Ascent
or, the Risen and Fallen on the Seventh Floor
by Kirryn Lia Todd
If there was a bane of my existence in the hotel, it wasn’t my own madness, or even caused by my own madness. It was Wender.
(I think if my own madness had caused Wender, I would have done everyone a favour by brushing my teeth with a shotgun.)
Landlord, professional jackass – Wender. I never did know whether that was his given name or his surname. To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t sure that I cared. He was a sallow pudge of a man with small, piggish eyes and slick hair oiling down to his shoulders. The way he looked at me made my skin creep so badly it was as if it was going to crawl off my bones, and I never truly understood why, until Nutmeg moved into the hotel and hissed through her teeth about perverts – greasy perverts, no less. The week beforehand was when Wender proclaimed to me that she was a sociopath. I could have put two and two together right there, but the unfortunate fact was that Wender usually knew the truth about most of us – he was a slimy bastard, but what he said about anyone was usually legitimate information. He never made anything malicious up, solely because he didn’t have to – the facts about most of us were malicious enough.
The thing with Wender and his tendency to induce skin-crawling was that it was so deep and awkward that I could scarcely recognise it for what it was. I had never gone out to bars and been hit on, never put up with a sleaze at a nightclub, because the better part of my later adolescence wasn’t spent experimenting with these social mores, but instead breaking wine bottles and screaming at the darkness. I’m still not entirely sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing.
Nutmeg, however, was very familiar with men, very familiar with perversion, and Wender hardly got to do much more than give voice to a flashing thought about her in various states of undress before she turned on him, quick and vicious as a snake. I could imagine that Nutmeg would probably shoot someone down with a machine gun’s fury, so…
“He’s what’s known in the Latin as a rat bastard,” she had said to me, a long time ago. I couldn’t argue overmuch with that.
With me, it was weird. Wender would flip maniacally between possibly caring about me (never quite worrying – I wasn’t worth worrying about) and seeming pissed off that I even existed. He was utterly fanatical about my paying the rent on time, and would get extremely narky if I was so much as half an hour late, sometimes. During the period where I hadn’t be able to leave my room and Vincent had collected my mail for me, I kind of got the impression that there had been Words, note capital, between the two of them, regarding me and Wender laying the hell off, because he had actually seemed nicer, less insane. Until I got well and he reverted back to his usual self.
“He needs to see you,” Nutmeg said, tight-lipped, as I had scrambled out of Mephisto’s lap, blushing right up to my hair and stammering excuses. “I tried to tell him what he could do with himself, but apparently he’s gone right back into ‘ugh! Girl give rent now! Ugh!’ mode.” Despite my embarrassment, I had to giggle at that. “Repulsive little scab of a man!”
“I didn’t even remember it was rent day,” I muttered, looking beneath the teakettle for the usual two or three notes I shoved under there prior to rent day…or at least that was how I did so eighteen months prior. Apparently I’d kept up the habit over the missing time, too.
“Understandable,” Nutmeg smiled a little. “Seeing as you can’t remember anything at all, dear.”
“Ha ha, funny funny.”
“This Wender is the landlord?” Mephisto asked, with his trademark raise of a single brow. He wasn’t embarrassed in the slightest at being busted by Nutmeg, but then again, I suppose it wasn’t like we were actually doing anything. It just must have looked that way. The demon probably found the entire situation amusing, especially Nutmeg’s reaction. I wondered if he knew she had been coming.
“Yes,” Nutmeg replied, looking as though someone was forcing her to melt something incredibly bitter and sour in her mouth, some kind of maniac confectionary. “Landlord, owner, something like that. I’m not sure. I pay my rent, he gives me hot water. If he doesn’t, I tell him what he can do with himself. I think it’s fair enough.”
I sighed, and moved to the door. “Are you coming?” I asked Mephisto, but Nutmeg stepped forward and stabbed her finger into the center of his chest, her other hand on her hip.
“Oh no, he is not. You, demone vecchio, will be staying here and having a chat to me. Primarily about ethics and doing what you’re bloody well told.”
“That sounds like fun,” Mephisto purred, and Nutmeg scowled at him.
“Don’t make me throw you out the window.”
“Please don’t!” I squeaked, against my better judgement, and the blush returned.
“Get out of here, Elouise,” Nutmeg sighed. “Before Wender blows a gasket. Not that I really care if he does or not, but I’d rather not attend a funeral where I have to pretend to be miserable for the little prick. I won’t throw your bloody demon anywhere, promise.”
