PART TWELVE: MÁIRE RUÁ
(Locke Mountain Breakdown)

 

I wasn't ready. I thought I was ready.

Ready to leave the mythic nursery, kick myself out of the nest and begin the dangerous career I'd trained for. But Life has a funny way of going sideways. In the midst of Death, it happens while you're worrying about other things. Or something.

I should have become a professional student, a university bum. But the wrongness of my destiny would permeate everything and everyone for miles around, and babies would be born with flippers in the tenements on Main Street while their bastard fathers rewrote the laws behind closed doors and the boogeyman capered and shook a leg in the streets.

The whales would still beach, the seas would still leach, and the stupidity of the worst we settle for still beat a path to my apartment door. The Fun would still follow me.

I'm doing it again. Ranting. Oh, the drugs, the drugs, the drugs, and the dreams behind the drugs, since I took myself off duty after the last tattoo. Don't bother looking. They're all out of order. I'M out of order, in case you missed it.

This is part of the gig. Part of my gig, the one I was born for before I knew it. People in my line of work are priests and priestesses of Thoth, the pale boatman and master of ritual who keeps the way Between. Aleister Crowley once wrote that if you go after a god, you have to go all the way, madness included. I don't know if Death's henchman is a god, but I know I'm only slightly mad. Not as mad as you think. I just...

All right, I lost it. I tried so hard to wuss out and avoid getting sued that the story makes no sense now to anyone who'd pick it up.

True, there's few but God to prove it to, but damn it, the tattoos, none of the tats match up to the decedents, they...

Oh, no, wait. I did that. I changed all the names to protect the decedents, and changed all that other stuff, too. No wonder it makes no sense.

Oh. Okay. Yeah. I was thinking movie rights. I was thinking Redemption. I was seeing red.

It was some kind of self-imposed therapy to get rid of the truth, and all the parts I still can't understand. The parts about Death's henchman. The parts that weren't a dream.

Oh my gawwd, some of this shit is... Ehee. Heee. Heeheehehehehehe---Look here at--

Oh, this one I can't even read, never mind even get to the stage of saying I like... This is sub-nonsense. Wow, I must have been blacked-out drunk. That's part of why I'm here.

There are a lot of those. I mean, I can see what I was trying to do, in most of these, but if I wanted to change everything that much, then why did I miss all the targets I set myself?

Sadly, here's another stuck-together comic-book scribble, another false start that could have been done well in a day. Such a shame it is, to turn my hands from these interesting concepts, now unworkable.

When they were new, what was not to like? But they have all died in captivity. Eleven attempts to break the fabric and the flow of what really happened, all fruitless. No one is going to know what I mean, because I couldn't take the time to do anything to GET IT DOWN before it ATE MY EYEBALLS.

What would you do? I think I first began to lose my mind in Med school. But not in the way you probably think. Nerves, they used to call it.

It started showing up in little ways, not just how much I drank or how many times I had to play Story Time the next morning to figure out where all I went and what all I did.

Nerves, and memories. Memories of a game my big sister Mary and I played when we were kids, and how Mary ended up. Mary often got in the way of danger for me, and one time...

Sorry. I need to stay on topic. I gotta slow down. Dr. McQuiddick tells me I can't get anywhere if I'm not centered. He shows me ways to stay in my body, to sit and let the terror pass, and see that even the unknown is finite.

I just snapped, that's all. Snapped and took myself out of the game, and tried to write it all away.

Sometimes, when you let something all out, it just escalates, and escalates. But if you let an idea fester too long, it mutates beyond all recognition. Then you cough it up, and the enraged villagers kill the wriggling thing before it has time to get to the water.

I look around, at the racket they're going to pull me back into in a few days, when I sign myself out voluntarily and look at a newspaper again. Or a computer. Or turn on a police scanner. I still hear things. Mary tells me things, in the dreams I can't remember, the ones the witchy little thing used to call "dream-walks" before she got Scared Skeptic.

It's a real kick in the teeth that my voluntary committal at County Hospital's Mental Health wing is my first true vacation from the Deputy ME gig. Makes sense to me, though. Sometimes you gotta get away.

There's some creepy people in my line of work. I remember when I met the Body Guy at County Hospital. That's all they called him, just... the body guy. I knew about the other cooler there, the one Rich calls 'Processing' (he's got his own wierd name for everything), where they hang decedents on hooks and chains Clive Barker-style, like in a stockyard, until the hacks come and take them out

But any time Pathology, the surgeons, anybody else, has something cut off and done with, it goes in a big supercooled vat in the basement that just says Body Parts. There's one student from St. Basil's, some kind of seven-year freshman named Huck or Chuck or something; they just call him the Body Guy. He runs all the forms and disposes of the parts. No one will say how.

"Now you see them," the orderlies joke, eyes wide and ominous, "now you don't. Poof..."

 

Poof. "You were talking about the mirror," the young psychiatric intern prods. He hasn't shaved in two days. He looks stoned. "Anything?"

I rub my eyes. "Didn't mean for that to happen. It's the goddamned Ativan. When can I go herbal?"

Dr. McQuiddick looks at the door as if someone might be listening. "When you wake up without a new tattoo, Genius."

It takes me two minutes to blink.

