by Alden, Luke
What he meant was not what I had perceived.
The Aboriginals do not think in the way that most westerners do. They have many voices in their heads, the voices of their ancestors and their family. They are constantly speaking with friends and people they care about. Within their head exists a multitude of consciousness.
‘I’m surprised that you do not spin off the Earth in your loneliness.’
They felt we were insane for only having one voice in our head.
Sometimes I wonder if they’re right.
1
I should know who I am by now.
2000 and some years old and I don’t even know when I am.
I look at Evaline sitting next to me. I begin to wonder if this is another hallucination. I begin to wonder if she’s anymore real than the Evaline I’ve been staying with these last few weeks.
The doctor told me that things would get worse. That my brain would start to cause me more and more problems. The drugs, they’ve starting eating away at my memory. They’ve started mixing things up.
Evaline looks upset. This moment is familiar. I’ve lived it before.
I ask what’s wrong.
She starts to shake. She buries her head into my arm. Her shoulders clench.
Her body quivers in a rhythmic way.
I’d hold her eyes if she cried them out.
She tells me that she’s been cheating on me. She tells me that she has been seeing another man.
And then it all clicks. I had forgotten about this. It happened over a thousand years ago. We moved past it. I think. She cheated on me and I got upset. We almost broke up for good. Then for some stupid reason, we ended up back together.
And I want to tell her things will be ok, that she doesn’t need to cry. That I love her and want to work through all of this. I just want to be with her. But those words, those words that lay on the tip of my tongue; they never bother spilling out into the air around me.
It’s like a dream.
Because all I want to do is love her but all I can seem to do is yell.
She’s crying.
I’m furious.
Red faced.
Shaking.
‘Who was it?’
And she doesn’t answer.
And I already know who it was. I know because I’ve lived through this moment before. The answer, it’s stuck in my head. It was just some guy. Someone I never knew. Someone she knew from work. Inconsequential from start to finish.
‘Was it Franklin?’
I have no control over my mouth or the words that seem to be forming within it. I feel possessed. And this, this is my séance. This is where I call upon the dead to inform the present.
I’d say that this was a dream, but I know that it’s not. It’s too real. It’s too tangible. I’m too in the moment.
And Evaline. She won’t even look at me.
I want to tell her that it’s ok, because I love her and that love means that I’m going to try to make things work.
Regardless of the emotions that I feel at the moment, I will try.
And Evaline. She starts to walk away. She tells me she needs to be alone. She tells me not to follow her.
She walks into the next room.
I follow.
She’s on the phone. She’s trying to call someone. Trying to have someone make her feel ok.
I want to hug her but instead I pull the phone from her hand and throw it to the floor.
I know that this is what I did before, but it all feels wrong now.
And perhaps I’ve grown more than I realize.
Evaline picks up the phone and starts dialing again.
‘Leave me alone you fucking asshole.’
‘You need to stop running from this goddamned situation. You need to answer my questions and at least give me an iota of respect.’
‘Go away. Just go the fuck away. You’re a fucking asshole. I cheated on you because you don’t even respect me as a person. You treat me like shit. You’re selfish, self centered and manipulative.’
This is the part where I fall apart.
This is the part where things go black.
And as my chest raises and my lungs fill with air, all I can feel is my body deflating.
My face goes pale.
My hands tremble.
I open my eyes.
My hands and feet are tied.
I’m in a room, on a chair.
It’s silent.
It’s dark.
It’s familiar
2
Someone whispers in my ear: ‘You’re dying and you don’t even know it.’
And moments pass in a fragmented hallucination.
3
We weren’t always in need of saving.
Then a man came along and told us that we were.
Many people believed it.
Many people still believe it.
It’s easy to think we’re flawed. It’s easier to think that death is our salvation from these flaws. So what happens when we don’t die?
Why would we need salvation if it can never be reached?
And maybe that’s the key to it all, belief in something we can never reach. It gives us motivation, a reason to keep moving. That or it makes us lazy. Because deep down, in our hearts and our guts, we know that we’ll never be saved and no matter what we do, no matter how despicable we are as human beings, there is nothing that will right our wrongs.
Dylan, that’s the man with the curly hair’s name, he tells me that he wants to die. He wants something bigger than himself. Perhaps salvation. Perhaps the preservation of a natural order.
He speaks to me, but I only hear pieces.
‘Death gives a purpose.’
‘Without out it we are aimless and boring.’
‘Sculpted, tanned and without hope or dreams.’
‘You don’t run a race if you know that it doesn’t matter when you finish.’
Dylan tells me that death is our best friend and our greatest teacher.
And this is what it’s like waking up from a head injury:
First things are foggy. Then the fog lifts and then you’ve got a stranger with curly hair telling you that you’ve wasted your life.
At least this is how things are for me.
Tied up.
Freaked out.
A little dizzy.
And I’m trying to figure out if what I just experienced, the little flashback with Evaline, was it a dream or was it a hallucination?
I can’t tell.
And behind Dylan is Evaline. The Evaline from my head. She’s looking nervous and silent and when I make eye contact with her, she quickly looks away.
I want to tell her to leave. I want to tell her that she doesn’t need to see me like this.
I want to tell her these things, but I also want to preserve some form of dignity in front of Dylan. So I keep my mouth shut and listen to what he’s telling me.
The rope is hurting my wrists.
And so he continues with his diatribe. His little song and dance about death.
I nod my head and act like I’m paying attention.
I act like I’m paying attention, yet I can’t take my eyes off of Evaline.
She smiles.
I smile.
Dylan looks behind his shoulder and then back at me.
‘Are you listening to me?’
‘Death is my greatest teacher.’
He shakes his head. He looks behind his shoulder again; thrown off and agitated.
He leaves the room.
My stomach growls.
I’m starving.
I’m still tied up.
I start to pass out.
I dream of Evaline.
In this dream she tells me that she was cheating. I tell her that we’ve been together for centuries, we’re bigger than one single fuck up.
When I wake up, my bones ache and my jaw is numb.
When I wake up, I open my eyes to a fist pulling back.
&nbs
p; 4
They say that you’re only as good as what you can take.
I must be no good.
I’m ready to cry after the first swing.
And I yell: ‘Fuck off you asshole.’’
No one’s listening
And then I feel a tooth go loose as the back of my skull starts to do a shimmy and a shake.
It’s Dylan.
I start thrashing around, wildly.
My body aches and I can feel blood dripping from my smashed-in face. I yell again. Louder. No one listens. Louder. No one responds.
Another fist and my brains are starting to feel like syrup in my skull. And it’s a pause and a breathe and a nervous twisting of nervous fingers as I feel my skull bounce against a wall.
Dylan asks if I’m ready to listen. If I’m ready to change. If I’m ready to acknowledge that everything ends.
I fail to understand.
I look at Evaline.
She’s watching me.
She looks strange. She’s looking distorted.
I’m not ready to listen. I don’t want to listen. I don’t care what this asshole has to say to me.
His diatribes about death, they’re meaningless. All I want is information on Evaline. The real Evaline.
So Dylan stands up and paces around with an obvious frustration.
And I ask: ‘So you’re the one that burns down all the buildings?’
And he looks at me.
Curly hair resting against his sweaty forehead. It’s angry eyes and heavy breathing as his fists begin to ball.
‘What does that matter right now?’
‘Well, I was just curious.’
And he doesn’t say anything. He just stands there, hovering over me, breathing heavily. Clenching his bloody fists. I watch my blood drip from his knuckles. I watch it pool on the floor. The light from above reflects on it and provides a deep red coloring; like a ripe cherry.
‘I guess you don’t have to answer that.’
And it feels like my voice is caught in my throat. It tries to move past the blood that slowly drips down to my gut, but it fails. My voice is rough and hoarse. My voice bubbles and quakes with the sound of a disrupted complacency.
And Dylan stops.
‘It was me.’
He crouches in front of me.
And I ask ‘Do you think you can just beat me into submission?’
He pauses with a thoughtful look. I feel tired as I watch him contemplate and eventually open his mouth.
‘I’m not trying to beat you into submission, I’m trying to beat you out of it’ and he looks at my broken face. ‘There is no sense of loss or fear in this world.’
And I’m listening to the words, but they’re not making any sense.
‘Loss and fear?’
‘Why do you think I’m hitting you?’
Things have suddenly calmed down.
‘Because you’re an asshole.’
I feel like I’m choking.
‘Because you don’t know how to feel scared.’ He pauses. ‘You aren’t scared and you don’t truly know what it means to feel anything other than complacency.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘How so?’
‘I feel sad because I’ve lost Evaline. I know what I feel.’
‘Do you?’ He stands up. ‘I don’t think you do.’ He paces. ‘You’ve felt approximations… variations. You’ve probably even felt a dull ache that feels similar to the emotions that you’re truly capable of. But I don’t know that you’ve felt loss or fear since you were a child.’
He walks across the room and his voice goes soft and gentle. ‘Human beings have an incredible capacity to adapt. We have an incredible ability to quickly feel complacent and forget what everything else might feel like. You may think that you’ve felt loss. You may think that you’ve felt fear. But even if you have, you’ve forgotten. You’ve realized, possibly consciously, possibly subconsciously, that you are going to live forever. You’ve realized that, in the end, nothing really matters. You’ve adapted to the sharp pain that love entails and you’ve lost the fear of loss, because when life is infinite, nothing is lost forever.’
