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There’s something about.
Something about what Swansea said that keeps replaying through his head amongst visions – amongst visions.
Shooting himself in the brain, it sent him back, it sent him back to pre-crash and the living quarters not doused in that sickening sunset-glazed screen, but he was still warped and shifted and ill.
The blunt metal of the gun in his mouth, and he placed it there, the homoeroticism of it all, the gun forcing his jaw open and he felt it blast through the flesh inside his body and was conscious for a moment, for long enough to feel the slippery goop of his own brain matter slither down the back of his neck and now he was in the living room.
In the living room, except it was not, it was not doused with the horrible orange of that sunset.
It felt like vomit, his brain sliding under his shirt and over his spine.
And Curly was whole.
The blast rang in his ears.
And he did not know what to do at all for a moment. He had wanted and expected relief in his suicide, but now it was more of the same metal walls suffocating him, the lack of an outside window – where the fuck were they? Where the fuck was the ship?
I want to see outside. I want to get out of here, he needed to-
But he lay back instead on a bed that in his brain was soaked with blood but clean now, clean. They didn’t even get their own living quarters, the appeal of their own living quarters.
----
At night, he snuck into Curly’s bedroom. When he was resting but not quite asleep, he kept the door open.
He got a lock, of course – except.
Except he shouldn’t think that way, not anymore; he had taken responsibility, so maybe this was his prize. His amendment. But nothing had really changed. He was still finished when they returned home. Anya was still pregnant.
“Jimmy?” Curly sat up in his bed, where he had been reading a magazine, upon his entrance through the sliding door. He was sick of the doors, of the suffocating passageways, of it all.
He closed it behind him, locking himself in a cage again.
Walked up to Curly until he was right in front of him and then on top of him, on top of his body where it lay on the sheets, sitting in his lap, and it was sickening how he barely flinched, how this procedure was familiar to them, at least had been familiar years ago.
All Curly did was drop his magazine to the side and rest his hands up on Jimmy’s shoulders instead. Understandable, he must have been coming in too aggressively; he must have appeared crazed.
“You look like you need a Psych Evaluation,” Curly said in a tone teetering on joking and concerned.
“I had a vision, of sorts, you know. Or maybe it was the truth, and God has granted me another chance, but in it I butchered you. I fed you your own flesh and watched you choke on it – your sawed leg, and the envy and hatred inside me is all-consuming. But I saved you, I saved you in the end, so maybe you should be grateful.” He was babbling words, barely understandable and he knew.
Now he knew what it was like to be the homeless man, the tattered woman mumbling prayers and visions under her breath he had watched and seen on the streets of earth, the unintelligible mad man, except he couldn’t remember home anymore, not really, and the memories he held felt almost implanted as well.
Curly was not pushing him away, so he leaned in even closer, close enough that his breath would warm his ear and he spoke.
“And notice that I didn’t eat it myself, I didn’t eat your leg, I gave it back to you in my generosity – maybe because I’m such a putrid thing that I wouldn’t deserve it. I probably understood that then. I still understand that now.”
He reached up to grab Curly’s wrists, where his hands were holding his shoulders, and instead dragged them towards his neck.
“I’ll do it again. I can feel it simmering within me. I’m not truly redeemed or in control.”
“What the fuck are you talking about, Jimmy.” Curly watched him with searching eyes, brows furrowed, lip downturned. Jimmy could see he was itching to call Anya over, have him assessed, medicated, something, something Captain-ly and responsible to do in this scenario –
But the walls the walls and the bodies laughed at him and he was being watched everywhere and there was no redemption now and there never would be and he had wanted to consume his flesh so badly.
“If you don’t kill me now, I am going to crash this fucking ship and everyone except for you will die, except, except you will remain hardly alive as well.”
He wrapped his hands around Curly’s hands now on his throat and made to stare into his eyes with conviction, but he couldn’t do it, couldn’t look into his eyes; he stared instead past his head at the wall, and the eyes of Polle met his, whispering to him from the poster.
“You’re going to have to take a deep breath and relax for a moment because right now I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I think you’re having a psychiatric episode of some sort, and it will pass. I’ve seen this before – it happens on long voyages. But it will pass.”
Curly spoke while dropping his hands slack down from his neck and Jimmy grit his teeth and brought his hand up – it was trembling – and hit him with a right hook to the face.
Briefly stunned Curly fell back onto his bed while grunting out in surprise and pain and Jimmy sat further over him, looming above him, and now brought his hands to Curly’s neck, applying slight pressure.
