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rainbowfic2015-04-06 08:35 pm
starphotographs) wrote in rainbowfic2015-04-06 08:35 pm
Clean Again 3, Baby Pink 22, Admin Yellow 15
Name: starphotographs
Story: Corwin and Friends
Characters: Corwin (POV), Martin.
Colors: Clean Again 3 (Everlasting Ends), Baby Pink 22 (“He says it would be awesome, but I think it would be disrespectful and macabre.”), Admin Yellow 15 (“In the end, we're all alone and no one is coming to save you.”)
Supplies and Styles: Portrait
Word Count: 7,943
Rating: Not sure if hard PG-13 or soft R.
Warnings: Choose not to warn.
Summary: Martin has plans. Corwin has doubts.
Note: This takes place several months after “From the Bottom of My Rotten Heart,” which is what I did for the “Body Envy” prompt. I think they can be read in any order, though. Also, this is at a point in their story when they’re in hiding, and living with Hal at his place at the junkyard. (Same Hal and same junkyard from “See You Later (If I See You at All).”) As always, comments of any type make me happy!
Rest in Pieces
“…Corwin, I will break your fucking nose. I mean it.”
Actually, I almost believed him. His right hand was clenched in such a tight fist that I swore it’d been compressed down to twice the density of the rest of him, ready to punch a hole through anything that got in its way. The way his arm was drawn back reminded me of a pinball plunger in the second before you let go. But, I figured I was probably safe. Being hooked up to the oxygen concentrator was kind of like being on a leash, and anyway, he was in so much pain that… Well, that we were in this mess in the first place. Martin had been defanged. He was only braced for what he still thought he could do.
“You’re not strong enough. Stop squirming.”
Martin stopped moving, but the vein didn’t. Digging was making things worse, so I decided to pull the needle out and start over.
“…The fuck I’m not! Jesus, it’s like you want to see for yourself. You want that? Because that could be arranged. You‘re temping fate, dumbass.”
“Martin… Quit your whining. Also, if you can sock me in the nose, you can probably make a fist with your left hand and make this bullshit easier. Stop screwing around and do it.”
His right hand relaxed, and his left contracted. With pretty perfect timing, I might add. It was like watching the tension travel from one side of his body to the other, as if it were a substance or an object in itself. Also, I made a mental note to watch out, in case he tried to punch me with that hand now, which really was a genuine possibility. If Martin wanted to mess someone up, he usually found a way, no matter how powerless the situation made him seem. I saw a vein that looked promising and went for it, but, like all the others, it rolled to the side. So I angled the needle to see if I could get in without having to start over again. Needless to say, he did not like this.
“…OW! Hey, how about, if you want me to stop whining, and you don’t like the idea of getting slugged, you cut that crap out? I feel like some kind of vein kebab.”
An hour ago, he felt like roadkill. Then he felt like “a fucking porch sofa,” and now this. I guess he‘d been sick so long that he was starting to run out of good similes.
“I’m doing the best I can, okay? I can’t help your arms are all skinny and fucked-up and shit.”
I can’t say for sure, because I’ve never given an injection to anyone else, but I suspected Martin was unusually difficult to stick. What flesh he had left had no cohesiveness or bounce to it, so his entire circulatory system must have been kind of floating around in there. Three years of self-injected medications and hastily installed IV lines had collapsed most of the veins in his left arm, and I didn’t know how to use anywhere else. All this was further complicated by the fact that none of the needle punctures sustained in the past month or so had even tried to close, so I was always trying to avoid any preexisting injuries. Basically, he had kind of a little flesh-and-blood obstacle course going on there. Combining that with my inexperience and his usual testiness, the whole task was pretty much a nightmare for both parties. Eventually, I had to try and pin the vein down myself, holding his arm in an iron grip. Now, I’d probably feel awful in about three days, when the huge greenish-brown bruise inevitably started rising up, but I didn’t know what else to do. And hey, it worked better than anything else I’d been trying. I felt that soft pop that I’d learned meant success, Martin flinched, and I pushed the morphine into him, shooting for the brain.
“…There. You okay?”
It took a few seconds for his face to relax, but when it did, he looked at me like this was the stupidest question ever asked.
“Um… No.”
He was lying flat on his back in bed, but somehow still managed to look down his nose at me.
“Martin, I meant ‘are you as okay as usual?’”
“I know. But that’s stupid. ‘Okay’ doesn’t have qualifiers. You are or you aren’t, and I’m not. What’s more, I’m never going to be, so it‘s not like you‘re going to get a different answer. You know that, so lay off.”
As always, the only way out of the argument was to concede to the fact that I was apparently an idiot and let it drop. Martin may be a person of considerable ability in most respects, but “backing off” was not among his particular talents. To put it another way: whoever first coined the phrase “let go or be dragged” had probably somehow anticipated his arrival on Earth, and just wanted to give everyone fair warning.
“Yeah, I know.”
Even after I admitted defeat, he still wasn’t done.
“’Okay’ was over a long time ago. This is like, the end stretch. Come on, you at least figured that out, right?”
I did. That didn’t make him saying it out loud feel any less jarring. Up until then, Martin had never said anything about dying, except maybe in an indirect, gallows humor kind of way. This isn’t to say that he never talked about death, because he did, all the fucking time, to the point where it got kind of annoying. Sometimes, it sounded almost like self-parody. Being dead was like a shtick for him. It’s just that the “-ing” had never come into the picture. It didn’t need to. Martin was already dead, and we dealt with it on those terms. Death-as-chronic-illness. It was just a normal problem. I mean, yeah, it was actually kind of a weird problem. I’d never heard of anyone else having it. But, like most weird problems, it functioned pretty much like a normal problem. We carried on like that for a good while. Then, without acknowledging it openly, we felt our old status quo, weird as it might have been, slipping away. Welcome to death-as-terminal-illness. That lost “-ing” suddenly had a place again.
“…If I said I kind of assumed, would you yell at me?”
He tilted his eyes like he was trying to look out the window above the bed, at whatever he could see from that position. From where I sat, the slate colored winter sky was dark and getting darker, the junkyard all jagged shadows and dirty snow, the horizon vanishing miles in the distance beyond the high chain-link fence. The world outside was hard and grey and cool. Inside was warm and stuffy. And almost just as dark, the corners of the room almost invisible, us sitting in a little pool of dim lightbulb-gold. Martin shifted his gaze to somewhere in that darkness around us, then exhaled softly.
“Nah. I mean, I might have a few weeks ago, but it’s not a few weeks ago anymore, you know? Acting like it isn’t going to happen doesn’t have much of a point to it now.”
I studied his face, trying to work out how he was feeling, but from what I could tell, he wasn’t feeling much of anything. From his expression, he could have been talking about any expected, self-evident thing. Which was probably the most classically Martin reaction to all of this, and the one that people who didn‘t know him well might not have anticipated. I’d never met someone with such a total, and probably intentional, disconnect between how they speak and act, and how they think. Martin could be petty and volatile. He always seemed almost willfully complex, and mostly used his impressive skill in lateral thinking to keep everyone he encountered on their toes. When he wanted to be, he was freewheeling and spontaneous. Unpredictable. But, even through all that, I’d always had an image of him as a sturdy, even-keeled, practical little being. So well-grounded that most people couldn’t even see that strong foundation underneath him, running miles below the Earth. For all his fucking around, Martin, well… Didn’t fuck around. Once he gained a good enough understanding of a situation, he’d dust off his hands and move on to the next. If asked for my thoughts on this, I’d say he probably had so much finesse that he found life rather unchallenging, and was just trying to make things more interesting for himself. Like a genius who screws around at the back of the class. That was him, too, so it would follow.
“So, you’ve, like…”
Made peace? Given up?
“…Accepted it? Not exactly. ‘Acceptance’ sounds pretty… Formal? It’s just… I don’t know. I can’t breathe, I can’t eat, I’m literally bleeding out of every orifice, and unless you shoot me up every few hours, I, excuse the cliché, hurt in places I didn’t even know I had. So it just kind of seems like a logical conclusion, and yeah, I’m pretty alright with it. Ever have a really long day and just want to go home and go to bed? Then you know the feeling. That‘s all. It’s not situation-specific or anything.”
“So, like…”
“…Tissues.”
“Wha…”
“It takes you forever to say anything. Pass the fuckin’ tissues and take some time out to string your words together.”
I grabbed the tissue box off the nightstand and handed it to him, listening to all his joints cracking and popping as he slowly sat up. If it felt anything like it sounded, god, I hoped the drugs were at least partially blocking it by now. Upright at last, he pulled out about five or six tissues, covered his mouth, and started coughing. I sat on standby, working out what I was going to say. Feeding myself my lines. Martin took a deep, rattling breath, spat, then held out the wad of tissues, now completely saturated, brown-black and sticky. There was also a bit of something, stringy and pinkish grey, but I didn’t want to think about what it was or where it came from.
“…Trashcan.”
I lifted it from its place by the bed. Martin deposited the tissues, then finished cleaning off his face with his sleeve. Good thing pretty much everything he owned was black, or his wardrobe would be in a pretty bad state by now.
“…Ugh. Gross. Fuck that, man. Anyway, what were you saying?”
“I don’t know. I guess… Martin, what do you want done?”
I had to wait a minute or two for him to resettle himself in bed before he could answer. He was flat on his back again, looking at the ceiling. Not at me. His eyes looked glassy, so I assumed the morphine had finally traveled up to his head. Either that, or he was about to blank for a while. Or, he was just feeling dazed and shitty because he was dead and/or dying. I couldn’t tell any of it apart anymore.
