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Nothing was wrong with him, right?
He knew he was in control.
Stop it.
Stop the incessant wails of irrationalization.
Please
Stop.
Don’t.
Not another day of this pain.
“Hey, Link…” Awkward silence filled the empty air. A familiar concoction of substances.
Shivering, lost miles too far. Wrapped in a gray blanket. Was it blue? It felt black, but he smelled flames. Always flames when he conversed. Always burning.
A new plastic bottle, filled with water. And dissolved medication. Think I’m a fool. Sure, I am. But I ain’t no bedeviled soul. Right? God.
Please someone just assure me.
“You should consume something, buddy,” Forced comfort. Laced with angst and delicacy. Damn his derailing mind.
A gun reaches out to him. Close to his face. He licks his lips, envisioning the unforgiving metallic taste it must have with the barrel shoved down his throat.
A flash, a sequence of intermingling clicks.
It’s a hand. Rhett’s in fact. But who is Rhett?
Rhett is me, but what I was once before. I am not Link. I am his receding soul, nothing of the same sort.
Names flash across his mind, morphing to disfigured faces as their voices properly match the unlikeness. Dripping, Squeals, Shrieks, Giggles. But off.
Lily. Christy. Which was the wife? Shepherd was his son, and Lando his father. He knew of that.
But then his shuffling brain corrected. Christy as spouse and her blonde hair. Lily the daughter, yet however similar to the former. Shepherd was of Rhett, Lando of his own.
Oh what a waste to fret over names.
What a waste when there are hurricanes of other things to fret. Like why there are so many bottles with so much medication reassembled on the bottom. So many bottles. Clutter. Clut-ter. Klutter. Clitter Clatter. Footsteps. Approaching and leaving marks through his own well-earned dust.
Stop. I want it there. Then why worry of bottles? Then why have an opinion at all? Because we want to. A collective agreement. Finally. Peace. For a moment.
The bearer of the cut-outs in his dust arrives. Who is he? Or she?
Someone new, he smells. But Rhett is still there. He feels his eyes on him, slowly smoldering. He knows conversation will start, because a smolder only leads to flames.
Younger woman. Thirties, he assumes. She gives off lime green outlined with a headache red. He doesn’t turn. Listens to her soft voice.
Click.
It clicks for him to register. He thinks Stephanie. Stevie, as she would have insisted.
Why here? Indeed another anomaly, but aren’t there always?
Not those bottles. They show up every day. Not Rhett. He is a bottle. He is here every day. With his still-good heart as your medication.
But I hate the medication.
So you hate Rhett?
So it could be true, though I do not want to.
Meds have spoiled the water.
His heart has ruined Rhett?
Yes, no. Maybe.
Stop it.
Stevie, no it was Stephanie. Says a phrase. Rhett agrees. Doesn’t know what she said. Something touches him. Red. Red. REd. ReD. REd. red.
No.
No.
Rhett shouts. Something jumps. What is this?
His blanket wraps tighter by the action of his own skeletal hands. He’s alive by his own mental power. A dry chuckle escapes the voice in his soul. What power?
Who is to judge? Not himself, for sure. He never was himself. Born… when? Did I have a mother? Diane. No she was Rhett’s. Well, she obviously is not here, so why would it matter.
Name check, along with the faces, as usual. Murmurings echo from everywhere. His hollow head. But then Why so many thoughts?
Bottles.
Bottles.
Medication.
The t-thumping h-heartbeat.
Rhett.
Snap.
Bottles gone. Drank them all too fast for those suckers to react. Not all, but enough. Was that still another wail? God, I thought those would be gone.
This one was real. Escaping Rhett, too slow to leap from his chair as be watched Link swig four bottles in an instantaneous second, already downing number five. He giggled.
Stop. The wails. What… what is sound? Does he hear the voice that is not his own in his mind, but how can it have its own voice if it does not even make a single true sound; how does he conjure or hear such a thing without a sound? How does pure thought exist? How does he exist? Oh wait… he doesn’t. No longer. I hope.
Dizziness. Little white feathers float in his vision. Some hands encase his shuddering head, shaking from the overload of my incoherent brain. Damn it all, goodbye. Perhaps, though, Rhett deserves better… Rhett! No! I know now, I know! Please, God, Lord, whoever the hell is listening, no please I am not ready! But… Christy, and my boys, Lincoln, Lando, they need to learn from me! I cannot be the father I had! No I made a vow to my own damned self! And Lillian, my beautiful lily flower, no. The aisle we needed to walk down, arm and arm, as I kissed her sweet forehead a farewell, and as the angels would sing over her pure grace, just as it had happened to my beautiful bride of blonde. No! I need to do these things for those I now remember…
And Rhett, my everything. I course bloods we mixed together, “something awesome” they blended to be, but not to end like this! Not with me in my selfish waste lying near lifeless in his arms.
But the feathers grew more opaque and he left the world drowning in his finally cleared thoughts, his finally surfaced regrets, and a cascade of feathers to douse the sound from everyone else.
***
The funeral ensued, of course. Some loyal, past creators attended, but none knew of the man he had become, fortunately. Still he was the cheery, family man, with giggles to endure a hurricane. Never would he be the lost fool, scuttled into a house on the outskirts of Los Angeles where only few would ponder. Only few would know.
Those few were there, with an incredibly morose audacity.
Stevie, slumped in her black pantsuit, her blonde hair now cropped short over these years of watching her boss’s insanity take over Not enough time to manage and maintain her natural beauty the way she used to. Even now, at only her mid thirties, gray streaked lightly through the roots.
Christy, his beloved wife. Her hair now gray in a timely manner. But her frown was etched far too deep for her age. Tears will never cease to fall from her once ebullient face. A shuddering hand clasped over her face, barely visible through her dark, shadowing dress. A widow she was now. The widow of a man she could never know. She could never know who he really was, and she could not live that way, so she would simply spend her days lost with her hollowed daughter.
Lily, now in her twenties, still young, but yearning now for her own day to come, so she can be with her father. But of course she wouldn’t take her own as he did, not now that he had already done so. Her own blonde locks had naturally turned to the dark rings that her father’s had taken shape to in the same way. Her resemblance now absolutely uncanny.
Lincoln, the next name in line. The fourth. His great-grandfather was a cold man, never giving enough love. The second, an absent father, an absent-minded man, drowned in his alcohol. And the third, oh there was hope. There was something, but fate had to roll its dice, and once again skipped a turn. Unfinished and taken away by itself. The man now lay in a coffin, just yards away, unfairly so. Now it was he, barely a man of true adulthood, to try and rebuild the Charles legacy. To make the world forget the cruelty embedded in his family line.
Lando. The begged-for child. The baby. The one with least time with his father. The one with the richest thoughts, introspection pulsing through his brain at a pace dangerously close to his father’s. If only he knew, if anyone knew, that that is what killed him. So the young lad of sixteen would just slow down before it grew of danger. Before he tainted the line that his older brother worked so hard to weave.
And Rhett. Confused. Where is he to go now? His arm clasped tightly around Jessie’s shivering frame, cold, most likely, as he believed, from his own slowed heartbeat. No tears would fall. Closing his eyes he saw tattooed on his eyelids, his blood brother a coughing fit of convolution, taken by his own mind. He knew of his own mental dangers. He kept the perimeter tight, he didn’t dare expand to the capabilities he would only see in dreams. But his friend would explore those outlands. He would dare to die. But how? It was an incredibly impossible feat that he hated that he accomplished. To watch his dear brother wear away into a shadow of himself. As he just sat and watched him cry and laugh and scream, but with no visible purpose. With no avail to his dementia.