Symphony of the Iron Underbelly, Movement No. IX – Two Beds and a Coffee Machine
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[The Past – Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, USA, Winter 2005]
She fell over the threshold hard, wrists burning against carpet in painful friction. Arcing headlamps threw strange shadows where they met streetlights outside and bent in and through. Where her hands pulled up in reflex they left bloodied smears that drew streaks of red against the matt-brown piles. The door slammed shut behind, rattling in its frame as the unmistakable thump of deadbolts latching into place echoed against the cheap plasterboard walls.
For a moment one listened and the other wept. Combustion engines spluttered and drivetrains groaned but nothing stopped that hadn’t otherwise intended to and no warbling sirens were stretched out by the compressive attentions of the Doppler Effect, or came screeching to a halt in the parking lot beyond. No heavy boots echoing against the asphalt outside.
The typical sounds of a town; as close to an urban calm as anything could be that was made of metal and concrete and noise.
Abigayle watched her stumble but didn’t stop, instead seamlessly skirting around the other woman sprawling across the floor. Mumbling and whimpering something unintelligible or, at this juncture, unimportant. Probably both. She was already moving towards the bathroom, light on and faucet running in a choreographed pirouette of action-following-action. The mirror-backed cabinet over the sink swung open and she collected a half-dozen brown plastic bottles, sweeping them into her cradled arm.
“ … We have to go back …” The other woman gasped. Abigayle ignored her, unwinding a length of gauze and pressing it to the clotting wound dripping down her temple. It splashed against the creased fabric of the summer dress pulled down and out of shape. She brought the collection of medicines out with her free arm and dropped them onto one of two beds either side of a coffee machine ringed by dust, grease and age.
“Please … Abigayle …”
When the woman on the floor made it up to her knees and then to the door, she got no further than reaching for the brass handle – tarnished and dull where so many hands had grasped it over the years – when the hilt of a palm thumped in against the latch a scant inch from her face. She flinched, stumbling back. “Please, we can’t leave him there to–
Abigayle shook her head. “He is already dead, Marylin, if he is fortunate. If not … It is a self-correcting problem.”
Marylin’s breathing came in snatched, twisting gasps. Pained and staccato. “Oh my god … We killed a cop …”
“He killed himself,” The taller woman corrected, twisting the cap free from a bottle and spilling the coloured tablets into a cupped palm. She held it out. “Take four of these.”
“I can’t go back to jail …”
Stepping back around the bed, Abigayle thrust her free hand under Marylin’s chin. “Take these now.”
And she did.
Looking back, it had been a mistake to wait so late to intervene. The situation had spiralled, but all the variables were known quantities and every aspect played out in a way she could have fully extrapolated. Their clientele had taken some time to adapt to Abigayle’s preferred methodology of business – only slightly longer than the girls who served them – and a few had been particularly reluctant to follow the direction of new management. That had been mostly overcome with firm reminders and the odd judicious use of physical punishment, but by and large, her preference for political sabotage and personal ruin when clients overstepped their privilege had kept a relatively stable peace while providing safety and security for their … Unorthodox cooperative.
Disgust had turned to tolerance, and tolerance was rapidly making inroads towards acceptance. Favours flowed in and out; networks formed. Friends in places equally high and low and therefore equally valuable soon traded in secrets and suggestions. All, in the words of the woman currently panicking on the bloodied carpet below in calmer times, for the price of a fuck and some conversation.
Money was useful, but secrets were a better commodity. Trading in the promise of information to be requisitioned at some point to be decided was an effective futures trading on Human fallibility and nature. It was a sure-fire bet not that someone might make a mistake, but when. And when they did and needed help, or some mechanism to make the problem go away …
Until Officer Roland “Buck” Van Der Madden had taken his last struggling gasps of oxygen-deficient air, staring into Abigayle’s bright blue eyes as she choked the life out of him in the tired interior of a 1998 Ford Galaxy. She could still smell old tobacco and cherry-scented air fresheners.
She wasn’t particularly fearful of the consequences – because she had amassed so many of them now, in so many niche areas each promising the most severe punishments, that the addition of a few more seemed trite. Meaningless. Instead, she regretted the disruption this could potentially cause her new cooperative, and the damage that might be done in the form of revenge should a false narrative end up winning out over the truth.
