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Title: Graffiti
Author: darkstar
Email: clone347@aol.com
Archive: feel free, just let me know
Codes: S/V relationship, angst, character death.
Spoilers: nothing big enough to count.
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: If I owned them, I'd give Vaughn a hug.
He needs one. But they aren't mine so there goes that idea...
Author's Notes: Response to Cover Me December Challenge
and to a challenge sent to me by my partner in crime and SuperBeta,
Airebella. If anyone would like to see the elements of either
challenge, they are included after the story. Share the love.
Summary: Sydney and Vaughn attempt to reconstruct
their lives after barely surviving SD-6's discovery of their
identities.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Graffiti (2/2)
by darkstar
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
.crevasse.
While Vaughn slowly threaded together the rope of words that
he would use to pull himself back into the world, the two
halves of my identity-- Sydney and Sadie-- were just as steadily
unraveling. I could not stop the dreams, which dropped like
fragmentation bombs into my sleep, and they were now beginning
to disrupt even Sadie's carefree world of country music and
raspberry lip gloss. Tips were down, due to my increasingly
frequent habit of seeing my father pass the diner in a crowd
of people waiting for a bus, with his black overcoat pulled
up around his neck. I would run onto the sidewalk, ignoring
the indignant truckers who needed another beer, and grab my
father's shoulder, to turn him around and embrace him, only
to find out that he was a stranger. Or that he was not even
there at all.
(That was the beginning of it. From there I remember watching
things spiral downward as if I was in the shower watching
a drop of water slide down my leg into the drain. It had that
kind of slippery inevitability. The only thing that surprised
me was that it had taken this long. I wanted to disintegrate
in this manner, having for some time considered it unfair
that Vaughn be the only one of us who was allowed to play
insane.)
I did not sleep, but instead bought a dictionary and a pink
highlighter and stayed up all night ransacking the English
language (and every other language that I could think of)
for newer, better words to fill his head until whatever dam
he had constructed burst open and spilled his story all over
the floor of our apartment. I wanted him to tell me that he
knew he was was going to die, that he knew no one could save
him until I did. I wanted to hear him provide proof that it
was something close to love that destroyed us, not any of
the other things we could call it: fear, selfishness, weakness.
I wanted him to squeeze it into sound. I wrote the words on
the palms of my hands and on the underbelly of my forearm
so I would not forget them by morning. I made us alphabet
soup-- a blatant hint, in my opinion, which he failed to register--
but pretended I was not hungry, that I had eaten at work.
When Marcie and the girls asked me if I wanted a hamburger,
I would tell them that I was on a diet, and show them the
token can of Slimfast I carried in my duffel bag, which I
never drank.
Sadie began to take fifteen minute smoke breaks, even though
she did not smoke, and vanish into the employee restroom,
lock the door, and sleep as desperately as she could. Her
uniform, despite the fact that it was already at least one
size too small, began to sag at the waist. Even Bill, usually
oblivious to anything but his frying pans and spatulas, noticed
this, and handed her a plastic bowl full of New Orleans chili
and told her that it would cure anything short of Ebola. She
knew that there had been customer complaints, but that he
would not fire her because he liked the color of her hair
(the purple was freshly touched up, as dark as an eggplant
or a bruise on her head) and because he believed her story
of the two-year old and the lack of welfare. And because she
was the only one of the girls who didn't mind working double
shifts without demanding a raise. All generosity aside, he
insisted that she wash the words off her arms before coming
into work, that she refrain from suddenly asking customers
if their fathers had died yet.
I wasn't doing much better. Our wall in the kitchen was,
by this time, a jumble of words, all crammed and elbowing
each other for room, and so I decided to begin on the living
room. I bought a pocket thesaurus and taped it underneath
Vaughn's chair on the theory that the words would seep up
through the wood and make him talk in his sleep. I left a
tape recorder hidden in the sugar bowl just to make sure he
was not cheating, speaking out the words when I was not there
to hear him. I was counting on the past experience that he
would be too absorbed the efforts of not remembering his name,
his past, to notice that I had reinvested myself in the same
pursuit. And I was right...it took him at least a week before
he realized that I did not eat my vegetables in the frozen
dinner, even when he picked out the carrots, that I did not
even eat the macaroni. He pushed it onto my fork insistently,
and rubbed the scar on his clavicle (always a sign that he
suspected something was wrong) when I described-- in brilliant
detail, the gigantic hamburger that I had eaten for lunch.
