(no subject)
title: all the dead seas/neon dreams (1/3)
summary:
mumblemutter's fess up you dressed up to kill yourself, from Daniel's point of view.
rating: not for kids anyway. the first part's not too bad, though.
Officer, officer, there they are--
Dolores Haze and her lover!
Whip out your gun and follow that car.
Now tumble out and take cover.
Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Her dream-gray gaze never flinches.
Ninety pounds is all she weighs
With a height of sixty inches.
My car is limping, Dolores Haze,
And the last long lap is the hardest,
And I shall be dumped where the weed decays,
And the rest is rust and stardust.
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
*
What he hates, almost more than anything, is that for a year after he can’t remember that day. He knows that he went to school - remembers, vaguely, the bus-ride there; the monotonous fluorescent-light hum of corridor routine - but his next memory is of waking up the next day in a hospital bed. It’s as if he went to sleep as Daniel Kessler and woke up as something else entirely, a new creature with a mind shredded by pain and a life he never asked for. It’s as if his life just shattered, splintered into a thousand sharp little pieces. Like he’d been too fucking careless, like if he’d just been that little bit more attentive he’d still be the old Daniel, who had a house and parents and a smile that actually meant something. Later bits of that day start to come back to him, and he realizes that he was better off not knowing.
*
His first memory is of waking up to a ceiling that wasn’t his own, too smooth, too white compared to the sloping, uneven ceiling of his old bedroom in his old house. The faint throbbing of voices outside, squeaking, rustling, rattling. He rubs his eyes with his hand and sees something rust-coloured under his fingernails. He’s not wearing his old clothes. When he looks outside the sun is setting, and Daniel has never been so confused in his life. His heart feels bruised, too large for his body, like a paper rose swollen by rain and blood. He has no clue where he is; he has no idea what’s going on, and his head just hurts so much. His mind feels like it’s draped in thick blankets, muffled and unable to struggle, like a body wrapped in a carpet and tossed in a lake. Everything hurts. Everything fucking hurts, and even though Daniel is in a bed surrounded by people it’s not his bed and they’re not his people and he staggers to the door and grabs the wall with his fingers, his fingernails all scabby with dried blood in little curls beneath his nails. Like harvest moons, or possibly parentheses. He looks out and there are so many people bustling about, all moving. It feels like they’re being projected onto a screen and soon his mother will come and pull it away and he’ll be home again. He can’t think anything clearly but that word cuts through and suddenly his heart expands and his mind drops in a white flash of terror-
- and he knows something is wrong -
- and he can’t stop screaming now -
- and the floor looms up against him suddenly and then he can’t think any more.
*
When he comes around again his mind still feels fuzzy and static, like a badly-tuned radio. There’s a nurse taking his pulse, fiddling with machines, and when she sees him she averts her eyes instinctively before looking up. “You’re awake,” she says. “How do you feel?” and Daniel can’t tell her.
He lies back down and closes his eyes; he feels dizzy and sick. When he opens them again there is a doctor there - and a policeman next to him. The doctor sits down next to him on the bed, a woman with mousy brown hair pulled back in a withered ponytail like the stem of a dead rose. She touches him on the arm and asks him how he feels, again.
Daniel can’t tell her. His sense of dread is quickly becoming terror, like a stain spreading and spreading over his mind. He watches as she puts her hand on his arm. He can’t feel his arm. His head is so light it could float away like a balloon in a fair-weather storm.
“Daniel,” she says, “Do you remember anything? Anything at all?” She glances at the cop who nods, almost imperceptibly; Daniel will hate him for the rest of his life, unremittingly and irrationally, like the doctor, like hospitals, like nearly everything. He looks at his hands and his fucking nails still aren’t clean.
“Daniel, this is important,” and then Daniel blurts, “I’m going to be sick,” before he is, wretchedly and painfully, on the bed. The doctor sighs; the cop looks mildly disgusted. He finds himself being pulled along into a bathroom; a nurse is with him in case he slips. The water bounces off his hair and he’s not even embarrassed to be naked in the same room as a woman, even though it’s never happened before. He doesn’t care about anything. He’s given a clean hospital gown and lead back to bed. The shower has helped, somewhat, and the fog of anaesthetic is beginning to dissipate. The doctor is waiting for him when he gets back. She sends the nurse away and the two of them are left alone together. She crosses the room and sits on the bed next to Daniel; takes one of his hands. He pulls it away.
