- XXVII -

* * * * *
         They're hitting him.
         In his dreams they keep hitting him.
         Just the same way they always are, he never gets any rest. No respite. He keeps trying to get his fortune told by the man with the trenchcoat hat and that's when they burst in. All confetti arms and whipsmart hands, and they hammer at him. Hammer at him until he screams. Screams and the whole world disappears. Leaving just him. Him and you. You and him.
         The world rotates on its pivotal axis, clouds sliding past like cotton candy writ large, a skywriter's nightmare. He's walking but not going anywhere, hands in his pockets, the world is turning beneath his feet, a treadmill of meadows and deserts. It all revolves around him. That's what they used to tell him, the giant faces in the sky, with oxygen eyes and carbon monoxide lips, pores in their skin like holes in the ozone. The rays beat down, the world is against him, peeling his skin, stripping him down to the pale. It's a way of showing its affection. It's a way of showing its animosity. Because that's the world. That's the way the world is. It hates him and it loves him.
         Beautiful women moonwalk past him, teeth shining like neatly arranged strings of pearls, with their limp seaweed hair, with muscles like bagels sewn under their skin. He can smell the fruity ripeness of their bodies. And yet he can't reach out to them. His arms aren't long enough to touch them. And he wants to. And they won't even slap him away, even that faint brush would be enough. It'd be something.
         The sun smiles in the sky, masking its invisible heat.
         The women mock him with their envious distance. The men meld with their girls and the four legged entities scramble off for the scrolling horizon, pulling up grass as they go. It's how they hit him. Right in the belt where he lives. Stars dance in his eyes, ballet for the simple minded. If he could fix them he would. Fix them right. Fix them and the smiling world. Smiles through his pain. Goddamn pain. It's a liar. The whole goddamn world lies to him, through berry stained claws, offering him drinks of white washed liquor, to make his head spin and body crave. Because it hates him. Because it can't beat him on his own terms and so it has to cheat.
         If he could get his hands on them, force his hands all over their sandpaper skin, the tension and the pressure exploding like nerve clusters in his spine, he'd be satisfied. Ecstatic. Caught in the glamour of his own tide. He'd spill his thick nectar all over them, and they could drink of each other. Soda. Iced tea. Just like when he was a kid. When he was still tender and the world hadn't introduced itself to him, a baggy man in a tattered overcoat, elegant in overlong coattails and a tophat pulled down over its eyes. He remembers that day. It all went to pans. Clanging in the kitchen, keening mating calls screeching cries. Couldn't even hear his own voice raised in anger. Can't hear the trees in the forest. If you blink you miss it all.
         His mother, weeping in the courtyard while the rocks simmer and catch fire.
         The voice. Telling him that he'll never be anything. That nothing will be the only object he ever clutches to his breast. Milk like liquid oozes from his slashed hand. Repetition is in the air.
         Women of the world putting on their slave makeup and marching into bondage. Rubbing his face in the ground. From a distance. A phone keeps ringing, telling itself the same joke over and over. He walks the world, and it walks with him. Ocean salt cakes on his sneakers, splashing his face. He'd like to show them, he'd like to reach out to them. But the light in their eyes is caged behind bars that he can't penetrate, plastic walls for polymer friendships. Grasping hands only finding congealed dust, decoys running in place for days. As if he didn't know. As if he couldn't tell. Running down the stairs is no way to play fair.
         Dim the day. Dim the light. The only way they'll ever get close to him. Pump shade into their veins, strain out the brightness until there's nothing left to see. And then you can touch them. But it's all fakery. There's no melting. No merging. You're just humping dry brick walls hoping for a thrill and only getting the feedback of your own sick reflection. Do it enough and you turn around to find that you've only managed to fashion your own cage.
         Stone walls do not a prison make.
         Shadows rising in half light.
         Nor iron bars a cage.
         Loopback voices wailing over the soundtrack of a detuned orchestra.
         But what about the mind?
         Flesh circuits smile like pretty diamonds, malice present in every stare.
         What about the mind?
         Running but not going anywhere.
         They told you it wouldn't open.
         He has to get out of here.
         And it didn't.
         But he's locked in. With the greycoil inmates.
         I'm not going to kill you.
         And the revolving door keeps hitting him in the face. Bruises burrow like maggots. He wishes that God had made a fairer world.
