I dug down with the needle, ripping his cheek, and now he screamed, a full-blooded sound, a frightened cry of conviction, this from a man I’d never known to show strong emotion. Blood spurted from his face to join the crusted blood on my forehead as I pushed with strength that was already waning once more, driving us both through the tall open windows onto the foot-wide false balcony outside.
An odd thing happened when we tottered there on the brink of the sixty-feet drop to the shiny wet street below. Sydney, with the back of his knees pressed against the stone balustrade, looked directly into my—into Moker’s—eyes. The moment froze, became meaningless as far as real time was concerned in the way such important moments often do.
Just for that ceaseless instant, his pale-grey eyes widened and I thought I saw recognition in them.
Maybe his guilt, with oblivion or hell a breath or two away, caused his mind to superimpose my real face onto one that was largely absent, because I’m sure his mouth and his voice started to shape my name, the fright in his eyes swapped briefly for a question.
“Ji—?” I’m certain he was about to say, but overbalance tore him away from me.
The half-formed query—if I’m correct in judging it so—swelled into a ferocious scream that withered to a self-pitying wail just before he hit the ground.
The soft mulchy—mushy—crunch that came back at me was awful to hear.
44
I swayed there on the phoney narrow balcony, any power I had left finally depleted, and the light drizzle soaking the head and hands of a body I’d borrowed for a while, one I’d never have liked to own full-time. A breeze flapped the lapel of the raincoat I was wearing, a breeze whose evidence I saw but couldn’t feel.
I felt empty, vacant, as bare as the shell I occupied. I thought that whatever memories Moker’s cooling flesh had sustained after his soul’s departure—or whatever chemicals in the brain that governed such things and which took just that little bit longer to expire after the body’s death—were finally spent. This shell, this vessel, this host, had no significance anymore, except to those who would view it later and recoil at its ugliness and injury.
It had no importance to me either. Nor had anything else in this world. Maybe.
I leaned forward, knees against the stone balustrade.
I had no further use for Moker. I wanted out. At least his carcass had helped prevent another murder. Pity Moker, himself, hadn’t earned that small redemption.
It was too cold inside this body now, too vacant. I could almost feel its flesh corrupting around me. I wanted my freedom.
I leaned even further out over the shiny deserted street, knees no longer hard against the balustrade then followed Sydney.
Falling in the dark. Body lazily tumbling over. Descent slow. So slow you’d believe that meeting the ground might not be so inevitable. But it is. Of course it is. It just takes longer than you would ever imagine.
And I’m suddenly afraid, even though I know I can’t be hurt at this journey’s conclusion. I’m already dead, so how can I feel pain? Besides, this isn’t even my body. Maybe it’s the shock I’m afraid of. Or maybe my mind is informing me that when you drop from a great height onto something hard and unyielding there’s going to be a lot of hurt. Probably only for an instant—depends on how far you fall—but, like the drop itself, that instant might last a very long time.
Also, something else awaits me in that moment before journey’s end. Moker’s final memory—and yet his first.
And I’ve been here before, but then I was interrupted by my own distress.
—chaos, images rushing through a freshly created mind—no order, no recognition, until everything slows, resolves itself, becomes calm and a clear recollection—
I understand. This is Moker’s original memory. His birth. I continue to fall, sailing down on my back, arms and legs splayed.
—darkness becoming lighter, redness and too much brightness, unformed shapes moving in front of me, floating, but not how I’ve floated before in the womb, huge rough hands beneath my slimed and bloody body, a separation, a snapping of something, the link that fed mi, the sudden awful feeling of loss, a sadness, my first, then sounds around me, not like the constant thud-up that had always comforted me, that had gone now, was replaced by these harsher noises I don’t like very much, and those blurred moving shapes, bright and white and pink, one looming larger than the others, warm stickiness being wiped from my body, unpleasant sounds, gasps, a sudden rigidity to the arms that hold me, an unhappy emotion that somehow transfers itself to me through that hardened grip, causing me unhappiness, more pink shapes, scarcely defined in my early unfocused vision—hands—reaching out to me—
—passed over to someone else, a wonderful feeling, a sense of comfort and safety, a pleasure that was common and continuous until a short time ago—wonderful to have it back, even though it’s not quite the same, not as secure as before—
—A terrible noise, sudden, high, frightened, a scream—
—and a new scene intrudes on the altering reverie, a flashback from a time that’s yet to come—a woman I know although I haven’t seen her for many, many years, the woman who gave birth to me, standing inside an open front door, a haggard woman whose prematurely wrinkled skin is yellowish, her wiry grey-streaked hair straggly, her clothes unkempt, and she looks at me with horror and contempt and slams the door in my face—my poor, poor face—and I hear her screeching on the other side of the closed door—
—go away!—
—go away!—
—and I’m returning to my birth setting and I’m being handed over to that same woman, younger now, tired but pleased—except she’s looking at me in the same way she would look at me years later when I’d gone searching for her and she had screamed and screamed when she had discovered me on her doorstep, the one she’d birthed all those years ago, the child she had tried to forget, the one she should love as any mother would, as any mother should, as any mother must love her own—but instead she was screeching, screeching—
—go away!—
—go away!—
—and now that same screech, only this is the first time, just after I am born, the screeching terrifying me although I have no conception of why it should—the disturbed sounds around me that I don’t even know are voices because I haven’t experienced life yet, but something in the sounds increasing my anxiety—already I don’t like this new world, already I’m becoming bewildered—frightened—and that screeching is shattering forever the contentment I had known in the womb—
—take it away!—
—take it away!—
—and already I have learned rejection.
I smashed into the ground beside Sydney and even relaxed bones shattered. The back of Moker’s head, which had impacted first, cracked like an egg—like a real egg this time, filled with runny yolk rather than chocolate goodies—and I felt the brain mash, some pieces of its matter scattering across the tarmac. