The Music of Razors (30 page)

TWENTY

CHANGES

D
REAMS CAME AND WENT. AS THE PROCEDURE PROGRESSED,
certain things fell into Hope to let her know how the operation was going. Henry put them there to make her feel safe, to reassure. That was their function.

She drifted in a cool sand pool beneath a peach-colored sky. Beneath her lazily kicking legs she felt the passing dance of water sprites. They buoyed her up, sang softly into her ears. One opened a panel at the base of her neck, and gently slid one of its children inside. Once this was done, what the child knew Hope knew, and Hope now knew what it was to be Henry: what he had done, what he had to do, what she had to do, how tired he was. Why she had to take over.

“We’re building an army,” she breathed. “And no one can know.”

She floated, taking this in, making this new knowledge a part of her.

She could feel the sprite-child wriggling inside her head. Feel it insinuating itself. It felt too much like violation, and she had had enough violation for one lifetime. Hands on her body she could retreat from (she thought of tigers), but fingers in her mind gave her nowhere to retreat
to.
She didn’t like it. She felt echoes of
no no no
building in tempo within her skull, felt something lovely instinctively answering the call, felt the sprite-child with its payload of instructions screaming in terror as icy-blue eyes found it, as impossibly heavy paws pinned it, and relentless jaws tore it apart.

Hope began to sink back into peace.

The water of the pool bubbled, and from some unfathomable depth something erupted. Something massive rose beneath her, lifting her from the once-still waters as enormous fingers closed over her. She could move nothing save her head, jutting between second and third digits, and soon that was held in place by something she could not see. Something cold and hard. Zero movement, utter entrapment, mounting claustrophobia, a blinding fear that stripped her back to an animal state.

An object alien to herself came in through the back of her head, grasping and tentacular, metallic and glistening, searching. An appendage for something outside herself looking to remove something inconvenient within. She told herself to run, and sensed something white and four-legged do just that, retreating as far back as it could, to her innermost place. The place was an amalgam of memory. Of her childhood bedroom—all stuffed toys and posters of perfect boys—of the specter of her father, and the hallway light upon the face of her dead brother standing by her bed as she slept.

The white tiger loped into that bedroom, looking behind itself for what it knew was coming, moved past her memory of her father at the door, of Walter by the bedside, crawled under the bed, and waited for the inevitable.

The thing came for it, all hands and fingers, snaking down the hall, in through the door, past Walter, and—without hesitation—under the bed.

Her head filled with the cries of animal pain. It was more than she could contain. She couldn’t stop the screaming. The appendage jerked and jostled, tugging stubbornly at something that refused to give way. She heard wet sounds. She felt something dislodge, painfully, from the center of all she was. The violation was total.

She couldn’t stop the screaming.

She had been sobbing in her sleep for about five minutes when Henry finally extracted the blockage, whatever it was that had been preventing him from changing things about her that needed changing.

The blockage was very small, and very pale. Like a stillborn kitten.

He’d never seen anything like it.

With that in mind, his first instinct was to replace it. But he never had the chance.

Already, it had begun to decay.

Setting it aside, he persevered.

TWENTY-ONE

END

T
HE PARAMEDICS HAD FOUND SUNI AT THE TOP OF THE
hill. He was lying on his back, on the lip of the quarry, bloodied and stargazing. He had wanted to lash out when they touched him, but found that he couldn’t. Instead, he’d taken himself away as they handled his body and put it into the back of the van and brought him here, to this ward, where policemen had tried asking questions and failed to get any answers.

It was dark now, with only the ambient light from the nurses’ station down the hall, the weak warm glow of sodium-orange clouds beyond the window, and the white glare of a television someone had remembered to turn down but not off.

As he lay there, on his stiff white bed beneath stiff white sheets, he’d listened to the police talking among themselves. They’d had words with the man who lived next door, and his wife, Joan. The girl had done that to him, the neighbor had said. Threw him through the window. Naked. It seemed they’d had a fight. Something about AIDS.

But the girl—Hope Witherspoon—wasn’t at her home address, and her mother hadn’t seen her in over twenty-four hours.

The police knew about Hope. About her record. Killed her old man with a steak knife.

Suni’s stitches hurt.

“We need strong people,” Henry was telling her.

“People like me.”

“You’re not people. You and these instruments…”

“We’re the same person.”

“Yes.”

“Thrown to Earth, my essence became bones, and what was left…what was left tried for so long to put itself back together.”

“But now you have power and purpose.”

“We’re building a body. An army.”

“Come the End, the two sides will face each other. Once that’s over we come out, clean up whatever’s left…”

“And take over.”

“No. The Angel only wants out.”

“It wants to be real. It wants to be acknowledged.”