I left the apartment at a fair clip, fuelled by my own embarrassment – at what, I still wasn’t sure. Mephisto and Nutmeg seemed to be able to bring that out in me all too well, lately.
Lately? The past two days. That was all I had. Then a black, gaping maw where I never was. Then eighteen months ago, and a vague memory of music.
I moved slowly down the stairs, dawdling, lost in my own thoughts. I wondered if it really was that I couldn’t remember, or rather…that I hadn’t been here. For twelve months I had been somewhere else, and my body had moved like an automaton, sleeping, eating, paying the rent…mourning for Amaranth…
A pang of sadness, eating into me like a stain, like creeping acid, stilled me for a moment. All I could do was stand where I was, mid-step, and wait for it to pass. I hadn’t been there. I should have been there. I found out how to–
No, you didn’t, came a thought, violent and logical as a fist to the face. You certainly did not figure out how to turn yourself into a song. You have no idea exactly how you did it. All you know is that it happened. How would that have been any kind of comfort to poor Amaranth? It would have driven her mad with grief. Use your brain.
“Brain’s not always functioning as per the manual,” I muttered, heatedly, beneath my breath. “So.”
“Who are you mumbling at?” someone barked. Wender. In my daze of thoughts, I had gotten myself down to the lobby and was wandering vaguely in front of the stairs. I shook myself.
“Nobody,” I replied, walking somewhat timidly to the desk with the rent money. It was amazing. I had been here four (five, five, god damn you) years and Wender still had the ability to intimidate me, on bad days. And today certainly wasn’t the rosiest day ever.
“You’re late with the rent,” Wender told me as he counted the bills, slowly, as if there was some chance I was trying to short-change him.
“I’m not. Today’s the ninth, that’s when I pay.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, princess,” he drawled, “It’s damn near four in the afternoon. I have a home to go to, as well.”
I twitched. “You don’t knock off ’til six on weekdays. You always say. So I’m not late.”
“You get it in in a timely manner next time, or you’re out on your ass,” Wender shot back, glaring at me poisonously. “Don’t think you can come in here and mouth off when you’re late, you little smartass.”
Something happened, then.
I looked in Wender’s eyes and something happened, something clicked…no, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t like a click, it was like being drop-kicked in the stomach by someone wearing steel-capped boots. Size 14. It was an eel, staring at me with malevolent yellow eyes, opening elongated jaws only slightly, just a peek at a double-row of needly teeth before closing again. The eel writhed in my stomach, bit holes in my vital organs, out through the flesh of my belly, and watched passively as bile and stomach acid and viscera tumbled out onto the floor. Still it swam through me, slow, assuredly, that it owned this body now and I was just an unfortunate blight leftover within it. I crossed my arms around my abdomen, feeling the draining sensation of all my blood leaving my face. The world swirled about, shuddered, righted itself, blurred, oversharpened, then showed itself through a bokeh lens.
“Fuck,” I whispered. I couldn’t think of a better thing to say. Perhaps there wasn’t.
“Excuse you?” Wender asked, with a withering glare.
I couldn’t straighten up. I crouched over, holding my belly, willing my entrails to stay put. No decorating for you right now, Nutmeg, I thought nonsensically. A manic little giggle, like a bubble of spit, escaped from my lips. Fell to the floor like river pebbles.
“You don’t have to use the stairs to get back up,” Wender said, turning his attention from me back to whatever it was he did behind that desk all day – running the hotel, I suppose. Ignoring requests to change lightbulbs and fix leaky taps and get the hot water going. “The dude fixed the elevator yesterday. One hundred per cent working order.”
“Okay. Thanks.” My own voice was a stranger to me. I stumbled to the end of the lobby, where the elevator was located, stabbing the button with shaking hands. The doors opened immediately, I lurched in, collapsing against the wall as they closed again, cutting me off from Wender. The eel hadn’t moved; it lurched nastily in my gut.
I threw up.
I’m terrified of vomiting, just terrified. Whenever it happens – and it occasionally does, coming down from a little too much of something or greeting the morning with a hangover – I lie as still as death, the colour of rice paper and sweating like someone had trapped me inside a furnace. A furnace inside my own body, ready to cook me from the inside out, like a microwave. I heard some horrible rumour once that tanning salons did the same thing, but I never tanned…
The wrenching sensation, the feeling that my grey matter was trying to exit my head via my nostrils and my eyes had exploded in their sockets – not to mention the terrible leaping of my stomach, peristaltic waves blown into nothingness and bile bile bile so much bile when there was nothing left to be thrown up…it terrified me. So whenever and whatever I did, I always tried not to vomit. Even if it meant putting up with stomach cramps so bad I felt like death had warmed up.