But then he began to meet me at the door and stand close to
my face until he smelled hunger on my breath. He began to
leave scraps of paper by my tennis shoes, on which were written
offers to accompany me to the bus stop. I refused, reminding
him of the Save-Rite and asking him if he wanted to deal with
an entire street of people, not just an aisle full. A dirty
shot, but I did not want him following me, for fear that he
would see me running after my father again. I had missed my
bus three times that week for just that reason.
He did not ask what was happening to me. He knew, having
done the same thing. I could not tell whether he was merely
allowing me to wear myself out before attempting to bring
me to my senses or if, more likely, he panicked at the thought
that I was becoming like him and had no idea how to stop it.
He left bundles of words on my pillow, all having to do with
food-- peach, yogurt, licorice-- as if to remind me of what
I was missing. I didn't have the time to explain to him that
I really wasn't starving, that I ate exactly half a bagel
on the bus every morning on my way to work and on my way back.
This was all my stomach would hold. Anything more and it rejected
the whole meal entirely. He would stand in the kitchen trying
to wash the dishes and at the same time watch me through the
bathroom door as I lost the dinner he had insisted-- emphatically,
but without words-- that I eat. I could still see him in the
edges of my vision, but it was different than I remembered.
I no longer understood his eyes; there was neither revulsion
or pity but something else, something new. Compassion, I think.
For some reason, this made me both grateful and angry.
We were at stalemate. We had run out of words to spend on
each other; all walls were covered, all dictionaries and thesauruses
exhausted. The night before my father's birthday, I broke
two ceramic cups just to hear him tell me to stop, and then
instantly regretted the waste and spent the entire evening
repairing them with duct tape and waterproof glue. I decided
to give up on words, to accept his silence, to join it. I
wrote this on the wall, a manifesto: crevasse..
A deep and unexpected gap in the earth.
On the morning of my father's birthday, I left for work with
every intention of become Sadie so completely and entirely
so that Sydney would have no time left to grieve. Sadie had
no father-- I had made that clear to anyone who asked--, he
left her and her mother before Sadie was three years old.
She never knew his first name and never wanted to know. She
had nothing to mourn. This plan worked well until lunch break,
when I looked up from handing a grubby eight-year old a Dino
Burger to see my father passing by the window, still in his
overcoat. But this time he stopped, and placed his hand on
the window, looking into the room. I could see the sweat of
his palm-prints on the glass. Of course he recognized me,
under the purple hair and tacky lipstick. He was waiting for
me, waiting for me to follow him. So I picked up my coat (although
I did not bother to put it on) and simply walked out the door.
By this time he was already ahead of me, moving down the sidewalk
in the crowd, blending in with everyone else. That is okay.
He would know that they would be watching me, that they must
never suspect that he was still alive. How logical of him.
I would follow. I would wait. I would see him again.
I do not know how long I walked,or how far, before I realized
that my father was not there, had never been there. I was
alone on a deserted back street cluttered with half-empty
warehouses, boarded up convenience stores, following my own
shadow from streetlight to streetlight. I stopped walking.
At one end of the street, a woman in a mini-skirt was climbing
into a man's car. At the other end, two homeless men were
fighting over a cardboard box. It became a seeming impossibility
to take another step further, and even if I could, I no longer
remembered the way back to the apartment. I sat down on the
curb and shivered at the first freeze of the night, and reached
to button up my coat, and this was how I discovered that I
had lost it as well. My coat, and my left shoe. This barely
registered with me; there was only a hollow numbness, a sense
of unbearable disappointment, that my father would abandon
me again. That he would lack the courtesy to come back from
the dead when his little girl needed him.
