So, Why Won't The Ghosts Go Away?
Oct 8, 2018 3:46:04 GMT -5
The Anarchist and Gerard Angelo like this
Post by Kyle Shane on Oct 8, 2018 3:46:04 GMT -5
He wasn't sure how long he'd sat there, feeling empty.
It was, for sure, after he'd come back home at six in the morning after last Trauma. Had hopped a plane, took a red-eye home to sleep in his own bed, and had gone to the vendor by the Jamaica Park entrance before walking up to his high rise, a carrier of two cups of coffee and a bag of bagels in hand. As his grin had split wide, he'd opened the door, ready for the kid to greet him as he was getting ready for school.
Only to find a dark, empty apartment, no school backpack laid on the center island, no big screen TV turned on for an early session of Fortnite or a pre-morning viewing of Cartoon Network. The apartment, devoid of a youthful haunt, was left feeling without. It felt dark, spare, spartan. And alone.
"You are alone," said one voice. The voice of the venom in his ear, the worm in his mind.
"You're never alone," contradicted another, no less horrible, no less insidious and no less nattering.
He had just sat down on the couch then, and hadn't risen for a while.
When he did rise, he found himself just walking around the empty space like a tiger in a pit. He missed how in some instances Johnny would have left a toy out for him to stub his toe on. He looked fondly down at his feet, looking at a flattened spot on the rug where the boy would lay on his stomach, feet kicking up idly as he had worked on schoolwork or etched out one of his drawings. Now there was only a flat spot.
Now he was just kicking around this apartment that was habitated chiefly by him and the ghosts.
"You are alone, and do you know why that is? Because you don't care about anyone but yourself," said the ghost with black, delicious relish. "You did it with Array and you did it with Johnny too, you found a way to get them out because there is nothing that terrifies the mighty Kyle Shane like human emotion and interaction. Go ahead, tell me I'm wrong." Kyle walked past and then through the daemon whispering in his ear, and it followed him around the room, insistently crowing about the past, over and over again. To him, this took the voice of Gabriel.
He walked the length of the living room again. He turned on the X-Box with the controller and stood there as the XBone screen floated to life, but he didn't start a game, he just blankly fidgeted with the control, hovering over menu options and finding nothing satisfying.
"You are never alone, Kyle, and you never will be," said the other voice. This one was more patient, menacing, final, like a Grim Reaper. It's enjoyment of his blank pain was the slow, succorous enjoyment of someone savoring a jawbreaker to elongate the flavor for the maximum amount of time... or the most hated rival ultimately reveling in the pain of his opposite. He thought of this voice as Seromine.
Hating himself, he shut the X-Box off, not even interested in starting Assassin's Creed among the backlog of games he hadn't gotten to. He cursed lightly, telling himself he needed to get out, go find some engagement. That nobody would ever want to look at a promo about a wrestler that sat in an apartment and talked to his ghosts. But at the very bottom of it he felt no interest, no pull in engaging with the outside world and really, nothing interested him. Not even his usual activities. He considered where he was at in life, encroaching middle age, constantly at a career crossroads of "Do I seriously want to keep doing this stupid shit I signed up for when I thought wrestling was cool at the age of eighteen" and always on the fence of calling every company higher up, telling them he was thinking of mailing the World championship belt in to them via carrier pigeon and he didn't much care about sitting on the rest of his contract. Whereas there was a vast log of kids from the neighborhood of Roxbury that were still townies, welfare princesses and deadbeats and burnouts; there were actually kids he had gone to school with who had incurred real, lasting success in an actual career that they can fall back on, lawyers and doctors. Hell, Hiro's start-up had him in enough money for him to afford a God damn boat.
"And you're still here in your silly little shorts at 29 years old, coming out to emo music and playing a cartoon character on TV," said the voice of Gabriel, both helpful and yet cuttingly, incisively painful. Yes, he said, giving that voice a flat, non-plussed look, that was a consideration, and it was A cause of his depression, but it wasn't... right.
"Of course it's not right, because you've been lying all along," Seromine says, with a pleased and haunting grin. Kyle cocked a look in the direction of that voice, but he knew what it was getting at, sitting on the sofa, and looking at the controller.
"How so?"
"Trauma was supposed to be your biggest win, wasn't it? Finally showing the dread Lord Seromine for what he was, a weak and callow, mortal man. A spineless man who has to rely on his Followers to get what he wanted, and you were the moral opposite of him. A gritty, DIY hero who'd pulled himself up by his bootstraps and who proclaimed that he wanted to present the people an example of what could be done if you applied yourself. A victory over Seromine wouldn't just prove your point that you were as legit as you say, it undermined Seromine's entire premise and credibility. It made God bleed," so says the never ceasing, never letting him rest voice of Gabriel undermining his accomplishments.
"Yes," he admitted.
"So, then?"
"So, why won't the ghosts go away?" Was it him asking this, or the voice? Did it matter? Were'nt they all different mouths of the same ventriloquist?
They didn't have to answer him. They knew he knew the reason.
Aimlessly he stood again, but there was a new fire in his legs and his hand spun out unbidden, divorced from his conscious thinking process. It hurled the X-Box controller into the wall with such force that the plastic mold shattered and the trigger buttons came out, and the broken mess fell like a bird with a broken neck falling from a window pane and he did not look back, his pacing had become more jerky, more unstable.
He had never wished so much he could smoke.
If only that lady hadn't confiscated his stash...
He walked to the spot in the living room where his after-image stood next to a stocky, no nonsense lady with a short buzz cut and a badge from Social Services. Her ghost was the one he heard in his head now.
" - some of the worst conditions for a child I've ever seen in all of my time at Boston CPS. We afforded you some leeway because of your athlete status and the fact that you're Juanito's biological father. But I can't condone this house to my superiors after the call that he put in. In this visit alone I have found bags of weed and a roach clip in this ash tray. I have found evidence of bags used to transport and sell quantities of marijuana."
" - Okay, that was a legitimate business I used to have with -"
" - And I found that Juanito was a borderline latch key kid who was solely in charge of taking himself to and from school almost every morning, and that his main after school activity was - attending a Bible Study group that has been found to have been run by a man trafficking in pedofilic imagery?"
