Psychostasis

by Ezra Blake

  “He went down for his friends,” Elliot mumbles.

  “In my understanding, it was a group effort.”

  He stretches once more toward the ceiling and sucks in a breath. The hooks tear at his breasts, elongating them all the way to his belly button. “She said she was eighteen.”

  Ivan nods. “Eighteen or not, she didn’t deserve the uterine rupture. Or the broken arm.”

  Elliot’s eyes glaze over. He collapses, hangs.

  “You share his tastes. Your search history is truly horrific, Elliot.” He flashes a smile in Christopher’s direction. “And this is coming from me.”

  He met them a few months after Dad left. Brent, Tony, and Cayden, three whiteish kids from school. If Travis is home, his friends are in the basement, drinking and shouting at the television. His mom can’t do much. She can threaten to call the cops, but they know she’ll never follow through.

  Elliot—Elizabeth, then—runs errands for them whenever he can. He cooks dinner for everyone and buys them cigarettes from the shady corner store down the street, but no matter how hard he tries, they don’t want him around.

  “They’re good guys but they don’t treat girls nice,” Travis says. And Elliot says yeah, but they hang out with girls all the time. Different girls every weekend, always swaying around and laughing about nothing. “You’re too young,” Travis says. But that’s crap because half the girls are his age, and besides, he acts older than Travis. He even has a job. He makes thirty bucks a week posting flyers for the Cash-4-Gold on the corner of 28th.

  But nobody wants their kid sister hanging around. Elliot is annoying, according to Travis. He’s too busy, according to his mom. He needs to go to school and take care of the house and help her wash and dress and get into her chair. Some weekends, he sneaks downstairs and listens to them bellow and laugh in the basement. It sounds like they’re having fun.

  Finally, he turns thirteen. He bakes a tray of chocolate cupcakes to celebrate. He’s a teenager now, and he’s nobody’s kid sister—and once Travis’s friends actually talk to him, they’ll realize that he can keep up. He’s probably smarter than them. He reads college textbooks for fun.

  It’s a Saturday night. A Sunday morning, technically. The moon is full and flooding the living room with dull, white light that makes the carpet look cleaner than it is. The sounds rising up from the air vents are all slurred laughter and high-pitched squealing. It must be the crazy kind of party that high school kids are always talking about, where people cry and throw up and somebody puts weed in the brownies. And Elliot is a teenager now. He’s going.

  He balances the tray of cupcakes on one arm as he opens the basement door. They don’t have weed in them, but everyone loves cupcakes. He steps down the wooden stairs with eyes locked on his bare feet to keep from tripping, and when he gets to the bottom, he sees Brent first.

  Brent is naked. The muscles in his back ripple as he thrusts forward. There’s a loud thud. A shriek. A spray of blood, and then Travis sweeps him off his feet and the tray clatters to the ground, smearing frosting across the bottom step.

  “Liz, I don’t know what you think you saw—” He drops Elliot on the couch and crouches to eye level “—but she’s our friend.”

  “Your friend? He was—”

  “I told you not to go down there,” he says, jamming his finger into Elliot’s flat chest.

  His stomach is hot and tight. His heart pounds in his throat. “He was hurting her.”

  Travis grips his shoulders and looks him in the eye.

  He says, “If you tell anyone, I’ll fucking kill you.”

  So Elliot keeps his mouth shut. Those thirty seconds loop through his head over and over.

  He sleeps with his mom that night, and the next night, and the next, and he doesn’t tell her why, no matter how she pleads. On the fourth night, she wakes to his fingers in her waistband as he whispers to himself: If you tell anyone, I’ll fucking kill you.

  She closes her eyes and pretends to be asleep.

  “That isn’t his fault,” Chris says. “He saw something terrible and it got all twisted up with puberty and hormones and—”

  “He willfully sought more of the same. He could have—”

  “What?” Chris spits. “Could’ve what, forgotten about it? I guess when you cut off my leg, I was supposed to forget about that, too?”