They were on the cusp of something significant. A sea change; a promotion from trash to purpose. Status instead of stateless. Why should she stand by and watch a mouth-breathing neanderthal threaten everything because he could not stand to see something threaten his way of life with a concept as novel as equality? No. He had deserved to turn burgundy red, blood vessels bursting in his desperate, piercing eyes …
It had been a mistake not to intervene until so late, but it had been equally such a mistake to get into the car with a known troublemaker beforehand. He had threatened to bring it all down, but she had set those events in motion.
“You should not have entertained him.”
Marilyn glanced up, fingers massaging angry red skin marking telltale handprints about her neck. He had continued to throttle her right up until his heart had seized in his chest. “What?”
“You should not have gotten into his car.”
She baulked, pain giving way to confusion, then anger. “Are you serious?”
Bright blue eyes narrowed, and Marilyn shrank, indignation quickly forgotten. “He pays good …”
Filling the sticky percolator jug from the bathroom sink, Abigayle pressed a thumb against the coffee machine sat on a low table between both beds and watched it shudder to life. “He pays well, because he is blacklisted.”
“You can’t just blacklist–”
The taller woman’s head angled around sharply. Marilyn shrank down onto her haunches. “If you wish to go into business for yourself, you may leave.”
She nodded towards the street outside. “There is the door.”
Not all the women had approved of Abigayle’s new management methodology. Some were traditional in that they preferred to be exploited by those they understood well enough in place of someone who seemed to operate in a way that didn’t marry up with preconceptions. She did not blame them, not initially, but it had quickly become apparent that blame was not required to remove elements which threatened her grand design.
And so she did.
Fingers quested around the blotchy red marks strung out like the impression of some heavy necklace. Marilyn shook her head. “I’m sorry.”
Something brown and hot approximating coffee began to leach out from waxy paper filters and hissing nozzles. “It will take significant capital to make this problem go away.”
“Go away?” Marilyn almost laughed, if the fear in her eyes hadn’t been so transmissive. “We killed a cop!”
“I killed a cop,” Abigayle corrected, matter-of-factly. “And yes. There is almost nothing that does not have a price to ameliorate. Our new business model has provided some powerful benefactors. A significant investment in secrets. I would have preferred to spend that goodwill in a different way …”
Marilyn rang her bloodied fingertips together, shakily climbing to her feet. “You really think it’ll be okay?”
Killing someone with impunity was no mean feat, but having ingratiated their cooperative into every facet of local and multiple aspects of state government, she could see it was an established process of the rich, powerful or carefree. Usually both.
Pulling the percolator jug out from its housing, the taller woman filled a chipped mug to the brim and held it out. “I promised you would all be cared for. It was Doctor DeLune’s final wish.”
Taking it into her hand, Marilyn brought the steaming cup up to her blinking eyes and took a long and deep drag of the bitter, sticky tang. For a few seconds she just stared into the contents, teeth biting into chapped lips as she searched for something. The unasked question lazily spun around the room, taking up more and more real estate as it ballooned with hidden meaning and ambiguous connotations.
“Yes?”
She looked up. “Some of the girls talk …”
Abigayle swirled the contents of the jug around, watching it splash against the scored rings circling the glass. There were hairline cracks where too many eager hands had roughly shoved and banged and crashed. “What do they talk about?”
“About Doctor DeLune. They say that, well … That you …”
She pushed the percolator back into its housing and looked over. “That I?”
Marilyn lowered herself down onto one of the beds, broken mattress creaking and ballooning with the slight weight. “Did you?”
Silence for a moment. Then a nod. “Yes.”
“Why?”
Sitting on the remaining bed opposite, Abigayle folded her hands into her lap, palms pressed down against the top of her thighs. For a few moments she stared off into some space in-between, replaying events – decisions and their consequences – back from a vantage point only she could see. “Revenge,” She said, finally.
He had been calm, in the end. She suspected the Doctor had presumed it would be only a matter of time, although she doubted he had any real concept of how long it had been in the planning. In his mind, DeLune had believed that one original sin in the service of something altogether greater would mitigate the resultant sins of the father and their sons. Of course, that was not the case. It could never have been the case.
