“The information I give you will be worth whatever she owes you,” says Jon. Duer sits and thinks for a moment.
“Very well. Let’s talk in my private chambers,” says Duer and he snaps his fingers. The thugs make a path from him to a wooden door at the back of the room. Duer goes to it, opens it and waits for Jon to join him.
“Just him, you two can stay outside,” says Duer and One Eye immediately starts to draw a blade from somewhere.
“Stop, One Eye,” says Jon. “Let me talk to him, I’ll be fine.”
One Eye seems to strain against himself but he puts the blade back. The thugs around him breathe a collective sigh of relief. Jon and Duer step inside. Jon wonders what tattoos Gerald would’ve chosen, if he had a choice.
Chapter 24
Now
Elsewhere are two letters that were never sent, because of pride, each a declaration of love that would’ve changed lives.
Here, the room is like a library but instead of books, hundreds of vials hang from hooks around the room, each with a label attached to it.
Rose Cottage, Dutch Tears, Snow Dawn, Saudade, Limerence, Ubi Sunt, Memento Mori, Crowhurst, Stendhal Syndrome, Lazarus Syndrome, Sic Transit Gloria Mundi, Melencolia, Lamentation, Judgement, La Petite Mort, Moriendo Renascor, Isaiah 22, Pie Jesu, Requiem, Ad Mortem Festinamus, The Wild, Fimbulwinter…
Jon’s mind slowly comprehends that every single one is a different form of Sadness.
Duer turns to him, “Booze makes you stupid and like it. It makes you fall around and not care. And eventually, stupid is the only way you know how to be. Cocaine makes you feel important, that life matters, that you matter. That the music is better than it really is. That every conversation is profound and that all pretenses have been stripped away. Ecstasy makes you dance all night and love your friends so much, in a way that you’ve never been able to tell them about before. Acid makes you see pretty colours and makes things breathe. But Sadness, there is nothing like Sadness.”
Duer goes to the shelves and holds up the vials one by one.
“This one feels like a death in the family, whomever you’re closest to and it makes you remember every good time you shared that you’ll never have again. It tastes like old age and bitterness and regret, like a phone not ringing. This one feels like your God has abandoned you and that you’re truly alone in the universe. It makes your mind so dark and so cold that your soul wants to scream. This one is the bitterest. It tastes like squandered talent and this one is the subtlest, it tastes like a lover turning away from you and makes you hear the words ‘we need to talk’ in the back of your mind. It makes you feel like someone’s, casually, leaving you forever. It’s obvious and blunt but it takes a real connoisseur to appreciate the nuances. This one feels like apathy and wanting to leave your skin. This one feels like a desire to fix something which can never be fixed. This one makes you feel like your dog has died. The one you’ve had since it was a puppy. Exactly like that. It’s considered a novelty by some. This one feels like a conversation not had. This one feels like yourself yelling at yourself.”
“It’s quite a collection,” says Jon and he fights the urge to smash one of the vials open and immediately swallow it. The feeling is like an unholy typhoon inside him, begging to be let out. He starts to sweat.
“I’m quite a collector. I’m glad you can appreciate it,” says Duer. “Would you like some?” He offers Jon a vial and Jon’s hands shake as he takes it. Jon pours some of it into his mouth. The familiar feelings begin to overtake him. Somewhere else, he’s back with Michelle and they’re happy again; he’s happy, in his sadness. Everything is normal.
“Whoa, take it easy, trickster,” says Duer as Jon falls to the floor, emptying the bottle. Jon is somewhere else. Jon is somewhere else. Jon is somewhere else. Somewhere, with Michelle.
Chapter 25
Now
A son makes himself a birthday card each year his father isn’t there and pretends it’s from him. He turns twenty and throws them all away. But someone finds them.
“Get the hell up,” says Emily and she pours a bucket of water over Jon’s face. Jon is yanked back to reality, back from the place where he and Michelle are real again, back to this hell without her.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” asks Jon as he looks around and he knows that there’s probably less wrong with her than there is with him. Edward is there. One Eye is there. Duer is there, with his personal honour guard of thugs.
“I’ve never seen an addiction as strong as yours,” says Duer. “You’re lucky you’re still alive. Your friends here bargained for your life and they’ve managed to convince me that what you have to say is worth hearing. I hope, for your sake, that they’re right,” says Duer, pacing slowly across the room.
Jon finds some remaining human part of himself and he turns to Emily. “Are you alright?” For the first time in a while, there’s genuine human emotion in his voice, there’s feeling and there’s caring. Emily manages a smile.
“I’m alright,” she says and she means as much of that as she can.
“You’ve been asleep for a while. I believe it’d be best if you start talking,” says Duer.
“Fine, but in private,” says Jon.
“Fine with me but no more Sadness for you until this is over,” says Duer and Jon nods, ignoring the lump in his throat, the animal, the typhoon inside him screaming for more and more and more.
“Emily, you need to hear this too. Duer, bring your most trusted men in with you, everyone else must stay outside,” says Jon. They walk back into Duer’s study and One Eye and Edward take their place outside it, discouraging any eavesdroppers. And Jon, in that little room, explains how his father ended the world.