“Once the balance has shifted, God won’t be able to look away. It’ll have to remember.”

“And once God remembers the Angel…”

“It’ll exist.”

“I don’t think the Angel will stop there. There’s so much rage…”

“Once the power that locked it away is gone, it’ll be free.”

Hope thought about this. She remembered some things Henry had dropped into her head. “Won’t we all die if that happens? Aren’t we all part of the Godhead? If that goes…”

“Yes, but there are factions now. Authorities. The Angel needs to remove the Authority that bound it.”

“God.”

“I never figured that one out. Call it God if you like. I use names I know for the sake of convenience.”

While Suni slept his mother came to visit. She had returned from business to find a calling card from the police wedged into the jamb of her front door, requesting that she call them as soon as possible. They had asked if she had a son, about so high, long hair. The police explained they had followed the blood trail back to the driveway of her address. They informed her that last night paramedics had received a call from a person identifying herself as Hope Witherspoon and that a person was injured atop the quarry nearby. They had found Suni (how do you spell that?), bloody, naked, and unconscious in the company of a girl with pink hair. The girl did not stay to answer questions. Neighbors report that this girl had thrown Suni through his bedroom window, resulting in lacerations to his body. It appears Suni then fled for his life. The police were currently seeking Hope Witherspoon for questioning. Not to worry, doctors say he’ll be fine. Maybe a little scarring though.

Suni had woken in time to see his mother leaving the room.

“Remember,” Henry said. “It’s better if they want it.”

She looked up at him. “Did you?”

His eyes were on Suni, sleeping. “We all did.”

He had torn up all his art, hadn’t he? Hadn’t he done that? Or had he just wanted to? Did he really? How was he going to get anywhere now? College dropped out from beneath him. He’d had it so good for so long: a roof over his head and food in his stomach, a life of his own with his mother always out of town. All taken for granted. He couldn’t
do
anything else! He was going to wind up living the things he had always dreaded, the bland eternal scenarios that existed just beyond the happy lie of high school’s end; the horrible, mediocre things that happened to everyone else. They’d cut his hair, give him his glasses back, put him in a starched shirt, and file him within some anonymous concrete block for the rest of his life. People would see him there, doing the same things over and over again, slowly going gray under the lighting. The memory of what he had once been now nothing more than a shriveled sliver lying cold in the most undistinguished crevice of the emptied cavern of his mind.

Somewhere else he was vigorously marbling a white wall with his own red heart, laughing and crying out; each leap a bloody sweep, each thrust a burgundy explosion. He could hear violins. He could hear cannons.

Someone pulled the drapes against the glare of the rising sun. They turned off the TV.

“Don’t let that happen…”

Someone stroked his head, quietly shushing him.

“Please…Don’t let that happen to me…”

Whoever it was whispered close to his sleeping ear. “You understand what that means. What it involves?”

“Yuh…yes.”

“Then say it again so that I know you mean it.”

“Don’t let that happen to me.”

And suddenly he was awake, standing in a black chamber, a cavern, the ceiling of which roiled in the darkness like a carpet of cockroaches. There were things up there, but he couldn’t tell what.

“Change comes with a price,” said a gentle voice.

He lowered his eyes from the crawling firmament to find her standing against a veiled background. Long lengths of gauze, backlit by some faint and indistinct illumination. Her vest glittered, hung with singing pieces of starlight. Instruments.

“Hope…”

She moved toward him, the tools chiming softly.

She took his hand, closed his eyes with a soft palm, and gently pressed her lips to his. The feel of it, and the smell of her hair, brought a flood of associations: The time he had first walked up to her and said hello; the way she had smiled at his distracted manner, completely unaware of Walter badgering him constantly with
talk about this
and
she likes that;
the clumsy way she had first grabbed him—suddenly and awkwardly turning his face to hers—the kiss landing to the left of his mouth as they sat on his mother’s couch watching an old rerun of
21 Jump Street.

Suni opened his eyes and looked to what lay beyond her. Earthen platforms apparently grown from the soil of the cave where they stood, spaced evenly about; rectangular slabs, each one with a thin veil drawn around it, concealing what lay there. Through the thin material Suni could see silhouettes, and they weren’t human. They weren’t even the shapes of any animals he recognized.

“I want to be with you,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to be with you.” Her hand squeezed his. “And now I can.”

Suni looked at her, drank her in. “Yyy-you muh-mean that?”

She nodded, a gentle smile creeping at the corners of her mouth. “I mean that.”

“So…www-wuh-what are you doing with these?” He ran a finger over one of the instruments, something like a knitting needle. It sang louder.

“This is how you become what you’ve always wanted.”