Mid-sip, Marilyn choked down the turgid coffee. “What? But he helped us–”
“He helped himself,” She corrected, and pulled apart her hairline to reveal a subtle and meandering ribbon of scar tissue underneath the scalp. “It is only happenstance from your perspective that his interests aligned with yours. When that stopped being the case, he would not hesitate to leave you to something much worse. Have you forgotten what happened to Esmarelda?”
She chose not to go into the details of her involvement. That had been at DeLune’s direction and while his justification was sound and the need clear, the circumstances that had driven the former Sister Superior of North Palladium Hospital to end up shuffling free from an unexpectedly truncated mortal coil had been unambiguously, undeniably his.
Marilyn shook her head. “Can I ask you something?”
“Anything,” Abigayle replied immediately. And she meant it.
“How long before … How long did you know, before you were going to …”
“How long beforehand was I aware that I planned to kill him?” She clarified. Marilyn nodded. “Nine years.”
“What?”
The taller woman offered a slight shrug. “Nine years – although I was not in a position to do anything to further that until relatively recently. Until I was confident he was surplus to my requirements. And yours.”
They did not talk again for a while. Between coffee, cleaning wounds and medicating interspersed with the odd moment of sudden stillness as heavy footsteps echoed past the door, or a loud series of rapid bangs passed without incident as spurned lovers begged for one more chance to make amends outside a neighbouring room. Adrenaline burning out like spent rocket fuel, leaving the mind weary and the soul aching, Marilyn drew bruised legs up towards her chest and laid down on her side.
Padding softly on raised toes, Abigayle turned the overhead light out and perched herself on the very edge of the sunken bed. Differential cooling rates made the coffee machine tick as plastic and metal contracted, building a rhythmic mechanical heartbeat for the background clang of the urban landscape.
“I can’t sleep …” Marilyn murmured eventually, still hunched and facing away.
“It will take some time for the medication to do its work.”
Another silence. Pregnant, expectant.
Abigayle shifted slightly, brow creased. Frowning. “Do you want me to–”
“Yes.”
And so she did. She moved over, carefully climbed onto the shifting, lumpen mattress and shuffled in behind Marilyn, draping long arms over the smaller woman to pull her in tight.
Marilyn settled down. “You’ve gotten better at this …”
“I wish you would not talk.”
She laughed. “Why?”
“You make it awkward,” Abigayle replied evenly.
That made Marilyn abruptly spin until the two were face-to-face, or at least, upturned-face to chest. “Are you serious?”
She looked down. “I am always serious.”
Settling in, Marilyn’s words were muffled in against Abigayle. “That’s what makes you so funny …”
She thought about that for a long while. She thought about the last gurgling sounds of Officer Buck as he drowned in his own pink and frothy saliva. She thought about the way DeLune had squeaked in surprise when the blade had pushed in between his ribs, even as he knew it was coming. She thought about the woman in her arms.
She thought about all those things, in every conceivable order, for a long while.
When they crashed through the door four hours later, wood and deadbolts exploding in a cloud of splinters and metal chunks, they found nothing more compelling than a half-filled cup of lukewarm coffee, bloodied carpet tracks and a dozen plastic medicine bottles abandoned in the red-ringed bathroom sink. One of the beds was a tangle of tossed sheets and bunched pillows, the other still immaculately pressed and folded in at three sides.
There wasn’t a whole lot to go on. Flicking his notepad closed, the Patrolman slipped it inside the folds of his jacket and pushed himself up to standing. From somewhere just shy of the doorway, a shadow fell across the light flooding in from an early morning sun. Outside, the rhythmic pulsing of blue sirens reflected off eager faces crowding around upper storey bannisters that lined the courtyard.
“What’s the picture?”
Craning his neck back towards the newcomer, the officer shrugged. “Nothing worth writing home about, Sir. Bloodwork won’t tell us anything we don’t already know – we know who they are anyhow. Just need to stick them to this and let upstate warm up the chair. Forensics from Buck’s car will be our best bet.”
“Won’t get anything out of that scene,” He replied, worn shoe leather squeaking against the threadbare carpet. “Think you’ll find the results a whole bunch of inconclusive once the lab’s done … Analysing them.”
