Abyss (Songs of Megiddo)

by Klieve, Daniel

  Malignant behaviours, on the other hand, don’t manifest as ticks or patterns, but as varying levels of psychotic behaviour. Once they take hold, any real distinction between the edges of you – where you end – and the corresponding edges of the behaviours – where they begin – are basically immaterial. By definition, that is to say...psychosis is invisible to the psychotic mind.

  Most malignant markers – for me and for most – manifested as responses to ‘triggers’. Encountering these was simply the result of running across something, out in the world, that meaningfully echoed or called to mind an aspect of the trauma that had caused the wound. Usually, for me, there’d be some kind of near-immediate regression or relapse. I often wouldn’t even realise what had happened, precisely...my mood would simply darken, and my thoughts would start to get a bit jumbled and erratic. I usually worked it out and worked through it. But, sometimes, a trigger would create a dissonance or a dislocation that I could neither consciously detect, nor handle. When that happened...at least looking back from a later, saner point...it was almost like damaged computer experiencing a system failure. A vast, sudden overreaction...to being assaulted with sudden insight into just how deeply you’d been marked.

  So, in response to triggers – if the response got out of hand and began to exceed the base-level emotional aspect – psychotic symptoms would emerge: auditory hallucination; more rarely, visual. Disordered, disrupted, and delusional thoughts and impulses. Extreme paranoia. Extreme and fluctuating emotions. Uncontrollable anger. Other...‘things’.

  While many other disorders encompassed these same aspects, massive trauma that caused lasting damage didn’t really seem to be constrained by any particular parameters. Psychosis, after all, was a term that, in a technical sense...really only indicated the lack of a more specific diagnosis.

  The worst of it was, you’d never know what might trigger you, precisely...or how you might react to it when it did. As for allergies...there was an entire spectrum of possible response-severity, and you really never knew just how bad a given response would be until you found yourself having it...or reflected back on fragments of memory and the testimony of those who dealt with you, after the fact. You could guess, in advance...and, if you were willing to look inside without averting your eyes – as difficult as it may have been to do so – you’d probably have been right more often than not. But there was always the possibility that your estimation would slip over something small that would end up triggering something big. And that would be when the panic began.

  §§§

  “So. Kayla...” Meg bit her lip. I raised my eyebrows. I knew the general contours of what was on its way. The only time Meg made that particular face was when she wanted a favour. If not a big favour, then certainly an involved one.

  “Uh-oh. Here it comes...” I chuckled, leaning back in my chair and folding my arms over my chest.

  “Don’t be like that,” She whined. There was a touch of adolescence to that whine, playful though it was. I felt a momentary surge of social claustrophobia, and couldn’t help but congratulate myself on my heterosexuality. I loved all of the Arden women to bits – those I’d actually met, that is – but thinking about what it would be like actually being with someone like Meg? I shivered. Maybe it was sexist, but it was also the sum of my life experience: boys were easy. Malleable. Girls – at least the kinds of girls I assumed I’d have been attracted to if I’d been attracted to girls – weren’t. “Girls like us have to stick together.”

  “Woot. Girl power.” I deadpanned. Meg scowled a mildly unimpressed little scowl before continuing; pretending my hilarious rejoinder hadn’t happened.

  Everyone’s a critic.

  “Look. Right now, I need some info. Like...need, Kayla. Can we talk?”

  “We’re talking now, Meg.” I reminded her: all fake innocence, topped with my most infuriatingly passive smile. To be fair, she could have been worse. The immediate example that sprang to mind was her sister: Naithe’s mother and my new mother-in-law. Now there was a woman – you’ll notice that I now use the term ‘woman’; something that she definitely was, but that I had significant trouble seeing myself, or Meg, as – who had elevated passive aggression to a nuanced species of artistic expression. And, as with any consummate specialist, the aptitude and finesse with which she plied her trade demanded admiration.

