The River Part 1 of 2

The water underneath them moved deceptively. Though it was cold and appeared still, underneath the placid wobbling of that textured lattice was a current that had been known to take many lives. Their old English teacher, Mrs. Sparrow, had once read them an original poem regarding the appetite of that river. Perhaps the only thing that revealed its lurking desire was its raucousness. At ground level, it drowned out what little Gretchen and Kurtis said to one another; up here, it was white noise from a television at midnight, something that could lull them to sleep if they weren't situated on the old railway's rusting truss bridge, sitting on jagged black ballast and staring down at that rushing intestine with heavy heads and heavy eyes.

Kurtis felt ready to double over at any minute, splashing into the cold and dashing his skull against the rocks, feeling the brief sensation of pain before being swept away by concussion and returning to the earth.

Gretchen stared at him, wondering what mysteries he could be contemplating, not knowing that moments before they sat he wondered the same thing. They were not yet in tune. Her hair whipped into her eyes and discomfort and some unconscious pressure urged her to look downward. Suddenly, she was meditating on her own fatality. How smooth the rocks below must be, those infant teeth covered in nourishing algae. They would chew her bones and send her down that interminable intestine, maybe to the James Bay coast, maybe to the Arctic Ocean. Maybe fishing boats would drag her turgid and colourful remains aboard whereupon its crew would contemplate the mysteries of death and beauty.

Their morbid fantasies were conversations on their own, their bond being so intimate that the two scarcely needed dialogue to engage one another; as such, neither of them were surprised to find themselves imagining the various ways in which the river would digest them. Kurtis imagined that the bridge was like a pair of gaudy braces. They looked at each other and chuckled until one of them applied this image in a more gruesome context: a hungry and unmerciful machine-mouth grinding them with steel incisors. It was easy for them to both assume that it was Gretchen who concocted this image, but neither of them wanted to admit it, to confront the underlying cause of Kurtis's year-long departure from home.

As if to reinforce this mutual avoidance, Gretchen hoisted herself closer to Kurtis and put her hand on his knee, slowly massaging his thigh. He responded by weaving his fingers through hers, and they both looked at each other with weak smiles that showed themselves only in a widening and thinning of the lips, the smiles of x-rays. Aside from the frailty of their expression they felt their warmth more than saw it. They had both missed each other despite past mishaps, had both needed each other the way fire needs oxygen and fuel, the way bears need blueberries in the dying heat of the late summer.

Clouds muddied the sky until the haze of the sun could no longer pierce their curtain-like veil in even the foggiest of light. They dreamed of nuclear winter and ruins like these old tracks. The people would live in the skeletal husks of their homes under the punishment of darkness—eternal darkness it would seem. The dust would never really settle properly. The atmosphere would love it and welcome it. Perhaps, one day, they would see the sun again.

Until then, they would cower in deeper darkness and manufacture lights and become paler and lonelier and emptier—thinly spread ghosts with thinly spread smiles. They would eat their canned food as all of the plant kingdom wallowed in despair and yellowed in the incapacity for photosynthesis. Great, noble trees would become stark ruins, castles for insects and parasites that were less dependent on light and warmth. Their egg laying would become confused, however, and generations and species would be cut short or pushed into new territory.

With no crops they would wither away. Greenhouses would be fortified and destroyed in guerrilla warfare undertaken by extended families and local communities. Stillbirths would be rampant.

His migraine is excruciating. He stumbles into a park bench upon which an elderly lady sits. She looks at him with abhorrence, withdraws. Shields her purse. Next to her, he throws up violently. His puke collects on the bench's beams, seeps between them with horrible slopping sounds as it hits the pavement below.

The old lady stands fearful, mutters something amounting to prayer, and flees. Her footfalls are buried among the cacophony of the rest of Berlin's streets. Here, everything is a drill and a hammer, a piston and a chamber. He had trouble believing that a city so important to Bach and Wagner could be so irritating and full of noise. He remembered Schopenhauer's disgust at the sound of whips and wondered what the man would have thought of the deafening mixture of twentieth century technologies and teeming mobs of self-interested plebeians.

Happy explosions propel his agony to new heights as he reels and slobbers and puke seeps onto the pavement below. He can smell its hot reek and the reek of garbage and fuel coming from an endless stream of noisy, violent motorists surrounding the park. Then he falls sideways and lands on the walkway. He stares up at the sky while he fondles distant grasses with limpid fingers, fainting from the agony of Gretchen's starvation and the cruelty of the blistering summer sun.

The canvas doesn't welcome her anymore. She was like an unwelcome guest at a ritzy party: turned down before being able to confront those responsible. She lies on the sofa against the wall doing nothing but cry. Her head throbs. The sun pours in through unturned and half-raised blinds. It winks at her through suggestive shades of blue and its glistening caresses the parquet flooring.

Her blurry eyes spied the empty ash tray and the note he left her after their horrible transaction. How many months ago was that? She stopped using her calender very shortly after he left and didn't work. Somehow there was always enough money in the bank account and the rent was always paid. She wanted to blame herself but nothing was their responsibility.

This was all outside their control.