And Dylan paces around some more. He looks at me. He smiles and then frowns.
‘When I was younger I felt things in the slightest of ways. I didn’t know death and therefore never knew consequence. Without consequence, I never felt fear or loss. Without fear or loss you can never know what love and happiness are. Because love and happiness, they are predicated on the notion of fear and loss. There is a give and take to our emotional spectrum, and once you take one simple thing like death out of the formula, everything else leaves.’
A dull ache crawls along my skin.
‘You have approximations of emotions, but you do not know how intense they can become.’
And I start to open my mouth to ask a question. I start, but I don’t manage. My words fail and fall and falter and I’m left without so much as a sound.
‘She just wants you to understand.’
And with that, Dylan leaves the room.
Evaline watches me with a blank stare.
I’m feeling something, I just don’t know what it is.
And I’m aching.
And the pain is starting to make me dizzy.
And my eyes fall shut.
And I dream.
5
I’m nothing without passion. I haven’t been passionate in a millennia.
I dream of passion with Evaline.
It’s a sensation that feels foreign.
It’s a sensation that I cannot articulate nor truly comprehend.
I thought I knew what it was.
Turns out the entirety of my life has been the equivalent of the sun cresting the horizon but never truly rising.
6
I wake up and I can’t see straight. I ache but I’m not aching like I should be. I’m feeling somewhat comfortable.
And then I realize that my head is on a pillow.
And I realize that I’m in my parent’s house.
On my bed.
And Evaline is laying next to me.
I press myself against her fake body and I smell her fake hair and I kiss her fake neck.
My lips are sore.
They sting. They’re swollen.
I should go see a doctor.
But I won’t.
The pain will linger.
The pain will last.
The pain will remind me that things can be more than what I let them be.
And I am a creature of limits. Limits that I impose on myself. Limits that I have created and held onto without truly knowing or understanding
And I kiss Evaline’s neck and she moans and twists and turns like I always remember her doing. She turns to me and smiles and buries her face into mine and we embrace, for a moment I think that maybe it’s something that I can hold onto.
I can’t.
I’m beginning to realize that what I know, it’s not real.
I get up.
Brush my teeth.
Look in the mirror.
My face is swollen and my eyes are black and blue and my nose is crooked.
I need to change.
7
I keep pulling my hair as if that will change the world.
And it doesn’t help that I see her all the time. She’s right there but I know that she’s not. And no matter how hard I try to lie to myself, I can’t seem to make the situation something that works for me.
I’m sick to my stomach with a guilty burn that reminds me of an emotion that I thought I forgot.
I wish I could find her.
And I look at her.
I want to yell.
I do yell.
‘I want you back!’
And she looks at me and I know she’s not real but she’s all I have.
‘Then find me.’
And I stand there for a second. There’s chatter in the background from a television that’s on too loud.
I can’t find much to say. My heart is racing and my forehead shines with a sweat that comes from nerves that burn.
Because I don’t know if I can love her like she deserves to be loved.
Because I don’t know if I can change who I am.
Because I now doubt all the emotions that I’ve ever had.
But I guess that’s what it’s all about. Fear and doubt. Right now, my greatest fear, it’s of being alone forever.
Forever is a long time.
And I know that she can’t answer, but I ask anyway:
‘Where are you?’
With my body slumping over, with my frame sitting on the edge of a bed that’s older than it has any right to be, with my heart trying to crack my ribs and my lips that scab from pain I’ve felt, with all of this, I want her to know that I want her back.
And she stands there and stares and she tells me that she’ll know where she is when I know where she is. And me, I’m feeling like I should already know, because I was with the curly haired man. We were in the city, I know we were. And so I know that she’s in the city. I know she is. She had to be with him. She had to be somewhere close. She had to be watching. She knew where I was.
And maybe it’s wishful thinking.
And I know everything has a meaning.
There’s no way that I would be abducted for no reason at all. Maybe this is her way of telling me what she’s up to these days. Maybe she’s trying to let me know that everything is ok.
I have no clue.
I just want to hold her.
So instead of sulking, I grab a bag. I go to a dresser. I throw some clothes into it. Evaline, the one that’s part of my brain, she looks at me and she starts to ask what I’m doing but the words never come out of her mouth.
She knows what I’m doing.
I sit down at a table. Part of me feels that I should write a note to my parents, let them know where I’m going. The other part of me, it knows that they won’t notice that I’m gone. I’ve been gone ever since I got here. I’m a broken down mess.
I’m a broken down mess and while they may notice it, they don’t know what to do about it.
I don’t bother with a note.
I grab my bag and ask Evaline if she’s coming.
‘Do I have a choice?’
And with that we walk out the door.