“…Well, what I’m thinking is, when my body gives the signal, I tell you to O.D. me. Speaking of which, I think that shot is kicking in, so you can go ahead and start on the rest. Let‘s get this shit done, already.”
This was the first I’d heard of this, and I wondered why the hell he hadn’t run it by me first, given that I kind of had a major role in his plans. But, since that wasn’t even what I’d meant to ask, I’d chew him out over it later. I grab the kipferon vial and uncap another needle.
“I mean… After that. You’re going to spend a lot more time dead than you’ll spend dying, you know.”
Martin was used to me not giving much visible indication that I was listening, so I was free to concentrate on filling the syringe to the right line, then giving it a few good taps.
“…Oh. Sky burial.”
I froze in place, needle held high and gleaming in that harsh, grimy light, like I was on the cover of some tacky horror film.
“Eww, Martin, no.”
“Well, why the hell not? It’s a done thing.”
“…That’s it, I’m fucking stabbing you.”
I moved about half an inch down that same relatively cooperative vein, and skewered it quickly, before it could slide away. Martin’s throat jumped like he was going to yelp, but he swallowed whatever noise he almost made. Instead, he breathed in sharply, sucking air through his teeth.
“God, take it easy with that thing, would you? Also, the heck you got against sky burials? Name one thing. Go on.”
I grabbed another vial, one of three that were filled with something that didn’t have a trade name yet. This one required a weird, larger-gauge needle, so I rifled through the nightstand drawer where I’d been stashing some of Martin’s assorted supplies.
“Because it’s like, one… Or, like, half of one… Step above putting you out with the trash. Actually, it might be a step below putting you out with the trash. See? It’s so fucked-up that I don’t even know where it is in relation to just shitcanning you!”
Martin, obviously unperturbed by the comparison, shrugged slightly.
“…Well, to be fair, it’s not like I’d even mind being ‘shitcanned.’ I’ll be dead, Corwin. It’s not like I would be there to disapprove or something.”
“I’d mind!”
The measurements on this type of syringe looked a little different, so I really had to pay attention. Between that and the current topic of conversation, I felt like my brain was spread a little thin. Juggling two separate things it wasn’t particularly good at. Well, three things, counting the multitasking itself.
“Then it’s a good thing you’re not the one who needs to get shitcanned, isn‘t it?”
He thought he was being very clever, and almost managed a laugh. I thought he was being a fucking smartass, as usual, but I let it slide.
“…Just a heads-up, I’m doing the big one now, okay? Anyway, this is the thing with the vultures, right?”
Martin looked personally offended, in the way that normally only followed Spenser goofing around and making jokes about “mindless zombies” or “destroying the head.” It was mostly a put-on, but usually came from a genuine place of wanting you to know that you were acting like an idiot. Sometimes, it was his way of playing along with the joke, should there be one.
“…I like vultures! And really, it’s just what was supposed to happen, before our brains got all huge and bloated and we wrecked the whole thing. Off-gassing in a sealed box for decades is a lot grosser. Imagine the fuckin‘ smell. And didn‘t you hear about all the problems with cemeteries and water tables? Like, with the rot and embalming fluid and shit? That‘s what happens when you don‘t let the vultures clean up after you. They‘re better at it than we are.”
I shook my head, and probed his arm for another sweet spot.
“How the fuck did people even think of this?”
Another shrug.
“I think it’s self explanatory.”
Smaller means sharper. Under the wider needle, the vein just sort of squished. Gripping the syringe with my teeth to free up my hands, I started messing with the rubber band I had around his upper arm.
“God, you have like, no structural integrity.”
I slurred, rather spittily, through clenched teeth.
“…And you do?”
“More than you!”
Pulling the band tighter with my left hand and injecting with my right was awkward as hell, but at least it created enough tension to let the needle go through.
“Ow!”
“Agh, glad that’s over… Anyway, I guess I actually meant… I don’t know. Why do people do this?”
With that, we were halfway through the intravenous leg of the whole medication ordeal. Usually, this is about where I start feeling like a giant jerk for repeatedly stabbing my dying best friend with pointy metal objects. But, like I said. Halfway through. I load the next syringe. A normal one this time. Thank fuck.
“Because it’s the most practical method when the ground’s too hard for burial and there isn’t enough wood for cremation.”
“So… The idea is, it’s just easier to drag people out on the lawn and let the birds get ‘em?”
“…Yeah, basically. I mean, there are other reasons, but then you have to specify if you’re thinking about Tibetan or Zoroastrian. They’re pretty much opposites.”
“Well, hey, we‘re stuck here until I‘m done… ‘Shooting you up,’ as you so intelligently put it… So, go on. Why, Martin? Explain the two perspectives on getting eaten by vultures.”
“Okay, just give me a sec. I didn’t phrase that right, because I didn’t know you’d actually ask.”
Martin bit down on the inside of his cheek, obviously thinking very hard. I thought of telling him to stop, because if he accidentally broke the skin, I didn’t know how long it would take to heal, but I didn‘t want to deal with any more Martin attitude than I was already getting for giving him injections.
“Well, like I said. We got nothing better to do. Also, hold the fuck still.”
Since it looked like he was still thinking, I went ahead and jabbed him again. He had something else to concentrate on, and the painkillers were working now, so he didn’t really flinch this time.
“Alright. Well, there aren’t actually just the two. Like I said, it’s kind of self-explanatory. Probably, everyone did it at first. And anyway, ‘opposite’ wasn’t quite the right word. They’re actually identical. It’s just different ways of looking at it.”
I chucked the empty syringe in the trashcan, then dug out a fresh one.
“Which are…?”
“Okay, the basic idea is that your body is just, like, barber floor hair… Wait, hold on. I have an analogy that would work better with potato peels or something.”
I was busy getting the next shot ready, and honestly, I wasn’t all that interested in wherever the hell this was going, because I suspected it was just him winding up to be willfully obtuse for a while. It was a mood he got in sometimes, and for as long as I’ve known him, it’s always driven me nuts. What’s worse, he only did it more often after his heath started to decline in earnest, so he’d really been trying my patience lately. All you can do is just let him come around to whatever convoluted point he decides to make, if there even is one.
“…Whichever is fine.”
“Not really. Barber hair wouldn’t work for this… Point is, it’s pretty much seen as the same stuff. But what the Zoroastrians think of as trash, the Buddhists think of as compost. The point of a Zoroastrian sky burial is getting you up on the platform, like the whole world needs to handle you with gloves or something. Tibetan sky burials are about getting you back into the world. Either way, the idea is that when you’re dead, you’re not there anymore, so it doesn’t really matter what happens. All there is left for you to do is disintegrate, you know?”
Martin, with his free hand, was absently fiddling with his own hair, which had been shedding a lot lately. Not enough to be noticeable to someone who hadn’t seen what it was like before, but enough that I noticed. In the past few months, it went from almost impenetrably dense to nearly average, practically sitting flush with his scalp now. As if scripted, he held up a few dark strands, examined them, then let them drift down to the sheets, limp and dark.
“…Okay, so it doesn’t matter. Not that I disagree, but if that’s the case, why would you even want a sky burial? Why be that specific in the first place? Also, you‘re not making a fist. Get on that.”
He made kind of a grunting noise that sounded a little angry, but he complied.
“I just like the whole idea behind it. I mean, not the Zoroastrian one specifically, because that can go get fucked. The execution is good, but the motive doesn’t feel much different than what makes most people want to see the people closest to them eventually get pumped full of formaldehyde and stuffed in a box. I mean, god forbid you be dead, right? It’s locking people out of the world when you should be doing everything in your power to help them rejoin it. And yeah, it’s not like you’re going to know about it or anything, and you’ll probably eventually decompose either way, but that doesn’t mean it’s right. It’s like… Reincorporation is your last act on Earth, even if it’s a passive one. And if you really care about someone, you’ll help them run to the finish line, not hold them back from it. They can’t do it for themselves, so it falls on you.”
This time, I’d stuck him mid-monolog, so I don’t even think he noticed. He was too neck-deep in his own crap.
“Martin… That’s all well and good, but the prevailing idea is, if you care about someone, you don’t let them get eaten by vultures.”
Without any warning, something in the conversation changed. And I had no time to prepare myself.
“…No, the prevailing idea is that, if you care about someone, you put aside all your selfish bullshit and see them through to the end. Even if it’s fucking hard. It’s not my problem if you’ve all decided the work’s over the instant someone flatlines. I mean, what, you’re one of those people who stops giving a shit about their friends the instant they leave the room? God, why didn‘t you warn me before I started hanging around you all the damn time? You‘re fucked-up, Corwin! Holy shit. You. Are. Fucked-up.”
I was used to Martin ranting, but I’d never heard him take this tone before. In fact, the closest thing to it that I’d ever heard, from anyone, albeit at about twice the speed, is when Spenser gets so wound up that he’s not having fun anymore and starts shooting off his mouth like an AK-47, blowing everyone else out of the conversation, desperate for enough space to pour out all the thoughts that he couldn’t be alone with. From him, it’s terrifying, but from Martin, it was straight-up surreal. Like I said, he’s always been one of the most ridiculously stable people I’d ever encountered. Or, at least he was, until two fucking minutes ago. To the best of my knowledge, at least. I had a sense that I was uncovering something I didn’t want to see. But, shit, if he’s going to talk like Spenser, then I’ll respond accordingly.
“…That’s not what I fucking said, and you know it.”
Just the blood thinner left to deal with. Dammit, why did I have to do the last one now? At least me loading syringes gave us a good reason to avoid looking at each other.
“Yeah, well, what did you say?”