"Just kidding," he continues.

"You're a dick," I respond. "That was a different dream."

I was telling him about my big sister, and a game that was a spell, called Bloody Mary. She said you light candles in the john with the door locked, look in the mirror and repeat the name Bloody Mary over and over, and after a while your face starts to melt and you see these weird lights, and...

 

"Cut, cut, cut," McQuiddick snaps, looking down his heavy eyelids at me like he wants to get in on the joke. I want some of that weed, but I know why he smokes it. It's unethical for us to talk about his cancer. But I can tell. Shame to see it so young. Lymphoma. They got it in the bud but it was really wiping him out.

I still my tongue. He doesn't. "I played that game, too. Me and my next-door neighbor Dave, when we were boys. Kind of like messing with a Ouija board. Ever read Karl Jung?"

"Sure," I say to him. "Once you start stirring up the mud on the bottom of the pond, those nasty archetypes bubble right up. No matter what name you hang on them. People can cause a lot more shit than they ever give themselves credit for. Jung knew that. Good call."

The young intern purses his lips. "Not exactly, but in the park. So... every time you use a mirror now, you see her, do I infer that right--"

"No, it only happened once. Sort of a vision, you might say. One of those archetypes, but the good kind, bubbling up when I was tired and had no tools and needed it the most."

I know Jeremy McQuiddick wouldn't understand the rest. The mirror speaks to me in dreams. Mary's eyes are maroon in the mirror, her hair longer and fiery red, not auburn. The image has faded into an older soul, the one we both saw in the bathroom that day when she swore off everythng but pure and applied science and became the most pious, righteous, generous young woman I ever knew in my life (besides Ma and Grandma). While she lived.

 

"She never talks outright?" the gray-faced young doc queried in his raspy voice, startling me from the run of my thoughts and changing their train.

I shook my head. "It's always in images. Mary... or whatever she is now... She swings a flaming sword. She walks me through all the Houses of the Mothers in the lands beyond physical discorporation, and tells me she's waiting beyond the second river there, in one of the border towns where they have need of Recorders Of Names."

Jeremy was rapt. "You missed your profession," he said without a trace of sarcasm. "What a poet you'd make, if you buckled down! Do you miss your sister?"

When I answered him, my voice came from far away. "Yes. We were twins. I watched her die. She got in a wreck with a fucking drunk who got out in three years. But I celebrate what she was to me, and what she did while she was here. She's still with me. Part of me. She's the non-physical part. I'm here."

"You and Philip K. Dick," the doc pointed out.

I saw that coming. "Heard it. Mary lived longer than that. Completely different psych diagnoses, anyway, me and him. He was a full-bore schizophrenic, just like Walt Whitman probably was. I'm..."

McQuiddick smirked, tapping his pen on his clipboard, waiting. I plunged. "I'm failing my dead sister, who I built into this hero, by getting too personally involved in the ...oh, are they really calling these the 'Splash Page Murders'? Does every comic-book wiseass in town work for the Sentinel?" I took a deep breath. He offered me the other cup of water on the table, and I took it.

I closed my eyes. For a moment I was right back there...

 

I shut the bathroom door, breath in my throat. There were tea-lights bobbing up and down on the waters of the bathtub.

"I'm not sure how this is supposed to w---" I began, and then Mary was pinching me. Not hard. Just enough to get my attention.

"I think it already is," she whispered back.

Two seconds later, she saw me shaking. I remembered myself then, young and pale with my black widow's peak, trying not to point at what I saw in the mirror, what shone through that place in the house in golden Vermeer light I could never understand, just that once. Gold, then crimson... then red.

"Scarebaby." Mary twisted an ear. I yelped, and slapped her hand away. She was nowhere near me. She giggled. The mirror clouded.

I saw the spirit take a hold on her, from the other side of the mirror, the other side of time, who knows what side of the sheets in our own blood that beat, and beat, and beat so hard and sang in our veins.

I heard a heartbeat beyond Pennsylvania in that mirror, the skirling of bagpipes under a harvest moon. I saw what touched every weird brain-case oracle in town. I heard the baobhan sith that my father's Cossack ancestors called Baba Yaga sing my name in hoary breath choked with sacrifice.

I had to not remember any more---

 

Then the doc is leading me back to my room.

"I think you've had enough for one day," he says softly. "You're coming along very well. We can talk at greater length about getting you home after you've... come out of the fog a little more."

His jaw is set. I can't help seeing it. He's trying. "You're not out of the woods yet. Sounds like there was a lot of stuff from way back. Some of it we might be able to get at, some we might not. You're going to have to accept that this may take a while. Can you meditate on that?"

I taste blood when I bite my cheek. That night, the pale skin-tagger steals through my window again, and lifts me up out of my skin, and tells me all the answers in words I can never remember well enough to write down when I'm awake. They give me all the paper I want, in here. And no back-to-back shifts.

Nothing but Time...

Time for a rewrite. Or maybe a great big fire when I get out. Maybe that will call Him in.

Maybe...

 

 

 

To be continued...

 

 

 

 

 

 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Mercury Retrograde Press.

Copyright © 2010 by Edward Morris

First Electronic Edition—published 2009/2010

ISBN 978-0-9819882-9-0