The Mystery Revealed

One moment my thoughts and my body are as heavy as a stone pillar, and the next, weightlessness. I’m a cloud, a smoking barrel. I’m a prism of light, a thought, a whisper, a cold breeze, the goosebumps on your arms, an atom, a cell, rebirth, and death. I’m everything and nothing. I’m the mystery revealed.

And though I know I’m not seeing with my eyes, because there are no sockets, no flesh, or a head to hold them. There are visions. At first, it’s my body lying in a pool of blood. Flesh, bone, blood, and little pieces of what I suspect are my brain tissue scattered like a madman’s painting on a dirty linoleum floor. The man with the suit and the gun, and the latex gloves, is wiping the barrel and the grip of the .35. Cleaning it for fingerprints. He’s walking over to my body, and kneeling down next to my outstretched right arm, being careful not to place his knee, which is covered with a $3000 dollar suit, in the bodily fluids that moments ago were inside my head. He’s gently lifting my hand and placing the gun inside of it. I see this, or I feel it. I’m witness to it.

Then time begins to roll backwards with rapidly intensifying speed, all the way to the beginning. Then it stops, and goes forward. The world, like it’s spinning off its axis, begins playing my whole life. My whole existence. I’m inside of these moments, and outside.

I feel my birth. A brilliant white light followed by the sounds of a doctor announcing my arrival, and the tears of happiness, exhaustion, and relief pouring through my mother. I’m three years old, falling down the steps of our condo, splitting my head open. I’m six. My first day of school, taking the bus home and missing my exit. Trees are whizzing by as we hit the off ramp, and I’m crying. I’m ten, my father is at work. It’s my birthday, and the kitchen table is filled from end to end with my favourite comic books. A big red bow in the middle. I’m 17, kissing Jenny Fitzgerald, and eventually bringing her up to my room, where I’m awkwardly fumbling with a condom. Shaking hands, and a face as hot as the center core of the planet, while Jenny sits naked, as comfortable as a broken-in leather ball glove, softly giggling. Not making fun of me. Not a giggle that says she’s going to tell all her friends what an absolute nunce I am in the sack. Just a soft giggle, reminding me that it’s just sex. It’s just fun with someone I love. It doesn’t need to be made into something bigger than it is. It doesn’t have to be monumental, monolithic; it doesn’t need to scrape the sky with its grandiose. It can just be a secret. A small secret communion between two bodies. A ritual of flesh. A coming together. A magnetism. An act. And eventually I can see myself calming down. My heart returning to its regular BPMs. I can feel the heat fading, going into hibernation, and resting up for the next time that I feel myself ruining a good thing.

Jenny’s kissing my neck softly while rubbing my forearm. “Just relax. It’s okay. It’s just me. Relax, baby. Relax.” I’m closing my eyes. Breathing in and out. Concentrating on my breath. Clearing my head of the thousand unwarranted, and uninvited thoughts that always spread like fucking bacteria during those moments where you just want to be present. Where you need to be present. The moments where you’d give away every material possession that you own, just for a switch to appear on the side of your head, that could turn your brain off. Just shut it off, and let you live in the moment, and stop self-sabotaging every good thing that comes along. Because God knows in my life, those moments were few and far between.

I finally get the condom on, and without hesitation, Jenny climbs on top of me. It’s a revelation. I’ve entered into a world. A world that was as fantastical as the dreams of CS Lewis, or Roald Dahl, for the entirety of my life, until that moment. Jenny leans down and kisses me the whole time as my hands stay glued to the small of her back.

It wasn’t perfect. Hell, anyone who says the first time is perfect is a liar. But it was damn good. And we sure had a lot of time to perfect our art. Our Sistine Chapel would be created throughout the next two years. Both of us not being scared to ask about what the other wanted, or what the other needed to be engaged, to be fulfilled, to be celebratory in the act.

Jenny and I used to talk a lot about that. About the people that condemned their partners as selfish and shallow lovers. They begrudged them and ripped apart the flesh from their bones as their backs were turned. We’d say that these people weren’t communicating. These people weren’t caring. They weren’t letting themselves be known. Sex to these people was no more than masturbation with another body.

Now, Jenny and I were laying in my bed. Her head tucked tightly under my left arm, as my right was folded behind my head. The aftermath much more calming than the precursor. That switch not quite on my head, but about as close as it ever could be.

For Jenny, it must have been the same. Because the calm allowed her to reveal to me the deepest and darkest depth of her self. The person within the person. The imprisoned soul, who was only allowed out for moments like these. Or a moment like that. Maybe. Probably it was the only time. The words flowed out of her mouth smooth and relaxed, like there wasn’t a single doubt in her mind that now was the time, and I was the person to hear the stories about who she was. What she was, and then let me, let us, decide whether or not our love could withstand it.

Jenny is delivering her heart to me on a silver platter. She’s speaking about her father’s death. The unimaginable weight of it. The nights alone at a small gravestone, holding palaver with the dead. Writing down everything that she needed to say to him when he was alive, but that she never did. For whatever reason. Life is enough of a reason, I’m thinking.

