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Chapter 12
The rumbling of the room has gradually grown more and more violent. It can’t be known for sure, but you think you’re riding over a gravel road. The room shakes you unflatteringly: because you are nude, the tremors can be seen and felt as they course through your body. An aggressive bump results in a phallic slap to the thigh. I should go back to bed.
The twenty-something returns with some clothes. He gives you another pair of uncomfortably tight jeans along with a green T-shirt. You notice that the jeans are practically black, with a brown belt sewn into the waist. Your new T-shirt features writing on it. Written in bold white letters on the center of your shirt are the words, ‘I Was There.’ You don’t know what the message means, and decide to ignore it.
“Where is Fisher?” you coldly ask the twenty-something.
“I was told to wait for the doctor before I brought him in.”
“Are you not my doctor?”
“No, just the apprentice.”
You squint at the boy, digesting this new information. Do doctors have apprentices? The few bits of medical knowledge you have mention nothing on doctor apprentices. The occupation is an oddity. “Is that some kind of European position?”
“I don’t know,” he replies. “I could ask one of our historians for you.”
“What?”
The twenty-something tries to explain, but the whine of the door cuts him short. An old woman wearing a lab coat with matching stethoscope slowly shuffles forward. This woman is clearly the doctor. Slowly she walks over to the bed, while her apprentice brings her the stool he’d been sitting on earlier. The doctor motions for you to sit on the bed. You oblige your doctor, as the young assistant places the stool behind her. You both sit comfortably. The doctor looks you up and down and her wrinkles multiply as she smiles at you. You reciprocate as you stare at the old woman.
“Jon?” the old woman whispers.
“Yes?”
“Boil us some water, then bring me the broken boy.”
The young apprentice nods at his elder and quickly exits the room through the left. The two of you are now alone. You swallow some spit as you await her next move.
“Icarus. Ic-a-rus. That is a very old name: old, and strange—don’t you think?”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“Why not change it?”
“It’s not mine to change.”
The old woman smiles at your response and leans forward. As she examines you, the faint glow of aged beauty radiates from her. Your doctor was once very attractive. Time has peeled this away from her body, but not her spirit: what was once a long, pronounced neck is now angled and sagging in places. High cheek bones don’t hold up dimples like they once clearly did, but instead create an aristocratic air. Her braided brown hair comes with slits of gray so noticeable they must be intentional.
“Do you know what happened to you, Icarus?” the doctor asks.
“No, I don’t. Do you?”
“I’m not asking to see if you know, I’m asking because I don’t know,” she says. You cock an eyebrow at her reply. “All I know, is that three hours ago, your idiot friend carried you right in front of our caravan. We nearly ran the two of you over. When I first saw you, I thought you were already dead. You were drenched in blood—literally gallons of blood. Look.”
From her lab coat, the woman pulls out a pickle jar full of fresh crimson blood. Jesus. The idea that she went to the trouble of saving your blood seems deranged. You reach to the jar to get a better look, but the old woman slaps your hand.
“This is mine now, Icarus. Consider it compensation.”
“What is wrong with you?”
“Arthritis,” she laughs. “But let me finish the story. You had a great fall, from the look of what was left of you. Either a bad situation in the Highlands, or possibly on the Train of Bethlehem—kids keep falling from that thing every day. Anyway, we found that your body was extremely damaged, yet not so. It looked like time was moving backwards, and all your injuries were mending in quick-time. I saw your shattered rib cage move back into place and solidify.” The old woman shakes her head and looks away. “That may have been the sickest thing I have ever seen.” She takes a moment to wipe the disgust from her mind. “After some time, I finally learned what was going on: apparently, you ran into the sound whale—or at least, that’s what our zoologist thought.”
“Zoologist?” you ask.
“A special scientist that studies animals…. The sound whale is something special. It both does and doesn’t exist in exact terms. It coasts around looking for silica—that’s pretty much just sand. Apparently before we were here, there wasn’t any silica for it to gobble up, but since the move it’s been having a good time eating. The sound whale jumps onto sound to travel through the atmosphere. We don’t know how, but for the whale to move on Earth, it needs ambient sound in some range of frequencies.”
“Where is Fisher?”