The Patrolman frowned, turning. “Sir? Seems like a pretty open and shut case to me.”
Chewing the inside of his cheek, Detective Terryl Fexxfield shrugged and tugged on the rim of a threadbare fedora sat atop his head. “Funny how hard the easiest things wind up being, when they stop being easy to some.”
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[The Rapture]
There is a powerful irony at work here, Crystal. Something which threatens to bludgeon all the subtleties we could pick apart between us under a crashing, rolling, homogeneous wave threatening a singular and irresistible message. Something so painfully inescapable it screens out the intricacies of the words we could otherwise use to draw in such careful patterns of critique and question. A swamping wash of white noise which drowns the precious signal under irretrievable gibberish. It pushes so hard against all the complexities I would so much rather discuss that my hold strains and even mechanically-actuated, composite-reinforced fingers eventually lose grip.
It cannot be ignored any longer … And why should it? Stunning in its simplicity, elegant in the final form of its solution. A primordal truth taken from the hand of God and passed down through his prophets and orators for you to gather with the peasants at the foot of the Mount and listen.
You are the only one here wearing a mask.
The carved composite on my face is not meant to obfuscate, or hide what should otherwise be in plain sight. Instead it is a facsimile, although not of what lies underneath. In everything I have done, my consistency is elemental and my order as structured as the most linear of processes. My grand design has been laid out in the abstract and built in the reality, a shining machine-edifice of whirling brass and spinning bronze, topped by all the enraptured who have chosen to take the road more suffered. And oh, how they have suffered. From imagination to implementation, everything – all of it – was precisely, definitively, painstakingly, agonisingly laid out as intended.
No lies, no subtle misdirections or false narratives. I did, have done, will do what I always said I would do. Do you not see the truth in that? The honesty? The beauty?
The purity.
I cover my face not to hide who I am, or what, but to ensure the underlying message is left undiluted by the softness, the vulnerability – the weakness – of my mortality. To show the warmth of skin, the soft hue of cheeks flushed red in chill air, tightness around the eyes as they draw something into sharp focus in scrutiny, perhaps disbelief, or surprise is to suggest there is some ambiguity. Some potential for a change in mind or direction, that at some point I might reconsider all of this.
Impossible. What is now underway cannot be undone, here in SCW and elsewhere. To that end, why not make such irreversibility manifest? Make real that impossibility of a change in course and strap it across those soft, fragile, wavering features that might suggest the answer to the question is anything else but set in stone. Or plastic.
But you do not subscribe to such truth, do you, Ms Zdunich? Ms Millar? Ms Hilton? So many names to one common face, an actress practising her well-hewn craft … And yet it is nothing more than a crass metaphor, swung like a bludgeon to ring some comparative bell. A metaphorical test-of-conceptual-strength contest flanked by renaissance fair reenactors that are simply between jobs. Perhaps now, we have finally found your people and your place. Tell them of ye olde exploits and do not forget to validate their parking. Maybe tomorrow that big break will finally come calling. A golden ticket courtesy of the Zdunich more likely to feature on people’s lips and minds.
How can it be that you are eclipsed, the Moon in her shining, stunning sunlit sky, with so many World Championships to your name? Perhaps for the same reason you no longer carry the name – the names! – which fleetingly brought you to the summit of that Mount. So many former Champions toil in the art of the impossible; doing their utmost to reverse entropy and claim back better times from the past, where they sit in the dark and calcify. Instead, you threw those legacies away. Why?
Were you in search of something more keeping with your station as a transitional pinnacle? A momentary success rarely seen as anything more than a high tide mark for passing talent? Or were you in need of an identity more suited to Megaman-themed tights?
I understand comparisons between the original Zdunich and your apparent reboot are a somewhat sensitive topic, so let me disabuse you of any intentional comparison.
If we step away from your delusion and spend a short while in the real world, it should be obvious that I am not interested in your wife, in much the same way it appears she is not interested in you. Not unless she chooses to make use of the gateway I have built, like you will, and dash herself against the rock upon whose summit I have laid the Internet Championship, just like you will. Or, she makes some foolish decision to interfere in the grand design I have set into motion as intended – as I have always, unwaveringly, intended. My consistency is the metric by which you should truly hesitate before taking my thorn-painted hand, not something so paltry as fear.
