57 :

I looked at him. His face, every last pore frozen forever, each hair static, in his sleep.

We had sat in silence for hours. There wasn’t anything to say. We’d run out of things to communicate. There was nothing I could tell him, nothing he could tell me. We were trying, in our loneliness, to bridge the gap between generations, between people, between souls, the type of gap that normally cannot be bridged even by flesh.

We needed each other, me and him. In some strange way. We were both lost. We both needed answers. And we both needed release.

“How long does he sleep?” I asked.

My voice didn’t echo in an empty room. I had no voice, nothing to project. But somehow the sound of it existed in our world, our detuned frequency of reality.

“Depends. Depends if he’s drunk or not. Which is often. Depends on if he gets woken up, which you don’t want. That puts him in a bad mood all day long. But er-“ he said, scratching his eye for an imaginary, psychological itch “- he’s normally always in a bad mood anyway, so you can’t really tell the difference.”

I placed my hand just over his neck. When he breathed, his Adam’s Apple, that strange thing that no-one really understands what it does exactly, brushed the skin of my fingers, if I had fingers.

I felt his skin enter me, the strange feeling of warmth, of penetration. I could feel the DNA of my murderer against me. And I knew that whatever he – it – was, the resemblance to me, the connection I felt to him, was not moral, or physical. He had once been human, like I. The difference was that he had made a choice, and I had not.

His DNA was an imitation of human, not human. His morals made him an animals in trousers. I could put him down like a dog. Dehumanising the victim. Becoming the thing I hate. That was my life. That was the only path I could take.

I was no longer me. The kind of penetration this gave me, deeper than the deepest sex, no longer trying to achieve a connection with someone, he became part of me. If I could wash that clean, if I could lose the memory.

“I wish I could forget.” He said. “If I could forget I was dead, I know what I would do.”

But he couldn’t. Every day he was here, every moment he was still trapped in this limbo, if there was only one thing he could do, he would be aware of being a slave. A corpse. A ghost of a time that could never be. Whilst time moved, he stood still.

“I’d choke that fucker to death.”

The air hung still. Heavy with the weight of a bomb.

I didn’t know where to put my eyes. Or what to do. Of course, if I forgot I was dead, I would know what to do. But how could I forget.

I missed sleep more than anything else. I missed being able to close my eyes, break from reality. If I could sleep, if I could eat, if I could feel, maybe I would be alive. Maybe I could fool myself into thinking I was alive.

“What do I do?” I asked.

A sleeping mans eyes twitched. His breathing deep and in shadows. His chest floating like the rise and fall of the tides.

“You kill the cunt. You kill him for me. For yourself. For her.”

My neck jerked, reactively. My eyes met his, those dark brown eyes, indistinguishable from the pupils, so dark they were.

“There’s always a girl. Besides, Samuel knows everybody. And everybody is waiting for you. ”

Samuel? He knows Samuel? My eyes focused, my brows furrowed in a moment of confusion. He read my expression like a scientist. Was I the last hope that stoof between this man, this thing, and man, ghost kind?

“Yeah sure. What do you think Samuel does all day? Hang around with all those losers in the tube station? Spend the rest of his life with disembodied ghost bums? Come the fuck on. If he can’t get out of this limbo, the least he can do is try to move to a better part of town.”

The fucker was trying to get a promotion. Maybe that’s how you got out, like the army or something, you got taken off the tour of duty, came back to the ‘real’ world like some shellshocked veteran with a grudge against reality. Maybe.

“Karen’s nice too. You wouldn’t want to leave her here if you can help it.”

Is there nothing he doesn’t know?

“I just don’t like hanging around there with them. I’ve got forever to do that.”

The sleeping figure coughed. Grunted. His eyes opened for a fraction of a second, lids dull focused right through me, mistaking the strange haze in front of him – me – for the lidded sleep of exhaustion. His neck fell back, his breathing deepened, and he was back again, dreaming. No doubt dreaming of chasing girls down dark alley’s until they admitted that they were hopelessly in love with him. Until death us do part. The bastard.

How come I hadn’t seen this guy before? There must be an answer..

So to set myself free, I had to be a murderer. But in doing that, I damned myself, yet released the souls of all his victims. What would Dante say? I’m sure he would damn me by the same principles.

I didn’t want this. I wanted to be normal. Usual. Like everyone else. The same usual worries. The same usual crap. Worrying about trains. About what to have for dinner. About if I programmed the video to record that thing on BBC2 when I went out for a drink. That’s the kind of worries I wanted. Have I got the right shirt for work? Is the train running on time? The usual worries. Love. Food. Television.

I didn’t want to have to think about if I was a murderer, I didn’t want have to debate the nature of life, death, God and the Devil. I just wanted my worries to be small ones.

“You have to kill him. Whilst you still have the chance.” Paul said.

My hands closed around his neck. My hands went through his neck. Just like I expected. It never got any easier. As if I were walking through water, wading through syrup, trapped in ice as it slowly thickens. Yet, if I believed as the cannibals do, by doing this I would somehow be absorbing his qualities – maybe I too would slowly be taking my first steps towards becoming like him. I could feel his blood, his bone, his sinew, the coldness of the hair, the warmth of remorseless flesh run through me, some kind of quickening of the pulse, the spirit, like a weird, fucked up, telepathic orgasm.

Paul snorted. “Fucking typical” he said, shaking his head. “Just like the rest.”.

The Rest? How many others were there like me? Was I the fourth? The twentyfourth? Which one? The last one?

“I was hoping you’d be different,” he said. “I was hoping you could do it.”

God knows. If there was a God, and she’d probably lost count by now. I knew what I had to do, was it something I could do?

The eternal question. Can we do the things we need to do when we need to do them? Can we accept the challenges that face us? Do we succeed? Or do we fail? Everyone fails in the end. On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everything falls to zero. Everybody loses in the end.

Life is not if we fail. It’s how.

Life is not how we live. It’s how we die.