jog shuttle to pause, play: rupture, rend, rive, split, cleave:
edited a past away.
what you thought would disappear lies and waits.
it wasn’t love but it was something as painful.
OF SPLENDOR, OF MISERY
“If we’re going to do this,” Jean Reynald paused to snuff out the unfiltered cigarette between his fingertips and the ashtray glass, “I want my ship back.”
“That’s.. impractical.” Cellophane wrapper crumpled in Paul’s hand. Next, foil. These late-time strategery sessions were bronzed with a nicotine aftertaste. “We’ve looked for—”
“Maggie or nothing. That’s the deal.”
“I can’t just—”
“Paul.”
Eyes lock across distances deeper than a tabletop, a war machine. “Fine. We’ll get her. Any other requests for your strike team?”
“Only two more. Relatively easy.”
“Let me guess—”
“Simon.”
“And pilot?”
“Michael.”
“Of course.”
Reynald’s silvered eyes narrowed as he sipped the last of his monkey-picked oolong. “Son, I know there are places you don’t want to go, and people you never thought you’d be asked to bring in. I wouldn’t ask you this if I didn’t know that we need them. That’s the cold truth of this: we need them.”
Flick, scratch, click. Paul inhaled, talked through the smoke’s exit. “I know.”
“Why?”
“Hmm?”
“This place—Why’d you bring me here?”
The wait—The weight of being whole draped the winter plains with a tougher skin than dustings of snow could provide. He’d dreamt worlds into realities, and this was how he now regarded the ghost space: more Minnesota January than Michigan February. He’d been to neither place, now never would.
The work-shined leather gloves were warmer than they’d ever really been. The realizations of ghosts were in the details of perception. There were trees on those edges, timothy spines interrupting the cadence of the frozen ground’s rises and falls. Grabbing and tearing one of the winter hay stalks without gloves would have been painful; the way timothy snaps, inserts itself into the palm when grabbed, when dry. Under gloves’ pressure, there was no danger, a buffer between red-stitched palms and infection. Ground those now-weeds into chaff. Alfalfa barely broke the snow’s surface; it was pliant, without will, bending to the white pressure and hiding until rising again, desiccated, in the thaws.
“If we’re going to make this work, there are things about me you have to accept.”
Alina walked to his side, faced the small snowed stone, one of dozens (hundreds, thousands?) across the ghost space. Glove reached for glove, but his hand was slack, not returning her attempt at reassurance through pressure. That place contextualized a particular, peculiar fear: he’s gone already, no hand in that glove; this is how distance feels, tastes of wind.
“Say something.”
“What do you—”
“Anything. Something.” But in that expanse, silence seemed the most appropriate discourse.
“I—”
“Not that, not here. There’s no way you could, not here.”
“Get out of my head.”
It hung there.
The glove under her grasp grew a framework of bones and action as it pulled away. He knelt before the stone, swept away the sugared surface. She thought of childhoods she’d not known spent building forts in the snow, a sunny day lying warmth, hardpack bleeding into snowpants, numbing knees and afternoon hot chocolate before suppertime. Snotty noses frozen solid. What semblance of a childhood she’d survived had had alternate definitions of forts, bleeding, and freezing.
“Know this: this man beneath me, this boy, he died because I chose typing over listening. Stayed home to finish writing a book and never looked at his warnings. Spent years trying to convince myself it wasn’t my fault, but I know…If I’d listened—”
“Paul, you—”
“And this one?” His bad knee locked upon attempts to rise, limped with a dragging right diagonally one row, one column. “She wasn’t nearly as passive a departure. Forced her away, murdered her in time. There’s a murder that allows the victim to persist. And persist,” he wiped the rock face, “she did, never knowing that she’d died. From the inside of a life based on lies, it’s easy to confuse continuation with happiness.”
“You’re—”
“A god. A fucking god here.”
Stumbled over two, up one.
