This is a story i wrote in early december of 2007. It's pretty much word-for-word of a dream i had about this boy that i wasn't in love with anymore.
The Boy had a terminal illness and we all knew that it was the day that he was going to die, but some people weren't allowed to be told. I t would cause too much unrest. There were 270 of us in all at the funeral party -- I guess you could call it a preemptive wake. The room was dark and concrete, the basement to some oversized New York apartment building looming up above. It had many rooms; it was a fitting place to say farewell, reminiscent of the catacombs of old.
The band began to play in the center of the room and the people thronged around them like ants. It was not a dirge -- the music was downright poppy -- and we found ourselves offended, crawling of into a corner of the room while the abomination occurred. It was the Boy's deathday, and they were playing a for spectacle, a show.
But then the pattern of the music broke, spilling across the basement in so many echoes like marbles come tumbling out of their sack. The drummer had broken down into sobs, and simply couldn't go on. At the sight of this I believe reality struck the Man, for he began to wail into the microphone like no human creature before, loud racking sobs accompanied by piercing shrieks and the most empty howls, like winds sweeping across a dark plane. The room grew silent as I left. I had to find him.
The basement had many strange rooms that I had become quite lost in before, but perhaps it understood the gravity of the situation. The foundations parted like a magician's curtain and I found myself in his room, paralyzed by the sleeping figure I saw curled up beneath the green paisley sheets of a bed much too large for him. I thought he was dead, and the room spun. The smoky tiles lining the fireplace became a blur, a miasma resembling a fortune teller's fire and the bare branches arranged so artfully in a vase the color of a robin's egg atop the mantelpiece a creature like Loki, 1,000 Lokis leering and grimacing and waving their mischievous arms at me, simultaneously calling Odin, gallows-god, to come for my boy.
The tear that plashed onto the exposed skin of my collarbone brought me back. It was a grim and probable fantasy, but I had to check, to be sure that my lover was dead before invoking such treachery with my thoughts. Odin arrives even unwelcome, and Loki never leaves. I could not prepare any sort of place for them here.
The Boy was curled around a stuffed bear, breathing shallowly. His kitten was nowhere to be found, probably scared off by the aura of death that hung about the room although the Boy was, upon my inspection, absolutely not dead yet -- his cheeks were dusted pink and a small shine of spittle graced his lower lip. Moving closer, I could still hear his breath.
The time was close, but it had not yet come, so I kissed him instead on his forehead as I left the room.
Outside the funeral party raged and roared once more, the dancers becoming frenzied as the time drew nearer to midnight and the slated day come closer to its end. I could see it in all of their eyes -- the half-hope that it was a lie, a false prophecy from an angry god, and that the slated act would not occur. This hope fueled the dancers' passion, and the band did not stop. Lo, it was a sight to be seen. Guests had come dressed in the Boy's honor, some as zombies and their awful brides, others as manga girls and boys, androgyny almost entirely contained except for the tiny skirts the girls were wearing -- without underwear. A few even deigned to arrive as those animals that he had dreamed about in his younger youth, dragons and giant lunar cats and confectioned butterflies. It was a maudlin affair; everyone was drunk and they were all dancing, but nobody was happy. Occasionally a blue spark would shoot out from the direction of the band -- tears had gotten into the microphone, into the amplifier, onto all of our faces. The equipment sizzled as our hearts did.
It was 11:57 and my eyes jerked down to my watch. I knew it was time, it was over, something was wrong, but the house was not admitting me. I felt things, horrible things, I knew their presence like I had known his, long ago, when he used to try to surprise me on the hallways. I had to get to that room, to bargain or to mourn, to save him or say goodbye. It was no use. The clock struck midnight and the revelers went mad. The crowd scattered, the band dropped their instruments, and no noise could be heard but for the scrambling of feet and the scream of the microphone, feeding back a grief greater than any put into it by the Man. Everything was wrong, I knew it. They were searching for a live Boy, it was past midnight, they thought that he was saved, they were all saved, and could leave this place now, carrying him atop their shoulders like a king but still LEAVING, still escaping the place that stank of death.
It was 12:51 when I finally made it to his room to discover a small girl, dressed in white, keening by the side of his bed. She looked up at me with china blue eyes rimmed dark and deep by sadness. Her mouth was drawn into the tiniest pink knot of misery. I knew who she was.
"Anima, you did well. Although... although the soul is gone the body..."
I choked on my words. I saw the Boy. He looked more beautiful than I had ever seen him before, skin white as ice and as even in tone, eyelashes spilling out onto it like December's willow branches grazing a frozen lake of truly unplumbable depths. The body did remain, but the soul had vanished. Slowly the ice was becoming bluer as reality set in and the winter in all of our hearts deepened.
I looked over at Anima. "Can you...?"
"Mrrowr."
"Oh." In her grief Anima had, like the Boy, retained her human form, but she had lost her will to be fully human. Her powers of speech had vanished just as she had the last time I visited him. I remembered my duties. I closed his eyes for the final time, sealing them each with my lips.
We both wailed, and as we cried to a moon invisible up through the greatness of our concrete vessel, a low moan accompanied us. It was the bear, and groans continued to escape her like pups, one after the other slipping out into this world as much of a curiosity as the fresh spawn of a unicorn, and as holy. She could not be living unless --
"You... you were successful." I gaped at the kitten, now feline once more. "Wonderful cat," I said. "If Bast were still alive herself to receive you, upon your death you would have the greatest funeral known to the animal world. He.. you... He shall return."
"Mrrr," she said.
No comments:
Post a Comment