         But I'm afraid this is going to hurt very much.
         But God hates him too. And God has a face. It's a face he's seen before.
         A face he knows.
         "You don't understand. You're better off in dreams. I can't hurt you there. Not the way I'd like to."
         OhmyGodhesgoingto-
         If Carl could wake up screaming, he would.
         But all he can do is simply wake up.
         His jaw aches again, like he was trying to scream. He's not sure what time it is, how many hours have passed since he last woke up. They keep the shades drawn so that he's always in darkness, nobody even wears a watch. Temporal deprivation. The opposite of sensory deprivation, that he has all he can stomach. He's sure that his blood is a soup of painkillers, and yet there's a mobile tingling rummaging through his body. Like his entire body is one ghost limb.
         Carl can barely even see the room around him, can't even really move his head, so he's always staring at the same bland speck on the wall. Sometimes he thinks he sees a dot there. Sometimes it starts to move. But he's not sure. He tries to occupy his mind by pondering it and then realizes what he's doing. And stops. But then he's bored again.
         It's too quiet. There isn't even the soft rustle of footsteps to add an understated backing to his opera of paralysis. Nothing but the room. The room and the bed. The bed and the room and his thoughts. Nothing to do but think.
         But Carl doesn't want to think. Because then he thinks about the night. And how it's gone. He knows where he is, and how he got there. Just the memory makes it hard to breathe, death in the shape of a giant gorilla sitting on his chest. Peering right into his eyes, daring him to lift the weight.
         Fear.
         Followed by a flash and then pain.
         Propelled motion, the arc of birds, tracing out the limits of gravity. Views tumbling end over end.
         And the impact, bone jarring and brutal.
         Dueling voices, whispers taunting screams, mingling sighs and slashed shouts.
         After it all, a single voice. Levelly recasting the mold of his past, throwing him into the bloody jaws of his future.
         He can still picture the face. The face behind the voice.
         Carl's not dreaming now, but he wishes he was. Because at least he can wake up from that. Even sleep isn't any relief, it used to be that Carl could look for a night composed of oblivion, hours of nothingness bracketed by his active days. Now dreams spearhead invasions into his paradise, reprising the days, his life compressed into silent five second bursts, replayed to an audience of one over and over again. And he can't move to shut the projector off, can't even knock it off the goddamn table.
         There's something wet caking around his eyes, salty weights dotting his cheek. He blinks and the world goes crystalline, like he's fitted prisms over his pupils. Rainbows dazzle his peripheral vision. Real life is pushing needles into his dreams and the dreams are fighting back, poking holes into his life.
         Fog floats in and out of his head, casting shadows over the parts of his brain that he needs. Figures drift in and out and he's not sure if he's seeing the real world or the dream one. Some people used to claim that they were the same thing. Carl's not so sure anymore either. He keeps hearing voices. Not long ago someone oozed into his room, slime coating his ears, and told him horrible things, threatened to perform chilling acts of vengeance on him. Simply because he didn't like Carl. What is he supposed to think about that? He never really thought about dying before now and laying here in the hospital, unable to even talk to people or move or do anything other than oscillate between sleeping and not sleeping. The same side of opposing coins. Carl feels like an art exhibit, people just file past him, cluck their tongues like they're admiring the audacity of someone brash enough to make such a bold statement. Then they take blood and talk to him in garbled words that seem to come from far away. Carl's the ultimate representation of modern man, he stands for something without really knowing what he's standing for. People just draw their own conclusions and that makes it all okay. His point of view doesn't matter at all. The side effects of silent performance art. You don't matter at all, in the end. The world marches on.
         In this stagnant time, Carl wonders why he hasn't gone crazy. He doesn't think it'd be all that unusual given what he's been through. But do crazy people ever believe they're crazy. It's endless. What did people call Catch-22 before the word existed? Circular arguments? You run the risk of falling so deeply into your own head that wherever you turn you get the same view. A blue wall of nothing. Carl doesn't want to end up like that, drooling his words and rolling his eyes while they attach the electrodes to his head in the hopes that maybe the tenth time will do the trick. But perhaps he's on medicine to help him avoid that, he's not sure what the hell they're giving him, most of the time he can't even keep his head together long enough to pain attention. Just the gnatsting of an IV sliding in, parting his vessels and delivering its compounded cargo into his body. Laughing children running amok in their anarchic paradise. Then his thoughts become phrases bound by loose glue, rickety cars being driven down pothole filled gravel roads, leaving pieces like droppings behind them as they go. By the time it reaches his conscious head, there's nothing more by a skeletal frame and a bent steering wheel. At least you know where it's going. You just don't remember what it looked like.
