Unseaming (24 page)

The sound came from the other side. She needed it shut.

It had no handle.

The only way to close it, she reasoned, was to grip its edge, jerk it toward her, pull her fingers free before they were caught in the jamb. She imagined herself with her fingertips caught and crushed and the door sealed, trying to free herself in this unearthly place. She wished she hadn’t.

I’m sorry for your loss. My condolences.

She couldn’t leave it open.

She braced herself, slid her fingers along the door with the barest of contacts until they passed through the crack. The corner of the doorframe brushed her knuckles. She curled her fingers through the gap, creeping as slowly as she could manage.

She couldn’t do it as is: she needed more room. She had no choice but to ease the door open wider, give herself clearance.

The noise grew louder.

She didn’t recognize what was happening, not at first. As she secured her grip, the tiny hairs on the back of her right hand pricked as if tweaked by a feeble breeze. The pressure became steady, the settling of a gossamer weight. It felt like long and emaciated fingers touching her as gingerly as she had touched the door.

She opened her mouth in a gasp that made no sound at all.

Fingertips dug down on the back of her hand.

She jerked the door toward her and pulled her fingers free..

The door sealed. The sound stopped.

She didn’t open her eyes until, in her hasty retreat, her heels hooked the back of the bookshelf box and she tumbled hard to the floor.

In the bedroom, Cecilia started to cry. So did she.

* * *

Lamont, between construction jobs, at least could mind the baby while she went to work. Thank goodness. At some level she still had trouble gifting him with her full trust; but this morning, as always, he acted more than willing to do his part, tolerated the early morning feeding, tolerated being up with Cecilia in the hours before dawn.

The noise really was gone.

Tarissa’s shift at the 24-hour big box hell store started at 7 a.m. Despite being even more shortchanged on sleep than usual, she hummed to herself, tuneless, joyous, a noise to cherish. And every movement suggested a smile. Lamont even noticed. He laughed and shook his head. “What’s with you this morning?” After a kiss, “Whatever it is, I like it.”

She just shrugged.

Then she saw herself in the mirror, under the bright bathroom light.

She almost called to Lamont. But they’d just spent an hour together tending to Cecilia and he’d said nothing.

She didn’t know what was wrong, what it meant, but she couldn’t afford to call in sick. They needed every penny.

She finished putting on her uniform, rode the bus to work. Few of the other passengers spared her a second glance, though the one that did, an elderly woman bundled in half a dozen layers despite the heat, stared a moment, eyes almost as wide as Tarissa’s had been in that years-ago photograph. When Tarissa’s eyes met hers she swiftly looked away.

Her boss frowned at her when she reached the time clock to swipe her badge, but that had to do with her timing, right on the dot instead of the preferred ten minutes early.

At the cash register she might have been a ghost, or, more apt, a machine spouting prices and phrases such as “Cash, check or credit?” and “Have a blessed day.” Some shoppers huffed their impatience when the lines grew long, but paid Tarissa the person no mind at all.

She passed the time during the lulls studying the marks on her hand where the being behind the door had touched her. An ignorant person might have mistaken those splotches for vitiligo. There were plenty of ignorant people in the world.

“Oh my God, honey. What happened to you?”

The woman’s name was Hildred, a store regular. She dressed in frumpy blouses, often flecked with paint, or with food, or both, sweet as could be with no sense at all as to when it was appropriate to talk or not talk, especially in a crowded checkout lane during the rush hours, never sparing any details of her diabetes or her bone spurs or her many other ailments. Yet she seemed to genuinely care about the people she repeatedly struck up conversations with, whether they were receptive or not.

Now Hildred stared at her, gape-jawed.

Others in line, even the other cashiers, were starting to look.

“I woke up this morning,” Tarissa stammered. “And it was just…I feel fine, but…” She flailed for something to say to diffuse the situation. “I’m going to see a doctor. Soon as I can. But I feel fine. Really.”

“Oh, honey,” Hildred said, and with just a little hesitation, trepidation, she put a comforting hand on Tarissa’s wrist. “I’m so sorry. My condolences.”

Tarissa’s gaze focused somewhere far away.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s okay.”

The past eludes me—yet I know the future with the clarity of vivid memory. A grand contradiction in my Father’s design, that remains to me a mystery…

* * *

A day will come when the sun’s pale yellow stare starts to fill with the taint of blood.

Among the confused and tremulous hordes of mankind, amidst the endless processions of grand towers forged from metal stolen from the moon, I will walk. One knowing face, one unique being traversing the rivers of humanity that flood this world.

Unknown now: unknown when it begins. But I shall not remain unnoticed. When the time comes, I will not hide what I am.

My life, a long cycle of waiting, to make the offer I must make.

