Memento Amare

by G. D. Cox

  There's no chance that his Clyde is coming back, he knows that now.

  There's no chance that he is coming back from this either, and he knows that now too.

  XXVI.

  UNA IN PERPETUUM, he'd murmured to Clyde after sliding the luxurious platinum, court-shaped wedding ring onto Clyde's finger, eyes more pink than blue, more wet than dry and beaming, beaming like the sun. Together forever, and that's a promise, sweetheart.

  XXVII.

  "I SWEAR, BABE, I'LL spend the rest of my life making it up to you. Spend forever. I swear."

  There is a most familiar, beloved voice rasping to him, between what sound like muffled sobs. He feels something hot and wet dripping and rolling in rivulets down the back of his fingers. Feels the graze of beard stubble and lips against the back of his hand and those lips ... those lips feel just like ... Clyde's. They feel just like Clyde's when they once pressed upon his mouth and his skin and let the sunlight into him, but it can't be because Clyde's gone. The Clyde he knew and loved is gone.

  So who is this?

  He doesn't know.

  He doesn't know, and it's such a strange thing to him, not knowing this man who seems just like his Clyde. It 's such a strange thing, not knowing every Clyde Barnett in every universe when it feels like he should. Like they're meant to find and know each other. Like they're meant to be, no matter who and where and when they are.

  Best to go back to sleep again, where he doesn't hurt and his heart isn't stuttering in his scarred, war-torn chest and still straining to beat for a man who no longer exists.

  Sleep now.

  XXVIII.

  "OF COURSE I WAS KEEPING an eye on the little shit the whole time. He's a dangerous man and we both know it. He knows it," Nate says with a low, rumbling voice to him, sitting at his bedside in his ICU private room with that infamous, black leather coat draping the back of the armchair. "And I know you, Phelan. You woulda kicked my ass if I'd just let him go and fucking vanish, messed up like he was. And believe me, he was a mess. We're talking a 'drink the local bars and liquor stores dry and puke all over himself in cheap motels' kind of mess."

  Cole's wide awake and feeling a fraction better since he stopped being a comatose parody of a human being. The fantastic painkillers still glutting his veins are doing their fine job of keeping him afloat, separate from the myriad of injuries his wrecked body is recuperating from at a snail's pace. He's reclined on his back instead of his side for a change.

  "Considering what you did," Cole rasps, gazing at his old friend through still swollen, slitted eyes over the raised guardrail, "I'll pretend you didn't just call my husband a 'little shit'. Again."

  He still sounds like hell, like his throat's been scalded with acid and is wasting away, but Nate understands what he said anyway. Nate barks out a short laugh accompanied by narrowed, crinkled eyes.

  "Good to know that wrinkly mass in your thick skull's still functional. Wouldn't wanna lose my favorite and most efficient paper pusher."

  Nate laughs a second time as Cole, straight-faced and silent, lifts his left hand off the bed and gives him the finger. Neither he or Nate point out the band of luxurious platinum that adorns the finger next to it. It speaks for itself with its gleam under the private room's sterile-white lights.

  Nate is solemn once more when he says, "I had him tailed to Denver, to Melissa Campbell's house. Flew over and picked him up after he left the place."

  Cole says nothing to that. Clyde has yet to elaborate on the months away from the GATF and New York City (away from him), but he's unsurprised that Clyde had indeed sought out his ex-girlfriend, just like the grapevine had alleged.

  "The moment I saw him in the car, I knew his memories of you had returned."

  Cole says nothing to that either. He knows there's a torrent of information that Nate's withholding from him of that encounter between Nate and Clyde. Whether it's because it was just that grueling or that Nate doesn't want to compound whatever stress he's already experiencing during his recovery, or both, he can't tell.

  This isn't the first time Nate's had to keep vigil at his bedside, wondering whether he's going to die or not and praying that the answer is no.