"- ...Again, that's... a bit simplifying but, I grew up as a latch key kid when my father was a single parent. I came home to a trailer in the shittiest part of town, by myself by bike every day and I came out - "
"And I have a sworn affidavit from a mister Alastair Joyner, boyfriend of an Array Kadima. Mister Shane, have you been issued a restraining order telling you to stay away from the theater where Mister Joyner's girlfriend is performing?"
" -......it's a complicated situation, she's my ex-girlfriend and someone I maintain a strong bond with... she'll always be my best friend... my soulmate... I ... look, lady... I'm not the world's best dad, but I love that kid. I love him to death. You can ask Array. You can ask Krista Miller."
"Your therapist." In the past playback, the after-image of the woman had closed the thick file, placed it under the crook of her arm, and removed her glasses, very sternly and pointedly looking at him. "A therapist you went to see for several issues."
She had cleared her throat.
"Mister Shane, any one of those factors, both in the things that I learned in the initial call places to CPS, and the things I've seen in this inspection horrify me. Any one of those is enough for me to recommend to my supervisor that we take Juanito Rodriguez as quickly and far away from this home immediately. But do you know the main reason that I'm putting in my report, the biggest red flag I see in my assessment?"
The ghost just stood there, head hanging, looking like he was wasted away, disappeared, already half gone. "No." He'd said softly, then, but knowing, yes.
"You have a rage behind your eyes that won't go away. And maybe it comes with your vocation. I don't know. But it didn't start when you began wrestling. And all of these toys and these - substances, they are there to help you cope with living with it. But you have a child in your care, a child who's mother entrusted you to do right by him. And instead, you're bringing him into your world, mirroring your own experiences, and I won't stand by and let him repeat your patterns. I'm sorry, Mister Shane."
She had ripped off a sheet of paper, and then, she had turned to look at the one after image, the little boy standing in the threshold. But that little boy wasn't there, nor was his ghost. It was just an outline. A suggestion of where he had been. The jerky, angry motion of his legs had faded it's flare-up, and he stood there, feeling a deep hole in the center of him.
"It's what always happens." the ghost of Gabriel was back, nonchalantly mocking in his ear. He gritted his teeth. "They always end up going. Because of you."
After images. Two people, in the center of the room, a lithe, slender, attractive girl just growing into a body that would have turned heads in high school and a familiar after-image of himself, somehow younger. It was in the middle of an explosive arguement.
" - Always gone, Kyle, I don't know why you won't let me come on the road with you, I -"
"Look, Array, I'm tired of you crowding me all the time. I told you, I need my space. Just back off, we aren't talking about this any more tonight."
"Talking about what?? You won't talk to me about anything, Kyle, you're shutting me out more and more. You won't let me in and let me know what's going on and you're always on your phone, keeping it hidden from me and not letting me see when I know you're flirting with other girls. Why have you stopped letting me in? Why can't we be the way things were the night you stayed with me at the hospital and never left my side?"
" - God, Array... you were a kid then. A God damn kid. And you're still a kid. I'm not doing this with you. You think I'm something I'm not, some love of your life. You don't know what you want. Go on, get out of here tonight."
"...Kyle, what are you - what are you talking about, I live here, I can't go back to my father's - I ".
"I SAID GET THE FUCK OUT? DID YOU HEAR ME? I'M NOT WHO YOU THINK I AM. I'M - I'M TOO GOOD FOR SOME UNDERAGE JUNIOR VARSITY SLUT WHO THINKS THIS IS SOME NOTEBOOK SHIT. GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY APARTMENT, AND DON'T COME BACK HERE. I DON'T NEED YOU. ... I... I don't... NEED, ANYONE."
A hurt little squeal escaped her mouth, and her ghost had clamped a hand over her mouth to keep a cry from coming out.
Triumphant silence as that tableau broke. The after images of Kyle and Array had parted, once again due to his temper, once again due to him finding some ways to push them apart.
"And you think that you're still some kind of example," marvelled the ghost of Gabriel. "You think anyone should look at what you're doing and feel good? You are empty, hollow, braggadocious ego, boy. You are a pathetic, childish specimen of - "
"ENOUGH!" he bellowed, "E- NOUGH!!!!!" He roared so hard that it felt like his surroundings shook. Certainly he felt a tap tap tap underneath his feet as a downstairs neighbor bumped the ceiling irritably with a broom, motivated into action by his sudden outburst. And the after images continued to parade around him, and the BCPS lady had been looking him so candidly in the eyes and said "You have a rage in your eyes that won't go away", and before he knew what was happening he had lashed out with a foot and kicked the 50 inch flat screen so hard that the LCD smashed into a spiderweb and he kicked it off it's stand. It lay there on it's back like an expensive obsidian turtle. And he continued his rampage amongst the ghosts.
He flipped over the IKEA entertainment center, glass shelves and metal frame that the TV, X-Box and PS4 had been sitting on, upending them and adding more broken glass.
With a savage grip he lifted one of the barstools up from the kitchen island and brought it crashing down through the coffee table.
His hands seized on a framed photograph of him and his kid. Last autumn, he had driven down to Hangtown to meet Grimm at a cornfield maze, and that was the first real bonding experience between him and Johnny. The frame cut through the air in the next second, like some deadly shuriken, to crack, broken against the wall.
And finally, as bubbling and volcanic as his eruption had been, it tempered down. His chest heaved. He found himself kneeling in the middle of a lot, a LOT of broken glass and the ruined pieces of what he'd done to his neat, orderly life.
And the voice of his tormentor, the ultimate end, said to him, calmly. "Just admit it, hero. Tell me. I was right. Wasn't that what this was all about? Say it... Ser- "
"No."
"Seromine was ri -"
"Fuck you."
"All along, Seromine was right. Wasn't he? ...Hero."
"Stop. Calling. Me. Hero."
"But that's what you are. Isn't it. It's what you come out there and espouse to the people who buy their tickets, wear their Kyle Shane merch, sing along to your theme song. Be your own God. Rise above your own challenges. Be... better. Right? Hero? I mean... that is what you stand for, isn't it?"