“I know this is difficult,” she begins. “But I need you to really think, now. Can you remember anything at all?”
“Why am I here?”
“Think, Daniel. Can you remember anyth-”
“I said, why am I here?”
“That’s the thing, Daniel. You were admitted here in a state of shock; you were completely incoherent… The memory will probably return, in time.”
“What happened? Where’s Mom and Dad?”
At the doctor’s look, Daniel thinks he’s going to be sick again. The room spins around him, twisting like so many sheets around him. He can almost repeat her lines from all the TV he’s watched as she says, “I’m afraid I have some bad news.”
*
The next few months ghost past him in a whirl, a drunken stumble from police-station to hospital to his aunt and uncle’s house just outside the city. Daniel’s feet never touch the ground; he doesn’t understand how his head can be so light and his heart so heavy all at once. The ground is no more stable than the sky; it feels like his feet could fall through any minute, like a knife through a lace curtain. He spends hours watching the rain fall outside. His aunt and uncle are nothing more than a collection of voices and noises (and when was the last time he’d seen them anyway? Six, seven years ago?) projected hazily onto a faded screen. Time rushes and cheats and lies like a drug-addict. He feels like he’s walking through aurora borealis; there’s always traffic and static and seafoam in his ears. He spends hours lying in bed. He spends hours sitting in his aunt’s garden though for all he cares he could be sitting in a bathtub or on the moon. Music is noise. Words rush past him backwards. He drifts in stillborn silence, his newly-visible bones bruised by passing breezes. Light is as blinding as dark. He spends hours staring at the ceiling. He spends hours in a booth with detectives, and this is the only time he speaks. He spends hours and hours and hours crying.
Finally the police admit that there are no leads, and the executioner of his parents is summarily pardoned. Daniel is sitting outside the booth staring into a full, cold cup of coffee, when he hears two detectives conversing around the corner.
“I don’t know why we’re even wasting our fucking time on this case,” says one; Daniel dully imagines him piglike, his skin like cookie-dough bloating out of his ill-fitting shirt.
“Because it’s the fucking Kesslers, what do you think? What, the chief’s just gonna stand back and be like, yeah go ahead and assassinate a well-known political family and I’ll just stand here and watch?”
“But everyone knows they were corrupt as shit. That Kessler was a slippy bastard. He just finally got his comeuppance from some prick he tried to outsmart. No fucking loss. He was as devious as they come. It’s not like he’s a huge loss to us.”
“But that’s hardly public knowledge, is it, genius? All the public sees is fucking perfect Kessler the family man and if we don’t even make it look like we’re trying to find out why someone just came and mysteriously shot them both in the back of the head then there’ll be hell to pay.”
“Yeah, I suppose. I’d be worried about the kid, though. Poor bastard, if Kessler fucked with someone really big then he’s in trouble, right?”
“Nah, I reckon the old gun-job was just to remove him - there doesn’t seem to be any revenge involved, just a clean assassination. The kid’s staying with the poor unknown relatives, we’ve got officers watching him just in case…”
Their voices fade as they walk down the corridor. Daniel shakes with rage; he feels like there are hummingbirds trapped in his ribcage; if he had a gun he would shoot these men in the backs of their heads, like his parents. His fists clench over and over, involuntarily, and it’s the first time he’s really, really felt anything in months and months. He throws his coffee-cup at the wall opposite and suddenly he’s just seething at everything and it’s so fucking unfair that idiots like those can possibly be in charge of punishing the bastard who killed his parents, who destroyed him. He’s angry at everyone, everything, for his parents for fucking dying on him and leaving him stranded at the edge of the earth, walking on stormclouds, raindrops caught in his eyelashes. He’s angry at whatever quirk of fate made it possible for someone with a gun to just come in and kill his parents, for it to be so fucking easy, so ridiculously, incomprehensibly easy. And yeah he’d always known that everyone could die but he’d known it in the same way that he knew he could be president of the USA if he’d wanted. Because knowing something doesn’t make it real. He’s angry at his parents for every little fucking thing they ever did wrong but mostly he’s angry because they left him behind.
