The Lanyard (17 page)

"I don't know..."

"Why do you think he needs to keep recovering those pills any way he can?"

CHAPTER TWENTY-
THREE

They turned down another hallway that ran parallel to the other then around to complete a square, although he wondered if the true shape was an octagon, a panopticon, a way for them to forever stare into the dark centre of the prison that caught them now just as they caught it, locked from them behind doors that would not budge. He had let her go ahead of him; he kept his hand on the wall to balance, on the smooth metal, illuminated by long red slugs kept in cages every so often was beaten out of shape in places with dents as deep as her mouth, a dull tingle now and then in his hand where it touched, as if the blood was flowing away, leaving.

"This one," she said, finding another door that would turn. "This is the one."

"What is it?"

She pushed the door open, working against clumps of dust piled up beneath it as it moved, like thatched patches of shed skin, growing into long hair and pieces of rag on top of black and white squares turned grey.

He followed as she moved away from him, becoming lost to the dark of this room, a black sand creeping up her legs, touching at her back, holding onto her clothes, fading. The light from the corridor focussed onto a sink unit with a cabinet on top, mirror tarnished but not cracked, the edge of white bathtub.

"Not so fast," he said, his voice no longer echoing like it had outside the room, as if coming from a funnel pointed at his mouth. The air had changed, become damp. The room gave the impression it was only a few yards across yet impossible to see, somehow it created that sensation of closing walls, clashing rocks like that tunnel. The smell began to grow, perhaps scraps of unstirred water that had not felt the stirring air for a long time, congealed like bags of jelly.

"There's a pull-light by the sink," she said. "It works."

The cold clutch of the porcelain humming like a rubbed glass as he approached it. He reached for a piece of string dangling from the cabinet above the sink guided by a memory he held, that they both did, of the time running down the bank of that hill, hand in hand, arm in arm, tied together by the touch of their flesh. He pulled it several times, creating a click, but no light. He stared at the wall and tried to see it attached to his hand. He waited for a moment and then pulled with more force, slowing down as he reached the snap, holding it there, straining it, before he let it go up and yanked it again. At last, the bulb started to work, producing a near violet glow that quickly swept over the rest of the room, casting his shadow across her where he blocked the light.

She walked up behind him and looked at her reflection in the tarnished glass. Her eyes were deep and seemed to drop away into her face, where the skin had piled into blue around the edges as if bruised, lashes that spread as if caked with dirt and the beginning of lines in her skin when she blinked. She reached around him and swung the door out towards his head, pushing it all the way back so that it held. Inside were some bottles and boxes. She moved a few of them around, reading their labels before she slid them to the side and grappled for others. An empty syringe fell and rattled into the sink. She pulled strips of pills, but dropped them behind her onto the floor. She stood on her toes, leant into the sink so that the tops of her thighs somehow anchored as she searched, as she rifled.

"Anything?" he said.

"Meds. Bandages and shit... So no."

"What kind of meds?"

She passed the next packet she came across behind her, holding it for him between her thumb and first finger so it flopped in the air, wrinkled plastic turned the colour of the light. He took it up and ran his fingers over the back, so that the empty chambers might reinstate. His fingers travelled until he found parts with pills inside, waiting to be born like grubs in a beehive. He turned it over and tried to read what was written on the foil.

"This isn't what you need?" he said.

"No."

She punched the inside of the door without conviction as she finished her search, as if slapping it away. It bounced on the hinge and began to return but did not get all the way to closed.

He wanted to hold her again, but she moved past him without catching his eye. She sat on the edge of the bath and turned to face him, crossing her legs and leaning back. She hadn't put her shoes back on. Her feet were touched with scraps of blood and patched up by dirt. Her toe moved from side to side, her legs tapered up to the knee and then glistened where they turned around and joined the rest of her. She had a blank expression on her face.

He took a step but his foot seemed stuck on the floor. He had been still for too long, how long, he didn't know, just waiting there, looking at her, aching, transfixed.

An ocean of blue light.

Her eyes had changed from black blanks to taking the glimmer of the near-neon sob of colour coming out of the tube over the sink, yet twisting it into a pattern like scan-lines stitched over where her iris was. He blinked. It was still there, the grid, the light weave, the illustrious mesh of light. She was staring at him. He was staring back. Her lips slipped apart but she didn't say anything. She left it to him.

"I think..." he said. "I think I remember something."

"What?"

"This room. This..." he looked over to the wall, above the bath, where there might be a vent stripped of its fan, but there was not. "This place... It somehow feels like I've been here before, like I've lived this. Like I've -- I don't know -- experienced it somehow."

"So how do we do this? What do we do now?" she said.

"I don't know."

"The mirror," she said at last. "We can use it."

She stood up.

"How?"