(It was on a street like this that a night watchman at the
local Rent-A-Shed found my father's body in the dumpster,
or what was left of it, after they finished making him the
scapegoat. No one could tell the difference between his face
and a rotten melon; they had to resort to the teeth for proof
that it was my father that had died.The autopsy confirmed
that every bone in his arms and legs had been broken at least
once, maybe twice, sometimes more. How do I know this? They
made sure I was sent complete details. They included photographs.
An clipping of the newspaper obituary, in which Sloane, the
"employer of the deceased", was quoted as saying
that he counted the loss of Jack Bristow as the loss of a
brother. He wore the same color sunglasses that he wore at
Emily's funeral.)
I was not crying when I remembered this.
I was shaking, suddenly aware that I had not eaten that day
or the day before, suddenly afraid (illogically or not) that
I would pass out on this empty street and that they will find
me in a dumpster somewhere. Then Vaughn be left without a
wrist to hold when he went to the grocery store. No one would
be there to explain why he could not walk down a street. I
did not know the way home. There was no Save-Rite to act as
a landmark. These buildings were cold, unfamiliar, as the
faces of hostile strangers. I was cold. I wanted a shower.
I wanted alphabet soup. I wanted, most of all, my father.
I had a dollar in my pocket, which I cashed in at Greg's
Car Repair for change to use on the payphone on the street
corner. The phone booth was covered in its own kind of graffiti,
which I at first took as a sign of comfort until I saw that
none of the words were any that Vaughn and I had passed between
us. These were squat, ugly words. I dialed the wrong number
the first time-- some pizza place-- and the second time I
could not remember what I was supposed to say to him, and
hung up in panic. After I went back inside to panhandle more
change, I tried one more time. The phone rang once, twice,
three times, five times, and I imagined him sitting in his
chair, looking down at the street, eyes fixed on the exact
corner that I was to have passed on my way home from work
four hours ago. I imagined him ignoring the phone. Six rings,
eight rings.
A click. At first I thought he had taken the phone from the
receiver to hang it up until I heard his breathing and knew
he was waiting for me to tell me where I was. When I tried
to speak, all of the words came out at once, even the ones
I had not intended to say.
/I am standing at Greg's Car Repair but this is not my home
and what is your name today, my name is Sadie because she
has no father but then I don't have a father either and please
find me because I followed my father here then he lost me
and now I want to go home but I don't remember. Please tell
me the way home./
A long pause, and then there is a voice talking and I think,
I've done it, he's going to tell me how to get home, he'll
have to talk. But it's only the operator telling me that if
I would like to make a call, please hang up and try again.
I hung up the phone and walked back inside to ask the mechanic
if I could sleep on his couch until my friend came to get
me. Which was a lie, because my friend could not even survive
for five minutes in a grocery store, much less for the thirty
minutes it would take him to find this place. To my surprise,
the man said yes, no doubt alarmed by my one bare foot and
my frozen hands and the cough that grew worse as I attempted
to explain him that I had missed my bus and tried to walk
home but made too many wrong turns. He even tried to give
me coffee, which I could not drink because my hands would
not stop shaking. And not only from the cold. This was my
father's birthday, I remembered, and my father is dead.
/Daddy, help me... /
Maybe it is proof for the resurrection of the dead that within
two hours, a man in a gray overcoat came into the office where
I sat on a cracked vinyl chair, holding a cold cup of coffee.
This was impossible, you see. This man panicked when left
alone on the streets, but here he was, alone, in a part of
town that neither of us knew. He was out of breath, as if
he had run from whatever bus stop brought him here. He saw
me at the same moment I saw him, although I do not think we
recognized each other at first. What was there left in either
of us that was familiar? It was the moment when our altered
states were most apparent.
His lips were pulled tight into a thin white line, a patch
of skin chewed away, evidence of his fight against the paranoia
of open streets and crowded buses. I could see the neck of
his empty champagne bottle sticking out of his left coat pocket,
and knew that he had armed himself, that he had prepared for
this as I would prepare for a mission. This made me want to
laugh, hysterically. Then it made me want to cry.