And yet sometimes I would get so frightened of everything that I would just lose control and threw up anyway. The fear doubled, my resistance gone, nothing I could do. A no-win situation. That’s what it was like now. I was too terrified to cry, too exhausted to do much more than kneel on the floor, heaving. Out of my mind, I stabbed my fingertip against the clear plastic button marked ‘7′ on the control panel (was it called a control panel? Selection panel? Button panel?) and slumped over even further as the g-force, hardly even noticable most of the time, attempted to smash my lungs and other organs down down down as I rose.
I’m screwed, I thought, shakily. I’m so screwed.
The lift stilled, and its bell sounded. At the seventh floor already. Now what the hell was I going to do? I couldn’t stand up, and I’d splashed vomit all over the floor and part of the wall. Wender was going to broil me and serve me with steamed vegetables and Tokay, nevermind a nice goddamn Chianti and screw the fava beans. The door slid open creakily.
“Elou – Jesus Christ, Elouise!”
“The cherry topping,” I moaned.
Killian’s voice, startled. Of course. Of course he would be waiting for the lift to stop, of course. Is this poetry? Comedy? Who is writing this screwed-up screenplay? Where’s the director? Can I fire them? Can I fire the whole creative team?
“Mother of God, Elouise! Are you all right?” Killian stepped into the elevator and kneeled down beside me, his hands on my shoulders, protective. “Are you sick? No, no, bloody stupid question. Come on, let’s get you out of here.”
“I threw up everywhere,” I wailed, stating the obvious. “Wender’s gonna kill me, he’s gonna just kill me.”
“Nevermind Wender for the moment,” Killian replied, helping me to my feet, supporting the majority of my weight. “Let’s just get you sitting down, yeah?”
“I made an unholy mess!”
“Yeah, you did. But nevermind it right now, okay? C’mon. Lean on me, and don’t be afraid to grab me if you feel faint. You hearing me?”
“Yes. Yes. Killian, there’s puke all over the–”
“Hush now, you idiot, okay? I told you not to worry about that.”
I half-stumbled, half-fell along the hallway, leaning on Killian and letting him guide me into an apartment – not my own, I could tell, solely from the lack of Nag Champa scent that was ever present. I could smell a hint of cigarette smoke, however, and something else…something underlying I couldn’t quite put my finger on. The world was still blurring like tears. Killian helped me sit back into something that I supposed was a sofa, I ended up sprawling instead of sitting.
“Here.” A glass of ice-cold water was pressed into my hands, condensation already making the outside of it slick. “Take small sips of that, and slowly. I’ll be back in a second.” The soft noise of an apartment door closing, yet again.
I sipped at the water and waited for the world to refocus itself. Gradually, it did, and I took a look around me.
So this was Killian’s apartment. It was messy – not dirty-messy, but disorganised-messy. There was a desk in the north corner just piled up with books and papers (not a single leaf not written on, it seemed like), and also what I guessed was sheet music. I wasn’t sure, I didn’t have the faintest idea about manuscripts and the like. I had a feeling someone had taught me in primary school the very basics, but just like my memories of primary school, the knowledge had disappeared into the ether of encroaching insanity. Anyway, I wasn’t here to create music – I was here to bring it to life with dance.
The guitar, that wretched, wonderful instrument that had flung me mercilessly and joyfully into the stratosphere with no thought of how I would get down, leaned against a pile of books on the floor – red, a red guitar. Not firetruck red, but more a deep cherrywood stain of sorts. An unmade bed. Clothes hanging inside out, and some even upside down, on the wardrobe rack. This was an aged double-seater sofa that I was sprawled in, almost but not quite as old as my red monstrosity. The lack of bookshelves provided the room in the apartment for it to be able to house a double sofa. Unlike me, demoting my TV to makeshift shelving, Killian’s was mounted on the wall.
Killian returned with a “hey” as he came back in, and I twisted myself around on the sofa to see him, despite a hideous humiliation clawing at me.
“Killian–” I choked.