I pulled the band tight again, so I wouldn’t have to waste a bunch of time, now that I was almost done. God, just let me finish this so I can leave the room. It went in easily enough this time. I pulled the needle out quickly, then pressed a wad of tissues against the puncture. This one bleeds. That’s why I usually do it last.
“Oh, I don’t know. Give me a break, Martin. I’m just not used to…”
“What? Dead people? Or just dead people you actually have to deal with? Go back a few thousand years and say that again.”
“You can say that, and I guess I can’t really argue with you. But the thing is, I’m not a few… You know what? You win. I couldn’t give a shit. Just tell me what this even entails. Do we just drag you out and like, hope some vultures show up?”
I took a few seconds to check the bleeding. It was slowing down, but not quite enough that I could let go yet. Martin paused to think.
“…Well, that’s actually one way to do it. Probably the most traditional, actually. There’s also a more complicated version.”
“How the heck do you complicate getting eaten by vultures?”
The blood was barely at a trickle now, so I grabbed a box of gauze and got to work. Since the needle marks stopped closing up, the skin at the crook of his arm looking bruised and raw and sticky, more and more like some kind of rotting organic mesh, I figured just keeping that area bandaged when not in use would probably be safer.
“ I don’t know, I guess ‘complicated” wasn’t the right word. Maybe it’s just more… Involved? Basically, you help the vultures get started. What happens, is the Body Breaker guts you, might make a few slices in the skin to help the birds smell you coming, sometimes cuts you into smaller pieces and kind of spreads you around so everyone can get a turn. Some wait around with mallets until the vultures are done so they can crush the skeleton. Sounds like a lot of work if you ask me, and I probably wouldn’t bother, but it’s pretty thorough about making sure there’s nothing left of you.”
“…Body Breaker?”
“Yeah. It’s just what it sounds like, so don‘t get sidetracked on it or anything.”
While I swiped on the antiseptic and unspooled the gauze, doing what little I could to keep him intact and clean, I listened to Martin calmly explaining just how he planned to be torn apart. There came a sudden awareness of some huge push-and-pull, us swaying in the wind at the center. It was about so much more than just vultures and bandages, but somehow, accidentally putting those things in the same context perfectly summed up the whole thing. I thought about how sad it was. We weren’t going to win. Any of us.
“So… What? I call up the funeral home all like ‘uh, can I speak to your Tibetan Body Breaker?’”
“Eh, even if they had one, it’d be overkill. Like I said, it’s labor-intensive, but not all that complex. Anyone could do it, probably.”
“I… Am not doing that.”
“Yeah, I figured you wouldn’t. I kind of assumed, if we went for it at all, Spenser would take care of it. He’s probably done worse.”
“…But not to anyone he knew! You can’t do that to him, Martin.”
“Nah. Spenser gets it, you know? It wouldn’t be some traumatizing thing for him. He doesn’t think that way. Actually, I didn’t know you did, either, but whatever. No one really ‘knows’ anyone, I guess…”
God, I wanted to punch him right in his snide little mouth.
“Hey, I’m just as surprised as you. Silly me, I guess I just never thought I’d have to think about it, period.”
Martin was staring at the ceiling again. He still had that glassy look, but I’d stopped trying to guess why. Probably, his mind was just somewhere else.
“…What, you think we were going to live forever? That I was going to live forever, like this? Holy shit, man. You’re even more out of touch than I thought.”
We weren’t going to win. Any of us.
“No, I just expected… I don’t know. Probably nothing that sounds much better, when I actually think about it.”
“See? You’re going to have to get used to this. Spenser might be the only one swinging the hatchet, but he’ll need someone to talk to, and they’ll have to be able to hold a normal conversation. The fuck you think is going to do that? Hal? No way. Dude cries when people get shot in movies. In fact, he ain‘t even invited. Can‘t have that pantywaist lousing up my goddamn Sky Burial…”
I taped the gauze in place, then let his arm go for the first time in what felt like hours. It stretched out limply on the bed. And I could hardly remember what I usually did with my own hands, so they didn’t look much better. We droop.
“…So it‘s for like, moral support or something?”
Martin tried to haul himself up into a sitting position, with no small measure of effort. Surprisingly, it kind of worked. He was at least able to make it so he was lying vertically against the wall, not horizontally against the mattress. He pulled his left sleeve back down, crossed his arms. His shoulders cracked sharply.
“No… Well, yeah, that too… Honestly, I think doing that sort of shit alone for so long is what fucked him up as bad as he is… But part of the whole thing is, the people doing the Breaking have to act casual, so the dead person feels like they can let go and move out of this sort of liminal space and onto wherever they’re going next. It’s how you prove to them you know that their body is just an object now. That you know they aren’t there anymore. You have to act like you’re just turning the compost, or they won’t catch on that it’s really time to go.”
“Martin… That’s all very interesting, but what the hell does it even have to do with you?”
“…Bucket.”
“Wait, what?”
“Now that we’re done with injections we’re doing pills, right? I just figured that if I’m going to puke, I might as well get it over with now so I don’t upchuck anything important. Now give me the goddamn bucket.”
The bucket sat next to the trashcan, like we’d needed to outsource the Vomit Division of the Waste Disposal Corp. or something. I passed it up to Martin, who carefully removed the tubes from his nose, then immediately collapsed around it and started heaving. He looked and sounded like he was in a lot of pain, so I ended up having to turn away until he finally finished, shaking from exertion and panting so hard I swore I heard sloshing in his lungs.
“…Take this fuckin’ thing away, would you?”
He practically shoved the bucket in my face, then went into another coughing fit, not bothering with the tissues this time. He just hacked blood into the bend of his elbow, further messing up his shirt, then calmly replaced the oxygen tubes, breathing heavily to catch up on any air he‘d missed. I took the bucket and sat it on the floor by the bed, not bothering to look at the contents, less because they were particularly disgusting and more because they weren’t anything I didn’t expect. Black and gritty, same as yesterday and the day before. All it showed was that he was bleeding a lot and hadn’t been eating, which I’d already figured out. Actually, I’d been really worried about him. I wanted to just come out with it, say “dude, I can see your ribs through your shirt, we need to find something you can keep down,” or whatever, but honestly, I wasn’t sure it would be worth the trouble. We weren’t going to win. Any of us. And you’re already losing.
“…Pills.”
Martin has one of those gigantic pill organizers, the kind that have literal drawers for each day. I passed him today’s drawer. He opened the “evening” compartment. I tried to pick up where we’d left off.
“So, anyway…”
“You were asking what any of that had to do with me?”
“I guess so.”
Martin launched into a dramatic speech, that I imagine he’d prepared, and rather poorly, I might add, while vomiting in a bucket. Which is actually kind of hilarious.
“God, Corwin, you’re dense as… I don’t even know. Some kind of big stupid cube. Just like… A block of… Crap. You’re a goddamn blockhead, is what you are. What doesn’t that have to do with me? Didn’t you catch the part about the dead person being caught in the middle and not really dead? Did you just sleepwalk through these last few years? Gee, where the hell would I get the idea that a gesture to urge me on to the other side might be just a little bit applicable?”
That screed exhausted him, and he had to pant to catch his breath, hard enough to visibly separate the ribs, air rasping loudly through his shredded lungs. Not knowing what else I could do for him, I reached for the concentrator on the nightstand and dialed up the air a notch. That seemed to help, and I waited for his breathing to stabilize before I got to talking again.
“…I don’t just mean that, I mean all of it. What ‘other side?’ What ‘you’ are you talking about in that context? Did I miss some memo about you not being an Atheist?”
I must have tripped some kind of mental wire, because that was when he, run-down as he was by now, really went off.
“…Not everyone is as fucking dismally literal-minded as you! God, some life. You don’t see any symbolic value in anything. There’s ‘straightforward,’ and then there’s whatever the hell you even are. I’ve always fucking hated that about you, you know that? Hated. Especially because it wouldn’t be so much of a problem if you’d just take five minutes and think, for once. That’s the whole issue I have with you here. You’re treating disbelief in an afterlife as a get-out-of-thinking-free card. And then you say I’m the one who just wants to be unceremoniously dragged out with the trash. I mean, okay, there‘s a religious basis. But you really can‘t see why a person, Atheist or otherwise, would look at a ceremony, the point of which is to show their body for what it is, while using it for its final intended purpose, and see just a little bit of meaning in that? Sucks to be you, asshole. Fucking sucks.”
Martin punctuated each cutting personal insult by choking down a pill with a sip of stale water from the glass on the nightstand. God, he’s so fucking pathetic. He could say just about anything, and I‘d never be able to bring myself to dislike him. Of course, he’s also annoying, so there’s that.
“Look, it just sounded kind of weird, alright?”
“Yeah, well, welcome to other people.”
“Martin…”
By now, he’d worn himself out. He was sitting so he was kind of bent in half, holding his head in his hands, ribs rising and falling again.
“…Look, I’m sorry. I’ve been kind of pissed-off lately. I took it out on you. Not saying I shouldn’t have, just saying you probably should understand why.”
Something about the position he was in made him sound kind of muffled.
“Okay.”
“Listen… Don’t even worry about this. I mean, we’re going to be doing it, but when the time comes, I guarantee you’ll be ready.”
That said, Martin let out a single wet, noisy, open-mouthed cough. A huge, dark clot fell out of him and onto the bedspread, where it sat, glistening, until he grabbed a tissue and plopped it in the can, on top of the syringes and everything else. We should really get one of those red doctor’s-office bags or something.
“But…”
He sat a little straighter, but was still propping up his head, one-handed now, leaning his elbow on his crossed legs, the way you‘d lean on a desk. It was the way he always sat when he kept me company on my hundreds of grad-school smoke breaks. I don’t know why this made me sad, but it did.
