by Ryan Schow
“Raven,” a voice says, slipping in between the seams of lunacy to reach me.
It’s her. She’s calling me now.
I push through the hoards, stave off the neurosis plaguing me at this point, work my way down into a dank nothingness that formed naturally before all these…whatever they are…alters. Calling her name, plowing further into the depths of her subconscious, my subconscious, I force the cacophony of juvenile pleading out of my mind until I finally find her, tucked away inside of the tiniest pocket in the blackest, darkest part of the overrun structure I now know as her mind.
“Why are you here?” I ask.
“Here, it’s quiet,” she says. She’s right. I can’t hear them anymore. “Here I can be at peace.”
“Who belongs to those voices?”
“You know.”
“I don’t know,” I admit. “How did they get in here?”
“They just did.”
“I don’t understand.”
She takes my hand in hers, one hand equals two hands down here. The two of us, we are the paradox. The unexplained fact with potentially disastrous consequences. Her hand is warm though. Even though it isn’t of the flesh down here, I feel her as if she were.
“When a person is tortured so badly, alternate personalities emerge to take the place of the host personality. They’re called ‘alters.’ But you already know this, don’t you? On some level?”
“That’s what all those…things are up there?” I ask, staving off the horror.
“Some, not all. Delgado created this structure at Dulce. He made it so the personalities we make through the torture we have suffered have a place to stay.”
“Is that how I killed Tavares?”
“Delgado created one personality, one task. He used integrative hardware to create for us these sensual dreams, to complete the mission when you were triggered. They weren’t necessarily dreams as much as they were mission parameters. When you stop being Abby, when you became Raven instead, the transformation purged that hardware from our body. The software, however, remained not only as backup, but as a means of creating more programs. The software, which was just hypnotic suggestion and implants given to an alter Delgado created inside us, is what triggered Tavares’s murder.”
“He wanted to use us.”
“He did use us, Raven. That’s why Tavares is dead. That’s why he’s dead and the Senator is dead. But the structure in our head, the framework, it’s left us vulnerable.”
“We’re vulnerable,” I say, thinking of the injuries she sustained, and the torture she was forced to bear. “I don’t understand how you’re still alive. I do, but I don’t.”
“They never wanted me to die,” future me says. “They only wanted me to suffer.”
“Who wanted you to suffer?”
“You don’t need to fight this war, Raven. That’s what I want to tell you.”
In the darkness, she scoots closer to me, pulls me into her arms and holds me. “I don’t want this life for you, sweetheart. You’re too young, still so innocent.”
I snuggle into her, ask: “What do you want from me? I can do anything. I will do anything for you. For us.”
For a long while, she contemplates the question, and then in the softest most fragile voice—the voice of someone long beyond broken, the voice of someone empty on faith and depleted of hope—she says, “Anything?”
I sit up, look at her in the darkness.
“Yes.”
“Then I want you to kill me,” she says, her very presence overflowing with pain. “You have to kill us both.”
2
My heart breaks. “I can’t do that,” I say.
“Then leave me be,” she says, turning cold.
“If I kill you, I kill me.”
“Look around, Raven. Listen.” In the distance, much further up, are the sounds of insanity, a mind overrun with madness. “It’s the only way.”
“I won’t do it.”
Forlorn, she says, “I had forgotten what it was like to be this scared of life, this big of a coward. For so long now I’ve been unkillable, mentally more sharp, more acute than any human left living, but now you humble me. You remind me who I used to be before becoming this, and it makes me ache so deeply for death your mortal soul could barely understand it with a hundred years of contemplation.”
“Is that why you came back? So I could kill you?”
“You are the only person for whom I will give this honor.”
“How do you kill the unkillable?” I ask.
I feel her smiling in the dark. “You know how,” she says. She’s right, I do know how. “When you do it, be swift and use haste.”
She says this, and then I feel myself kicked out of her mind the same way someone would feel kicked in the chest by a barnyard donkey. Standing over her body in the lab, gasping for breath, I feel freshly born, completely off balance. I look at her, expectant. As if she has anything left to offer me.
She gives me nothing. Be swift, she told me.
Staring at her naked, ruined body, her skin is textured with goosebumps; all the little fine hairs on her arms and neck, on her breasts and stomach, they are standing cold, in defiance of the body. I lift her body into my arms, carry her to the elevator and upstairs to the full bathroom where I run a hot bath and talk to her the way you would talk to a coma patient.
When the tub is full, I gently place her in the water, then wash and scrub her body with a scented soap. My eyes won’t stop seeing her scars, the decayed flesh of her wounds, the way the hacked bones seemed to have started growing but suddenly stopped. The torn flesh where the circular iron plates were wrenched off is meaty red and not healing. It’s angry looking, maybe infected. Because her pubic hair is overgrown, way beyond something you’d see in seventies porn—more like something you’d see in an older woman unaccustomed to getting the peen—I have to trim it. No girl can have pubes that burly and feel good about herself. Even in the afterlife.