Gabriel's ghost was quick to his other side, cutting in rudely and shooting his last attempt at a rebut down. "No, because he does not believe in anything. This, right here, is all Kyle Shane believes in. Empty validation caused by video game references. So much of his self esteem is making it appear people love him and cheer for him. His soul is empty. He believes in nothing. He worships his own face in the mirror. He never seeks anything deeper or more spiritual. He knows that nothing he does will EVER live up to the standards set by the great men and women who wrestled in the past, and it eats him alive. But instead of dealing with his emotions in a positive way, he'll just throw out pop culture references left and right! See! That's exactly what he's doing!"
Alright, that did it. He looked angrily around him, knowing he had no more stuff to smash, and even if he did, he needed a way to channel this into something rather than break the rest of his apartment. He got to his feet, padding through the glass and going over to the hallway door. He steadfastly refused to look in the boy's bedroom door, not even to see what displays, posters or memorabilia of the kid's time had been left. No, the room he wanted had a sound mixing booth with a mic for recording, and a camera for filming, and just a stool. Whenever he got the empty and angry feeling, it was where he went, his Batcave, and honestly this part of the job may just have been why he stuck with it. Because when he had nothing else in his life, he had his words. And they were surging, straining in the back of his throat. The bile that had been eating his gut like a cancer was bubbling, eating into his words and constricting his windpipe and he longed to spit it out like acid venom and burn through someone's chest cavity. It remained possibly the only sense of pleasure he was capable of feeling right now.
"You know, I - I'm having a little bit of trouble figuring out where to begin, because I should be feeling validated, right? I did win, convincingly, despite Seromine's best efforts to take me down I fought my absolute hardest and I won the day. And that should be a testament to everything I was talking about when I went in to this. But Gabriel's words from a few weeks ago keep creeping into my mind. And it was oh, so funny, oh, Kyle Shane doesn't care about anything, ALLLLLLL he does is empty video game references with no heart behind it and that so reductive and insulting cheap parody of me was just enough to really get under my skin. In the end, that became as much what this is all about as saying me or Seromine are right. Am I nothing more than cheap references? I defy you, except on Traumas where I go in for a special entrance and use A video game as a metaphor... am I nothing more than a cheap pop to get people smiling at me? Someone with no heart behind what I say or do? I want you all to look at my life and the people that mean something to me... and I want you to look at Gabriel, who only ever cuts promos with either his ex-wife or a bunch of random Followers who are never even given fucking names. And then you tell me which one of us is really the one living an empty life. See, I might have gotten gratification by beating Seromine and showing the world that ultimately his stupid little Jonestown act is hollow, but it's Gabriel who's really pissed me off now. And it's Gabriel that really raised the question of what, of all of us, the three men in this triple threat are about.
Seromine is about obedience, about not questioning dogma and buying wholesale into the message of his cult. Gabriel is about inconsistency, never being able to keep straight whether Rick Majors is dead or if he's holding on to what made him Rick Majors, I.E. his wife, his past. But he's dead and moved past Rick Majors, all those times he's told us when he's standing in front of a fucking coffin or a gravestone with an effigy Rick Majors in it. Gabriel can never keep straight whether he's committed fully to the cause of what Seromine wants or if it's okay to step out of line and take what he wants. He couldn't make his mind up in the Icemann Invitational whether he even wanted to be in the finals from week to week. And now is Gabriel's biggest statement, he's going into business for himself, proving that he's man enough to be the champion, a big thing for RICK MAJORS because RICK MAJORS has had only fleeting chances with gold in the past and a title win for RICK MAJORS would be the final capper on his year, but the statement is also that the title is coming back home to Seromine and his Lord, as he said at the December Iceys, is the rightful champion, who only lost via my cheating. And he's been biding his time all along until the time was right. Or the time was right for him. He'll make his mind up. If I supposedly am all about living only for the validation of the fans, I think one single atta boy from Seromine would make Gabriel cream his pants. But as soon as Seromine turns his back, he'll be rubbing his chin and plotting how good it would finally be for Rick Majors to win a title, any title. One can't do without the other, and it's that bifurcated mind that makes Gabriel lose focus.
I am never bifurcated. I am never conflicted.
But as for what I stand for?
What do I stand for?
..."
He sits back on the stool, pushing the mic on it's trundle away. The rage burning is still there, but he's talked a lot about Gabriel and Seromine, but at the end of the day it's the same old shit with them. Same old digs, same old insults. He's been kicking Gabriel for that funeral thing for like a month straight now, and Gabriel likewise has tried so hard to insult him that you really get the sense of a forty year old man having to Google what video games are current so that he could try and make fun of a Millenial. The anger was there, but it wasn't focused at Gabriel... or Seromine, or even their ghosts whispering in his ear right now. Why not?
"Because we're just a convenient focus, and you know that." Said the calm, inexorable, final voice of his end boss. "Hell, even in real life, how you see Gabriel and Seromine relates more to where you stand in your career than it does putting a stop to some evil cult. I became a ghost in your head, a devil on your shoulder because my voice acted as a counterpoint to yours."
"But his voice isn't the one, boy," said the rough, redneck, angry drunk tones of Eric Shane. "It wasn't what started any of this, it's just a focus for what you're thinking of now. Cause you feel it all the time, don't you? You feel me. That's what the CPS lady saw. Child Protective Services, HAW. You know how many times those assholes came to the house after Karen died? And they never took you away."
No, they hadn't. Not even when he'd had bruises on him. No one had ever taken him out of there.
"And now you're angry. Well, where do you think that anger comes from, genius? And then ask yourself why you're always seeing these things, talking to these people."
Eric smiled at him, swaying drunkenly, looking like he had just polished off a six pack of Natty Light in front of a TV dinner and Wheel of Fortune, beer belly hanging over his Dockers, work boots off, stained shirt, and belligerent, angry sneer. Kyle looked at him as he took the mic back to start recording, looking dead into Eric's eyes.
"...What do I stand for?
I don't stand for pride. I don't stand for honor. I don't stand for any of the things people cheer me for, to be honest.