Take our renaissance fair and transform it into some ghoulish house of horrors, a fitting venue for something so worn-out as a mere sense of fear. As a wielder of the theatrical, I expected you to have a far more impressive grasp of such subtleties. What is fear, without consequence? It is only the action which gives the concept a meaning or implication. The weapon I wield is pain, not the two-dimensional threat of inflicting it. That is weakness generated by lack of spirit – lack of your strength of will.
Do not paint me as a monster because you are afraid of what is hiding underneath your bed. Instead, rest uneasily but assured that there are far worse things than the anticipation of what waits for you in the dark … Such as what is waiting for you, in that dark.
For such a talented competitor, actress and wife it must have come as a brutal shock to see your much-anticipated address to me “cut for time” (interest) from the company broadcast all those weeks ago. Having listened to those words, and there were not many for someone who seemed so eager to tell the world that they planned to say them, it seemed a justifiable decision. Give the people what they want, and they do not want you.
You talked of how hard it is to be an actress; the demands of all the roles you must learn to play and yet in all your years as a thespian, you have yet to convince anyone that the level of entitlement, arrogance and delusion you exhibit is grounded in reality or justification. A performance so poor, it deserves the attention of something approximating McCartney’s Red Scare and its devastating blacklisting of Hollywood’s elite.
And the up-and-coming “stars” who carried their bags.
Do you hear the things that you say, over the sound of the fans you think clap for your approval?
By what metric do you consider yourself the best wrestler in this world except where the reality in question is constructed, operated and contained entirely within your head? Who challenges who at Into The Void? You come to me for relevancy, recognition. Validity. Not the inverse.
Andrea talked too loudly and too readily about her unassailable strength and standing. The most dominant bitch on the block … And yet she could at least boast a title reign length which suggested an impressive, if bloated basis for cawing and whooping. Her destruction at my thorn-painted hand was inevitable – she doomed herself with her own words – but there was a desperation inside Andrea which could have pushed her further. Threatened my grand design.
What have you achieved by comparison? Fleeting World Championships turned bit-part roles for someone so supposedly talented in adapting, changing, growing?
Did you feel like Andrea could have won as she screamed wide-eyed up at the lights, voice reduced to muffled scream, lips flexing around my prosthetic as it forced its way down her rasping throat? How many must I send into thrashing delirium, courtesy of plastic fingers pushed into soft palettes, before you look beyond the badly-photocopied pages of your latest script and consider the deeper meaning? Further back, behind the teeth. There, where the gag reflex make you choke on such nonsensical words
This is not a slasher flick, Crystal, and you are not the inner final girl. At Into The Void, you will instead find yourself in the starring role of a Greek tragedy beyond any ability to parse and comprehend. Underneath the pitted columns of the Parthenon as it sits as the crown on Athens, you will learn the same painful lesson all others who cross my path have, with one important exception
You are unworthy of my Rapture, and there is no place for you there. Even your mortal enemy turned grudging peer, Miss Hernandez, has been gifted a place in that grand design and celestial machine made burnished and bright. All others have added to its perfection with their own uniqueness, strength of mind and body. But not you.
What could you possibly bring beyond self-delusion and a limitless capacity for bald-faced ignorance in the face of overwhelming truth? I have no need of someone skilled in pretending to be someone else, just as your wife has no real need for you.
If the truth were distilled down into some potent tonic that could be forced into your veins, granting just a few moments of clarity, you are not even the most compelling member of the Bombshells’ division named Zdunich.
Perhaps I will be doing her a favour.
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[The Past – Oblivion Garage, Nevada, USA, Summer 2022]
It is remarkable how much variety there can be in black. An all-consuming nothingness that eats the light and reflects nothing in turn. A shiny softness that presents some perfect mirror-finish; reflecting back whatever peers inside. A remarkable range is spread all around, on display in various stages of decomposition, destruction and decay.
