by Micah Thomas
Nestor’s color was clotted blood, corrosion, and hate borne of bitterness.
Thelon refused him. Refuted him with love, trust, and bravery in the face of doom.
They collided again, forced together by the pressure of this place—a vacuum exerted nothing and everything to convey that they did not belong and antibodies emanated from the all corners, too vast for Thelon to perceive as color, sound, or any other sensory analog other than gravity.
Ultra-good, formulation, desire point, ego death. A person and not a person. Those things we are and those things we exile and all the others spun in their spheres amid the strata of the ineffable.
Pressure. Pressure. Persevere. Paul Revere. Doom junkies. Vibrant terror life. This is the shit. The dead shit. Alive at every level of scale. Self-replicating. Density of nothing like an atom. Nothing like a vacuum. Something though.
Around the bend of wanderings, free from the predetermined paths of knowing, Thelon knew he could get lost in this—consumed by the incompatible experiences and never return—but Nestor clawed at him with want, predatory in knowing Thelon’s life, but Thelon’s life had changed. His multitudes were not a weakness any longer, and Nestor found himself locked out of Thelon’s totality.
Perception bound truths around them, knowledge packets of data expounded in poetry, alien and terrible in antithetical anti-knowing to human discourse. The living otherness crept closer. Nestor invited the competition and lured these entities of alignment and consumption towards their tangled knots of frictional force.
Thelon knew Nestor’s purpose was to hijack. Nestor was the cuckoo, a thief of power, a virus, but Thelon had a secret. In the path to integration, through the doubling of dreams and accumulation of knowledge and recovery of all things lost, a skill unfolded from him. I am more than myself.
Like cellular division, Thelon produced his double and named him T, and T contained might and was angry at Nestor.
Together, T and Thelon wove their hooks into an interlaced matrix basket, a web between them, and in it. Nestor was trapped, a fly in a sticky web.
They held him as he thrashed, letting him gnash and claw, but restrained him like a mad dog. He was unforgiveable. Unredeemable. The alien antibodies in their vastness touched his rust-colored light in a stabbing motion and Nestor shrieked as the rough beast ripped him from the web and carried him out into the darkness.
T and Thelon reintegrated and though lost in the immensity of the unknowable sea field, they moved their attention with the mastery they’d learned upon the Moon while taking a bath loaded on psychedelic drugs. Together, they imagined Annie and with a silent pop, they returned to the freezing courtyard.
Cassie, Annie, and Henry stood expectantly with a quilted blanket, ready to wrap Thelon up and rush him inside.
Disoriented, Thelon allowed them to help him into the building. Shaking from more than the cold, asked, “Where’s Cat and PD?”
Cassie rubbed his extremities as they sat by the large fire in the hotel lobby. “We left them on the farm catching mice or whatever. It’s a good life.”
Annie knelt beside him near the fire. “Is there anything you want to tell me, love?”
“Well,” he shivered and touched the rough stonework beneath him, “I guess nothing is ever really over, but in this case, something is done.”
Henry asked, “Where did you go? We lost sight of you. Cassie Prime searched, but wherever you went, it was deep.”
Cassie added, “Yeah. That’s right. I don’t know, but we ditched him there and he can’t get back.”
Annie said, “I told you no funny business from your friends, so you went and did it yourself.”
“Did anyone else see?”
“No. Henry came and got me, told me the basics.”
“You mad?”
“A little. You ready to go back and be married to me?”
Thelon thought on this. Can things go on? Could he go on? What was the alternative? He looked at his bride and at his friends. Something was over. Some part of the story was done but life went on. He made a choice to do the same.
“Yeah.”