Post by Kyle Shane on Jun 18, 2018 18:25:08 GMT -5
"Dad? I brought you something for your head,"... the little boy says, hesitantly from the foot of the bed. The haze of fever distorts the air. The little kid is twenty years ago, bringing morning-after hair of the dog and BC powder to a drunk's bedside. No, he's now, and he's looking at me with the same worried eyes peering from beneath a mop-like crown. The same scared, hesitant look.
Her lips as close as a lovers to my ears, she leans across my body, whispering in, "that's right, this story is always about connections, isn't it?"
I shut my eyes against the baking heat of my dying brain, falling into stillness, into sleep, into oblivion. I can hear Johnny say, disheartened, "happy Father's day, Kyle..." and when I open my eyes again... and the heat baking in between my ears, turning my brain into the melted slush of a gas station Icee dropped on the sidewalk on a scorching day, melted bits sluicing into minute cracks. As I squint, trying to make sense of the panting heat, I open my eyes and find scorched earth as far as the eye could see. In the distance, through the blowing curtains of dirt, large, tentacled nightmare machines floated back and forth, titanic sentries watching a blasted, endless desert. This is no mere fever dream, can't be, as I'm pelted by dirt and grit from the nonstop assault of the wind. The heat beats down, not inside my head, but clinging, like a palpable, heavy burden, sapping my will.
A rough hand clapped on my shoulder, jovial and playful, and a familiar voice hit my ear. Where once it was roughened by rage and alcohol, my father's voice bellowed out cheerily, "Another day at play under the fields of God, eh boy?" I'm expecting a trick, or an attack, but as he turned, I saw Eric standing there beside me, just as weatherbeaten and sandblasted as I. He had a shovel jauntily cocked up on one shoulder, and if he was going to show any of the usual drunken fury or paranoid indignation, there was no sign. Instead, he led the way down a dune, looking back and expecting his son to follow. Finally, I did, still marvelling at the surreality, and yet the gritty realness of the wavering wasteland.
We make our way to a sort of camp, where and I pick out other figures through the sand. One greets us both with a kiss.
I'm frankly more shocked to see her.
Karen Shane beamed at both of her boys, her chestnut hair wrapped up in a bandanna, her dirty face still radiant and untouched by cancer. She was proud, despite their surroundings. Her boys. "We've got a hit in sector 4, Hiro excavated something."
"I'm sorry, Hiro...?" I stutter despite not willing myself to speak. It's bizarre how natural this feels. Mom hadn't known Hiro Sasuke.
Eric and Karen ignored me, looking somberly at the approaching shade. It whirred silently on monstrous anti-grav lifts. Steel cable tentacles and science-fiction cannons bristled out of it from every angle. Complex machinery. It was like a child's nightmare of a mechanical squid. It was coming this way, and a PA address speaker squawked, and it just blared one word, "DIG," and so the people in the camp, including mom and dad, some of whom may have been taking a break, scrambled for tools.
A gun swiveled towards me as I stood there, dumbfounded by this reality. It's muzzle glowed with a fierce blue light as it readied a killing charge.
"DIG," the alien, distorted squawk came from the machine again, and, not knowing why but adhering to the expectations of the dream, I picked up a fallen spade and walked over to the excavation squares, preparing to do just that.
A spade dug into the earth, and from one square over, Karen beams at me.
"What are we digging for?!" I shouted, expecting one of the floating nightmares to turn back my way, to blast me to pieces with a hundred guns or shred me with tentacles.
"If you want this desert to bloom into something useful, you've got to water it with your heart's blood, they told us in that way they've got," said a sneering, drawling voice to the left, and to my lack of surprise, Hiro was there, his business suit hanging off of him, rolled sleeves getting down to the grit.
"Didn't used to be like this. It used to be, this wasteland was fun, a three-ring circus, a blast to visit every week... now it's drudgery and misery and toil." His voice was bitter, rueful. That he was so far out of his element, out here, among the excavation with me.
"Hiro, what the fuck are you talking about?"
But now Hiro just smiled like the cat who ate the canary, pointed skyward at the machines moving in their tight, back and forth sentry routes, and whispered, "Dig."