I am Kyle Shane and I am a dumpster fire of a human being when I walk away from a Pure Class Wrestling arena. I am a jumbled mix of aloofness, narcissism and deep seated rage so profound it'd scald the Devil in Hell. I play the part of a cocky, confident champion because I do pride myself on achievement in what I do. But to be good at wrestling, I had to cut out the parts of me that made me a relatable, human and caring person. I had to kill them dead. And so maybe you're right Gabriel. Maybe I am hollow inside. Maybe all I am is a man with no friends, no honor, and nothing left inside me but emptiness and hate. And maybe a higher power would redeem me, turn me to a path of positivity, save my soul and make me better. Maybe then I wouldn't be alone.
Maybe."
Disgusted with himself, he gets up. He walks out of the promo shooting room without a second glance at the mixing board, and he stalks the halls again, as the ghosts come with him, always following and mocking for what he doesn't have.
Knowing he shouldn't, he nonetheless steps into Johnny's room.
Johnny wasn't there. In fact, nothing of Johnny's was there.
What he saw was an empty bed, stripped of all the sheets, a white, sanitized, spare room, a window out onto a balcony, and a ghost of himself. No, not an after-image, not a memory of where he had been. This was him, laying there, dead. He had indeed gone full Gabriel here, and he was looking at the body of Kyle Shane, laying there in what had been his son's bedroom. And the ghosts, all of them now, where following him in the room, pointing out the chuffed marks where the boy's posters had been but were now gone, because of him. The empty writing desk where he had done his homework, now spare and simple wood, because of him. And Kyle Shane, alone again, empty again, a hollow man, who in the very final analysis was always going to end up here, lonely, embittered and full of rage, dying alone. This is you, says Gabriel. You believe in nothing.
Because you're me. My anger. My rough hands. My temper, Eric says.
Tell me I was right, in the end, Seromine says.
And the Kyle Shane laying in the bed there, he doesn't say anything. He just lays there, finally defeated, stripped of everything that made Kyle Shane the character flashy and over the top.
Maybe Gabriel has the right idea. After all... maybe I do have to end it to start something again.
He looked towards the balcony, the sliding door out onto the wooden deck overlooking the city.
The kid would sometimes hang out with him sometimes on that. Both of them, looking over the city and talking about school, in their contentious, back and forth, unprepared parent and child way. But Johnny was here. And he was.
And he...
"And I...
I'm not a hero."
He slides the sliding door open, letting it slam. He puts one foot, testing, out onto the deck, and looks around.
"You always were my hero."
He looked next to him on the little deck, and there the kid was. Just as he always had been. After-image, ghost, mirage, but he was there and Johnny looked as solid as Eric had been when he'd been sneering at him. Johnny was there, sitting next to his side, looking out over Boston as the night. But he couldn't be. Miss Boston CPS lady wasn't telling him where Johnny had been sent to, back to Grandma Ismelda, to some foster family, not a clue, but she had loaded him into a van that day as she had ripped a report off her pad and handed it to him, and there had been a long exchanged look as Kyle had stood on the curb and Johnny had watched him from the window. He shook his head back at the kid.
"How can you say that, kid? It's because of me that CPS got called? Hell, it's because of all that shit in the house that you - "
"Look... dad... I don't blame you for Father Bowen and the kids. I don't blame you for any of it. But I'm here because you're having a low moment and you need help."
"I'm living here with my ghosts," he said, to himself, half amused, half not.
"But the CPS lady was right," he said, at last, looking down at Johnny. "I wanted to do right by you, for your mom. Izzy was... is a special lady to me, and I failed her. I failed you, as a dad."
Johnny looked sadly out over the lights below. "I forgive you. You didn't make it easy... but you tried."
"It just... it feels like I started out as a jug someone filled, but put a hole in the bottom of, and all the goodness has slowly leaked away over time. I'm no hero. What I say out there, about making your own reality, trying your hardest and manifesting your own positivity, I don't mean that shit, I don't even know halfway how to go about it. I mean, obviously I don't, or things would turn out a lot better for me personally than they do professionally. I don't... I don't know why I do the stupid shit I do, with you, with Array, or why I self destruct more often than not, I don't know how to be confident and always know the right thing to do when it's not executing a flippy, crowd popping move, and I don't... I don't know why I'm still here."
He leaned his elbows against the deck railing, looking down as he said this.
Wiser than his years, even as a ghost, the kid nudged into his side, putting a head against his ribs as they city watched together. "Know why the ghosts don't go away? It's because they're everything you carry with you. The bad, and the good. So believe me when I tell you this, you have the answer on the tip of your tongue. But the bad voices tell you it's wrong. The bad voices don't want you to think it."
Seromine, pally arm around his shoulder, smiled in his ear. "Tell me I was right... hero."
"You aren't who you say you are because you know what to do instinctively, or because you do everything perfect on the first move. You are that because you never stop trying. Even when it hurts. Even when it gets hard. Even when the bad voices want you to stop. People do believe in you, even when the negative voices tell you that they don't. That what you're doing is stupid, or that they don't understand it. The people that do understand you, they do it because they see that you have these bad voices in your head telling you that you can't do something, and you try to do it anyway. That is what makes you a hero."
His eyes were full of tears as he looked down at his son's after image. "And that's why you'll always be my dad."
There was a pregnant pause, and he nodded. Johnny was already becoming ethereal and see through, slipping away as he gave him a nod and smile. "I'm gonna do right by you, kid. I'll show CPS."
He stepped back into Johnny's room, locked the sliding door shut, and stepped back out into the hall. There he came face to face with the consequences of his rampage, and then the voice of Seromine came into his head again. "It didn't have to be like this, Kyle... you could have joined me, and the boy never would have come to harm. You failed... and you still have yet to admit that we were right about who you are."
"Shut the fuck up," he told his mind and the ghosts wearily, having had enough dialogue for one night. He went to fetch the broom, thinking that if he started by cleaning up the after-effects of the rampage and the destroyed TV and entertainment center he'd have a good handle on getting started fixing his life. If only in a micro sense. But it was a start.
"Say it now, or later... doesn't matter, Kyle... you'll come around to it in the end..." smirked that voice, and he didn't have the energy to tell it to shut up again. He just swept up broken glass, letting it's words ruminate in the back of his mind, and he kept sweeping despite feeling it's smile at the nape of his neck.