“…No. You will be ready. What you’re going to have to watch over these next few weeks, or months, or however far you have to stretch this shit into the future to feel better about it… Just trust me. It’ll make getting torn apart by vultures look like a cakewalk. You’ll start looking forward to it. I promise you.”
While he spoke, he kept his eyes fixed on mine. Again, this was something he‘d always done, and there was something strangely poignant in that. Like if he kept at it long enough, the world would remember how things were supposed to be, and finally set it all right.
“I don’t know…”
I’d never liked really insistent eye contact. It always seemed like something that would be seen as really rude, and I was genuinely surprised when I realized it was actually expected. Well, Martin locks eyes with you like he’s trying to get a good look at your retinas, which even hardline eye-contact sticklers find kind of unnerving. But for some reason, I never minded it as much from him as I did from most people. It was just such a part of who he was, I guess, that it didn‘t bother me. He wasn’t unknowingly invading my space. He was just being Martin. And right now, I was just as fixated as he was, trying to commit that intense, faded-green stare to memory. I’d come to rely on his sharp, expansive, noisy personality to back me up, and I had no idea how I’d make my way in the world without even a token bit of that forceful, unflagging vitality on my side. But, he looked away. I looked at the floor. The connection was lost. I missed him already.
“…I know you don’t know. I don’t expect you to. We’re not there yet. Just… Think about everything that might happen, and remember that I’ll have to be there for it. I’ll be stuck in here, sitting through it all. When my body isn’t me anymore, I won’t feel a thing. I mean, fuck. You know?”
He sat back up against the cold window, hair hanging in his face. It looked wet and dirty, but I wasn’t sure if he was sweating, or if he‘d splattered some blood on it, or if it was just stringy from not having been washed in a while.
“What, and I won’t be there for the goddamn vulture thing?”
Martin leaned forward again, not even bothering to look at me. For the first time, I was the one who wanted to move my head around until the other person was forced to meet my eyes.
“You will, but you have only one easy fucking job: let me go.”
“It’s not as easy as it-”
I couldn’t even finish before he snapped at me, louder than I thought those ruined lungs could manage.
“…Practice!”
Facing down the way he was, he might as well have been yelling at the mattress.
“What…?”
“I said, fucking practice. Start now.”
“I-”
“Start now, and you’ll make all the shit leading up to it easier on both of us. It’s enough stress without knowing you’re going to be all fucked up over me not being around.”
Yeah, well, too late.
“Martin, you don’t… I mean, I don’t… The hell do you want from me? How? How do I…”
My throat started pulling at itself, and I felt a weird pinching behind my eyes. I watched everything go blurry. Thank god, finally. For the first time in years, I was going to cry. Sure, I’d had a lot of near misses and false starts, but the last time I actually went all the way and cried was a few months before I completed my PhD. I guess I was stressed or something. It was long enough after Martin died the first time for him to be awake and aware, but he was spending most of the time blanked out, and wouldn’t really interact with anything or anyone. I was still going in to visit him semi-regularly, but I remember one day, I figured that, if he didn’t care, I wasn’t going to bother anymore. That decided, I went to my bathroom to have a smoke, closed the door, sat down on the toilet lid, and just scattered into a million pieces. I hadn’t been sleeping. I’d taken enough caffeine pills that afternoon to set my teeth on edge. Increasingly, I hardly understood what people wanted me to do, beyond “too much at once.” I’d clawed my way up to a place where I didn’t belong and couldn’t survive. And I was alone. My best and only friend didn’t like me anymore. And I knew that he was totally disconnected from everything, not just me, so it wasn’t personal, but the fact remained that he didn’t, and there was nothing I could do or say to bring him back. What’s more, I’d been walking around in a kind of daze since they rushed us out of the space station, and terribly busy, so I hadn’t really felt the impact until I finally got a minute’s peace. I completely lost my shit. It went on for about an hour, and it was that noisy, snotty kind of crying where your hair and shirt get wet and you feel like you’ve been rained on. I tired myself out, then just sat there, completely silent. I smoked half a pack in one sitting, staring, unseeingly, at my ugly shower curtain. Then- and here’s the really weird part- I stood up, sat down at my computer, and started proofreading a paper. After that, I never cried again. I guess something just got shocked out of me.
“…Jesus, didn’t I just explain!?”
“No. You just fucking ordered me to-”
As soon as I opened my mouth to reply, the pulling stopped and the feeling evaporated. Just one of those things, I guess. Defeated, I turned towards the window. By now, it was completely dark. All I could see was a blurry reflection of how we’d look from the other side of the glass. Martin’s shoulder blades rising above his hunched spine, black shirt and dark hair blending into the shadows, like he was only half there. My scarred face, with the same dull look it always had; that terrible, uneven haircut I’d given myself last month, starting to lose its blunt, freshly-scissored edges, too long in some places, sticking out awkwardly in others. My god, how did we get here? What the hell happened to us?
“I meant before. It’s the same as being there to watch the vultures. I mean, shit, didn’t I just say that?”
“You did, but…”
“What I’m saying is, you need to just act and talk like you would any other day, or this is going to fucking suck for me! I’m already coming apart at the seams, so let’s just start now. Act natural, do your fucking job, and let me go in peace.”
He was holding his head again, so I couldn’t see his face, and couldn’t even guess at what expression he was making. The only expressions his voice went with right now were expressions I’d never seen on him, ever. If I didn’t know him so well, I’d think he was about to cry. And I might not have cried in years, but I’d only seen Martin cry once. Even then, I didn’t actually see him. Just heard him, sniffling on my fire escape after I lost my temper in some stupid argument and accused him of being a sociopath. I felt terrible then, and I felt terrible now, even if I didn’t really do anything this time. The problem was, I felt like anything I even could do would seem like a betrayal. I guess I could go along with what he wanted. But, looking at him now, even without seeing his face, all I could think was that this wasn’t someone I could bear to let go. He needed me, and he needed me to not need him. I needed him to know he was needed. There were just too many conflicting needs to meet at once. We weren’t going to win. Any of us. The game was rigged from the start.
“That sounds great on paper, but I don’t know if I can just act like you don’t even matter to me. I mean… You do. I’ve known you longer than almost anyone. I can’t…”
“You can. I won’t be here, Corwin. To matter, or not-matter, or anything else.”
“You act like that isn’t the whole problem!”
I couldn’t keep my voice from shaking. I willed myself to cry and get it over and done with, but nothing came. I just felt slack and hollow.
“I act like it’s happening, so you’d better start getting used to it now.”
“I don’t know if I…”
“Yeah, well, you don’t have a choice. I’d keep that in mind if I were you. And it’s not like I don’t have a damn good reason to keep it in mind myself. So if we can’t do anything, let’s just say ‘screw it’ and live our lives. Wipe that fucking look off your face and keep going.”
“Well… What should I do, then? No one told me how to do this.”
Martin exhaled noisily, then glanced at over at me. No fixed gaze; he was just kind of looking at me. Normally. His eyes could have belonged to anyone. For the first time, I was smacked with how little there actually was left of him.
“…I’m going to bed, so logic follows that you say goodnight and go bother someone else.”
Without another word, he slid down under the covers, then turned away and curled up on his side.
“Okay… Goodnight, Martin.”
I have no idea how it occurred to me to do this, because it isn’t like me at all, but before I went to turn off the light, I gently laid my hand on his shoulder. His hand jerked up to smack me away.
“Didn’t I just tell you to act normal!? Don’t fucking touch me, and don’t come back in here until you can get that through your head!”
My arm dropped at my side. Martin went still and quiet again. Body resting heavily, hair limp and matted and dark against the pillowcase. I looked down at him for a while, which just made me want to put my hand back where it was. For the split second I was able to touch him, he felt cold and bony and fragile. I wanted him to leech even just a little bit of the heat from my hand. And yeah, maybe it would be weird to say “goodnight” again when I’d just said it, so I could say something like… I don‘t know. “It‘s okay.” Even if, like he said, it wasn’t. And I‘m sure this was the opposite of the sort of reaction he was trying to inspire, but even knowing that just made me think about how badly he needed to be held. He should have a physical reminder that someone was there, whether he liked it or not. Facing away from me, drawn up around himself, his spine cresting so harsh and jagged under his shirt that it almost looked like it was hurting him. He seemed so sharp and self-contained, completely closed-off. Terribly small and angry, in pain, charging forward on some difficult, final internal journey. Alone. God, I didn’t want him to be. Fuck it, he was my friend, and I wanted so badly to just sit down and say “tough shit, asshole, I’m going to hold you until my arms fall asleep.” But, I’d never been a physically affectionate person. He told me to act normal. And I guess I should at least try. I force myself to turn away from him.
“Fine. Goodnight.”
starphotographsStory: Corwin and Friends
Characters: Corwin (POV), Martin.
Colors: Clean Again 3 (Everlasting Ends), Baby Pink 22 (“He says it would be awesome, but I think it would be disrespectful and macabre.”), Admin Yellow 15 (“In the end, we're all alone and no one is coming to save you.”)
Supplies and Styles: Portrait
Word Count: 7,943
Rating: Not sure if hard PG-13 or soft R.
Warnings: Choose not to warn.
Summary: Martin has plans. Corwin has doubts.
Note: This takes place several months after “From the Bottom of My Rotten Heart,” which is what I did for the “Body Envy” prompt. I think they can be read in any order, though. Also, this is at a point in their story when they’re in hiding, and living with Hal at his place at the junkyard. (Same Hal and same junkyard from “See You Later (If I See You at All).”) As always, comments of any type make me happy!
“…Corwin, I will break your fucking nose. I mean it.”