Or maybe it was their responsibility; didn't they have a duty to themselves at least to figure it out, to make it work? The fact that they knew so little about their condition and their place in the universe made this seem daunting, impossible.

It would be so much easier if she could paint again. Little would come to her and she wondered if it was because of terror or because of her distance from Kurtis. She hated that they shared the same cruel destiny and all she wanted was to be with him in peace and not worry that some abominable act of hers would send them yet again spiraling into acts of self-destruction or making attempts at spiritual discoveries that they would never find alone.

She needed him and even though all she could do was sit in their apartment with the walls leaning in on her and tremble with the fear of human contact, she could still feel that somewhere Kurtis was plodding through lonely, all too human streets. Plodding and wishing that he was back home, back with the only thing that made any sense. Her. Him. Two abominations who had no choices. No control.

All she did was cry comfortless tears under an unsympathetic shower of rays.

When their minds were most synchronized they lost all sense of who they were, where they were. Their ability to distinguish senses could be overwhelmed and they didn't know whose bodies they were controlling. This was worst in the days of craving and loneliness where Kurtis, alone on the east coast of Canada, realized the desperate urgency of his return home, to the upstairs apartment Gretchen had barely kept since his departure. He knew, of course, about its rot through feeling her sense of rot and malaise. Thus he would not be surprised by a stained sink, a moldy bathroom, the smell of cigarette smoke that would taint the walls with a grimy yellow.

They crossed many boundaries once, felt the wrong things in wrong places. Wondered why Limerick was such a tearful place. Wondered why the glum foggy bogs of inland Ireland were such a cause for joy—how did their tears mix so well? How did Gretchen wake in the deep of the night with tears of giddiness and glee? Even from so far away they fed each other.

An implacable pain startled Kurtis from a troubled slumber. Nightmares of death and monsters predating on bunnies and kittens; of bloodshed and alien races stealing the skins of men in order to integrate into human society and cause the profoundest and deepest suffering. He was merely a boy at the time, so hopefully you can imagine how horrifying it would be to wake up from that. Even an adult has trouble processing these sorts of dreams comfortably.

He snapped shut like a snare while clutching a place that was not quite groin nor abdomen. It was somewhere in the middle. He felt like his intestines were tearing themselves apart, that his testicles were inside him and ready for bursting, It was distinctly period-like and bafflingly feminine.

He tried to distract himself by petting the hairs that led to his member and gripping his entire muscular structure and nervous systems in a state of perpetual tension but the overwhelming emotional energy of the experience rattled his brain and destroyed his concentration. The experience felt like nothing short of madness, of hysteria; his ego seemed incapable of bearing the strain and he felt that any minute he could dissociate and enter into what old primitive people would call a “bush-soul”; that bit of trivia came from one of his father's old psychology books. Kurtis felt like he had a fever and his eyes stung as though he were crying.

Gasping for air he tried to straighten up. He felt like he might soon shit himself. He wondered, for one strange instance, if he was turning into a girl and was about to bleed everywhere like he was taught girls do during puberty. Was this it? No, that was crazy. He considered that he was really sick. Would that mean that his death was coming? Oh no, not death! This world was too confusing and interesting for death. His insides swelled again. Organs pushed against organs: bladder and duodenum, stomach, liver, gall bladder. Everything got pushed higher and higher. Muscles were tearing under the strain of whatever virus or illness was overwhelming his body. He moved with the sinuousness of a caterpillar, lost his balance, and collapsed to the floor.

He read a bit about bugs. He wished he were a caterpillar and had the right gear to maintain his grip. A sturdy set of prolegs would be nice about now. Maybe this was it: his metamorphosis. Soon his penis would shoot out silk and he would build a nice cocoon and sleep for a while and then wake up and eat and enjoy the beauty of the world. It was entirely possible that metamorphosis was excruciatingly painful; Kurtis had no way of telling one way or the other.

One more brutal tear was all it took: it was hemridging! That was the word for it. He wet himself and fainted just as his mom burst into the room, screaming his name. In his dreams he was chased by a bloodthirsty version of his favourite stuffed animal from childhood: Gonzo from the Muppet Show.

There were many times where they wept unconsciously beneath a sturdy, mature Norway maple whose leaves were perpetually a deep, majestic crimson. It was a pillar that loomed over them and threatened them with secret extinction: it reminded them of how impenetrable nature was and how even when mankind had come and gone molecules would still be able to organize and stabilized into a variety of polypeptides and sugars based on a series of rules written in climates that were probably equally as inhospitable as any that would emerge after mankind had finished ruining itself and poisoning everything it touched.

It was one of the few trees on the school's barren grounds but everyone knew that it belonged to the Scary Twins. On very few occasions were they ever confronted.

Nicknames always bear a secret measure of scorn. They attempt to cast the individuals involved in a role based on word association and they encourage said individuals to adhere to those roles in subconscious ways. Every nickname bears the mark of reduction, of simplification, of debasement and restriction. It inhibits the power of the individuals. It is a lie. Gretchen and Kurtis never referred to each other by name, never verbally addressed each other in public or private. The nickname was given to them long ago when they were schoolyard playmates in elementary school.