His stomach sank and he stepped away. He couldn’t take much more of this. “No. Fuck that. Nuh-not again.” In the last two days he’d had everything he was pulled from his head and rammed back in. He wouldn’t withstand being reintroduced to himself all over again.

“You already agreed.”

“Nnn-no.”

“Three times you agreed.” She stepped closer, and something slid painlessly through his navel and out through his spine. Cold threads crept upward, enveloping his brain, and sensation ceased. The flesh of his face felt slack and weighty, hung on his skull like a heavy leather hood.

“No pain,” she said. There was a blade in her hand. “Nothing but what you’ve always wanted.”

She was having a little trouble thinking. She had that feeling, like when there’s something you’re supposed to remember. Only she knew there wasn’t anything she was supposed to remember at all, yet she still had that feeling, like she’d forgotten something…something.

“Let him go.”

She rummaged through the jumble of who she was. My name is Hope. My mother’s name is…Victoria. My father’s name is…was…David. I like Suni, and…circus music…and…and…something white. She shut her eyes, tried to see it rather than think it. It was there. It was right there. The memory of it…of him…of something solid, and true, and real. She could feel the memory of it, waiting to put her back together. Something familiar, something part of her, as old as the universe…something she had been too long separated from. The thing that kept her alive, and cohesive, throughout her entire life. Things flew apart, people crumbled, but always she remained.

But not anymore.

Music. There was music. Circus music.

She remembered now. It had been taken away. She looked down, despondent, frustrated. She looked at her shirt.
GUNSMITH CATS.
She shut her eyes. Something white. Something she liked. She had a tattoo. What was it of? Her mother’s name was…was…

Her father’s name was…was…

Henry.

“Hope, you’ve got to take that out of him.”

Her memories, her sense of identity, her knowledge, were a series of colored windows sliding and moving in front of one another. Occasionally, when there was a chance alignment of various disparate elements, she would regain a sense of who she was. But the windows would continue moving and sliding and orbiting, and the sense would pass, leaving her with nothing but the knowledge of something re-lost.

Something that prowled when the two right windows crossed. Something…

“Let him go.”

White.

“No. He said.”

“He’s useless to us. He doesn’t even know what’s happening. Let him go.”

“No!”

Henry’s dead hand touched her shoulder. An incoherent sound fired from her throat. She flicked and stumbled away, falling onto the dirt. He was standing over her, a black shape against the smoky luminescence filtering through the veils. Things slid from one part of her into another.

[Faces and memories melted together.]

She felt as if she existed in all times at once: past, present…She washed and melded with the little girl she had been, the woman she was becoming, her ideas of what she would be…she felt sick, confused, angry…

“What you’re feeling is a side effect of the operation.” [You were a mistake, Daddy had said.] “It can be fixed.” [You can be fixed, Daddy had said.]

Henry extended a hand.

[Daddy had backhanded her.]

She gritted her teeth.

[She had cried out.]

He said, “
I’m not going to hurt you.
”

[He had said, “Look what you’re making me do.” She had said, “I’m sorry.”]

She said “Fuck you, Dad.”

[She had cried.]

She cried.

[The knife had been in her hand before she really knew it.]

She had something that felt like nothing and looked like silver. It cut as she swung out.

[She had cried.]

Henry looked at his hand, the split leather of the glove, the bloodless, parted flesh of his palm. So very little left that was human in the true sense of the word.

“Maybe it’s better this way,” he said, to no one in particular.

[Daddy had looked down at his bent-back sobbing daughter, at the woman she was becoming. “It’ll be good,” he had murmured.]

Hope shrieked.

[Hope had screamed.]

And stabbed Henry through the heart.

Some of her colored windows pass each other, and through them, fleetingly, Hope sees herself being led into the courthouse via a shielded rear entrance. She remembers being the center of a little flower of people, moving tightly from the rear of a van, into the laneway and then five or six steps to the door. There was a youth worker with her, and her solicitor, and a couple of cops, and a few people that she didn’t know. She remembers looking to her side, through the bundle of shoulders, and seeing a person standing at the end of the laneway, some guy eating an ice-cream cone, watching with blank interest. His red cap read 3
DAY CLEARANCE
and his T-shirt advised that if she wasn’t living on the edge she was taking up too much space.

In that moment her situation seemed lonelier than it ever had, and in that moment she remembers wishing that someone was holding her.

Someone she truly loved.

Hope swallowed and her bottom lip began to buckle. A tear splashed onto her mouth, and she kissed him. It tasted like gasoline.

“I love you,” Suni said. “Don’t do this.”

Her translocation from place to place was, to her, like remembering things. She would see it, be aware of it, but only at a distance. She would desire a place and there she would be.

Hope and Suni were back at the quarry, looking over the place that gave birth to who they had been. It was only appropriate that it should see what they had become.