Chapter 8: To Succumb to the Inevitable
In order to properly honor our dead, custom says we eulogize them, minimize their faults and play up their strengths. Having finally succumbed to the vision, albeit a slightly different one, of my inevitable end in a mass grave, I, along with many, many others, were not allowed our rightful, respectful dues. Let us not lament then, that we had no honor, but let it be immortalized in this, our story.
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Loneliness.
How easily the word stands by itself. Or lay in bed, staring at the ceiling at night, lights turned off, wanting to cry silently in the deep blue light because maybe after the tears came, sleep would follow. But no, sleep doesn’t beckon yet, first the tears, the silent yearning, the poetic words scrawled on paper or on the wall of the mind, characters of light that fade into darkness behind shut eyelids. Loneliness knows these things. It speaks in the quiet stillness, uttering over and over that this is the thing it fears most-Itself.
My loneliness threatened to overrun me. I needed more than a lover-I needed someone to touch me, with whom I could share my little brilliant moments. What was my life if no one was close enough to share it, all the victories and tragedies and beauties seen and truths unveiled? Who could help me laugh away the fear behind all the minute pressures that weighed on my worrisome head?
Three weeks had passed since the return communication from Trixie’s people-she accepted the challenge and looked forward to the day she could pummel my face into fleshy pulp. The messenger had been charged with the duty of making it perfectly clear that that was her precise statement, verbatim. He had waited in the maze level, surrounded by a beacon of white light, lounging in an aluminum lawn chair. He told the patrol that he had been there for two and a half days. White flags were duct-taped to both sides of the upright back.
Three weeks gone by and I felt no better. Realization of the fact that I had known Rachel would leave offered little in the way of consolation. I trained daily with Hoover, Eli and Logan at my side, and for half of the day I felt stable. But it was false stability in that I could lose my self for a brief period of time in physical exertion.
The loneliness always came back.
It ate at me, oxidized and rusted the foundation on which the healthy self had been constructed. Memories of the nervous, sallow, near-idealistic but dishonest version returned with renewed vigor. I became increasingly quiet, mindful of the lessons and bout to come, but enveloped wholly in a self-pitying mode, in an ocean of misery and defeat.
What started as a pebble gained momentum and mass in an act transformation. Loneliness redefined itself and found that it resembled perpetual melancholy. Melancholy gave way to desperation. Desperation rolled itself into one huge mother of a boulder, always threatening, with gravity laughing merrily at its side, to crush the spirit.
I closed eyes glistening with the haze and half-stupor of depression to shut out all light. Memory came flooding in to take its place.
“Where are you from?”
The conversation began in the dark, filling my emotional core with a sort of thrilling trepidation. It was the prolonging, the delay, the aspect of individual imagination, and the fact that I couldn’t see her, that ignited my brain, doused it with gasoline and touched it with the torch of curiosity. I tried not to think of possible outcomes. After all, we were a mere phrase deep into the conversation.
“Originally?” A faint hint of a smile tinged her words.
“Sure.”
“Dallas-originally. I grew up there, went to school there. God knows how I ended up here.”
“Hmm, you’ve piqued my curiosity. Tell me more. I want to hear romance, daring and mystery.”
“Well, I heard that there was this extremely intelligent, mysterious man up north. Word was he had something to say.”
“Yes, go on, go on.”
“But, as it turned out he wasn’t too easy on the eyes, but somehow, miraculously, I found myself attracted to him.”
“I’m going to have to ask you to shut up now.”
Her voice was sweet and I didn’t have to wonder whether there was a smile on her lips when she spoke-she chose to laugh instead, a full-bodied thing charged with vitality, more beautiful than the saddest song I could ever hear.
And just like that, I was ready for my time to be up.
In the blue study of fond and aching memory, the revelation came. I could feel the gears winding down, knew, with the deepness of knowing instilled upon birth, with the surety of an elderly woman rasping faintly on her death-bed, that the second-hand would soon stop.
It was a matter of course, a matter of the circle, which no living being could deny. The rise had come and I was very near the point of falling. The time of dying had peacefully made its presence known, and I thanked it for its gentle and subtle touch.
For another gentle touch-of a more tangible nature-I would have given anything.
I stood ready to defeat the world just for her. For the breath of her lips on my skin, my lips. Even had they offered death, a last departing kiss for the trip back to birth, it would have been enough.
Two hours left and I could not awake.
I lived in a transparent cocoon of somnolence. I made a show of meditation and focus-a half-truth. My mind was absent. Absent of activity save the obsession of one penultimate touch before the ultimate expulsion of the flame.
