Descent

It starts with just a single moment, not unlike any other. It starts with his head deep underwater, thinking of the day he went to see the great Roman baths in England. His hands run along the smooth edges of the tub the way they ran along the smooth, stone walls. He remembers the murky water of the spring, the bubbles trembling upwards like the breath of spirits imprisoned in the water. He can imagine them chained far below, mouths wide and bellowing, eyes dark and soulless. Here it is his own breath that escapes the corners of his lips and breaks through on the filmy surface. Here he can feel his heartbeat, crystallized in the warmth and ringing like wind chimes in his ears. There he felt it ragged in the swollen air, the bang of a war drum that persisted on long after everyone on the battlefield was dead. Here he follows the air up and sucks in thick steam curling like dragon smoke around him. It tastes like suffocation.

He opens his eyes, lashes dripping the glue that had sewn them shut, and sees them reflected back at him in the mirror, bulging and red and lined with memories. The mirror is clear despite the condensation in the room and refuses to show him anything but himself, pale and naked. It shows him the artistic blooms that cover his arms, the grace in their fat lines that merge, split, and splice. The darkness runs from them, sliding down his skin to spoil the rainbow water. He spots in the smaller strokes purple shamrocks, cannas, and periwinkle, and in the larger ones, hibiscus, orchids, and lilies. Underneath that, he can just make out the ragged thorns and stems that march through them like angry claw marks. They feel like scars from another age. He spreads his arms out to the sides to drip onto the floor, raining blue and red, green and black, on the tiles.

He can hear everything in this ceramic prison, from the slow drops plopping from the faucet into the bath to the gurgle of the pipes beneath. And even beyond that he can hear the uneven tones of his mother’s voice in the hall and the sharp, accusing ting of the gaudy bells she’d hung outside on the porch. He closes his eyes to hear all these things form a symphony circling his head like an invisible halo, but instead he hears someone else’s words billowing through the eaves, seeming to come up from the floor, deep underground, and float lazily up until they bounce lightly off the ceiling.

There it was the fourth of July and his head ached with the boom of fireworks overhead. The remnants of a fiery beauty hung as copper glitter in the brimming sky and the light of them flashed off the teeth of a blond boy as he laughed.

“Marlin, look!” The boy exclaimed as a pink vision blossoms. The Marlin then didn’t know that that was the last time the blond boy would ever speak to him.

The Marlin here, the Marlin now, takes a breath through the sudden stifling heat that threatens the contents of his stomach. Owen. His lips shape the name but he cannot bring himself to let it ripple in the air of his prison. The blond boy now only looks at him furtively in passing, his words for only the pretty birds that parade themselves around him, squawking at one another with little regard for the shadows that slip by around them. He sees one of these shadows, coming into sharp focus in the harsh light, her form twisting and bending until features appear. She is pale, but dark, so dark that it is hard to look at her; his eyes get lost in the black. Her hair is crinkled, her clothes worn, her body torn apart from the inside out. Her eyes are the ones he saw in the spirits imprisoned in the baths. Her ghost does not speak to him, but he sees the hopelessness in her face, the plea in the press of her hands in the cloth of her skirt. Unbidden, the image of her is transported to stand still beside the blond boy. The contrast is shocking and Marlin’s lips pull down to dig into the skin of his cheeks. He bats the image away quickly, feeling betrayed by his own mind.

The shadow girl, her name was Alexa. The name seems stretched for so small a girl. He remembers holding her awkwardly in the forest behind her house, her small frame wrenching back and forth from the force of her sobs. Her words strangled him as they escaped, talking of invincible wounds and grotesque kisses, like those of steel on skin. The abuse she’d suffered at the hands of a mechanical man, tapping into her well of youth. The language she spoke felt foreign and ugly, crackling like scrunched paper. It drove knives into his skull, and soon after, into his flesh. But that was a long time ago. Now, Alexa could not even spare him a ghostly glance in the hallways. He knows that she feels she is safe from the truth of her condition as long as her eyes do not meet his.

Marlin opens his eyes to the soft knock of his little sister at the door. “Marlin! You’ve been in there for ages!” She shouts and he covers his ears against the harsh noise.