*
The reporters follow Daniel around for a little while; the murders make the state news; after awhile the case is unofficially closed due to lack of evidence. It was a clean, professional job, and the unofficial consensus is that Kessler had it coming. Yeah, sure, it’s a pity for his kid, but you know kids, they get over things easily.
*
The anger consumes him at first. He hates everyone and everything, himself included. He deliberately stays out in the cold until he shivers uncontrollably. When he gets hungry - not often - he won’t eat. He tortures himself in a million different ways because it’s a distraction. Little petty things piss him off, like the way that there’s no power shower, like how the taps always drip, like how his bedroom is a small, poky boxroom now. He hates himself for letting these little things get to him, when the man who murdered his parents is still alive. His aunt makes him go to a child psychiatrist, where he sits and refuses to talk. His uncle broaches the subject of school - after all, Daniel was such a bright kid, he had such potential, he had friends who wanted to know how he was. And, after all, it wasn’t doing him any good to mope around the house; and he’s getting so thin now, so fragile looking. Daniel stares at him silently until he retreats. He overhears snatches of conversation and he knows that his aunt and uncle - who, after all, have not been in touch with his parents for years, but are duty-bound to take him - are getting impatient, have no idea what to do with him.
He doesn’t give a fuck. The idea of going back to school is repulsive and terrifying. How can he go back to all those people who don’t know what he’s going through, who haven’t got a fucking clue? And yeah, the therapist’s spun him the usual line that people know what he’s going through, that he’s not alone, but honestly, how many of them have had their family murdered by a professionally hired gunman? How can he go and be around normal people when he can’t manage one day without a weeping fit? And how can anyone expect him to do this?
*
When they send him to school, he brings a backpack full of clothes. He doesn’t go back.
summary:
mumblemutter's fess up you dressed up to kill yourself, from Daniel's point of view.
rating: not for kids anyway. the first part's not too bad, though.
Officer, officer, there they are--
Dolores Haze and her lover!
Whip out your gun and follow that car.
Now tumble out and take cover.
Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Her dream-gray gaze never flinches.
Ninety pounds is all she weighs
With a height of sixty inches.
My car is limping, Dolores Haze,
And the last long lap is the hardest,
And I shall be dumped where the weed decays,
And the rest is rust and stardust.
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
*
What he hates, almost more than anything, is that for a year after he can’t remember that day. He knows that he went to school - remembers, vaguely, the bus-ride there; the monotonous fluorescent-light hum of corridor routine - but his next memory is of waking up the next day in a hospital bed. It’s as if he went to sleep as Daniel Kessler and woke up as something else entirely, a new creature with a mind shredded by pain and a life he never asked for. It’s as if his life just shattered, splintered into a thousand sharp little pieces. Like he’d been too fucking careless, like if he’d just been that little bit more attentive he’d still be the old Daniel, who had a house and parents and a smile that actually meant something. Later bits of that day start to come back to him, and he realizes that he was better off not knowing.
*
His first memory is of waking up to a ceiling that wasn’t his own, too smooth, too white compared to the sloping, uneven ceiling of his old bedroom in his old house. The faint throbbing of voices outside, squeaking, rustling, rattling. He rubs his eyes with his hand and sees something rust-coloured under his fingernails. He’s not wearing his old clothes. When he looks outside the sun is setting, and Daniel has never been so confused in his life. His heart feels bruised, too large for his body, like a paper rose swollen by rain and blood. He has no clue where he is; he has no idea what’s going on, and his head just hurts so much. His mind feels like it’s draped in thick blankets, muffled and unable to struggle, like a body wrapped in a carpet and tossed in a lake. Everything hurts. Everything fucking hurts, and even though Daniel is in a bed surrounded by people it’s not his bed and they’re not his people and he staggers to the door and grabs the wall with his fingers, his fingernails all scabby with dried blood in little curls beneath his nails. Like harvest moons, or possibly parentheses. He looks out and there are so many people bustling about, all moving. It feels like they’re being projected onto a screen and soon his mother will come and pull it away and he’ll be home again. He can’t think anything clearly but that word cuts through and suddenly his heart expands and his mind drops in a white flash of terror-
- and he knows something is wrong -
- and he can’t stop screaming now -
- and the floor looms up against him suddenly and then he can’t think any more.