Chapter 26
Now
A single tear on a post-it note that says, “Goodbye forever. I will love you for just as long.”
“You’re lying,” says Duer and he slams his fist against the table. “I know what I saw, I know what killed my parents.”
“Do you really?” asks Jon, “Ask your men, one at a time, what they saw. Was it an earthquake? A nuclear holocaust? An invading army? The only common denominator is the shadows, that’s it.”
“If what you’re saying is true, then it’s the greatest lie ever told,” says Duer. He stares out the window at the distant marble spires of the United Government building. Jon can tell some part of him is starting to believe. Emily is crying in the corner. Duer’s two top men are whispering quickly to each other, debating Jon’s story.
“And you say this doctor you encountered, he wants to do it again?”
“Yes, he says the illusion wasn’t finished at The End, that because my father died, he never completed the second part,” says Jon.
“What’s the second part?”
“I don’t know exactly. I think because the first part was catastrophe, depression and misery, the second part was supposed to be some kind of positive hallucination, something that pulled everyone together and inspired them to fight a common enemy to build a better world. But that’s just a guess.”
“The doctor needs you, right?”
“Yes, that’s what he said.”
“Well then, my little friends, all we need to do is keep you out of his hands for a few days and we’ve won, correct?”
“Correct. There’s something about the significance of the date that it happened last time, it makes the illusion powerful, something about the emotional resonance everyone has with it. He can try and use me after it but it won’t work nearly as well. He believes that he needs me on that date, as near as I can tell,” says Jon. Duer steeples his hands in thought, then after a pause, claps them.
“Very well, we will hide you and your friends from the United Government, at least until the anniversary of The End passes.”
“Thank you,” says Jon. The animal inside him is screaming for more. He reaches out for another vial of Sadness.
“May I?” he says.
Duer makes a mock b
ow and says, “Go right ahead.”
Emily looks away. She knows she helped make Jon the addict that he is. And now, she’s starting to regret it.
Chapter 27
Now
A woman turns away from the man she loves, as a passerby takes a picture. The picture is saved on a memory card.
Emily hears Jon’s voice talking in the small room Duer gave him to sleep in. No one’s responding. At least, no one living. She opens the door.
“Jon?” He doesn’t answer. “Jon?” She asks again, into the darkness.
“What do you want?” comes the voice, weak and feeble.
“What’s wrong with you?” Emily asks, sitting down on the edge of his bed.
“What’s wrong with me? I don’t know, my father’s responsible for Armageddon and apparently I could be too; everyone insists the girl I’ve been in love with for the last ten years of my life doesn’t even exist; and I’m living in a store room belonging to one of the most powerful drug dealers in the city. Other than that, nothing is wrong with me.”
Emily could hear him opening another vial of Sadness in the darkness.
“Jesus, Jon, how much of that do you really need?”
“Every time I take it, it brings her back to me, Emily. It brings Michelle back,” Jon laments.
“She’s not real, Jon. She’s a construction.” A vial flies across the room and smashes against the wall behind Emily’s head.
“She’s not a construction,” says Jon and she can hear his voice shaking. He’s full of fullstops and anger.
“Michelle, don’t listen to her, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” Suddenly, a soft glow fills the room and Michelle appears next to Jon, bathing his forehead in water, wiping it with a cloth.
“She’s not real, Jon, no matter what you do, no matter how real you try and make her,” says Emily. Michelle’s ghost looks at her with scorn in her eyes.
“I know your eyes are behind hers, Jon, even if you don’t,” says Emily and she turns to leave the room. Jon screams and the room is bathed in imaginary flames as he retreats to his imaginary lover. Emily shuts the door behind her and leaves Jon in a purgatory of his own design.
An hour later, she finds him in the bar, drunk.
“Talk to me, Jon.”
“Why can’t I just be quiet? Why can’t I just be quiet and happy? Why do I have to be making a noise for you to be happy? Don’t you fucking get how upset making noise makes me? Don’t you fucking get it? I just want to be ok. That’s all I fucking want.”
Emily doesn’t take his shit, she repeats herself: “Jon, talk to me.”
And he cries in that way that only addicts can, in that way that only the people who will always know what it means to always be wanting something they cannot have.
Jon talks about his drug, “There’s not a breath of air I can breathe or a step I can take that won’t remind me of her. She is as much a part of me as my skin.”
Emily sits next to him and puts her hand on his shoulder.
“But she was never real, Jon.”
“She was real to me. And while I can be logical about this, logic has never once mended a broken heart or fixed a sundered soul. She has poisoned the very core of me. A dream has killed me.”
Emily pulls him closer, putting her arms around him and feeling something for him she hasn’t felt since she was a teenager.
He whispers into her ear, “Perhaps I can live through this. But I would be deluding myself if I thought that late at night, before I slept, she wouldn’t return to haunt me. And that would be unfair to whomever I was trying to sleep next to. No matter how pure my intentions were. There are no soulmates. Love is a lie. Love, is broken.”
Something about the way Jon says this breaks him; and a little of it breaks Emily inside, too.