"Dig..."
I squirmed, and rotated my head, moaning against the blasts of heat from the exhaust. The desert was heating up. And I can't tell if it was the alien squid monoliths sliding back and forth on antigrav exhaust superheating the air or the fire inside of me. I turn.
And my flushed cheek touches a cool pillow, sweat immediately soaking into the velvet. I was immediately lighting the pillow ablaze with my ambient heat. And I gasp, opening my eyes, and pushing up on an elbow in the soaking bed, finding two observers, standing at clinical attention behind a glass observing window built into a funnyhouse ward. Krista records notes on her pad, pursing her lips as she turns her head, conferring with her colleague, the eldritch black tag. It stands there, luminous eyes shining, but nodding in agreement as Krista mouths a bit of diagnosis. I can't read her lips through the glass.
"So what do you think they're saying?" Array says from her spot where she was stretched over top of me, straddled and clinging.
"Remember the central thesis," she said, pointedly, and nodded, "Everything in your little world is about connection, right? So what do the stag and Krista have in common? What does little Johnny's mental state have to do with you going into your dad's bedroom after his benders? What indeed..."
I can't believe we're having a conversation in an embrace and affectation that would be pillow talk while I'm laying there burning to a cinder and my head in on the verge of exploding in a shower of wet, sticky pumpkin pulp. I gasp for air, rasping out breath. I wipe some sweat off my upper lip, and look at her. She's looking at me, eyes peering over the horizon of one shoulder, vampy and mysterious. "I know what the stag is trying to lead me towards... it wants to push me towards respect..."
She laughs uproariously, rolling over onto her back and writhing in bed, sticking her tongue out, bratty. "Oh, babe, so obvious. You connected entry level metaphors about winning a wrestling match against some idiot named Tyler Scott and the manifestation of what the universe is trying to tell you comes up with it's just about respect?... No... that's not what it's about... I think you need to try again... I think you need to dig deeper..."
"Dig?" I'm asking and she pokes me with one finger in the center of my forehead, pushing me back down, my astral self flying out of my body. "Dig." She affirms.
"DIG." Squawks the mechanical squid monolith, as I look up from my glaring desert excavation. And it's gun pointed at him, bristling with electric light.
Again, and again, until every muscle in my upper body felt pulled and I felt weak from the effort. I was near the point of heat-drained collapse when I struck something hard and unyielding, a solid, unbroken talisman in the earth. I pushed loose sand away, stared in confusion and dug my fingers into the ground, pulling out... a handful of loose teeth.
TEETH?
My neighbors gathered around him, telling me that I'd had done some good work this dig, telling me it was the best find of the excavation even though I really didn't feel that way that I'd done anything special.
From one square over, the young mop top of Johnny smiled genially at me, completely unafraid and not nervous. He pointed to my bounty. "Hey, put 'em under your pillow and you'll have a fortune by morning."
I crawled out of my little self-dug hole, crossing the string over to Johnny. I felt that bedroom, and fevered dalliance in the sweaty sheets was there too, but it was like two intersecting rooms that were separated by a thin membrane of glass. In the here and now, I hugged my son. In return, he handed me a handful of rocks. "I dug them up for you... I dug really, really deep," he said, and then he looked down at his hands, ashamed and embarrassed as he let me examine them, "I dug pretty hard," he admitted. I looked at his hands, and they were broken, mangled, the fingers twisted, bent, and the hands covered in blood. I'm horrified. I never, ever would have wanted my kid to have to -
"You're getting there, aren't you," said Krista, and I'm back in her office. I look around wildly. The headaches and burning are subsided, the feeling of scorching in a hot desert dig are subsided, and everything except the slightly unreal waver of mirage in the air says this is real. Except when I look up at the clock on the wall. "...those hands are supposed to be at 3 and 7."
Krista nonchalantly glances up at the clock, which is a distended oval with the hands lying on the bottom and the numbers sloped to the side. "I been meaning to get that fixed."
"What did you mean, I'm getting there," I demand, standing up, so that I can loom over her. Krista leans back in her armchair surrounded by racks of black antlers. She pushes her glasses up on the bridge of her nose, but looks at me calmly.
