by Schow, Ryan
It was sad. Her life was a cold, heavy stone sitting in the bottom of his heart. Maybe she’d been right: he couldn’t understand. To know through conversation is not to know by experience.
Back at her place, a nicer-than-he-expected apartment deep into Las Vegas proper, she offered to make him coffee. He accepted. On the living room couch, she asked about his life, who he was, and he lied. Out of his mouth, out of that shameful piehole he called a mouth came lie after lie after lie.
His father was worth nearly a hundred million. He had called and asked for hotel money for the summer, and his dad gave him thirty grand just like that. For a kid like him to be living in a penthouse suite in Vegas on his daddy’s dime, and a woman like Becky to be working nights around drunken dicks just so she could afford a shitty car and a cramped apartment—he was ashamed of himself.
He wasn’t even an adult. He was a pretender.
More than ever, he felt like a boy around her. Not a man. Not even a decent kid. He felt like a leech, parading around on his father’s accomplishments as if they were his own. What did he do in the world but consume things? And destroy things? He thought of all the damage he did hacking into the security systems of real businesses built by men he couldn’t stand in the same room with, and for what? To prove he was worth something in his father’s eyes? How much value does a man have who creates nothing and destroys everything?
People like Becky must surely despise kids like him. Yeah, the lies came easy. He was here because his father, the shoe salesman at Macy’s making fifty-five grand a year, worked too much and couldn’t spend the summer with him. Brayden said he came to Vegas to work construction with his friend’s dad so he didn’t have to deal with fat old women’s feet like his father did. He told her he’d thought about being a shoe salesman, but that he looked ridiculous in a suit. He said he couldn’t sell butt sex to a sodomist, so what did his father expect him to do about feet and shoes?
And what did Becky have to say to all this? She simply looked at his hands and said, “A little soft for construction, don’t you think?”
“That’s what my friend’s dad said,” he replied, laughing. He curled his fingers in, made the soft pads of his hands inaccessible.
She opened them back up, put his palm on her cheek and nestled into it. “I like how they feel against my skin. When they’re calloused and rough, that’ll be sexy, too. For now, I like these. They remind me you have enough life left to do it better than me. Better than people like me.”
And right then and there, the mood jumped from deeply depressing to real life erotica. Brayden leaned in and kissed her, forgetting she was a mother, a forsaken wife, a bartender being lusted after and abused in so many ways by self-absorbed guys and arrogant girls and bosses that would never appreciate or know her. Instead, she once more became an object of his desire. His feelings for her in that moment were purely carnal. As were hers for him. Their pairing was a natural, illegal thing, not that he minded. Not that she minded, either.
Sometimes you want who you want, and you need who you need. So you do what is necessary, you simply take what’s in front of you and make the best of it.
3
Becky was seriously the hottest most morally unregulated woman he had ever met. The things she could do, the things she’d taught him, it made being with Netty or Aniela feel so ten years ago. The difference between being with a woman like Becky and being with a girl like Netty measured enormous.
Becky was a freak. A super freak. And then he came and suddenly, the shame came roaring in. Becky the mom, the left wife, the single mother. This knowledge of her life poured salt on his brain.
He didn’t see her the same anymore. Not now. The way things look before you do something so bad you know you shouldn’t, they’re all shiny and brilliant and sensual. But afterwards? When the lust melts off and the best parts of you are laying roped out on some stranger’s satin IKEA bed sheets, what you have is extreme self-loathing.
Mind you, it doesn’t happen all at once.
It’s a gradual progression that starts with you wiping up your privates, then covering them fully. The way his dick looked after leaving the wet warmth of Becky, it was not something he wanted to think about.
She was multidimensional now. Not at all singular. One word didn’t describe her. She wasn’t a number or a classification. To him she was an adult, and he was a kid. In words, that doesn’t mean shit, but in real life? The thought nagged at him.
“Thanks jerk,” he said inside his head. He was, of course, talking to his penis. The shameful bit of Brayden with the growing capacity to always do wrong.
Becky was lightly snoring inside of two minutes. He crawled out of bed, careful not to wake her, then called a cab in the kitchen. The last time he left, he gave her a note and snuck out. Not this time.
She deserved better. Better than him. Better than this.
When he was dressed, even though all he wanted to do was get out of there and digest his disgust with himself, he walked quietly into her bedroom, lovingly pulled her hair from her face and leaned in to kiss her on the cheek. She stirred. He kissed her again, on the mouth this time, because last time he was not man enough to even say a proper good-bye. When she opened her eyes, it was only barely. A smile crept onto her face, and it meant the world to him.
“Leaving?” she asked.
“I wanted to say goodbye this time.”
“Mmmmm,” she said, smiling wider, “thank you.”
He knelt beside the bed and showed her tender eyes. “One day your daughter will come around. It’s probably not because she doesn’t love you. It’s just because we’re douchebags at this age. Totally into ourselves, and totally enthralled and enraged by life and the world. We’re part hate, part angst and all bad attitude. It’s just what we do, and we’re really good at it.”
“You’re special, Brayden,” she said, no longer so groggy. “Will you do me a favor, and don’t be a stranger?”