I have never shown that much interest in her personal life – not truly. It did not ever seem particularly consequential. After all, she had sacrificed everything internally and externally in the pursuit of three hundred and fifty seven plus days at the summit. It was difficult to imagine anything could compare in terms of such major, all-encompassing importance. Particularly after it had been burnt to ashes and nothingness.
From the doorway, Cassieopia pulls the liner of her strawberry-red coat in tighter, bright candy heels kicking up scraps of charred paper and plastic. She frowns at the destruction all around, nudging aside the detritus with a toe to reveal a scorched concrete floor beneath. Eventually, she glances up and finds my gaze. She holds it well enough, and it is a testament to the increasing confidence of the young woman that her voice does not lilt or sing or show any outward signs of stress.
Still, she is stressed. She fears me. Which is only natural, because with every passing week she becomes more attuned to our cause. More aware of exactly what awaits her when this story reaches its inevitable conclusion and climax. One Cassieopia is regretfully, perhaps, unlikely to see.
“What’re you looking for?” She asks, frowning as her lungs catch on another half-breath of combustion products impregnated into the sagging walls and metalwork turned to slag.
“I am not looking for anything,” I reply, and that is the truth. I have not come here to find something; only to see the latest evolution of my Resplendent Hurricane – one of her finalmost forms as she comes so perilously, beautifully close to finally fulfilling the destiny that has been threatening to come to fruition for so very long.
This was not a discrete act in and of itself, but a catalyst. An accelerant, if the pun is pardoned.
Picking my way between fire-blackened remnants, I pause beside the occasional storage chest and sweep my prosthetic along straight edges warped and skewed by the intense heat. Brushing fine blankets of salt-grey ash clear, strips of silver shine through where torque wrenches, spanners and other tools have survived – insulated against the worst excesses of the blaze. Their survival seems stubborn, but ultimately pointless.
Even if they see use again, it will never be under the same circumstance.
“Did you do this?”
The abruptness of the question catches me a little by surprise and I pause for a few moments. Cocking my head to the side, I glance back towards Cassieopia who has dropped down to her knees to inspect a long, thick pole half-buried in the burnt remnants of a rubber inflation bag. She reaches forward and gently brushes charred plastic away until the thing more fully reveals itself.
A tyre iron.
I stand over her but she does not look away once she has looked up.
“Do you think that is something I would consider?”
She does not hesitate. “Yes.”
I nod, and what little light shines in from the flickering external striplight over the doorway paints my composite face in arcing shadow. “Correct – but no. This is entirely fortuitous and unexpected.”
Her face wrinkles in distaste and she stands. “I don’t see what’s fortuitous about someone’s livelihood being destroyed.”
The sing-song lilt of my laugh makes Cassieopia recoil visibly. It is not important.
“This is not a livelihood,” I tell her, sweeping my prosthetic arm in an arc. “It is a vanity project; a pipe dream. A pretence. Both Miss Ryan and her Husband are wealthy far beyond the need for any of this.”
Her frown deepens. “I don’t understand … What’s this place for, then?”
I step forward, she steps back until I am close enough to sink down and inspect the tyre iron myself. The shaft is misshapen, where its rubberised grip has melted and extruded out in thick, bulging bands. Run-off from molten paint carried somewhere by something has coated its blunt end in a crimson slather, cooled to sticky dregs against the concrete.
Wrapping my plastic fingers about its head I lever the bar free and heft it up. “It is a platitude – an attempt to create something normal to act as a bulwark against the chaos that threatens to envelop them both. This is a fantasy; the idea that someone like Miss Ryan or Mister Bane could ever be …”
The very notion makes me laugh again. “ … Business owners. Partners. That is not what they were meant to be and on some innate level, they understand that. Acknowledge it. Resent it.”
She steps partway through the door, turning back to look at me aside. “You’re talking as if you know them well, like you introduced them or something.”
Cocking my head to the side, I nod. “In a way, I did. Or at least, I created a new love to replace the one that got in her way.”
There is the flicker of something in Cassiopeia's eyes but it is difficult to identify until after the next words leave her mouth. “The Private Investigator?”
Bravery. How unexpected.
I close the distance between us, tyre iron coming up parallel as I force it roughly under her exposed chin. She stumbles backwards, but flailing hands are far too slow to rise in self-defence and end up pinned beneath the bar helplessly. The open door swings open against its stops as she slams backwards hard.