Actually, I almost believed him. His right hand was clenched in such a tight fist that I swore it’d been compressed down to twice the density of the rest of him, ready to punch a hole through anything that got in its way. The way his arm was drawn back reminded me of a pinball plunger in the second before you let go. But, I figured I was probably safe. Being hooked up to the oxygen concentrator was kind of like being on a leash, and anyway, he was in so much pain that… Well, that we were in this mess in the first place. Martin had been defanged. He was only braced for what he still thought he could do.
“You’re not strong enough. Stop squirming.”
Martin stopped moving, but the vein didn’t. Digging was making things worse, so I decided to pull the needle out and start over.
“…The fuck I’m not! Jesus, it’s like you want to see for yourself. You want that? Because that could be arranged. You‘re temping fate, dumbass.”
“Martin… Quit your whining. Also, if you can sock me in the nose, you can probably make a fist with your left hand and make this bullshit easier. Stop screwing around and do it.”
His right hand relaxed, and his left contracted. With pretty perfect timing, I might add. It was like watching the tension travel from one side of his body to the other, as if it were a substance or an object in itself. Also, I made a mental note to watch out, in case he tried to punch me with that hand now, which really was a genuine possibility. If Martin wanted to mess someone up, he usually found a way, no matter how powerless the situation made him seem. I saw a vein that looked promising and went for it, but, like all the others, it rolled to the side. So I angled the needle to see if I could get in without having to start over again. Needless to say, he did not like this.
“…OW! Hey, how about, if you want me to stop whining, and you don’t like the idea of getting slugged, you cut that crap out? I feel like some kind of vein kebab.”
An hour ago, he felt like roadkill. Then he felt like “a fucking porch sofa,” and now this. I guess he‘d been sick so long that he was starting to run out of good similes.
“I’m doing the best I can, okay? I can’t help your arms are all skinny and fucked-up and shit.”
I can’t say for sure, because I’ve never given an injection to anyone else, but I suspected Martin was unusually difficult to stick. What flesh he had left had no cohesiveness or bounce to it, so his entire circulatory system must have been kind of floating around in there. Three years of self-injected medications and hastily installed IV lines had collapsed most of the veins in his left arm, and I didn’t know how to use anywhere else. All this was further complicated by the fact that none of the needle punctures sustained in the past month or so had even tried to close, so I was always trying to avoid any preexisting injuries. Basically, he had kind of a little flesh-and-blood obstacle course going on there. Combining that with my inexperience and his usual testiness, the whole task was pretty much a nightmare for both parties. Eventually, I had to try and pin the vein down myself, holding his arm in an iron grip. Now, I’d probably feel awful in about three days, when the huge greenish-brown bruise inevitably started rising up, but I didn’t know what else to do. And hey, it worked better than anything else I’d been trying. I felt that soft pop that I’d learned meant success, Martin flinched, and I pushed the morphine into him, shooting for the brain.
“…There. You okay?”
It took a few seconds for his face to relax, but when it did, he looked at me like this was the stupidest question ever asked.
“Um… No.”
He was lying flat on his back in bed, but somehow still managed to look down his nose at me.
“Martin, I meant ‘are you as okay as usual?’”
“I know. But that’s stupid. ‘Okay’ doesn’t have qualifiers. You are or you aren’t, and I’m not. What’s more, I’m never going to be, so it‘s not like you‘re going to get a different answer. You know that, so lay off.”
As always, the only way out of the argument was to concede to the fact that I was apparently an idiot and let it drop. Martin may be a person of considerable ability in most respects, but “backing off” was not among his particular talents. To put it another way: whoever first coined the phrase “let go or be dragged” had probably somehow anticipated his arrival on Earth, and just wanted to give everyone fair warning.
“Yeah, I know.”
Even after I admitted defeat, he still wasn’t done.
“’Okay’ was over a long time ago. This is like, the end stretch. Come on, you at least figured that out, right?”
I did. That didn’t make him saying it out loud feel any less jarring. Up until then, Martin had never said anything about dying, except maybe in an indirect, gallows humor kind of way. This isn’t to say that he never talked about death, because he did, all the fucking time, to the point where it got kind of annoying. Sometimes, it sounded almost like self-parody. Being dead was like a shtick for him. It’s just that the “-ing” had never come into the picture. It didn’t need to. Martin was already dead, and we dealt with it on those terms. Death-as-chronic-illness. It was just a normal problem. I mean, yeah, it was actually kind of a weird problem. I’d never heard of anyone else having it. But, like most weird problems, it functioned pretty much like a normal problem. We carried on like that for a good while. Then, without acknowledging it openly, we felt our old status quo, weird as it might have been, slipping away. Welcome to death-as-terminal-illness. That lost “-ing” suddenly had a place again.
“…If I said I kind of assumed, would you yell at me?”
He tilted his eyes like he was trying to look out the window above the bed, at whatever he could see from that position. From where I sat, the slate colored winter sky was dark and getting darker, the junkyard all jagged shadows and dirty snow, the horizon vanishing miles in the distance beyond the high chain-link fence. The world outside was hard and grey and cool. Inside was warm and stuffy. And almost just as dark, the corners of the room almost invisible, us sitting in a little pool of dim lightbulb-gold. Martin shifted his gaze to somewhere in that darkness around us, then exhaled softly.
“Nah. I mean, I might have a few weeks ago, but it’s not a few weeks ago anymore, you know? Acting like it isn’t going to happen doesn’t have much of a point to it now.”
I studied his face, trying to work out how he was feeling, but from what I could tell, he wasn’t feeling much of anything. From his expression, he could have been talking about any expected, self-evident thing. Which was probably the most classically Martin reaction to all of this, and the one that people who didn‘t know him well might not have anticipated. I’d never met someone with such a total, and probably intentional, disconnect between how they speak and act, and how they think. Martin could be petty and volatile. He always seemed almost willfully complex, and mostly used his impressive skill in lateral thinking to keep everyone he encountered on their toes. When he wanted to be, he was freewheeling and spontaneous. Unpredictable. But, even through all that, I’d always had an image of him as a sturdy, even-keeled, practical little being. So well-grounded that most people couldn’t even see that strong foundation underneath him, running miles below the Earth. For all his fucking around, Martin, well… Didn’t fuck around. Once he gained a good enough understanding of a situation, he’d dust off his hands and move on to the next. If asked for my thoughts on this, I’d say he probably had so much finesse that he found life rather unchallenging, and was just trying to make things more interesting for himself. Like a genius who screws around at the back of the class. That was him, too, so it would follow.
“So, you’ve, like…”
Made peace? Given up?
“…Accepted it? Not exactly. ‘Acceptance’ sounds pretty… Formal? It’s just… I don’t know. I can’t breathe, I can’t eat, I’m literally bleeding out of every orifice, and unless you shoot me up every few hours, I, excuse the cliché, hurt in places I didn’t even know I had. So it just kind of seems like a logical conclusion, and yeah, I’m pretty alright with it. Ever have a really long day and just want to go home and go to bed? Then you know the feeling. That‘s all. It’s not situation-specific or anything.”
“So, like…”
“…Tissues.”
“Wha…”
“It takes you forever to say anything. Pass the fuckin’ tissues and take some time out to string your words together.”
I grabbed the tissue box off the nightstand and handed it to him, listening to all his joints cracking and popping as he slowly sat up. If it felt anything like it sounded, god, I hoped the drugs were at least partially blocking it by now. Upright at last, he pulled out about five or six tissues, covered his mouth, and started coughing. I sat on standby, working out what I was going to say. Feeding myself my lines. Martin took a deep, rattling breath, spat, then held out the wad of tissues, now completely saturated, brown-black and sticky. There was also a bit of something, stringy and pinkish grey, but I didn’t want to think about what it was or where it came from.
“…Trashcan.”
I lifted it from its place by the bed. Martin deposited the tissues, then finished cleaning off his face with his sleeve. Good thing pretty much everything he owned was black, or his wardrobe would be in a pretty bad state by now.
“…Ugh. Gross. Fuck that, man. Anyway, what were you saying?”
“I don’t know. I guess… Martin, what do you want done?”
I had to wait a minute or two for him to resettle himself in bed before he could answer. He was flat on his back again, looking at the ceiling. Not at me. His eyes looked glassy, so I assumed the morphine had finally traveled up to his head. Either that, or he was about to blank for a while. Or, he was just feeling dazed and shitty because he was dead and/or dying. I couldn’t tell any of it apart anymore.
“…Well, what I’m thinking is, when my body gives the signal, I tell you to O.D. me. Speaking of which, I think that shot is kicking in, so you can go ahead and start on the rest. Let‘s get this shit done, already.”
This was the first I’d heard of this, and I wondered why the hell he hadn’t run it by me first, given that I kind of had a major role in his plans. But, since that wasn’t even what I’d meant to ask, I’d chew him out over it later. I grab the kipferon vial and uncap another needle.
“I mean… After that. You’re going to spend a lot more time dead than you’ll spend dying, you know.”
Martin was used to me not giving much visible indication that I was listening, so I was free to concentrate on filling the syringe to the right line, then giving it a few good taps.
“…Oh. Sky burial.”
I froze in place, needle held high and gleaming in that harsh, grimy light, like I was on the cover of some tacky horror film.
“Eww, Martin, no.”
“Well, why the hell not? It’s a done thing.”
“…That’s it, I’m fucking stabbing you.”
I moved about half an inch down that same relatively cooperative vein, and skewered it quickly, before it could slide away. Martin’s throat jumped like he was going to yelp, but he swallowed whatever noise he almost made. Instead, he breathed in sharply, sucking air through his teeth.