*
When he comes around again his mind still feels fuzzy and static, like a badly-tuned radio. There’s a nurse taking his pulse, fiddling with machines, and when she sees him she averts her eyes instinctively before looking up. “You’re awake,” she says. “How do you feel?” and Daniel can’t tell her.
He lies back down and closes his eyes; he feels dizzy and sick. When he opens them again there is a doctor there - and a policeman next to him. The doctor sits down next to him on the bed, a woman with mousy brown hair pulled back in a withered ponytail like the stem of a dead rose. She touches him on the arm and asks him how he feels, again.
Daniel can’t tell her. His sense of dread is quickly becoming terror, like a stain spreading and spreading over his mind. He watches as she puts her hand on his arm. He can’t feel his arm. His head is so light it could float away like a balloon in a fair-weather storm.
“Daniel,” she says, “Do you remember anything? Anything at all?” She glances at the cop who nods, almost imperceptibly; Daniel will hate him for the rest of his life, unremittingly and irrationally, like the doctor, like hospitals, like nearly everything. He looks at his hands and his fucking nails still aren’t clean.
“Daniel, this is important,” and then Daniel blurts, “I’m going to be sick,” before he is, wretchedly and painfully, on the bed. The doctor sighs; the cop looks mildly disgusted. He finds himself being pulled along into a bathroom; a nurse is with him in case he slips. The water bounces off his hair and he’s not even embarrassed to be naked in the same room as a woman, even though it’s never happened before. He doesn’t care about anything. He’s given a clean hospital gown and lead back to bed. The shower has helped, somewhat, and the fog of anaesthetic is beginning to dissipate. The doctor is waiting for him when he gets back. She sends the nurse away and the two of them are left alone together. She crosses the room and sits on the bed next to Daniel; takes one of his hands. He pulls it away.
“I know this is difficult,” she begins. “But I need you to really think, now. Can you remember anything at all?”
“Why am I here?”
“Think, Daniel. Can you remember anyth-”
“I said, why am I here?”
“That’s the thing, Daniel. You were admitted here in a state of shock; you were completely incoherent… The memory will probably return, in time.”
“What happened? Where’s Mom and Dad?”
At the doctor’s look, Daniel thinks he’s going to be sick again. The room spins around him, twisting like so many sheets around him. He can almost repeat her lines from all the TV he’s watched as she says, “I’m afraid I have some bad news.”
*
The next few months ghost past him in a whirl, a drunken stumble from police-station to hospital to his aunt and uncle’s house just outside the city. Daniel’s feet never touch the ground; he doesn’t understand how his head can be so light and his heart so heavy all at once. The ground is no more stable than the sky; it feels like his feet could fall through any minute, like a knife through a lace curtain. He spends hours watching the rain fall outside. His aunt and uncle are nothing more than a collection of voices and noises (and when was the last time he’d seen them anyway? Six, seven years ago?) projected hazily onto a faded screen. Time rushes and cheats and lies like a drug-addict. He feels like he’s walking through aurora borealis; there’s always traffic and static and seafoam in his ears. He spends hours lying in bed. He spends hours sitting in his aunt’s garden though for all he cares he could be sitting in a bathtub or on the moon. Music is noise. Words rush past him backwards. He drifts in stillborn silence, his newly-visible bones bruised by passing breezes. Light is as blinding as dark. He spends hours staring at the ceiling. He spends hours in a booth with detectives, and this is the only time he speaks. He spends hours and hours and hours crying.
