“Where are we? What is this place?” Yvonne breathed as Wright led them to a long, spiralling flight of polished stone stairs, leading down...down...down into the dark metropolis.
“Oh, I do apologise.” Wright smiled back at them. “How rude of me. Dio? Yvonne? Welcome to Palatine Hill.”
V – Dissonance
~ Kayla ~
23/11/2023
My favourite memory of Naithe – maybe the one memory of him that I’ll never completely let go of – is from this one night, just after Christmas, a couple of years before The Crisis.
Once upon a week of lost, love-soaked sweetness, we’d shut ourselves up and away from the world. We were living on leftovers and scraps from Christmas dinner with his parents, and we’d made this pact – because we hadn’t known each other for all that long, then – that we were going to pretend that the world had ended, and we were the only ones left. Just us, locked away from the dead, empty world outside of his apartment.
I think what I remember best of all is the smell. The air was heavy with the blending, competing scents of stale tobacco smoke, peppermint throat lozenges, pomegranate lip gloss, and this horrible, budget brand, bought-in-bulk air freshener from Costco. That was back when Naithe was still trying to find some way to dispose of the evidence of my pack-a-day smoking habit.
When it comes to all things olfactory, almost any smell you can imagine can eventually become your ‘default’: your point of reference for interpreting any and all other scents. If you’ve ever been to a dairy farm for more than an hour or two, you’ll totally get what I’m talking about. It’s just a matter of time. So, after the first couple of days of our little lock-in – if one of us opened a window or the front door – the smell of fresh, clean air seemed somehow disconcertingly foreign.
It’s funny how that works; how the normal becomes the odd, and the odd starts to become a new species of normal. Things that seem so totally noticeable to begin with...they start to blend into the minutiae of the day to day, and become just as unremarkable as any other unremarkable thing could possibly be. Provided, of course, they have a little bit of time and a lot of misdirection to work with. And we had misdirection. We had plenty.
Mostly, it was that we were both trying to think about anything other than the fact that I had to go back to Melbourne a few days later. We just pushed aside anything and everything that was likely to distract us from one another. But there was also the sex that we’d completely failed to have. That was a focus, too. Neither of us had been deliberately avoiding it, I don’t think. We were just completely wrapped up in whispers in ears...lips on skin...the sound of each other’s laughter, and the light in one another’s eyes.
I remember that it was mid-evening, and we were watching something mindless. I was in nothing but my underwear and one of his old, oversized T-shirts. I just remember looking at him...looking straight into his eyes, and telling him – for no particular reason other than that I felt it – that he was it for me...the one and the only...and that no one could ever measure up to the strange, beautiful, perfectly imperfect Human being I’d come, so quickly and unquestioningly, to love with everything that I had in me.
At the time, I couldn’t help but wonder what the fuck I was even doing. Emotional openness was a skill-set I had barely scraped the surface of. Trust and honesty were foreign languages to me. And as far as succumbing to co-dependency? I’d never been ‘that girl’; I’d always been the girl who laughed at the idea of ‘love’ and said something about neurochemistry and biological imperatives.
Which was true. It was and is about that. Merely that.
But ‘merely’ is a deceptive word. Nothing has ever been ‘merely’ what it is. Not in the cumulative history of the world, or the Galaxy, or the Universe.
But that’s moving away from the point. Sort of. Not really, I guess...but it is getting a little ahead of things.
What I meant, was...that the girl who met a hot guy and came over all ‘Disney’? That was a girl I’d never wanted to be. Never would be. In fact, historically, I was far closer to being the girl who tried to get off with that girl’s boyfriend...just for the drama of it all. And I was and would forever be who I’d always been, and I didn’t doubt that for a second. But there was, all of a sudden, an open door...and, apparently, a willingness to explore what lay beyond it. To explore something totally new to me. With him. And to revise the rigid blueprint that I’d constructed for the future as I saw it stretching out in front of me.
He’d said that his life without me would be like the alphabet without vowels. He’d said that the entire world had been shades of grey until I came along and flooded it with vibrant technicolour. He’d said a lot of things, that night...that on any other night, with any other guy, I would have treated as clichéd overstatement and pants-getting-into-oriented bullshit. But, that night, my sardonic rejoinders and critical, misanthropic diatribes had been nowhere to be found.
We made love that night. Yeah, I know. ‘Made love’. It was the first situation in which I’d used that term – whether in my mind or in the world – without it being coated in multiple layers of mockery and sarcasm. This is, simply, because it was also the first time that I’d really understood why people used the term – why they bothered to differentiate it – in the first place.
It was clumsy and brief, and not very...well...good, when I really considered it. But then, I’d always qualified sex as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ based on where it ranked on a dual scale of creativity and deviance. That’s what had always ‘gotten it done’ for me, so to speak. And, in the majority of situations...that was a reality that was never going to really change, for me. When it came to sex, my tastes always seemed to err towards the borderline of conventional acceptability. At best. And I was completely comfortable with it being that way, the vast majority of the time. But that night...the feelings behind it all: clambering breathlessly to a transcendent crescendo of mutuality beyond anything I’d ever known, were...illuminating. Powerful. It had floored me.
