Edith felt like she'd run a marathon – her whole body ached. Too many long days at the shop. She kicked off her shoes, pulled a bottle of Chianti from one of the grocery bags and poured a glass. She started boiling a pot of angel hair, then threw some veggies from the fridge into a pot of hot oil. The Chianti loosened the snakes of tension that had coiled themselves around her bones. She added some red sauce to the veggies, then poured herself another glass.
When it was all done she swirled it together on a plate, curled up on her loveseat and flipped on the movie she was an hour into. It was an old black and white noir: a man avenging his brother's death by infiltrating a dark criminal underworld, then falling in love with the young daughter of said underworld. Edith had no idea what it was called – she'd never had a memory for movies. Sometimes she'd be halfway through and realize she'd seen it before, but she'd still keep watching because she wouldn't remember how it ended.
Near the end of the movie, when all the vengeance business was taken care of, the man was talking to the woman on the outskirts of a dark alley as the sun was just coming up. Somehow Edith's eyelids had become the heaviest part of her body, but she was determined to see how it ended. He was trying to talk the woman into running away with him to a farm his family owned in Nebraska. When he raised a hand at an approaching cab (quite fortuitous considering it was dawn), which pulled up to the sidewalk.
Maybe it was the intense and heavy tones of the music, or perhaps the darkened alleyway that was always seen behind her, as if constantly beckoning to her, but you just knew she wasn't getting into that freaking cab. She'd fought all her life to get out of the situation she was in, yet if she actually left it, she wouldn't know what to do – she'd be absolutely lost if she gave up being lost. It's as if the only version of herself that she knew was the one who was struggling. One of the many faces of the archetypal Woman. The Struggler, who must always be escaping, or the Abused, who must always play victim. Petty and cliché, sure, but Edith was so hooked. Maybe it was the thematic music or the bottle of Chianti which sat less than half full next to her glass, maybe it was how Edith and her aching feet were looking forward to this movie all throughout the endless workday – whatever the reason, Edith was completely invested. Every inch of her wanted the woman to get into that cab, no matter how the woman coyly played with the man's heart as well as her own, hinting that she wanted to go with him yet avoiding the actual words. She was choosing Death and Destruction, utter Annihilation and Hopelessness, yet rather than do the obvious – call her an idiot and say the guy is better off without her, Edith hoped and rooted for her to just say “alright” and jump into the stupid cab. She even woke up Maurice as her hope had been displayed through the kicking of her feet, and he drearily and confusedly began complaining to her about the inability of humans to adequately interact with his species.
“Shhh!” Edith pointed at the screen with her half-full wine glass. “Maybe she'll come to her senses, Maurice!”
Maurice complained some more and hopped off the loveseat, wandering over to his pillow bed. God knows he'd seen enough film noir to know that Edith's hopes were in vain, and he knew better than to try talking any sense into her. In that small way the woman on the screen and Edith were alike – neither one of them would be changing their ways any time soon.
Then everything went dark. And not in the whole she was drinking wine and passed the hell out way that you're thinking. The power was off, and judging from how little light was coming in through the green curtains, it seemed it wasn't just Edith's building. She got to her feet a little too quickly and promptly fell back onto the loveseat, remembering suddenly her state of inebriation. More carefully this time she got to her feet, then pushed the curtains aside to let in the bit of light that poured out of the half moon and handful of stars. She smiled. “The trees did their job,” she said to Maurice. “They pulled the stars out.”
Using her cell phone's light to guide her way, she opened the closet between the bedroom and kitchen and rummaged around until she found a couple of tall prayer candles in the bottom of a box – Saint Mary and Archangel Michael.
Luckily Maurice wasn't woken by the power outage – she would hate to think of what it would do to his fragile temperament. By some miracle he was still sleeping soundly on his tiny bed, tucked underneath a small table that had an empty flower pot sitting upon it. Edith had attempted taking care of plants several times, but had come to the conclusion that plants were one of the things she wasn't any good at.
She curled back up and watched the little fur ball sleep, the yellow of the candlelight dancing in and out of his fur like fireflies. Edith wondered how the woman in the movie was making out, and if the man was smart enough to leave her there. Soon enough all of the possibilities bloomed in her mind, bathed in swimming, flickering colors:
The woman gets into the cab and they drive off into the sunrise.
She goes to embrace him just as a shadowed figure in the alley shoots her in the back, and she falls into the man's arms as the assailant flees into the darkness. The man is torn – does he pursue the shooter or stay with her? Her fingers grip the sleeves of his shirt. “We would have been happy, wouldn't we?” she asks. “I believe so,” he says. “I believe so.”
They embrace, and a gunshot rings out. His eyes widen, and she lifts a tiny revolver between them. “I didn't want it to end this way,” she says. “You have to believe me. I didn't want this.” And then he collapses to the ground, the smoke from her gun disintegrating between them in the wind.
They embrace and a gunshot rings out. She collapses in his arms and gazes up into his eyes. “I knew you would do what was right,” she says. He shakes his head. “I couldn't,” he says. “I couldn't do it.” Then it's revealed that the person driving the cab is actually his brother, who is supposed to be dead, and is holding a large black revolver. (This really wouldn't make any sense, but it would have fit the mood quite perfectly).
