Intentional Dissonance (18 page)

“What’s wrong with me? I don’t know, my father’s responsible for Armageddon and apparently I could be too; everyone insists the girl I’ve been in love with for the last ten years of my life doesn’t even exist; and I’m living in a store room belonging to one of the most powerful drug dealers in the city. Other than that, nothing is wrong with me.”

Emily could hear him opening another vial of Sadness in the darkness.

“Jesus, Jon, how much of that do you really need?”

“Every time I take it, it brings her back to me, Emily. It brings Michelle back,” Jon laments.

“She’s not real, Jon. She’s a construction.” A vial flies across the room and smashes against the wall behind Emily’s head.

“She’s not a construction,” says Jon and she can hear his voice shaking. He’s full of fullstops and anger.

“Michelle, don’t listen to her, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” Suddenly, a soft glow fills the room and Michelle appears next to Jon, bathing his forehead in water, wiping it with a cloth.

“She’s not real, Jon, no matter what you do, no matter how real you try and make her,” says Emily. Michelle’s ghost looks at her with scorn in her eyes.

“I know your eyes are behind hers, Jon, even if you don’t,” says Emily and she turns to leave the room. Jon screams and the room is bathed in imaginary flames as he retreats to his imaginary lover. Emily shuts the door behind her and leaves Jon in a purgatory of his own design.

An hour later, she finds him in the bar, drunk.

“Talk to me, Jon.”

“Why can’t I just be quiet? Why can’t I just be quiet and happy? Why do I have to be making a noise for you to be happy? Don’t you fucking get how upset making noise makes me? Don’t you fucking get it? I just want to be ok. That’s all I fucking want.”

Emily doesn’t take his shit, she repeats herself: “Jon, talk to me.”

And he cries in that way that only addicts can, in that way that only the people who will always know what it means to always be wanting something they cannot have.

Jon talks about his drug, “There’s not a breath of air I can breathe or a step I can take that won’t remind me of her. She is as much a part of me as my skin.”

Emily sits next to him and puts her hand on his shoulder.

“But she was never real, Jon.”

“She was real to me. And while I can be logical about this, logic has never once mended a broken heart or fixed a sundered soul. She has poisoned the very core of me. A dream has killed me.”

Emily pulls him closer, putting her arms around him and feeling something for him she hasn’t felt since she was a teenager.

He whispers into her ear, “Perhaps I can live through this. But I would be deluding myself if I thought that late at night, before I slept, she wouldn’t return to haunt me. And that would be unfair to whomever I was trying to sleep next to. No matter how pure my intentions were. There are no soulmates. Love is a lie. Love, is broken.”

Something about the way Jon says this breaks him; and a little of it breaks Emily inside, too.

Chapter 28

Now

An executioner’s mask.

Jon tries to sleep but all he can do is remember; he remembers what it was like to touch her, when he first thought she was real, her skin was a foreign land he’d never finish exploring, a place where he’d always be a welcome stranger but a stranger nonetheless. His fingers would travel from her neck, down her back, across her ribs, and if they were in bed, slowly towards her thighs, always moving, just above her skin.

And she would sigh softly and welcome him into her land.

Jon screams himself to sleep.

Emily can hear it in the next room.

“You need to stop giving him Sadness, Duer,” says Emily. Duer smiles.

He knew this was coming.

“He’s a big boy, Emily. I also don’t think you’re in a position to be giving me orders,” says Duer.

“He’s going to kill himself or all of us if you keep feeding him that stuff,” she says.

“I’m sorry, Miss Emily but last I checked, you were the one who got him started on the stuff,” and as he says it, Emily clenches her jaw.

“I know. It was a mistake.”

“That’s the thing about mistakes Emily, my dear, is that you have to live with them. We all do.”

“I’m not even sure why you’re helping him, Duer.”

“It’s simple, Emily. Power. If even half of what he says is true, he could change the world as we know it. Don’t you think the world needs changing?”

“Maybe. I guess it depends on what you want to change it to,” says Emily.

Duer walks across the room to her and runs his fingers through her hair. She noticeably cringes at his touch and as she pulls away, he wraps her hair in his hand and yanks her head closer to him.

“When you’re me, darling, you can change the world to whatever you want.” She starts to cry. There’s a knock on the door. 

“Boss?” one of the thugs asks, the door half opens. 

“What is it, you fool? Can’t you see I’m busy?” Duer snarls from across the room. 

“There’s someone here to see her,” says the thug. 

“Who?” 

“Her,” says the thug and he points at Emily. Emily has no one left in this world. And yet, here was someone. Duer lets go of her hair, losing interest in her like a cat losing interest in a dead bird.

“Go,” he says and waves her away, still sobbing.

She walks outside towards the bar and meets a ghost. 

Chapter 29

Now

Hemingway’s shotgun

“Emily thought this would be good for you,” says Edward. They’re in the back of one of Duer’s delivery carriages, hidden behind boxes of old bottles and crates and other things they’d piled on top to hide themselves from the city’s Peace Patrols. It’s the night before the anniversary of The End.

They just have to stay out of the clutches of the doctor for another 24 hours and everything will be ok. Or at least, as ok as it was going to get. They can never go back to normal, whatever that once was. 

“I still don’t know where we’re going, Edward,” says Jon. He raises another vial of Sadness to his lips and drains it. It takes more and more to actually have any kind of effect on him, to feel anything at all. 

“You’ll see,” says Edward. And he smiles. He thinks One Eye is smiling too. Even in the dark, he can sense a change in the mood. The carriage rattles along, past smoke stacks and broken homes, past schools and factories for what feels like forever. Finally, it stops. 