  And I did admire it, honestly. Compared to her...Meg was a bush-league manipulator. I had also, of course, met plenty of other women – and men; after all, these sorts of skills are far more significantly correlatable with intelligence than with gender – who were far more frighteningly adept than Meg at leveraging weakness to get their way.

  I suppose, as well...that I’d be lying through my teeth if I claimed that I didn’t have a finely honed set of my own skills in this area.

  With Meg, the difference was that – generally, to an external observer – it was hardly noticeable. You had to know her to know what she was doing, and the better you knew her, the more obvious it became. By the same token, though, the better you knew her, the less inclined you were to push back against it. She wasn’t the kind of friend or – I imagined – significant other, that you’d really want to say ‘no’ to. Not because you’d pay for it if you did, but because she had a way of making you want to see her happy. Of making you willing to expend a decent amount of effort in order to make that happen.

  That was how, when you had Megan Arden – now Megan Rodriguez-Arden, apparently – in your life, you’d find yourself happily devoting hours and hours of what should have been your free time to the attempt to widen that pretty smile of hers, just a little bit more: only to, at some point in the middle of it all, have this moment of sober clarity where you realised that you’d...well... you’d ‘been had’. Part of me admired it. But, as I said, a bigger part of me couldn’t help but breath a sigh of relief that I wasn’t in Eli’s shoes. It was probably part of the reason she liked young guys so much: too young to realise that there were better things to do with their lives than being the Head Priest of the Cult of Meg.

  Fairly sure he’s getting enough out of it to make it worth his while, though.

  No doubt.

  And, I guess...every relationship has some elements to it that mirror that dynamic. The see-saw never quite sits horizontal: it’s always up on one side and down on the other, even if the weighting shifts from time to time. Some people swear by submission to an equal, or however you want to phrase it. Some people take it a step further, and seem to actually want an unequal dynamic: either on the one side or the other. I, personally, can’t fathom either – at least...I can’t fathom either if I’m meant to be on the bottom – but then, loss of control seems like insanity to me...so I’m hardly an objective commentator.

  “Just meet me outside after the first speech, okay?” She pleaded.

  God. That pout.

  It was disturbingly easy to forget that I was a good seven years younger than her. Her whole strategy was premised on her ability to make a person feel as if they were dealing with a teenager in need.

  “Of course.” I nodded. “I love that dress, by the way.” I commented, making an illustrative, up-and-down gesture with my hand. She looked a little confused.

  “I’m the Maid of Honour.”

  “Mmhmm.” I nodded. Her eyes narrowed.

  “You picked it.”

  “Mm-hmm.” I nodded again. Realisation slowly began to cast light over the shadowed horizon. She smirked.

  “I love it too, Kayla...you have such great taste.” She cooed with syrupy, exaggerated sweetness. “You’re the best.” I tilted my head towards Naithe.

  “So this one keeps saying.”

  §§§

  It goes like this:

  The fight or flight reflex activates deep in the subconscious mind as a response to the initial trigger...desperately trying to reposition your focus away from the torn and bloody – the desiccated and desecrated – remnants of those parts of you that were once whole. So whil
e the trigger pushes you to focus on these parts...your mind, defensively, pushes back.

  The pressure builds to intolerable levels more rapidly than you might think. Sometimes it runs out of steam. Often, in fact...but that’s nothing to rely on. Sometimes, coping mechanisms can defuse you. Sometimes not. Sometimes you don’t have time to pull yourself together. Sometimes you don’t even realise it’s coming. It can come on fast, and the symptoms may hit you before your awareness that something’s wrong does. And as soon as the symptoms hit? Game over.

  This is because the tenuous house-of-cards that is your psychological coherence, simply...collapses: a loud, messy ‘hard reset’ of your system in slow motion.