         They haven't told him anything. Carl isn't sure what he means by they. The folks who run his world. He hasn't seen any of them yet, just phased out phantoms flitting in and out of his awareness. The only solid thing was the voice promising terrible and faceless revenge on him and that promise weighs like a physical cloud over his head. He thinks he knows who it was but the voices and the face don't go together. Carl was expecting that motion of attack from someone else, a different face with a voice torn from the beginning of time itself. But maybe that person feels he's done enough. It's not something he'll dispute, Carl never expected to wind up here, stretched out like a retired mannequin, more medicine than person. It's not a stay he's looking forward, but at least Carl knows he will get out some day. Soon. His injuries will heal and life will get back to normal again.
         All he has to be is patient.
         And frankly, Carl prides himself on his patience. It's gotten him this far in life and so far, he really can't say he has any complaints. A blip on the radar here and there is nothing to get upset about. It passes. Life passes and you move on to something else. That's just the way the world has to work. Or else you might as well let it trample all over you.
         "Oh, Carl, Carl, Carl . . ."
         A whisper in the air vent is calling his name. It caresses his ear but for some reason he doesn't get tense. The medicine again, making him a plush doll, all smiles and no muscles.
         ". . . Carl, Carl, Carl . . ."
         But no, it really does sound like his name. Is he dreaming again? Carl doesn't remember falling asleep but then, who does?
         A flicker of movement at the edge of his alerts him.
         Dome shaped, it seems to be rising.
         The meager light catches unruly strands of hair atop a conservative haircut.
         His beatific smile starts to fade. Like dew evaporating.
         Hooded eyes float into view, awash in the sea of a sardonic face.
         Carl feels his heart start to pound.
         A man in a blue sweatjacket, hands hanging loosely in the jacket pockets, is rising from somewhere beyond the end of his bed. There's a small light behind him, the one that Carl find himself staring at for no reason sometimes, the one that he thinks they shine into his face deliberately. And it's haloing the man's head.
         It's a face he knows.
         ". . . my friend, we have just got to talk . . ."
         Tristian.
         Oh God. He can't breathe.
         He can't breathe.
         The man is grinning sharply, teeth marshmallows in the fractured light. He's not casting any shadow, there should be something falling onto Carl's face, a dark half person, stretched and without distinct dimensions. But there's nobody there. Just the two of them.
         And he can't breathe.
         This has to be a dream. Things like this don't happen in real life. People don't appear out of nowhere and rise from the floor. They don't stand there grinning at you, giving you the sensation that they're rustling through the filing cabinets in your head, finding all the incriminating stuff, sorting it into piles for their own skewed agenda. It's not real. It just can't be real.
         "Now, Carl, my boy," the man is saying, his voice the sound of shredded wood hitting a newly waxed floor, "it seems to me that you've had quite the night. Haven't you now?" Carl's heart is seizing in his chest, trying to escape. Last time he saw a face with eyes like this, the world rushed forward to try and split him open. When the man raises a hand, Carl almost breaks his jaw attempting to scream. "But wait, don't answer," the man admonishes, "because I think a record like yours speaks for itself."
         He slips his hands out of his pockets and clasps them neatly behind his back. The almost idiotic grin has barely wavered. But it's just a feint. Even stupid silly human Carl can see that. It's all calculated.
         "And, I've been doing some . . . thinking. You did a bad, bad thing, Carl, I think we're all in agreement on that one. And you deserve to be punished for that . . . the problem is," and he raises an eyebrow, as if noticing Carl's condition for the first time, "everyone has their own idea. Tristian thought stopping you was enough. My brother thought the memory of physical pain was enough. The good Commander thought that the threat of future retribution would be enough."
         He leans back, pressing himself against the wall, almost melting into it. Shadows drape themselves like curtains over the top part of his face. In the neardark, his eyes are different.
         They seem to be glowing faintly.
         Oh God. He has to be dreaming. But that doesn't seem to mean a damn thing here.
         "Between you and me I think they're all missing the point."