At this point the possible outcomes got looser and looser, until they made little to no sense whatsoever. Edith was the camera, she was the nearly empty street, she was the darkness in the alley watching the events unfold. Curled up on her loveseat, through eyes barely open she watched as from out of the antique picture frame, from out of the old empty flower vase and from the rusted gas lamp that she used as a bookend on her book shelf, the little blue creatures emerged. Each about as tall as one of her fingers, with little arms and legs and heads, they dropped to the floor and scurried into her closet. Then about a dozen of them emerged pulling a thin blanket across the floor. Edith reached down to try and help them heave it onto her, but her hand was of no use whatsoever. They jumped up onto the love seat, pulling the blanket up with them, and covered her completely.
“Thank you,” she muttered. “You're so nice.”
A couple of them pushed a pillow under her head, then two of them shimmied up the Catholic candles and blew them out. And then it all went dark again – and this time it was in the she was drinking wine and passed the hell out way that you're thinking.
File 2 :: [Mars]
A mere four(ish) neighborhoods away from Edith, just over the hump of the Mississippi, lies the neighborhood dubbed The Marigny, where the electricity hadn't shut off and the stars were also showing up in the sky – at least the mere 2,463 stars you could see from the city ever since the aftermath of the Drawing of Dawn's Shade in the summer of 1974[1]. The stars' light, indistinguishable from the blueish light of the streetlights, was pulled in through the open window by a constant and pleasant breeze, then pushed about in spirals on the floor of the dim room by the bassy beats of Tricky emitted by a pair of duct-taped speakers. Mars squeezed a lime into her vodka soda, swirled the drink inside the mason jar she used as a glass, then sipped it as she looked at the man lying face down on a bed of pillows on the hard wood floor of her attic apartment. He was bald, a bit overweight and wore a pair of overalls which were pulled down to his waist, exposing his shirtless back.
Streams
of energy pulsed just underneath his skin, dozens of streams all criss-crossed and jagged like thin broken bones. “You need a lot of work,” she said to him, stepping closer and studying the streams.
He turned his head so that he could speak. “But you can help me, right Mars?” His voice was that of a little boy using a man's vocal chords.
“Of course I can, but you're gonna have to figure out why you're so jacked up, and do something about it. And it's going to take more than a few sessions to clear all this up.”
“It ain't me, it's the plants! They know somethin'! They ain't growin' right. They look normal, but they ain't. They feel somethin' comin'.”
Mars sighed. They always blamed it on something else – this or that energy in the air, creatures coming through time to haunt them, slumlords – but in the end it was really something within, some way they were perceiving the world. “Alright, don't think. Can you do that? I'm not your shrink, and I sure as hell ain't your plants' shrink. Hate to be blunt, but hey, we're all good at what we're good at, and not good at what we're not, right?”
He took a big breath and relaxed into the pillows.
Mars slipped off her blue and white kimono, under which she wore black pants and a red tank top that showed off most of the sprawling ram's head tattoo that engulfed her chest, the ram's horns curling under the tank top's straps. She straddled Tomas' waist.
“Now, you have to relax, but be really careful not to sink into the floor, alright? It scares the shit out of my landlords, and they're already starting to think that I'm a prostitute or a drug dealer as it is. Think you can keep from doing that?”
“Mm-hmm.”
Mars took another sip from her mason jar, then set it beside her on the floor. She reached up and pulled one of the long needles from the ball-shaped nest of red dreadlocks atop her head. Her other hand she ran along a section of Tomas' back, tracing one of the streams. “Now relax and be very still,” she whispered. “Don't pay too much attention to the images that come up. Just let them be there.”
She inserted a needle into his shoulder, into a healthy section of one of the streams. The pulsing light flowed up the needle and caressed her fingertips. She took another needle from her hair, traced the stream down several jagged and twisted turns, then inserted the needle into a another healthy, glowing section close to his waist. The pulsing energy spiraled up the length of the needle, kissing her fingers.
Mars traced a finger down his back, down a shadowed line that was like a dried up riverbed which once contained the stream before it became sick. She pulled out a third needle. “Just watch the images,” she said soothingly over the slow thumping bass that rolled like heavy coins out of the speakers, circling around the two of them. She carefully inserted the third needle halfway between the dried-up riverbed and the jagged stream, a few inches below the needle in his shoulder. The stream twitched a little, and she felt Tomas flex underneath her. “You are the perceiver, not the perceived.”
She pulled out a fourth needle and inserted it a couple inches lower, again between the jagged stream and where the stream should have been. The stream of light slowly bent towards the two needles, straightening itself out the tiniest bit, as if relaxing.
Mars rubbed her eyes and opened them wide. Staring at the inverted light of the streams had a tendency to dry her eyes out, and would eventually give her a headache. But she found that if she flexed them occasionally it wasn't so bad.