As always, there is a bully, a joker, or an insecure whelp of some sort looking to exert external power in order to conceal internal frailty, not just from others but from oneself. Do you see the nicknames here? The categories of personality we're participating in? It doesn't matter as much in a narrative, because bit parts are always bit parts and their performers are crudely hewn marionettes even at their best. Even the major players are inadequate facsimiles of human beings, tangible only when one allows them into their space. Are you open enough to invite such wretched souls inside your humble home? Will you offer them tea and ask them what they've learned about this gruesome world? Try not to be appalled when you are told that the universe is a black comedy and that our suffering can easily become a source of amusement. They will garrulously describe for you how many ways your being means nothing, my major players will; they are a bête noire to humanity if humanity was any wiser you see—that is their very best nickname.

The crafty bully in question was named Andre Gagnon; he would become a sports fanatic and play poker and possess both moderate intelligence and immoderate sexual practices. He would marry three times and have two estranged children. He is not innocent for being cast in such a way; he played his roll quite well, as we all do when the lights come on. There are many like him in this world; you don't have to look hard. Sometimes we are our own favourite actors. Sometimes we fall prey to our own clichés.

Andre and Kurtis had a tendency to quarrel frequently with no clear end and no clear victor. Only a clear instigator was ever distinguished—a fact which Andre resented and used to his advantage. Thus, despite never doing anything to deserve such a moniker—despite his chivalry in all engagements with this childhood foe—Kurtis was still dubbed a crybaby and a rat and a sore loser. Little Kurtis Rosae—some twenty pounds smaller than his opponent and still able to hold his own—was nothing but a wuss.

This violent process continued throughout grade school, even when Gretchen left to Brandon, Manitoba for three years. The notion of The Twins had been forgotten or at least ignored for the duration of her absence, but the enmity between Kurtis and the pugnacious Andre only mounted.

It was during freshman year in high school that Kurtis and Gretchen perhaps deserved the title of Scary Twins, when the nickname—if only for a fleeting moment in their lives—was the most apt representation of who they were. Still, it was only a nickname. The Norway maple which stood alone in the schoolyard showered them in its blood like they were statues in the fountain at the centre of a Florentine piazza. Gretchen—her lips a deeper shade of black than could be described—leaned against the coarse, ridged bark in corpse-like repose.

At this time in the autumn the weather was still mild but many of the trees began preparing for the long and trying dormancy of winter. Those leaves fell like razors and painted themselves like oil on a canvas of shriveling blades and the untilled, gravelly dirt of the schoolyard. Andre's beau was a licentious little tart named Chrissy who dressed only in designer clothing and always wore her hair fashionably. Yes, this is typical; adolescent girls know how to socialize like it was nobody's business despite their incapacity to comprehend the ramifications of any of their actions. But let's not discuss things that are muddled beyond anyone's capability to discuss with civility or sensibility; if it is worth discussing then let future ages discuss it. Let us also hope that they don't make our mistake and discuss things of ill importance (such as, possibly, the sexuality of organisms with sex organs).

Returning to our archetype: Chrissy, ineffectively raised by the flaccid hand of modern parenting, was a portal for creative slander. If it could be turned into an insult, she'd find a way; if it was event or image that could be formulated by her imagination, she'd formulate it and find the target that best suited her at the time.

She hadn't liked Gretchen from the start. Gretchen was quiet, mousy, and hard to rouse. She only spoke when addressed in the classroom, gave a terse (and usually correct) answer, and then carried on about her business. Business was usually staring at whatever was on her desk and absorbing it with the silent discipline of a samurai. They had an afternoon English class together, and the one thing that annoyed Chrissy the most was the sound of furious scribbles and strokes coming directly behind her. As Mrs. Sparrow recited Browning and broke off to provide context to certain lines, Gretchen would highlight those lines, scrawl asterisks, and flip back and forth between dictionaries, thesauri, and textbooks. While Gretchen would nearly fail in any other subject, throughout high school her aptitude with languages, arts, and trivia would earn her a respectable average.

Although the thought of Gretchen failing at anything provided Chrissy with a degree of satisfaction, that scrawling was like a flock of birds frantically scrambling along the bottom of a new cage, and its intimations of success boiled Chrissy's otherwise frigid blood.

“Hey there hatchling,” Chrissy said to a sleeping Gretchen.

This address startled Kurtis; he looked at Chrissy for a moment and resumed his idleness. She'd be pretty if her eyes and cheeks weren't so full of poison. He thought about the red tint the umbrella of leaves cast on her face and thought that Gretchen would like this image. Hopefully, she would dream it and tell him about it when she woke. Or they would just know.

Chrissy examined Gretchen from toe to head: black converse sneakers, black-and-white striped stockings that ran from scrawny ankles to broad hips, a layered black skirt, a velvet vest over a black blouse which, in her slouching posture, erased any curvature from her chest. Her black mop of hair—a single braid on the right side—ran in thick tendrils along her milky, baby-like face. Her fingers were intertwined, drawing to Chrissy's attention a solitary ring with a polished onyx stone; Kurtis had given it to her as a birthday present.

“Nice rock, hatchling.” Hatchling, of course, had come from Gretchen's aptitude in Mrs. Sparrow's class.