§§§
Before I met Naithe, I hadn’t really had anyone who I was close to. At all. In any way, that is, that any normal person would define the word: ‘close’. Of course, it’d been so familiar that it had seemed...natural. Human beings are adaptable, after all. They learn to work with what they have, and, in the absence of other intimacy, I’d always had me. For a long time, that felt like plenty. With my parents gone – and having been gone for a long time – I had no family that I was aware of...and I’m sure that – at some point – this reality had probably been hard for me. But it wasn’t something I remembered, so it wasn’t really something I could have dwelt on, even if I’d wanted to. Which left me, like I said, with me. And as I’m sure anyone who spends too much time with just themselves can back me up on, there were many occasions when it felt like I was more than enough company.
This isn’t to say that I didn’t have people. There had always been people. Just not...‘emotional intimates’. Back in Melbourne, I’d had this diffuse, semi-indifferent web of casual acquaintances and work contacts that I was on fairly good terms with. They were people who I’d spend time with when there wasn’t a good reason not to...or whose company I’d sometimes seek out when I didn’t feel like they’d get the wrong idea about it. Not that they didn’t; but I’d always been extremely good at enforcing distance. As euphemistic – as cold – as that sounds...it was, I believed, a necessity. Self-preservation and all.
I can admit that there are some other ways of interpreting the person that I used to be. In place of ‘self-preservation’, you could’ve, if you’d wanted to, called it was ‘misanthropy’ without being entirely wrong. Or – like one lovely and not at all self-righteous guidance counsellor had, on a note to the Carers I was with at the time, described it: solipsism. Well, she didn’t actually use the word: ‘solipsism’... what she said, was that she’d observed: “a series of attempts to retain plausible deniability on the subject of whether or not other people exist on th
e same level that she does”.
The thing is...while I was, generally, quite alone...I’d never really felt, or even thought of myself as being...‘lonely’. What might have been loneliness had always felt more like...safety. Control. And safety and control were things I desperately, obsessively required. When I kept people at a distance – or, yeah, sometimes ran them off entirely – it was for my safety, and...in a way...theirs, too.
§§§
“Can we like...leave?” I whispered to Naithe as we sat at the head table at the reception. He discreetly raised an eyebrow at me. “What?”
“Soon, Kay. There’re still speeches to come.” I leaned in close, my lips approaching his ear.
“Okay...whatever you like.” I pushed my hand onto his thigh under the table, sliding it down the outer, and then back up the inner side of the familiar curvature. “But the sooner we get out of here...the sooner you get to see the obscenely expensive things I’ve got on under this dress. And the sooner you get to peel them off of me with your tee – ”
“ – Hi, happy couple!” My hand snapped away from Naithe’s lap and I sat up in my chair: jolting, bolt-upright, into place like a rat-trap being sprung. I glanced at Naithe...smirking at his now beet-red cheeks.
“Aunt Meg. Eli.” Naithe smiled. Meg beamed. She looked incredible. She always looked incredible. It was, honestly, kind of ‘her thing’. But, on that night, the ‘Meg effect’ was especially pronounced. Pretty and blonde; tanned and all-American...I was momentarily surprised that I wasn’t jealous of just how great she looked. I’d never really been that sort of girl, either...but if I had been? Yeah. I would’ve turned green.
Meg and I had liked each other the second we met. I think – purely on personality – that would have always been the case. But beyond that, we had more than a little bit in common. For one thing, I worked in journalism, while she worked in Public Relations. PR wasn’t a sibling profession, so much as journalism’s ‘evil twin’ – at least as far as most of the people I’d worked with were concerned – but it did give us some extra things to talk about, on occasion.
“Hi Rodriguezes,” I beamed.
“I think Rodrigui is the correct plural, there.” Naithe said mock-authoritatively, nodding to himself. Meg smiled and I laughed.
“Technically,” She countered: “It’s Rodriguez-Arden. Bit of a mouthful, but I just couldn’t let the last name go entirely.”
“We just left well enough alone,” Naithe smiled, reaching for and squeezing my hand. “As she kept telling me: ‘Donohue’ is a much better journalist name than ‘Arden’.”
“Whatever floats your boat,” Meg shrugged. Beside her, Eli looked pale and a bit confused.
“You okay, Eli?” Naithe asked.
“Hmm?” He sniffled.
“Yeah, he seems to be patient zero for the latest round of flu. So I hope you lovebirds have had your vaccinations: it seems like it’s going to be pretty nasty this year.”
“Of course.” I nodded. “We go together. I like watching them stick him with the needle,” I made a jabbing motion, throwing him an evil little smirk.
“She does.” Naithe confirmed. “Last year she asked the doctor if she could do it.” Meg chuckled.
“You’re both freaks.”
“Takes one to know one, right Aunt Meg?” Naithe grinned.
“Moi?” Meg raised a mortified hand to her chest. “That’s no way to speak to your aunty, you little punk...” She reached out, ruffling his hair affectionately. Eli covered his mouth and coughed. It sounded like an 18-wheeler grinding to a sudden halt.
“Aww...poor Uncle Eli.” I smiled apologetically.