He forced himself to ignore it. Because he had a promise to keep.
It was, for sure, after he'd come back home at six in the morning after last Trauma. Had hopped a plane, took a red-eye home to sleep in his own bed, and had gone to the vendor by the Jamaica Park entrance before walking up to his high rise, a carrier of two cups of coffee and a bag of bagels in hand. As his grin had split wide, he'd opened the door, ready for the kid to greet him as he was getting ready for school.
Only to find a dark, empty apartment, no school backpack laid on the center island, no big screen TV turned on for an early session of Fortnite or a pre-morning viewing of Cartoon Network. The apartment, devoid of a youthful haunt, was left feeling without. It felt dark, spare, spartan. And alone.
"You are alone," said one voice. The voice of the venom in his ear, the worm in his mind.
"You're never alone," contradicted another, no less horrible, no less insidious and no less nattering.
He had just sat down on the couch then, and hadn't risen for a while.
When he did rise, he found himself just walking around the empty space like a tiger in a pit. He missed how in some instances Johnny would have left a toy out for him to stub his toe on. He looked fondly down at his feet, looking at a flattened spot on the rug where the boy would lay on his stomach, feet kicking up idly as he had worked on schoolwork or etched out one of his drawings. Now there was only a flat spot.
Now he was just kicking around this apartment that was habitated chiefly by him and the ghosts.
"You are alone, and do you know why that is? Because you don't care about anyone but yourself," said the ghost with black, delicious relish. "You did it with Array and you did it with Johnny too, you found a way to get them out because there is nothing that terrifies the mighty Kyle Shane like human emotion and interaction. Go ahead, tell me I'm wrong." Kyle walked past and then through the daemon whispering in his ear, and it followed him around the room, insistently crowing about the past, over and over again. To him, this took the voice of Gabriel.
He walked the length of the living room again. He turned on the X-Box with the controller and stood there as the XBone screen floated to life, but he didn't start a game, he just blankly fidgeted with the control, hovering over menu options and finding nothing satisfying.
"You are never alone, Kyle, and you never will be," said the other voice. This one was more patient, menacing, final, like a Grim Reaper. It's enjoyment of his blank pain was the slow, succorous enjoyment of someone savoring a jawbreaker to elongate the flavor for the maximum amount of time... or the most hated rival ultimately reveling in the pain of his opposite. He thought of this voice as Seromine.
Hating himself, he shut the X-Box off, not even interested in starting Assassin's Creed among the backlog of games he hadn't gotten to. He cursed lightly, telling himself he needed to get out, go find some engagement. That nobody would ever want to look at a promo about a wrestler that sat in an apartment and talked to his ghosts. But at the very bottom of it he felt no interest, no pull in engaging with the outside world and really, nothing interested him. Not even his usual activities. He considered where he was at in life, encroaching middle age, constantly at a career crossroads of "Do I seriously want to keep doing this stupid shit I signed up for when I thought wrestling was cool at the age of eighteen" and always on the fence of calling every company higher up, telling them he was thinking of mailing the World championship belt in to them via carrier pigeon and he didn't much care about sitting on the rest of his contract. Whereas there was a vast log of kids from the neighborhood of Roxbury that were still townies, welfare princesses and deadbeats and burnouts; there were actually kids he had gone to school with who had incurred real, lasting success in an actual career that they can fall back on, lawyers and doctors. Hell, Hiro's start-up had him in enough money for him to afford a God damn boat.
"And you're still here in your silly little shorts at 29 years old, coming out to emo music and playing a cartoon character on TV," said the voice of Gabriel, both helpful and yet cuttingly, incisively painful. Yes, he said, giving that voice a flat, non-plussed look, that was a consideration, and it was A cause of his depression, but it wasn't... right.
"Of course it's not right, because you've been lying all along," Seromine says, with a pleased and haunting grin. Kyle cocked a look in the direction of that voice, but he knew what it was getting at, sitting on the sofa, and looking at the controller.
"How so?"
"Trauma was supposed to be your biggest win, wasn't it? Finally showing the dread Lord Seromine for what he was, a weak and callow, mortal man. A spineless man who has to rely on his Followers to get what he wanted, and you were the moral opposite of him. A gritty, DIY hero who'd pulled himself up by his bootstraps and who proclaimed that he wanted to present the people an example of what could be done if you applied yourself. A victory over Seromine wouldn't just prove your point that you were as legit as you say, it undermined Seromine's entire premise and credibility. It made God bleed," so says the never ceasing, never letting him rest voice of Gabriel undermining his accomplishments.
"Yes," he admitted.
"So, then?"
"So, why won't the ghosts go away?" Was it him asking this, or the voice? Did it matter? Were'nt they all different mouths of the same ventriloquist?
They didn't have to answer him. They knew he knew the reason.
Aimlessly he stood again, but there was a new fire in his legs and his hand spun out unbidden, divorced from his conscious thinking process. It hurled the X-Box controller into the wall with such force that the plastic mold shattered and the trigger buttons came out, and the broken mess fell like a bird with a broken neck falling from a window pane and he did not look back, his pacing had become more jerky, more unstable.
He had never wished so much he could smoke.
If only that lady hadn't confiscated his stash...
He walked to the spot in the living room where his after-image stood next to a stocky, no nonsense lady with a short buzz cut and a badge from Social Services. Her ghost was the one he heard in his head now.
" - some of the worst conditions for a child I've ever seen in all of my time at Boston CPS. We afforded you some leeway because of your athlete status and the fact that you're Juanito's biological father. But I can't condone this house to my superiors after the call that he put in. In this visit alone I have found bags of weed and a roach clip in this ash tray. I have found evidence of bags used to transport and sell quantities of marijuana."
" - Okay, that was a legitimate business I used to have with -"
" - And I found that Juanito was a borderline latch key kid who was solely in charge of taking himself to and from school almost every morning, and that his main after school activity was - attending a Bible Study group that has been found to have been run by a man trafficking in pedofilic imagery?"