Without Owen and Alexa, he walks the corridors pressed against the tired lockers, drifting alone through the days, watching Owen from a distance with his new friends and every now and then glimpsing a flash of white and black, like an old movie, and he knows Alexa is there. He vaguely recalls the way she looked at her funeral, paler than usual, the dark crosses glittering on her arms with a sinister light. But when he sees her in the empty classrooms at school, she is how she had always looked. He wonders what he could have done to please her, and what would have happened if they’d never met at all. Would he still be sitting here in the bath with ink stains on his arms and her phantom in his head?

His little sister is still wailing away at the door, scolding him for staying in here so long. He feels his fingers turn to rubber, the cold beginning to seep in through the water and into his bones. He shivers as the steam dissipates and the bath water stills and clings like a second skin. He feels weak and salt-water rivers slide involuntarily off his chin to plink onto the pool resting on his lap. His body trembles and flops as though boneless against the sloping sides of the tub and he can feel something is wrong, dreadfully wrong, with him.

By now his sister senses some threat and calls a little more urgently. Marlin’s arms collapse into himself and he frantically clutches them to his chest, but he does not cry out for help. Instead he whispers to himself silently as tears cascade down his cheeks. The mirror shows him soaked in ink from head to toe, the bath overflowing with the darkness. He feels it sink through his tissue, the muscle and the fat, and coat his bones in slimy paint. It feels like hell and his arms have gone numb, losing all feeling, if there was ever much there to begin with. His heart felt like it was wringing itself dry, like one of the towels his mother squeezed out on the grass and then hung up on the clothesline. His sister was pounding on the door now, screaming for help, and he hears his mother’s pattering feet.

Alexa’s hand is now on his shoulder, looking at him through starless orbs, her mouth a thin crease in solid marble. He hears her voice in his head as he stares back, almost singing to him.

“Don’t cry or the pain will be worse, Marlin,” She murmurs. He remembers these words from a long time ago and they jab through his throat, cutting off his breath. “Remember you have nothing left to lose.”

But that’s not true! He wants to yell at her, thinking of his little sister in colourful dresses wearing the crystal necklace he’d bought for her birthday. Alexa’s face held no expression; instead she leans forward, inches from him, and flashes the tanned face of a blond boy behind his eyes.

“He has left you alone. I am gone. You have nothing.” She says smoothly as his voice hitches in quivering whimpers. His mother has taken something firm and heavy to the door and he hears the crack as it hits the wood. It’s probably his baseball bat, the one he’s never used. Alexa shoves another image at him and then another. He sees himself as a child, crouching before a fire as a man smiles wickedly at him, his mother sitting beside him, trapped in his too-tight embrace. But he’s left us! He protests uselessly. He sees a teacher praising him before a classroom of growling wolves, snapping their jaws as she pins his work up on the board. The images come faster, picking up speed; being kicked into a closet that locks with a click and encloses him in the dark, talking to Owen while he tries to restrain the disgusted curl of his lip, pleading for Alexa’s parents to forgive him for not being there for her.

He tries to imagine how she felt, lying in her own bath of blotchy water, staring at the ceiling with her heart full of lead as the life left her eyes. Was she scared, as he is now? Did she regret anything? Did she wonder if anyone would miss her? He feels her cold lips press against his cheek as if in answer.

His vision is becoming smeared, blurring at the corners and spreading out to the sides until he can see nothing more than the vague shape of himself in the mirror. He feels his body shutting down, losing the will to go on. Alexa is gone now and he sees instead Owen, his eyes crinkling into a smile.

“It’s better this way.”

His mother bursts through the door and chokes when she sees him, arms crossed and holding onto his shoulders, inky blood spilling down his chest into the already saturated water. Shock keeps his little sister at the door, gripping the frame as though she could secure it as a lifeline for him. His mother races towards him, grabbing all the towels she can find and ripping his arms from his chest to wrap them in fluffy cotton. She’s talking but he can’t hear her, too focused on the ice that’s infiltrated his body and wondering if he is going to survive. He lets his mother cradle his head and brush back the sticky hair from his clammy forehead.

“Please don’t leave me, don’t leave me, baby,” She mumbles against his ear, but he barely registers the sound. His sister still stands in silence, watching her mother hug her older brother as his life buckles under the throes of death. It’s better this way.