“Paul, it’s—”
“She,” wiped the face, his own, “died in my arms. Do you still want this?”
“—not your fault.”
Pulled the gloves off, clenched hands to fists, smashed both against the ground. Compound fractures, each finger. Echoed across skeleton trees. The wind had stopped. She’d felt the impact across twenty silent feet.
He stood, dribbling blood and flecking fragments to the ground. Steam. One simple flash and his claws had repaired. Grabbed both gloves in one hand.
“I refuse to be the end of you,” stood in place, yet she walked toward his speech, “but if we do this, there’s no other way.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I can’t,” another line burned across his temple, “but I do. I’m asking you to leave. Right now. Don’t be a part of this. I can almost see your face—You’re becoming integral.”
Proximity. Saw silver crawling behind his muddied eyes. Alina thumbed the new burn, allowed her palm to rest against the unshaven cheek. “I’m not leaving.”
He grabbed her wrist, considered removing her touch, but held her hand closer. Mouth played over appropriate sentiments, found none to voice. Some communications are solely internal approximations of external poetries.
Love is, after all, sacrifice, whether borne out in bitten tongues, arms wrapped around and stifling fears, nighttime combat over sheets and vying for higher percentages of a bed’s square footage. No one will admit to the fraction of hate rippling under love’s frozen surface, because to acknowledge that dichotomy would undermine the hesitant interplay that defines desire. Love is, after all, defined by loss.
Staff meeting.
West noted the unfamiliar, growing steadily more-familiar, silence whispering out of the stillness of the birth chambers. The ratcheting and slams of a million billion artificial canals had been replaced by the echoing nothing in which you could park the moon, if you were in fact driving it, ever since Judith had—
fused with Alina, the new woman walked in and took her place at the table. She still answered to Alina, Al, Cap’n Crunch, sweetness, but she was more. The god Judith had found home, and that home was somehow less mousy-haired, less banana-titted. She’d grown freckles for every transgression that she wore mostly on her shoulders and the back of her neck, a scatter across gently-angled cheekbones under upturned eyes. As she slid into her chair, utilitarian (the chair, completely, the woman, mostly), Reynald cleared his throat, and she raised her hand to preempt.
“Boys.”
And they were. Veritable sausage-fest. West, Reynald, Hank, Sam. The twins were elsewhere. The bear lacked balls.
“Where is he?” Reynald accented over the three words, the tension materializing in the acute angles of his fingers.
“Detox.” Her term for the silver chamber. Quickening, they all knew. More and more time in the mercury sea, leaching out, leaching in, a Chinaman’s attempt at karaoke. “Let’s hear it.”
“The Lettuce Brothers report A/O lock at eight under, hovering on Delta.” West let the glass tink the tabletop. Things were falling in the space outside of time.
“New sights, new sounds?”
“Fairly certain Tunguska, 1908, fourteen-seven.”
“Good. File under ‘sneaking suspicion.’ Next?”
“Bleedthrough tertiaries on 1994, 1998 lines, fourteen-seven.”
“Interesting, but no surprises. Next?”
“Lunar meteor impact, 2047.”
“Fourteen—?”
“Thirty-three.”
“Extrapolations?”
“Didn’t touch our target. Fucked thirty-three over, though. Moon collision. Sixth extinction.”
“Kink…Forget it, let’s run the nineteen naught-eight probables and feed it to the maths. Get on it asap. Target completion—”
“Wednesday is the day we fight.”
“‘Thursday is the day we fade, to live a life unfiltered, mirrors of the ways we smoke to graves, we are ghosts,’ et cetera, et cetera. Don’t quote him. Not here.”
A rubber can only hold so much, and Hank finally came. He slammed his palm down on the resin tabletop, pulled off his hat, looking strangely pathetic given the tousled strands of surviving white hair sticking straight up from his head, falling in slow motion back into place, a high red rudding his nose and cheeks. His jaw working up to: “Goddamn it, just stop this shit.”