"- ...Again, that's... a bit simplifying but, I grew up as a latch key kid when my father was a single parent. I came home to a trailer in the shittiest part of town, by myself by bike every day and I came out - "
"And I have a sworn affidavit from a mister Alastair Joyner, boyfriend of an Array Kadima. Mister Shane, have you been issued a restraining order telling you to stay away from the theater where Mister Joyner's girlfriend is performing?"
" -......it's a complicated situation, she's my ex-girlfriend and someone I maintain a strong bond with... she'll always be my best friend... my soulmate... I ... look, lady... I'm not the world's best dad, but I love that kid. I love him to death. You can ask Array. You can ask Krista Miller."
"Your therapist." In the past playback, the after-image of the woman had closed the thick file, placed it under the crook of her arm, and removed her glasses, very sternly and pointedly looking at him. "A therapist you went to see for several issues."
She had cleared her throat.
"Mister Shane, any one of those factors, both in the things that I learned in the initial call places to CPS, and the things I've seen in this inspection horrify me. Any one of those is enough for me to recommend to my supervisor that we take Juanito Rodriguez as quickly and far away from this home immediately. But do you know the main reason that I'm putting in my report, the biggest red flag I see in my assessment?"
The ghost just stood there, head hanging, looking like he was wasted away, disappeared, already half gone. "No." He'd said softly, then, but knowing, yes.
"You have a rage behind your eyes that won't go away. And maybe it comes with your vocation. I don't know. But it didn't start when you began wrestling. And all of these toys and these - substances, they are there to help you cope with living with it. But you have a child in your care, a child who's mother entrusted you to do right by him. And instead, you're bringing him into your world, mirroring your own experiences, and I won't stand by and let him repeat your patterns. I'm sorry, Mister Shane."
She had ripped off a sheet of paper, and then, she had turned to look at the one after image, the little boy standing in the threshold. But that little boy wasn't there, nor was his ghost. It was just an outline. A suggestion of where he had been. The jerky, angry motion of his legs had faded it's flare-up, and he stood there, feeling a deep hole in the center of him.
"It's what always happens." the ghost of Gabriel was back, nonchalantly mocking in his ear. He gritted his teeth. "They always end up going. Because of you."
After images. Two people, in the center of the room, a lithe, slender, attractive girl just growing into a body that would have turned heads in high school and a familiar after-image of himself, somehow younger. It was in the middle of an explosive arguement.
" - Always gone, Kyle, I don't know why you won't let me come on the road with you, I -"
"Look, Array, I'm tired of you crowding me all the time. I told you, I need my space. Just back off, we aren't talking about this any more tonight."
"Talking about what?? You won't talk to me about anything, Kyle, you're shutting me out more and more. You won't let me in and let me know what's going on and you're always on your phone, keeping it hidden from me and not letting me see when I know you're flirting with other girls. Why have you stopped letting me in? Why can't we be the way things were the night you stayed with me at the hospital and never left my side?"
" - God, Array... you were a kid then. A God damn kid. And you're still a kid. I'm not doing this with you. You think I'm something I'm not, some love of your life. You don't know what you want. Go on, get out of here tonight."
"...Kyle, what are you - what are you talking about, I live here, I can't go back to my father's - I ".
"I SAID GET THE FUCK OUT? DID YOU HEAR ME? I'M NOT WHO YOU THINK I AM. I'M - I'M TOO GOOD FOR SOME UNDERAGE JUNIOR VARSITY SLUT WHO THINKS THIS IS SOME NOTEBOOK SHIT. GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY APARTMENT, AND DON'T COME BACK HERE. I DON'T NEED YOU. ... I... I don't... NEED, ANYONE."
A hurt little squeal escaped her mouth, and her ghost had clamped a hand over her mouth to keep a cry from coming out.
Triumphant silence as that tableau broke. The after images of Kyle and Array had parted, once again due to his temper, once again due to him finding some ways to push them apart.
"And you think that you're still some kind of example," marvelled the ghost of Gabriel. "You think anyone should look at what you're doing and feel good? You are empty, hollow, braggadocious ego, boy. You are a pathetic, childish specimen of - "
"ENOUGH!" he bellowed, "E- NOUGH!!!!!" He roared so hard that it felt like his surroundings shook. Certainly he felt a tap tap tap underneath his feet as a downstairs neighbor bumped the ceiling irritably with a broom, motivated into action by his sudden outburst. And the after images continued to parade around him, and the BCPS lady had been looking him so candidly in the eyes and said "You have a rage in your eyes that won't go away", and before he knew what was happening he had lashed out with a foot and kicked the 50 inch flat screen so hard that the LCD smashed into a spiderweb and he kicked it off it's stand. It lay there on it's back like an expensive obsidian turtle. And he continued his rampage amongst the ghosts.
He flipped over the IKEA entertainment center, glass shelves and metal frame that the TV, X-Box and PS4 had been sitting on, upending them and adding more broken glass.
With a savage grip he lifted one of the barstools up from the kitchen island and brought it crashing down through the coffee table.
His hands seized on a framed photograph of him and his kid. Last autumn, he had driven down to Hangtown to meet Grimm at a cornfield maze, and that was the first real bonding experience between him and Johnny. The frame cut through the air in the next second, like some deadly shuriken, to crack, broken against the wall.
And finally, as bubbling and volcanic as his eruption had been, it tempered down. His chest heaved. He found himself kneeling in the middle of a lot, a LOT of broken glass and the ruined pieces of what he'd done to his neat, orderly life.
And the voice of his tormentor, the ultimate end, said to him, calmly. "Just admit it, hero. Tell me. I was right. Wasn't that what this was all about? Say it... Ser- "
"No."
"Seromine was ri -"
"Fuck you."
"All along, Seromine was right. Wasn't he? ...Hero."
"Stop. Calling. Me. Hero."
"But that's what you are. Isn't it. It's what you come out there and espouse to the people who buy their tickets, wear their Kyle Shane merch, sing along to your theme song. Be your own God. Rise above your own challenges. Be... better. Right? Hero? I mean... that is what you stand for, isn't it?"
