Symphony of the Iron Underbelly, Movement No. XII – Enraptured
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[The Present – Saint Louis, Missouri, USA, Summer 2022]
The stink of iron spilling from her slack lips mingles with sweat and something spiced; a sweet perfume that climbs an unbearably hot column of lazy air to make my head swim, even as she topples backwards. Red hair runs red still, and glassy eyes squeeze open and shut in some hopeless, autonomic, reflexive loop. I do not think she can see me now, only dollops of colour in swirls that bleed around her brain. It is beautiful to see her so enfeebled, so weakened. So defeated.
Many have spoken about doing such a vaunted thing, but none have achieved it. Her legend has crossed beyond internet subculture and catering table talk between respected industry veterans, to become something revered. Even by those who intrinsically hate her.
I did not hate her. Quite the opposite. I think – I am almost certain – that I loved her at some point. It is difficult to quantify, since I am not entirely sure what constitutes the feeling. Still, there are some objective markers. A quickening of the heart, the tremble of limbs made from flesh and blood and not plastic. All recognisable.
All transitory. Fleeting. It was less a love and more an infatuation. Something to be enjoyed, perhaps even coveted but impermanent. Destined to be made obsolete and retired. Oh, how she was retired. The sound of her skull crashing against stonework rings through any number of hazy recollections to make each detail shake at some singular resonant frequency. A natural order of things which produces utter clarity.
Here is a whitewashed Painted Hurricane, bone-breaking winds dissipated and laid low and switched out for warm summer sun on my skin. Dropping to one knee I listen to the wet gurgle of her ruined throat, a diminuendo of increasingly hoarse, guttural gasps that trail off as what little oxygen makes it into her lungs is lost in a panting, heaving wheeze. The sensations feel welcome because I have longed for them for so long, but overwhelming because I dared not dream that I would finally be so privileged to watch her fall.
It is difficult to kill an idea. Especially one so powerful as a Queenpin. It takes root in all those who gaze upon her works and baulk and think: how? How can I defeat it?
You cannot defeat an idea. Instead, it must be destroyed. Scoured from existence, beyond reality and into the memories of those who no longer even look at it. Reach inside what they remember about her and pervert it. Change it. Take a missing conscience and give it back, but primed to poison instead of purify. A Flower Girl Named After the Stars again.
After much planning and hardship, so many sacrifices, I watched her fall.
Fall by my own thorn-painted hand. The cultivation of so many years of toil; of a test set half a decade ago and only now administered and so satisfactorily failed.
The harsh white of my prosthetic, curled in black ribbons of painted points, is flecked in wet splotches of blood that spill over its edges and drip to the rutted concrete in fat splashes. It is at this point I would lean in and hear her sob, but of course, she does not.
She did not. Amber Ryan has never shown such weakness even in her darkest moment – and there were such black minutes gifted from me to her. This one, now, for example. And so my suspension of disbelief twists and stretches and everything dissolves back into what is real and true and several days removed from my dream, turned a warm summer reality.
In this real world she is on a gurney, still breathing in stuttered, wet contractions somewhere in Las Vegas with the rest of her sinful kind. Inside her drug-addled mind, she is bleeding to death on a noir-inspired rooftop, looking for a hero. It does not matter anymore, because her time is over. The shadow she cast over my everything is lifted. I am here and I am free at last.
Free at last. Ahead, the sun squats until only its burnt orange rim peeks over the confluence of skyscrapers and angled roofs that make up downtown Saint Louis. Sweeping in a sterling silver curve, the Gateway to Westward Expansion, A Monument to Indian Killing, the Arch is burnished gold by reflected rays.
The heat is stifling – a thick blanket of humid wetness that clings to everyone and everything, leaving a shimmer of damp on every surface it coils and caresses. Beads of sweat pool and run in competing sprints around the porcelain rim of my mask until surface tension loses versus volume at the chin, and it drips free to stain the material of my lap a midnight blue from cerulean. A gunshot rings out in the distance, and someone is presumably killed for no good reason at all. Senselessly, callously. Without purpose.