“God, take it easy with that thing, would you? Also, the heck you got against sky burials? Name one thing. Go on.”
I grabbed another vial, one of three that were filled with something that didn’t have a trade name yet. This one required a weird, larger-gauge needle, so I rifled through the nightstand drawer where I’d been stashing some of Martin’s assorted supplies.
“Because it’s like, one… Or, like, half of one… Step above putting you out with the trash. Actually, it might be a step below putting you out with the trash. See? It’s so fucked-up that I don’t even know where it is in relation to just shitcanning you!”
Martin, obviously unperturbed by the comparison, shrugged slightly.
“…Well, to be fair, it’s not like I’d even mind being ‘shitcanned.’ I’ll be dead, Corwin. It’s not like I would be there to disapprove or something.”
“I’d mind!”
The measurements on this type of syringe looked a little different, so I really had to pay attention. Between that and the current topic of conversation, I felt like my brain was spread a little thin. Juggling two separate things it wasn’t particularly good at. Well, three things, counting the multitasking itself.
“Then it’s a good thing you’re not the one who needs to get shitcanned, isn‘t it?”
He thought he was being very clever, and almost managed a laugh. I thought he was being a fucking smartass, as usual, but I let it slide.
“…Just a heads-up, I’m doing the big one now, okay? Anyway, this is the thing with the vultures, right?”
Martin looked personally offended, in the way that normally only followed Spenser goofing around and making jokes about “mindless zombies” or “destroying the head.” It was mostly a put-on, but usually came from a genuine place of wanting you to know that you were acting like an idiot. Sometimes, it was his way of playing along with the joke, should there be one.
“…I like vultures! And really, it’s just what was supposed to happen, before our brains got all huge and bloated and we wrecked the whole thing. Off-gassing in a sealed box for decades is a lot grosser. Imagine the fuckin‘ smell. And didn‘t you hear about all the problems with cemeteries and water tables? Like, with the rot and embalming fluid and shit? That‘s what happens when you don‘t let the vultures clean up after you. They‘re better at it than we are.”
I shook my head, and probed his arm for another sweet spot.
“How the fuck did people even think of this?”
Another shrug.
“I think it’s self explanatory.”
Smaller means sharper. Under the wider needle, the vein just sort of squished. Gripping the syringe with my teeth to free up my hands, I started messing with the rubber band I had around his upper arm.
“God, you have like, no structural integrity.”
I slurred, rather spittily, through clenched teeth.
“…And you do?”
“More than you!”
Pulling the band tighter with my left hand and injecting with my right was awkward as hell, but at least it created enough tension to let the needle go through.
“Ow!”
“Agh, glad that’s over… Anyway, I guess I actually meant… I don’t know. Why do people do this?”
With that, we were halfway through the intravenous leg of the whole medication ordeal. Usually, this is about where I start feeling like a giant jerk for repeatedly stabbing my dying best friend with pointy metal objects. But, like I said. Halfway through. I load the next syringe. A normal one this time. Thank fuck.
“Because it’s the most practical method when the ground’s too hard for burial and there isn’t enough wood for cremation.”
“So… The idea is, it’s just easier to drag people out on the lawn and let the birds get ‘em?”
“…Yeah, basically. I mean, there are other reasons, but then you have to specify if you’re thinking about Tibetan or Zoroastrian. They’re pretty much opposites.”
“Well, hey, we‘re stuck here until I‘m done… ‘Shooting you up,’ as you so intelligently put it… So, go on. Why, Martin? Explain the two perspectives on getting eaten by vultures.”
“Okay, just give me a sec. I didn’t phrase that right, because I didn’t know you’d actually ask.”
Martin bit down on the inside of his cheek, obviously thinking very hard. I thought of telling him to stop, because if he accidentally broke the skin, I didn’t know how long it would take to heal, but I didn‘t want to deal with any more Martin attitude than I was already getting for giving him injections.
“Well, like I said. We got nothing better to do. Also, hold the fuck still.”
Since it looked like he was still thinking, I went ahead and jabbed him again. He had something else to concentrate on, and the painkillers were working now, so he didn’t really flinch this time.
“Alright. Well, there aren’t actually just the two. Like I said, it’s kind of self-explanatory. Probably, everyone did it at first. And anyway, ‘opposite’ wasn’t quite the right word. They’re actually identical. It’s just different ways of looking at it.”
I chucked the empty syringe in the trashcan, then dug out a fresh one.
“Which are…?”
“Okay, the basic idea is that your body is just, like, barber floor hair… Wait, hold on. I have an analogy that would work better with potato peels or something.”
I was busy getting the next shot ready, and honestly, I wasn’t all that interested in wherever the hell this was going, because I suspected it was just him winding up to be willfully obtuse for a while. It was a mood he got in sometimes, and for as long as I’ve known him, it’s always driven me nuts. What’s worse, he only did it more often after his heath started to decline in earnest, so he’d really been trying my patience lately. All you can do is just let him come around to whatever convoluted point he decides to make, if there even is one.
“…Whichever is fine.”
“Not really. Barber hair wouldn’t work for this… Point is, it’s pretty much seen as the same stuff. But what the Zoroastrians think of as trash, the Buddhists think of as compost. The point of a Zoroastrian sky burial is getting you up on the platform, like the whole world needs to handle you with gloves or something. Tibetan sky burials are about getting you back into the world. Either way, the idea is that when you’re dead, you’re not there anymore, so it doesn’t really matter what happens. All there is left for you to do is disintegrate, you know?”
Martin, with his free hand, was absently fiddling with his own hair, which had been shedding a lot lately. Not enough to be noticeable to someone who hadn’t seen what it was like before, but enough that I noticed. In the past few months, it went from almost impenetrably dense to nearly average, practically sitting flush with his scalp now. As if scripted, he held up a few dark strands, examined them, then let them drift down to the sheets, limp and dark.
“…Okay, so it doesn’t matter. Not that I disagree, but if that’s the case, why would you even want a sky burial? Why be that specific in the first place? Also, you‘re not making a fist. Get on that.”
He made kind of a grunting noise that sounded a little angry, but he complied.
“I just like the whole idea behind it. I mean, not the Zoroastrian one specifically, because that can go get fucked. The execution is good, but the motive doesn’t feel much different than what makes most people want to see the people closest to them eventually get pumped full of formaldehyde and stuffed in a box. I mean, god forbid you be dead, right? It’s locking people out of the world when you should be doing everything in your power to help them rejoin it. And yeah, it’s not like you’re going to know about it or anything, and you’ll probably eventually decompose either way, but that doesn’t mean it’s right. It’s like… Reincorporation is your last act on Earth, even if it’s a passive one. And if you really care about someone, you’ll help them run to the finish line, not hold them back from it. They can’t do it for themselves, so it falls on you.”
This time, I’d stuck him mid-monolog, so I don’t even think he noticed. He was too neck-deep in his own crap.
“Martin… That’s all well and good, but the prevailing idea is, if you care about someone, you don’t let them get eaten by vultures.”
Without any warning, something in the conversation changed. And I had no time to prepare myself.
“…No, the prevailing idea is that, if you care about someone, you put aside all your selfish bullshit and see them through to the end. Even if it’s fucking hard. It’s not my problem if you’ve all decided the work’s over the instant someone flatlines. I mean, what, you’re one of those people who stops giving a shit about their friends the instant they leave the room? God, why didn‘t you warn me before I started hanging around you all the damn time? You‘re fucked-up, Corwin! Holy shit. You. Are. Fucked-up.”
I was used to Martin ranting, but I’d never heard him take this tone before. In fact, the closest thing to it that I’d ever heard, from anyone, albeit at about twice the speed, is when Spenser gets so wound up that he’s not having fun anymore and starts shooting off his mouth like an AK-47, blowing everyone else out of the conversation, desperate for enough space to pour out all the thoughts that he couldn’t be alone with. From him, it’s terrifying, but from Martin, it was straight-up surreal. Like I said, he’s always been one of the most ridiculously stable people I’d ever encountered. Or, at least he was, until two fucking minutes ago. To the best of my knowledge, at least. I had a sense that I was uncovering something I didn’t want to see. But, shit, if he’s going to talk like Spenser, then I’ll respond accordingly.
“…That’s not what I fucking said, and you know it.”
Just the blood thinner left to deal with. Dammit, why did I have to do the last one now? At least me loading syringes gave us a good reason to avoid looking at each other.
“Yeah, well, what did you say?”
I pulled the band tight again, so I wouldn’t have to waste a bunch of time, now that I was almost done. God, just let me finish this so I can leave the room. It went in easily enough this time. I pulled the needle out quickly, then pressed a wad of tissues against the puncture. This one bleeds. That’s why I usually do it last.
“Oh, I don’t know. Give me a break, Martin. I’m just not used to…”
“What? Dead people? Or just dead people you actually have to deal with? Go back a few thousand years and say that again.”
“You can say that, and I guess I can’t really argue with you. But the thing is, I’m not a few… You know what? You win. I couldn’t give a shit. Just tell me what this even entails. Do we just drag you out and like, hope some vultures show up?”
I took a few seconds to check the bleeding. It was slowing down, but not quite enough that I could let go yet. Martin paused to think.
“…Well, that’s actually one way to do it. Probably the most traditional, actually. There’s also a more complicated version.”
“How the heck do you complicate getting eaten by vultures?”
The blood was barely at a trickle now, so I grabbed a box of gauze and got to work. Since the needle marks stopped closing up, the skin at the crook of his arm looking bruised and raw and sticky, more and more like some kind of rotting organic mesh, I figured just keeping that area bandaged when not in use would probably be safer.