"Why did you think that beating Tyler Scott would mean that you gained this respect, this credibility you craved? Did you find it, when you did beat him, what you were looking for?"
I frown at that. Because, well, no. People think that, but no. That because I crow about my accomplishments in a wrestling game, that I'm a tweeting little bird desperate for attention. The common theory behind my even doing the TIIT Betting Pool was I needed to draw attention back to me, which has just enough ring of truth to mean something. But it's not arrogance when I said that I wasn't overly worried about the results, nor was I chasing any one of the winners. I wasn't even chasing a victory over Tyler Scott at Living a Legacy, because I didn't need to prove myself. Men like Tyler and Justin Michaels reacted angrily to what I said and did, called me no more than an arrogant, worried, scared little paper champion. And yet they were the ones that chased me down, tried drawing my attention with cheating opponents in my matches and hitting me from behind. And to what end? Did my stock rise through the roof when I kicked the shit out of a Tyler Scott or a Justin Michaels? No.
Hell, Justin Michaels was so triggered and butthurt by my simply saying I wasn't taking him seriously or the announcers saying that I was a bigger threat to Seromine and his Followers that that kicked off three weeks worth of material from him.
So no, that credibility wasn't, in the final analysis, what I needed at all... because I was proven.
She continues, ignoring my millisecond's mental digression, "When I asked you what the black stag meant to you, I theorized that it was a manifestation of rage. When you looked into yourself, you thought that it symbolized chasing respect, trying for endless search for acceptance and credibility. But that's not true, is it? Because that's not what is the most true constant of your life, is it?"
I palm my forehead. The heat is coming back. "So what is? What are you - what are you all saying?"
"Inevitability."
"Yours is always a question of connection. Of constancy. Of what you have inside you, what you were born with. What you pass on to other people. What you leave behind. The bleak eventuality that you're chasing, is in reality what follows you around wherever you go." Her skin is black, and her therapist's swivel chair is wreathed in a crown, a buttress of antlers.
"I mean, face it, baby-cakes," a black-skinned, luminous eyed Array purrs, as she curls up next to me in bed, tracing her inky finger down a line of my skin, the midnight residue it leaves behind sizzling. "You do the digging yourself. You dig down deep into the guts, breaking down to bedrock time and time again. But that exterior? No drill can pierce through that. You're a stony shore that the waves break on again... and again... and again... and you just go on existing, never caring who smashes to bits... who suffers when they try to get close."
"I broke my hands tryin to dig this up for you," says a black skinned, mop topped little boy, his sad eyes holding a golden little bauble out for inspection for me. His ruined, bloodied hands hold a leather strap and a cheap gold plate. His eyes are downcast, and his supplication of his gift makes it clear he wants me to be impressed at what he found, not mad at what he did. And that's it. In that moment I snap, unable to take the idea that someone I care about hurts themselves, breaks their hands trying to dig deep for me. I can't even help myself, feeling disassociative and outside my body as I grab him by the shoulders, shaking him violently.
"I didn't want this for you! For any of you!"
In my fever, I look back at Johnny, but instead of the little boy who's mother I swore I would do right by, I see a ten year old from a trailer park in the past, his face a mass of bruises. I'm horrified. In that second I know I'm more like my father than ever. But then, mine is always a question of connection, of legacy... isn't it?
The others in their squares turn to me, their eyes wide with shock. They all pause, their spades mid-the action of flinging a trowel of dirt, and they look hurt and wounded, but the eldritch, midnight boy shape's eyes waver in tears as I grab his shoulders, squeeze and shake. I can't help but bark bleakly into his face, the heat from my mouth baking like an oven, "You stupid kid, I never wanted you to hurt yourself trying to dig, that's not your job. It's not any of your jobs. Why did you do that? Why the hell can't you understand?"
A shining, milk-white tear cut down the star field of his face. "I'm sorry," he whimpered, cringing back with his shattered hands, breaking my heart all over again as I recognized the familiar posture of subservient cowardice. "No, I -"
But I turned, and I was in an office again, and I looked on haplessly as blood pooled around my feet, flowing from the chair and the wreath of antlers. "Inevitability." It was all she said.
