starphotographs (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
starphotographs) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
rainbowfic2017-02-23 11:01 pm
starphotographs) wrote in rainbowfic2017-02-23 11:01 pm
Rain Cloud 5
Name: starphotographs
Story: Solarpunk Hellscape
Supplies and Styles: Portrait
Characters: Fowler
Colors: Rain Cloud 5 (I keep working, but it never gets done)
Word Count: 5,100ish
Rating: R
Warnings: Choose not to warn.
Summary: Fowler II is a born and bred proxy of God. This is some of what that means.
Note: I know I’ve been MIA like foreverrrr. XD But that’s partly because I’ve been switched over to “input” mode while I laid down the groundwork for an entirely new ‘verse! It’s still kind of rough and not quite “there” yet, but I think it’s ready to debut, at least. (This also means I will be needing a new story tag, when it’s convenient. :D)
I, Fowler II
Swallow hard, clear your throat, here we go. I hope you’re feeling creative tonight.
I swallow hard; I clear my throat.
(Creative isn’t a feeling.)
The sky is grey-brown and featureless, the clouds eating the floodlights, chewing them up, spitting them back over all of us.
(Be or don’t be.)
I’m on stage, in the center of the brilliant throat, already mostly digested. The crowd is draped in that sticky pre-chewed light, glowing from behind, faces gone. They all look like they could be anyone. I’m trying to tell myself who they are, so I can tell them in turn.
They’re counting on me. They think I know something they don’t. I let them just go on thinking that.
If I didn’t, none of this would work.
Keep your hands in your pockets until you need them, and remember, you’re only sweating from the lights. Not because you feel like you’re one slip away from being found out.
If I let go of the lie, they’d dismiss me as just another liar. If I told the truth, I’d no longer be trustworthy. If I wasn’t a fraud, I’d be a heretic.
They’re the ones who are on the chopping block tonight, not you. You’re the one who’s coming for them, and you can destroy anyone who forgets and steps out of line.
You were built with that power.
I take a deep breath, and start chopping.
“I, Fowler II, a Speaker graciously created on the infinitesimal line between infinite worlds, can see your other lives behind my eyes. I see why you’re filled with guilt in this one. If you’d step forward, I can tell you that of which you must absolve yourself.”
I’m lying again. Behind my eyes, I’m reading my lines.
My voice breaks in my throat and rumbles in my skull. The crowd is frozen in place, everyone so sure they’re not upright and virtuous enough to deserve a reading of their transgressions. I stand in silence. The slimy light drips down their backs and away from their faces. We can’t stare at each other like this forever. Someone always steps forward before the pause decays from pregnant to awkward.
Tonight, it’s a young woman, pressed grey shirt, long hair. I’ve never seen her before in my life. I have no idea who she is, and no idea what she’s done.
All I can do is try to guess what she might want, what impulse drove her to step forward and stand beside me this night. Even up here in the roaring heart of the lights, out from under the drooling sky, her hair is still sticky from it. A slick, glistening corona around a void.
And when the fresh light finally falls across it, her face still looks blank.
I can work with this.
We turn to each other, draw so close that we’re breathing each other’s wet breath. She hears my lungs rattling, I hear her shakily inhaling and exhaling; too quickly and through her teeth.
This is part of the process. This is what really makes it work.
No God. Just you and me behind the curtain, pulling the strings and fucking with our own heads.
“Fowler II.”
If I seem better than the rest, it’s just because I’m the only one who figured that out. I know there’s a trick to it.
My own voice is unbearably loud, but everyone else sounds like they’re underwater, drowning and calling out for me to take their hand. An emergency phone call on a bad connection. Someone dying in the next room. Like all decent men, I’d hate to be a useless bystander. I want to be able to say I’ve done all I could for them.
I was there when He wasn’t. Remember that.
“Hello, Sister.”
She bows her head slightly, and I place my hands on either side. Her hair is sweaty. My palms are sweaty. The two of us all sticky and melting together. Holding our humidity between us. The water of the womb, the fug of a mass grave. Small contagious things splitting and merging on the grey jelly of a petri dish. In that wet heat, something is starting to break free, offgass, multiply. It wants to devour the both of us. I want to let it.
(The burning pits spitting and crackling, belching meaty human steam.)
“You’ve seen what I’ve done. I have the strength to hear it.”
I nod, somewhat sadly.
All part of the show.
I already have a little story worked up, or at least the skeleton of one. All the blood and guts will wind together when I start Speaking, the story filling up my body and spilling out of my mouth. Holy bile.
Sometimes, I can almost see how the rest believe it doesn’t really come from inside them. How easily they can palm off all those nasty thoughts on other souls in other worlds.
I clear my throat again, exhale snot vapors.
“Do you remember your brother?”
She shakes her head.
“I don’t have a brother.”
Don’t break eye contact. Don’t break character.
“Then he was never born in this world.”
And there’s the line that lets you get away with all of it. People will believe whatever you say, as long as you remind them it didn’t happen here. In infinite worlds, anything is possible. So the scripture says.
Our amended version, at least.
Her eyes are hollow. She doesn’t know what’s coming, but she knows it has to be bad. Her own brother. I need to stop using this trick. It almost makes it too easy.
You’re better than this.
“What have I done to him?”
Here it comes. I can feel our pulse now. Her temples, my palms. Our veins weaving together so I can reach out and feel all her entangled selves. It’s a nice touch.
Act just well enough to fool your body, to impress it, and it’ll pick up your slack every time. Wind yourself up until your hands shake, blank your eyes, turn damp and white with ersatz fear. Breathe like you have a gun to your head. Cry on demand.
It’ll let you do it all, if you show it what you want.
“The unspeakable, Sister.”
And I’m a Speaker. Sometimes, I tell myself a joke, and they don’t even notice.
“Tell me.”
We’re huddled over the mic on my collar, whispering her secrets to the crowd.
“You hated each other. I can’t see the original dispute, but I know it was nothing that should bring things to where it did. You were the one that brought it there, Sister. And, though he hated you for what you were in that world, he never fought back. The one day he tried, that ended things for good.”