I can only imagine what he saw when he looked at me. A snow
girl, thoroughly turned into an icicle, her ribs showing through
her flimsy t-shirt, her mascara frozen into clumps on her
eyelashes. Half-erased words still visible on her forearms
because she hadn't taken the time to wash them off thoroughly
at work, her (one) bare foot tracing circles in the dust on
the floor. Pink toenail polish, chipped, worn down until it
was just visible on the big toe and the middle toe.
Ghosts. Double hallucinations. But when he sat in the chair
next to me and took the coffee cup from my hands, laying it
carefully aside, I knew that we were both flesh and as such,
both still alive. How unfair.
"You aren't supposed to be here." I muttered. "It's
impossible."
He shrugged off his overcoat and pushed it in my hands but
I couldn't manage the buttons because my fingers seemed bloated,
waterlogged, clumsy. He leaned over and began to button them,
one by one. The action of a father. This was when the last
piece of the thread came undone.
"They've killed us, haven't they? They found a way to
do it that did not involve guns. Fine. I quit. They win.."
His hands (I was looking down, avoiding his face) finished
button the last button and then pushed back the sleeve of
the coat so he could see my arm, so he could see the remnants
of the words I had meant to carry to him. By this point my
hands were balled into fists; I would have struck someone
if I had known who to hit.
When he spoke, it was nothing like what I had imagined. No
thunderstorms broke silence, no continents shifted; there
was not even that rusty guitar sound I had expected. At first
I could no understand the words, they were hoarse like sandpaper
on stiff velvet, but then I began to realize what he was doing.
He was reciting, one by one, the words we had spread across
the wall. He spoke them as if they were an incantation.
"Solomon. Wrinkle. Lip. Pianoman. Saffron." With
each word he uncurled one of my stiffened, angry fingers,
loosening them at the knuckles, coaxing them to relax. "Macaroni.
Newspaper." He grinned. "Rain. Indigo. Crevasse."
He closed his palm around mine and traced shapes onto the
back of my hand.
"I will say any words, Sydney, anything you want to
hear. Listen. I will say the words. But you can't quit. Not
now. Not like this." He shook his had. 'You didn't kill
your--"
He stopped mid-sentence, or rather, was stopped when I leaned
forward and placed my mouth on his. It was not a kiss. I was
not searching for love but for the vibrations left by the
words on his lips. /I will put my words in your mouth./ I
wanted to carry these words, his first words.
But that was not the only reason. The first time I kissed
Vaughn, I would always remember, it was to put my lips against
his and stop a lie.
/You did not kill your father./
I wondered what words he would have left for me if he knew
the truth. But the truth was for another night. That night
we were fragile, both of us. We walked through the house and
spoke aloud, together, every word on our wall. And then I
cried, without shame, and wrote my father's name in the left-hand
corner by the window. In Memoriam. Since neither of us could
sleep, he stayed up to read to me from a paperback copy of
Sonnets From The Portugese that I had bought at the Save-Rite
last month. He would stop, every few lines, as if shocked
at the sound of his voice. It had changed during its silence:
deeper, now, but also threadbare in places, as if almost worn
through. I closed my eyes and hoped the tape recorder in the
sugar bowl was catching this, just in case it should turn
out to be a dream and in the morning I wake to find him silent.
Although this was not what I feared, now. I feared the impending
disasters of truth, the kind of calamities which would surely
befall us now that both of us could speak and had only two
excuses for keeping back our stories. We could plead ignorance
or we could lie.
Ignorance was the obvious choice. I no longer had the stomach
for lies.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
.spaces.between.words.
In those days, I would dream of hospital rooms that smelled
of betadine and screams (although they made me stand in the
hall outside when they disinfected his burns every day, I
could still hear him) and bedpans. I dreamed of the art of
living not by seconds but by the rising and falling of a man's
chest, the pounding of his pulse through his wrist. I did
not trust the machines, only my own fingers placed in the
hollow of his neck, searching out a heartbeat, only my own
hands, flat on his chest, waiting for it to inflate with air.
That night, I dreamed of another snapshot: a manila envelope.
