The Fine Line Between Life And Death - 09.01.99
I can’t remember my early childhood very well, but it seems like most others don’t either. Not before four or five anyway. It’s like all the secrets of the universe are born into us from the moment that conception occurs, as though Heaven has some secret channel into our minds to tell us what we’re going to need to eventually figure out again after it’s taken away bit by bit. Before we can tell it to anybody. Like a big game. Or maybe Hell would be more appropriate. I don’t know… lines of cruelty seem to bend and fold and blur no matter what angle you look at them from.
Anyway, we forgot it all, my brother and me. Now we’re just starting to really get it back, but the way we paint it, it’s hard to tell what shade of black it is anymore. There were times when I didn’t think we’d even get this far. Being proven wrong has its perks sometimes, but damn if we didn’t land some bad ways to stumble through it.
Sure, we were born into some rich pad with all the trappings of royalty, or at least upper class, but that was just a gilded cage with impressive crown molding we sat snug in for a few years. We were prizes, the two of us; me about two years older. How cute, how perfect for them, our parents, and their life with their friends and society.
I’ll admit it. I liked the traveling, seeing the old temples and tombs, the long rivers or the wild, virgin places of the world stretching out until the deserts in a vast sea of green. If there is a paradise left somewhere in the world, I bet it stays in those jungles far, far away from humanity and its lust for God’s power of Control, Creation, and that inevitable child, Destruction.
I try to tell myself I’m not like that… that I don’t use my Gift that way. It’s inevitable though… why else do I have it if not to be just a better version of my species? Ah, but we’re not even there yet. It’s the trouble with a past like mine. You can’t seem to avoid distraction, the shakes, the coincidences, and the urges to jump ahead to what you know is coming. Life… Death… Rebirth… and then once more with feeling… over and over.
But I digress…
So we traveled the world, just one big façade of a happy family. Greed and Envy had swallowed that house so long ago, there was no chance of seeing the light coming through the maw anymore. Brother and I just didn’t really know it yet… or maybe we did and just chose to ignore. Seems like the way it goes.
I’ve blocked out the specifics of that moment when we got separated on the narrow, third world streets in some city in China. I don’t even remember the name now. All I remember is seeing this woven basket sitting by the corner, its reeds old and busting on one side, empty and dry. And then I hear my father’s voice and someone grabs me hard by the wrist. And we’re jerking this way and that, me shoved to our mother. They’re all calling out Brother’s name but it’s like a canyon echoing in my head… so surreal. That’s all I remember. Not a thing more.
You’d think for something that important, that vital to you, you’d remember it better. Like in those old stories where you hear about how one twin knows what the other feels. Yeah, not so here. I remember the plane trip home, the royal blue of the fabric seat in front of me. After that, well, that’s when the family began to be more true to their form. Like that busted basket on the day they took my brother.
I did feel lost without him. Like it was my fault. And maybe it was; luck has a way of turning as sour as possible around me. I suppose it’s why I try to read things so hard; people, places, things… all so I can maybe, just maybe get that glimpse of the next time something’s going to go wrong, as it always must, and be ready, or at the very least unsurprised. It isn’t rocket science when you get down to it.
Anyway, after that everything started falling apart. Dad took to drinking more than before, or going out for his “golf.” Mother just got snappy with each hour and fired half the staff on a whim. Me? I faded. I took ill. Maybe it was something I picked up while we were overseas in that forsaken place. Maybe it was just depression. Either way, I was sick as a dog. I was wan, emaciated, hollowing out in places that you only see in National Geographic or those commercials to save some kid in a godless country. After so many years of looking it over, I think that’s where she got the idea to start with for what came next.
Cards and sympathies poured in. Mother received them all. She drank it in like a whore’s ruff on French nickel night. The attention… she loved it all so much. Oh yes, she’d put on a face and cry every now and then. I’d like to think she actually felt sorry, maybe even guilty too, for letting Brother be taken like he was. But then I’d look into her eyes as we posed ourselves at various acts of life in the many rooms of the house. I’d look into her eyes and the eyes of my father, and I read it plain as day… why couldn’t it have been you? Why couldn’t it have been you?