Kurtis took personal offense to this, particularly to having his gift ridiculed, “Insulting a sleeping person is either low or stupid, I'm not sure which,” he commented.

“Nobody asked you, faggot.”

Kurtis's slightly androgynous face earned him an unfavourable reputation among some. Kurtis was less keen on responding to this. He shrugged and reached for his backpack, shuffling through it for his cellphone.

“Gonna call one of your faggot friends for a quick rim job before class?” That voice was not Chrissy.

Kurtis snapped up at the sound of a distinctively male voice. Andre was here. It was like Chrissy had unconsciously called for reinforcements in order to escalate a siege on a stalwart fortress. Such possibilities didn't strike Kurtis as absurd anymore; he had recently begun an investigation into the paranormal based on his experiences of phantom pain and his almost inhuman bond with Gretchen Waller.

“If you're interested in joining I can give him your number...” Kurtis muttered. He closed the phone—it was intended as a cue for Chrissy which had clearly failed—and threw it back in his bag.

By this time, Gretchen was awake to the commotion. She cracked her knuckles and stretched out her legs, exposing them past the knees under her bulging and puffy skirt.

Chrissy pointed at her legs, “I think you're showing a bit too much you slutty little goth.”

Andre laughed, “You're gonna piss off the Scary Twins.”

Gretchen felt exposed; she wanted to adjust her skirt but was aware of what it would imply to Chrissy. Quickly, she assessed Kurtis's thoughts. They were both displeased with this interruption but were prepared to endure it. It was like having a housefly land on you; eventually, sooner than you'd think, it would go away. It might land on you again. It would still go away.

Without missing a beat, Chrissy continued, “Is that how you get your grades? Flashing a bit of slutty thigh?”

Kurtis felt Gretchen's adrenaline like it was his own, which also soared. It was feedback. Gretchen's eyes were beginning to burn, and there was nothing Kurtis hated more than feeling those cold, ice-water orbs burn salty and hot, to feel that lip quiver and those facial muscles tighten up; to feel the tension in her legs and the muscles unwilling to just move that goddamn skirt because of pride and the sense of battle.

Andre followed up in the heat of their mutual muscular agony, “Yeah, show that shit to Sparrow and offer to lap up her cunt like a dog?”

“Do you let her tongue-fuck you while you read Byron?”

“Are you about to cry? Is it from the shame? Is it cause it's true? Aww, look.”

It was the sarcastic cooing that sealed the deal.

Kurtis closed his bag with its drawstring and stood up. He licked his lips slowly. Scowled at Chrissy. His eyes came back to Andre, making it immediately clear that words were of little use anymore.

Andre bared his teeth and charged Kurtis without hesitation. His eagerness was as unquestionable and visible as Kurtis's calm. Kurtis was ready for the angle and the shape and the weight of Andre's blind charge, and in a simple fluid gesture he had driven Andre's face into the trunk of the old Norway maple. Taking the arm he had secured, Kurtis then flung Andre backward and tripped him onto the ground.

Gretchen did nothing but scream the whole time; there was a hyena's satisfaction in her every curse as Kurtis beat Andre like a police K-9 on a ragdoll badguy. “Who's the hatchling now you fuck? What do you think of having your ass kicked by a slut?”

To anyone watching, Gretchen's sobbing tirades were disorienting.

Fists swung back and forth like a pendulum, and even though his knuckles and joints became sore with the constant contact he made with the different parts of Andre's skull, Kurtis kept better time than a seasoned death metal drummer; their honour was at stake. Not Gretchen's, not his. Theirs. Every swing meant something—another scar healed over in another violent blow, each strike a resounding victory over all they had endured. It was armageddon for all of Andre's upper body, and Chrissy made the foolish mistake of pulling at Kurtis's hair.

Gretchen felt the contact of that whore through him, and in a moment of blossoming rage screamed loudly and clearly for all to hear, “Don't you dare touch me you fucking bitch,” and as she did so Kurtis flung a backhand that felled the future prom queen of a different high school.

Gretchen proceeded to laugh gaily through choked tears as she rolled in the grass and her clothes netted crimson leaves. Kurtis welled with satisfaction. When he lost momentum, the onslaught was over. Kurtis heaved deeply and looked at Gretchen who seemed every bit as exhausted. They smiled to each other with such mad sweetness as only lovers should possess. These to were by no means lovers—nor were they haters. They sat trapped in a concrete room like cellmates more than soulmates. A cup overflowing. Maybe they loved each other. They weren't sure; how could they know when they didn't know their own selves?

It didn't matter; they enjoyed each other thoroughly then and drank each other's delights from the overflowing cup that was themselves. They filled themselves back up again and were hypnotized by each other's faces—smiles and sorrows, a hungry wolf grin like the ritual masks of some indigenous tribes—for several minutes in the quiet of their aftermath.

Breaking their hypnosis, the bell croaked a digital summons; Kurtis stood, snatched up his backpack, and walked toward the school calmly underneath the soft pattering of rain; he was undeterred by any of the other individuals. A large proportion of the student body had witnessed the exchanged with gaping jaws and colosseum rapture. Seeing the Scary Twins stare at each other as though they were eyeballing spoils of war had mesmerized them, and only the faintest whispers ever escaped from any of the cliques who'd witnessed the stilted fight.