It is so wasteful.
Such reckless use of death. Lacking in finesse, in imagination. In the mad desire to kill, they do not pause long enough to understand everything the act entails. Thoughts turn immediately to what I imagine is the freshly surgically repaired body of my Dissipated Hurricane, lost beneath a scratchy nylon bed sheet and tendrils of snaking tubes pumping disinfectant, blood products and painkillers into her shaking veins. A smile spreads out underneath composite, I nod to the idea of it. Approvingly.
I do hope my present gifted to excite the latter brings her sweet agony for a very long time to come.
People are so very quick – in such a terrible rush – to kill each other. You cannot learn anything if you are dead, and there are so many wonderful things we do not know yet, but could if only given the chance. The lessons. An opportunity. After all, if you kill them, they will not learn anything. A green leotard did not undermine the validity of that particular point.
Sirens wail, distorted and drawn out by doppler effect, glass and steel. Something pretending to be a breeze briefly tries to stir, but settles on tickling my sweat-exposed skin ineffectually. Its feeble efforts are cut short by the slab of broken brickwork that takes me out of sight of the wider city.
The service tunnel is an order of magnitude cooler, thermally blessed by an overhang of thick, cobbled stone which absorbs the numbing heat of day. Chunks of shattered masonry, plastic bottles bleached white and rusted fragments of broken metal clink and topple as my feet sink into the mud and the trash and the shit. Something foetid skitters by on stubby legs misshapen with tumours and boils, stopping long enough to hiss.
An iron gate washed out in orange and scabbed by corrosion hangs open, the remains of the chain and its associated padlock – still locked tight – shining utilitarian silver against the black, wet earth. Up ahead, something red stands in a still silhouette against sparkling city lights and the ground underneath my feet begins a subtle transition from dirt to metal. Soft thumps exchanged for hard, reverberating clangs.
“Why the fuck are you here?”
Cassiopeia sits on a railing overlooking the drop down to the Missouri river some sixty feet below. Her left hand is squeezed tight around the malformed metalwork and blanched white with the pressure of the hold; her right brings a dirty-brown bottle up to cherry-smeared lips and tips back the sticky dregs.
The bottle sails clear from the bridge and down. It has already disappeared from view before it ever reaches the water.
Weakness permeates every part of her being. She stinks of it. Her free hand trembles, bloodshot eyes finally unable to stand the silence of my non-reply before turning to find mine. Her face is puffed, haggard. As if the skin has been wound in tight and sharp against the skull. A wretch.
“Why?”
For such a varied thing as language, capable of incredible prose and descriptive complexity, it can be frustratingly vague. So many response, potential inquiries, it is almost–
“Why are you here?” She interrupts.
She has made such progress in the last few months, and it gives me just a moment’s pause to think about what Cassiopeia might have gone on to be if her usefulness had not so recently concluded and come to its appointed end. A useful tool, no doubt, but one that was only ever capable of a singular task … Now complete and lying in its hospital bed, panting and groaning.
I have kept her waiting long enough. “I am here to complete our final lesson.”
Her face contorts, anger flushing the skin red and making the lips draw back in something like a snarl. “You made it quite clear that I’m superfluous to requirements.”
She is. “You are,” I reply, cocking my head to the side.
Teeth bare. “Then why the fuck are you here!”
It is interesting that for all the rage she appears capable of, it has never surfaced at a moment which might help her resist all the terrible things she has become embroiled in. The missteps and mistakes – and deliberate, overt actions – that have led her to consider throwing herself off this bridge in her hometown … But we will come to that shortly.
The mewling, soul-searching desperation in her voice is unpleasant, but she has always been so patient, so I will indulge her. “I said it is time to deliver your final lesson, Miss Mearns.”
She jerks upright at the tone of that, fingers squeezing the metal railing tight. Her lips work for a few moments, either practising for what is about to come or stuck in a failure of words following the impulse to speak them. Something all too typical shimmers underneath her eyes and she roughly drags the hilt of a palm across her cheek. I am not sure why she chooses to try to hide it now, given how painfully vulnerable she so obviously is. It is pathetic.