“Hm?” he replied, sounding ridiculously cheerful for someone who probably had just cleaned up another person’s vomit. My face was burning. I was hoping a sudden flock of flying elephants would find it prudent to swoop in through the window and carry me off to their eyries in lands unknown.
“You didn’t – you didn’t have to – I mean, that was…I could have…I’m sorry, that’s gross, I’m sorry…”
Killian looked puzzled for a minute, then a grin lit up his face.
“Oh, that? I didn’t!”
Now it was my turn for confusion. “What? Then where…?”
The grin became positively cheeky, and brighter than his bright bright midsummer shine eyes.
“Down to the lobby. To yell at Wender than both Elouise and I had to ride in an elevator where someone had lost their lunch, and we were disgusted, and does he sit around on his fat arse all day waiting for this place to crumble?” He winked at me, and I burst into giggles, which got worse and worse as I kept that grin in my mind, memorising it for later.
“That’s awful!” I gasped out. The giggles were turning into full-blown laughter. “That’s really awful! Killian!”
“Ah, well, it’s no more than he deserves. The man’s a prick and a jackass. Both at the same time.” He reached over and pressed the back of his hand against my forehead; my heart thumped uncomfortably. There was a scent, neither sweet nor offensive, just the scent that was Killian’s own, from his skin. For some reason my olfactory responses had gone into overdrive. “You don’t have a temperature. That’s a good thing. I’ve been worried about you, Elli. After this morning and all…”
If I thought my heart was thumping before, it was thrashing now, rocking against the birdcage bars of my ribs, trying to break free of the sinews that tethered it to my chest. Elli? He called me Elli? Another thing I didn’t know. No one else gave me a nickname – unless Nutmeg’s “sweet pea” and Vincent’s occasional “kiddo” counted, but neither of those were derivatives of my own name. I felt giddy, bizarrely happy, yet secretly furious that I hadn’t been here, conscious, whatever, when he’d started calling me it.
“This morning…” I murmured, trying to get my brain back on track. “This…oh. Oh, that was…I’m sorry, I–”
“Don’t be,” Killian replied with a sad smile. “It was a dumb thing of me to think that you’d be perfectly okay with it. I mean–”
“I can’t remember it,” I whispered, feeling a curious, jelly-like sensation of disconnection take up residence in my shoulders and drip down my body. “I can’t remember any of it.”
“You mean…Amaranth going?”
“No,” I replied. “Everything. The last…no, you wouldn’t believe me.”
Killian raised an eyebrow, and I was stunned by the Mephisto resemblance – so much for the winter and summer difference between them. But I supposed winter and summer were just two sides of the same coin.
“Try me. Go on. You know I’m not a jackass like Wender, Elli.”
That name sent shivers along my skin. I didn’t know, though. I hardly knew him at all. That hurt more than I thought should be possible.
“I can’t remember anything,” I whispered. “Anything from the last twelve months. Since about last November. Just, just nothing. I know the time happened, I know it passed. I do know. But I wasn’t there, I can’t remember…”
Killian’s sapphire-storm eyes widened. “Nothing?”
“Not a thing,” I replied, miserably. “I just woke up and suddenly a year was gone, just gone. I mean, I know some things happened…most things, actually…but it wasn’t like I was there. I mean, I know the Sydney Harbour Bridge opened in nineteen…whenever it was, right? But it wasn’t like I was there.”
“That…does make sense, actually. But…then you…oh fuck, then you had no idea about Amaranth, and I just…” he looked horrified and sad. “I just…oh, Elouise, I’m so damn sorry! I didn’t–”
“N-no, no no!” I shook my head, squeezing my eyes closed so the tears that had gathered in them would melt away. “It’s not, I mean, how could, how could you know? How could anyone know? It’s not, it’s not normal…I never…I just…”
“I must be a stranger to you, as well,” Killian murmured slowly. “I only came here less than year ago…you were gone by then, I’m guessing…Christ…” I suppose the miserable look on my face was answer enough. He looked at me, desperate and wretched as I felt (why? Why do you feel like this? It’s not fair that I don’t know). “Really nothing at all? Nothing you felt, remember feeling…nothing?”
“Nothi…no.” I blinked. “No…wait…no, not nothing.”
“You remember something?”
“Something,” I replied. “Yes.”
“What was that?”
“Music.”
Killian’s turn to blink. “Music?”
“Yes. Guitars, shining, shining…no. One guitar. It was…” My eyes flickered over to where Killian’s guitar leaned in its place, and Killian didn’t fail to notice.