  And here’s the kicker: if you can’t defuse it; if you don’t know how or don’t have time...then – whether or not you have any awareness of what begins to overtake you – you won’t care. One possibility is that you’ll be a puddle of incoherent mulch – babbling; laughing; crying; screaming; lashing out – which is, of course, one of the more common results of a psychotic break. Alternately, you’ll be able to convince yourself that you’re acting rationally...which means that you’re delusional.

  Assuming you’re still standing when the dust clears...generally the chaos subsides and normality returns. Now comes the unavoidable, intolerable aftermath...where you piece together the parts that you couldn’t remember and begin to account for the damage done. And...y’know...there’s always damage. Even if it takes awhile to find. Even if it’s just on the inside.

  To avoid the collapse...vigilance is key. Vigilance, and the assumption that – sooner or later – the inevitable will happen. So you strategise how you’ll react if...and you plan for how you’ll respond if...

  And then you wait.

  You wait like a soldier at a watch-post in enemy territory and you just never stop waiting. Because you have to. Because you can’t not. Because once...a long time ago...someone – or something – did something to you. It left you...different. Fundamentally. On a good day, you think they broke something inside of you, or took something away from you. Not necessarily something that you needed, but...something that contributed to the greater whole; something that made you...you.

  On a bad day? Well...it’s more like they left something behind.

  And so you wait.

  I’ve found that other people who spend their lives dealing with situations reminiscent of mine, typically try to insulate themselves from exposure to things that might trigger them. Just like I do. They cordon off those places in their mind as best as they can, and avoid letting people too close. To the uninitiated, it can seem like almost anything other than what it is. Self-involvement; emotional coldness; apathy; laziness; closed-mindedness; introversion; extroversion, too. Almost anything other than what it is: Self-preservation.

  Some achieve a balance. Some lose themselves completely. Inevitably...eventually...we all toe that line between control and chaos. We do so, either because we convince ourselves that we’re ‘better’: that we’re ‘healed’...or because we find someone – or something – that seems to be, approximately, worth the risk.

  Or, for some of us...we do it because of something inside of us begins to wake up.

  For the adventurous among us, there are other...‘options’. Some seek, for example... to ‘cauterise’ the wound through over-exposing themselves to triggers.

  To be completely blunt about it...I’ve never had the stomach for that. Or, from another perspective...I’ve never been that incredibly fucking stupid.

  But then...I would say that.

  Everyone’s experience of the aftermath of trauma is different. The unifying commonality is the scale of the wound: the degree of the damage done; the significance of that damage. Beyond that...various stratifications of shared experience draw us together...but...ultimately, keep us fundamentally apart. A long time ago...perhaps a year after my parents died...I started to have these...‘encounters’, is a word I’ve heard used to describe them. And it seems to fit. They led, initially and since, to a fairly strong suspicion – nascent, originally; understood only on the most basic possible level – about which ‘cohort’ of trauma survivors I, most likely, belonged to.

  It came, as a rule, at night. It still does.

  Sometimes...lying in the dark, I’d feel – like a slow, creeping, fever-like feeling engulfing me – a building awareness that I wasn’t...quite...alone. I’d be there...under the covers. Just me. It’s hard to describe, but...it’d be as if there was some other person in my mind. A complete and coherent parallel structure of consciousness, co-habiting me. In beginning to succumb to sleep, it was almost as if the wall between myself and that Other began to lose its integrity...allowing inter-drift. Overlap.

  The progression was always the same. The more awake I became, the less I could feel it; the less I could recall how it felt to feel it. But...in those moments where I was stuck there – in the space between waking and sleeping – I had this sense...of intent. And...just for a moment...the thought would occur to me that...if I went to sleep, and just...never woke up...if someone else woke up instead, and I just...stopped: then, perhaps, that would be...better. Perhaps that’s what I wanted.

  But it wasn’t and isn’t, and the sense that I’d just thought some other self’s thought; a thought that was thought on my behalf by a self other than me – but from within me – jolted me awake. As quickly as it came, the feelings and thoughts were gone again...but while I felt them, they’d been solid. They’d been definite. And they had solidly...definitely...come from within, rather than without.