  “I shouldn’t have to justify this, Christopher. He’s been nothing but a force of destruction in the lives of everyone he held dear. He maimed, murdered, and exploited—”

  A loud sob wedges itself between them. Only then does Ivan realize they’re toe-to-toe, chests thrust forward, squabbling like apes. He takes a step back.

  “I’m sorry.” Elliot’s voice is rusted metal drowned in mucous. He blinks up at Chris. “He’s right, it’s my fault. I’m sorry.”

  “Hush, darling.” Ivan gives Chris a pointed look as he twists off the cap of a fresh water bottle. He crouches at Elliot’s side and tips water into his parched mouth.“You’re paying your penance. There’s no need to—”

  Elliot spits it back in his face.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  “I’m hurt,” Ivan says, drawing away.

  A wet smack echoes through the bunker as Christopher’s fist connects with his ear. He’ll be lucky if he has any fingers left unbroken when this is through.

  The hook rips through Elliot’s left breast and clangs against the concrete. His aim was poor and the blow was misaligned—it might leave him partially deaf, but this is only relevant in the context of these next few weeks.

  Chris grabs Elliot by the hair and wrenches him backward. The other hook rips free and he hangs by the neck, whimpering, scrabbling fruitlessly with his handcuffs. “You will never disrespect him like that. Do you understand?”

  “Ah—hhgh, hggh,” he gurgles. Chris rips another strip of tape from the roll and pastes it over his bloody mouth.

  Ivan places a hand on the small of Christopher’s back, marveling once more at his masterpiece. Chris turns. His cherubic face glimmers with sweat. His lips are impossibly pink, and Ivan is forced to kiss him. “While I appreciate the sentiment,” he says, “I’m perfectly capable of defending my own honor.”

  “It spit on you.”

  “He is a person, Christopher. If you can only perform when you distance yourself from his humanity, perhaps I haven’t taught you as well as I’d hoped.”

  “I don’t know how you can call this a him.” He kicks Elliot hard in the thigh, making him wince.

  “Times have changed,” Ivan says mildly.

  Chris snatches a glove from their stash of supplies and pulls it on, flexes his fingers, and douses them in capsaicin. “Fine.” He reaches beneath Elliot and grabs a handful of genitalia. “So you don’t need this, right?”

  Elliot’s face turns cherry red and he screams until vessels burst in the whites of his eyes. Ivan can’t see what Chris is doing down there, but he can infer: capsaicin searing his delicate mucous membranes, an agony so hot and pure that no thought can survive its wrath.

  Elliot is not a boy.

  He’s not a girl or an object. He’s pain. It’s neither good nor evil, past nor future. It just is.

  The first eternity is bearable. Pain becomes suffering only in its obscene context, and there was a moment—fury, terror, bated breath—before Christopher stuffed the saturated glove inside him. That’s the worst part. He remembers what it was like not to hurt.

  His chest is numb, at least, and even when the hooks rip all the way through his nipples, he doesn’t feel it until he looks down to find himself separated into four dangling flaps of tissue. Chris and Ivan are no longer paying attention; they're arguing with each other: I don’t want to draw it out any more. And I never said you had to kill them. Only Elliot is present to witness his prison crumbling. He makes one last, heroic attempt at intellectualization. He conjures snapshots of textbooks and clinical trials, collects snippets of news reports which he was too preoccupied to truly
watch—a background hum of misery happening to other people.

  This body was never yours, he tells himself.

  It doesn’t matter what they do to you. You’re just here to watch.

  He forces his vision into focus.

  Chris is hugging the wall, fists balled at his sides. Ivan is tight against him, one hand on his shoulder, as loose and tranquil as a person can be. If not for the bloodstains or the sweat sticking his hair to his brow, he could be giving a guest lecture, or making rounds.

  “It is human to form attachments,” Ivan says. “They can even be advantageous, if you know how to use them.”

  “I’m not attached.”

  “It isn’t a problem, darling. I’ve counted this among the likely outcomes. I’ve prepared.” Chris turns away, but Ivan catches his chin. “It’s fine by me, so long as you understand the weight of that responsibility. Boys can live quite a long time, if you let them.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I don’t want to hurt them, either.”

  Ivan takes a step back, untying the strings on his apron. The keys to the handcuffs are in that pocket. Elliot follows the fabric through his blinding pain.

