0238. Awake
SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH my so-called father today, aside from the usual.
His bile produces the same spores it has since the start of summer, the masses that grow increasingly difficult to extract.
Like his body heat has dwindled to glacial, calcifying the necrotic colonies of fungal slime I know from the contents of my nightmares.
The dreams themselves being long, slow death from the inside out.
But I’m not asleep—something else is wrong.
Again we have an outsider with us, the man that Daddy darling calls a partner, the one Ova tries so desperately to ignore but can’t, as she could no more effectively ignore a change in the wind.
Everything’s been different since he joined their merry band, the fulcrum of familial legacy sent skittering by the insertion of his presence.
For so long our fragile peace was the suspension between two people, a reluctant détente that served both needs.
But now there is an interloper, another injection of will.
He sees room for improvement in their methodologies. It challenges the one thing the ritual demands absolutely, which is their unequivocal belief.
The frequency of the ritual is increasing with their intensity of desperation, which should worry me, except that I know one thing about recklessness, which is that it can’t be sustained.
They are particularly jittery today, unsettled, whereas I am feeling …
I don’t know how to describe it. Calm? I feel like there’s an end in sight, which is so close to peace I almost feel sated.
You, on the other hand, are irritated.
The blood isn’t right. It won’t work.
“The blood is never right,” I murmur to nothing. “It never works.”
Normally this is a punishable offense, especially with both men present (not counting Hodel, who does not take part, only cleans up the mess).
My role is not to speak, but to transcend.
The vessel in addition to the altar. Ova looks at me dully, like she knows I’m talking to you, which will only make them blame me later, because it means I’m currently me.
But this new feeling I have is so precious I can almost, very nearly, stand the risk.
This is ridiculous. You’re pacing around and it’s giving me a vague sensation of nausea. He’s putting everything at risk.
My life is a constant state of accepting things that cannot possibly be.
If I asked myself questions like what exactly do you mean by everything, I’d get nothing done.
Arguably I already get nothing done. Normally I’m sedated for the ritual; my presence is required, but in the past, you’ve always taken my place.
On some level I long to be asleep again, watching this all play out from somewhere backstage, trapped behind the curtain.
Wondering how much of what I experience is dream or story, and how much of it is real.
You wanted to be free. It comes with a price. Now comes the pincushion jab. Stay awake.
“Ouch,” I say aloud. The grifter’s eyes flash but don’t rise to mine—I do not interest him as much as the rest of this.
It’s possible he does not believe in you at all, does not need convictions of any kind, simply relishes the work and the privilege of power by proxy, this invitation to the arcane aristocracy into which he has charitably bought.
Whereas Father Figure and Ova both glance at me, dazed, from the slab of greenhouse fountain.
They can’t harm me, wouldn’t dare try. But do they listen?
Of course not.
And because of them, we are where we are.
There is never any breeze over here, but now I can smell Anya’s hair from the wreckage of my imaginings. The fluid way in which she inhabits both my waking and my dreams.
If I close my eyes, will I see her, will it ever be real enough?
Christ, a girl, you say tiredly. Of course you’d be like this over a girl.
One thing you have a lot of are chivalric love stories.
You believe in love, and actually, I think that’s the worst of it, because generally speaking love has a low bar to clear for qualification—so much evil can be justified by love.
The question in your mind (according to you) is not whether the love is good or bad, but whether it is love or not love, and once a thing is love then everything is fair, the poets conferred and they all agree.
If the feeling is love, then everything done in its name is right and just and worth defending.
Eternal love. This is the problem, the belief that love can or should be immortal when we all have finite endings. That love can or should outlast a body—this is a troubling conviction when taken to its most dangerous extreme.
Then again, these sound like wise thoughts, which means they cannot possibly be mine.
Look at him, you sneer in my head. Prowling around like willpower alone will alter the recipe once it’s put in the oven to bake.
I snort a little, which drags Ova’s eyes blankly, impassively, to mine. Part of her face is drooping a little; Hodel will need to fix it. She looks unwell.
Of course she’s not well. Aren’t you paying attention?
“I know what you know,” I murmur.
Ridiculous. This whole operation is flawed.
I don’t say anything because you’re throwing a tantrum.