“What’s the point …” She sighs, voice cracking like the remains of her self-respect. “You got what you needed, what you did–”
“Enough.” It is my turn to intervene; this has already taken too long and there is so much to do elsewhere. “When you began this journey with me, to walk towards Rapture, I made you a promise. An exchange. This was never transactional or some purely-one-way affair. My aim was always one of transformation, and look what we have changed. It is time now for me to give to you what you deserve …”
Cassiopeia finally breaks eye contact, and her head dips down to look at the rolling river far below. Finally, sullenly sinking below the downtown cityscape the last washed-out halo of the sun disappears and the temperature drops several blessed degrees. “I don’t deserve anything …”
“You are weak of spirit, no doubt,” I muse. She flinches. “But you could not have been any other way and still played your part as her conscience, her moral and ethical centre. It is your fragility that made you something Amber sought to protect, to override all her natural instinct and defences and leave herself vulnerable …”
The tears are flowing freely now, falling so very far down to join the rest of the water.
“I was bait …”
Very good. Despite undergoing such an intense existential crisis, she remains capable of some critical analysis. This whole tiresome process might yet be sped up. “Yes; something to tug at what was left of her heart which be in no doubt despite her protestations, still absolutely exists. I have even seen it break once.”
The image of watching Amber step out from a nondescript dressing room in Atlantic City all those years ago and abandon Fexxfield to his fate is an intoxicating one. It is difficult not to drink so deeply of the memory that there is no reason to think about anything else. No, not yet. There is too much to do to relax so completely.
“Usurp her self-control, defeat her desire not to become messily entangled with “people” and “feelings”. A cancer, in a way. To hollow out her own conviction and strength of will at the moment she needed it most. Part the gates and allow me to walk through and run then her through.”
“Willing bait,” I add. “Because you came to be a part of this beautiful thing of your own free will. And so, it is only right you are rewarded with the knowledge of what now comes next.”
She shifts her weight imperceptibly. “I already know what comes next …” and in a single moment, the straining knuckles of her hand around the barrier relax. Blood flows back into the blanched skin, turning it a bright pink. Over the minutes I have worked my way closer while she drinks her fill of woe and sorrow for herself, and the plastic phalanges of my prosthetic grip tight the collar of her summer dress just as Cassiopeia tips forwards.
Hauling backwards, she cries out in shock, pain, sadness, grief – there are too many competing feelings to accurately tell which one – and collapses into my grasp. She thrashes for a few moments, coming dangerously close to offering something like a punch, but she is slight and her will broken and so she quickly slumps.
I press the sweat-slicked ceramic of my mask against her ear. “I told you once that there are oh so many things worse than death …”
She sobs quietly, I continue. “ … And you think you have experienced them all. That is why I knew you would act rashly, like this. No, Miss Mearns, not yet. The dread that makes you think there is no reason to wake up to face another day is still to age, still to ferment and mature into something far more delicious. It is not time for you to go because you have not learned your final lesson, not yet. But here, now, is your opportunity. Your moment to learn.”
She falls back into my hard embrace, one which cares nothing for her pain or misery. Her shoulders shake, chest heaving with every agony that sputters and chokes through the tears. For a few moments she simply despairs, interspersed with an occasional attempt at speech which descends into sniffed consonants and gurgled vowels.
Dutifully, I sweep the matted blonde out from her swollen eyes with my prosthetic. Cassiopeia struggles in the impossible ambiguity of it after all; desperate for any comfort but disgusted by the notion it might absurdly be me who provides it and so she walks an impossible line – jerking forward before sinking back. Trapped between what she wants and what she hates. Just like a formerly Resplendent Hurricane.
Another gunshot rings out, and she starts up. The plastic fingers of my hand curl around a shoulder and force her back down.