I never give it all away at once. I make them ask for it. Patience and decisiveness are what make me what I am here. I lead them as my father did, but I lack his mercy. Fowler II is the refinement of Fowler I. Or at least an experimental rearrangement. Everyone knows that.
Everyone wants to take what I’m dishing out.
“How did it end?”
Our eyes lock. That’s what I was waiting for. I bring the axe down on her.
“He fought back against you, and, finally challenged, you snapped. In the kitchen, you splashed his face with drain cleaner before you grabbed him by the neck and smashed his skull against the counter. Five minutes later, in the garage, you ran him through from end to mouth with an old iron pipe, laid the pipe over the two cars, doused him with lighter fluid, and lit a match.
Wait for her to finish visualizing. That’s it.
Perfect.
“...I see all you did, but I can’t see where in the sequence he gave up and died. I do know that he died trying to force himself to forgive you. I do know that your parents never looked you full in the face again after that day. And I can feel the stale air in the cell you sat in for a decade. The cell where you’re sitting right now, in another life.”
God, I made about half of that up on the spot. I’m getting good. I shouldn’t be letting her take credit for this.
I look at her and think, plagiarist. She looks inside herself and thinks, murderer. We’re staring each other right in the pupils, clear through to the retina and up to the brain.
And one, and two, now cry on demand. Not enough to spill over, now. And don’t move your face.
My vision blurs like a rainy windshield. She takes the new guilt and swallows it, or tries. She’s swallowing air and spit. There’s nothing authentic about any of this, and she doesn’t even know it.
The body picks up the slack.
“I understand.”
Her eyes look dead. In my head, mine look sad and compassionate and accusing, but I know they’ve been empty for half my life. All the better. No one suspects a thing. They can’t know I’m condemning them in the name of a God I barely remember believing in.
They see what they want to see, because they don’t have prior experience with not seeing anything at all.
“Do what you must, Sister.”
Our foreheads touch. I can no longer watch what she might be feeling. If my hearing wasn’t shot to shit by now, I’d try to listen instead. I’d feel for it, but I’m pretty sure the blood I feel speeding up under my hands is my own.
“I will.”
The fluid in my head makes her sound like one of those fake people that find you the right phone line. They don’t sound like anything because they don’t feel. Or maybe she sounds like this because she’s not feeling, either.
“Righteousness in all lives.”
I feel her nod once.
“Yes.”
My hands fall back to my sides. We unstick, split back into our respective separate parts.
Once again, I call out to the crowd. I cradle the next head and spin out their story.
Repeat ten times.
*****
The thing about being a Speaker is that, most of the time, there’s about shit-all to do. We’ve all been around the Municipality enough times, wall, to wall, to wall, to wall, to get sick of everywhere and everything. They don’t let us take part-time jobs, because some of us are too fragile and all of us are too good for it.
No one else much likes talking to us, because they don’t know what we’d say when they aren’t prepared to hear it, don’t know what otherworldly intel we might have on them.
So, most of us end up sitting at home alone, or with our Hand, who has to keep us company because they’re not allowed to say no. Or, sometimes, we go out and wander around until a few of us cluster together.
Who the hell knows why. None of us have anything to say to each other because we all have the same damn life.
We sit in church and in study groups, we sit at home, we go up on stage and do our routine. The only thing they don’t know about me, or can’t just infer based on their own shitty lives, is that I know I’m doing a routine. But I can’t say that, because I don’t know what would be “done about me” if I got caught. At best, they wouldn’t let me do it anymore.
At worst, they’d come up with some way to injure me until I was dead, and thus no longer their problem. And make everyone else watch.
Make them.
Like they don’t want to watch of their own volition. Like, after hearing us describe, excuse me, unspeakable violence Sunday night after Sunday night, they’re not itching to take in a little of the real thing. Like people can somehow pray away the bloodlust.
If they could, they probably wouldn’t pray at all. Because that’s why we put all these systems in place to begin with. To give ourselves noble reasons that can make us feel righteous about wanting to tear each other apart.
Hangings, stonings, slit throats, rending of flesh, burning at the stake, boiling in oil, crucifixion. Death, famine, and pestilence. That’s what the people want, and we made God in our image.
And now here I am.
Don’t mind me. I’m just the entertainment.
I want to talk about this, but I can’t.
(Burning at the stake, boiling in oil, crucifixion.)
So I stand around in front of the main temple with Ikeda IV and Niehaus I. Not talking about anything, just idling while they do it for me. It’s actually kind of nice.
I’m staring at the stone giants in the center yard, a circle of elongated, abstracted humans, stretching like hot wax, raising round mirrors that fling what they don’t absorb back up at the sky. During the day, the mirrors tilt upward at the sun, fill our wires with its mighty hydrogen glow, luminescent and prosperous. During the night, they tilt forward at the opposite mirror, make a perfect dark hallway.
I’m not even thinking about what they mean, because I’ve already thought it a thousand times.
Pleas to God; infinite worlds.
They’re not thinking about it, either, because they’re busy talking about their identical lives.
Who they Spoke to, what they made up and didn’t know they made up. What they only think they saw. Arson, robbery, stabbing. Nothing an actually-guilty person couldn’t reasonably come back from with a change of heart and a solemn vow. Nothing a few lashes couldn’t fix, if you were told you did it somewhere else. Nothing like anything I would say.
Ikeda IV coughs, clears his throat, and spits on the ground.
“Fowler II, you were brutal last Sunday.”
Don’t you forget it.
“I was only telling the truth.”
This, of course, is another lie.
“Well, yeah, but it’s the way you said it. You don’t mess around. You’re not much like your dad.”
And there it is again. I never understood why people always thought that was a compliment.
Number One was actually pretty popular in his time. Everyone said he embodied mercy, that he knew God and everybody could make things right. But, it is true that some people didn’t like that. It implied he thought God was a little confused by how to go about things. He got tripped up by the other side of infinite potential. He wasn’t a hard-liner. Not like me.
Because I don’t believe in God. Because all of this is proof that, at least within these walls, we’re beyond saving.
I don’t say this.