Trixie was likely to break my face into assorted fragments, and I didn’t give a shit. According to my calculations, she would achieve this by the third round and spit on my corpse by the sixth. I contemplated the details with detached amusement, an absent smirk forming on my lips.
A hand, the wrong one, gripped my shoulder. I kept my eyes shut.
“You alright?” Hoover’s voice, firm and shot through with obvious concern.
“Yeah. I think so,” I lied. I stood and turned toward him.
“Good thing,” he said, eyeing me, discerning the lie, “’cause we gotta be gone soon.” His eyes bored into me. I nodded approval.
“Listen-we don’t have to do this. We can reschedule, or call it off altogether,” he pleaded.
“No.”
“She’s going to kill you!” he shouted, inches from my face.
“I know,” I said quietly.
“What the fuck, man? Is there any way to get through to you? Each and every day for the last few weeks you’ve been in a trance, a robot. We’ve all been patient, but you’ve got to remember that our asses are in the clamps too. Snap the fuck out of it.” Fierce blue eyes burned cold, attempted to penetrated the haze in my head. Another second like that and he whipped around and strode to the doorway of my chamber. Venting frustration on the heavy drapes hanging there, he flung them aside in a petulant gesture of unnecessary force.
I thought Trixie was using unnecessary force, but it just turned out that her gloves were weighted.
I could have sworn I was fighting a robot. Trixie was mechanical, sidestepping my advances, jabbing with those leaden fists. My head might as well have been a watermelon for all the trouble she had hitting it.
I had not snapped the fuck out of it, as Hoover had requested. I didn’t remember the exultant rise of the masses to the surface. I couldn’t recall the feel of heat in the first touch of full sun my skin had experienced in three seasons. Despite the fact that it was a cold winter sun, I should have felt something. I didn’t. I had no pictures in my mind of the deliberate march to the site where the arena had been erected. I had no recollection of the unseasonably mildness of that day. I couldn’t have told you that it wasn’t a day for conflict or death, that it deserved to be spent in lazy, vigorous admiration of all things living. I was too busy being a mindless, numb automaton.
And in front of me dodged a very convincing robot, impolitely sticking her red gloves in my face, ribs and belly. The gloves, I observed as they flashed toward me, were a muted red. Psshh! went one of the gloves, making light of my situation, connecting with the left side of my head. The she-robot danced away, and I noticed that she was muted in color as well. She danced back and this time did more volatile, punishing things to my head. Absorbing a left to the face, then a quick body combination, I fell backwards. She pressed the attack. I retreated, looked to the crowd for help. I was falling apart. I knew it, as one might suspect imminent death when jumping out of a plane without a parachute, as fact. I knew it because I looked to the crowd and thought I had seen my lover. It was torture, that sight, so I shut out all light to stay myself against the pain.
And in so doing, invited on myself an entirely separate set of pain. Eyes closed, ropes sliding against my back, slick with sweat, I felt my head explode. The uppercut was solid, devastating in its quickness and retreat of impact. My jaw snapped shut with the blow, teeth coming together with a loud click! My head whipped up and back. Knees buckled and I dropped to a state of prone worship of repose. The crowd sighed.
I swam there, beached for an indeterminate period of time on the mat, eluding my brain and the responsibilities that went along with it. I kept my eyes closed and sought a place where I could find relief. I beckoned reprieve, but it evaded me neatly. Hysteria and fear of madness brought me back to the immediate here and now. Rachel, or the visage of her, standing still among the masses, had mouthed something. An apology.
I could not accept it. I refused myself the drug of reality and instead accepted hallucination as the healthy determinate to shape reality.
Vaguely, I heard a bell ding. I cracked swollen eyes, searched for its source. I noticed that everything was muted, shaded in a tinny gray light. The robot was sitting in a corner.
I heaved myself to my feet and imitated the girl, lowering myself into a seat in the corner opposite her. She stared at me, so I stared back. A short, gaunt man stepped in front of me, cut short the staring contest. He grabbed my face.
The shock of intimate touch brought me back halfway. That robot across the ring was Trixie, a formidable foe with a timely jab and a nasty right. The man screaming in my face was Logan.
“Do you know where you are?” he asked loudly, eyebrows furrowed with deep concern.
“Now I do.” I wrinkled my nose. “Man, that breath could revive a dead horse. I wish they still made tic-tacs.”
“Let’s not focus on my problems, you’ve got some that need addressing.”