“My playing? Me and the Desert Bastard?”
I giggled. “The Desert Bastard? Is that really its name?”
Killian grinned. “If guitars could have birth certificates, that one’s would say Desert Bastard on it.”
“What a name! Why do you call it that?”
“Because he’s a bit of a bastard, and I got him in the desert. Or as close to the desert as you can get and still be able to get to a guitar. D’you know Striketown, by any chance?”
“Nope. Where is it?”
“Way, way out west from here. Close to the border, actually. It’s not a bad little place.” Killian climbed over the back of the sofa and retrieved the Desert Bastard before plonking himself back down next to me, settling the guitar across his knees and settling his fingers on its slender neck, lower down across the body, like caressing a lover. There was a bizarre purity in his movements, despite that. I was enchanted. “I went there with my old man when he went out there for some reason or the other – we didn’t get along too well, still don’t, kinda, so I never asked. Just tagged along. There was a guy who made guitars there, and this ol’ Bastard was the nicest looking. Nicest sounding, too. So I decided I had to take ‘im.”
“He is nice looking,” I replied, surpressing a shiver as Killian strummed a chord, which one I had no idea, but it was beautiful, brushing through the air like a bell made of desert sand. “But…he doesn’t look like a bastard. Or sound like one?”
The sky-eyed boy laughed. “No, I guess not. But when you’re learning how to play and you make mistakes…well, it’s not your fault, it’s so obviously your instrument.”
I giggled. “I guess so.”
“Do you sing, Elli?” he asked. I frowned a little.
“You mean, I didn’t tell you during the…the empty time?” Killian lowered his eyes, still strumming gently.
“Mm, you did,” he replied. “But I thought that…it’d be…maybe I’d be more polite if I asked again. Maybe.”
A rush of warmth went through me, and I smiled at this boy, summertime incarnate.
“Thank you. Thanks…just thanks.”
He smiled back, just like sunshine.
“I don’t sing, though. Can’t carry a tune to save my life. Can’t read music or anything like that, either.” I paused. “I dance.”
“Now that, I didn’t know.” He looked a little startled.
“I didn’t tell you?”
“No, never mentioned it.”
“That’s…that’s really weird,” I said. “If I told you I couldn’t sing, but didn’t mention dancing…I love to dance. I’ve danced sinced I was little…danced all the way through the insanity.” I was mystified. Dancing was in my blood the way I knew music was in Killian’s, I didn’t even have to ask to know that. Forgetting that I danced would be like forgetting to breathe, for me.
“What kind of dancing? Ballet, or…?”
“Oh, not really anything,” I replied, with a sheepish grin. “No one ever taught me. I mean, that is, I’ve never had a dance lesson in my life. I just…danced. As soon as I could walk, I danced. To anything. Anything with a beat. Some things that didn’t.”
“That’s pretty cool, really.”
“I guess so. I think back in high school a friend of mine said…or maybe it was one of my sisters, I’m not sure…well, someone said the way I danced was like belly dance hopped up on speed. I think I was supposed to be offended, but that was kind of awesome.”
Killian laughed. “Belly dance on speed, yeah? I’ve never seen belly dance in real life, just on the TV. But holy crap, that’s some sexy stuff. I love belly dancers…they make me wriggle.”
I giggled. “’Cause there’s a lot of hip shaking and swaying and stuff. It’s pretty neat. I sometimes wish I could take an actual belly dance course, you know, not just dance the mishmash thing that I do. So I could do all the things that they do. You know, those hip circles and stuff.”
“Why can’t you take a course? Money?”
“People,” I said shortly.
Killian paused for a moment, half a heartbeat (a micro-second of micro-expression? Mephisto would have been able to tell me), then just nodded.
“S’okay,” he said.
I wondered.
“So then. I make music, and you dance to it,” he mused, a little smile hovering around the corners of his lips. Suddenly, out of the (summer sapphire sky) blue, I wanted to kiss him, and the sensation shocked me to the core.
It wasn’t that I was asexual or aromantic or anything like that, I had hormones and wants and needs and all that sweaty annoying stuff which people always made movies about (and said movies always became blockbusters, despite the same old stuff being in them. I never understood that). It’s not like being crazy negates your sex drive or something of the like. The more depressive of us tend to have low libidos, it’s true, but we’re not frigid amoebas or anything. It was there, I knew it was there, but I ignored it most of the time…because there were other things on my mind (smashing glittering fragments of deep green glass tumbling like fatal confetti around me, red blood poicianas blossoming on my feet as they fell…)
But it wasn’t like it had anything to do with my sex drive. At least, I don’t think it did. It was just a sudden urge…to press my lips to his, to breathe in his air and make it my own, to make him…
What? I didn’t know. See me. But he was seeing me, I was right here…
“I dance to it,” I replied, somewhat bemusedly.
