0312. Awake #2
You have obviously left your wife by then. It is only you and Emmanuelle in the villa.
Until him.
Until me.
It’s him first. The only son of your only son.
You dislike the presence of him instantly, because it reminds you that although you have purchased the rights to forever, you didn’t begin these preservation efforts until after you were already old enough to be a grandfather.
But Emmanuelle is so kind, so unfailingly sweet, she reminds you that a truly great man must always have a legacy.
If there turn out to be kinks in the concept of forever, then everything may one day belong to him.
And so, when William comes to the villa, you grudgingly invite him in.
You welcome him into the fold, the lovely cocoon you share with this woman who was made for you and you alone.
He is a struggling actor, and you help him where you can.
You have friends all over the country, including New York.
He asks to stay here with you, in the villa, but you tell him no.
He’s seen the evidence of your rituals—you are unaccustomed to hiding, and occasionally you slip. A lipstick here, a bloodstain there.
Worse is that you can see his presence changes things—it alters the precious atmosphere you paid for with the misery of your previous life. Your grandson looks too long and too closely at your new wife, and so you are glad to see the back of him, relieved beyond words to watch him go.
Then there’s me. You never love Emmanuelle more than when she carries me, swollen and purring like a cat.
Her face is round as a saucer and you feel another surge of fondness over the youth she still hasn’t given up (Hodel helps).
You’re so filled with joy that, once again, you forget to be careful.
Emmanuelle catches you in the greenhouse; she interrupts a ritual.
She faints dead away and you plead with Hodel to save her.
Such is the depth of your love: You spend a precious ritual on reviving her, on preserving the child in her womb.
When I’m born, it all makes perfect sense to you.
The body, the blood, and the Holy Ghost are all one and obviously so are we.
You and I, and Emmanuelle—Emmanuelle is not my mother, because I am the version of you that will outlast the test of time, when you eventually take new occupancy in this body—together, we are a family.
The villa shelters us (it crumbles around us).
You make notes on the rituals and store them in your library.
You write your own name to reference both of us, as if I have no presence of my own.
When William returns with the beginnings of his fortune, he is outraged by my presence. Jealous, you realize. William says he was the one meant to succeed you in legacy, not the emaciated toddler you’ve raised above your true heir.
He says: All that money and look at you, living in squalor!
You’re sick! All those teas, the goddamn smoothies—can’t you see you’re being poisoned?
She’s driving you to madness, she’s trapped you in her web, it’s not even you she wants!
You’re completely at her mercy—you can’t even feed yourself—you can barely lift your head!
No, you say, no, it’s not true, it is you who are the master.
You are eternally strong and young. You are powerful and there is divinity inside you.
You have made certain of it. You have done what no other man could have done and ensured your own eternity.
You will last as long as your undying love.
You don’t see it when William swings the poker at your head; things have been blurry for some time now, such is the ecstasy of your love.
Neither of you notices when the flames from the hearth—you no longer have heat, the city seems determined to ignore you, or at least Emmanuelle says so and she would never lie—reach the curtains, and then the furniture, and then the roof.
Somewhere a child is crying, and it is your new body, you realize, welcoming you home.
You are ebbing away from your prior form and entering your new one, transcendence blessed by the purity of flame.
You are so grateful to your love, to Emmanuelle, for giving you this new container—this freshness of body and blood to hold your everlasting ghost.
On the day you die, you are both yourself and me. Both ninety years old and three.
Because your spirit flees your body, into mine. Eternity purchased by the convergence of all those bodies, the souls you bled so you could live on forever—in me.
William refuses to acknowledge us as Killian’s chosen, and so he performs the ritual ad nauseum, for such time until he can master you, and presumably discard the empty husk of me.
Ova—she is not my mother, only my maker—calls us Julian, in reference to both of what we are.
Ova doesn’t hate me, not like William does, but without a legal document, her quality of life is won only by the grace of William’s whims, most of which turn on his unfulfilled obsession with her.
Everything for Ova is noir, erotic cinema; a role she must play, and has played, to wring as much freedom as she can from the desires of two different men.
She changes her face, she alters her body, she reshapes her future, clutches tight to the past. She tells William no, not yet, we can’t, we have to wait, it’s impossible, because I exist and therefore so do you. I am her salvation, or at least, I would have been.
But then William found a new partner, someone whose taste for carnage aligned so neatly with his own, and now the rot has irreversibly set in.
With each day you remain trapped in me, desperation more rapidly consumes them.
They’re running out of time to please their caged god; their bodies are killing them slowly.
Does Ova believe? I really don’t know. I do know this body doesn’t want hers, and secretly, I think she is glad for it.
What exists between Ova and me may be twisted beyond recognition, but because of you—aside from you—it’s still the closest thing I’ve known to love.
The problem, aside from all the failed blood, is this body.
It does not want brutality at all. In fact, this body is often moved to seizure as if the two spirits inside it are at war, and one thing remains unignorable: If the ritual worked, then it would already be over.
William would have Emmanuelle, Emmanuelle would have you, and I would finally have oblivion.
So where does the story go from here, if not our collective decay?
A last-ditch profession of faith, or something like it: You must be the product of the ritual.
You must be the reason I cannot always decide, the reason I can’t even die.
But occasionally it seems I am fighting my restraints, harder now than ever.
The sedatives Hodel gives me only increase in dosage, and yet it seems like they no longer work.
Here is a truth I’ve been holding in the recesses of my mind: The ritual isn’t meant to leave any traces.
The placement of the bodies, the brutality of the marks, the outraged headline splashes, they are clues to the puzzle, taunts or pleas to be witnessed, maybe even caught.
But the ritual is meant to be secret, so these things are not by your design.
If, indeed, you are—or have ever been—Killian de Witt.
Sometimes you don’t even sound like you, and then I wonder if I am getting stronger.
If someday I will not only share your power, but override your commands.
Is this the freedom you tried to tempt me with?
(If the rot foretells cursed life or eventual death, then is it the ritual that’s failing, or has it never been anything at all?)
All the women they have sacrificed still live in my head, they come to me in dreams, but lately they are all Anya. She haunts me like inevitability, like undeniability itself.
My thoughts are chasing themselves, mine or yours or indistinguishably ours.
Love—if it is really love—can justify all things. You taught me that. Even bloodshed. Even inhumanity. Even betrayal.
Love may be cruel, but it is always fair and righteous, or it must be. Isn’t it?
Because if it isn’t, then how certainly we are damned.