The woman with bandages wrapped around her fingertips over
the raw skin where the nails were pulled back opens the manila
envelope suspecting something between a bullet and an explosion.
Her knees are jutting up against the bed of the burned man,
who is either asleep or awake, she cannot tell. He does not
speak, not even to her. She was left on her own to improvise
the story of his burns. A gasoline accident. Tragic. She used
bad grammar so the nurses would believe that the two of them
were stupid enough for that degree of carelessness.
The contents of the envelope are somehow louder than any
bombs. The woman pulls the photographs into her lap and recognizes
instantly, even through the bruises, the face of her father,
all life crushed, powder fine, blown away. An autopsy report
is included, which details in clinically sadistic glee everything
they did to him before they killed him. Also, an obituary,
clipped quite recently from a newspaper. Surveillance photos
of the funeral; her mother wears a black scarf and no sunglasses
and there is a redness like tears in her eyes. Whether this
is a lie or something true, the pictures does not tell. Accompanying
these silent devestations is a single, handwritten note:
You are absolved. Disappear. I will be watching you.
Sloane.
She folds the envelope neatly and slides it into the drawer
beside the bed, next to the Gideon Bible. She wonders if she
should read a Psalm in memorial, but she knows she doesn't
have the right. She has become her mother; no, she has become
something worse. Her mother took his love but spared his life.
She, on the other hand, took both, at whim. "I never
loved you, she whispers, into the autopsy photo of his swollen
face. She does not believe it and tries again. "I never
loved you, she whispers, resting her head on the mattress
beside the burned man and aligning her fingers with the veins
in his left wrist, hunting down the pulse."
She begins to cry. As it turns out, the burned man is not
asleep after all, because he moves his hand-- sucking in his
breath at the sudden movement-- to cover her eyes, clumsily.
He catches her tears on his fingers, collects them in the
hollow his palm. He is trying to comfort her because he thinks
she is crying for him, out of her love for him. Such is the
extent of her selfishness that she will let him think this,
that she will burn the contents of the envelope-- apart from
the obituary-- to ensure that he never finds out otherwise.
Because she does love him, completely. Without reservation.
It is just that she is not sure what that means.
(It is these sort of lies that I used, without discrimination,
to force us both to survive. When I look back, it was ruthless
of me in a way that my mother never could be ruthless. She
required grand schemes, omnipotent plots, visions of ideal
realities, even if they were only ideal for her organizations.
My treacheries rotated around the search for one man's voice.
I have asked myself which one of us was truly without justification.
)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
.heart.
For the next twenty-six days (I counted them) life began
to rotate back toward something that I could accept as normal.
He did not talk incessantly, which was a relief, but treated
conversation as something to be savored in small quantities.
We spoke of nothing more elaborate than the stickness of the
oatmeal at breakfast-- should we switch to Quaker?-- and the
scandals found in the entertainment section of the newspaper,
and the patterns of metaphor in the Sonnets. We did not put
up the finger paint and the crayons, but merely put them aside,
on the counter by the coffeemaker, until we needed them again.
Sometimes we discussed, very carefully, the meanings of the
words on the wall, why we had chosen them. He learned my favorite
color. I learned that he had played piano when he was five.
We both learned that vanilla lip gloss was the flavor most
suited to a kiss, and consequently, kept a tube in the pocket
of each of our coats.
Other sanities emerged:
He began to take walks; at first he would only venture (alone)
to the bus stop to meet me when I came back from work, but
within a week he had passed the Save-Rite and discovered new
territories beyond our street. Once or twice he even made
it to the diner, where we would share a lunch. He agreed with
me that the hamburgers had the taste of cardboard soaked in
oil, but he complimented Bill on his cooking and tipped him
ten dollars for remembering to omit the pickles. I think this
was just an excuse because he remembered that Bill was the
one who had given me the chili when I was so intent on becoming
ahollow space. This made him an ally.