“We’re here,” says Edward. The driver goes round the back and opens up for them and they find themselves in a blasted, desolate suburb that looks like it’s been looted more times than the sun has risen. Jon looks around him, then he recognises some of the architecture of the house next to them. It’s the home he grew up in. Jon runs inside. There’s his room. There’s his parents’ room, beneath the graffiti and burned out walls; this is where he became what he became. This is where he snuck out that night with Emily and Michelle and here, here is the bathroom where his mother killed herself soon after The End. He touches the wall and steadies himself. 

“Why did you bring me here?” he asks, staring into the closed lids of his eyes.  

“Emily said it might remind you of who you once were, before you became this mess, before Michelle, before The End, before anything.”

Jon walks outside and One Eye and Edward follow him. Here is the road they walked down together. At the end is a park. The park where they swung and smoked and this is the place Jon last felt normal. Jon starts to retrace the steps he took ten years ago. He turns and he’s facing the park. Only one swing remains, the rest are all stolen or burnt. On that swing, is a woman. Jon feels like he should know her. She’s familiar yet different. He walks up to her and she turns around and stands up as he approaches. 

“Hello, Jon,” says Michelle. 

Chapter 30

Now

Steven’s hands were soft, yet he worked with them all the time. Hands made for praying and now he’s dead. Now he’s dead and I am alone. I am alone. I will fall off this building and I will hit the ground so fast, I will fly into his arms on the other side. He will read to me each night we spend in heaven. His voice will be the last thing I hear. I will never hear silence again. He will write his name and then the word “loves” and then my name on my skin with his fingers. I will fall and then I will fly and then I will be with him. We will be together again soon and I will hold his hand and he will hold mine. Jump now. Now. Now. Now.

Steven’s hands were soft, yet he worked with them all the time. Hands made for praying and now he’s dead. Now he’s dead and I am alone.

It doesn’t make sense. A part of Jon’s brain always lights up whenever Michelle’s around but not now. Now she’s just here and if he blinks, she doesn’t stop existing and when she talks, Jon has never thought of the words she’s saying. She is her own entity. Her own person. Not Jon’s.

“I managed to finally find my way off the algae farm and back to the city and I ran into one or two people I used to know, they told me I could find Emily at that club and she told me what had happened, to a greater or lesser extent, and now I’m here,” says Michelle.

Jon still hasn’t processed it completely. She’s Michelle but she’s not his Michelle. Her hips are slightly rounder, her hair isn’t silver anymore, more brown. She is not hanging on his every word. She is not a figment of his imagination. This is the real Michelle. Jon nods at the things she says, his brain slowly turning things over. Edward and One Eye have given them some privacy and are standing at the back of the park, keeping an eye out for looters or wandering Peace Ambassadors. 

“I don’t know who I’ve become,” says Jon. 

“I don’t think I know either, if you’re looking for an answer. I met you
once
, Jon. I didn’t expect you to form a relationship with someone you thought was me.”

“I didn’t know she wasn’t you. I didn’t know she was just some lonely part of me.”

“I understand. Kind of. I think.” They sit in silence for a moment.

“Come here,” says Michelle and Jon gets up and hugs her like he loves her. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispers in his ear as she touches the edge of a Charge Stick™ to the side of his neck. Jon shakes uncontrollably and with his last moments of consciousness, he sees a phalanx of Peace Officers walk around the edge of the park up to him and Michelle. She holds him as he falls. The last thing he hears as he passes out are the yells of Edward and One Eye as a thousand shots ring out. 

Chapter 31

Now

Mary. I’m alive. I didn’t die. Don’t jump off the building Mary. I love you more than anything else. I don’t want to bury you. Please Mary. Don’t do it. Stay with me. We can be happy while we’re here. We’ve got years left. We’ve got so many seconds left to hold each other. Please, Mary.

Mary. I’m alive. I didn’t die. Don’t jump off the building. Mary. I love you more than anything else. I don’t want to bury you. Please, Mary.

When Jon comes to, the room he’s in is quiet except for the whir of sextants tracking the stars and the crackle of the fire that powers them. Long curtains hang from the ceiling, hiding more spinning machines and through two of them, Jon can see the lights of the last city on Earth blinking like distant white skulls. Michelle is there. The real one. She’s in a government uniform, a red one he hasn’t seen before. It is exactly ten years to the day that The End began.

“What job did they offer you in exchange for betraying me?”

“This is my Auto Systemic Meridian Response uniform.”

“It’s cute.”

“It’s the uniform one wears when one whispers quietly and performs small tasks for the benefit of government employees, so that they may experience a tingling sensation across their skull. If someone draws you, or whispers softly near you, this is the tiny shiver you get, the pleasurable tingling sensation across your scalp and back. It is called ASMR for short. The experience has become a delicacy amongst government employees.”

“That’s all it took to betray me? A job as someone who whispers softly to others to give them goosebumps?”

“You don’t know what I’ve been through, Jon.”

“I know you better than you think.”

“No you don’t. You know some fantastical version of me you’ve built in your head. You know a sixteen year old girl that you met once. Every single other thing about me that you think you know, you’ve made up.”

“No, there are parts of you that were real.”

“No Jon, there weren’t. I don’t even like comic books. I just told you I liked comic books that night because I thought you were kind of cute.”

“You lied to me?”

“Yes, Jon, ten years ago, when I was a kid, I lied to you and I’m sorry that hurts you.”

“This isn’t you.”

“This is me. You’ve been in love with a ghost for ten years, Jon; an illusion, an imaginary friend and I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this but that girl never existed anywhere but your head.”