“I think you knew I would be here,” I offer, as much in thought as expression. “Even in such pain and suffering, you cannot commit without some external validation. It must be exhausting to be so … Torn. To lack clarity.”
She says nothing at first, almost petulant. But the temperature continues to fall and the river continues to surge past below and eventually, Cassiopeia has no choice but to respond.
“What’re you waiting for?”
I smile. “Your blessing, to give you what you have waited so long for. The final lesson: living with the terrible things you have done in the dark, because you cannot get out and find the light.”
Her tears fall anew, but this time there is too much metal and hopelessness for them to find the river again.
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[The Rapture]
The complex ballad of life can be summarised as a series of opportunities to embrace change. There are no constants – no meaningful ones – beyond beginning it, and ending it. The entirety of that span, between those two arbitrary points (mostly) outside of your control, is a gradual conversion from potential to reality as time moves on and the former is used up. Along the way, we all must apply the lessons taught by bitter and blessed experiences to recognise our full potential and achieve all that we can. Only then, can we be the very best version of ourselves.
Why are we here, if not to improve? To grow? And as anything which lives and scrapes together sufficient cognitive ability to recognise that fact, pain and its associated miseries are such a wonderful method for stimulating growth. Nothing easy, after all, was ever worth having.
To plateau is to die the little death. If you are not moving forwards, you are moving backwards. It is with some disbelief then that I find myself doing the unthinkable and repeating what has gone on before. Regression is a hard and closed fist to my existence, because it is forced on me by those who either should know better or do and think nothing better of it. Nothing new, only a retread of a story that was worn-out the first time it was opened and read. A book which has no new lessons to tell me, because I have already moved from cover to cover and found it wanting.
An insult. A tyre iron to the shoulder, to draw another intoxicating memory out. Such sweet Oblivion.
To be granted the chance to learn these lessons, to sit underneath the shade of the hot sun for a while and listen, truly that is a wonderful gift for anyone to receive. Eagerly. And I have dispensed so much of my wisdom across this company and its assets: delivering choice education to those who have carried its subsequent scars onwards as permanent reminders. These wounds I gift as lessons. Each made choice and carefully inflicted, something I am only so pleased to provide safe in the knowledge those that limp and grimace and grip the edges of their sinks in the morning, racked with the pain of those lessons, have taken all my words and agonies to heart. It is in my own small way a contribution to the betterment of others.
And yet, Crystal, you are here again. With a new name. Again. Not only have you failed to show the proper appreciation and respect for the effort I previously gave to disavow you of your flaws, you have embraced the very weakness I so generously showed how to purge. Whether through ignorance or spite, you have chosen to commit the most serious insult I can think to suffer:
Wasting an opportunity I have gifted you; turning away from the lessons I have taught and wrote in scars against your skin and on your mind. Did you experience insufficient pain, necessitating a second dose of reality? I am interested in whatever it is you feel you did not receive the first time you were so brutally put down.
To all those welcomed to my Rapture I gave such time and effort. None were dismissed, although some were treated with the appropriate lack of respect they deserved. A few were targeted with extreme prejudice, as Miss Hernandez can attest. I have not seen her in a while – presumably still walking the block she formerly dominated, now made resident in rent-controlled accommodation courtesy of the reigning Internet Champion.
Was I not generous in my attention? In my haste to move on to deliver my grand design, do you feel as if the pain you suffered was not everything you hoped for? Is this some sadomasochistic attempt to wound yourself for the pain you have caused others?
Is this about Seleana? I regret that there is not the time to spare to dissect that again.
There are such masterful things at work now which demand my attention and effort, and I regret there is precious little time for me to uplift the Bombshell Division at the pace I have done so previously. There are so many deserving women waiting for their opportunity to embrace change through the twin pleasures of misery and suffering, by my thorn-painted hand.
There is one in particular who now carries a heart that used to belong to someone else. Something I would be most interested in reclaiming on her broken behalf. If only because it would wound her more deeply than even the exquisite agonies I have already visited against her. But that is not the task to prosthetic (hand). No, instead I must deal with a Ghost of Zdunich Past. A step backwards instead of forwards.