On the eleventh day, a morning of frost and newspaper forecasts
of snow, I choked on my oatmeal when he told me that he had
been hired by the Save-Rite to sweep floors and, ironically,
stock shelves. Seven dollars an hour, no less. We could almost
afford a television, or even a couch. At first, I didn't believe
him-- by this time I was skeptical of anything but bad news--
but he convinced me that he started that morning. Which was
cause for immediate celebration.
It quickly became a vanilla lip gloss morning.
We began, also, to assume the routines of normal people when
they are in love, which (ignorance, remember?) we still took
as fact about each other, without question. I skimped on my
usual to-work bagel and bought a sweater from the thrift store--
dark blue cashmere, barely worn-- and lingered too long in
the cosmetics aisle of the Save-Rite when he wasn't looking.
He went without sugar in his coffee so I could have an extra
lump in mine. We found a coffee shop two blocks over and decided
that we liked the soft orange walls and the prints of the
Mona Lisa laminated to the tabletops enough to visit twice
a week. In reality it was an excuse to be seen holding hands,
to watch strangers smile at the way his hand hovered at the
small of my back when we walked into a room. Twice a week,
we walked to the Naro, an old movie theater on 24th street
that had been taken over by independent and foreign film,
and bought tickets to the afternoon matinee. We washed dishes
together; I was slightly miffed that he learned the art of
blowing bubbles with his hand after only ten days. We ran
out of lip gloss on a routine basis.
But even in this, there were warnings that the ignorance
was running out and I would have to tell him the truth or
resort to open lies. These warnings followed us into even
the most simple moments, pulling at our ankles like undertow.
I became aware that we were keeping secrets, stashing them
in the cupboards or under the mattresses or in the lining
of our coats. I did not tell him that the dreams were back,
that my father visited every night and even during the day,
beckoning me to walk down strange alleys, although I ignored
him. He did not tell me that even though he slept on a mattress,
now, he still clutched the empty champagne bottle in his hand
to fight off the noises he heard in the hall. If we found
these things out, it was by accident. He could tell when I
woke blaming my watery eyes on a cold; I could tell by the
thin smooth gleam of glass just visible under the edge of
his blanket.
Still, we persisted. Until the twenty-third day, when we
were sitting in stained orange plush seats of the Naro, watching
the end credits of The Million Dollar Hotel roll across the
screen while a man sang about one of the many ways one could
misplace love. Which, later, I would view as an omen that
we should have left immediately, but at the time it seemed
harmless enough. We had not moved from our seats even though
everyone else had left, partly out of reluctance to leave
the warmth for the cold walk home, partly out of the indolence
of the evening.
(It was then that for the first time, we indulged in a conversation
about the future. This was our mistake, you see. As long as
we held ourselves in the present, living from morning to evening
to morning, we were safe. The past could not find us. Now
we were moving out of this bubble, exposing ourselves to the
future and then becoming vulnerable to what we had left behind.)
I mentioned that the plush of the movie seats had inspired
me to start saving money to buy us a couch of our very own,
and then we could move on to even greater extravagances: a
television set, perhaps even with cable. He conjured the idea
of an entirely new apartment-- one with a balcony and a view--
in a new city, where I wouldn't have to wear a waitress uniform
and he wouldn't have to push a broom. He had friends in Portland,
not from the agency but from college, who could find us work
in their art acquisitions firm. Last he'd heard, they were
looking for someone to take over the Asian appraisal market
and with my good looks and his good taste-- he grinned at
this-- we could land the job easily. We'd pretend to be married,
or maybe we could even get married. Vegas was about halfway
between here and Portland...
(Of course, I thought, I should have known that this life
could never be enough for him just like it will never be enough
for me. I should have known that he would want to give me
something more complete, something devoid of french fry grease
and drunk rednecks, because he would feel he owed it to me.
Because he thinks I saved him, and because we say we are in
love.)
I put my coat on and told him that we needed to leave, that
the walk home would be cold enough without waiting until midnight
spinning useless conversations. I was desperate; I did not
fight fair:"Are you too good for this life, are you too
good to remember that up until three weeks ago I was the only
one keeping us alive because you were so conveniently insane?"