But somewhere in that sick little breaking mind of hers, I knew she loved every minute of it. The looks of pity, sympathy, anything... for me, for Brother, for her husband’s growing estrangement. And she fed off of it. I just happened to be the easiest target.
I had finally started eating more than crumbs, sleeping a little more than before, being more healthy, more like the kid I was every day. And the sympathy stopped coming as strongly. That connection to her sanity snapping thread by meaty thread.
She started making up the continued illnesses, keeping me inside so I’d stay pale and look wearied. Calling in doctor after doctor to get a “cure.” At that age, I wasn’t sure if she was making it up, or seeing something there that I, as a child, couldn’t understand, couldn’t see just yet. In my own manner of looking back on it now, it seems like a bit of both.
In any case, the lies didn’t last long. You can only go on words alone so long, action must always follow. So she resorted to other methods for the results she wanted; rubbing me down with oven cleaner fluid, or much, much later, injecting me with syringes left over from my previous “treatments” filled with urine or some other waste. Keeping me in an almost constant state of illness.
It worked. It worked so well for what she wanted; the rashes that wouldn’t go away, the dangerous fevers, the voiding of my own bodily functions. I had no control. Hell, I can’t even count how many surgeries I’ve had from those years of my life. I don’t even think half my body is mine anymore. But she got her fix.
She always kept me so well balanced. To make sure I didn’t just die of it and end it all for her. Sure, there were times in the beginning when she almost fucked it all up, but that was before she learned my limits, stretch as they might later. Ones that would keep me close, in the house, so she couldn’t be separated from me for too long. Long enough that whatever she had me on that month would wear off as I grew to realize what she was doing to me. How fake it all was.
The breaking point came with another dangerous set of fevers. The hallucinations from the toxins in my body leaving me weak as a kitten on some days. But I felt freer inside them. I was healthy and so strong. Everything was so bright. I would walk in the deserts I’d seen in my earlier childhood, look out over the frozen tundras devoid of anything and anyone, hear the cracked and drying earth under my feet as I skipped across it; so free.
It was almost brutal to wake back from that freedom, even from such a wasteland, but the wind stayed with me sometimes, just a few moments after waking. Sometimes I felt greater shapes I knew were just looming on the next mile, but I always woke up before I got there. It was when I decided I’d had enough. This torture had to end somewhere.
And so, my eyes bright, the heat shining on my brow, I slipped from bed one night. The hallways of the house seeming so much larger from the fever, bending and twisting like I was going to fall. Somehow I made it to the kitchen. I ran my hands under the water for a few minutes to clear my burning somewhat. Then I took one of the biggest knives I could find, and I headed back upstairs.
I don’t know how long I stood in there, just watching them as they slept. They looked so harsh, even in their sleep. The lines on their faces making them look like something out of a comic book, all evil and filled with maliciousness. Yes, this was time to die.
I took a step forward, and my mother rolled over in her sleep. I stopped dead still, thinking I’d woken her, but her face flashed faintly in the small light in the room and I could see her eyes were still closed. Was she faking? Had she heard me? I don’t know which, but I ran from that room. I stumbled. I fell. I got up. I ran again.
I went back into my room. My hand was hurting so I looked down at it. Must have cut myself when I fell in the hall. The blood sparks something in me. Only one escape from this… I drew the hot bath. Didn’t even bother to take off the thin clothes I’d worn to sleep in, and sat down. The knife was still in my hand.
It used to shock me sometimes afterwards, how easy I drew it down one arm and then the other. Long, uneven jagged lines. The one on the left is longer than the right. I wonder if anybody else besides the cutters take any notice to the way it feels, how good, how easy it is, cutting through your own flesh. I know I didn’t at the time. It was just a hasty thing, a way out; my death.
Sometimes I wonder if the second go around will be like the first. But that’s neither here nor now.
I can’t describe the sheer disappointment I felt when I woke up in that white room and realized the beeping I heard was the monitor of a hospital. It registered too fast. I’ve been hearing that music for so long I could mistake it for my own heartbeat at times without a second thought.
