It's Gone Now.

[Kyle Shane]

10^3

My eyes open; I'm drenched in sweat and wracked in pain. This is the new normal for me.

Like images on the inside of a soap bubble just a fraction second away from bursting, the dreams cascade through my mind again, just a little highlight reel to remind me of what I've lost. In short order a string of embarassing defeats at my day job taking me to a "professional low" before a prickly turncoat moment I really should have seen coming. I close my eyes back again, laying on my sweat-soaked sheet, breathing it in and hearing the call out again ("He just gave Kyle Shane a Hunter Suite of his own! I thought they were partners in crime??")

I blow out a breath. The momentary recollection passes. It was always going to happen... and anyway, it wasn't what left me in this predicament. All things considered, it was barely a blip on my radar by the time that night was over. None of those things were. But the ever present iron band that's clamped itself just above my V-indents and curves around to my back, it sizzles with sick heat against the cotton. The phantom pain of a broken piece between my L2 and L3 vertebrae reminds me of what really matters, now, and I can dispense with the little trivialities and recollect the real traumatic worldshift that the David Hunters of the world could never be. Even through a concussed glass pane, I still have that memory.

Images, scattershot: He sits up in the bed, and is already pulling on a pair of pants, despite the doctor's words coming faraway. It's like his ears are packed with gauze. "Sir, you are concussed, we need to keep you here for observation," says the orderly more clearly, because he's in Kyle's face and Kyle can read his lips. But Kyle's face is an inscrutable, pinched scowl.

He's at the front desk, signing paperwork, and his phone is blowing up with texts from Array. "Can I at least call you an Uber???

"Answer me please?"

"Kyle I know things are weird and distant between us bc of..... what I'm feeling for Marki but you cant just send me a one sentence text abt concussion screening and not expect me to feel worried"

"You know I'm officially done with your distant keep me at arms length so I dont get let in on the bad stuff routine Kyle, you want to be an asshole then by all means drive yourself home"

The speed at which he was driving peeling out of Mercy General and on his way through the common.

Passing the Mass Transit outpost and turning on a side street, he screeched at 68 mph around a blind intersection. His blurred vision made the effect feel like flying, the world whipping past and the halogen elongating ethereally; it felt like hyperdrive.

-- When suddenly, scuttling through the street was a mangy, lop-eared, shaggy stray dog. The avatar of irony, the patronus of the lost. And he swerved, hard. It was so arbitrary, one second there was a dog, and then the next there was a brick wall. And there was a sudden stop. And there was silence.

I woke up unable to move any part of me. I tried to move. When people were crowding around my car and pulling me free, I looked up at them and I felt nothing. I was sweating profusely, but all I felt was cold. I know I called out to... someone, but all I could see was distorted face leering over me; know exactly how alien abductions must go. And try as I might... I could not. Move. My arms. I could not stand. Some idiot was trying to sit me up and I felt nothing. But as I sat there, shivering and being moved, my dull eyes caught the shadow of the dog retreating down the road, and it felt like I was parting ways with something vital to me.

That was August first.

Array and Marki stand side by side in the hospital room, now. Array is tensely biting her thumb, the way she does often when she's thinking, the little mannerism being in the orbit of this man has brought her to do with such frequency that she doesn't even realize she's doing it. At length, Marki gives her a gentle "babe" and holds out her hand and Array comes to awareness of her partner in the room, and becomes more present. Almost apologetically, she smooches the taller woman's cheek. She's thankful of the understanding. Anyone else wouldn't want to be dragged into a position between their current and the feelings with a complicated ex; nevermind rushing in to their bedside. Array huffs out a breath and has to stop herself from kicking the feelings. From recriminating herself again for her last text. For not just coming to get him. For doing this, for not doing that, so many things. Instead, she just looks at him there, sleeping fitfully, turned slightly to his side.

"The doctor said that it was a compression fracture between the L2 and L3 vertebrae, the impact into the steering column slammed his solar plexus hard and doubled him over, pushed his spine together so hard that pieces... broke..." she's reciting the prognosis deadpan, no emotion given to the words, flat and faraway stare. "He may be able to... walk but it's going to be a six month recovery and he - and he can't bend, or lift more than five pounds and - "

Marki, the bartender, who came in late to all of this drama and only knows Kyle as the creep that raped a girl and then made up some elaborate sci-fi story about being body switched, just looks over him assessingly. So, a broken back. This piece of trash makes Array feel bad, plays on her emotions, and guilts her into caring and then he drives off into the sunset and he only gets a broken back. It, honestly, would be a little bit kinder if he had broken his neck instead. Or worse. She doesn't want that to come across her face, but it does. At length, she goes to steer Array away.

"Look, we can't do anything more for him," Marki says, somewhat brusquely. "The doctor said he'll start PT in two weeks, and he'll have to restore the muscle and work around the missing pieces of vert. It's tough, but he'll be -"

Array's eyes widen, and she becomes a little more animated, as if she needs to start following up with a plan, "His PT, the doctor said he can start with light yoga and some weights, I can work with him and - "

"Ray." Marki cuts in, harder, "You can't fix him when he's like this. Kyle is broken. And that is not your fault. It's okay. You can be a part of his life, god knows he will always want you to be, but he isn't yours to fix."