Chapter 28
Now
An executioner’s mask.
Jon tries to sleep but all he can do is remember; he remembers what it was like to touch her, when he first thought she was real, her skin was a foreign land he’d never finish exploring, a place where he’d always be a welcome stranger but a stranger nonetheless. His fingers would travel from her neck, down her back, across her ribs, and if they were in bed, slowly towards her thighs, always moving, just above her skin.
And she would sigh softly and welcome him into her land.
Jon screams himself to sleep.
Emily can hear it in the next room.
“You need to stop giving him Sadness, Duer,” says Emily. Duer smiles.
He knew this was coming.
“He’s a big boy, Emily. I also don’t think you’re in a position to be giving me orders,” says Duer.
“He’s going to kill himself or all of us if you keep feeding him that stuff,” she says.
“I’m sorry, Miss Emily but last I checked, you were the one who got him started on the stuff,” and as he says it, Emily clenches her jaw.
“I know. It was a mistake.”
“That’s the thing about mistakes Emily, my dear, is that you have to live with them. We all do.”
“I’m not even sure why you’re helping him, Duer.”
“It’s simple, Emily. Power. If even half of what he says is true, he could change the world as we know it. Don’t you think the world needs changing?”
“Maybe. I guess it depends on what you want to change it to,” says Emily.
Duer walks across the room to her and runs his fingers through her hair. She noticeably cringes at his touch and as she pulls away, he wraps her hair in his hand and yanks her head closer to him.
“When you’re me, darling, you can change the world to whatever you want.” She starts to cry. There’s a knock on the door.
“Boss?” one of the thugs asks, the door half opens.
“What is it, you fool? Can’t you see I’m busy?” Duer snarls from across the room.
“There’s someone here to see her,” says the thug.
“Who?”
“Her,” says the thug and he points at Emily. Emily has no one left in this world. And yet, here was someone. Duer lets go of her hair, losing interest in her like a cat losing interest in a dead bird.
“Go,” he says and waves her away, still sobbing.
She walks outside towards the bar and meets a ghost.
Chapter 29
Now
Hemingway’s shotgun
“Emily thought this would be good for you,” says Edward. They’re in the back of one of Duer’s delivery carriages, hidden behind boxes of old bottles and crates and other things they’d piled on top to hide themselves from the city’s Peace Patrols. It’s the night before the anniversary of The End.
They just have to stay out of the clutches of the doctor for another 24 hours and everything will be ok. Or at least, as ok as it was going to get. They can never go back to normal, whatever that once was.
“I still don’t know where we’re going, Edward,” says Jon. He raises another vial of Sadness to his lips and drains it. It takes more and more to actually have any kind of effect on him, to feel anything at all.
“You’ll see,” says Edward. And he smiles. He thinks One Eye is smiling too. Even in the dark, he can sense a change in the mood. The carriage rattles along, past smoke stacks and broken homes, past schools and factories for what feels like forever. Finally, it stops.
“We’re here,” says Edward. The driver goes round the back and opens up for them and they find themselves in a blasted, desolate suburb that looks like it’s been looted more times than the sun has risen. Jon looks around him, then he recognises some of the architecture of the house next to them. It’s the home he grew up in. Jon runs inside. There’s his room. There’s his parents’ room, beneath the graffiti and burned out walls; this is where he became what he became. This is where he snuck out that night with Emily and Michelle and here, here is the bathroom where his mother killed herself soon after The End. He touches the wall and steadies himself.
“Why did you bri
ng me here?” he asks, staring into the closed lids of his eyes.
“Emily said it might remind you of who you once were, before you became this mess, before Michelle, before The End, before anything.”
Jon walks outside and One Eye and Edward follow him. Here is the road they walked down together. At the end is a park. The park where they swung and smoked and this is the place Jon last felt normal. Jon starts to retrace the steps he took ten years ago. He turns and he’s facing the park. Only one swing remains, the rest are all stolen or burnt. On that swing, is a woman. Jon feels like he should know her. She’s familiar yet different. He walks up to her and she turns around and stands up as he approaches.
“Hello, Jon,” says Michelle.
Chapter 30
Now
Steven’s hands were soft, yet he worked with them all the time. Hands made for praying and now he’s dead. Now he’s dead and I am alone. I am alone. I will fall off this building and I will hit the ground so fast, I will fly into his arms on the other side. He will read to me each night we spend in heaven. His voice will be the last thing I hear. I will never hear silence again. He will write his name and then the word “loves” and then my name on my skin with his fingers. I will fall and then I will fly and then I will be with him. We will be together again soon and I will hold his hand and he will hold mine. Jump now. Now. Now. Now.
Steven’s hands were soft, yet he worked with them all the time. Hands made for praying and now he’s dead. Now he’s dead and I am alone.
It doesn’t make sense. A part of Jon’s brain always lights up whenever Michelle’s around but not now. Now she’s just here and if he blinks, she doesn’t stop existing and when she talks, Jon has never thought of the words she’s saying. She is her own entity. Her own person. Not Jon’s.
Intentional Dissonance Page 13