Don’t you understand why all of this is happening? You’re the heir. You’re the blood. The ritual will never work because he’s a usurper and everyone knows it. You know, Ova knows, even he knows—
I don’t know what that means. Nothing I know is demonstrably real. None of my memories, either. They’re all yours.
No. No. No. You punctuate each one with a sharp throb that sends me doubling over, a low groan slipping between my lips.
From here, bent in two, I am looking directly at the girl, whose face is turned toward mine.
Her chin is slumped into her chest. She went still minutes ago, finally, from pain and shock and blood loss.
She isn’t right. Imagine if I told him that? “You didn’t choose correctly; once again you forsake the blood.” Imagine how he’d take it.
The blood, the blood, the blood, you taunt in my head. What normal person talks like that?
That’s very unusual for you to say. It’s almost like something I would say, and I don’t know what to do about this unexpected symmetry. For a moment I stay doubled over the girl’s body, pondering what would happen if I leaned forward to shut her eyes, if I asked her nicely not to haunt me.
“You’re the ones who do this to me,” I whisper.
Ova looks as if she can hardly lift her head, but she is staring at me now.
“You did this to me,” I repeat. “But I don’t want this.”
Daddy dearest pivots to look at me now, finally, and from here, even through the haze of the ritual’s intoxication, I can actually see what you mean.
The blood is wrong, but it’s not just the wrong blood, that’s only a symptom of the real sickness.
The wrong choice doesn’t just mean the wrong outcome; the wrong choice means the wrong input, the wrong state of mind.
Of course the ritual will never work! He wants what he believes you’ve given me—he wants to be deemed worthy, to choose the terms of his loyalty, to be entitled to what’s yours.
He doesn’t actually want what the vessel necessitates.
The subservience, the inability to choose.
With great power comes great immobility. They think this is all about one thing—desire, beauty, eternity. But they overlooked the operative element of this contract.
They forget that this has always been about control.
“I don’t want this,” I say again, louder. This, I realize. This was what you wanted me to witness, what you kept me awake to see. If I could find the space for heartbreak, maybe I’d give in to it, but I don’t. “And more importantly, neither do any of you.”
“Hodel.” The grifter gestures in my direction. “Handle this, will you?”
Neither Hodel nor Ova takes this well. He says nothing, but she can’t help herself. “It’s not your place to give orders.”
“Will.” A drawl, almost a laugh, as if he knows where the real power lives. “Shut her up, would you—”
Again, this time with a hiss, “It is not your place to give orders—”
“She’s never going to fuck you.” Louder, performatively loud. “You know that, right? She wants the house, she wants the money, she wants the influence and the access and she’s out here fucking everything that moves that isn’t you, but she doesn’t give a fuck about—”
“Enough.” His voice is a seethe between his teeth. Strained by the push and pull, the necessity to choose a side. Who will it be?
But, of course, we all already know: “Hodel, administer the dose.”
Fucker, you’re saying in my head, repeating it over and over. Fucker, motherfucker, you’ll never get it right, the road is closed to you. The end is coming. Again it sounds suspiciously like my voice.
The grifter’s expression is triumphant; he forgets that power means something different here. Ova’s face is stricken, pale with a tinge of green. I know she’s holding in a cough.
This time, Hodel ventures, “He’s already been dosed—”
“Then dose him again.”
Ova really doesn’t look well. Maybe the ritual is failing for both of them?
For all of them?
Maybe the ritual will never work. Maybe it can’t.
Maybe it never has.
“You,” I say. “You’re the problem.”
There is a new, low-burning thing in my chest. The magnification of a tired but familiar feeling, one I can finally put a name to. The bruises in my knuckles pulse and throb.
“Hodel.” This time I feel his tremor of fear, the question mark behind his facade of collected certainty. Of mastery, which he has never truly had. “Shut him up or the ritual will fail—”
I can smell the viscera that’s coming. I can feel the throb of a heart in my hands.
Another wave of nausea strikes me. The more I push, the closer I bring us all to the edge of ruin, and yet— “The ritual already failed. It failed the moment you chose the wrong girl. It failed the moment you spilled the wrong blood. It failed the moment you came into my house—”
A hand closes around the back of my neck. There’s a sharp jab to the inside of my arm and then everything floods, the ocean pulled over my head like a blanket—