"I'm sorry..." I say, and the kid breaks, falls through my hands, sinking back into the sand, merging with it. And then I turn again, and I'm kneeling in sweat soaked sheets. But the hand that comes up to touch me isn't the inky black of the stag, and the eyes that look me over, while sardonic and taking none of my self pitying shit, are green. She strokes my cheek. "But it doesn't have to be, desperado. It's not written in stone."
"Isn't it?"
She laughs, a soft, sad lilt. "Some ships may have sailed. Some people may have been pushed on. But you have others. You always have family. And you aren't alone. There are forces in the world that are stronger than the devil you've carried with you, and if you let it, it can help you."
"Oh, what do you know. You're off with the Stray'an pretty boy. Alastair. You don't care."
"If I didn't care, I wouldn't be here. I always care. You just get too into your head to notice." She says, sharply.
"Array, I'm -"
"Stop saying you're fucking sorry. Just BE BETTER." Her words hit me to the core. "Ask yourself, what are you really digging for?"
"They say, if you want the desert to bloom, you have to water it with your heart's blood." Hiro says, from somewhere else. And then it's me that's laying in the pit of an excavation. And there's a circle standing around me. Hiro. Alastair. Johnny. Eric. Chad. Izzy, dead and rotted though she is. Array. Mom. They lift spades up. Izzy's corpse fingers tighten on her shovel, and she brings it down, piercing my chest as I lay in the middle of the square. I'm screaming as I fall into unconsciousness, back into the void. And then all is blackness.
It's sometime later when I sit up, a strangled cry escaping my throat. But the heat has subsided, and despite my laying amid a pool of my own sweat soaked sheets, the fever has broken. I feel myself. No dreams.
I exhale. No dreams.
Johnny knocks on the bedroom door. He's bright and attentive this morning. "I'm so glad you're up, your fever was so high last night and the doctor lady said to keep giving you anti-biotics and juice." He says, as he lays a glass on my bedside table, and some pills. Hovering like a mother hen, my kid places a hand on my forehead.
"Hey, you shouldn't be ministering me, kid, don't you have school?" He snorts, and shakes his head. "It's Sunday, dad. Father's day?" And I groan, realizing I've missed more time.
I hug him. Drawing him in to a tight embrace. Smooshed up against my pec, he looks bemused. I don't care.
"I'm trying to be better," is all I can say, those words loaded with as much meaning as I can feel.
He pulls himself away, smiling with that same patient, I love you dad but you are so weird kind of way that has defined our living situation. But he understands. He gently pounds a fist to my shoulder. And then, he goes fishing in his pocket. "Hey, I got you a Father's day gift..."
He hands me something, and I go from looking suspiciously at him to feeling the weight in my fist. It's an old musket ball. It's rusted and speckled with clay, and age. "I was looking for things in the park with that metal detector..." his eyes met mine purposefully, "I dug down pretty deep to find it."
Hearing the words dug made my blood freeze.
"And you have a visitor, too," he said, waving an arm in the direction of the door. And there I see someone who has just been leaning against the door jamb, smiling as she takes in the family tableau. Array doesn't move to get in on the tenderness, just stands by the door and throws a peace sign. But still, I'm happy to see her.
"You - you did come..." I whisper, and then I'm wondering what of my fever dream was the reality.
"I just stopped by," she said, and she came closer to stand by Johnny, but still keeping some space between us. "I heard from Krista about your headaches and your losing time... I was worried..." she holds a hand up, to stop herself and me. "I know what this looks like, but I'm just here to see that the kid is taking care of you."
So Alastair doesn't know you're here. Alright. Not saying that, I smile, and I reach for her hand. "It's good that you came. I needed you here by my side to fight through the fever."
Array chuckles, and she looks unsure. "I didn't do anything of the sort, pal. Just wanted to stop and give you well wishes."
I have to laugh at that. "So you weren't here in this bed, when you told me to be better."
Array throws her hands up, getting frustrated, "Kyle... don't do this, you have Johnny here, don't make this about our relationship, okay... you're just telling yourself what you want to hear, and that isn't the case. I'm just here as a friend, and I'll be leaving. Happy Father's day, yeah."