He flinched at the last one. This is how I could tell that
I had broken skin, but also that this would not work, this
love that demanded no answers. The truth dangled as an unwritten
half to every sentence we said; if we did not face it, then
it would pull us under. So the next morning, over breakfast,
I told him that he was not going into work that day and neither
was I. He suspected what I had in mind, and tried to avoid
it, but I left him no choice. I brewed a new patch of coffee,
extra strong. I poured it into our favorite mugs and sat down,
and noticed that I was out of breath.
"Do you want to know how my father died?"
(The best way to get used to icy water is to dive in)
He looks down at his coffee cup; his left forefinger begins
to trace circles over the scar on his clavicle. "Not
really. I know enough."
It would have been so easy to stop, then, just to leave it
alone, but I took a sip of coffee (grimaced at the bitterness)
and continued. "They broke every bone in his arms and
legs, in more than one place, but this was not what killed
him. He died from blunt force trauma to the head, when they
made sure that no one would be able to recognize his body,
except by the teeth."
"Sydney, you don't have to--"
"Let me finish, Vaughn."
I bit down on my lower lip and pushed back from the table,
and stood by our graffiti wall, my palm flat over the words.
Rocket. Solomon. Indigo. Remember what they did to him, how
they made you watch it on that monitor, remember the moment
when you would have done anything to make it stop. And so
you did.
"You have no doubt assumed that they caught my father
by surprise, like they caught us. You will have explained
our escape by luck, by my uncanny ability to get us out of
desperate situations. Dixon or Marshall could have helped
us. All of these scenarios would be plausible." I traced
my forefinger down a crack in the wall, picking at the plaster.
"And all of them would be lies."
In the silence of the room, I can almost hear the skin of
his finger scraping across the roughness of his scar, around
and around, not even aware that he is moving.
"They gave me a choice. They told me that for everyone
there was something unthinkable, something that could not
be resisted. I tried not to believe them." "
My finger caught on a sharp edge of the plaster. I put it
in my mouth and tasted blood. I did not let myself stop; I
kept on talking, hearing the words pile up, one after another,
building a wall between us that was worse than his silence.
"I did not believe them until they brought in a television
screen and forced me to watch them burn a man with a blowtorch.
That man was you. And it was unthinkable, you know, so I did
the only thing that could be done. I gave them what they wanted.
What they wanted was my father. Do you understand? He was
not caught. He was sold. In return, they gave me--" I
gestured behind me to the aparment "this life. They gave
me you."
I turned around expecting to see him disgusted with me, angry,
but instead there was something different: a shock, a horror
but not the kind I thought I would find. He walked to the
window, and stared into the street, his hands shaking where
they gripped the wall on either side. When he spoke, it was
strangled.
"That's impossible."
"Like mother, like daughter--"
"No, that's not what I mean. They couldn't have asked
you to betray your father...because..." The long silence
of a frayed thread preparing to snap. "Someone else had
already given them that information."
Now it was my turn for that kidney-punched-with-an-iron-glove
feeling. "What?" I could barely get the word out.
"Who?"
"They broke me, Syd."
He slumped back into the chair, limp, fumbling for his coffee
cup but spilling it. Brown liquid splashed across the table,
to the floor. Drip-drip-drip.
"You would have been so proud of me," He mumbles.
"I did not say a word, not even my name, but then they
said that you were next..." A pause. "I hate fire,
and I couldn't just let them...so I told them where your father
was. So they could do it to him. I didn't care, just as long
as they didn't do it to us. That is why I hated words."
His voice trails off, as if slipping underwater, then surfaces
again.
"Why would they need us to betray him twice? It's impossible."
I watched a fresh drop of blood bubble from the cut on my
finger, suddenly fascinated that it could be that red...that
soft... I was dimly aware that I should be raging, that I
should be furious-- at him, at the men who would not be satisfied
with breaking one of us, that they would use us as weapons
to break the other just because they had that power-- but
that anger was smothered by a heavy numbness. A glacier was
forming inside my chest, slowly squeezing out everything else.
But at the same time, I was hot, too hot to breathe; I turned
on the air conditioning by the window.