None of this concerned them. Kurtis only cared about washing his hands before science.

Gretchen examined what she wished was Andre's corpse and then hopped up, chasing after Kurtis and following him with the indecisive closeness of a lost dog. She laughed to herself as she heard Chrissy's hoarse cry of “you bitch” underneath staggered whimpers as she clutched her fallen beau.

Gretchen was dreaming. She was playing alone with a ball in a sandbox. Her mommy was talking to a strange man, and they walked away together and left Gretchen alone. Gretchen thought the stranger was her daddy at first but he was taller and he had a tail, which Gretchen thought was strange.

Why are they walking away from you? she wondered. You want them to play with you. You can't do much with this ball except kick it. Maybe you could sit on it and bounce.

She heard a voice that was strong and manly and she thought of a happy circus clown that wanted to give her treats. The circus clown disappeared from the sky in the back corner of her mind and she wished he stayed around so that he could play with her with the ball. It could be their ball and they could share it forever.

Why are you alone?

The world disappeared into a mist and she was enclosed in a room where static filled the sky. It made her feel sick. The air was full of noise and the noise felt like sand! It made her think of the flickering dots of black and white that exploded across TV screens.

Oh no you're being turned into a TV! You don't wanna get sucked up into space do you? Do something!

She felt a biting in her stomach and she felt like she was going to throw up and pee herself, but at the same time she felt like she was going to laugh because she was watching herself go through this agony with someone else's eyes.

Little Gretchen Waller with long sandy hair woke up defecating and screaming. She felt like her insides were pouring out of her bottom and she begged and begged for her mother to come.

(Dear little child that she is, Gretchen wasn't aware that in the adjacent room her and her father were doing very adult things—it wouldn't be too much longer before Gretchen knew what those things were but for now we can save her one potential humiliation as she is, clearly, enduring another. What child enjoys shitting their bed? What a dreadful source of shame that would turn out to be, especially at the age of eight, when you should be well passed even peeing your bed. Are you some sort of baby, Gretchen? Won't you ever grow up and be able to take care of yourself?)

It took them forever to get there and dear God she wondered why, but her parents didn't tell her why they took so long to come. They stood over her at an uncomfortable distance; Gretchen thought they smelled funny but she still wanted her mommy to come close and give her a big hug.

She didn't realize that she, too, was reeking. Mommy flipped on the light as daddy bolted out of the room nauseated.

“Let me pull down your sheets, baby.”

Gretchen's eyes were swollen and watery; she held herself up by shaky, pale hands and she looked, to her mother's eyes like grim old death come to steal her baby away.

As mommy peeled away the sheets she wretched at the brown watery stain that pooled around her daughter like a mud puddle. She wretched and tore the sheets away completely; the shock of the scent of her own waste overwhelmed Gretchen so promptly that she threw up all over her mom's night gown.

She didn't stop throwing up for a week.

“They don't know what's wrong with him...” Jackson sighed as he collapsed into the short, cube-like hospital chair next to his wife Irene. “He's been like this for a week and now he's sleeping almost all the time.” He curled up like a slinky and he felt ready to go down those steps. Slinking on down, flipping over and over. Just like his favourite childhood toy.

Irene placed a gentle hand on his back and began rubbing it but it was a cold comfort. She felt compelled to do it anyway, having no clue what else to do. Their son was probably dying and nobody could do a goddamn thing. They tried taking care of him at home, making sure they could nourish him in any way and forcing him to maintain decent fluid levels to counteract water loss from diarrhea. When he started messing his own bed again Irene called for an ambulance straight away. As it approached he vomited into his own mouth; he didn't have the strength to turn and reach the bucket. It seemed like he had become so used to it that he had practically fallen asleep while throwing up. Irene was forced to resuscitate him, and the paramedics arrived shortly afterward.

Kurtis was whisked away to the hospital and a number of attempts at diagnoses revealed nothing. No stomach virus, no bacterial infection. No ulceration, nothing ruptured. Only symptoms that pointed to nothing.

Jackson pressed stars into his eyelids as Irene suffocated her tears. Whatever it was, they were sure their boy was doomed.

Gretchen woke up in a hospital bed with a needle and tube in her arm and a pounding headache. She felt the softness of her mother's hand first, and as her eyes adjusted to light she realized a different feeling: comfort.

For a while she dreamed she was dead and that monsters shaped like all her favourite things chased after her through dark enclosures with strange coloured lights. She ran through sea green sewers and ochre caverns dripping with slime, through abysses with boiling chocolate oceans watched over by monster forms of firemen and policemen and doctors. Nurses constantly puking ran after her with scissors to cut out her stomach. In the caves she saw stop signs and neon green and rusted fences and twisted staring faces, busts with forearms melted to brick walls and screeching in forbidden languages.

Gretchen thought she was in hell and when she woke up she thought that maybe she was in heaven and that in running from the monsters long enough some god had smiled at her and saved her.

Then she knew this wasn't true because she remembered another half of her nightmare visions.

Mommy was talking to someone. She sounded excited and relieved but she was crying; Gretchen had seen this feeling in other people before so she wasn't shocked that mommy had tears—tears of joy. It made Gretchen feel happy when she wasn't busy thinking of the other half.