She began looking at herself in the glass again, bending in close so that she might have expected the surface to shimmer and ripple like a stream when she poked it, and yet with the expression flipped left to right, that of a curious child -- though she had symmetry enough not to care -- of a child yet to touch a still lake, a still place, not even prepared for the ripples that would grow from her fingers when she did. She hesitated just an inch from the glass as if a static field came out from the surface and jigged the hairs on her arms.

He put his face next to hers, close enough to see the patterns in her skin caused by veins, caused by the long silver smears that joined imperceptibly into her pores that he had admired, so fine that they might feed like those plants that did not need soil, taking their nutrients from the air and slowly extending like silk across a fabric map, marking out countries, the borders he had to cross to be a man but might never not.

She pushed her finger into her eyebrow and it lifted up as if she was searching for a book under the edge of a mattress. She held it in place for a moment, squinted at herself, and then let it drop.

"What is it?" he said.

She turned to one side and looked out of the corner of her eyes at the reflection now showing the spiral in her ear that was matched by the way her hair wrapped around the top of it and then curled at the edge, taking on all of the same colours as the dark cavern into her skin, like the one they had crawled through, like the one they had fallen down.

"Can you picture how my skull looks under my head?" she said whilst holding her hand under her chin and lifting it slightly. A piece of her hair that she had pulled back fell down and swung gently across the lines in her brow ploughed by thought.

"I don't know what you mean."

"I mean that under my skin, under yours, there's this skull. Like you see in the books, like you see out there, all around. This bone. And it's this thing we all have and
it's
so shining white and bright inside us. But why do we never think about it, or try to see?"

"I don't know."

"Look me in the eye," she said.

He tried but couldn't. Not because of his old habit, his lack of direction, his fear. But more because he realised the eye of a skull, what she had asked him to imagine, was an empty giant round black, grown like the moon when it drifted across the sun. How could he see past her iris knowing of that depth, that emptiness, the nothingness that would go all the way to the back of her head.

"I can't do this," he said.

"You can't look at me?"

"No... The rest."

"Well you have to," she grabbed his shoulders. "You will."

He pushed her back. Her calves hit the tub causing her to stumble and use a hand on the side to steady herself. She stopped as if frozen, hovering in place.

"Why?" he said.

"Listen."

One of the doors further down the corridor slammed shut again. Another opened. He'd lost count of how many times. How many hits, punches of breath. It was as if a wind kept rushing down the shaft through which the corpses had sunk, through which they had, a storm, interfering with the rooms, opening them like some vengeful spirit, searching, not finding whatever it was, slamming shut. He wondered what it was the wind could search for? What should it search for but the sea, not some shaft, some sinkhole?

"Don't say anything," she said.

He looked at the door, narrowing his eyes, trying to figure out if her words could have reached that far, or had they been aimed expertly at his ear so as to fall on the floor at any further point and splash his toes.

It was either some strange wind creating the noise they kept hearing now, or something else. Like some other people, some other thing, from up above or below, the cursed, the sick, whatever they were, alerted to the noise he and she had made on the bed, had made clattering in the cupboard, alerted to their scent, the invisible footprints that gave them away. Girl heat, boy heat. He didn't fully know what it was. There just had to have been scent involved, just as there had to have been touch. Touch between him, between them.

The boy moved away from her and approached the door. It was not properly closed and seemed to twitch. He dared himself to pull it open and peek along the corridor. His hand held in space, half-lifted, turned side on, had begun to shake then stopped. Something hissed from deeper in, from far away and at the same time right under his nose. He put his hand on the door and pushed it so as not to let it slam. When it was in the frame he leant into it, leant his weight to it, and then stepped clear. The back of the door was divided into four parts, an embossed cross running down both lines of symmetry. He thought about touching himself that way, religiously. His hand went up to his chin but then he let it drop.

There was a switch-lock below the handle. He turned it and pushed it as hard as it would go until it clicked in place. As he went back to her the sound of whispered voices crept after him like long tendrils of black coming under the gap in the frame, curling around his feet like smoke snakes that rose like cobras and spat in his ear.

He reached for the string hanging down under the cabinet. It twitched and span as his fingers approached, seemingly tinged with the same magnetic fields that made all rope jangle around. He pulled it and the light blink and then stopped. As the string snapped, he managed to take her hand, so that they wouldn't be alone, so that they would have the connection, when the darkness filled the room, a sheer-bright, luminous line reaching out from his fingers to her to hold them together as one. Her grip tightened around his hand and he felt her nails go into his skin.

And then silence. And then nothing. Nothing but the sound of their hearts in their throats, talking in drum rhythms, climbing like birds and then splitting back, like little droplets of ash in a volcano in their stomach, red like the sky, pushing up their throats and turning to stones that would drop at first but then get held on the rest like giant rocks being wheeled into place by men, markers for this, for that, suffering backs. And they watched for the telltale light at the bottom of the door, which had never moved, had never changed, for the shadow coming across.