So I shave her pubic region, belly-button to butthole, and then her underarms. I wash her hair, gently clean her face, trim her eyebrows because they, too, are overrun. I even shave the little hairs on her upper lip, chin and cheek because all that peach fuzz seems counterproductive to true happiness.
When I’m done, even though she’s practically comatose, I ask, “How do you feel now? Better?”
Nothing.
I lift her from the water, dry her lovingly, cry over her and hug her. I hug her so tight, and I pray to a God I cannot see, one I barely believe in—a God I want to hurl curses and hatred at for what He has allowed of mankind, and then I take her back downstairs and wrap her in blankets.
After a few minutes, I fire up the incinerator, which I wouldn’t have known even existed without stumbling upon its location in the storage banks of future me’s mind, then shuttle the gurney to the table in the lab where she lays perfectly still.
Everyone fantasizes about death, about dying at some point in their lives. Sometimes, things get so difficult that a complete and total do-over seems the logical, if not melodramatic means of solving the unsolvable problems. But we rarely do this. Most of us anyway. We just can’t. So we start thinking of the practical aspects of slicing up our wrists, or hanging ourselves, or gobbling down bottles of pills, and we chicken out. We think about the heartbreak we’d cause others: our parents, siblings, friends, and our colons seize. We think about everything that makes us who we are just being erased as we turn to worm food, or go to hell, or reincarnate as lesser versions of our past-life selves, and then doubt creeps in. We think of suicide as a means to an end, and then we find new means, because ending it all is too painful to comprehend. So we trudge ahead with lots of despair, and we survive the taking of a massive emotional dump—the one that saves our life. And then we try living again.
Now, holding my future self’s hand, surveying her devastated body, I prepare to kill myself, and then I surrender myself to the task. Closing my eyes, I reach into her heart and I sque
eze until it seizes, until the muscle stops beating. Her body shivers a bit, and I feel her soul slip out of the body. I feel her hovering. Me. Two souls in the same room. Two souls that should be one.
Impossible! Yet not at all. I don’t even bother trying to work my mind around it.
As I sit there with my dead self, blubbering like a spanked child, I say, “I’m sorry,” and I know she feels me, hears me, understands me. The hand in mine goes slack. Her body temperature plummets. After that, I use my mind to physically split open her chest. Reaching inside the now opened cavity, in through blood and bone and organs, I grip her lifeless heart, sever the arteries with my mind, then take it out and lay it like a slab of meat on the table.
When I take her head from her body, it is my mind envisioning a clean cut line between her C4 and C5 vertebrae. The head just sort of rolls off the shoulders and blood drains everywhere.
Pushing through something so agonizing it has yet to receive a name, I remove her leg and arm, and then I quarter her torso. I feel her. She’s everywhere, still hovering, watching. Raven. My heart soon blossoms with joy and I know this is her telling me she’s finally at peace.
Thanking me.
On the gurney, I gather together all her cordoned parts, then walk them like choice cuts of meat to the room where the incinerator stands waiting.
Opening the oven door, I slide out the rack and place her body parts on it. When everything is there, I push the burn-rack back inside and shut the door. The logical, sad part of me wants to cry, but with her spirit beside me, no longer burdened by her physical past, I can’t. She is elated to, at last, feel freedom from this world, this burden. Inside her head, in the madness that was an eight century old me, there was darkness and chaos, and so much melancholy it seemed the unbearable affliction. Now I feel only the richness and the wholeness of her soul and how freedom abounds. These are the same kinds of emotions I experienced listening to Nikki on the beach in Big Sur, and to some degree in myself when I left my life behind for a week.
“If you can do this while you’re alive,” her soul whispers to mine, “then you can have what I was never able to have.”
“So I have…a chance at happiness?” I ask.
“You just took the first step,” she says mind-to-mind. My heart beams with brilliance and trust for the first time in a long time, then she says, “Thank you.”
To her I breathe out a heartfelt “I love you” and then she’s gone. Off to heaven, or wherever it is damaged, dead souls like mine go.
The Face in the Silver Scissors
1
Cameron stood in front of the mirror. She was naked. Resentful. “Mirror, mirror on the wall,” she said, her stare glacial and condemning, “who’s the most ruined of them all?”
The mirror remained silent. Her cell phone, however, did not.
She put on her robe, walked in the other room, checked the text. It was from Theresa. It said: WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T GET ONLINE.
The phone had been ringing all morning. Was Theresa trying to reach her? Probably. Cameron listened to the messages. They were from her father. He sounded panicked.
“Honey,” he said, “call me as soon as you get these messages.”
For the love of God, she couldn’t take any more bad news! She continued to stare at the text. If the calls from her father and the text from Theresa were related, what was so important that she couldn’t get online?
“I won’t get online,” she said, crawling back into bed.
She went online ten minutes later.
If she had a weaker constitution, she would have gone to pieces. The icy fingers…the diamond-sharp fingers of bad news…they trailed down her back, dread slithering beneath the surface of her flesh. What she saw, the things she read online, it was the physical embodiment of trepidation. A deep, soul sucking dread that, when coupled with the abuse she had taken, as well as the emotional roller coaster Raven ran her on, seeped into her leaving her breathless and forlorn, like nausea and bad drugs mixed with the most toxic news ever.