“Problem, Mr. Cowboy?”
“Yes there’s a problem, Jud. Al. Whoever the hell you are today.”
“Care to bring it to the group, or are you just going to smack my table around some more?”
There is an uncomfortable dynamic that develops when dams break, when dikes leak, when a group of people share something and must present it to an uninitiated brunt oblivious to the conflict. This dynamic evidences itself in diverted eyes, sudden attention gifted to the mundane: a hangnail, the right angle at a paper’s corner, evidences in the until-then suppressed urge to clear a throat or cough. The assembled hierarchy of Judith Command, at least those possessing balls, now all looked to Hank while Alina leaned back into her chair and interlocked her fingers with a confidence that could only have come from Judith herself.
These men were not cowards; know that. They just didn’t know how to tell god she was wrong. They were each fictional characters, but they left it to the fictional character twice removed from reality to voice their concerns. Hank, as a character within a television show within a novel, had a disconnect that they couldn’t.
His gun hand shaped itself into an all-fingers representation thereof and pointed at the young woman at the table’s head. “You,” he chose words just before speaking them, crafting each into viable concepts, “need to get that fucking boy out of the silver and into this room.”
“Miss him?”
He scoffed. “We all do, girl. But more than that—That shit’s getting into his head. He ain’t no good to us in there. If we’re gonna—”
“I believe he met with Reynald yesterday…?”
“He did.” Jean Reynald’s voice wasn’t nearly as unafraid as he’d hoped. “It was…I don’t know.”
“That ain’t the point, and you know it. If we’re gonna finish this, he needs to be a part of it. Can’t all be worked out by you two.”
“We,” Alina’s face stuttered over a smile, “have things in hand.” A jump cut reduced to a fraction of a frame, for an instant, Hank saw Judith looking out from Alina’s eyes. “Don’t you trust us?”
“‘Us?’ No. Alina, yes. Paul, yes. Jud, you scare the shit out of me. He wrote me. You’re just along for the ride, and I don’t rightly appreciate you taking over while he’s swimming.”
“Listen, Hank…I’ll try to be better about this. Try to get him in here and—”
“You do that.”
She paused. “He needs to get his shit together. That’s why—”
“—he lives in the silver? It ain’t right, girl. He ain’t right no more.”
“We’re working on it.”
He’d never learned how to swim.
He’d never trusted meditation, relegated it solely to the province of those unshowered non-Western types who embraced yoga and feng-shui and ate Thai to make themselves feel worldly. He didn’t meditate in the silver pool; he thought, too much, simple as that.
He grew angrier with breathing.
The pool seemed deeper in those final days, and not being able to swim (or float—even with the requisite remainder beer belly, he had a hard time floating), he walked into the tideless, tideful mirror lake until the surface tickled his lips, plugged his ears and slid into his nose, his eyes above the surface until the alien crawled into and through, his too-long hair a shawl on the silver, grasped and pulled under by a trillion trillion reaching robots, giving himself to the pull and disappearing under the sealing, untouched glass.
After that first breath, he sometimes forgot to take another.
It wasn’t meditation; he wouldn’t allow the word to stain him, so imbued with past hatreds and connotations of loss. He thought. Tried to wrap his mind around a solution: they were slowly losing the war. Maire’s nightmare forces, combinations of silvers, bleeds into all realities, were gaining non-ground quickly, urged forever onward by the great archives of knowledge stored in Hope’s and Whistler’s stolen patterns. Forts were burning, out on the periphery of core reality. Maire was strong, getting stronger. He was weak. She was coming for him, cutting straight for the heart of him, and he was tripped up more by his insecurities than a shattered knee he’d not yet lived through. The silver was the only place the outside non-world didn’t scream at him; his children, the trillion trillions, whispered, sang in voices beneath perception. It was a cold embrace, but it gave him purpose.