“Hm,” replied Killian, then began strumming the guitar – hard, lively, wildly. He grinned at me. “Can you dance to this?”
I grinned back, feeling the music thrill upwards through me, radiating from my solar plexus and spreading out into my limbs, reaching upwards and outwards like the fronds of a vine, searching for the sunlight.
“I can dance to anything,” I said. Challenged and challenging. I raised my arms above my head – this was my fighting pose.
“Go on, then,” he said, fingers flying, along the neck and across the body of the Desert Bastard, grinning all the while. “All rock and roll used to be dance music, you know – show me!”
The last two words were a shout, and they set me free.
Leaping to my feet, I let the music explode inside my veins. Twisting, leaping, turning, coming out my mouth in laughter, joyous and free. How could it be that only four hours ago, I had been crying myself to the point of sickness? Was this what people were talking about when they said something was a miracle? These miracle days…filled with demons and beautiful sociopaths and the living incarnations of summer and music music music music.
I wasn’t turning into a song, not this time, not as I whirled around in time to the tapping of Killian’s foot against the tiled floor, the savage rise and fall of strings, lionlike and growling. My arms weaved invisible patterns of moondust and caught the afternoon sunlight pouring in through the window, wrapped it about me like a dress made of gauze and gold, burning and burning, scorching everything it touched, everything but my dance. It was as if the rain that had threatened that morning had been driven away solely because the sun knew that I was going to dance.
For the first time in a year and a half? Maybe?
Hips, midriff, chest, back and back and back. Leaning forwards and backwards at the same time, offering my belly to Killian to touch, then whirling away in my tangle of lights, grinning slyly, just before his fingers could reach. He would laugh, return his hand to his guitar, and the song would keep playing, louder, wilder, matching my movements, my own ecstasy, flying without falling, up and up and up and up.
When he slammed down on the last chord, I stilled, finalised the dance with a flourish, held as still as the trembling echoing remnants of the song ghosting through the room, taut but dying.
“Whoo!” Killian exhaled, grinning at me. “You can dance.”
“I told you,” I giggled, and collapsed backwards onto his bed, panting, gasping for breath, exhausted but utterly delighted. “I told you!”
He laughed, and abandoned Desert Bastard and the couch to flop down next to me upon his back. He was just as out of breath as I was, to my surprise.
“That you did.” I loved the way he turned his head and smiled at me, then. I couldn’t have put it into words if I tried, though.
“You look like someone I know,” I murmured.
“Hm? Do I?”
“Yeah. Pretty identical, to be perfectly honest.”
“Well, everyone’s supposed to have a twin somewhere in the world, aren’t they? So. Who is it that I look like?”
“A friend. Kind of a friend. I haven’t known him for long, but he’s a friend.”
“Yeah? Who is he? Someone here at the hotel?”
“Yes.” I began giggling, unable to help myself. The truth was too ridiculous not to laugh at. “He’s the Devil! The Devil himself, you look just like him!”
Killian laughed along with me. “You’re crazy. Absolutely bonkers.”
“That’s common knowledge around these parts!”
“You know what I mean.”
“Lucky enough for you,” I teased.
“H’m.” He stared up at the ceiling, eyes thoughtful. “Do you know who I think really looks like me?”
“No, who?”
“You do.”
“What!” I propped myself up on my elbows, giving him a look of disbelief. “That’s ridiculous.”
“It isn’t,” he smiled. He reached up and pulled my shoulders back down, so I was lying on my back again. A strange sensation of sharp horror passed through me as quick as a rainbow; and I was left even more confused in its wake. I blinked across at him.
“Look up,” he said, eyes still skyward. I followed his gaze.
There was a mirror affixed to the ceiling above his bed. I wanted to laugh out loud and ask him why on Earth he had such a silly thing put there, but something caught my eye before that thought had time to flourish.
“Oh,” I gasped. “Oh!”