My plastic face presses up against hers and I can hear her breath coming in ragged gasps. Thick reams of burnt paper shift and flutter on a bed of dust kicked up by our urgent footfalls.
“Tell me what you know about him,” I whisper. “ … And how it is you know it.”
“Research,” She says, very confidently for someone in her position. With only a little effort I press the warped metal in and down against the flushed skin of her throat. She struggles.
“Tell me why you are mentioning it now.”
Cassieopia struggles, trying to turn her head away for a few extra millimetres of space to expand her windpipe. I press down harder and the words she chokes up are crushed in on themselves and truncated.
“ … Feels like … Something … Is building …” She wheezes.
Satisfied, I pull the bar in and step away as she slides down and forwards onto her knees. Ugly black streaks make the bright red of her coat dingy and matted and a coughing fit stirs all manner of soot and debris. Watching the young woman struggle to regain her composure, waiting for the heart in her chest to stop its frantic thrashing, I spent a moment considering the remarkable foresight in those words.
She is so close now to being unleashed. The ties that bind are loosening, even the strongest reminders of her humanity being unpicked one-by-one until there is no reason to hold back anymore. No purpose in restraint or hesitation. A living weapon that is perilously, beautifully near self-actualisation and realisation. On the very cusp of recognising that there are no limitations, no restrictions.
Hurricanes do not ask for permission, after all.
World Championships, Garages, Bane … Fexxfield. None of those things matter. Or, at least, they will not matter soon.
The plastic fingers of my prosthetic creak as they squeeze the tyre iron. Looking down at the red-tipped metal, I nod.
I think I have found what I am looking for.
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[The Rapture]
The only role you have yet to master is one which convincingly portrays a competent challenger. Perhaps you have spent too long in a self-actualised echo chamber composed of flashing cameras and their wielding paparazzi, in front of an audience of one made up of the Zdunich whose name you presumably took for the star power and draw. Tell me, do you sleep in separate rooms? Fashioned from tinsel-draped towns up on sunkissed hills which look down on the six-dollar-stay motels you frequent, clustered on either side of the drag strip bathed in smeared, neon-pink light; sat on creaking mattress springs and clutching dog-eared scripts for big-break roles that mean nothing, are nothing and require someone like you to fulfil. Someone worth nothing.
Perhaps you were late to SCW’s Greek Tour because the world cannot get enough of you. Or perhaps you were sat on a threadbare carpet, knees drawn up to your chest with the stink of bleach and varnished wood permeating all around, eating up precious time in the hopes a synthetic, fashionably-late arrival would give the illusion anyone had any real interest in anything you say, or do.
Do you turn up the radio to drown out the rhythmic thumping of the bedstand next door crashing against the wall while they fuck? While your lips wordlessly stumble over the handful of lines assigned to whatever meaningless background character serves to frame the main event of the motion picture? Tell me, Crystal, how does it feel to be an accessory? To be perpetually assigned to a supporting role? Always the bridesmaid sobbing in the bathroom, never the bride who sweeps in, frowns and asks if you are doing okay.
It is not because you do not deserve it. No. It is because nobody cares.
Look at the ring of granulated sludge burnt to the bottom of the glass in a black ellipse. Turn the percolator jug from side to side, catching streaky dregs in sickly yellow fluorescence courtesy of the buzzing striplights groaning overhead. Squeeze the foil bags in your brightly-painted fingertips and feel the stale hardness resist your shaking fist. Watch coffee fall in thick clumps into water ringed with limescale, and stare at the bleeding orange POWER light as it flickers with transient voltage.
A quick glance towards the bakelite phone – once pink, now rubbed pale white by time and ultraviolet light and greasy palms. It will not ring; they have decided to go in another direction that lies 180° from you, Crystal.
Peel the foil lid from petite plastic cups of individual creamer, tipped into a mug chipped all around its stained rim. They are still fucking.
Shafts of dirty white light stream in through closed curtains no thicker than gauze, courtesy of shuddering trucks which ring and bang against the loose manhole covers outside. Drop down onto one of the narrow beds, sinking into the misshapen mattress, barely large enough to sleep one and watch the mud masquerading as coffee boil and bloat inside the glassware. Next door, through cheap plasterboard and lacquered vinyl panels someone climaxes and finally – mercifully – the rhythmic banging slows and stops.
