Semblance of Eden 3 ~ Blasphemy

I’m not even sure how all of this began. It’s as though… for as long as I can remember it just was. It’s not lust. Because lust is only one thread of what it really is. He is, somehow, all parts of me… Everything I am, he’s already cornered the market on. Everything I want to be, everything I fear and abhor and denounce and loathe. Everything I desire, I have ever desired.

That’s what he is.

Can’t all be like him, thank God. Can’t all enjoy suffering at the whims of the one man we’d die for just one kind word from. But… he’s the drug habit you keep insisting you can shake. Wherever I am, I’m not alone anymore.

It’s really more trouble than it’s worth sometimes.

And I don’t even know why, but I’m standing at the bar in the lobby on the first floor of my hotel. It’s something as dreary as habit that’s lifting my voice to order whiskey, no ice, clean glass please… Because that’s the taste of this city. The taste that reminds me I’m home and I’m alive, still, somehow, even though I’ve already died a hundred times over, and my bones were buried long ago beneath sand and wind and sand…

But there’s something else, too. Something that doesn’t taste but that lingers like the sting of copper – a coin or a bit of wire - under my tongue. And it’s what I was really after. The faint static charge that only he has, that carries in his voice, and in his fingertips. And in his will when he wraps me in it. And that is with me now, hardly even faded. I don’t need the liquor to help me sleep as long as I have that. Close my eyes just right, and it could be like falling into his arms.

It’s not the way I should be thinking, I know that. Even so fresh from his presence – proximity that confirmed all those suspicions fluttering uneasily in my gut, shaped by a drive through the desert with nothing but dust and sun and bones and no perspective at all – I can’t help but think it’s somehow wrong. For a man like that, for a woman like me… it all seems so unnatural, almost blasphemous.

And in my head, I hear a dead man’s laughter. Hear a dead man chiding me for using such superstitious terms, in a voice ominous and empty like the grave.

Blasphemy, he tells me, is a hollow expression. Any meaning it once had was lost a long time ago, like footprints after a sand storm. For words like that to apply, he says with a thin lifeless laugh, something would still have to be sacred.

We don’t need religion; we just need a miracle.

I don’t know if those words, spoken to me long ago in a room cooled by machinery, are truth, or just some monstrous approximation of fact, gutted like the frame of a car. But I will accept them without question for now. It’s not as though that’s all I have to think about in a spare moment…

The empty glass on the bar is refilled before I can wave the bartender away. I’ll be paying for it anyway, so I reach for it right-handed, and instantly I’m remembering the events of the street with a new kind of clarity as my dislocated shoulder begins to throb all over again. I should have been able to hide my wince better than I do – never know who’s watching after all.

I lift the glass anyway, and toss it back in a fit of silly defiance. I could justify it if I told myself that movement is probably the best thing for an injury like that, but I don’t.

Again, that voice in my head, choked with dust. He’s telling me now to keep my wits about me. He’s telling me that I have a purpose and that’s all anyone can hope for in this world.

These are the words of the man who made me what I am. The man who saved my life and taught me how to kill. But they are also the words of a dead man, and I don’t have to listen to them, I don’t. It’s made me laugh before and it almost makes me laugh again now, when I think that this is the closet thing to ideology I’ve ever had, the closest thing to faith.

If I were drunker or stupider, I might say that I have something more important than that now, and again that word without meaning – blasphemy – springs to my mind. I can brush it away now, like a bit of dust from the hem of my coat; I can leave it next to my empty glass on the bar instead of a tip.

My room is small, and nothing in it but a toothbrush and a change of clothes in the closet belong to me. It’s comforting in a way, returning to someplace so sterile and so familiar. Someplace that knows better than to ask questions of me. I lock the door firmly behind me, and my clothes fall in a breadcrumb trail across the room in my wake. Each bit of fabric, like erosion.

I stand, naked to the waist, before the little sliver of glass that passes for a mirror and try to cajole my shoulder back into place. My arm’ll be worthless in the morning if I leave it this way, but fifteen minutes pass, then twenty, and then I’m too angry to do any good anyway.

I curse at my reflection, because it refreshes me.

My eye patch fastens at the nape of my neck with half a dozen intricate buckles and straps, and I unwind them with the same efficiency as cleaning a gun. Some nights, this thing is just too damn heavy, and the cool night air stings the flesh around my Eye that has been too long out of the sun. And I know… it shouldn’t feel like anything, but a faint chill always slides down my spine the moment I know I’ve disappeared from the radar. That I’m free, even if it’s just for a few minutes. Talk about a devil on your shoulder…

I arrange the eye patch and my gun on the bedside table, well within reach. They look at home right there, almost like a still life, and I think fleetingly that they’re beautiful, and then that I know better than that. And even if I’m mad it’s no excuse.

Clean sheets and the cool side of the pillow can be fairly underrated pleasures. I pull my knees up and hug the edge of the blanket tight. Just like the girl I haven’t been in a long time, I think. When I close the Demon’s Eye, there’s a brief shuddering moment of awareness, the instant I know I’m fading back into focus like the haze breaking on a corrupted videotape. The instant I’m real again.

I wonder sometimes how much longer my luck is going to hold up. I made it across the desert. I’m here, and that’s a definite plus. On the other hand, I’ve lost my mind. And somebody out there’s probably after me for killing Victor by now. I’ll just… add him to the list, alongside all the other people who are after me for all the other things.

But it’s a comfort to know that I’ve done all this for a reason. And that… my reason is staying just a couple doors down.

I like to pretend, just before I sleep, that the air smells faintly of him.