He and I, lying there, side by side, his long dark hair and my own (much longer), spilling around our heads like strange halos. Our skin, both linen ivory porcelain pale. His high cheekbones mirroring my own, the curve of our shared brow, the tilt of our heads as we leaned together. We were unalike yet too similar…we were like a brother and sister, we could have been twins…
“See?” he whispered. “Now that is weird.”
“Our faces are different,” I whispered back. “Nose, mouth, eyes – your eyes…I’ve only ever seen them, that colour, just once before…”
“On your friend? The Devil?”
“Yes, he’s the only other person…”
“I wonder if I should worry about that,” he chuckled. “Our faces are the same, but different. Isn’t that funny?”
“How does that even work?”
“Life’s a mystery, that’s for sure.”
“Why do you have a mirror above your bed, anyway?” I asked, still giddy from this newly discovered twin-ness. I had to really fight the urge to twine my fingers around his own, to see if our hands echoed each other, but I didn’t want to move, as if the illusion might shatter. Why did this suddenly make me feel closer to him, like there was something special between us?
He chuckled wryly. “Don’t look at me, I’m not the one who put it there. I moved in and there it was. It was a bit distracting at first, believe me.”
“I can imagine,” I said. “Would be worse if you slept on your back. But I think most people do…”
“I sleep on my side,” Killian replied. “But it was still sorta…see–” he rolled over onto his side, facing me, then moved his eyes up, then back to my face, then up again, then back again “–kinda had the old shifty-eyed dog thing going on for a while.”
I cracked up. “All you needed was the duh-duh-DAH kind of background music.”
“Yeah! I suppose I could have taken the Desert Bastard into bed with me and done it myself, but I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t want anyone with the word ‘Bastard’ in their name in bed with me.”
“’Some’s bastards, some’s ain’t, that’s the score’,” I quoted, completely off the top of my head with the utter randomness that sometimes just exploded from me. I was feeling happy enough that even if his smile turned patronising or distant or he just nodded, I would have still been perfectly at peace, but instead his grin became wider.
“Kerouac!”
I felt giddy, deliciously spinningly madly giddy, as light as an angel’s feather or a sigh of autumn air. My heart exploded into strawberry champagne and flooded my veins.
“Book – in 7A, I mean, I don’t know her real name – she loaned me it. On the Road. I just, I wish that…I mean…I loved it! And that quote…”
“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” His eyes sparkled. “It even applies to guitars.”
“I guess so!”
“My favourite passage was the part where Sal Paradise was describing the people he liked the best,” he said. Suddenly, his blue eyes were burning into mine, dark and light all at once, with the same lightning waltzing through them as there was in Mephisto’s – again, the wintersummer, lightdark, two sides of a coin. “Remember? ‘The only people for me are the mad ones…’”
The mad ones.
I continued breathlessly, my heart tripping all over itself. “’The ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing…’”
Oh, that gorgeous smile. “’But burn, burn like fabulous Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars…and in the middle you see the blue center light pop–’”
“–and everybody goes “aww!”’” I finished, eyes wide and staring and my heart fluttering and thudding and giggling itself into insanity. Killian’s grin widened, his eyes sparkled bright flame spiderstar blue.
“See? The mad ones. Crazy people are the only ones worth knowing. If Jack said it, it’s got to be true.”
“Like me?” I blurted out.
“Of course like you. You are crazy, Elli. Your head is in too many places to cover with conventional dialogue. You’re crazy, in a Kerouac way.” He paused, as if thinking this over, then nodded. “That’s extraordinary.”
The bleeding poincianas on my feet closed up, and bloomed instead around me as red velvet roses with golden stars concealed in their centers. The shards of green glass exploded, minute fireworks, shooting star swarms that swept upwards in sparks, settling on my skin, glittering.
“Really?” I whispered. I couldn’t have trusted myself in that moment to speak any louder, lest I break the spidersilk thread of this dream and wake myself up. Because it had to be a dream, right?
“Really,” he said, sitting up and moving back over to the couch, slinging the Desert Bastard across his lap once again. He strummed gently, humming softly…and the giddiness I had felt this morning returned.
“That…” I croaked out. I sat up and cleared my throat. “That…that song you’re humming. That’s the one you were playing this morning…right?”
“That’s the one.” He smiled sheepishly, tucking an errant lock of hair behind his ear. “I, er, woke you up with it, it seemed. I have to apologise for that, again.”
“No, no!” I insisted, shaking my head. “I mean, I was…it was just…I was…” I gave up, and tried something else. “Did you write it?”