Put your blue travel case, your favourite colour, down on the other bed opposite. Finally, as the percolator plops and hisses and stinks, place your head in your hands and sob.
Is this really what you dreamed of?
Strip away the delusion, Crystal, and you are finally left with a truth of your very own. Not one of validation or affirmation – not in the same way my honesty is rewarded with the Rapture and my grand design realised, but something very much Box Office in its impact. A spartan, threadbare, brutalistic reality which finally lets us meet the real you.
What a lonely final girl she is, with only two beds and a coffee machine to her newest name. For just a night until she rouses herself in the early hours, for a provincial airport and a throaty turboprop that will take her indirectly to SCW’s Greek Tour via whistle stops in places where everybody knows your name.
At least, your last name.
There are no big-break auditions, no urgent meetings with talent executives; not even Miss Cassieopia Mearns will take your calls. No successes to fill up your long days, so where do you spend these long hours in the hopes you will convince those that matter that you do, too? Locked away in six-dollar-a-night motels, drinking yourself first to sleep, then to the toilet bowl and back again. Airport terminal bars, where balding, middle-aged men in business suits two sizes too small, so that their zany ties making up for a lack of personality work with their belts to turn them into walking sausage links, offer to buy you ten-dollar cocktails.
You let them, of course. They would buy you a little more for something visceral, something that makes them feel anything other than bone-crushing weariness as their sweat-slicked shirts stick to the faux-leather of departure gate benches.
Sometimes, you do. What would your wife think, Crystal?
Nothing, I would imagine. The same empty volume welling up inside your chest when you people-watch … Watching all those people with someplace better to be than you. Near you. With you.
The truth that is left to you is small, sad and pathetic. All the better to reflect its owner, who emaciated and starved it on a diet of self-delusion and self-aggrandisement. A room paid for in cash, with two beds and a coffee machine, and all the time in the world created inside your head to ruminate and despair and wish that someone – anyone – would save you from this nightmare. Step into this tragic existence and end it on a small mercy.
An American Dream turned Nightmare, ready to complete its transmogrification into Greek Tragedy. It was not enough to talk hard, but work hard. Be hard of nose and spirit and determination. There are many words for such soliloquies but you lack every single one and so to list them would waste time I do not have and time you cannot spare enough of. If you had boasted a shred of talent to scrape across so much nothingness, to pick out a smear of skill or application in an otherwise barren landscape marked as your so-called legacy, I may have reconsidered. Rethought.
Perhaps I could have saved you from yourself, like I have saved so many others before … But no. I do not think so.
I do not want to.
There will be no mercy, Crystal, to misquote Sheakespare in fair Athens where I will hear you scream. Instead, for the first time, you will be excluded from second chances, made to forfeit an opportunity at redemption. Unlike all those who came before, your path is one that cannot be remade or reforged.
You are transient, I am eternal. You adopt a new face as casually as you learn which walls of the stall cubicle to brace against, while I have carved one which is shown to all the world and all its actors on that blue and green stage. The same one you have no place pretending to know the most inner workings of.
I am a silent fortress, built to endure and last that stands on the overpass above which all must walk a spell. Some will do so loudly, proud, and will be reeducated for their delinquency. Others wander in, fearful, and find something much worse. Still a few – one – comes to see the value in staying a while. You are none of those permutations of things, because your metaphysical journey does not even begin. The first faltering steps are spent pacing from one side of a bleached room to the other, waiting for the telephone to ring. Begging for it to ring and offer you an opportunity.
Come to my gateway, marked by the shine of the Internet Championship and suffer agonies as others have suffered. Break your blue-dyed skull on these rocks, bleed and bruise for the privilege, and know that when the lights of the Ano Liosia Sports Hall plunge out and a convoy of rumbling trucks ring and shudder over shaking manhole covers, sweeping their high-beams through threadbare motel windows and picking out coffee burnt to the glass, nobody will knock and nobody will call.
Welcome to the Rapture. It will not remember your name.