"Okay, Array," I smile, laying down against the pillow.
Her heart skipped a beat.
She's lying.
Her lips as close as a lovers to my ears, she leans across my body, whispering in, "that's right, this story is always about connections, isn't it?"
I shut my eyes against the baking heat of my dying brain, falling into stillness, into sleep, into oblivion. I can hear Johnny say, disheartened, "happy Father's day, Kyle..." and when I open my eyes again... and the heat baking in between my ears, turning my brain into the melted slush of a gas station Icee dropped on the sidewalk on a scorching day, melted bits sluicing into minute cracks. As I squint, trying to make sense of the panting heat, I open my eyes and find scorched earth as far as the eye could see. In the distance, through the blowing curtains of dirt, large, tentacled nightmare machines floated back and forth, titanic sentries watching a blasted, endless desert. This is no mere fever dream, can't be, as I'm pelted by dirt and grit from the nonstop assault of the wind. The heat beats down, not inside my head, but clinging, like a palpable, heavy burden, sapping my will.
A rough hand clapped on my shoulder, jovial and playful, and a familiar voice hit my ear. Where once it was roughened by rage and alcohol, my father's voice bellowed out cheerily, "Another day at play under the fields of God, eh boy?" I'm expecting a trick, or an attack, but as he turned, I saw Eric standing there beside me, just as weatherbeaten and sandblasted as I. He had a shovel jauntily cocked up on one shoulder, and if he was going to show any of the usual drunken fury or paranoid indignation, there was no sign. Instead, he led the way down a dune, looking back and expecting his son to follow. Finally, I did, still marvelling at the surreality, and yet the gritty realness of the wavering wasteland.
We make our way to a sort of camp, where and I pick out other figures through the sand. One greets us both with a kiss.
I'm frankly more shocked to see her.
Karen Shane beamed at both of her boys, her chestnut hair wrapped up in a bandanna, her dirty face still radiant and untouched by cancer. She was proud, despite their surroundings. Her boys. "We've got a hit in sector 4, Hiro excavated something."
"I'm sorry, Hiro...?" I stutter despite not willing myself to speak. It's bizarre how natural this feels. Mom hadn't known Hiro Sasuke.
Eric and Karen ignored me, looking somberly at the approaching shade. It whirred silently on monstrous anti-grav lifts. Steel cable tentacles and science-fiction cannons bristled out of it from every angle. Complex machinery. It was like a child's nightmare of a mechanical squid. It was coming this way, and a PA address speaker squawked, and it just blared one word, "DIG," and so the people in the camp, including mom and dad, some of whom may have been taking a break, scrambled for tools.
A gun swiveled towards me as I stood there, dumbfounded by this reality. It's muzzle glowed with a fierce blue light as it readied a killing charge.
"DIG," the alien, distorted squawk came from the machine again, and, not knowing why but adhering to the expectations of the dream, I picked up a fallen spade and walked over to the excavation squares, preparing to do just that.
A spade dug into the earth, and from one square over, Karen beams at me.
"What are we digging for?!" I shouted, expecting one of the floating nightmares to turn back my way, to blast me to pieces with a hundred guns or shred me with tentacles.
"If you want this desert to bloom into something useful, you've got to water it with your heart's blood, they told us in that way they've got," said a sneering, drawling voice to the left, and to my lack of surprise, Hiro was there, his business suit hanging off of him, rolled sleeves getting down to the grit.
"Didn't used to be like this. It used to be, this wasteland was fun, a three-ring circus, a blast to visit every week... now it's drudgery and misery and toil." His voice was bitter, rueful. That he was so far out of his element, out here, among the excavation with me.
"Hiro, what the fuck are you talking about?"
But now Hiro just smiled like the cat who ate the canary, pointed skyward at the machines moving in their tight, back and forth sentry routes, and whispered, "Dig."
"Dig..."
I squirmed, and rotated my head, moaning against the blasts of heat from the exhaust. The desert was heating up. And I can't tell if it was the alien squid monoliths sliding back and forth on antigrav exhaust superheating the air or the fire inside of me. I turn.