What’s that the Jazz musicians say anyway? It’s not the notes we play that make the music go, but the ones we don’t. The ones between.
Yeah, that sounds right.
Anyway, we forgot it all, my brother and me. Now we’re just starting to really get it back, but the way we paint it, it’s hard to tell what shade of black it is anymore. There were times when I didn’t think we’d even get this far. Being proven wrong has its perks sometimes, but damn if we didn’t land some bad ways to stumble through it.
Sure, we were born into some rich pad with all the trappings of royalty, or at least upper class, but that was just a gilded cage with impressive crown molding we sat snug in for a few years. We were prizes, the two of us; me about two years older. How cute, how perfect for them, our parents, and their life with their friends and society.
I’ll admit it. I liked the traveling, seeing the old temples and tombs, the long rivers or the wild, virgin places of the world stretching out until the deserts in a vast sea of green. If there is a paradise left somewhere in the world, I bet it stays in those jungles far, far away from humanity and its lust for God’s power of Control, Creation, and that inevitable child, Destruction.
I try to tell myself I’m not like that… that I don’t use my Gift that way. It’s inevitable though… why else do I have it if not to be just a better version of my species? Ah, but we’re not even there yet. It’s the trouble with a past like mine. You can’t seem to avoid distraction, the shakes, the coincidences, and the urges to jump ahead to what you know is coming. Life… Death… Rebirth… and then once more with feeling… over and over.
But I digress…
So we traveled the world, just one big façade of a happy family. Greed and Envy had swallowed that house so long ago, there was no chance of seeing the light coming through the maw anymore. Brother and I just didn’t really know it yet… or maybe we did and just chose to ignore. Seems like the way it goes.
I’ve blocked out the specifics of that moment when we got separated on the narrow, third world streets in some city in China. I don’t even remember the name now. All I remember is seeing this woven basket sitting by the corner, its reeds old and busting on one side, empty and dry. And then I hear my father’s voice and someone grabs me hard by the wrist. And we’re jerking this way and that, me shoved to our mother. They’re all calling out Brother’s name but it’s like a canyon echoing in my head… so surreal. That’s all I remember. Not a thing more.
You’d think for something that important, that vital to you, you’d remember it better. Like in those old stories where you hear about how one twin knows what the other feels. Yeah, not so here. I remember the plane trip home, the royal blue of the fabric seat in front of me. After that, well, that’s when the family began to be more true to their form. Like that busted basket on the day they took my brother.
I did feel lost without him. Like it was my fault. And maybe it was; luck has a way of turning as sour as possible around me. I suppose it’s why I try to read things so hard; people, places, things… all so I can maybe, just maybe get that glimpse of the next time something’s going to go wrong, as it always must, and be ready, or at the very least unsurprised. It isn’t rocket science when you get down to it.
Anyway, after that everything started falling apart. Dad took to drinking more than before, or going out for his “golf.” Mother just got snappy with each hour and fired half the staff on a whim. Me? I faded. I took ill. Maybe it was something I picked up while we were overseas in that forsaken place. Maybe it was just depression. Either way, I was sick as a dog. I was wan, emaciated, hollowing out in places that you only see in National Geographic or those commercials to save some kid in a godless country. After so many years of looking it over, I think that’s where she got the idea to start with for what came next.
Cards and sympathies poured in. Mother received them all. She drank it in like a whore’s ruff on French nickel night. The attention… she loved it all so much. Oh yes, she’d put on a face and cry every now and then. I’d like to think she actually felt sorry, maybe even guilty too, for letting Brother be taken like he was. But then I’d look into her eyes as we posed ourselves at various acts of life in the many rooms of the house. I’d look into her eyes and the eyes of my father, and I read it plain as day… why couldn’t it have been you? Why couldn’t it have been you?
But somewhere in that sick little breaking mind of hers, I knew she loved every minute of it. The looks of pity, sympathy, anything... for me, for Brother, for her husband’s growing estrangement. And she fed off of it. I just happened to be the easiest target.