She continued on like that, down the stream a couple inches at a time, bending it back bit by bit towards the shadowy line where it should have been. Tomas twitched from time to time, but he did much better than she thought he would. She expected him to ask her to stop after about ten minutes, but she glanced at the clock on the wall and she'd been at it for over half an hour. “Feeling alright?” she asked.
“Mm-hmm.”
“I can do another row.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Ok, stay there a minute and rest.” Mars got up and stretched her arms, back and neck. Then she took a long drink from her mason jar, opened one of her dresser drawers and pulled out a thin box of needles – she'd used up the supply in her hair. She pulled out the Tricky CD and put on a Massive Attack album, then pushed Play and Repeat. Straddling the back of Tomas' waist once more, she picked another stream that wasn't as bad as the rest and began the process all over. Releasing the tensions of the streams that weren't so bad off would affect the other streams, making them stronger and healthier – since all the streams were really just energy flowing from the same source. Just like a rotten apple would spoil the bunch, a couple of healthy apples could pull the others out of their decay (at least in this example – you might not want to try this with real apples). That was, of course, as long as Tomas did his part and worked to free up the way he perceived his relationship to the world around him.
When she'd finished the second row, Mars got up and let Tomas rest for a minute with the needles still inside of him. She filled a mason jar with water from the sink faucet and took an Advil for her eyes, which were burning in their sockets.
“You did amazingly well,” she said to Tomas. Mars squatted down next to him and removed the needles, placing them onto a towel in her hand.
Tomas moaned a little, too relaxed to turn his head and speak.
“You wouldn't believe how many supposed bad-ass toughs come in here and then can't stand twenty minutes of their own emotional images. End up bawling or saying I'm some kind of witch putting other people's thoughts inside them.” She shook her head and tapped his flabby shoulder. “You can get up now, if you're ready. I'll get you some water.”
When she walked back from the sink with a fresh jar of water he was sitting up drying off his pink, splotchy face. The pillow he'd been resting his face on was soaked. He looked up at her and his eyes began tearing up again. “I'm not the plants,” he whispered.
Mars crouched down and handed him the water. She placed her hand on his large, bald forehead. “Don't talk about any of it, not to me or anyone else for a couple days. What you saw was much closer to your source than words are, and turning the experience into words will just dumb it down. Your best chance is to just be with it. It's between you and you, Ok?”
Tomas nodded. “There's no way I can thank you enough.”
“Don't worry about that. Just drink some water and don't think to much about what you saw. Don't analyze it, cause you'll probably be wrong. Just let it simmer.”
She got up and stretched for a minute as Tomas downed the water. He began pulling on his shirt and fastening on his overalls.
“Sorry about the pillow,” he said.
“It happens. You want to sit outside and have a drink? It's a nice night.”
Tomas nodded his big head. “Sure.”
A sliding door from the tiny kitchen led out to a metal landing on the back of the house, where there was a skinny metal staircase leading down to the landlord's patio. This served as the entrance to her apartment. Using a few carefully placed milk crates as stairs on one side of the landing, she brought Tomas up to a square section of roof that was flat. There were a few little potted plants around the edges, as well as miscellaneous metal and bone trinkets she'd found over the years.
They sat on the roof with a tall candle set into a wine bottle between them and sipped vodka, soda and lime from mason jars. Mars rarely brought anyone out to her roof sanctuary, but Tomas had impressed her. She felt like after she was done with him they might keep in touch.
“I don't know if I'm going to be much for talking,” said Tomas after they'd sat there for a while.
Mars shrugged. “We don't need to talk.”
They couldn't see a lot of the city from where they sat; some buildings and oak trees blocked their view, but they could see in a few directions. The stars shined down, though their light was nothing compared to the faded light of the city's streetlamps.
“Mars, can I ask how old you are?”
“Twenty-six.”
“And
you're from here?”
Mars nodded.
“Ever lived anywhere else?”
Mars took a long drink from her jar before answering. “I got carted off to San Francisco when I was twelve. A vain attempt by a loved one to keep me from getting sucked up into this part of New Orleans. The city between the city.”
“You didn't like it there, in San Francisco?”
“I liked it fine, but only because I didn't remember enough about New Orleans. I'd forgotten how much I belonged here. I stayed in San Francisco for years, but there just wasn't enough for me. I hopped between foster homes and groups of runaways, then lived for a while with the cave dwellers underneath the city. I'd always been able to see the streams of energy running through some people, but I began to realize that those people with the streams of energy running through them weren't actually people. That's when I started really getting into trouble. The entities of the city didn't like some little orphan girl knowing what they were up to, and none of them would talk to me when I confronted them. So I made a hobby out of spoiling their plans as best I could. Stupid shit, like throwing firecrackers into an alley when one of them was eavesdropping on someone.
“One time a building was going to be burned down in the middle of the night – a political move by some of the entities that wanted to take control of a section of the city. Of course I didn't care who was doing what and why – I just wanted to screw with them. I called the fire department when the fire was barely started and the building was saved. The Caretaker of the building in turn hid me from the entities who were then hunting me. Turns out the ones I pissed off were pretty powerful. He helped me escape, but essentially I couldn't go back to the city.
The Axeboy's Blues (The Agents Of Book 1) Page 2