And my flushed cheek touches a cool pillow, sweat immediately soaking into the velvet. I was immediately lighting the pillow ablaze with my ambient heat. And I gasp, opening my eyes, and pushing up on an elbow in the soaking bed, finding two observers, standing at clinical attention behind a glass observing window built into a funnyhouse ward. Krista records notes on her pad, pursing her lips as she turns her head, conferring with her colleague, the eldritch black tag. It stands there, luminous eyes shining, but nodding in agreement as Krista mouths a bit of diagnosis. I can't read her lips through the glass.
"So what do you think they're saying?" Array says from her spot where she was stretched over top of me, straddled and clinging.
"Remember the central thesis," she said, pointedly, and nodded, "Everything in your little world is about connection, right? So what do the stag and Krista have in common? What does little Johnny's mental state have to do with you going into your dad's bedroom after his benders? What indeed..."
I can't believe we're having a conversation in an embrace and affectation that would be pillow talk while I'm laying there burning to a cinder and my head in on the verge of exploding in a shower of wet, sticky pumpkin pulp. I gasp for air, rasping out breath. I wipe some sweat off my upper lip, and look at her. She's looking at me, eyes peering over the horizon of one shoulder, vampy and mysterious. "I know what the stag is trying to lead me towards... it wants to push me towards respect..."
She laughs uproariously, rolling over onto her back and writhing in bed, sticking her tongue out, bratty. "Oh, babe, so obvious. You connected entry level metaphors about winning a wrestling match against some idiot named Tyler Scott and the manifestation of what the universe is trying to tell you comes up with it's just about respect?... No... that's not what it's about... I think you need to try again... I think you need to dig deeper..."
"Dig?" I'm asking and she pokes me with one finger in the center of my forehead, pushing me back down, my astral self flying out of my body. "Dig." She affirms.
"DIG." Squawks the mechanical squid monolith, as I look up from my glaring desert excavation. And it's gun pointed at him, bristling with electric light.
Again, and again, until every muscle in my upper body felt pulled and I felt weak from the effort. I was near the point of heat-drained collapse when I struck something hard and unyielding, a solid, unbroken talisman in the earth. I pushed loose sand away, stared in confusion and dug my fingers into the ground, pulling out... a handful of loose teeth.
TEETH?
My neighbors gathered around him, telling me that I'd had done some good work this dig, telling me it was the best find of the excavation even though I really didn't feel that way that I'd done anything special.
From one square over, the young mop top of Johnny smiled genially at me, completely unafraid and not nervous. He pointed to my bounty. "Hey, put 'em under your pillow and you'll have a fortune by morning."
I crawled out of my little self-dug hole, crossing the string over to Johnny. I felt that bedroom, and fevered dalliance in the sweaty sheets was there too, but it was like two intersecting rooms that were separated by a thin membrane of glass. In the here and now, I hugged my son. In return, he handed me a handful of rocks. "I dug them up for you... I dug really, really deep," he said, and then he looked down at his hands, ashamed and embarrassed as he let me examine them, "I dug pretty hard," he admitted. I looked at his hands, and they were broken, mangled, the fingers twisted, bent, and the hands covered in blood. I'm horrified. I never, ever would have wanted my kid to have to -
"You're getting there, aren't you," said Krista, and I'm back in her office. I look around wildly. The headaches and burning are subsided, the feeling of scorching in a hot desert dig are subsided, and everything except the slightly unreal waver of mirage in the air says this is real. Except when I look up at the clock on the wall. "...those hands are supposed to be at 3 and 7."
Krista nonchalantly glances up at the clock, which is a distended oval with the hands lying on the bottom and the numbers sloped to the side. "I been meaning to get that fixed."
"What did you mean, I'm getting there," I demand, standing up, so that I can loom over her. Krista leans back in her armchair surrounded by racks of black antlers. She pushes her glasses up on the bridge of her nose, but looks at me calmly.
"Why did you think that beating Tyler Scott would mean that you gained this respect, this credibility you craved? Did you find it, when you did beat him, what you were looking for?"