“No ‘Uncle’ talk, lady. How’m I meant to deal with having a niece who’s older than me?” This was true. And it was a little weird, also. Meg rolled her eyes, enveloped by an aura of mostly-smug-but-a-little-embarrassed speechlessness. At thirty-three – even taking into account how young she looked for her age – Meg was noticeably older than Eli, weighing in at a comparatively childlike twenty one years of age. But hey...Meg knew what she liked, and Eli knew how lucky he was that she liked what she did. It seemed to work.
“Blame your cradle-snatching wife.” I commented. Meg poked her tongue out at me. Eli just laughed. Well...he didn’t just laugh. We all looked on with nervous concern as his eyes squeezed reflexively shut and his hands clutched at his belly, laughter morphing into a strangled, tormented struggle for breath. “What kind of flu did you say he had? Spanish flu? In nineteen-fucking-eighteen?” I raised an eyebrow. Meg threw me a look that said, simply: ‘don’t...scare...him’.
“We’re really glad you soldiered through, though.” Naithe assured them. He meant it...but at the same time, I knew he’d be doing the exact same maths that I was: working out how many of our guests would, hit with a particularly bad case of influenza, come under the ‘high-risk’ heading. “This wouldn’t have felt right without you both here.”
“S’ok.” Meg’s lips were tightly pursed in a tense, pink little grimace. She was clearly worried. “We wouldn’t have missed it for anything. We love you guys.”
“We love you both, too.” Naithe looked so happy. It made me feel warm inside.
§§§
The way that I’d always thought about it; the way that – to me – it seemed to work...was that, when wounds healed – psychological wounds just the same as literal ones – they generally healed unevenly. The ruptured flesh never perfectly knitted back together...and they always left a trace, however minute that trace may have been.
Larger wounds left larger evidence: Winding scars. Thick, sinuous contusions. Marks that faded with time, but were still, generally, at least somewhat evident in a person’s behaviour and the reactions they had. They could complicate or compromise a person...but in small ways, mostly. In – from the outside – barely noticeable ways.
As it was for everyone, there’d been some bits and pieces of my life where things had happened that had left these...‘marks’. My personal, private collection of scars and contusions; abscesses and holes...dotted the topography of my psychological landscape. Again: Just like they did for everyone. Some people had many, many more than me. Most people, so far as I could tell, had quite a few less.
And, like I said: there were signs. Signs that showed, to whatever degree, on the outside.
For example – without meaning to, and from an early age – I’d gravitated towards words and concepts like: holes; rifts; branded skin; hollow objects; train derailments; and structurally unstable buildings. There were many more, but they all centred on the same foundations: they were all things that were empty; broken; scarred; compromised; or in the midst of their own annihilation. I brought them up as allusion and metaphor constantly, without even really realising the extent to which I was doing it. They were always just...the first things that came to mind as comparisons or for contrast. This was due, I assumed, to a basic level of symmetry that I instinctively grabbed for between them and myself.
In my experience, this wasn’t all that unusual, either. These were – and are – all fairly common subconscious preoccupations for a good proportion of people who’d lived through something – or some things, as the case may have been – that had changed them. Because, ultimately, they were ways of relating. One finds, that is, things outside of oneself with aspects which mirror what one tries to avoid, or which resemble what one seeks to better understand, on the inside. It’s just...a more narrow, recognisable version of how everyday people create meaning in the world around them, every...single...day.
But I’d also been through some other things. Worse things. And these had created different kinds of damage.
When a trauma was profound enough, it seemed to me: when it tore too deeply and too extensively, the associated wounds could take a very long time to heal. Much longer than if the wounds had been small, shallow, or superficial. It was also possible, however, that they never really would heal.
When this happened, the scar tissue simply...r
emained raw, no matter how much time passed. Bloody and ragged...swollen and seething...you lived with it as best as you could. But you were never quite the same as you had been: because the trauma – in its way and over time – ceased to be a thing that had happened to you. It became, instead, a part of you.
There were parts of me like that. Parts that I tried to protect others from, and tried to protect myself from...in terms of the damage that they could cause if they were uncovered. So I learned to...‘cordon off’ these parts of who I was. These raw, ever-bleeding edges of me that were too sensitive to allow other people access to, and too grotesque to explore myself.
The potential complications, when it came to these kinds of damage...were immense. With something benign...something like a preference for certain words or concepts, I could have – if I’d wanted to – just trained myself to stop using them. I could have made a list of anything morbid, say, and just...monitored myself; meting out rewards and punishments for compliance. As long as I had the self-control for it, and a fairly adequate ability to concentrate and criticise myself, it would’ve been a reasonably simple thing to do. I mean...I haven’t and I won’t, because it’s not really that important or noticeable...but the point is: I could.
For more significant damage, though, the markers aren’t benign, but malignant. You can’t negotiate with...or ‘train out’ malignant behaviour. Not really. The key difference is that benign markers are passive...and thus you can become aware of them, more-or-less, as they manifest. In the moment they occur, that is...or immediately after. You interact with them as loose variables which, though they impact on, or reflect aspects of you, they are...quite clearly...not you.
Abyss (Songs of Megiddo) Page 7