“Well…sort of.” Killian frowned slightly, looking down at his hands still strumming, as if they were frustrating him. “It’s…difficult to explain, really. It’s like I wrote it and then I forgot it. Or something. I’m not sure…”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“It’s…well. Before I moved here, about a year ago – I was living with my ex over in Kangaroo Point at that, ha, point – I began writing this song. It came together really quickly. One of the best things I’ve ever written, I think. Practically overnight, the bones of it came to me…just flowed right through me.”
Like how I dance, I thought, and nodded. Killian continued.
“By the time I moved here, about a year back, it just…blossomed, I guess you could say, turned into a real song, you know – chorus, verses, coda, the works. It was…you probably think I could strangle myself with my own ego, but it was a freaking beautiful song.”
I just smiled, shaking my head. “That’s not egotistical. Sometimes you can do awesome things. So.”
He grinned at that. “I like your way of thinking.”
“But…you said you forgot it?”
“Yeah.” Killian looked frustrated. “I don’t usually write music down, y’see…I remember it. Lyrics, yeah, I have to write them down. I always forget them. But the music usually sticks. About…maybe even less than a month ago, I started to forget the music as well as the lyrics. My perfect song was…evaporating, or something.”
“Like the missing time…” I murmured.
“It does seem a bit like that, now that I think about it.” Killian shook his head. “But it sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Forgetting something you spent a year perfecting in a matter of weeks.”
“But you can remember pieces of it?”
“Yeah.” He strummed again, adjusting his fingers. “Something like…” he closed his eyes; I felt a sharp pang at seeing that bright blue hidden by eyelids. He began humming, softly, the sound rising and falling around the glowing murmurs of Desert Bastard, twirling around it and inside it, fragments of a song like fragments of the sun turned into stone. The world swam about, an aquarium stained with gold and light. The high cliff, the desert (so rich, so alive, so quiet – God lived there, I knew it, I could run, and He would be there and smile at me, hold me in His arms like burning brands, whisper secrets about the arid lands) – the ache, the ache, to hurl myself off, let go again, to become–
“W-woah,” I said, getting to my feet shakily, then tripping over them. Killian stopped playing with a twang, and was at my side in a flash.
“Woah! You still feeling sick? Sorry, Elli. I babbled on so much that I forgot that…perhaps dancing right after throwing up wasn’t the best idea either. Man, I am such a dumbass. C’mon, I’ll walk you back to your apartment, you can get some sleep. You’ll feel better then.”
“Mhmm,” I agree, languorous and water-limbed as Killian helped me to my feet and we left the apartment. I felt very peaceful, very sleepy – exactly the way I remembered feeling after consuming a heavy dose of opiates. Oh, sweet codeine sandwiches. Except I’d never really put codeine on a sandwich. I didn’t know if such a thing was even possible. It probably tasted like crotch.
“Here we go,” he said, opening the door to my apartment. “Would you like me to get you a drink of – oh, hi, Nutmeg. Elouise is kinda sick, so…”
I could feel the smirk on Nutmeg’s face without even focusing on her.
“No, you’re not interrupting anything, thank you!” I said, before collapsing onto the ugly red couch with Mephisto – still invisible to Killian – immediately putting a hand on my shoulder.
“You mind your manners,” Nutmeg replied evenly, and turned to smile at Killian. “Thank you, kind sir, I’ll take things from here.”
“No problem…um, hey, Nutmeg, what are you doing here, anyway?” Killian tilted his head; Mephisto muffled a chuckle. “I mean, if it’s none of my business, by all means tell me and I’ll piss off, but, uh…”
Nutmeg laughed, throaty, rich and rather cheeky, I thought. “I was sharing a martini with the Devil, but of course.”
Killian blinked, then grinned at that. He looked towards me. “Does this sorta thing happen all the time in your place, Elli?”
“Lately, it’s the done thing,” I replied, and I couldn’t help grinning back, despite the mirrorball fishes still swimming around in my brain, reflecting the afternoon light in a leisurely, underwatery fashion.
He laughed, and waved. “See you two some other time. I’ll try and be quiet with the guitar noise.” Please don’t, I thought. Oh, please don’t! “Bye, Nutmeg.”
“Goodbye, Killian.”
“Elli?” He looked over my shoulder, and those eyes. Oh, those eyes… “Don’t…be a stranger, will you? I mean…”
Again, my heart was strawberry summer wine.
“Absolutely and definitely not,” I promised.