There was always a figure either watching her or inside her depending on where she was. Sometimes she felt like it was stealing her heart's energy and sometimes she felt like she was stealing its heart energy. Eventually it felt like they were just exchanging it, the way you breathed air in followed by air being breathed out. She stopped thinking about heaven and hell and the stuff she heard. It was a something-else that was with her, not an angel or a god or a devil even. Something-else was travelling through those dark places with her, and it didn't seem to want to be there. The truth was that she didn't want to be there either, but she felt like she had dragged the something-else with her.

When mommy and the other person were done talking, Gretchen was back to her senses. She could see well even though things felt a bit fuzzy—a bit too real—and she felt the needle in her arm and reached for it.

“Oh no dear, don't touch that,” the other lady in the room said. A nurse.

Gretchen felt like vomiting—but she knew it wasn't because she was sick. This nurse looked like the head nurse—the boss nurse that told the other monster nurses what to do. Gretchen's eyes were wide and her throat got tight. She couldn't breath for a minute. The nurse stood up and smiled and Gretchen calmed down. You're in the real world now, she thought, finally.

“Dr. Coleridge said that was one of the worst stomach viruses he'd ever seen,” the nurse said. “You must be a really strong girl.”

Gretchen wasn't convinced by that clean lady with her bright sunlight smile. The something-else was there suffering right along her. The suffering almost took them both.

The sun reemerged in awkward steps, like a child dancing to a convoluted techno track. Its harsh glare made Gretchen and Kurtis feel almost vampiric. They both laughed at this briefly; hadn't someone called them that once before? It was enough that they were associated with goths—it was bad enough to be associated with other groups of people in general. They were too alone for even themselves to understand; they were alone as this rusted old truss bridge, which served no function anymore.

An unusual stone caught Gretchen's attention. She picked it up and showed it to Kurtis. Unspectacular quartz stared at him. He held it out in front of her so that he stared into it, stared through it and into her.

We're like this quartz in this bed of molten rock and rusted steel. We don't belong, she thought to him. They had become good at thinking to each other and it had been a long time since they practiced it. Even on the way their minds were silent—only their feelings played like a weak AM broadcast. Most of it was noise and they didn't bother reading each other. They learned to understand when it was invasive—at least, when they had any control over it.

Kurtis pondered over the rock, and when he lowered it he locked eyes with Gretchen in another hypnotic stare. She took the rock from his hand and showed him the onyx ring, still worn and still in her possession after all those years. In a strained and fumbling gesture she clasped his hand and let their heads drift closer. They arched their necks slowly and uncertainly as their lips reached forward like a flower blooming in the morning on an overcast day.

The approach of their kiss was agonizing and precarious but its result was sweet and invigorating. They felt all the standard nerve impulses and all the changes in heart rate and muscular tension through each other in unison. It excited them thoroughly and they were both disappointed that they had forgotten that feeling, so they kissed again and again. Gretchen licked Kurtis's lips and then forced her eyes onto his.

Satisfied, they laid back on the rocks with their heads butted together and stared intently at the brightening sky through the truss rods which ran overhead.

Kurtis woke up screaming. He was pretty sure he just had a dream where he was sodomized by a bulldog but that dream image washed away with the tide of conscious thought and the undiluted awareness of genuine pain in the here-and-now. His asshole really felt like it was on fire and he remembered that time he was sick for no reason as a kid. Shit was everywhere that time, but he didn't smell it now.

That woulda been goddamn embarrassing.

So why did it feel like he just shat out a broadsword? But that wasn't the only thing he felt while he howled like a pack of wolfmen on angel dust. He felt like his shoulders were torn up and like he was punched in the face by a fist made of hammers. What he mistook for hot sweat pouring down his face turned out to be blood: he flicked on the lamp by his bedstand and saw the bright gruesome stains all over his pillow. he recoiled in horror. He was fucking bleeding everywhere. His cock was throbbing—he whipped off his boxers and looked down. A bit of blood pumped out like the last toothpaste from the tube.

Oh fuck oh shit a thousand times what the fuck is happening to you.

His parents both tore into the room at the same time and froze at the sight of their mutilated son. Irene shakily covered her mouth and bumped into Jackson; he took her by the upper arm and squeezed it gently, “Is there someone else here?”

Kurtis looked at his father with stupefied anger, “I don't fucking know dad I just woke up like this!”

Irene raced to Kurtis and took his hand in both of hers, surveying his ruined bed with confused terror. She saw the stains on his crotch and was only more disturbed and mortified; naturally, she didn't look there again.

Jackson shifted. He was less battle-conscious, “What do you mean? You just woke up with a black eye, a huge cut on your face, fucked up arms, and ...Kurtis... you're f—...your dick's bleeding!”

Kurtis was balled up in pain before his mother even reached him. Jackson walked around checking the windows: all closed, locked from the inside. Nobody had come in through there. Jackson left the room and closed the door behind him, searching the house with an unregistered Colt revolver he kept in a special container with a bit of marijuana.