  (It isn't Clyde's first time either. The only reason Clyde isn't here right now is because he's out like a light, bundled up on a bed in the room next door. Sedated yet again. Clyde is refusing to sleep until his body gives out on him, until the doctors are coerced into drastic measures to tranquilize the volatile, obstinate man with a needle to the arm or, on at least two occasions, the neck. His volatile, obstinate, devoted man.)

  "As much a big mouth as he is, he didn't say a damn word the whole trip back here, after I told him what happened to you. I don't think he said a single word to anyone throughout the rescue mission, not until we got you back along with the gray-eyed fucker. He insisted on being the one to ..." - Nate pauses, pointedly - "interrogate him. And me? I wasn't about to say no when he looked the way he did."

  Nate sits up and leans forward, elbows on the chair's armrests, fingers threaded.

  "After you were out of surgery, I went with him to your apartment. I wasn't about to let the poor bastard remain alone then, either. When he saw you'd packed up his things and everything else that proved he'd been there at all ..." Nate shakes his head. "Jesus, you should have seen his face. Should have seen him pacing up and down with his hands pressed to his temples like he was losing his mind right there. You have no idea how glad I was I already took his guns from him. I had to yell at him to get through to him at all. I thought he was going to throw himself out the window right in front of me, and considering your apartment's ten floors up?"

  Nate lets the question stay unanswered verbally. Cole visualizes that answer anyway in his clouded mind. He sees Clyde hurtling over the off-white, smooth sill of their living room's expansive windows, flying and defying gravity for a frozen instance in time before disappearing from view, as if he never existed, as if he was never there at all.

  Cole's fingers twitch hard at his side. Cole says nothing. He lies as still as he ever has on a bed under thick, wool blankets, gazing on at Nate who gazes back with eyes heavy-lidded and piercing brown and so very old and weary of the many shadowy, cruel ways the world chooses to be. The nasal cannula is tickling his nostrils and his contused left cheek where it's been taped. His throat's now more of an arid desert with fresh water flowing deep, deep down beneath its hillocks of sand, but he says nothing and continues to listen to his old, good friend speak about another old, good friend, another man he still loves so (and always will).

  "But before that, when you were still in surgery? He stuck around the whole time. Perched himself on a seat in the waiting room and refused to talk or move. His face then? Shit, he coulda given me a run for my money for a stone-cold, soulless one. When Alain finally came out and told us there was still a big chance you were going to die in the next twenty-four hours, when he told me to call your parents -" Again, Nate shakes his head. Pauses for a long moment. "Fuck. I'm glad all the windows of this building are damn near unbreakable."

  Cole's eyelids flicker down. The dark eats at him again. The fingers of his left hand twitch hard again. He feels the band of luxurious platinum and its engraved Latin inscription around his finger. He feels the warmth, the weight of the vow that it embodies. He sees Clyde, asleep and alive and close, cocooned in blankets like a caterpillar metamorphosing into something spotless, sinless. He opens his eyes again, his breaths slow and set, his hand loose and lax on the bed.

  "You think that was bad? You know what he said to me after he saw you? After I found him outside your room again looking like he wanted to find the nearest ledge to jump off, and I threatened to lock him up in a cell until he got a grip?" Nate snorts in an amalgam of amusement and disbelief. "He said, 'Sir, you can put me in a dog cage next to his bed if you think that's best. Just let me stay with him.'"

  Cole stares at Nate, his face as blank as it's ever been.

  "Tell me you didn't ac
tually put him in a cage," he croaks out.

  "No, Boots. I told him I didn't need to. He already was in one of his own making, worse than any I could ever think of."

  And once more, Cole says nothing and shuts his eyes. He wonders if he'll find the key to this cage, too. Like he did with the first one that had almost destroyed Clyde from the inside out, the one that Clyde's monster of a father and the rest of this vast, unfair, unpredictable, senseless world had locked him in. He wonders if Clyde will want to leave it when he opens the door this time.

  Please, let the answer be yes, again.

  XXIX.

  COLE DOESN'T SLEEP.