“I guess I don’t talk much like him, but I think I’m like him in other ways.”
Ikeda IV thinks for a moment, clears his throat, and spits again, almost hitting my shoe. I glare at him, but he either can’t see it or doesn’t care.
“Yeah, you can really connect with a congregation. I know he was a little famous for that. Early to say, but that might be a Fowler thing.”
The two of us all sticky and melting together. Hands. Head.
“Well, I’m only the second, but it’s looking promising.”
He nods.
“That’s what they say! Anyone requested you yet?”
I shake my head.
Everyone assumes the opposite, until I have to tell them myself: my gametes aren’t in very high demand.
I’m a fine Speaker like my father, it’s true. When a Speaker is particularly good, people usually want to make more of us.
But even the most devout know Speaking isn’t genetic. It’s a legacy, a sensibility, more about the influence of parents on children and the connotations of names. A lot of the women here would want to raise Fowler III, but fewer want anything to do with my shitty genes. My terrible eyesight, my listless constitution, my short stature.
I don’t even have the right look. My father was on the tall side, and his build was almost architectural. One of those people where you look at them and remember that we all have skeletons.
I look like someone started sculpting a human figure out of white putty and got bored before they got around to adding any of the details. A courtroom sketch artist would look at me and throw up their hands in frustration, not knowing where to start on my face because there’s nothing about it that’s the least bit particular to itself. I could be full of plastic pellets or shredded paper or chopped liver or any fucking thing, for all I look like I have actual human bones and muscles.
If there’s anything distinctive about me at all, it’s that I’m so plain I almost look fake. And I only know that because I have to look at myself every single day. They’re probably all afraid they wouldn’t remember which kid was theirs, if he came out like me.
My brother bred true. He would have looked like my father. But his insides weren’t turned around the right way.
He was of this world and this world alone. It wasn’t worth the trouble of keeping him.
I’m sorry, Zero.
(Don’t think about this.)
I think about my misshapen lenses and my boring face.
“Not as far as I know.”
He shrugged, wiped his nose on his sleeve. I really wished I hadn’t seen him do that.
“Huh. Well, good luck.”
I mumbled, thanks, coughed twice, spat in the old paper towel I had in my pocket, and blew a snot rocket in the dust. He gave me the same disgusted look I just gave him.
We all have different ways of dealing with it, and each one’s ways are absolutely repulsive to all of the others. Then they put us all in the same room and expect us to get along and not hope everyone else just chokes.
Niehaus I is watching us, with a mixture of fascination and pity.
He isn’t like us. He escaped all of this, because they didn’t breed him on purpose.
The story goes: he went to a routine medical appointment as a little kid. They noticed his heartbeat was on the wrong side. His parents converted and sent him here. The Seminary took his first name and gave him the “I” in good faith.
His odds are mediocre. He only has it in the bottom half of his genes, not in every floundering cell.
But, if God wills it, he’ll give us Niehaus II.
I don’t know why anyone would want that. He’s annoying. He stares, for one thing. He hums tunelessly to himself all the time because he doesn’t know he’s doing it. He can’t remember anything, and always tried to read off my papers when we were in training. He borrows things from people without asking and always ends up stepping on them or sitting on them or something.
I hate him, and I hate his shitty son already.
He shook his head quickly, snapping back to reality.
“Oh! Fowler II! Did you hear about what happened to that lady you started with on Sunday?”
Don’t look excited. You don’t like doing this. You are God’s proxy, and it’s hard work.
That’s what you want them to keep thinking, alright?
“Um, no. What?”
He cleared his throat. Not thickly, like we do. It was the kind of clearing that seems more like a part of speech than anything else. The body making an unconvincing attempt at mimicking itself.
“I’m surprised you haven’t heard! You’re usually so on top of things.”
More reasons why Niehaus I should never breed: inability to get to the fucking point. Backhanded compliments. Gossip. His entire stupid face.
“...Just spit it out!”
Both of them look scared. Sometimes, this happens, and everyone passes it off as part of why I command a lot of respect. I’m harsh and intense, not absolutely sick to shit of everyone.
(That’s what you want them to keep thinking, alright?)
Niehaus I clears his throat again. I think about doing the same and spitting a wad of slime big enough to fill a hotel shampoo bottle in his mouth, just to prove a point.
“She, uh, got ahold of a can of gasoline. Didn’t even know we had any of that stuff around, or what for, but, um… She climbed up on her roof and set herself on fire.”
Doused him with lighter fluid, lit a match.
“Do what you must, Sister.”
Now I’m really trying to keep a straight face. Sometimes, this happens, and it almost makes the whole thing worth it. They take what I said they did to others and try to do it to themselves. They condemn their theoretical actions by making them real and directing at someone they deem more deserving. It means something, and I’ve been trying to put it in words for years.
“Anything that can happen will happen, eventually, somewhere.”
That’s too broad.
“People are only innocent until someone puts an idea in their head.”
Not even true. If it was, who would be having these ideas in the first place?
“Violence against oneself doesn’t count and can be indulged freely with full permission.”
A workable concept, but a tangent at best.
“You can’t atone. You can only give yourself more to answer for.”
Too obvious. Not quite the same concept.
(I’m at a loss.)
I’ll figure it out. I just have to keep making it happen.
“I only tell them what they’ve done. What they deserve is for them to decide.”
The idea is, you decide or God will eventually decide for you. Build your own Hell and let Him take care of Heaven.
All the devils are here.
Ikeda IV is alternately smiling at both of us.
“See, what did I tell you?”
Nothing I didn’t know.
*****
On the walk back to the apartment, I think of the woman I Spoke to, the story I told about her brother. Drenched to the skin; sweat and petroleum. Heat and oxygen; damp breath and fire. The two of us joined through pulsing arteries, the poison I quietly pumped into her heart from whatever dingy reservoir I’d installed in place of mine. The images play projected on the dome of my skull like a film strip, and I smell meat all the way home.
Turns out, that last part wasn’t my imagination. There was smoke on the horizon, and I started smelling that, too.
The pits must have filled up again.
Real meat, real petrol, real fire. Hazmat suits and flamethrowers. People walking home with cloths around their faces to keep out the unclean particles and vapors of unclean people.