Staggering into the bathroom, she dropped to her knees, lifted the toilet’s lid and surrendered her entire body to the seizures pumping bile and misery from her stomach.
In the other room, the phone rang again. She ignored it. She remained on her knees on the floor, dry eyed and too stunned to cry. Decisions were made inside her, then undone and remade.
How could her father do this to her? To her mother?
Front page news on Yahoo was no quiet affair. Hundreds of millions of people now knew. Her friends knew. Their extended family and all her father’s fans knew.
He was caught last night blowing the lead singer of a ridiculously popular boy band that, for ten years at least, had small breasted, screaming girls going sterile just listening to them. It was the biggest story on the internet.
The only story with any real traction.
The phone rang again, its noise shrill, if not incredibly intrusive. She wiped her eyes and mouth, then blew her nose and flushed the wad of tissue. Standing up, she cinched her robe closed, then walked into the other room and checked the Caller ID. It was him. Again. Her father. She wanted to stomp on the phone just to get it to stop ringing. Just to not hear the voice on the other end and all the bullshit that it was prepared to spew. Someone knocked on the door, which made her put her hands to her ears. She couldn’t talk now. Not now. No freaking way! The knock became insistent.
“Go the fuck away!” she screamed.
She heard a key slide into the lock and turn but she couldn’t summon the energy to stop it from opening. The door swung open and Julie appeared. When she saw Cameron, she drew a sharp, startled breath, almost like a gasp, then did the mother of all double takes.
“Jesus shit,” Julie muttered, horrified. “What happened to you?”
“Where’d you get the key?” Cameron snapped, fighting the urge to turn away. Instead, she just stood there like her eyes wouldn’t blink.
Then: “Janine.”
Julie seemed incapable of wiping the stricken look from her face. Not even a loaded shotgun to her head would stop that ever-telling expression. It made Cameron want to cry. On the other hand, her ex-BFF’s reaction had her wanting to be mean, if anything to stop the surge of emotion.
“Cameron,” Julie said, worried, like they were still friends, “who did this to you? Did you do this to yourself?” Julie’s eyes bore the most incredible shine, like she was starting to cry, which made Cameron even more sad, and even more mad. The Julie she knew never cried.
“No, I didn’t do this to myself!” she spat. What kind of stupid question was that??
“Is this a cry for help, or something?” her former friend asked, wiping her eyes. “I mean…do we need to call someone or something?”
“No. We don’t need to call someone or something,” she mocked, undoing her robe. She opened it wide, revealing the scabbed X’s over her nipples and the blood-crusted word carved into her pubis.
Julie reeled.
“Raven,” she snarled, pulling her robe shut and cinching the knot.
That word, that name, it seemed to elicit a response in Cameron’s former friend. The same kind of response you get when you smell something particularly rancid in the air.
“But…how?” Julie asked. “Why?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, closing down emotionally. Remembering how Julie ditched her for that retard Brayden, that goddamn nobody, she said, “We are not friends, Julie.” Thinking of that career ruining move of her father’s, hoping to God it wasn’t true but knowing it probably was, she said, “Time for you to go, and don’t come back.”
“Cameron—”
“You’re dead to me.” The tone in Cameron’s voice was beyond reproach. Her words were knives meant to cut deep, meant to sew permanent seeds of separation.
Julie took a step back as if punched square in the chin. She tilted her head sideways, her eyes more stunned by the statement than she seemed when she first saw Cameron�
�s injuries. Her face was complete astonishment.
“Don’t say that,” Julie begged, as if she wasn’t letting Brayden, that swamp donkey, stick it to her.
Cameron folded her arms, resolute. “Get out, bitch.”
Julie looked at her a second longer to see if she would relent, or apologize, but Cameron gave her former BFF the stiffest, most sincere look. It was the look that said she was all business.
Julie finally turned and left.
2
Riled, her blood at full boil, Cameron stalked over to her phone, snatched it up, punched in her father’s number. When he picked up, she didn’t even wait for him to say hello before she said, “A fucking boy band, dad? Really?”
“The media is blowing this all out of proportion,” he said, clearly on the defensive.
“The only thing being blown, daddy, is that little blonde faggot who’s the same age as me.”
“Don’t say that word!” he boomed.
“Oh, don’t act so pious. Jesus, you’re worse than Eddie Murphy ‘giving a ride’ to a twenty-year old transsexual prostitute.”
“Don’t reduce me to that, Cameron!”
“You reduced yourself.”
“Is that what you called to tell me?” he said, his tone no longer that of righteous indignation but of absolute resignation. Like whatever energy he had been saving for her, she managed to take, leaving him completely exhausted.
“I didn’t call you,” she barked. “I’m returning your call.”
God there was so much anger in her, so much rage.
“Yes, well. Your mother left me.”
“When?”
“Last month. She wanted to tell you, but…well, she has this thing about being reclusive. She’s in some metaphysical retreat in Arizona praying for…whatever, the soul of the earth, or whatever in the shit those freaking crazies do.”