Shadows of familiar objects jutted out at him with unworldly violence and mirrors projected hidden threats at every corner. Doors were swung open with movie-star bravado as Jackson scanned his home, revolver cocked and gripped.

After half an hour of nerve shattering silence, Jackson was convinced that nobody was in the house; there was absolutely nothing unusual, out of place, or damaged. What, then, had goddamn happened to his son?

Next to Gretchen's bed was a furry black carpet that she was especially fond of. At the center of the carpet was a large black candle, and surrounding the carpet, forming an equilateral triangle, were three other candles; there were no other lights in the room except for the pale glow of the half-moon. She sat on her bed, gripping the mattress with locked arms and a deep slouch.

It had been nearly week since they'd seen each other; Kurtis was hospitalized and given a psychiatric evaluation since his parents had convinced themselves that—despite the lack of any implements or tools—he had mutilated himself and was probably seeking attention. Apart from his agonizingly melancholy outlook and his utter inability to explain his wounds he was able to get away from the evaluation without any diagnosis or any drug prescription.

Dr. W: Do you mind if I ask you to answer a few questions? They'll start to get fairly abstract.

Kurtis Rosae: Go ahead.

Dr. W: Do you remember what you were dreaming the night that you were...wounded?

KR: I think I was being chased by dogs...

Dr. W: What kind of dogs?

KR: Bulldog...German Shepherd...horse-humans.

Dr. W: Li—

KR: Not like Centaurs; they were humans with horse heads, sort of.

Dr. W: What do you think your purpose in life is?

KR: That...that's a switch. My purpose in life isn't really anything I've thought of. I don't think life has a purpose. Life is a consequence of reactions. Mine is just...part of many.

Dr. W: Part?

KR: Yeah, part.

Dr. W: Do you sometimes feel like more than one person?

KR: I usually feel like less...

The exchange went through a number of enigmatic moments where Kurtis almost lost his cool, where he almost confessed some things that would have earned anyone sterilization and perhaps a lobotomy and a cushioned room in the far corner of one of Ontario's remaining psychiatric hospitals.

When he saw Gretchen at school on Friday he suddenly felt a lot less crazy. That beautiful face was marred with a black eye, several other bruises coloured violet and pollen-like. A deep cut ran along her jawline.

He didn't feel as connected to her as usual. It was dreadful; he felt like he was missing a part of himself. Gretchen told him she was mugged, and when Kurtis told his story her lips tightened. They felt uncomfortable around each other all day, felt like they were torturing each other on sight. They would pass in the crowded hallways on opposite side with their heads turned down, Gretchen clutching her binders and texts like a teddy bear and Kurtis shuffling to class almost blindly. Teachers spoke like their mouths were full of cotton; everything was hazy like a shot from a bad soap opera. The crudely drawn cock on Kurtis's desk reminded him of the ridiculous and humiliating agony of that improbable night. Self-mutilation? No fucking way.

Gretchen saw everything in slow motion. Her eyes were blurry like she was perpetually sleeping. Other girls passed notes, giggled and blew bubble gum. The smell of cigarette smoke nauseated her.

During a science lab Kurtis excused himself silently and threw up after an unexpected bout with nausea. Myriad eyes poured over him, and whispers and noise burned both their ears.

The final bell rang for the day, and even that was completely incapable of providing them with any feeling of relief. Kurtis stared into his warped locker with a slacked jaw, mechanically slipping binders, textbooks, and assignments into his briefcase. The briefcase was his father's idea and, in truth, it did make him feel pretty masculine. It counterbalanced strange extremes of femininity that sometimes overwhelmed him. With his bag full he stopped cold. Paralyzed. The halls were empty, a bare draft whispering through like the lonely streets of an abandoned frontier town. Ghosts like whispers drifted about behind him: the residual psychic energy of bodies teeming with hormones, stress, and chaotic nerve impulses. He felt mentalities and thoughts that he'd never experienced before, like he was jumping into the heads of spectres aeons old, except they weren't old. They were childish and hostile, self-centred; like new humans who'd not developed along the lines of karma whose spiritual energy would restrict them in future manifestations. Grasshoppers, spider mites, snakes, boars, rats. Those residues felt like psychic filth. It angered him to the point of revulsion but still he felt paralyzed. Impotent. Above all: tired.

A feeling of explosive warmth calmed him and relieved his exhaustion, dissipated—perhaps absorbed—all his tension. A tiny, milky white hand was on his shoulder.

“What are you doing tonight?”

Kurtis closed his briefcase, “I'm going to your house.”

Gretchen's steps were tiptoes that felt like tidal waves drowning all those putrid animals in a wrathful deluge. Each step was a cataclysmic splash that sent all those whispers away.

Away into the flickering darkness of her bedroom with its sanguine walls perforated by a white chair rail. Gretchen mesmerized herself with the whiplash of the central flame and wondered whether or not her carpet catching fire would be comic or tragic in a truly dramatic way. Flames would engulf them and liberate them from the pangs of life; the house would be destroyed and maybe others would follow. The neighbourhood could be reduced to a charred waste. Dozens of homes, dozens of families bereft of material possessions. Lives that weren't ended mortally would end financially; poverty, famine, agony, suffering. For her it was an entirely sensual experience. How erotic the dance of flame and destruction could be!