Speakers aren’t obliged to do this, because it wouldn’t make much of a difference. Uncleanliness flows in and out of us from the four corners of the multiverse.
When it’s you, it’s a divine duty and privilege. When it’s us, it’s a metaphysical contamination hazard.
You were made for this.
I’m not particularly offended. It’s kind of a moot point, anyway, because most of it is our doing. Some people dole out death sentences to themselves. Others just take it a little too far. Bleed out, asphyxiate, dehydrate, slip into shock, starve, turn septic.
A few refuse medical treatments with the Church’s blessing, embark on a spiritual quest that ends with a flying leap into the grave.
Number One laid out on a bed in the back room, unable to talk, hardly recognizing you, dry-drowning in his own fluid, it’s in the blood now, it won’t be long.
I was only twelve. He was only forty-one. I loved him. I decided I was going to be nothing like him.
(Don’t think about this.)
I close my eyes, inhale the broiled-meat wind, and think as hard as I can. Her being carried off to the pits to finish what she started, slick and rigid and muscle-red, or falling apart in disjointed chunks like an overcooked chicken. Maybe just ash and bone in a bucket, tossed in more out of politeness than anything else.
The brother I invented, burned at the stake in the garage.
Two matching charred red masks with tense skeletal grins, ecstatic in their satisfaction that they’ve finally suffered enough to show those stripped faces to God.
It’s not the worst thing I could imagine, I guess.
*****
“Fowler! I’ve got all your stuff ready.”
Wes is waiting for me as always. He’s happy to see me, and I really mean that.
And he really means it, too. His excitement hasn’t been fake in years, so I don’t fake it, either.
“Fuck off, I’m getting in the shower.”
My voice is cold. I don’t even look at him. When I finally take a short glance, he looks wounded and helpless. We’re both acting out old roles. Poorly. Wooden, lackluster, not quite remembering our lines or our motivation after all this time.
“Are you sure? You aren’t looking so good.”
Now your turn.
“Shut up, Wesley. I don’t give a shit.”
I used to yell at him all the time. I used to do a lot worse. He spent his whole life learning to wordlessly obey; I spent my whole life without someone I could take everything out on without repercussion.
When I was sixteen, I realized that, since he had to do what I said, all my secrets were safe with him. And I decided our relationship was going to change.
I still ordered him around, but it was different.
He wanted to read what I’d read, so I told him to.
He wanted to grow his hair out, so I told him to.
He wanted to sit at the table with me, so I told him to.
He wanted to go by something less formal, so I told him just Wes was fine.
He was asking if he could be a real person. I was telling him he could.
As if I had that power. As if I’m quite considered a real person. As if I’d ever been granted that title myself.
But, there’s still some part of my brain that thinks it can snap at him. Some part of his that accepts being snapped at.
Old habits die hard. Old patterns and reflexes live forever in suspended animation.
He sits deflated on the couch, the vest in my spot beside him, the loaded syringe and a new rubber band on the coffee table. Him all ready to strap me in, tie me off, and turn on the television. Me kicking off my shoes in the entryway, not eager to get stabbed or vibrated the second I walk in the door.
I already suffer enough to meet God.
The body picks up the slack.
We don’t say anything else.
I step into the bathroom, drop my pants, sit down on the lid of the toilet, and get to work. This shit has been in for three days now. Some of the punctures are probably getting nasty by now.
The body picks up the slack.
I owe it the same favor. We eat our own tails. Everything’s covered here.
(I was there when He wasn’t. Remember that.)
Every few days, I reapply: two rows of staples from a few inches above the knee to just past the middle of the femur, orbited by a jagged asteroid field of needles and quilt pins. When the holes turn red and start leaking plasma on my slacks, I clean up and start again.
The staples come out easy enough; I stick a dental pick under them and take them up three or four at a go. They’ve usually mostly worked themselves out by now, anyway. They slide back and forth when the fabric brushes them. I find them in my laundry and in my sheets, tipped with yellowed bits of crystallized seepage and cloudy white shreds of dead tissue.
The pins and needles are buried deeper and need to come out one at a time, so they can take a while. Sometimes, the needles slip under the skin, so I have to dig a little and thread the holes with the pick to get them out. They slide out of the flesh with an infrasonic squeak that resonates down in the bone. A feeling like my skin would start unravelling if I pulled long and hard enough.
I wish this would really happen, that I could watch myself do it, see what I’d made of myself when I’d finally pulled it all the way out.
“Ecstatic in their satisfaction that they’ve finally suffered enough to show those stripped faces to God.”
The perforations sting in the shower. The flesh is still sore when I step out and put everything back in place. I concentrate on the cool heaviness and thud-click of the stapler, the weird lack of resistance when I start with the pins, like I’m pushing them through cold clay.
I could be full of plastic pellets or shredded paper or chopped liver or any fucking thing.
I bite my tongue until I’m finished, then I go lie down on my bed of nails.
Or sit on the couch; always making sure to keep my legs crossed, keep the pressure steady.
A lot of us do things like this. For most of them, it makes at least a little sense. They believe they have to, that it’s expected of them. That they’re committing infinite sins and in need of continuous punishment. That they have to keep up with all their horrible selves.
I do it even though I know there’s nobody watching.
When I stopped believing in God, I decided it was my job to name my own list of transgressions and mete out my own punishments. Considering the circumstances, it wasn’t hard.
Being complicit in any of this: Original Sin.
We don’t need to know what’s happening in other worlds to know we all deserve to fry here and now. Our wrongdoings are naked and obvious.
Within these walls, we’re beyond saving.
If I have to bullshit people a little to make sure we all get what we deserve, then that’s what I’ll do.
And I, in turn, am a liar, a torturer, a murderer by proxy, and a fraud.
If I wasn’t a fraud, I’d be a heretic.
I’ll take myself down with the rest.
“You can’t atone. You can only give yourself more to answer for.”
“Violence against oneself doesn’t count and can be indulged freely with full permission.”
“Do what you must.”
Swallow hard, clear your throat, here we go.