There's a long moment of consideration. Array looks back at him, in the bed, turned onto his hip to alleviate the pull of the muscle against the L3 that feeds a constant stream of agony with every hitch. Then she looks down, bitterly, thinking of the texts. So much hangs in the frosty ICU ward air. "Let's just go." She said, not wanting to be in that hospital room anymore, feeling sour.

I'm standing, now. Having showered, taken a swallow full of pain meds, and the iron band around my midsection fades into the background. For the moment, I can even forget about the phantom itch of bones that aren't there knitting themselves. I stand at the window of my new place, far from the Kyle Shane penthouse in the city, a quiet lake house with a lawn covered in the remnants of a mid spring snow.

And I think back on the hospital, for the millionth time reliving the memories and how it made me feel helpless and small. Like everything was slipping. Like everything that made me even a little bit happy was being stripped away, bit by bit and I began to realize just how lonely that feels. The chunks of spine that smashed together like tectonic plates left a literal missing piece in my body that would never regenerate. It brought so much into perspective about where I was. For so long I'd only seen things in terms of what I accomplished that I didn't put in the work for work's sake. I'd seen acquiring people in my life as just another goal without any care to how I treated them. And I took for granted just how hard you need to work, every day to stay at the top of your game, I just took it as a given that I was always looked at as the most innovative, forward thinking, game changing catalyst of progress and achievement. If my peers were stuck in the past, that was on them. People I even thought were better than that, like David.

Yeah, David. Honestly, part of me still roots for him in all things, even after he stuck a proverbial dagger in my back. Part of me still wanted him to be so much more than what he is. But I see how limited he is. If there was one thing that 2019 proved effectively, it's that David Hunter breaks easier than I do, and it doesn't even take a 60 mph collision to reduce him to rubble, all it takes is a clown named Sicko pointing out his character flaws and that he's not the center of the universe he thinks he is, and David's already mentally ready to throw in the towel. That alone is one reason why even when I've been gone, David hasn't gone as far as he could have. And as much as it saddens me that he hasn't amounted to more, I still can't muster the sympathy, because we did not have the same trajectories in 2019 but it ended about similar. Maybe that's why I shared enough disappointment in the both of us, in all of us as a whole. I remained stuck in the past, mired in my "great works" and in love with my own message so much that my ego blinded me, told me to shrug off a concussion because I'm the God of Game dammit, and I pushed aside people that cared about me. And it cost me the chance to keep doing it. It gave me the epiphany at the cost of being able to put it in practice, and it made me sit on the shelf for agonizing months. I could not sleep except for fitful, flashback fueled replays while the broken parts of my lower back ached like a pus-infested wound.

And I worried, because this critical injury came to me in the prime of my life and shaved time off of it. Time...

And it made me think of all of the great athletes struck down in their prime, who were never able to get back to what they once were... and they were younger than I am.

I turned thirty this year. Thirty.

It arrived with a crashing, jarring impact that stopped all of my youthful momentum in it's tracks.

I turn this number over in my mind as I step out onto the porch, into the crisp northern air. Snow coats the ground, but it's melting through in patches, grass poking it's way through, renewal of spring the metaphor of shaking off a long and cold winter. My breath fogs in the night.

The questions that filled my mind as I adjusted to the "new normal" cycle of sleep-dream-sweat-wake up in spasming phantom pain doubling me over and making me bend in a way counter to what my injury wants, they started driving me.

Because the missing part of my discs were manifestations of a void I've gone all my life just covering over with an easy fix, instead of doing the hard work to try and fill. And that made me so angry at myself.

The cherry of a cigarette lights up in the dark of the hospital room. It's amazing that nobody's even noticed the sinister, unforgettable shape. The figure sitting in the chair is gnarled, his curved back not meeting the chair, but he leans his crutch against it and comes forward as he smokes, withdrawing his cigarette and placing his hands on his knees as he leans forward in an act of getting closer.

"None of them understand, do they, Kyle," Patrick says, his voice a grating whisper.

"The girl and her little barmaid have stopped coming to visit you, and you're alone." He smiles, "Just us graveyard ghosts in here. They treat you like you're a broken toy glued back together, just waiting to see if the glue takes... they pity you. But I,"

"I know you can come back from this. Why?"

"Because it's in you. You think that there is something missing from you. Something taken from you. But when you get up there tomorrow and the PT tells you to take those steps, I want you to feel the same way I did, every time I had to go in there and learn to step with these rotted limbs. To feel the anger. The hate. To let that strengthen you. To make that your guiding force and to take that hate out on everyone who abandoned you. For the world that moved on from you. Don't turn it in, on you."

He puts the cig back to his lips, puffs contentedly.

"Because only that anger is going to replace the hole missing from you."

So maybe, yes, I was mad. Or just disappointed when I looked at my peers and saw they'd learned nothing. Nothing changed in my absence. Nobody took my message and applied it to themselves, I honestly think sometimes they were just waiting for me to stop talking. The world just continued turning on it's axis. There comes another Icemann Invitational Tournament. David Hunter continued to ally himself with anyone and everyone - now it's Gerard Angelo, now it's Holden Ross again, now it's ... it does not matter. There was never a takeaway. Because they didn't ever experience what I did. They'd never felt the world stop. They've never seen their mistakes play out at night like images on a soap bubble dancing tantalyzingly in front of their eyes.