  “You and I both know that isn’t true. Help me understand,” Ivan says. “This should be no different than Martin Guerre, or Piero, and you handled them so well. You’ve come so far in finding yourself.”

  “Finding you,” Chris says. “I don’t want to torture them, Ivan. I want things to be normal.”

  “Normal.” He drops the apron in a heap on the concrete—too far; he’ll never reach—and ruffles Christopher’s hair, which is brown and stringy with blood. “What sort of normal might that be? Should I play professor again?” He grabs a strip of numb breast tissue and stretches it toward himself. Elliot grunts. “This is the pectoral fat pad,” he says. “These lumps are the lobes of the mammary gland, containing alveoli, which produce milk. They’re also a common site of cancers.”

  “Stop it,” Chris says.

  “I need you to clarify. When you brought me to the autopsy lab, were we normal, then? When I threatened to drown you? Our first meal in Florence, when I fed you your leg—”

  “Is this a fucking game to you, Ivan?”

  “Darling,” he chides, and leans in for another caress.

  “I’m serious. I do what you say, you get angry. I make my own decisions and you laugh at me. What the hell do you want?”

  “I only want to lead you into—”

  “Jesus Christ,” he groans, tossing his hands in the air. “My true self is telling me to slit their throats and take a fucking shower, but that isn’t exciting enough for you, is it? It has to be cruel and artistic and your exact flavor of depravity but it has to be my idea, right? It has to be your fucking idea in my head. But I’m not you, Ivan.”

  Chris backs him against the wall, shaking and scarred with fury. The muddy purple glow makes the ends of his matted hair stand out like fiber optic lights.

  “I’m not you,” he repeats.

  He’s Christopher Dour, and that means something. It must.

  And still that trembling core of him calls out into the darkness: I’m yours. I’m yours. Please put me in my place.

  Chris drops his hostility. It splinters and crumbles on the concrete. He picks up a shard—a hunting knife, its wooden handle still saturated with Ash’s fluids—and presses it into Ivan’s hand.

  “Just do it,” he says. “I’m done waiting around for you to work up the nerve.”

  Ivan’s face is unmoved, his lips upturned. “I’m not making your decisions,” he says, and passes it back. The knife is unfathomably heavy in Christopher’s palm.

  “Choose now, Ivan, or I’m walking back to the house,” he says. “If I’m your bitch, fine. But if I’m supposed to be your equal, you need to treat me like an equal.”

  Ivan ponders this for a moment. He asks, “How can I respect you when you can’t respect yourself?”

  “This is me respecting myself. Listen to me!” Chris shouts. “I don’t want this anymore!”

  In a just world, the house lights come up. The audience groans and shuffles down the aisle, muttering about wasted time. They dump paper cups and candy wrappers in the bins outside; they validate their parking and take the highway home.

  In a just world, Ivan thanks him for his time and calls a cab. But justice is fickle.

  “Say something.”

  Ivan smiles.

  “Say something.”

  He lifts his chin. Chris turns away.

  “You never gave a shit about me. Jesus,” he says. “I’m so fucking blind.”

  He paces halfway to the corpse—any corpse, take your pick—and then his chest tightens and he turns around again and there’s Ivan, fucking smiling. Ivan with red hair and sleeves rolled up to his elbows. Ivan with teeth, with genuine mirth in his eyes.

  Chris says: “You don’t love me.”

  Ivan’s grin spreads like cancer.

  He says: “You never loved me.”

  Like malaria.

  He says: “You just wanted company.”

  It spreads like heavy metals through the water table.

  Then his knife is in Ivan’s shoulder and he’s on the floor, laughing. Chris wrenches it out. He grips Ivan’s hair and slams his face into the concrete, over and over until his jaw caves in, until his teeth shatter and fall like marbles, until his lovely high cheekbones are protruding in fragments from his skin. He coughs up pieces of tongue, and he’s aspirating blood but continues to laugh.

  “Again,” he wheezes.

  Chris slams his skull against the floor again.