I swallow hard; I clear my throat.
I step under the hot water, and am engulfed in flames.
“Now cry on demand.”
Story: Solarpunk Hellscape
Supplies and Styles: Portrait
Characters: Fowler
Colors: Rain Cloud 5 (I keep working, but it never gets done)
Word Count: 5,100ish
Rating: R
Warnings: Choose not to warn.
Summary: Fowler II is a born and bred proxy of God. This is some of what that means.
Note: I know I’ve been MIA like foreverrrr. XD But that’s partly because I’ve been switched over to “input” mode while I laid down the groundwork for an entirely new ‘verse! It’s still kind of rough and not quite “there” yet, but I think it’s ready to debut, at least. (This also means I will be needing a new story tag, when it’s convenient. :D)
Swallow hard, clear your throat, here we go. I hope you’re feeling creative tonight.
I swallow hard; I clear my throat.
(Creative isn’t a feeling.)
The sky is grey-brown and featureless, the clouds eating the floodlights, chewing them up, spitting them back over all of us.
(Be or don’t be.)
I’m on stage, in the center of the brilliant throat, already mostly digested. The crowd is draped in that sticky pre-chewed light, glowing from behind, faces gone. They all look like they could be anyone. I’m trying to tell myself who they are, so I can tell them in turn.
They’re counting on me. They think I know something they don’t. I let them just go on thinking that.
If I didn’t, none of this would work.
Keep your hands in your pockets until you need them, and remember, you’re only sweating from the lights. Not because you feel like you’re one slip away from being found out.
If I let go of the lie, they’d dismiss me as just another liar. If I told the truth, I’d no longer be trustworthy. If I wasn’t a fraud, I’d be a heretic.
They’re the ones who are on the chopping block tonight, not you. You’re the one who’s coming for them, and you can destroy anyone who forgets and steps out of line.
You were built with that power.
I take a deep breath, and start chopping.
“I, Fowler II, a Speaker graciously created on the infinitesimal line between infinite worlds, can see your other lives behind my eyes. I see why you’re filled with guilt in this one. If you’d step forward, I can tell you that of which you must absolve yourself.”
I’m lying again. Behind my eyes, I’m reading my lines.
My voice breaks in my throat and rumbles in my skull. The crowd is frozen in place, everyone so sure they’re not upright and virtuous enough to deserve a reading of their transgressions. I stand in silence. The slimy light drips down their backs and away from their faces. We can’t stare at each other like this forever. Someone always steps forward before the pause decays from pregnant to awkward.
Tonight, it’s a young woman, pressed grey shirt, long hair. I’ve never seen her before in my life. I have no idea who she is, and no idea what she’s done.
All I can do is try to guess what she might want, what impulse drove her to step forward and stand beside me this night. Even up here in the roaring heart of the lights, out from under the drooling sky, her hair is still sticky from it. A slick, glistening corona around a void.
And when the fresh light finally falls across it, her face still looks blank.
I can work with this.
We turn to each other, draw so close that we’re breathing each other’s wet breath. She hears my lungs rattling, I hear her shakily inhaling and exhaling; too quickly and through her teeth.
This is part of the process. This is what really makes it work.
No God. Just you and me behind the curtain, pulling the strings and fucking with our own heads.
“Fowler II.”
If I seem better than the rest, it’s just because I’m the only one who figured that out. I know there’s a trick to it.
My own voice is unbearably loud, but everyone else sounds like they’re underwater, drowning and calling out for me to take their hand. An emergency phone call on a bad connection. Someone dying in the next room. Like all decent men, I’d hate to be a useless bystander. I want to be able to say I’ve done all I could for them.
I was there when He wasn’t. Remember that.
“Hello, Sister.”
She bows her head slightly, and I place my hands on either side. Her hair is sweaty. My palms are sweaty. The two of us all sticky and melting together. Holding our humidity between us. The water of the womb, the fug of a mass grave. Small contagious things splitting and merging on the grey jelly of a petri dish. In that wet heat, something is starting to break free, offgass, multiply. It wants to devour the both of us. I want to let it.
(The burning pits spitting and crackling, belching meaty human steam.)
“You’ve seen what I’ve done. I have the strength to hear it.”
I nod, somewhat sadly.
All part of the show.
I already have a little story worked up, or at least the skeleton of one. All the blood and guts will wind together when I start Speaking, the story filling up my body and spilling out of my mouth. Holy bile.
Sometimes, I can almost see how the rest believe it doesn’t really come from inside them. How easily they can palm off all those nasty thoughts on other souls in other worlds.
I clear my throat again, exhale snot vapors.
“Do you remember your brother?”
She shakes her head.
“I don’t have a brother.”
Don’t break eye contact. Don’t break character.
“Then he was never born in this world.”
And there’s the line that lets you get away with all of it. People will believe whatever you say, as long as you remind them it didn’t happen here. In infinite worlds, anything is possible. So the scripture says.
Our amended version, at least.
Her eyes are hollow. She doesn’t know what’s coming, but she knows it has to be bad. Her own brother. I need to stop using this trick. It almost makes it too easy.
You’re better than this.
“What have I done to him?”
Here it comes. I can feel our pulse now. Her temples, my palms. Our veins weaving together so I can reach out and feel all her entangled selves. It’s a nice touch.
Act just well enough to fool your body, to impress it, and it’ll pick up your slack every time. Wind yourself up until your hands shake, blank your eyes, turn damp and white with ersatz fear. Breathe like you have a gun to your head. Cry on demand.
It’ll let you do it all, if you show it what you want.
“The unspeakable, Sister.”
And I’m a Speaker. Sometimes, I tell myself a joke, and they don’t even notice.
“Tell me.”
We’re huddled over the mic on my collar, whispering her secrets to the crowd.
“You hated each other. I can’t see the original dispute, but I know it was nothing that should bring things to where it did. You were the one that brought it there, Sister. And, though he hated you for what you were in that world, he never fought back. The one day he tried, that ended things for good.”
I never give it all away at once. I make them ask for it. Patience and decisiveness are what make me what I am here. I lead them as my father did, but I lack his mercy. Fowler II is the refinement of Fowler I. Or at least an experimental rearrangement. Everyone knows that.