“He’s here, just wait. Now, up in the mesi—no sorry, mesosphere, it can move as fast as it wants. Nothing up there but a good view. But down here, in the troposphere, where oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide fill the atmosphere, things are difficult for the whale. Damn thing comes down moving at the speed of sound, sometimes faster, and it gets ripped to shreds, because it’s moving so fast and the friction is so great. Even when the whale is riding sound waves, it can’t help the fact that it’s still a whale. Do you understand me so far?”
“What does this have to do with me?”
“When creatures encounter an obstacle they can’t overcome, they are either deterred by pain, or they evolve. In the whale’s case, it evolved. So, whenever the whale comes down to gobble up some silica and gets ripped up, it ignores the pain, and apparently heals. Bleeds like crazy, but the whale always heals faster than death. When it’s done, it goes wherever it goes, and leaves a giant bloody mess behind—but a mess that has an unusually strong regenerative effect on mammals. Which was where you came in. Now, this is all conjecture at this point. Obviously, I can’t test for most of what I think happened.”
Slowly, you start to see where the doctor is headed. Calm. Stay calm? Shut up, just relax. You begin interpreting the news she now gives. It facilitates thoughts that are new and intentionally ignored.
“I don’t know how, but it looks like you fell into that mess. You were a goner, but now you’re not. Icarus, you could have died. You should have died, but by some chance encounter, you didn’t.”
You pat your chest, testing how true the doctor’s story is. You find it a bit sore, but intact. This is the second time you’ve almost died. You’re not sure what happened to you after drowning in the lake. Everything’s been so bizarre after Cemone. You have been so distracted with Fisher, the Green Gash, P.S.D., you never realized how unbelievably inadequate you are at living. You’ve nearly died twice by simply trying to get home. Why can’t I just figure this out? Why does it feel like everything I’m doing is going to end up in failure? Why am I so pathetic?
Inadequacies aside, features of your personality have begun to clash with your history in a way you’ve tried to ignore for a very long time. You’re a painter that can’t seem to finish a painting. A drug addict that can’t handle a day without a fix. A man that until recently, didn’t even have a friend. Expectations of the self have turned from reasonable goals to weapons for emotional masochism. How am I still this miserable person?
I should be able to do things on my own by now, but for whatever reason I’m still unable to make a right move without nearly getting myself killed. If you’re every move ends in failure, doesn’t that make you a failure? It means nothing I do is in my control. Well that’s convenient. I just need to get home. I can build from there and continue my art again. Like I said: convenient.
The silence of the room is the only thing keeping you contained. Icarus, you need to calm down. Things are going to be alright. Are they though? The doctor says nothing as she examines your hopelessness. Inhale, exhale, are all you can muster. You continue to cope with your own thoughts until you find a baseline emotion. It’s alright to be scared. But you’re not alone. Whispered in your ear, a wistful thought emerges from the void. Painful thoughts that are now converging. What are you even doing? The thought accompanies an emasculating amount of doubt. “Oh, God,” you whisper.
You bend into your hands and knees as the thought repeats itself. What are you doing, Icarus? Why are you here? In the past, you’d forced yourself into accepting art, drugs, work—anything to answer this question—but now the failure at attempting to accomplish anything you consider important fuels in you a hopelessness unlike any you’ve ever known. “I don’t know anymore,” you confess.
With no claims or glory to demonstrate worth in your identity, you find no shelter from the storm raging inside.
Sitting in a tiny room, you have your first taste of the bitter, numbing, exhausting soul-candy that is desolation: the cancerous feeling pushes its way through your body, demanding more space with each second, until you and it stalemate—or at least, until it has had enough of you. It’s going to be okay… I think. Several times you attempt to fight the feeling, and each time you feel more pathetic than the last. Forced to rationalize the native occupier, accepting him as a part of you: feeling his influence on your past, present, and future; it cuts its image on your mental identity. You see him, it, you. You have depression. I’m so sorry. May your dejected renaissance be a short one, and may you find the light of your penumbra.
“Icarus?”
You look up and see Fisher standing next to Jon. Fisher wears new clothes, and has received a fresh shave. You look him in the eyes for only a second. That is all the time it takes your friend to see your defeat. Idiot. Fisher walks to you and the two of you embrace.
“Fisher, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, no it’s not,” you moan. He doesn’t really love you. He’s just stuck with you. Fisher wraps you up and contains the shudders of your overwhelming wail. This continues until you reach your destination: The Solstice.