“ I don’t know, I guess ‘complicated” wasn’t the right word. Maybe it’s just more… Involved? Basically, you help the vultures get started. What happens, is the Body Breaker guts you, might make a few slices in the skin to help the birds smell you coming, sometimes cuts you into smaller pieces and kind of spreads you around so everyone can get a turn. Some wait around with mallets until the vultures are done so they can crush the skeleton. Sounds like a lot of work if you ask me, and I probably wouldn’t bother, but it’s pretty thorough about making sure there’s nothing left of you.”
“…Body Breaker?”
“Yeah. It’s just what it sounds like, so don‘t get sidetracked on it or anything.”
While I swiped on the antiseptic and unspooled the gauze, doing what little I could to keep him intact and clean, I listened to Martin calmly explaining just how he planned to be torn apart. There came a sudden awareness of some huge push-and-pull, us swaying in the wind at the center. It was about so much more than just vultures and bandages, but somehow, accidentally putting those things in the same context perfectly summed up the whole thing. I thought about how sad it was. We weren’t going to win. Any of us.
“So… What? I call up the funeral home all like ‘uh, can I speak to your Tibetan Body Breaker?’”
“Eh, even if they had one, it’d be overkill. Like I said, it’s labor-intensive, but not all that complex. Anyone could do it, probably.”
“I… Am not doing that.”
“Yeah, I figured you wouldn’t. I kind of assumed, if we went for it at all, Spenser would take care of it. He’s probably done worse.”
“…But not to anyone he knew! You can’t do that to him, Martin.”
“Nah. Spenser gets it, you know? It wouldn’t be some traumatizing thing for him. He doesn’t think that way. Actually, I didn’t know you did, either, but whatever. No one really ‘knows’ anyone, I guess…”
God, I wanted to punch him right in his snide little mouth.
“Hey, I’m just as surprised as you. Silly me, I guess I just never thought I’d have to think about it, period.”
Martin was staring at the ceiling again. He still had that glassy look, but I’d stopped trying to guess why. Probably, his mind was just somewhere else.
“…What, you think we were going to live forever? That I was going to live forever, like this? Holy shit, man. You’re even more out of touch than I thought.”
We weren’t going to win. Any of us.
“No, I just expected… I don’t know. Probably nothing that sounds much better, when I actually think about it.”
“See? You’re going to have to get used to this. Spenser might be the only one swinging the hatchet, but he’ll need someone to talk to, and they’ll have to be able to hold a normal conversation. The fuck you think is going to do that? Hal? No way. Dude cries when people get shot in movies. In fact, he ain‘t even invited. Can‘t have that pantywaist lousing up my goddamn Sky Burial…”
I taped the gauze in place, then let his arm go for the first time in what felt like hours. It stretched out limply on the bed. And I could hardly remember what I usually did with my own hands, so they didn’t look much better. We droop.
“…So it‘s for like, moral support or something?”
Martin tried to haul himself up into a sitting position, with no small measure of effort. Surprisingly, it kind of worked. He was at least able to make it so he was lying vertically against the wall, not horizontally against the mattress. He pulled his left sleeve back down, crossed his arms. His shoulders cracked sharply.
“No… Well, yeah, that too… Honestly, I think doing that sort of shit alone for so long is what fucked him up as bad as he is… But part of the whole thing is, the people doing the Breaking have to act casual, so the dead person feels like they can let go and move out of this sort of liminal space and onto wherever they’re going next. It’s how you prove to them you know that their body is just an object now. That you know they aren’t there anymore. You have to act like you’re just turning the compost, or they won’t catch on that it’s really time to go.”
“Martin… That’s all very interesting, but what the hell does it even have to do with you?”
“…Bucket.”
“Wait, what?”
“Now that we’re done with injections we’re doing pills, right? I just figured that if I’m going to puke, I might as well get it over with now so I don’t upchuck anything important. Now give me the goddamn bucket.”
The bucket sat next to the trashcan, like we’d needed to outsource the Vomit Division of the Waste Disposal Corp. or something. I passed it up to Martin, who carefully removed the tubes from his nose, then immediately collapsed around it and started heaving. He looked and sounded like he was in a lot of pain, so I ended up having to turn away until he finally finished, shaking from exertion and panting so hard I swore I heard sloshing in his lungs.
“…Take this fuckin’ thing away, would you?”
He practically shoved the bucket in my face, then went into another coughing fit, not bothering with the tissues this time. He just hacked blood into the bend of his elbow, further messing up his shirt, then calmly replaced the oxygen tubes, breathing heavily to catch up on any air he‘d missed. I took the bucket and sat it on the floor by the bed, not bothering to look at the contents, less because they were particularly disgusting and more because they weren’t anything I didn’t expect. Black and gritty, same as yesterday and the day before. All it showed was that he was bleeding a lot and hadn’t been eating, which I’d already figured out. Actually, I’d been really worried about him. I wanted to just come out with it, say “dude, I can see your ribs through your shirt, we need to find something you can keep down,” or whatever, but honestly, I wasn’t sure it would be worth the trouble. We weren’t going to win. Any of us. And you’re already losing.
“…Pills.”
Martin has one of those gigantic pill organizers, the kind that have literal drawers for each day. I passed him today’s drawer. He opened the “evening” compartment. I tried to pick up where we’d left off.
“So, anyway…”
“You were asking what any of that had to do with me?”
“I guess so.”
Martin launched into a dramatic speech, that I imagine he’d prepared, and rather poorly, I might add, while vomiting in a bucket. Which is actually kind of hilarious.
“God, Corwin, you’re dense as… I don’t even know. Some kind of big stupid cube. Just like… A block of… Crap. You’re a goddamn blockhead, is what you are. What doesn’t that have to do with me? Didn’t you catch the part about the dead person being caught in the middle and not really dead? Did you just sleepwalk through these last few years? Gee, where the hell would I get the idea that a gesture to urge me on to the other side might be just a little bit applicable?”
That screed exhausted him, and he had to pant to catch his breath, hard enough to visibly separate the ribs, air rasping loudly through his shredded lungs. Not knowing what else I could do for him, I reached for the concentrator on the nightstand and dialed up the air a notch. That seemed to help, and I waited for his breathing to stabilize before I got to talking again.
“…I don’t just mean that, I mean all of it. What ‘other side?’ What ‘you’ are you talking about in that context? Did I miss some memo about you not being an Atheist?”
I must have tripped some kind of mental wire, because that was when he, run-down as he was by now, really went off.
“…Not everyone is as fucking dismally literal-minded as you! God, some life. You don’t see any symbolic value in anything. There’s ‘straightforward,’ and then there’s whatever the hell you even are. I’ve always fucking hated that about you, you know that? Hated. Especially because it wouldn’t be so much of a problem if you’d just take five minutes and think, for once. That’s the whole issue I have with you here. You’re treating disbelief in an afterlife as a get-out-of-thinking-free card. And then you say I’m the one who just wants to be unceremoniously dragged out with the trash. I mean, okay, there‘s a religious basis. But you really can‘t see why a person, Atheist or otherwise, would look at a ceremony, the point of which is to show their body for what it is, while using it for its final intended purpose, and see just a little bit of meaning in that? Sucks to be you, asshole. Fucking sucks.”
Martin punctuated each cutting personal insult by choking down a pill with a sip of stale water from the glass on the nightstand. God, he’s so fucking pathetic. He could say just about anything, and I‘d never be able to bring myself to dislike him. Of course, he’s also annoying, so there’s that.
“Look, it just sounded kind of weird, alright?”
“Yeah, well, welcome to other people.”
“Martin…”
By now, he’d worn himself out. He was sitting so he was kind of bent in half, holding his head in his hands, ribs rising and falling again.
“…Look, I’m sorry. I’ve been kind of pissed-off lately. I took it out on you. Not saying I shouldn’t have, just saying you probably should understand why.”
Something about the position he was in made him sound kind of muffled.
“Okay.”
“Listen… Don’t even worry about this. I mean, we’re going to be doing it, but when the time comes, I guarantee you’ll be ready.”
That said, Martin let out a single wet, noisy, open-mouthed cough. A huge, dark clot fell out of him and onto the bedspread, where it sat, glistening, until he grabbed a tissue and plopped it in the can, on top of the syringes and everything else. We should really get one of those red doctor’s-office bags or something.
“But…”
He sat a little straighter, but was still propping up his head, one-handed now, leaning his elbow on his crossed legs, the way you‘d lean on a desk. It was the way he always sat when he kept me company on my hundreds of grad-school smoke breaks. I don’t know why this made me sad, but it did.
“…No. You will be ready. What you’re going to have to watch over these next few weeks, or months, or however far you have to stretch this shit into the future to feel better about it… Just trust me. It’ll make getting torn apart by vultures look like a cakewalk. You’ll start looking forward to it. I promise you.”
While he spoke, he kept his eyes fixed on mine. Again, this was something he‘d always done, and there was something strangely poignant in that. Like if he kept at it long enough, the world would remember how things were supposed to be, and finally set it all right.
“I don’t know…”
I’d never liked really insistent eye contact. It always seemed like something that would be seen as really rude, and I was genuinely surprised when I realized it was actually expected. Well, Martin locks eyes with you like he’s trying to get a good look at your retinas, which even hardline eye-contact sticklers find kind of unnerving. But for some reason, I never minded it as much from him as I did from most people. It was just such a part of who he was, I guess, that it didn‘t bother me. He wasn’t unknowingly invading my space. He was just being Martin. And right now, I was just as fixated as he was, trying to commit that intense, faded-green stare to memory. I’d come to rely on his sharp, expansive, noisy personality to back me up, and I had no idea how I’d make my way in the world without even a token bit of that forceful, unflagging vitality on my side. But, he looked away. I looked at the floor. The connection was lost. I missed him already.