         Pushing himself off from the wall, he starts to pace back and forth in front of Carl's bed. Too scared to even move his eyes, Carl just fixes his vision on the same boring spot and hopes that this will all fade away. It feels so warm in here all of a sudden, he's breaking out into a sweat. Something is dripping into his eyes and he can't even move to wipe it away.
         Carl just tries to lie as still as possible.
         The man bobs out of view.
         "Really you aren't getting any punishment . . . your injuries, they're only temporary and frankly, they could happen to anyone. The guy down the hall is worse than you and he got hit by a car . . ."
         A sound of scuffling feet.
         ". . . is that fair, I ask you . . ."
         Bobs back into view again, head intently bowed, like he's following a small scampering animal.
         ". . . threats, injury, it's all irrelevant. Everyone forgets, injuries go away . . . and the whole time she's going to have to still deal with it . . ."
         And out of view.
         ". . . while you just move on. So you have a few nightmares, a scar here, a limp there . . ."
         Like a toy ship he floats past Carl again. He's hoping that the man will forget about him, maybe just pace himself right back outside. Perhaps he's only in love with the sound of his own voice. Carl is backtracking in his mind, trying to rationalize all of this, trying to have it all make sense. But it's not.
         ". . . Tristian would say let the law handle it . . . letting us step in was only because he lost his head for a second, he's a standup guy like that . . ."
         Receding and then he's gone again.
         ". . . but honestly, she barely remembers anything, our beating the hell out of you, as fun as that might have been, gives you a damn good alibi and the few witnesses could be easily discredited . . . you'd be off in just a bit with a decent lawyer . . ."
         A satellite skimming the ground, buzzing his bed, coming around again. Carl wishes he could stop paying attention but the words are flintlock cannons pointed right at his head, muted smoke and fire, a pounding he doesn't dare ignore.
         ". . . and you know what, that doesn't sit all that well with me . . . I know what happened and I got to see this planet form, which something to see I should have you know and probably a sight everyone should experience at least once . . . law doesn't apply to me, I'm no human that I'm forcing my own limited view into a complicated issue, I can see all the strings . . ."
         He comes back again, stopping and clicking his heels together as he does so. The sound is the echo of roulette, empty chambers giving you one more second. Carl's running out of chances. He's scared, God he's so scared, he wants to start screaming again but the thing might just silent him right there and then.
         But it's just staring at him.
         "So with all that settled," and he appears frighteningly serious all of a sudden, Carl can't even describe his expression it's too pure, like the man has thrown all pretenses away because they no longer amuse him, he has no more use for them, "the only question that remains is when I'm going to do it."
         The chill in his voice is the sound of a world bereft of heat or air, formless wind moving endless void. Carl hopes to God he just didn't wet himself.
         "Now, don't be afraid, I'm not going to kill you, I figured if Tristian and my brother and the good Commander couldn't do it, I might as well follow in their footsteps . . ." his smile is both sad and exultant at the same time, a man using his power for once to get exactly what he wants, ". . . but I'm sorry, Carl, I can't bear the thought of you and her walking around out there, call it whatever you want . . ."
         And Carl's not sure what he's talking about, his words are strung out with pity, but he's not sure for who.
         ". . . but this is really the only fair thing I could think of."
         Slowly, he raises one hand into the air. His thumb is posed lightly against his middle finger, the forefinger curled just slightly. Carl suddenly feels his heart stilling and the world grinding down, like it's the only important feature of his entire sick life.
         "I'm sure when you wake up in twenty years, you'll look back on all of this and laugh."
         No.
         Finger and thumb slide past each other, and the snap is the thread of eternity breaking.
         No!
         Carl feels his head go light and then heavy, the man is receding from him, or Carl is travelling down a tunnel, faster and faster, he tries to hold on but he can't, hands are grabbing him and pulling him down. Farther down than he's ever gone. Farther down than he can bear to stay.
         No, come back!
         In the pinprick light at the end of the tunnel, he sees the man turn away, slipping out of view.
         His head touches soft crystal feathers.
         Vision blacks out.
         A slow motion dissolution of a house of cards, in black and white silence.
         It can't end like this.
         Can't even keep his thoughts together.
         Can't even keep
         Can't even
         Can't
         No.
         No. No. No.
         NONONONONONONONONONONO-