Gabriel's ghost was quick to his other side, cutting in rudely and shooting his last attempt at a rebut down. "No, because he does not believe in anything. This, right here, is all Kyle Shane believes in. Empty validation caused by video game references. So much of his self esteem is making it appear people love him and cheer for him. His soul is empty. He believes in nothing. He worships his own face in the mirror. He never seeks anything deeper or more spiritual. He knows that nothing he does will EVER live up to the standards set by the great men and women who wrestled in the past, and it eats him alive. But instead of dealing with his emotions in a positive way, he'll just throw out pop culture references left and right! See! That's exactly what he's doing!"
Alright, that did it. He looked angrily around him, knowing he had no more stuff to smash, and even if he did, he needed a way to channel this into something rather than break the rest of his apartment. He got to his feet, padding through the glass and going over to the hallway door. He steadfastly refused to look in the boy's bedroom door, not even to see what displays, posters or memorabilia of the kid's time had been left. No, the room he wanted had a sound mixing booth with a mic for recording, and a camera for filming, and just a stool. Whenever he got the empty and angry feeling, it was where he went, his Batcave, and honestly this part of the job may just have been why he stuck with it. Because when he had nothing else in his life, he had his words. And they were surging, straining in the back of his throat. The bile that had been eating his gut like a cancer was bubbling, eating into his words and constricting his windpipe and he longed to spit it out like acid venom and burn through someone's chest cavity. It remained possibly the only sense of pleasure he was capable of feeling right now.
"You know, I - I'm having a little bit of trouble figuring out where to begin, because I should be feeling validated, right? I did win, convincingly, despite Seromine's best efforts to take me down I fought my absolute hardest and I won the day. And that should be a testament to everything I was talking about when I went in to this. But Gabriel's words from a few weeks ago keep creeping into my mind. And it was oh, so funny, oh, Kyle Shane doesn't care about anything, ALLLLLLL he does is empty video game references with no heart behind it and that so reductive and insulting cheap parody of me was just enough to really get under my skin. In the end, that became as much what this is all about as saying me or Seromine are right. Am I nothing more than cheap references? I defy you, except on Traumas where I go in for a special entrance and use A video game as a metaphor... am I nothing more than a cheap pop to get people smiling at me? Someone with no heart behind what I say or do? I want you all to look at my life and the people that mean something to me... and I want you to look at Gabriel, who only ever cuts promos with either his ex-wife or a bunch of random Followers who are never even given fucking names. And then you tell me which one of us is really the one living an empty life. See, I might have gotten gratification by beating Seromine and showing the world that ultimately his stupid little Jonestown act is hollow, but it's Gabriel who's really pissed me off now. And it's Gabriel that really raised the question of what, of all of us, the three men in this triple threat are about.
Seromine is about obedience, about not questioning dogma and buying wholesale into the message of his cult. Gabriel is about inconsistency, never being able to keep straight whether Rick Majors is dead or if he's holding on to what made him Rick Majors, I.E. his wife, his past. But he's dead and moved past Rick Majors, all those times he's told us when he's standing in front of a fucking coffin or a gravestone with an effigy Rick Majors in it. Gabriel can never keep straight whether he's committed fully to the cause of what Seromine wants or if it's okay to step out of line and take what he wants. He couldn't make his mind up in the Icemann Invitational whether he even wanted to be in the finals from week to week. And now is Gabriel's biggest statement, he's going into business for himself, proving that he's man enough to be the champion, a big thing for RICK MAJORS because RICK MAJORS has had only fleeting chances with gold in the past and a title win for RICK MAJORS would be the final capper on his year, but the statement is also that the title is coming back home to Seromine and his Lord, as he said at the December Iceys, is the rightful champion, who only lost via my cheating. And he's been biding his time all along until the time was right. Or the time was right for him. He'll make his mind up. If I supposedly am all about living only for the validation of the fans, I think one single atta boy from Seromine would make Gabriel cream his pants. But as soon as Seromine turns his back, he'll be rubbing his chin and plotting how good it would finally be for Rick Majors to win a title, any title. One can't do without the other, and it's that bifurcated mind that makes Gabriel lose focus.
I am never bifurcated. I am never conflicted.
But as for what I stand for?
What do I stand for?
..."
He sits back on the stool, pushing the mic on it's trundle away. The rage burning is still there, but he's talked a lot about Gabriel and Seromine, but at the end of the day it's the same old shit with them. Same old digs, same old insults. He's been kicking Gabriel for that funeral thing for like a month straight now, and Gabriel likewise has tried so hard to insult him that you really get the sense of a forty year old man having to Google what video games are current so that he could try and make fun of a Millenial. The anger was there, but it wasn't focused at Gabriel... or Seromine, or even their ghosts whispering in his ear right now. Why not?
"Because we're just a convenient focus, and you know that." Said the calm, inexorable, final voice of his end boss. "Hell, even in real life, how you see Gabriel and Seromine relates more to where you stand in your career than it does putting a stop to some evil cult. I became a ghost in your head, a devil on your shoulder because my voice acted as a counterpoint to yours."
"But his voice isn't the one, boy," said the rough, redneck, angry drunk tones of Eric Shane. "It wasn't what started any of this, it's just a focus for what you're thinking of now. Cause you feel it all the time, don't you? You feel me. That's what the CPS lady saw. Child Protective Services, HAW. You know how many times those assholes came to the house after Karen died? And they never took you away."
No, they hadn't. Not even when he'd had bruises on him. No one had ever taken him out of there.
"And now you're angry. Well, where do you think that anger comes from, genius? And then ask yourself why you're always seeing these things, talking to these people."
Eric smiled at him, swaying drunkenly, looking like he had just polished off a six pack of Natty Light in front of a TV dinner and Wheel of Fortune, beer belly hanging over his Dockers, work boots off, stained shirt, and belligerent, angry sneer. Kyle looked at him as he took the mic back to start recording, looking dead into Eric's eyes.
"...What do I stand for?
I don't stand for pride. I don't stand for honor. I don't stand for any of the things people cheer me for, to be honest.