I had finally started eating more than crumbs, sleeping a little more than before, being more healthy, more like the kid I was every day. And the sympathy stopped coming as strongly. That connection to her sanity snapping thread by meaty thread.
She started making up the continued illnesses, keeping me inside so I’d stay pale and look wearied. Calling in doctor after doctor to get a “cure.” At that age, I wasn’t sure if she was making it up, or seeing something there that I, as a child, couldn’t understand, couldn’t see just yet. In my own manner of looking back on it now, it seems like a bit of both.
In any case, the lies didn’t last long. You can only go on words alone so long, action must always follow. So she resorted to other methods for the results she wanted; rubbing me down with oven cleaner fluid, or much, much later, injecting me with syringes left over from my previous “treatments” filled with urine or some other waste. Keeping me in an almost constant state of illness.
It worked. It worked so well for what she wanted; the rashes that wouldn’t go away, the dangerous fevers, the voiding of my own bodily functions. I had no control. Hell, I can’t even count how many surgeries I’ve had from those years of my life. I don’t even think half my body is mine anymore. But she got her fix.
She always kept me so well balanced. To make sure I didn’t just die of it and end it all for her. Sure, there were times in the beginning when she almost fucked it all up, but that was before she learned my limits, stretch as they might later. Ones that would keep me close, in the house, so she couldn’t be separated from me for too long. Long enough that whatever she had me on that month would wear off as I grew to realize what she was doing to me. How fake it all was.
The breaking point came with another dangerous set of fevers. The hallucinations from the toxins in my body leaving me weak as a kitten on some days. But I felt freer inside them. I was healthy and so strong. Everything was so bright. I would walk in the deserts I’d seen in my earlier childhood, look out over the frozen tundras devoid of anything and anyone, hear the cracked and drying earth under my feet as I skipped across it; so free.
It was almost brutal to wake back from that freedom, even from such a wasteland, but the wind stayed with me sometimes, just a few moments after waking. Sometimes I felt greater shapes I knew were just looming on the next mile, but I always woke up before I got there. It was when I decided I’d had enough. This torture had to end somewhere.
And so, my eyes bright, the heat shining on my brow, I slipped from bed one night. The hallways of the house seeming so much larger from the fever, bending and twisting like I was going to fall. Somehow I made it to the kitchen. I ran my hands under the water for a few minutes to clear my burning somewhat. Then I took one of the biggest knives I could find, and I headed back upstairs.
I don’t know how long I stood in there, just watching them as they slept. They looked so harsh, even in their sleep. The lines on their faces making them look like something out of a comic book, all evil and filled with maliciousness. Yes, this was time to die.
I took a step forward, and my mother rolled over in her sleep. I stopped dead still, thinking I’d woken her, but her face flashed faintly in the small light in the room and I could see her eyes were still closed. Was she faking? Had she heard me? I don’t know which, but I ran from that room. I stumbled. I fell. I got up. I ran again.
I went back into my room. My hand was hurting so I looked down at it. Must have cut myself when I fell in the hall. The blood sparks something in me. Only one escape from this… I drew the hot bath. Didn’t even bother to take off the thin clothes I’d worn to sleep in, and sat down. The knife was still in my hand.
It used to shock me sometimes afterwards, how easy I drew it down one arm and then the other. Long, uneven jagged lines. The one on the left is longer than the right. I wonder if anybody else besides the cutters take any notice to the way it feels, how good, how easy it is, cutting through your own flesh. I know I didn’t at the time. It was just a hasty thing, a way out; my death.
Sometimes I wonder if the second go around will be like the first. But that’s neither here nor now.
I can’t describe the sheer disappointment I felt when I woke up in that white room and realized the beeping I heard was the monitor of a hospital. It registered too fast. I’ve been hearing that music for so long I could mistake it for my own heartbeat at times without a second thought.
What’s that the Jazz musicians say anyway? It’s not the notes we play that make the music go, but the ones we don’t. The ones between.
Yeah, that sounds right.