It was the worst time he could imagine. But he did not want it to end.

CHAPTER TWENTY-F
OUR

What she asked of him wasn't right. What she wanted him to do, or say. None of it. He couldn't be glad and be like this. He couldn't pretend that it was the only way. He looked her in the eye and got her to repeat. He felt that way she might see. She might stop. He proceeded up the hill, then, only now unsure if there was adulthood at the top or merely death.

He turned his back. He turned away. He left her lying on the bottom of the bath, waiting for him to wrap his hand in the scraps of rag they found down by the dried up toilet, that had almost fused with the floor. He picked them up in a bundle and pulled them out, turning the strands tightly over and around his fist to create a makeshift glove that barely had any give. He walked over to the dull glass mirror in the cupboard and stared at himself, distracted by the long stains growing down from the top, following them up like ladders, all the way to where they appeared on the ceiling, those green veins over the night sky, and back to where they scratched across his face like claws.

He stepped back and aimed a punch at the glass. He hit it as hard as he could, picturing a target a few inches deep into the surface, as if trying to bloody his own nose. His hand bent down to his wrist as it hit in the shape of a rabbit foot. It rebounded and then slid, dropping onto the sink. The mirror did not break. He tried again, not using his knuckles this time, but turning his hand into a hammer instead, bashing it against the glass, pushing into it so that he could feel the cupboard door start to bend. He hit it again, and again. Hot red inside his nails, under the bandaged rags, dripping down his arm. He yelled and thrust, yelled and thrust.

At last, a large chunk of glass broke off, smashing into the sink beneath the cupboard to make a hundred stars that suddenly leapt to capture the white-blue light from the lamp and fling it over them, blinding him nearly as much as the pain.

He was crying now. He put his damaged arm behind his back as if trying to forget it existed, holding it off towards the door as if he hoped never have to look at it and see what he had done... Become some ghost forced to watch its suicide attempt being pulled from the river and pumped. She still hadn't said a word. With his other hand he picked around in the sink. The shards had angled towards the plug and many slipped down into it until it jammed, like all those corpses poured into the pit in the ground, become a pyre that would not burn -- he was sure of that -- but could shine, and did shine, so that he felt the spores of silver in his eyes.

He carefully selected the longest shard he could find, which tapered to the edge like the sting on a bee, wrapping his fingers around its widest part, feeling it cutting into his skin a fraction of an inch, becoming stuck, as if he might never put it down, or shake it free of his flesh when he wanted to, when he had to hand it to her to inspect.

He held it over the light so that it cut across like a thin shard, like the tip of a rocket ship crossing the sun, glinting for a moment in the blast of phosphor as as he rotated it, vanishing as it went edge on, becoming too thin, the brightness able to wrap all the way around it, making it seem to pulsate against the dark, just a last momentary star sparking out, exploding, dying on the clip at the edge of the shard where it wasn't quite smooth enough to fade.

The light flickered in his eyes as he turned away. He stared at his feet. His shadow blurred and pulsated, cast over the tiles and the rusted rails as it ran towards where she was. A couple of scraps of what could have been leaves began to stir near his feet and he stepped through them. He shuffled towards her, as if trying to make the moment last forever, the makeshift knife in his hand, transparent, transplanting, slowly cutting through him until his fingers severed and lost all control. So that she could use his hands as she pleased, to caress her, to penetrate her, to pass her the blade, to stroke her face, her hair, with no way to enjoy it, to hate it, to experience it, like watching through the blades of an imaginary fan up on the wall as it spun, as it made time stand still in slices like dribbles falling down a sluice, congealing fat that would see out their time like the
runoff
from a candle wick.

At the bottom of the bath, almost invisible with the backdrop of baked-in red stains and brown slurry, which crept up from the hole where the plug used to sit and turned like a spiral outwards and back in, she had reached out, but not to him; instead, she started peel something off the side, clutching her fingers around whatever it was, attempting to pry it from the flat. Her nails went underneath. It came free and slid to the side and started to move around. She edged it closer to the plughole, allowing the metal to come free, allowing its shape to appear, to take on appearance from a memory she might of had, that he might of had, of a razor blade with the oval shaped hole in the centre plugged with mucus. She teased some of it out with the end of her thumb and once the first part had fallen away into darkness it was easy to see the rest. She held the blade up to the light so that a beam shone through the centre. There was writing embossed on the top of the blade that had become as much use as morse code for all of the years it had sat like she did now, in the bottom of the bath, reclaimed by the organic material growing away from it like roses up a wall. And she had turned it over, gripping it by the small notches in the side.

She ran the blade on the back of her hand.

"Don't." he said.

She pressed harder and harder, pushing it into her skin, grimacing, until even in the low light the white lines created by the pressure shone out like a line of scratches across a piece of bone, evidence of prehistoric teeth, that this thing in her hand might once have had the ability to cut, but no more.