At first my words will be mere rumor, circulating among the residents of the underdepths. My message will find its way among the filthy creatures dwelling in the sewer networks deep beneath our urban blight; creatures whose only light comes from the poisons that make their eyes phosphorescent. Whispers will find the ears of the affluent and mad who seal themselves away in underworld vaults, hording treasures from every age—hiding from some real or imagined cataclysm, yet striving to hold control of the lands above.

I will wait. Through one path or another, bubbling up through the earth, my message will emerge into day’s dimming light.

Those who seek me shall find me. My misshapen face—for by human eyes it is so perceived—printed in two dimensions, projected in three, shall form the center of every conversation: rotating slowly atop the great round tables where corporate councils meet, regarded in puzzlement and awe; placed on private altars and worshiped; precious oil burned, rare beasts slaughtered, even—most horrible of all—children slain to gain my favor.

Against a growing chaos, I will speak the same words, over and over, the network of technology that wraps the world in its web providing my forum. My offer, carried as pulses of light, beamed to the void and back again:

“This world is dying. Very little time remains. Soon all you’ve become, all you have ever dreamed of becoming, will be scoured away.

“But humanity need not perish. He who first brought you into being didn’t intend for you to die with this world. Give me your fealty, ask in humility and I, as His messenger, will strive to grant your kind a second life.”

Beneath the flickering light of my burning effigy, religious despots will thunder ridicule, and their followers will chant murder in the streets. Through communication channels wired straight into the heads of their desperate listeners, the rationalists and analysts will call me mad: an exploiter, a charlatan, a parasite. Yet many more, hearing whispers from shadows of memories too ancient to be understood, will know my creed for Truth.

Knowing this, despite my visions of the imminent future, my heart will fill with hope—a human sentiment, surely, gained from so many eons among them.

Is it possible, with so much of the past behind me, that I will have forgotten the hideous service mankind grants its saviors?

The sensations, so vivid: the terrors, so real. I feel them now as I will then: Rough hands roust me from a dreamless sleep, seize my wrists in crushing grips, tear at the folds of my gown; fingers twine in my tangled locks, drag me out into a moonless night. My scalp screams as the follicles tear out—black fluid covers my eyes, clogs my vision. My assailants fill my ears with angry babble; their fingernails strip my gown away, strip skin from my back, belly, breasts…

Outside this frail vessel that carries my soul, a flurry of sensations: of being bound, held high in the air, bleeding; a crowd’s chorus of jeers; traveling swift in a craft along an ill-made path. Descending: a shower of blows, a rough grope that ends in a cry of disgust. Ascending.

Inside this vessel, a mounting shrill of fear—knowing what I will see when my vision clears.

When my blood-crusted eyes can finally open, a terrifying vista below: the twisting neon spires of the tallest towers of man glow ethereally in the darkness, seen from the rooftop of the tallest tower of all. Painfully harsh grips keep me doubled-over, force me to my knees, dangle me head-first over the edge….

But when I twist my neck, I glimpse the stars. This night, their clusters shine brighter than any stellar panorama I will ever see with these eyes. I gaze heavenward, and know my silent appeal is useless.

Beneath my terror, a sorrow blooms. Whether mankind itself chooses its final course, or a mad, misguided few, it will not be mine to know. I make no protest at their mishandling: I leave their angry accusations, their hysterical demands, their threats of violation unanswered.

The blade of light pierces me between the breasts—thrusts upward, parting the walls of my belly. My only sound—a gasp—as my body cavities empty into the abyss; a black, viscous flow baptizes the darkness beneath me.

Those who clutch this emptied vessel—who see what flows from my gutted corpse—will know then that I was never human. Even as they let my body fall, they will know.

All will feel my passing from the flesh.

My sorrows, an affectation from my time among humans, left behind with the shell I once wore. Liberated, I shall grieve no more. I—a tiny mote of nothingness, a vast discorporeal consciousness enveloping the world—will dance through the torrents of wind and weather; swim in the gulfs between atoms…and wait.

The energies that bound me to my body, loosed in a massive burst, detected by the instruments of my destroyers, defying analysis. Their learned ones will flounder for explanations—a reverse in polarity? A warning from God, a message from the Spirit Mother? A formation of a white hole; the opening of a wormhole?

A beacon call.

Their radiologists will marvel, their astronomers will speculate at a grand disturbance in the cosmos, a surge in background cosmic rays. They’ll mutter in alarm at a tremendous dark mass discovered by their forests of radio telescopes, appearing spontaneously at the galaxy’s edge, generated from nothing, emerging from nowhere. A drifting mass of dark matter—a dark nebula, perhaps—spilled through a rift in the fabric of space?