  It's why he knows precisely when Clyde sends the email to him, why he hears the custom-assigned beeping noise from his comm pad notifying him of it arriving in his inbox. He sits there on the bed with his back against the headboard in the semi-darkness, lit only by the nightstand table lamp. He turns his head and stares at the comm pad on the nightstand with blank eyes.

  It takes him about nine minutes to dredge up the courage to pluck up the comm pad and check its screen. His throat constricts to a pinhole when he sees that the notification really is for an email sent from Clyde's GATF email address.

  It takes him about three minutes to dredge up the courage to open it and read it.

  And it takes an immeasurable time for the short message to register on his mind, for each word to be read and digested by his bewildered brain:

  I can't be the man you wish I was. I can't be the man I used to be. I don't know how to live this life that isn't mine with you and it isn't fair to you and me for me to keep pretending I do.

  I'm sorry.

  I'm sorry.

  The comm pad suddenly feels as heavy as his body had been when that kukri irrupted through his chest and out his lower back. He feels as if half of him has gone missing for good, hacked away by that same kukri in swinging chops and all that's left behind are ragged edges that bleed and bleed and won't stop. His suddenly tremoring, weak arms sink down onto the unmade bed. The comm pad jostles out of his hands and bounces onto the rumpled covers.

  He ... he doesn't understand. He doesn't understand what the words mean. He doesn't understand what Clyde's saying to him, what did Clyde mean, what, why, why did Clyde send this?

  He stares at the opened email on the comm pad's screen. The screen's glare is incinerating his eyes. The black words on white are blurring into indistinct, fuzzy dots. Droplets of something molten and wet are materializing on the screen and he doesn't know what they are or where they're coming from.

  There's someone in the room making a loud, harrowing noise, almost animal-like, laden with grief that he can't begin to fathom. It's a horrible, funereal noise, a noise wrung from a flayed wound whose torment has no blessed end in sight. He thinks this someone sounds very much like him, and he sways, he sees his trembling hands scratch feebly at the covers like the last scrapings of a man in a mass grave, scratch and scratch over where the mapped valleys of Clyde's body once were in their ... in his bed and there's only so much blood in him, really only so much, before he runs dry and dead.

  He feels himself rocking in place in uncomprehending torpor. He feels something molten and so very wet in rivulets upon his face and he's ... he's the one making that loud, harrowing, horrible noise, now that the lifelong dam in him that had corked up entire oceans, entire planets of oceans, has given way. He's the one crying.

  Clyde isn't coming back.

  Clyde really isn't coming back.

  He isn't coming back either. Not from this. Not from this.

  The sorrow and loss and regret that impale him is worse, far worse than anything that damn kukri did to his body. The tears come fast and so do his breaths. He topples over in a twisted heap onto what is ... what was Clyde's side of the bed as if that panther that had locked its fangs in him is laying him out on a sacrificial slab, his shriveling heart now splinters within ribs already sundered once. He shoves his face into the sheets and gasps in what remains of Clyde's scent, of the ghost that clings to the breadth of them, between wracking sobs.

  Soon, Clyde's scent will fade away. Soon, it will be just another memory that he alone will carry in his mind. In time, that memory will fade and die, and so will Clyde's scent, so will the dips and crevasses of Clyde's body in this bed, the flawless slotting of that miracle of a body to his own, like they were made for each other, meant for each other.

  This bed is his alone again. And this room. This apartment. This existence, because Clyde isn't coming back. Clyde is never coming back. Clyde, the Clyde he knows and loves, is dead.

  He finally knows what it feels like when hope dies. He's alone, again. And he cries. He cries, like he never has before.

  An eternity in moon shadow later, as his ragged edges dry up and decay, as the sun rises and makes its staid presence felt in a thin wedge of light between the curtains, only two thoughts circle each other in the white-out daze of Cole's mind:

  I wish that mercenary had killed me with that kukri that day in Rio Rancho.

  I wish I was already dead.

  XXX.

  NATE IS ROARING AT someone like Cole has never heard Nate do so before.