And they've never had to come to the sobering realization that they came close to losing the best years of their life to a wheelchair. Now everything before that seems trivial, and everything on the other side of it takes on so much more significance.

The work to get me here showed me what I should have been focusing on all along, and it wasn't the titles. It wasn't the Achievement Unlocked.

Starting all over again, from the lowest point through superhuman levels of pain, to bring myself to a point higher than I started at. That's the achievement.

I stretch lightly against the front porch brace. Feeling the tight pull of the muscle against my L3, but the pain has subsided for the night. I'm aware of what I lost, every bit of it. I remember cleanly the nights that I laid awake, unable to bend or move my legs, feeling only the searing itch of the broken bone niggling underneath my skin, threatening to drive me mad.

I breathe in the night air in my new cabin, listen to the rustles of the pine in the snow. It's all gone.

It's gone now.

10^4

"So, tell me more," James exhorted me, as he hands me another rum punch.

"Oh, James, I don't know why you like hearing these stories, they're at least ten years old at this point," I chuckle, and take the drink from him. I take a look at the sky, but the White Event hasn't started yet. The Followers are all congregated out on the lawn. But James and I are just standing, two men in white chinos and boat shirts staring out at the sky. I drink my drink. James watches me, as always, his eyes searching into me. For just this moment, I shrink away, feeling that old youthful avoidance of being truly known.

But then James claps me on the shoulder jovially, and leads me out onto the front porch. The old wooded cabin I bought when I turned thirty is a compound now, and the faithful turn their heads as their leaders emerge out onto the hardwood. And as I'm standing with James, and he's smiling and holding on to me, I feel the good feeling rise in my heart as our friends who have been sleeping out on the lawn stand and smile at us.

"You carried so much anger then, Kyle, and I wondered how much of your new attitude was anger."

I mull it over. "Some," I allow.

"You've told me before about your foray back after the injury, and it just seems to me like you went into it with noble intentions, but you couldn't help but feel the slightly negative motivations."

"Maybe. Could be." I look at a follower, a beautiful blond child I know as Noel, who hands me a handmade wreath. Noel doesn't speak, however. Her white milk eyes and genteel smile, however, offer a wave of peace.

"You made a comeback and immediately lambasted them over the way that they held tight to their core belief system."

"I was young and angry."

"So you were angry that PCW was always going to be PCW?"

"More like I felt undervalued because they valued people talking about history more than they do the future." Was the short answer. But Noel was with her family, a blonde woman and a bald, bearded man who smiled broadly and beatifically at us and waved.

"And how do you feel about it now?" James prodded, more like the psychologist he used to be in The Old World than in our current configurations in life. But for once in my dealings with a shrink, I did not feel like a lab rat.

"I feel like I wasn't appreciating the effort that went into it. And I was mad at myself, for not performing to my own potential, even though I thought I was."

"And where do you see it all now?"

"I think..." I regarded James, his broad face and salt and pepper hair and beard. He looked a bit like Jor-El in all the Superman movies. "I think that it doesn't matter," I answer with an ease and a calm that eluded me until I had reached my third decade. I smile. "It was a lifetime ago... and the hole that I was trying to fill... it's gone now..."

Something, a long ago injury, pulls at me. But I'm looking out over the people in white pants sitting cross legged on our lawn as James raises his ringed fingers to the sky, standing against the rail. James looks at me, nods, and then turns to address the communers.

"FRIENDS,

I STAND WITH OUR BROTHER KYLE HERE, AND WE ARE AT THE PRECIPICE OF THE WHITE EVENT! AND I..."

His voice drops an octave as he looks at me, takes my hand in his. "WELL... I DON'T KNOW IF I COULD HAVE DONE THIS, WITHOUT KYLE OPENING HIS HEART TO MY ADVICE... AND GIVING HIS HOME FREELY SO THAT WE COULD AMASS...

FOR YOU!!

FOR ALL OF YOU, SO THAT YOU COULD EXPERIENCE THE WHITE EVENT!

BROTHERS, SISTERS, CHILDREN ALL, KYLE SHANE IS WITH US AS A TRUE BROTHER.

AND WHEN THE WHITE EVENT COMES, WE SHALL STAND BESIDE YOU IN TIME.

BE STRONG. BE BRAVE. IT WILL BE A TIME OF CRUCIBLE, OF CHANGING... BUT IT WILL BE A TIME OF BIRTH."

The communers exult, cheering, and singing "Beside you in time"

I look at the sky, and James scans the horizon over the trees with me.

He looks over at me, arching an eyebrow, and smiles, "What are you thinking, Kyle?"

The sky has taken on a glow over the tops of the pines. I open my mouth, but the awe of the moment takes it out of me. I had felt so many things, doubt, pain, recrimination and anger for so much of my life, but right now, all I can think of is the wonder.

Everything else is gone at the moment.