She threw it aside and it clattered then fell.

He held the shard towards her, stood over her, pointing it down, angling it. The piece of mirror looked like an icicle all of a sudden, the frosted blue light not doing it any favours. He turned it away so that it held to the wall, imagining it clinging to the roof of one of the houses he had survived winters in, those fingers on the edges of the roof that had scared him, threatening to drop, to fall, to cut, to shatter skulls, like the experience of a night terror, of waking up and realising there was something wrong.

"You have to do it," she said. "You promised me."

He couldn't reply.

"Please."

He remembered snapping the ice fingers from a low roof to use them like sticks, to fight with them, against each other, against petrified wood, against frozen stems. And they had won because they were thick. And they had lost because they could fracture

He was close to her now, near enough to feel her breath.

"Just do it from the other side," she said. "So I can't see it."

He knelt down.

"You could close your eyes."

She shook her head.

The shard tilted up to his face as he paused. The point glimmered. Her eye came into focus behind it, glinting with wet, pupil large but shrinking and the emerald swirl, seeming to spin. He leant as far around to the other side as he could. He stopped. She blinked. He moved away.

"I can't take this anymore," he said. "Fuck."

"You can," she replied.

"It's not right."

"It's the only chance we have."

"For what?"

"To win, to rebel... to get away with it, like you said."

"No."

"To end on our terms... Because I don't want to be like that."

"But you won't. We can find more pills. We will."

"And then?"

"And then more..."

She laughed.

He looked at her. He could look at anyone now, he knew that... Anyone but himself... But why? Because when faced with a looking glass he had broken it. He had punched into it and had it shatter into pieces. And in the long shard he could only see himself piece by piece, as if something had already cut him up. The guilt. The gilt.

His eyes appeared dark, pulled down by a great shadow, he turned the shard to reflect his nose, with the silver green slither of dirt attached to the bottom of it, his mouth, open, his teeth set apart and sharp, he looked at his neck and his chest before it was impossible to see any lower.

He dropped it onto the floor and it tumbled away, turning end over end as it brushed his clothes and fell onto the floor without sound.

"What are you doing," she said.

"I said, I can't."

"But what changed?"

"Nothing. It's just..."

"What?"

"I just can't."

She pulled herself up out of the bath and leaned towards him, kicking her legs under her body so that she sat on her haunches and seemed to rock back and forth.

"But I need you to do it," she said, "for me, for us. So we can just remember how it was... just these days... these good days... And not the rest."

He shook his head.

She looked down over the side of the bath. She wanted the shard. He readied to hold down her arms, moving across so that she couldn't see it, lined up perfectly to catch the pulse of light being thrown from over the sink. And suddenly his eyes snapped straight ahead.

"We don't have to do this," he said.

"Yes, we do."

"No. Because it doesn't pass."

"It doesn't pass!"

"What are you talking about?"

"It doesn't pass... The disease... Do you remember how you caught it? Did anyone ever say?"

"No..."

"You weren't born with it though, I'm sure. It won't pass through. I'm proof of that. It means hope."

"Proof of what?"

"My father had it, but I don't."

"How do you know?"

"Well if I do is it so bad? If you do?"

"That's me without meds; it's not me."

"How do
you
know?"

"What's it matter anyway?"

"We can beat it. We can prevail."

"Prevail? What are you on?"

"You and me. What's inside of you."

"I don't think it happens like that--"

He grabbed her hands and stared deeply into her, until she let her head fall back.

"It does."

Maybe because life really did not begin in the ocean, or up above. Whatever his father had told him he'd read. It began somewhere else. In another place, in another man's house. And while there did not seem to be any reason to the colours of the sky, the sea, the air, there were. Just as the sun existed for him, for them, through the mist of distance, always. Dark was just an absence of light. And when the sunk sank down to the mountains  it was not gone, but merely exploring the back of the world, the part that would remain in silhouette until they were brave enough to climb it.

Perhaps they already had.

He smiled at her.

"It'll be ok," he said. "There's more to this place than it appears. I can tell. We can't give up. I won't let you."

His mind ran away then returned, pushing like some tide further and further up the beach. They would need to find towels soon. They would need to learn and plan. But they could rebuild the world in this way and go on. That's what rebellion really was, getting away with it, surviving it, embracing the chance. And he knew now he would not stop. And nor would she. He had seen that flash of light. And even as the rocks rattled across silver seams, and the houses came down, even as the blunt burnt edges of the city ran red, some like they had found one another and rushed down a hill and must rush on, just as the first men became the last, looking at an image of themselves through a protective glass mask, passed out, passed off, by day, by night, by dawn, to the fade, and beyond. But not them. Arm in arm, now, hand in hand, tied like string and then untangled over and again. Nodding their heads, together, strong. That was ever how they could run.

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