Finally the police admit that there are no leads, and the executioner of his parents is summarily pardoned. Daniel is sitting outside the booth staring into a full, cold cup of coffee, when he hears two detectives conversing around the corner.
“I don’t know why we’re even wasting our fucking time on this case,” says one; Daniel dully imagines him piglike, his skin like cookie-dough bloating out of his ill-fitting shirt.
“Because it’s the fucking Kesslers, what do you think? What, the chief’s just gonna stand back and be like, yeah go ahead and assassinate a well-known political family and I’ll just stand here and watch?”
“But everyone knows they were corrupt as shit. That Kessler was a slippy bastard. He just finally got his comeuppance from some prick he tried to outsmart. No fucking loss. He was as devious as they come. It’s not like he’s a huge loss to us.”
“But that’s hardly public knowledge, is it, genius? All the public sees is fucking perfect Kessler the family man and if we don’t even make it look like we’re trying to find out why someone just came and mysteriously shot them both in the back of the head then there’ll be hell to pay.”
“Yeah, I suppose. I’d be worried about the kid, though. Poor bastard, if Kessler fucked with someone really big then he’s in trouble, right?”
“Nah, I reckon the old gun-job was just to remove him - there doesn’t seem to be any revenge involved, just a clean assassination. The kid’s staying with the poor unknown relatives, we’ve got officers watching him just in case…”
Their voices fade as they walk down the corridor. Daniel shakes with rage; he feels like there are hummingbirds trapped in his ribcage; if he had a gun he would shoot these men in the backs of their heads, like his parents. His fists clench over and over, involuntarily, and it’s the first time he’s really, really felt anything in months and months. He throws his coffee-cup at the wall opposite and suddenly he’s just seething at everything and it’s so fucking unfair that idiots like those can possibly be in charge of punishing the bastard who killed his parents, who destroyed him. He’s angry at everyone, everything, for his parents for fucking dying on him and leaving him stranded at the edge of the earth, walking on stormclouds, raindrops caught in his eyelashes. He’s angry at whatever quirk of fate made it possible for someone with a gun to just come in and kill his parents, for it to be so fucking easy, so ridiculously, incomprehensibly easy. And yeah he’d always known that everyone could die but he’d known it in the same way that he knew he could be president of the USA if he’d wanted. Because knowing something doesn’t make it real. He’s angry at his parents for every little fucking thing they ever did wrong but mostly he’s angry because they left him behind.
*
The reporters follow Daniel around for a little while; the murders make the state news; after awhile the case is unofficially closed due to lack of evidence. It was a clean, professional job, and the unofficial consensus is that Kessler had it coming. Yeah, sure, it’s a pity for his kid, but you know kids, they get over things easily.
*
The anger consumes him at first. He hates everyone and everything, himself included. He deliberately stays out in the cold until he shivers uncontrollably. When he gets hungry - not often - he won’t eat. He tortures himself in a million different ways because it’s a distraction. Little petty things piss him off, like the way that there’s no power shower, like how the taps always drip, like how his bedroom is a small, poky boxroom now. He hates himself for letting these little things get to him, when the man who murdered his parents is still alive. His aunt makes him go to a child psychiatrist, where he sits and refuses to talk. His uncle broaches the subject of school - after all, Daniel was such a bright kid, he had such potential, he had friends who wanted to know how he was. And, after all, it wasn’t doing him any good to mope around the house; and he’s getting so thin now, so fragile looking. Daniel stares at him silently until he retreats. He overhears snatches of conversation and he knows that his aunt and uncle - who, after all, have not been in touch with his parents for years, but are duty-bound to take him - are getting impatient, have no idea what to do with him.
He doesn’t give a fuck. The idea of going back to school is repulsive and terrifying. How can he go back to all those people who don’t know what he’s going through, who haven’t got a fucking clue? And yeah, the therapist’s spun him the usual line that people know what he’s going through, that he’s not alone, but honestly, how many of them have had their family murdered by a professionally hired gunman? How can he go and be around normal people when he can’t manage one day without a weeping fit? And how can anyone expect him to do this?
*
When they send him to school, he brings a backpack full of clothes. He doesn’t go back.