So consider how deep that depth of insult will be to see you stand opposite on Sunday in Phoenix, Arizona. Lessons already dispensed, wisdom offered – and turned away by likes of you. It is more than disappointing. It is unacceptable. Who are you to deny me? A so-called Hall of Famer who has spent more time in pursuit of success than enjoying it? A handful of precious memories strung out on lights joined by year-long toil in nothing of importance at all. The other Zdunich in name and spirit.
Seleana could do so much better I think.
Over the past few months I have set about building a vast, silver and brass edifice which will change this company. My Celestial Machinery. Its intricate parts fashioned with painstaking precision, built on all those who have come before me and been made better – and enraptured – for it. Even you, before your insistence on a second attempt at the impossible. All it lacked was a heart to power it, to give it life so that my vision, my grand design could at last be enacted.
And that heart began to beat last weekend, when I took it from Amber Ryan’s chest and set it in its place alongside mine. After all, I told her she was the heart of the Rapture but I did not say the rest of her was required to facilitate that new beginning. She will not need it anymore, anyway – for I have gifted her the greatest kindness of all; absolution. Freedom from suffering and the ambiguities of who she is versus who the world would like to see. A beautiful mercy. A hurricane, dissipated.
Now, Amber can return to the second man to make the mistake of crossing her path with any permanence. Her gift for bringing suffering to others is matched only by her capacity for self-delusion in the face of the obvious. Still, where Mister Bane is diminished, my Songbird is uplifted. It is all in service to the grand design.
Curious that accolades – Championships – do not stay long with the males she invites onto her web. An entomological mystery we do not have time to examine, since there is never to be another chapter in the Case of the Hurricane that Thought it Could … But Could Not.
Still, there is one aspect to her absolution which gives me a moment’s pause. Amber had a protege. Miss Blackthorn. She could yet be of use, depending on how deeply her scars truly run. Her story has such a gilt of tragedy that holds in tandem such appeal. A moment’s pause extends, and thoughts turn to whether I had focused on the wrong woman …
Tantalising but ultimately, another distraction. Something to be considered when I have dealt with the lesser Zdunich again. Such repetition has become boring. Blase.
Still, all of these things that are now coming to pass demand my fullest, most rapt attention … And yet I am distracted, forced to look away from perfection, my Rapture, to look down at you Crystal and ask – ironically, given the ambiguities – “Why?”
Why are you here again?
It cannot simply be because you were told, or assigned, or anything so procedural. SCW has already proven that being directed to face a particular opponent is no obstacle to avoiding them. Otherwise, I would have delivered my precious lessons to Mercedes Vargas and her partner Miss Steele, instead of Dollar Store-discount demons in faux-blood and pseudo-gore. Nobody except fools and little children called Chloe simply do what they are told within this organisation.
Why are you here again?
Are you on some newly-motivated mission to find the happiness you could not find with Seleana? Do you think you will find it in some trinket made from tarnished gold-plate and sweat-stained leather; something you have already tried and failed utterly to take from me? It is dangerous to covet something so intensely that you are willing to be dismantled. On the first occasion, I was willing to reassemble you into something groundbreaking and beautiful. This time, I will leave your parts to rust in that warm summer sun.
Why are you here again?
This world is run-through with sin, sprouting like the tufts of weeds from between cracked sidewalk slabs. The flawed stumble everywhere, their bleached existences competing for the prize of most meaningless and non-contributory. At every turn I am beset by those who should understand their role in the acceptance of the agonies they are assigned by tutors who are trained and educated; from my thorn-painted hand to the wounds on your body. And yet, they drag heavy feet against the stony ground with slack jaws and wide eyes, drawn to simple tokens of success like the Internet Championship. Lured by lights in the distance.
It is dangerous to follow lighthouses because of the lack of anything else in the dark. Just ask Miss Beaufort. There are so many roses clipped from my garden, brought up to my painted face and enjoyed. One must be careful with their thorns, though.