She’s telling me how empty you feel. And how long it takes to cry. To truly wash yourself of the sinking feeling. The quicksand feeling that you’re going underground with them. For a while, you suffocate in silence. The numbness, initially, is the strongest feeling you own. It wrestles with sadness, anger, and even small traces of empathy, jealousy, and happiness. .

But then one day, your defence system is broken. Your Berlin wall, your great wall, your Edinburgh Castle, your impenetrable fortress is broken, and the floodgates fall. Then you’re a whimpering, anxiety ridden, grown child whose emotions are just as sporadic and unreachable.

She’s telling me all this as I continue to rub her between her shoulder blades, where she has a small Japanese tattoo that translates to strength in love. I don’t talk. I let her get it out. I don’t attempt to say I understand, or provide pseudo-solutions. This is her time. I let her have it. As much of it as she needs.

Then Jenny stops for a minute. Up to that point, she hasn’t cried or choked up. But now I can tell. I can feel it in her muscles as she tenses up. But she carries through. She tells me about her mother. Her mother, who handled the tragedy of her father’s premature death by nearly drinking herself into one. She completely loses touch with reality. The idea of reality is something that becomes so fractured that in order to draw another breath, the smell of vodka needs to be on it.

At that bar, drunk off her ass, she meets a soul more corroded than hers. This man tells little white lies until her cheekbones hurt from smiling and laughing. He’s charming, he’s handsome, but he’s the devil. Milton’s devil. The wordsmith, the charmer, the one who is so articulate, and confident that you fall in love with his words, though you have no idea what they mean. But you don’t care. You just want to see his lips move. His eyes look at you the way that no eyes have since you the days of high-hair, and Purple Rain. That’s enough to feel empowered. To feel special. To feel ready to give this world another try. No, not your young daughter at home, dealing with a grief as deep as yours, but from a stranger with kind words, and hard-strewn eyes.

Like a vampire, the man is invited into Jenny’s old Victorian home on Waterloo Road. He stakes the place out and instantly Jenny feels something off about him. Something wrong. She can’t tell if it’s the way he walks, or talks, the way he laughs, or the way he touches her mother, and the way he looks at her. But she thinks it closer to all the above, then it is to one specific trait.

And it isn’t long before he’s sitting next to her on the couch, while her mother is working. Wrapping his arm around her, smelling her hair, telling her how much of a grownup she is. She isn’t a little girl anymore. She’s a woman. That it’s time to start acting like one.

The gradual torment leads to the bedroom, like it so often does. Midnight visits from the monster in the suave skin mask. He holds his large right hand over her mouth, as his left arm goes prospecting underneath her covers. That same smile. That same laugh. The one that fills her mother with second-chance euphoria.

By this point, Jenny is crying. Not loud. Softly. As for me, my heart is beating like a jackhammer. At that moment. The moment that I’m being brought to. Is the moment that I decided to kill the king of Annandale. The moment I decided to kill myself.

After Jenny finishes her story. I simply tell her I love her. “I love you, Jenny. I love you so goddamn much. It hurts.”

She’s drifting off to sleep, still nuzzled on my chest. But that night I don’t sleep. Not a fucking wink. I stare at my ceiling. A young man who always lacked a certain passion. A young man good at a few things, but great at none. Great at none because I never took that next step. That steep inclined step that takes you from the land of the average, to the world of the greats. But in my head on that night, I’ve never felt a passion so deep. One that didn’t stem from vainglory, but from burning hatred.

Now, as I float in the ether between life and death, all I see is Jenny. Jenny lying on my chest. Breathing softly. And I look at the young man draped with anger and fear. And I want to yell at him. I want to tell him to just hold her. To just stay with her and take off somewhere. try to get the fucker arrested. Anything but what he did. What I did. The vigilante shit. The Hollywood movie shit. The stuff that doesn’t work in the real world. The world where the bad guys don’t always get what’s coming to them, but the stupid ones do. You can count on the stupid pricks, to always get what’s coming to em.

As I reach out to touch Jenny’s soft face, the world, again, begins to spin. This time forward. It takes me through the drunk meetings with my regicidal friends. How to kill the king. The king. The king. Death to the fucking king. It’s all we talk about for months. It’s spinning past every word. Every stakeout. Every fight with Jenny as she tells me to just let it go. To just leave it the hell alone, because I’ll only make things worse for her. And worse for me.

I’m screaming, I’m pointing in her face. I’m telling her how it has to be. Then it stops. And the king is leaning over my body. His face merely inches from mine. He’s smiling. Then he’s laughing.

He says, “You stupid, stupid, fucker. You got balls, kid. But come on, what chance did you have? A stupid ending for a stupid kid.”

Then he gets back up. Looks at the large man who cleaned the prints. Taps him on the shoulder, and tells him. “Jenny is going to be a mess. I’ll have to go and console her the best that I can.” Then he winks at him, and he lets out a deep, hearty laugh.

The king leaves the room.

Then nothingness.