I am Kyle Shane and I am a dumpster fire of a human being when I walk away from a Pure Class Wrestling arena. I am a jumbled mix of aloofness, narcissism and deep seated rage so profound it'd scald the Devil in Hell. I play the part of a cocky, confident champion because I do pride myself on achievement in what I do. But to be good at wrestling, I had to cut out the parts of me that made me a relatable, human and caring person. I had to kill them dead. And so maybe you're right Gabriel. Maybe I am hollow inside. Maybe all I am is a man with no friends, no honor, and nothing left inside me but emptiness and hate. And maybe a higher power would redeem me, turn me to a path of positivity, save my soul and make me better. Maybe then I wouldn't be alone.
Maybe."
Disgusted with himself, he gets up. He walks out of the promo shooting room without a second glance at the mixing board, and he stalks the halls again, as the ghosts come with him, always following and mocking for what he doesn't have.
Knowing he shouldn't, he nonetheless steps into Johnny's room.
Johnny wasn't there. In fact, nothing of Johnny's was there.
What he saw was an empty bed, stripped of all the sheets, a white, sanitized, spare room, a window out onto a balcony, and a ghost of himself. No, not an after-image, not a memory of where he had been. This was him, laying there, dead. He had indeed gone full Gabriel here, and he was looking at the body of Kyle Shane, laying there in what had been his son's bedroom. And the ghosts, all of them now, where following him in the room, pointing out the chuffed marks where the boy's posters had been but were now gone, because of him. The empty writing desk where he had done his homework, now spare and simple wood, because of him. And Kyle Shane, alone again, empty again, a hollow man, who in the very final analysis was always going to end up here, lonely, embittered and full of rage, dying alone. This is you, says Gabriel. You believe in nothing.
Because you're me. My anger. My rough hands. My temper, Eric says.
Tell me I was right, in the end, Seromine says.
And the Kyle Shane laying in the bed there, he doesn't say anything. He just lays there, finally defeated, stripped of everything that made Kyle Shane the character flashy and over the top.
Maybe Gabriel has the right idea. After all... maybe I do have to end it to start something again.
He looked towards the balcony, the sliding door out onto the wooden deck overlooking the city.
The kid would sometimes hang out with him sometimes on that. Both of them, looking over the city and talking about school, in their contentious, back and forth, unprepared parent and child way. But Johnny was here. And he was.
And he...
"And I...
I'm not a hero."
He slides the sliding door open, letting it slam. He puts one foot, testing, out onto the deck, and looks around.
"You always were my hero."
He looked next to him on the little deck, and there the kid was. Just as he always had been. After-image, ghost, mirage, but he was there and Johnny looked as solid as Eric had been when he'd been sneering at him. Johnny was there, sitting next to his side, looking out over Boston as the night. But he couldn't be. Miss Boston CPS lady wasn't telling him where Johnny had been sent to, back to Grandma Ismelda, to some foster family, not a clue, but she had loaded him into a van that day as she had ripped a report off her pad and handed it to him, and there had been a long exchanged look as Kyle had stood on the curb and Johnny had watched him from the window. He shook his head back at the kid.
"How can you say that, kid? It's because of me that CPS got called? Hell, it's because of all that shit in the house that you - "
"Look... dad... I don't blame you for Father Bowen and the kids. I don't blame you for any of it. But I'm here because you're having a low moment and you need help."
"I'm living here with my ghosts," he said, to himself, half amused, half not.
"But the CPS lady was right," he said, at last, looking down at Johnny. "I wanted to do right by you, for your mom. Izzy was... is a special lady to me, and I failed her. I failed you, as a dad."
Johnny looked sadly out over the lights below. "I forgive you. You didn't make it easy... but you tried."
"It just... it feels like I started out as a jug someone filled, but put a hole in the bottom of, and all the goodness has slowly leaked away over time. I'm no hero. What I say out there, about making your own reality, trying your hardest and manifesting your own positivity, I don't mean that shit, I don't even know halfway how to go about it. I mean, obviously I don't, or things would turn out a lot better for me personally than they do professionally. I don't... I don't know why I do the stupid shit I do, with you, with Array, or why I self destruct more often than not, I don't know how to be confident and always know the right thing to do when it's not executing a flippy, crowd popping move, and I don't... I don't know why I'm still here."
He leaned his elbows against the deck railing, looking down as he said this.
Wiser than his years, even as a ghost, the kid nudged into his side, putting a head against his ribs as they city watched together. "Know why the ghosts don't go away? It's because they're everything you carry with you. The bad, and the good. So believe me when I tell you this, you have the answer on the tip of your tongue. But the bad voices tell you it's wrong. The bad voices don't want you to think it."
Seromine, pally arm around his shoulder, smiled in his ear. "Tell me I was right... hero."
"You aren't who you say you are because you know what to do instinctively, or because you do everything perfect on the first move. You are that because you never stop trying. Even when it hurts. Even when it gets hard. Even when the bad voices want you to stop. People do believe in you, even when the negative voices tell you that they don't. That what you're doing is stupid, or that they don't understand it. The people that do understand you, they do it because they see that you have these bad voices in your head telling you that you can't do something, and you try to do it anyway. That is what makes you a hero."
His eyes were full of tears as he looked down at his son's after image. "And that's why you'll always be my dad."
There was a pregnant pause, and he nodded. Johnny was already becoming ethereal and see through, slipping away as he gave him a nod and smile. "I'm gonna do right by you, kid. I'll show CPS."
He stepped back into Johnny's room, locked the sliding door shut, and stepped back out into the hall. There he came face to face with the consequences of his rampage, and then the voice of Seromine came into his head again. "It didn't have to be like this, Kyle... you could have joined me, and the boy never would have come to harm. You failed... and you still have yet to admit that we were right about who you are."
"Shut the fuck up," he told his mind and the ghosts wearily, having had enough dialogue for one night. He went to fetch the broom, thinking that if he started by cleaning up the after-effects of the rampage and the destroyed TV and entertainment center he'd have a good handle on getting started fixing his life. If only in a micro sense. But it was a start.
"Say it now, or later... doesn't matter, Kyle... you'll come around to it in the end..." smirked that voice, and he didn't have the energy to tell it to shut up again. He just swept up broken glass, letting it's words ruminate in the back of his mind, and he kept sweeping despite feeling it's smile at the nape of his neck.
He forced himself to ignore it. Because he had a promise to keep.