Everyone wants to take what I’m dishing out.
“How did it end?”
Our eyes lock. That’s what I was waiting for. I bring the axe down on her.
“He fought back against you, and, finally challenged, you snapped. In the kitchen, you splashed his face with drain cleaner before you grabbed him by the neck and smashed his skull against the counter. Five minutes later, in the garage, you ran him through from end to mouth with an old iron pipe, laid the pipe over the two cars, doused him with lighter fluid, and lit a match.
Wait for her to finish visualizing. That’s it.
Perfect.
“...I see all you did, but I can’t see where in the sequence he gave up and died. I do know that he died trying to force himself to forgive you. I do know that your parents never looked you full in the face again after that day. And I can feel the stale air in the cell you sat in for a decade. The cell where you’re sitting right now, in another life.”
God, I made about half of that up on the spot. I’m getting good. I shouldn’t be letting her take credit for this.
I look at her and think, plagiarist. She looks inside herself and thinks, murderer. We’re staring each other right in the pupils, clear through to the retina and up to the brain.
And one, and two, now cry on demand. Not enough to spill over, now. And don’t move your face.
My vision blurs like a rainy windshield. She takes the new guilt and swallows it, or tries. She’s swallowing air and spit. There’s nothing authentic about any of this, and she doesn’t even know it.
The body picks up the slack.
“I understand.”
Her eyes look dead. In my head, mine look sad and compassionate and accusing, but I know they’ve been empty for half my life. All the better. No one suspects a thing. They can’t know I’m condemning them in the name of a God I barely remember believing in.
They see what they want to see, because they don’t have prior experience with not seeing anything at all.
“Do what you must, Sister.”
Our foreheads touch. I can no longer watch what she might be feeling. If my hearing wasn’t shot to shit by now, I’d try to listen instead. I’d feel for it, but I’m pretty sure the blood I feel speeding up under my hands is my own.
“I will.”
The fluid in my head makes her sound like one of those fake people that find you the right phone line. They don’t sound like anything because they don’t feel. Or maybe she sounds like this because she’s not feeling, either.
“Righteousness in all lives.”
I feel her nod once.
“Yes.”
My hands fall back to my sides. We unstick, split back into our respective separate parts.
Once again, I call out to the crowd. I cradle the next head and spin out their story.
Repeat ten times.
The thing about being a Speaker is that, most of the time, there’s about shit-all to do. We’ve all been around the Municipality enough times, wall, to wall, to wall, to wall, to get sick of everywhere and everything. They don’t let us take part-time jobs, because some of us are too fragile and all of us are too good for it.
No one else much likes talking to us, because they don’t know what we’d say when they aren’t prepared to hear it, don’t know what otherworldly intel we might have on them.
So, most of us end up sitting at home alone, or with our Hand, who has to keep us company because they’re not allowed to say no. Or, sometimes, we go out and wander around until a few of us cluster together.
Who the hell knows why. None of us have anything to say to each other because we all have the same damn life.
We sit in church and in study groups, we sit at home, we go up on stage and do our routine. The only thing they don’t know about me, or can’t just infer based on their own shitty lives, is that I know I’m doing a routine. But I can’t say that, because I don’t know what would be “done about me” if I got caught. At best, they wouldn’t let me do it anymore.
At worst, they’d come up with some way to injure me until I was dead, and thus no longer their problem. And make everyone else watch.
Make them.
Like they don’t want to watch of their own volition. Like, after hearing us describe, excuse me, unspeakable violence Sunday night after Sunday night, they’re not itching to take in a little of the real thing. Like people can somehow pray away the bloodlust.
If they could, they probably wouldn’t pray at all. Because that’s why we put all these systems in place to begin with. To give ourselves noble reasons that can make us feel righteous about wanting to tear each other apart.
Hangings, stonings, slit throats, rending of flesh, burning at the stake, boiling in oil, crucifixion. Death, famine, and pestilence. That’s what the people want, and we made God in our image.
And now here I am.
Don’t mind me. I’m just the entertainment.
I want to talk about this, but I can’t.
(Burning at the stake, boiling in oil, crucifixion.)
So I stand around in front of the main temple with Ikeda IV and Niehaus I. Not talking about anything, just idling while they do it for me. It’s actually kind of nice.
I’m staring at the stone giants in the center yard, a circle of elongated, abstracted humans, stretching like hot wax, raising round mirrors that fling what they don’t absorb back up at the sky. During the day, the mirrors tilt upward at the sun, fill our wires with its mighty hydrogen glow, luminescent and prosperous. During the night, they tilt forward at the opposite mirror, make a perfect dark hallway.
I’m not even thinking about what they mean, because I’ve already thought it a thousand times.
Pleas to God; infinite worlds.
They’re not thinking about it, either, because they’re busy talking about their identical lives.
Who they Spoke to, what they made up and didn’t know they made up. What they only think they saw. Arson, robbery, stabbing. Nothing an actually-guilty person couldn’t reasonably come back from with a change of heart and a solemn vow. Nothing a few lashes couldn’t fix, if you were told you did it somewhere else. Nothing like anything I would say.
Ikeda IV coughs, clears his throat, and spits on the ground.
“Fowler II, you were brutal last Sunday.”
Don’t you forget it.
“I was only telling the truth.”
This, of course, is another lie.
“Well, yeah, but it’s the way you said it. You don’t mess around. You’re not much like your dad.”
And there it is again. I never understood why people always thought that was a compliment.
Number One was actually pretty popular in his time. Everyone said he embodied mercy, that he knew God and everybody could make things right. But, it is true that some people didn’t like that. It implied he thought God was a little confused by how to go about things. He got tripped up by the other side of infinite potential. He wasn’t a hard-liner. Not like me.
Because I don’t believe in God. Because all of this is proof that, at least within these walls, we’re beyond saving.
I don’t say this.
“I guess I don’t talk much like him, but I think I’m like him in other ways.”
Ikeda IV thinks for a moment, clears his throat, and spits again, almost hitting my shoe. I glare at him, but he either can’t see it or doesn’t care.