I dropped to the floor beside the chair and put my arms around
him because it gave me something to do with my hands, and
also because I was afraid that I would slap him. Part of me,
a horrible part, asked what right *he* had to betray my father.
As if it was my choice and mine alone. I could accept what
I had done, but not that he had cheapened himself in that
way. He was supposed to be above that, better than that.
Of course he was thinking the same thing about me. We could
not forgive each other because we were guilty of the same
crime. We could not love each other when that love was defined
by the man we had betrayed.
"We aren't going to be able to live with this, are we?"
I whispered, into his ear. My left arm rest along his back
and I could feel the scars pushing up through his t-shirt,
hard, unyielding. A useless question.
He said nothing to me. There was nothing left to say, no
word that could fit. I stood up and began to clean up the
spilled coffee before it soured the table; he did not move,
not at first. But then he moved to the counter, and picked
up the crayon box, sorting through the colors. He put on his
overcoat, buttoning one button at a time. He met my eyes twice:
without revulsion, without pity. When he walked out of the
room, he paused at the wall just long enough to write one
word, the letters jagged, uneven.
H E A R T
Even from across the room, the word looked broken. t The
next morning, when he came home and began to pack, I did not
try to stop him. I wrapped a loaf of bread and two oranges
in a plastic bag and tucked them in his duffel bag. On afterthought,
I slid my tube of vanilla lipgloss into the corner. I asked
him if we had considered the other options. We could claim
asylum in silence again, or I could get pregnant and then
we would have to stay together, it would be the only honorable
thing to do.
But he knew, I knew, that they were just words. Without meaning.
Random nonsense, an attempt to fill silence.
(For everyone there is one thing which to you cannot be imagined,
is merely unthinkable.)
This was the genius of what Sloane had done to us.
When the door slammed shut behind him, I knew that he would
not be back. There were things worse than silence, that now
we had discovered all of them, that even if we lied to each
other and said it did not matter, it would not be enough.
I would not run into the street looking for him; I would not
stop him, even if I could.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Someday I will have to tell you the story behind this picture:
A woman standing in the kitchen of a deserted apartment,
standing by the window, standing by the air conditioner even
though it is winter because she wants to feel the air press
her skirt against her legs. She is watching a man in a gray
overcoat enter a taxi cab, not one of those yellow cabs that
pull up to the curb like a pointless smiles, but the more
somber black-on-white variety. "I never loved you,"
she whispers, into the place on the glass where his reflection
would have appeared, if he had been pinned to the right angle
of light. "I never loved you," she whispers, into
emptiness, into space.
(Someday she might even believe this, if she says it just
right. Someday.)
Behind her the wall is covered with random words: rocket,
solomon, indigo, wrinkle, lip. Crevasse. Piano, rain, saffron,
newspaper. Heart. And other such insanities. The meaning of
these words is a secret she will leave in the kitchen, not
entirely out of place amidst the unwashed plates, the cracked
coffee mugs, the pile of children's crayons and finger paints.
She reaches for the coat she bought just last week, a second-hand
Army coat, heavy with its wool and wooden buttons, but leaves
it draped over the windowsill, over the place where he reflection
would appear, if she had anything left to reflect. Her only
reflection, now, is the wall and the lost, beautiful graffiti.
She leaves the room.
Someday, yes, I will have to tell you this story. We will
sit at the hot-pink formica counter of the restaurant where
I wore out three pairs of tennis shoes as a waitress, and
we will order the coffee (strong as ink) and as you ask me
what happened to us all, my fingers will move in distraction
across my napkin. The words they trace will appear to you
as nonsense. After the last memory of the last word, I will
tell you this:
The greatest tragedy of surviving is that we are forced to
live in the aftermath of those who survived with us.
But how could I make you understand this?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
elements:
theme song: Electrical Storm by U2.
(Cover Me Challenge)
- A reference to a tv show
- The Mona Lisa
(Airebella's Evil Angst Challenge)
- Sydney point-of-view Jack dies.
- Vaughn is tortured.
- Someone must say the following line: "I never loved
you"
That should explain some of my madness.
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