The singing, bodhisattva drones, the tender tickle as they erased farmer tans, tweezed an ingrown hair from his jaw, twisted cancers from purchase in his lung and prostate, tenderly, tenderly aligned a spine, sloughed dead cells, slowed a racing heart, closed ducts and reassured, the singing, the drones.
He felt a hand.
Paul spun, lashed, feet pushing the bottom away, rising above the surface in motion, slowly, noting the returning droplets of the splash, the drone lapsed. He gasped, fearful that he wasn’t alone, treaded toward the shore, hands shifting and eyes burning at the prospect of combat.
Another back breached the surface, the body arcing from one edge, familiar, unbeautiful and fundamentally same. A scar across the chest, code burns on left forearm, the white mark of Cain blaring less obviously from the right temple.
The figure stood, bent to the right: shattered knee. The figure stood, slicked with silver, unnaturally-large hands, hardened sculptures of bone and obtuse angle, brushed the liquid metal from arms and chest. The teeth were the same. The jib was cut more of brass than silver. It extended a hand.
“Shake my hand, brother.” And he thought of the cold war of the end of his youth, a father extending a hand to a brother, the same admonition, met with refusal. “Shake my hand.”
Fundamentally same, but.
“Come with me.”
They sat at the edge of the silver pool, Indian-style, both slumped forward for the weight of their torsos. They’d once been described as unique constructs: chicken legs, barrel torsos, the longest arms and biggest hands. Not well-designed. Unique. Pieced together from leftover parts. Mistakes given life.
Paul looked into the newcomer, had questions but didn’t ask. The older version had answers but didn’t offer them.
Whereas Paul was an image of a specific point in history, the post-college unraveling of muscle, a jowl, a gut, hair past his shoulders (he’d let it grow out since Hope had—) and a beard, full, (he’d let it grow out since Hope had—), the other was a study in evolutions and counterpoints, the face better-defined under taut skin, the hair cropped short, now lit with a disconcerting array of pure whites on the side, a clump, Whistler-esque, growing in at the line. Deeper canyons flanking the eyes, the mouth’s edges forced a little deeper down by years. Two gray flecks marring the brown-green surface of the right eye, rendering it blind. The torso wasn’t smaller, the arms not shorter; the legs were still chicken. Gray insinuated new patterns into the chest.
“Upgrade?”
“Paradigm shift.”
“Office talk.”
“Realism.”
“Huh.”
“Call me your Omega.”
“Is this better?”
The silver pool had disappeared, replaced with the Cafe Bellona. Paul noted a sign on the counter: UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT. A bus ground to a halt at the stop down the street. The brakes sounded like screaming.
“Not better. Different.”
The coffee shop was empty save the two time-offset versions of the same man. Paul thought he heard a rustling behind the counter, through the door leading to the inner sanctum, coffee filters and the cash box and mops. Presumably, New Management was back there. Those hidden sounds were more frightful than they should have been, the creak of a floorboard, the swish of fabric, the clearing of a throat.
“Where is everyone?”
The Omega let the question hang and fall. He gestured toward the great windows at the shop’s front. There were people passing by, eyes as downcast as the day was overcast, no one diverting attention to Bellona.
Something crashed in the back. Paul jumped.
The link was dead. It was supposed to show the president.
Most of the tables’ chairs were still turned upside-down on their tops. The lights were off. Maybe it wasn’t open yet? Maybe Bellona had new hours of operation? The chair legs obscured the corners in dozens. Paul noticed that theirs was the only set table.
“Supposed to be people here. Simon and Maggie, Joseph and Helen, S—”
“Don’t.”
“How does it all end?”
“More with a bang than a whimper.”
“No.” Paul struggled over concepts. “Me. How does it end?”
“You developed a germinoma around your pineal gland at age twenty-four.”
“Brain cancer?”
“You died of an overdose of anti-seizure medication at age twenty-seven.”
“And you?”
The Omega smiled, an expression that reminded Paul of war. “That’s me.”
Broken: A Plague Journal tst-3 Page 20