Crystal, you have made the final mistake in a long and inglorious career of errors by turning those wide eyes upon me a second time. You are the epitome of this Division’s bloated form – distended by averageness, engorged on fleeting moments of success as short as they are multitudinous: singular points at which your fingertips brushed against greatness before it continued on and you spiralled down.
Why are you here?
If my prose is too complex, too sophisticated, too flowing, let me offer you something crushed underfoot and deep into the shit. Under the pointed apex of the GCU Arena this Sunday, I will fucking end you.
No complex metaphors spun out on threads of allegory or metaphor. There is no divine purpose for which your suffering can act as tribute or contribution. The sole purpose of my venture at Climax Control will be to inflict such an agony on you that there will be no deluded third attempt at relevancy. You were allowed to leave our first dance together because I gifted you those moves from which to change, to grow – to become something greater than the sum of the half-dozen surnames you have carried so far. Instead, you wear your sins with the same pride you carry in your fleeting accomplishments. You have learned nothing.
You did not listen to me, Crystal and so now, you will feel. I can only talk for so long before action becomes a welcome respite. Even servomotors and actuators become tired if they are forced to repeat the same moment over and over again. Does it not shatter you? To repeat every mistake as it is the first time of making? Drain every sinew, hollow out your bones?
Why are you here?
I will put you flat on your back, staring up at the spinning overhead lights, blood pooling in a halo of failure drawn all around a head that is filled with such incredible imagination to believe you – the other Zdunich – could ever deign to take my gateway, the Internet Championship, from my cold, dead hand. I have turned this accolade, previously a bauble of the former most Dominant Bitch on the Block, into a place of education. Of learning. Here, the brave and the eager and the foolish all jostle for a chance to be transformed. To be given new purpose. Enraptured.
You were once given such an opportunity. Look how you have squandered it, like your marriage and the latest iteration of a life that has been reset so many times that the latent memories of each previous failure begin to form some gestalt additional failure of its own. So many past lives lived in misery, they become some homogeneous error that follows you around for all time.
Sweep those blue locks that induce visual cortex migraines out from your glassy eyes and see what has been achieved in my grand design. I have taken the mightiest Champion of recent time, one who worked three hundred and fifty seven distinct miracles, who defeated all comers again and again and again and broke her. Dissipated her winds, quelled the storm and remade stormy skies sunny. You bask in the warmth of a world without Amber Ryan, who would just as surely dispose of you at the second as twelfth attempt, because I willed it. Because I wrote it. Because I delivered it.
Why are you here?
Is it something more simplistic? Is it less title glory or redemption you seek, but absolution in your complete and total destruction? Tell me Crystal, have you grown tired of the emptiness that comes from being a walking falsehood? An example of bravado, of ego looking for a justifiable reason to exist? Have you simply come to Phoenix this Sunday to die? I will be only too pleased to expedite your request. You stand at the midpoint of a peak you could not climb even before you first understood the difficulty of the ascent, when naivety as to the scale of an insurmountable challenge was still an ally, at least notionally. You have only become older, slower, more fearful and less sure in the intervening time and somehow, you believe this qualifies as reasonable grounds for a second attempt?
Is there a numbness that takes your heart in its nothingness and squeezes tight? A reflection in a six-dollar motel bathroom mirror which looks like you but does not feel like you. Does not feel at all. A paralysis of spirit that leaves the body to move, to respond; to fight and flight but on some autopilot that steers you from one disaster to another. Tell me, Crystal, is your skin cold to the touch? Do you fear failure as much as the success that has eluded you for such vast swathes of the disappointment otherwise marked as a career?
Do you miss the way it feels to be validated? To be something. Someone. You are so very far from home, Miss Zdunich, but there is no path back to Kansas that runs through the Rapture, for I am it made manifest; a swirling vortex of change that has turned this Division inside out and to pause my great work to focus on you is an affront. An offence. You are nothing and that is where you will be returned, so completely neutered and rendered harmless that you will be left to compete with Miss Benton for softest in head and weakest in spirit. A contest more suited to your skillset to emerge as runner-up.