I frown at that. Because, well, no. People think that, but no. That because I crow about my accomplishments in a wrestling game, that I'm a tweeting little bird desperate for attention. The common theory behind my even doing the TIIT Betting Pool was I needed to draw attention back to me, which has just enough ring of truth to mean something. But it's not arrogance when I said that I wasn't overly worried about the results, nor was I chasing any one of the winners. I wasn't even chasing a victory over Tyler Scott at Living a Legacy, because I didn't need to prove myself. Men like Tyler and Justin Michaels reacted angrily to what I said and did, called me no more than an arrogant, worried, scared little paper champion. And yet they were the ones that chased me down, tried drawing my attention with cheating opponents in my matches and hitting me from behind. And to what end? Did my stock rise through the roof when I kicked the shit out of a Tyler Scott or a Justin Michaels? No.
Hell, Justin Michaels was so triggered and butthurt by my simply saying I wasn't taking him seriously or the announcers saying that I was a bigger threat to Seromine and his Followers that that kicked off three weeks worth of material from him.
So no, that credibility wasn't, in the final analysis, what I needed at all... because I was proven.
She continues, ignoring my millisecond's mental digression, "When I asked you what the black stag meant to you, I theorized that it was a manifestation of rage. When you looked into yourself, you thought that it symbolized chasing respect, trying for endless search for acceptance and credibility. But that's not true, is it? Because that's not what is the most true constant of your life, is it?"
I palm my forehead. The heat is coming back. "So what is? What are you - what are you all saying?"
"Inevitability."
"Yours is always a question of connection. Of constancy. Of what you have inside you, what you were born with. What you pass on to other people. What you leave behind. The bleak eventuality that you're chasing, is in reality what follows you around wherever you go." Her skin is black, and her therapist's swivel chair is wreathed in a crown, a buttress of antlers.
"I mean, face it, baby-cakes," a black-skinned, luminous eyed Array purrs, as she curls up next to me in bed, tracing her inky finger down a line of my skin, the midnight residue it leaves behind sizzling. "You do the digging yourself. You dig down deep into the guts, breaking down to bedrock time and time again. But that exterior? No drill can pierce through that. You're a stony shore that the waves break on again... and again... and again... and you just go on existing, never caring who smashes to bits... who suffers when they try to get close."
"I broke my hands tryin to dig this up for you," says a black skinned, mop topped little boy, his sad eyes holding a golden little bauble out for inspection for me. His ruined, bloodied hands hold a leather strap and a cheap gold plate. His eyes are downcast, and his supplication of his gift makes it clear he wants me to be impressed at what he found, not mad at what he did. And that's it. In that moment I snap, unable to take the idea that someone I care about hurts themselves, breaks their hands trying to dig deep for me. I can't even help myself, feeling disassociative and outside my body as I grab him by the shoulders, shaking him violently.
"I didn't want this for you! For any of you!"
In my fever, I look back at Johnny, but instead of the little boy who's mother I swore I would do right by, I see a ten year old from a trailer park in the past, his face a mass of bruises. I'm horrified. In that second I know I'm more like my father than ever. But then, mine is always a question of connection, of legacy... isn't it?
The others in their squares turn to me, their eyes wide with shock. They all pause, their spades mid-the action of flinging a trowel of dirt, and they look hurt and wounded, but the eldritch, midnight boy shape's eyes waver in tears as I grab his shoulders, squeeze and shake. I can't help but bark bleakly into his face, the heat from my mouth baking like an oven, "You stupid kid, I never wanted you to hurt yourself trying to dig, that's not your job. It's not any of your jobs. Why did you do that? Why the hell can't you understand?"
A shining, milk-white tear cut down the star field of his face. "I'm sorry," he whimpered, cringing back with his shattered hands, breaking my heart all over again as I recognized the familiar posture of subservient cowardice. "No, I -"
But I turned, and I was in an office again, and I looked on haplessly as blood pooled around my feet, flowing from the chair and the wreath of antlers. "Inevitability." It was all she said.