  Chapter 31

  Jake is somewhere alien, familiar, and incredibly dense. Perception upon perception, ceaseless black movement, layers and layers and infinite layers of sorrow, jest, despair, ecstasy. His body is gone. It occurred to him, several centuries ago, that he’s only taken amphetamine, which doesn’t cause hallucinations. That knowledge has long since become irrelevant.

  They carry his limp soul through fields of black flowers and lives he never lived. They surround him, shield him. They convey him through a celebration.

  This part, too, is familiar. He’s attended and forgotten this party billions of times, stood in the thrall of dancing, hyper-intelligent jesters and basked in their adulation: He’s here! He’s here! Congratulations, you made it home safely!

  But even in this non-place defined by the absence of time, his convoy alerts him, with serious clarity, that this is neither the time nor place for celebration. They push through the welcome wagon and into a world of pure information, unknowable symbols, the matrix of reality itself.

  Let me see, he asks them. Please, I want to see.

  But they only twist their limbs around and through him, blanket him tighter, and press onward.

  Cold dread lingers beyond the matrix. Its tendrils seep through their shield; Jake’s soul quivers and shrinks. He doesn’t dare think. Something is out there—a multitude of somethings, so unfathomably vast that his deepest love and suffering are so insignificant as to be non-existent in their monumental presence. His convoy carries him through unnoticed.

  You’re at the end, they tell him on the other side, and they let him go.

  Jake floats in nothing and stares into the mirror of existence. He smiles.

  It’s a pretty good joke.

  “Don’t move,” Chris says. “I’m gonna get him medical attention.”

  “Please, it’s not going to help. Just unlock my handcuffs, I’ll—”

  “Wait. Stay here,” he says.

  “We’ll die here. Chris, please.”

  Chris drags the limp body across the floor, leaving a trail of blood behind him. He’s hollow, rotten, dead, and he has eyes only for Ivan.

  Shhhhk. A gasp. Shhhhk. Gasp.

  “Leave the door open, just leave the—”

  It was supposed to be early-onset Alzheimer’s, like his grandparents.

  He’d lose names and places first. Days and mo
nths would trickle between his fingers, slow enough that he wouldn’t notice. His friends and family would chuckle when he lost his keys, but the laughter wouldn’t crease their eyes. Soon enough, he wouldn’t have friends or family. He’d have faces, but they wouldn’t match his family’s faces. He’d have names on the tip of his tongue.

  He’d have his mother, maybe, and he’d have Travis back when he was not guilty. Travis badgering their father for a few dollars to spend at the Wawa after school, Travis smelling of cigarette smoke and smiling: I’ll buy you a pack if you stay quiet. He’d lose Travis, too.

  After that, there’d be no point. He’d forget how to swallow his food. His heart would forget to beat and he’d forget to be alive, and then he’d be nothing but the ripples of a skipping rock, sunk. It would be ugly and expected. He’d forget the indignity.

  He’s already forgetting. The noose restricts blood flow to his brain, and his memories warp. He remembers the anatomy lab as a sanctuary, Agatha as strong and sterile, but that can’t be right because Ash leaks. Ash billows and melts.

  Already he’s forgotten his mother’s face. Already he’s lost hours.

  And Chris is not coming back.

  Elliot’s hands are still shackled. His noose is tied. He’s pissed himself twice and opened his eyes a dozen times, each time shocked to feel the urine burn his skinned knees, shocked to see blood and stone. He’s waiting for a sign, but if he doesn’t get one soon, he’ll have to use the rope. Sleep chases him in tight circles. He closes his eyes, chokes into blackness, gasps himself awake. Losing hours. Days? He doesn’t know.

  “Ja-ake,” he sings under his breath. “Jacobjacobjacob.”

  A key is nestled in the apron pocket, discarded where stone meets bloody concrete. It glimmers in the corner of his eye, sometimes there, sometimes not. He’ll never reach, anyway. Not a chance. It probably isn’t there.

  He sings songs to stay sane. He recites poetry and fast food slogans. Every word he’s ever spoken, every textbook and advertisement is there, swirling beneath the surface. “Potatoes tonight,” he says. “Sorry, Mom. It’s all we got.”