“See this? See what I’m fucking capable of. I will kill you. I will kill you if you don’t put me down like a sick dog.”
Jimmy brought his face down so that it was directly over Curly’s, their noses brushing.
“I’ll fucking do it. I’ll fucking do it, and I’ll have no regrets. I’ve sawed through your skin. You’ve choked with my fingers down your throat.”
The calm, the calm on Curly’s face was pissing him off, it was making his fucking blood boil, and he had been calm before too – hadn’t he? He had been calm even when his skin was incinerated and he was an idea of what a man should look like.
“Calm down, that’s an order.” He watched him now, cold and resigned, but his arms stayed by his sides even as Jimmy tightened his grip.
And he wouldn’t be calm, he wouldn’t, he still had the sensation of dying at his finger tips, and he was looking to return, there was nothing here for him in this vessel before the crash, they were steering straight into hell, the endless venture, and he would do it all again, he would do it all again if he were to be released from this room now.
“My life is fucking over, Curly. It’s over, it always has been, it never really began. There’s something terrible inside me, something festering in my flesh, and it needs to be exterminated.”
He was grinding his teeth so hard that some part of his gums had started bleeding, because now as he spoke small droplets of blood dripped down onto Curly’s face and stained it like a constellation of stars.
Then their bodies were flipped over and now he was rolling down, off the bed and hitting the floor, the oxygen knocked out of his lungs with Curly kneeling on top of him, ass on his stomach and feet being used to hold down his legs so that he couldn’t bring them up and his hands clutching around Jimmys neck and he felt briefly, deeply relieved.
“Okay. Is this what you want, then?” Curly asked as he started applying pressure to the delicate structure of Jimmy’s neck and he nodded frantically. Salvation within sight, he could taste it on his lips; this was the only person who could kill him in a way that would leave him redeemed.
“Please.” He whispered as the calloused hands squeezed tighter, cutting off his airflow completely, and it was now, it was now that the deep panic consumed him in a way that he had been calm while shooting himself in the head, while in control, because now Curly decided if he was going to die or not.
And the nausea overtook him, the resentment, the anger, his hands shot up and he clawed with his fingers on the muscular forearms that held him down until he felt blood welling up, but his head was thrumming, brain buzzing behind his eyelids, almost a state of euphoria, but he still wasn’t breathing until-
The hands relented their grip, and he inhaled so deeply that he choked on the air and started hyperventilating, attempting to get a full breath.
No sound above him that he could make out through the blood rushing in his ears, but the sensation of a hand holding his came through, and eventually, eventually, he started to breathe again.
“Are you done now? Can we speak normally?” Curly’s voice talking above him, he was kneeling above him now, no longer pressing down on his body, and somehow the suffocation had felt better.
There was a discomfort and wetness on the bottom half of his body, and he realised with disconnect, deep disconnect from reality, that he had pissed himself in fear of dying, or as a response to the suffocation, something, one of those things-
Why was the humiliation so intense? These people were like empty vessels to him. He felt like the only person who had ever been alive.
“No.” He cried now, his entire body trembling. Rolling around onto his left and right side in a fit of mania. He needed to find the gun himself, except, except Anya had hidden it and although he now knew the location, he did not remember the fucking code and he would have to venture down into the cockpit to retrieve it and it would be done for if he stepped in there.
Above him, he heard Curly shifting.
“I’m going to call over Anya.” He spoke,
The ultrasound, the mutated corpse of a child –
“No. No. Fuck, no. Don’t leave.” He grasped onto Curly’s wrist with one hand, held his shirt with the other.
“Don’t fucking leave me.” He spoke while sobbing now, tear tracks staining his flesh, cleansing him. Maybe this is how he would be cleansed.
“Okay.” Curly reassured as he interlaced his fingers with the hand that had been holding his wrist and brought it down to the floor beside Jimmy’s head.
His other hand he used to lift Jimmy’s back up slightly, so that they were in a sort of awkward embrace now. He placed his head onto Curly’s shoulder and sobbed. Out of control.
When he regained his composure, some of it, the sweat and the tears and the snot and the blood still dripped down his face, but when he could speak again he turned and he whispered into Curly’s ear.
“Swansea told me something, something before he died. I can’t get it out of my head. The idea of it.”
Curly’s hand tightened on his back as he spoke.
“I think, I think the best fucking days of my life were after the crash.”