“Right-o, Johnny.”
“What the fuck is up? Is that it? You fucked up?”
“Not anymore.”
“If you say so,” he said with obvious disbelief. “Ok, it’s the twelfth round and you need to play catch-up real quick. This is it, the last one. You’ve got to put her down. Got me?”
“Gotcha.”
“This isn’t a regulation fight, but I wouldn’t worry about sticking it out for the remaining few rounds. That judge, Barry, he won’t let you win anyway. I recognize him from my Gingerbread days.”
“Tell me what I need to do and I’ll do it.”
“You’ve got to knock her on her ass and make her stay there.”
“Ok.”
“Ok. She’s quick, but you knew she’d be quick. Besides, when your head’s not in your ass, you’re pretty damn quick yourself. When she comes with that big right, you dodge left, get her in the guts then put everything you’ve got into her head, just like we taught you. She’ll collapse on impact.” He punctuated the words by squirting water into my mouth. I swished it and spit it out. “Ready?”
“Super.”
“Hit it.” I arose unsteadily as the bell rang out, feigning weakness. Trixie advanced straight-on, quickly and without hesitation. She wasted no time in coming with that heavy right hand.
I dodged left, felt the displaced air breeze by my face, came up with my right, slammed it into her solar-plexus, felt her body shudder, heard the sudden gasp of air being forced out her lungs, came forward with an overhand left, whipped her head to the right with the impact, watched as she stumbled backward into the ropes.
Beyond which I saw a face appear then vanish in the crowd.
Suddenly my senses were ablaze with life, just in time for the crowd to go dead still. Even the few hundred citizens of the Rev, who were gathered on the outskirts of the arena, held their breath. The ropes, colored in the symbolic bright red, vibrated with the impact of Trixie’s body. The sun blazed down on my shoulders, face, chest, bathing me in a great invisible sea of heat. Out in the crowd, thousands of faces looked on in shock to see their all-powerful dictator crumpled like a wasted sheet of paper, lying prone on the mat. All was stillness.
And that whistling, making my head spin, so much so that I thought I saw Rachel, struggling forward through the crowd. And I knew it was a hallucination because she was making no headway, just as a hallucination would, all for the sake of a good, crazy taunting, to lead me to the precipice where sanity ended. I followed. And on the edge of that vast, great chasm inside which madness resided, I found the very real substance of her body, her arms, her hands on my neck.
Lips against mine and my eyes went wide as I truly saw. An apology, she mouthed an apology, and I felt so perfect and right that I couldn’t fathom for what she needed to ask forgiveness. She kept on mouthing though, and I wondered why she would do that when I was standing right there, inches from her warmth and brilliance.
But the hallucination hadn’t ended, because no matter the effort she put forth, I couldn’t discern meaning in the words.
It was then I truly noticed the whistling. Wailing, screaming down from above, the noise promised death. With the slow, graceful motion of one steeped in utter serenity, I craned my neck backward, tilted it unto infinity. There I saw the promise, winking with the help of the sun on its gleaming metallic shell. It knew our time was up, and so I relented to empirical evidence. It was time to loosen the shackles of mass.
And so we all died like that, a thousand faces turned to the sun in what, from the profound and complete lack of motion, could have been misconstrued as the last act of worship before the willing death. Fire bloomed from the place we had stood, spread out in a wave of wind and heat, indiscriminate in its rending of skyscrapers and shanties alike. In retail shops impervious to revolution, clerks convinced their prospective clients to purchase the latest design-shortly before disintegrating instantaneously to dust. Mothers chided their fatherless children for loud insolence-before performing the same function as the saleswomen and clients. We were all fodder, in the wake of that miserable creation and we died watching the strange instrument plummet down, screaming for us to move, hide, do anything but stay there.
But there was no running from that sort of instrument.
It detonated a few hundred feet above our heads, and from the rubble, the differentiation between neutron and atom was easily discernible. Atom had been the way of it.
Rachel and I dissolved in one another’s arms, silent and at last able to put the eternal feuding to rest. In all of time, we had been brought to this fulcrum. To witness the atrocity rent was enough. To be branded with the knowledge was punishment.
And so it is that I know and have always known that sense in me that responds more willingly to the melancholy. I have always been molded by pain and have, time and again, assisted in the crafting of others in that same cast.
I will live again, I know this. And perhaps next time, I will balance on that fulcrum before the instant of death has arrived. The next time, perhaps I will put a halt to the cycle. I wish it. I wish it desperately.
THE END
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