“I promise,” he replied. Whether he meant it or not, the very fact that he said it seemed to mean something to her. He kissed her again, then went outside and waited in the cold for his cab.
Paralayers
1
I am not myself. Inside my body, it’s dark and scary. And it’s crowded. The voices in my head aren’t only in my head. They come from some place deeper inside me. They’re everywhere. A man’s voice, jagged and taunting, he’s telling me the body is his. Another voice, distinctly female, is saying shut up Delta. Shut up. But he doesn’t.
He just laughs and laughs and laughs.
And there’s someone else, too. Someone who’s part of me, not separate like the others. A voice, loving and unfamiliar. She says, “Just stay here, Savannah. Stay here where you’re safe.” I want to tell her my name is Abby, but I don’t. Wherever it is I am, it’s a womblike darkness.
She says, “Up there, I can handle it for a while. Just stay down here.” I couldn’t do that.
I can’t.
My body is mine. My mind is mine. And whoever the f*ck it is in here with me, they can’t just take it. It’s MINE!
So I crawl my way out of the bottomless void, suffering the ruckus of a relentless and malevolent laughter, and some woman’s insistence that Delta go to sleep (whatever that means). Then a voice: the voice I think of as being on my side. She’s saying, “Savannah, it’s not safe. You’re not safe up there.”
And all these voices? Jesus, they’re making me think my mind has become a stocked-full insane asylum.
I crawl and crawl up through the darkness and out of the mire, feeling invisible feet pushing on my head to stay down, to go back to sleep, to just leave the body to me (whomever “me” is).
“No,” I growl.
The lightless void inside my mind has no walls, nothing to give me a sense of any of this being real. It’s all black. Ever expansive. Not an ounce of texture.
Then there is…me.
Finally.
The feeling of a body around me. T
he upwelling of tactile sensation. Emotions. Not any good emotions, though. Fear. And helplessness. And a profound sense of resolve to take back what is mine.
The voices fall silent. My eyes open.
And he’s there.
Here.
Right in front of me. Standing tall—seven feet tall at least?—and looking regal. The doctor who put his finger in my head like it was a bowl of soup and not an impenetrable skull. The thing I watched hovering over my unconscious body when I first got to this place and spent my time…on the ceiling? Is that right? Yes. Dead maybe, but not. I was in a coma.
“That’s right, little one,” he says.
His voice is molten honey. Silky smooth, hypnotic. If I pull the thread on that voice, will I end up in heaven? Or someplace worse? There is something else, though. A sickness in the silk. My skin crawls, spoils under his gaze.
“You were in a coma,” he says. “Not dead. And I did have my finger in your brain. In one way, it’s our way of looking around, finding the problem.”
“And what was my problem?” I hear my mouth say.
I’m no longer in the box. The lid is pulled open, but I’m outside it. I’m naked, curled in a fetal positon on the cold concrete floor at the room’s center. On my side, my hip and shoulder press into the ground. I strain my neck to hold his downward gaze. He is taller than the Empire State Building. The Statue of Liberty if Lady Liberty was a man who was not a man, and not human.
His eyes blink like human eyes. Then they blink again and he speaks.
“You have a latent strain of DNA that is not human and not…all the way us. It is, however, similar enough for me to understand.”
“What are you?” my mouth says.
Already my body is trying to right itself. Torso twisting to get my knees underneath me; hands pushing my chest off the polished concrete floor. On all fours, nude, I await an answer.
Then it occurs to me: have I lost all my modesty in this constantly changing life of mine? God, I hope not. Sitting up, crossing my legs and covering my breasts (because I still don’t want them seen by strangers), all he does is smile.
His expression warms me, but my brain doesn’t register tenderness. It registers threat. What is this awful dichotomy I can’t stop feeling around him?
When he reaches for me, when those long, long fingers zero in on my head, I scuttle backwards on palms and heels. The fear is a knife shooting right through me. My face changes, betrays my terror. His hand in the air turns over, snaps to a fist, and then it pulls me forward. He’s not touching me, yet I feel invisible fingers curl up under my ribcage, using it as a grip to drag me closer toward him. My bare butt is skittering forward, covering the ten feet of concrete floor between us with nothing to explain it.
I slide right up to his feet. My body is wrapped in invisible tethers. The fear becomes something worse, something more terrifying. Like when you were a kid and you really, really believed in monsters because they were in your closet, and under your bed, waiting. Terror became a palpable thing. A force that owned you, and ruined you, because it changed something fundamental in you.
That’s exactly how I feel right now.
Looking at the doctor, his invisible tethers still controlling me, the word that comes to mind is evil. He kneels before me, uncurls those fingers, and puts one of them not in my head, but up into my nostril. He pushes the finger one digit, two, three digits deep in spite of the screams erupting from me.
My body goes numb. Things in my mind begin to shift and coil.
2
I can’t feel anything. Inside, however, I fight to squirm, to get away, to get that fleshy ET-like finger out of my nose, but my body is paralyzed. And I can’t stop looking into his eyes. Now they’re not blinking up and down, like human eyes; they’re blinking side to side, like a snake. The breath falls out of me, unbidden, defeated. I am nothing next to this…creature.