“Yeah, you can really connect with a congregation. I know he was a little famous for that. Early to say, but that might be a Fowler thing.”
The two of us all sticky and melting together. Hands. Head.
“Well, I’m only the second, but it’s looking promising.”
He nods.
“That’s what they say! Anyone requested you yet?”
I shake my head.
Everyone assumes the opposite, until I have to tell them myself: my gametes aren’t in very high demand.
I’m a fine Speaker like my father, it’s true. When a Speaker is particularly good, people usually want to make more of us.
But even the most devout know Speaking isn’t genetic. It’s a legacy, a sensibility, more about the influence of parents on children and the connotations of names. A lot of the women here would want to raise Fowler III, but fewer want anything to do with my shitty genes. My terrible eyesight, my listless constitution, my short stature.
I don’t even have the right look. My father was on the tall side, and his build was almost architectural. One of those people where you look at them and remember that we all have skeletons.
I look like someone started sculpting a human figure out of white putty and got bored before they got around to adding any of the details. A courtroom sketch artist would look at me and throw up their hands in frustration, not knowing where to start on my face because there’s nothing about it that’s the least bit particular to itself. I could be full of plastic pellets or shredded paper or chopped liver or any fucking thing, for all I look like I have actual human bones and muscles.
If there’s anything distinctive about me at all, it’s that I’m so plain I almost look fake. And I only know that because I have to look at myself every single day. They’re probably all afraid they wouldn’t remember which kid was theirs, if he came out like me.
My brother bred true. He would have looked like my father. But his insides weren’t turned around the right way.
He was of this world and this world alone. It wasn’t worth the trouble of keeping him.
I’m sorry, Zero.
(Don’t think about this.)
I think about my misshapen lenses and my boring face.
“Not as far as I know.”
He shrugged, wiped his nose on his sleeve. I really wished I hadn’t seen him do that.
“Huh. Well, good luck.”
I mumbled, thanks, coughed twice, spat in the old paper towel I had in my pocket, and blew a snot rocket in the dust. He gave me the same disgusted look I just gave him.
We all have different ways of dealing with it, and each one’s ways are absolutely repulsive to all of the others. Then they put us all in the same room and expect us to get along and not hope everyone else just chokes.
Niehaus I is watching us, with a mixture of fascination and pity.
He isn’t like us. He escaped all of this, because they didn’t breed him on purpose.
The story goes: he went to a routine medical appointment as a little kid. They noticed his heartbeat was on the wrong side. His parents converted and sent him here. The Seminary took his first name and gave him the “I” in good faith.
His odds are mediocre. He only has it in the bottom half of his genes, not in every floundering cell.
But, if God wills it, he’ll give us Niehaus II.
I don’t know why anyone would want that. He’s annoying. He stares, for one thing. He hums tunelessly to himself all the time because he doesn’t know he’s doing it. He can’t remember anything, and always tried to read off my papers when we were in training. He borrows things from people without asking and always ends up stepping on them or sitting on them or something.
I hate him, and I hate his shitty son already.
He shook his head quickly, snapping back to reality.
“Oh! Fowler II! Did you hear about what happened to that lady you started with on Sunday?”
Don’t look excited. You don’t like doing this. You are God’s proxy, and it’s hard work.
That’s what you want them to keep thinking, alright?
“Um, no. What?”
He cleared his throat. Not thickly, like we do. It was the kind of clearing that seems more like a part of speech than anything else. The body making an unconvincing attempt at mimicking itself.
“I’m surprised you haven’t heard! You’re usually so on top of things.”
More reasons why Niehaus I should never breed: inability to get to the fucking point. Backhanded compliments. Gossip. His entire stupid face.
“...Just spit it out!”
Both of them look scared. Sometimes, this happens, and everyone passes it off as part of why I command a lot of respect. I’m harsh and intense, not absolutely sick to shit of everyone.
(That’s what you want them to keep thinking, alright?)
Niehaus I clears his throat again. I think about doing the same and spitting a wad of slime big enough to fill a hotel shampoo bottle in his mouth, just to prove a point.
“She, uh, got ahold of a can of gasoline. Didn’t even know we had any of that stuff around, or what for, but, um… She climbed up on her roof and set herself on fire.”
Doused him with lighter fluid, lit a match.
“Do what you must, Sister.”
Now I’m really trying to keep a straight face. Sometimes, this happens, and it almost makes the whole thing worth it. They take what I said they did to others and try to do it to themselves. They condemn their theoretical actions by making them real and directing at someone they deem more deserving. It means something, and I’ve been trying to put it in words for years.
“Anything that can happen will happen, eventually, somewhere.”
That’s too broad.
“People are only innocent until someone puts an idea in their head.”
Not even true. If it was, who would be having these ideas in the first place?
“Violence against oneself doesn’t count and can be indulged freely with full permission.”
A workable concept, but a tangent at best.
“You can’t atone. You can only give yourself more to answer for.”
Too obvious. Not quite the same concept.
(I’m at a loss.)
I’ll figure it out. I just have to keep making it happen.
“I only tell them what they’ve done. What they deserve is for them to decide.”
The idea is, you decide or God will eventually decide for you. Build your own Hell and let Him take care of Heaven.
All the devils are here.
Ikeda IV is alternately smiling at both of us.
“See, what did I tell you?”
Nothing I didn’t know.
On the walk back to the apartment, I think of the woman I Spoke to, the story I told about her brother. Drenched to the skin; sweat and petroleum. Heat and oxygen; damp breath and fire. The two of us joined through pulsing arteries, the poison I quietly pumped into her heart from whatever dingy reservoir I’d installed in place of mine. The images play projected on the dome of my skull like a film strip, and I smell meat all the way home.
Turns out, that last part wasn’t my imagination. There was smoke on the horizon, and I started smelling that, too.
The pits must have filled up again.
Real meat, real petrol, real fire. Hazmat suits and flamethrowers. People walking home with cloths around their faces to keep out the unclean particles and vapors of unclean people.