Her bodies were scattered parts on the floor: she was fragmentary and everywhere. She was the candles, was her wardrobe, was Kurtis, was herself, was her bed, was the glowing television downstairs, was the naked Potentilla that made her feel like an exhibitionist when she changed and didn't feel like closing her window. Something about the past week wasn't right, like the magnetic poles of the earth had decided to switch roles in a game of “you wouldn't last a week in my shoes, bitch”. Maybe the polar entities were doing okay but she wasn't, and she assumed that Kurtis wasn't either.

Even when Kurtis sat next to her she felt like she was looking at herself through a pinhole camera, or a kaleidoscopic lens, or through the last moments of life. He didn't feel like the light at the end of the tunnel and he didn't sound like the choir of angels when he asked, “Where did you really get those bruises?”

Gretchen.

Gretchen.

Gretchen.

Gretchen.

Gretchen Fucking Waller the man asked you a question.

Her knees locked together with as much force as she could muster, like she was trying to force herself to implode like a star and suck away all the light in the solar system and continue in her unabated thirst for the raw energy of matter and galaxies. Like digesting food, her soul would break down all those compounds into usable components.

She didn't flinch when Kurtis took her gently by the chin and forced her to lock eyes with him, “Gretchen...you have the exact same bruises I do...and the cut on your jaw...it's uncanny.”

“It's nothing...” Gretchen protested, “Nothing but a coincidence.”

“It's scary.” Kurtis paused, thinking about the way he woke up drenched in his own blood and writhing in agony, “I need to know something.”

Without another word he placed his hands on Gretchen's shoulders and peeled off her sweater. Gretchen's entire body locked up with shock like a rabbit that had just snared itself in the dead of winter. It can't be happening again, that was madness. It was impossible. Not twice in one week, not from two completely different people. Shock and tingling and rattling like cages, oh so many cages in so many ancient prisons with so many tortured souls begging to be put out of their misery in any way possible. Burn me alive, impale me, shoot me in front of a squad, drown me, fuck my eye sockets and skewer my brain, I don't fucking care. So many things, so many ways, so much insanity. Not to keep happening, having to revel in my own destruction, not to have to watch myself through compound eyes and wonder why I feel like a fly on the wall, why I feel like a maggot eating my own rotting flesh left in a ditch to be forgotten, just another dead whore.

It broke then. The dam, the seal, the barrier, the last floodgate. Isengard was to be washed away in the wrath of unimpeachable Nature, who always found a way to break everything down into smaller parts and synthesize new and interesting compounds. The angels had fired off the last of their trumpet blasts like cannons laying siege to the profane earth. It was the last virus, or something like it. The strange mutation that would walk the earth and kill mankind in so many apocalyptic nightmare stories. It was a small voice inside both their heads, a fragile and confused utterance:

Dad, wha...

That utterance was the profane voice of betrayal and despair.

Kurtis instantly recoiled like he had just fired a rifle for the first time, collapsing onto Gretchen's floor and almost knocking over one of the candles. Another fist made of hammers, that! He saw Jesus on the Cross and Jeanne D'Arc on fire and pilgrims drowning and heathens being slaughtered and the remnants of war and blazing battlefields. He saw it all: all of mankind.

He saw the atrocious art of Daddy Waller, dearest Daddy Waller who took from his daughter what he couldn't find from his wife that night. He gagged and spat and rolled up onto his arm, putting his face directly into the flame of one of the perimeter candles. He swore and struck it, hearing it crash into the door of Gretchen's wardrobe and not giving a fuck whether or not it fizzled out or killed them both in a flaring and ghostly orange display. They were both hideous displays anyway, they were both tortured, defiled, and driven to the abysses wherein demons without name or age chased them through the nightmares of others.

Gretchen didn't move; only her tears moved. They did all the work and let her be. Kurtis stared at her, his own eyes full of that garish salty water. He stood up with a drunken swagger and pinkish cheeks, “This...happened before!” Kurtis yelled with astonishment.

Gretchen's sullen face turned upward, her eyes a shimmering wreck as they saw the truth in his face.

He pointed at her and shouted, “Two years ago! The exact same thing happened!” It wasn't an accusatory yell. He pointed the finger back at himself. “The exact same...”

He stopped talking because he felt Gretchen's mind again. They felt more than ever that they were one thing. Their senses shot back and forth between one another and they saw through each other's eyes in endless feedback, each burst getting shorter and shorter. Their heads swelled with migraine-like agony and they wondered if they were going to have a singular epileptic seizure. Kurtis stumbled toward Gretchen (maybe they both willed themselves to move together, they didn't really know) and they embraced and cried and let their mind-body sense bound back and forth in increasingly violent ricochets.

Within a minute they had both fainted in each other's arms, dreaming the same dream until the sun blasted insulting quantities of light through Gretchen's window the next morning, like that sinister army of angelic trumpeters heralding apocalypse under the guidance of mutated lamb. They dreamed they were in a castle on Mars, cradling each other's disembodied heads in their arms and surveying the universe from a central tower. Although the Gretchen repeatedly dream-thought Arrakis, the principle was the same: everything around them was barren and arid.

Part 2 of 2.

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