"I'm sorry..." I say, and the kid breaks, falls through my hands, sinking back into the sand, merging with it. And then I turn again, and I'm kneeling in sweat soaked sheets. But the hand that comes up to touch me isn't the inky black of the stag, and the eyes that look me over, while sardonic and taking none of my self pitying shit, are green. She strokes my cheek. "But it doesn't have to be, desperado. It's not written in stone."
"Isn't it?"
She laughs, a soft, sad lilt. "Some ships may have sailed. Some people may have been pushed on. But you have others. You always have family. And you aren't alone. There are forces in the world that are stronger than the devil you've carried with you, and if you let it, it can help you."
"Oh, what do you know. You're off with the Stray'an pretty boy. Alastair. You don't care."
"If I didn't care, I wouldn't be here. I always care. You just get too into your head to notice." She says, sharply.
"Array, I'm -"
"Stop saying you're fucking sorry. Just BE BETTER." Her words hit me to the core. "Ask yourself, what are you really digging for?"
"They say, if you want the desert to bloom, you have to water it with your heart's blood." Hiro says, from somewhere else. And then it's me that's laying in the pit of an excavation. And there's a circle standing around me. Hiro. Alastair. Johnny. Eric. Chad. Izzy, dead and rotted though she is. Array. Mom. They lift spades up. Izzy's corpse fingers tighten on her shovel, and she brings it down, piercing my chest as I lay in the middle of the square. I'm screaming as I fall into unconsciousness, back into the void. And then all is blackness.
It's sometime later when I sit up, a strangled cry escaping my throat. But the heat has subsided, and despite my laying amid a pool of my own sweat soaked sheets, the fever has broken. I feel myself. No dreams.
I exhale. No dreams.
Johnny knocks on the bedroom door. He's bright and attentive this morning. "I'm so glad you're up, your fever was so high last night and the doctor lady said to keep giving you anti-biotics and juice." He says, as he lays a glass on my bedside table, and some pills. Hovering like a mother hen, my kid places a hand on my forehead.
"Hey, you shouldn't be ministering me, kid, don't you have school?" He snorts, and shakes his head. "It's Sunday, dad. Father's day?" And I groan, realizing I've missed more time.
I hug him. Drawing him in to a tight embrace. Smooshed up against my pec, he looks bemused. I don't care.
"I'm trying to be better," is all I can say, those words loaded with as much meaning as I can feel.
He pulls himself away, smiling with that same patient, I love you dad but you are so weird kind of way that has defined our living situation. But he understands. He gently pounds a fist to my shoulder. And then, he goes fishing in his pocket. "Hey, I got you a Father's day gift..."
He hands me something, and I go from looking suspiciously at him to feeling the weight in my fist. It's an old musket ball. It's rusted and speckled with clay, and age. "I was looking for things in the park with that metal detector..." his eyes met mine purposefully, "I dug down pretty deep to find it."
Hearing the words dug made my blood freeze.
"And you have a visitor, too," he said, waving an arm in the direction of the door. And there I see someone who has just been leaning against the door jamb, smiling as she takes in the family tableau. Array doesn't move to get in on the tenderness, just stands by the door and throws a peace sign. But still, I'm happy to see her.
"You - you did come..." I whisper, and then I'm wondering what of my fever dream was the reality.
"I just stopped by," she said, and she came closer to stand by Johnny, but still keeping some space between us. "I heard from Krista about your headaches and your losing time... I was worried..." she holds a hand up, to stop herself and me. "I know what this looks like, but I'm just here to see that the kid is taking care of you."
So Alastair doesn't know you're here. Alright. Not saying that, I smile, and I reach for her hand. "It's good that you came. I needed you here by my side to fight through the fever."
Array chuckles, and she looks unsure. "I didn't do anything of the sort, pal. Just wanted to stop and give you well wishes."
I have to laugh at that. "So you weren't here in this bed, when you told me to be better."
Array throws her hands up, getting frustrated, "Kyle... don't do this, you have Johnny here, don't make this about our relationship, okay... you're just telling yourself what you want to hear, and that isn't the case. I'm just here as a friend, and I'll be leaving. Happy Father's day, yeah."
"Okay, Array," I smile, laying down against the pillow.
Her heart skipped a beat.
She's lying.