  In the hazy back-end of mind...I was always aware, at that point, of the single question...this time definitely a question of my own making: what if I just gave in? What would happen, then? But I never let myself dwell on it. How could I?

  When I said that – for some of us – something inside begins to ‘wake up’, this was the feeling I was referring to. I’ve heard others describe it, too. Hearing it always sends shivers down my spine: a perfect replication of what I feel...even down to the unexplainability of it; the vagueness of the specific feelings being alluded to; the indescribable horror of it, and the accompanying inability to accept, on any genuine level, that something so macabre has actually been invented by one’s own mind. And, of course, there was always the deep, desperate desire to rationalise it away. But I’d never been able to do that. Because I’d never really been able to summon up the courage to try.

  For fairly obvious reasons, I had no desire to explore it further; whether to investigate why it happened, or to try to prevent it from happening. Whatever it was in me that made me feel that way at night...it was a part of me that I didn’t want to have anything to do with. The continuing problem was, that while I knew myself well enough to know where not to dig; to leave the holes alone and the dark places down in them hidden from the light...other people might not have been so...intuitively cautious. How could I trust another Human Being to know where not to dig? To understand – on an instinctive level – the dangers of doing so?

  VI – Intake

  ~ Dio ~

  23/11/2023

  Wright ushered Dio and Yvonne into the Bureau. The building – an imposing granite dome ringed with incandescent foliage – made Dio nervous.

  Like most of Palatine, it reminded him – more than any other thing – of a photo negative of something familiar. The memory of those hulking grotesqueries: those distant, sprawling testaments to the perverse architectural ingenuity, and unhinged, obverted fetishism of their creators...were, yes, definitively locked away in the repository of things mad and monstrous, situated in the very deepest corner of Dio’s shadowy back-mind. But most of what he saw struck him as the direct and uncomplicated execration of the known and familiar. It was as if the colours of Palatine Hill were inverted; as if he and Yvonne – ushered downward by their ‘Virgil-apparent’, Wright – had stumbled into a parallel world: the opposite – diametrically – of their own. A place where the very spectrum of visible
colour had been tipped on its head, and committed to the dark night of day.

  Once inside, though, the Bureau was very much what one might have expected of a building bearing its name. Very much...or less than. It reminded Dio more of a free clinic, than anything else; starched and cut-rate; tacky and generic. There was an eerie sensation of familiarity, also: A kind of pantomime-normalcy that prodded and poked at Dio’s sanity with the experimental curiosity of a malign psychiatrist.

  There was a reception desk with a friendly – if tense and overworked – receptionist. There was a waiting area complete with faded linoleum floors and plastic, plasto-fabric-padded chairs. There was a small television set, suspended in one extreme corner of the room, playing out some desperate, post-midday-programming telesales riff featuring, apparently...literally the only set of knives you’d ever need. Guaranteed, of course. Except where specified in the fine print.

  Dio caught Yvonne’s eyes, expecting to see a reflection of his own disbelief at the absurdity of it all. What he saw was a heightened state of awareness: the sharp, slightly mad eyes of the mouse that had seen this break in the maze before. The mouse that knew – sooner rather than later – there’d be two buzzers. If they got the right buzzer, then that was fine. That wasn’t the one she was worried about. She was worried about the other buzzer. The buzzer that carried the current; the buzzer that delivered the shock. The traumatised acuity in her expression was suggestive of too much experience with that second kind of buzzer.

  Concerned though he was, Dio couldn’t help but find Yvonne’s vulnerability endearing. It was, after all, an extremely rare thing for her to display. Covertly reaching for her hand as Wright leaned casually over the reception desk and conversed inaudibly with the receptionist – elbow down and a flirtatious smirk on his face – Dio squeezed reassuringly. Yvonne shot him a look, like: ‘thanks...but really Dio...what’re you gonna do?’