“…I know you don’t know. I don’t expect you to. We’re not there yet. Just… Think about everything that might happen, and remember that I’ll have to be there for it. I’ll be stuck in here, sitting through it all. When my body isn’t me anymore, I won’t feel a thing. I mean, fuck. You know?”
He sat back up against the cold window, hair hanging in his face. It looked wet and dirty, but I wasn’t sure if he was sweating, or if he‘d splattered some blood on it, or if it was just stringy from not having been washed in a while.
“What, and I won’t be there for the goddamn vulture thing?”
Martin leaned forward again, not even bothering to look at me. For the first time, I was the one who wanted to move my head around until the other person was forced to meet my eyes.
“You will, but you have only one easy fucking job: let me go.”
“It’s not as easy as it-”
I couldn’t even finish before he snapped at me, louder than I thought those ruined lungs could manage.
“…Practice!”
Facing down the way he was, he might as well have been yelling at the mattress.
“What…?”
“I said, fucking practice. Start now.”
“I-”
“Start now, and you’ll make all the shit leading up to it easier on both of us. It’s enough stress without knowing you’re going to be all fucked up over me not being around.”
Yeah, well, too late.
“Martin, you don’t… I mean, I don’t… The hell do you want from me? How? How do I…”
My throat started pulling at itself, and I felt a weird pinching behind my eyes. I watched everything go blurry. Thank god, finally. For the first time in years, I was going to cry. Sure, I’d had a lot of near misses and false starts, but the last time I actually went all the way and cried was a few months before I completed my PhD. I guess I was stressed or something. It was long enough after Martin died the first time for him to be awake and aware, but he was spending most of the time blanked out, and wouldn’t really interact with anything or anyone. I was still going in to visit him semi-regularly, but I remember one day, I figured that, if he didn’t care, I wasn’t going to bother anymore. That decided, I went to my bathroom to have a smoke, closed the door, sat down on the toilet lid, and just scattered into a million pieces. I hadn’t been sleeping. I’d taken enough caffeine pills that afternoon to set my teeth on edge. Increasingly, I hardly understood what people wanted me to do, beyond “too much at once.” I’d clawed my way up to a place where I didn’t belong and couldn’t survive. And I was alone. My best and only friend didn’t like me anymore. And I knew that he was totally disconnected from everything, not just me, so it wasn’t personal, but the fact remained that he didn’t, and there was nothing I could do or say to bring him back. What’s more, I’d been walking around in a kind of daze since they rushed us out of the space station, and terribly busy, so I hadn’t really felt the impact until I finally got a minute’s peace. I completely lost my shit. It went on for about an hour, and it was that noisy, snotty kind of crying where your hair and shirt get wet and you feel like you’ve been rained on. I tired myself out, then just sat there, completely silent. I smoked half a pack in one sitting, staring, unseeingly, at my ugly shower curtain. Then- and here’s the really weird part- I stood up, sat down at my computer, and started proofreading a paper. After that, I never cried again. I guess something just got shocked out of me.
“…Jesus, didn’t I just explain!?”
“No. You just fucking ordered me to-”
As soon as I opened my mouth to reply, the pulling stopped and the feeling evaporated. Just one of those things, I guess. Defeated, I turned towards the window. By now, it was completely dark. All I could see was a blurry reflection of how we’d look from the other side of the glass. Martin’s shoulder blades rising above his hunched spine, black shirt and dark hair blending into the shadows, like he was only half there. My scarred face, with the same dull look it always had; that terrible, uneven haircut I’d given myself last month, starting to lose its blunt, freshly-scissored edges, too long in some places, sticking out awkwardly in others. My god, how did we get here? What the hell happened to us?
“I meant before. It’s the same as being there to watch the vultures. I mean, shit, didn’t I just say that?”
“You did, but…”
“What I’m saying is, you need to just act and talk like you would any other day, or this is going to fucking suck for me! I’m already coming apart at the seams, so let’s just start now. Act natural, do your fucking job, and let me go in peace.”
He was holding his head again, so I couldn’t see his face, and couldn’t even guess at what expression he was making. The only expressions his voice went with right now were expressions I’d never seen on him, ever. If I didn’t know him so well, I’d think he was about to cry. And I might not have cried in years, but I’d only seen Martin cry once. Even then, I didn’t actually see him. Just heard him, sniffling on my fire escape after I lost my temper in some stupid argument and accused him of being a sociopath. I felt terrible then, and I felt terrible now, even if I didn’t really do anything this time. The problem was, I felt like anything I even could do would seem like a betrayal. I guess I could go along with what he wanted. But, looking at him now, even without seeing his face, all I could think was that this wasn’t someone I could bear to let go. He needed me, and he needed me to not need him. I needed him to know he was needed. There were just too many conflicting needs to meet at once. We weren’t going to win. Any of us. The game was rigged from the start.
“That sounds great on paper, but I don’t know if I can just act like you don’t even matter to me. I mean… You do. I’ve known you longer than almost anyone. I can’t…”
“You can. I won’t be here, Corwin. To matter, or not-matter, or anything else.”
“You act like that isn’t the whole problem!”
I couldn’t keep my voice from shaking. I willed myself to cry and get it over and done with, but nothing came. I just felt slack and hollow.
“I act like it’s happening, so you’d better start getting used to it now.”
“I don’t know if I…”
“Yeah, well, you don’t have a choice. I’d keep that in mind if I were you. And it’s not like I don’t have a damn good reason to keep it in mind myself. So if we can’t do anything, let’s just say ‘screw it’ and live our lives. Wipe that fucking look off your face and keep going.”
“Well… What should I do, then? No one told me how to do this.”
Martin exhaled noisily, then glanced at over at me. No fixed gaze; he was just kind of looking at me. Normally. His eyes could have belonged to anyone. For the first time, I was smacked with how little there actually was left of him.
“…I’m going to bed, so logic follows that you say goodnight and go bother someone else.”
Without another word, he slid down under the covers, then turned away and curled up on his side.
“Okay… Goodnight, Martin.”
I have no idea how it occurred to me to do this, because it isn’t like me at all, but before I went to turn off the light, I gently laid my hand on his shoulder. His hand jerked up to smack me away.
“Didn’t I just tell you to act normal!? Don’t fucking touch me, and don’t come back in here until you can get that through your head!”
My arm dropped at my side. Martin went still and quiet again. Body resting heavily, hair limp and matted and dark against the pillowcase. I looked down at him for a while, which just made me want to put my hand back where it was. For the split second I was able to touch him, he felt cold and bony and fragile. I wanted him to leech even just a little bit of the heat from my hand. And yeah, maybe it would be weird to say “goodnight” again when I’d just said it, so I could say something like… I don‘t know. “It‘s okay.” Even if, like he said, it wasn’t. And I‘m sure this was the opposite of the sort of reaction he was trying to inspire, but even knowing that just made me think about how badly he needed to be held. He should have a physical reminder that someone was there, whether he liked it or not. Facing away from me, drawn up around himself, his spine cresting so harsh and jagged under his shirt that it almost looked like it was hurting him. He seemed so sharp and self-contained, completely closed-off. Terribly small and angry, in pain, charging forward on some difficult, final internal journey. Alone. God, I didn’t want him to be. Fuck it, he was my friend, and I wanted so badly to just sit down and say “tough shit, asshole, I’m going to hold you until my arms fall asleep.” But, I’d never been a physically affectionate person. He told me to act normal. And I guess I should at least try. I force myself to turn away from him.
“Fine. Goodnight.”
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“…That’s it, I’m fucking stabbing you.” HEEE
Step above putting you in the trash- he does care. AWW.
“Okay, the basic idea is that your body is just, like, barber floor hair… Wait, hold on. I have an analogy that would work better with potato peels or something.” MORE HEEE
"At least me loading syringes gave us a good reason to avoid looking at each other." I love this line. I just love it.
“How the heck do you complicate getting eaten by vultures?” Martin can find a way. He's Martin. He has powers.
I think in one of my previous comments I mistook Hal for someone else and I am sorry for that. Hal is Hal. No one else.
Why do I think Body Breaker is a good job for Spenser?
"The bucket sat next to the trashcan, like we’d needed to outsource the Vomit Division of the Waste Disposal Corp. or something." I shouldn't hee at that, but, I did.
"It’ll make getting torn apart by vultures look like a cakewalk. " ALL OF THE HEARTS.
"Hell, Martin locks eyes with you like he’s trying to get a good look at your retinas, which even hardline eye-contact sticklers find kind of unnerving." MORE HEARTS
AND YOU WRITE THE BEST SADFEELS. THE GROSS MAKES THEM BETTER.
Thank you!
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AND I CAN ASSURE YOU THAT YOU ONLY HEE'D AT THINGS I WROTE FOR THE HEE'ING! <3 And didn't see anything that indicated that you didn't know who Hal was, so no worries!
Grossness enhancing sadfeels is like, the Holy Grail of writing for me. I mean, one of my favorite stories involves graphic descriptions of people who got boiled in hot springs and died scared and baffled. AND WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT, MOST SAD THINGS HAVE A GROSS COMPONENT. So my theory is that you only get the full effect of the sad if you respect the gross and let it say its piece. :D
Thanks for reading!!
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I'm glad you think so! His problems are pretty fictionalized (I mean, dude's technically a cyborg), but I want to write him reacting to it the way real people react to similar things. I feel like a lot of stories with futuristic settings forget about that, and it kind of takes me out of it. :/
Thanks for reading!
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Thanks for reading, and sorry for such a late reply! I'm trying to be better about keeping on top of things.