  "You think you got it bad now? You think you're the one suffering? It's because of you just taking off like a muthafucking coward that he's in there, looking like a human-shaped bruise with broken ribs and internal bleeding and a carved up back like a pig's in a slaughterhouse! In a fucking coma he may never wake up from!"

  "I know that, okay?! I KNOW!"

  Nate is roaring at another man who's roaring back just as loudly, as ferociously and that man sounds just like ... someone he knew, someone he loved so much. They sound so far away from him, as if he is standing in the sanctum of a vast, blooming wheat field and their words are pinpricks of light from decomposing stars billions of light-years away in the velvet-black night sky above him.

  Something wooden, solid and large smashes against the floor. He thinks that maybe it's a chair. He thinks that after an impact like that, it wouldn't be a chair anymore.

  He hears the other man let out what sounds like a guttural sob, like it was uprooted from the man's very lungs, bitten off at the end. He wants to sit up and get off this bed. He wants to find this crying man and draw him into his arms. Pet his possibly lush, golden hair. Shush him with a kiss to that possibly high forehead. Murmur to him that everything's going to be okay, that they've got each other and they're going to be okay.

  And he ... can't. He can't move. Can't see, can't feel.

  He doesn't know who this other man is, but he knows it can't be the man he knew and loved so much. It just can't be.

  "You think I don't how much I've fucked up?! You think I wanted to hurt Phelan like that?!"

  "No. But you did hurt him, and you have no idea how much it takes to really do that. I saw him after you left him. With a. Mutha. Fucking. Email."

  "I'm gonna spend the rest of my life making it up to him. Forever if that's what it takes. I swear it. I swear."

  The man sounds so much like Clyde, so much ... but it would be too good to be true that his Clyde, his Clyde he knew and loved so, has returned. He isn't that fortunate. No one is that fortunate to get their Happily Ever After again after losing it.

  His Clyde is never coming back. His Clyde is gone. Dead. And he has to remember that.

  Best to go back to sleep once more, where he doesn't hurt and his shriveled, dormant heart isn't stuttering in his scarred, war-torn chest and still straining to beat for a man who no longer exists.

  Sleep now.

  Sleep.

  XXXI.

  MANY YEARS FROM NOW, Nate will tell Cole about the arcing spatters of sordid blood across the two-way mirror of one of the many interrogation rooms at HQ. Nate will tell him about Clyde, his beloved Clyde, howling his potent, magnified rage as he slams white-knuckled fists into the grotesque, crimson mask that was once the face of a shrieking, gray-eyed Croenian man, again and again and again.

&nbs
p; That very man had, just days before this scene of unbridled violence and vengeance, pierced Cole's lower back with a putrid knife and butchered his flesh with it, inch by flaming inch, hewing from him miles and miles of seizures and volumes of screams.

  "I saw it through to the end," Nate will say to him, his face stone-cold and soulless and remorseless (but not his heart, not by a long shot). "Compared to what I would have done, your husband was kind."

  And feeling the usual antler-like, echoing ache in his scarred lower back, a pale shadow of the agony it once was, Cole will reply, "I remember that man's laugh, when the knife went in. I forgot Clyde's laugh, when the knife was out and there was no more blood in me."

  XXXII.

  AT NOON, STILL SLUMPED on their ... his unmade bed and leeched of everything good and worthwhile by mute, ruthless gods clearly in the know, Cole hauls his GATF comm pad to him with one still cold, shivery hand. The thin wedge of light between the curtains is starker now, slicing across the bed and his folded lower legs. He feels no warmer. He feels like he's still walking in a sleep that Clyde has already woken up from, already cut loose from and forgotten (and he wants to sleep forever, dream forever, if it means his Clyde is there with him). He unlocks his comm pad and speed-dials a number he knows by heart.

  He knows Clyde won't pick up. He knows Clyde although Clyde doesn't know himself right now (and probably never will, never want to again). He knows that right now, Clyde will have his comm pad shut off to regroup, to get distance between them. He knows he'll be automatically directed to the GATF's internal voice messaging service and he doesn't give a damn if the agents assigned to the service will listen or not to what he intends to say.