Speakers aren’t obliged to do this, because it wouldn’t make much of a difference. Uncleanliness flows in and out of us from the four corners of the multiverse.
When it’s you, it’s a divine duty and privilege. When it’s us, it’s a metaphysical contamination hazard.
You were made for this.
I’m not particularly offended. It’s kind of a moot point, anyway, because most of it is our doing. Some people dole out death sentences to themselves. Others just take it a little too far. Bleed out, asphyxiate, dehydrate, slip into shock, starve, turn septic.
A few refuse medical treatments with the Church’s blessing, embark on a spiritual quest that ends with a flying leap into the grave.
Number One laid out on a bed in the back room, unable to talk, hardly recognizing you, dry-drowning in his own fluid, it’s in the blood now, it won’t be long.
I was only twelve. He was only forty-one. I loved him. I decided I was going to be nothing like him.
(Don’t think about this.)
I close my eyes, inhale the broiled-meat wind, and think as hard as I can. Her being carried off to the pits to finish what she started, slick and rigid and muscle-red, or falling apart in disjointed chunks like an overcooked chicken. Maybe just ash and bone in a bucket, tossed in more out of politeness than anything else.
The brother I invented, burned at the stake in the garage.
Two matching charred red masks with tense skeletal grins, ecstatic in their satisfaction that they’ve finally suffered enough to show those stripped faces to God.
It’s not the worst thing I could imagine, I guess.
“Fowler! I’ve got all your stuff ready.”
Wes is waiting for me as always. He’s happy to see me, and I really mean that.
And he really means it, too. His excitement hasn’t been fake in years, so I don’t fake it, either.
“Fuck off, I’m getting in the shower.”
My voice is cold. I don’t even look at him. When I finally take a short glance, he looks wounded and helpless. We’re both acting out old roles. Poorly. Wooden, lackluster, not quite remembering our lines or our motivation after all this time.
“Are you sure? You aren’t looking so good.”
Now your turn.
“Shut up, Wesley. I don’t give a shit.”
I used to yell at him all the time. I used to do a lot worse. He spent his whole life learning to wordlessly obey; I spent my whole life without someone I could take everything out on without repercussion.
When I was sixteen, I realized that, since he had to do what I said, all my secrets were safe with him. And I decided our relationship was going to change.
I still ordered him around, but it was different.
He wanted to read what I’d read, so I told him to.
He wanted to grow his hair out, so I told him to.
He wanted to sit at the table with me, so I told him to.
He wanted to go by something less formal, so I told him just Wes was fine.
He was asking if he could be a real person. I was telling him he could.
As if I had that power. As if I’m quite considered a real person. As if I’d ever been granted that title myself.
But, there’s still some part of my brain that thinks it can snap at him. Some part of his that accepts being snapped at.
Old habits die hard. Old patterns and reflexes live forever in suspended animation.
He sits deflated on the couch, the vest in my spot beside him, the loaded syringe and a new rubber band on the coffee table. Him all ready to strap me in, tie me off, and turn on the television. Me kicking off my shoes in the entryway, not eager to get stabbed or vibrated the second I walk in the door.
I already suffer enough to meet God.
The body picks up the slack.
We don’t say anything else.
I step into the bathroom, drop my pants, sit down on the lid of the toilet, and get to work. This shit has been in for three days now. Some of the punctures are probably getting nasty by now.
The body picks up the slack.
I owe it the same favor. We eat our own tails. Everything’s covered here.
(I was there when He wasn’t. Remember that.)
Every few days, I reapply: two rows of staples from a few inches above the knee to just past the middle of the femur, orbited by a jagged asteroid field of needles and quilt pins. When the holes turn red and start leaking plasma on my slacks, I clean up and start again.
The staples come out easy enough; I stick a dental pick under them and take them up three or four at a go. They’ve usually mostly worked themselves out by now, anyway. They slide back and forth when the fabric brushes them. I find them in my laundry and in my sheets, tipped with yellowed bits of crystallized seepage and cloudy white shreds of dead tissue.
The pins and needles are buried deeper and need to come out one at a time, so they can take a while. Sometimes, the needles slip under the skin, so I have to dig a little and thread the holes with the pick to get them out. They slide out of the flesh with an infrasonic squeak that resonates down in the bone. A feeling like my skin would start unravelling if I pulled long and hard enough.
I wish this would really happen, that I could watch myself do it, see what I’d made of myself when I’d finally pulled it all the way out.
“Ecstatic in their satisfaction that they’ve finally suffered enough to show those stripped faces to God.”
The perforations sting in the shower. The flesh is still sore when I step out and put everything back in place. I concentrate on the cool heaviness and thud-click of the stapler, the weird lack of resistance when I start with the pins, like I’m pushing them through cold clay.
I could be full of plastic pellets or shredded paper or chopped liver or any fucking thing.
I bite my tongue until I’m finished, then I go lie down on my bed of nails.
Or sit on the couch; always making sure to keep my legs crossed, keep the pressure steady.
A lot of us do things like this. For most of them, it makes at least a little sense. They believe they have to, that it’s expected of them. That they’re committing infinite sins and in need of continuous punishment. That they have to keep up with all their horrible selves.
I do it even though I know there’s nobody watching.
When I stopped believing in God, I decided it was my job to name my own list of transgressions and mete out my own punishments. Considering the circumstances, it wasn’t hard.
Being complicit in any of this: Original Sin.
We don’t need to know what’s happening in other worlds to know we all deserve to fry here and now. Our wrongdoings are naked and obvious.
Within these walls, we’re beyond saving.
If I have to bullshit people a little to make sure we all get what we deserve, then that’s what I’ll do.
And I, in turn, am a liar, a torturer, a murderer by proxy, and a fraud.
If I wasn’t a fraud, I’d be a heretic.
I’ll take myself down with the rest.
“You can’t atone. You can only give yourself more to answer for.”
“Violence against oneself doesn’t count and can be indulged freely with full permission.”
“Do what you must.”
Swallow hard, clear your throat, here we go.
I swallow hard; I clear my throat.
I step under the hot water, and am engulfed in flames.
“Now cry on demand.”
no subject
no subject
Your tag has been added!