I destroyed Amber Ryan, and that makes me mighty. You have destroyed nothing more significant than a marriage.
Why are you here?
There is one final permutation to explain away the unexplainable. A final solution to the question that has been maddening in its simplicity versus rational justification. Perhaps you are here, Crystal, not because you think you can win, or because you seek an expedited end, but because those with influence and power have realised too late what has come for them and their precious Division – and company.
They were only too pleased to turn their masked boogeywoman on those that frustrated or inconvenienced them. A weapon to be freely employed in reminding those with ideas not consistent in assigned stations of the consequence of crossing authority. You would be a strange choice, Crystal, given your clear inferiority but how many other loyal foot soldiers remain who would take that order at all? There are better candidates to take my lessons and attempt to teach me, but they either will not or cannot do such bidding. Miss Johnson, our current World Champion, is the former. My Dissipated Hurricane, the latter because she cannot stand without medical intervention.
After all, I am not sure your acting career is one to provide sufficient income for the life you have become accustomed to. There is little call for someone who can so effortlessly wield failure and underachievement – a limited skillset in this industry of sanctioned violence and unpleasantness.
There is one aspect by which you can take comfort in what is about to happen to you – again. You will be an exclusive audience of one to a truly memorable moment. Free from the concerns of false goddesses and their compassion-based poisons, it is time for me to deliver my vision to all and sundry. I have walked a long and shining road inlet with the precious metals of all those who have sacrificed themselves: roses, dominant bitches, darling dreamscapes, strange beasts … You. This has prepared the way but the true work is not yet done, and we have a little further to go. The summit of this Division beckons, one which was formerly occupied by a Hurricane but is now the residence of a Superhero. I think it is the perfect place for a Rapture.
You represent a pause I was not prepared to make. With so much to do and so much pain to prepare to inflict, this is a distraction I do not welcome. Still, some wonderful things can spawn from the spontaneous, the unforeseen. The unrehearsed.
On Sunday, Crystal, there will be no script despite the fact that you have already had a rehearsal for what is about to happen to you. No lessons. No place on offer in the Rapture because it is no longer something on the horizon, but a tangible and glorious change here, now. Whether you act as collateral damage which escaped its first scheduled appointment with destruction, or an exclusive audience of one, it does not matter. You are not fodder or fuel – you are simply in the way. Perhaps the question as we prepare to do this again is not so much why you are here, but who you are.
Have cheap motels and B-Movie supporting roles worn thin like the threadbare carpets you pad barefoot over? How did you know she was sick of you? Was it a sudden dissociation at the end of a pink bakelite phone, or the long death of a love suffocated by distance and tamped by apathy? These are the same questions I asked you before but this time, the answers mean nothing to me.
Perhaps, they mean nothing to you. Or at least, the real you.
It must be difficult to pretend to be someone else. Not in terms of profession – but to deny the truth of yourself, to yourself. To spend so long building a facade to present to a world which did not ask to know you and does not care; a silent fortress taken from one of your many silver-screen hits that reveals its flaws and compromises when the camera pans a little too closely. Thick black walls that sport curious patches of white, where hasty primer peels off to reveal soft polystyrene underneath.
I already know you more deeply than any of those who have lent you a new surname over the years. It is impossible to hurt someone as I have hurt you and not know them intimately. Indeed, this is the only aspect of you which truly surprises me, Crystal: that you have chosen to change nothing – to repeat the same mistakes and missteps and assume that providence, god or a wet ring apron will intervene to get it right for you this time.
Is it ignorance? Or the result of some deep-seated soul searching in the few moments before you step through thick felt curtains and pretend you are not walking to your doom. again.
Perhaps, the question you should ask yourself is not why you are here, or who you are … But when.
When will you feel anything, ever again?
On that singular subject, given careful definition, I would be so pleased to help provide the answer: Sunday, in Phoenix.
Welcome to the Rapture.