Less than nothing, in fact.
The finger, it continues to push apart walls of flesh, relentlessly stretching the nasal cavity, just push, push, pushing its way up inside me until it penetrates the soft tissue walls. My eyeball bulges; it drips tears. A soft whimpering leaves my mouth, along with the involuntary grunts of pain and soon a steady crying.
“Stop that,” he says. But I can’t.
My nose is being finger-f*cked by an enormous, inhuman stranger. The headache pounds into existence, a dizzying, debilitating crush of pain. With a headache like this, I’m thinking migraines are for pussies, that this is the real deal.
Blood runs from my impaled nostril down the rest of my face, dripping onto the floor. Weakness pervades my body. And then he’s there again, the animal inside me: Delta. He’s tugging on the legs of my soul, clawing up my consciousness, saying things like, “Get outta my way bitch, I got this,” and I’m now swirling in the toilet drain of my own mind. Desperate to hang on, unwilling to relent.
“This is your pituitary gland,” the doctor says, calm as can be.
If I weren’t in so much pain, I would try to focus. But I can’t. Besides, I’m about to lose control of my body to the one called Delta.
“Its function, among other things, is to regulate your hormones. Do you have any idea the role this plays in your life, young lady? How a few specific hormones combined with the extra material in your DNA changes everything? You only need to be permanently activated. Switched on, if you will.”
“No,” is the word that escapes my hateful mouth. Delta is fighting to edge me out, to make me give up the body. But I won’t.
I WON’T!
“This was not the original reason you were brought here, to Dr. Delgado. No, this has proven to be a more interesting turn of events. Interesting to me, that is.”
“Why…is…that?” I say. I feel skewered. My nasal cavity is a pushed apart, raped thing that has my eyeball watering big time. The doctor’s eyes become human. The headache turning inside me like a screaming banshee dims to a muted, isolated pain just below the base of my skull.
My imagination sees Delta trying to take over. Using imaginary, authoritative hands, I jostle him back down, almost like I’m holding him under water waiting for him to die. And this finger in my head? I can’t help wondering where it’s been. If he cleaned it before driving it up inside me. And why is it not hurting anymore? Him putting his finger in me, at first, it made my initial transformation seem tame by comparison, but now? Now it hardly hurts at all.
“I can control your pain,” he says, answering the question I was about to ask.
“Are you in my head?”
“There are many in your head, young lady.”
“Get that gosh damn finger out of me,” I snarl, even though my face is a mess of tears and blood and probably a fair amount of squeezed-out snot.
“Should I activate this otherwise dormant hormone,” he says, as if he hasn’t heard a word I’ve said, “you will be the light that shines the brightest. Almost instantaneously you will feel entirely new abilities coming online. You are already experiencing them to some small degree, yet the full force of the hormones have not been released. Imagine being a god while at the same time being human. You could walk among the living, an immortal, an all-powerful being.”
“If you mean me not being able to die, I already know about that.”
“I mean exactly the opposite. You will be able to live. Your limited understanding of this life is regulated by your human design, but my existence has many of those regulations lifted. You only see a tenth of the life before you, whereas I see all life. Once I activate the hormone, you’ll see all that which you’ve been missing. Pitfalls, however, lie in your lack of guidance. There is no one walking the earth in this time who shares your genetic makeup or your abilities, therefor you’re alone and must tame and then hone these abilities on your own.”
“I’m sure I can handle it,” I say, even though I’m scared and have no idea where I am or what this doctor is that he refers to me as human and blinks his eyes side to side.
“Sounds familiar,” I say, my words splattering a fine mist of blood on his white lab coat.
“This is different from those abilities you’ve been given by the man with many names.”
“Dr. Gerhard?” I ask, the question in my eyes. The pain is all but gone now. Even the base of my skull feels normal.
“Among others, yes.”
“I can’t die, apparently. Doesn’t that already qualify me as godlike? I think so and I’ve handled that just fine.”
With this, he smiles.
“You can die, my dear,” he says. “It is only a matter of the details.”
“So you say.”
“Perhaps I rip off your arms and legs. Then tear off your head and spoon out your guts. With all parts of you separate, one could burn them, incinerate all the many shares of you, and scatter the remains across the globe. Could you then survive, my dear?”
“Probably not.”
“Your life is mine, if I want it. And it’s yours if you want it, as well.”
With his impossible finger still three knuckles deep inside my head, with this claustrophobia I’m feeling starting to wane, I say, “And this is why you’re picking my nose?”
A friendly laugh escapes his perfect mouth, the sound addictive, hypnotic. “I have a connection with you right now that no human will ever have. All I need from you is an answer.”
“Then ask the gosh damn question,” I bark. There is something pissed off and desperate stirring in me. A force dragged into existence by my anger. A dark niggling in my brain. Whatever it is inside me, whatever demon I possess, it wants at the doctor. It wants to tear his throat out.
“Oh,” he says, looking in my eyes and beyond me at the same time. “This is interesting.”
“What?”
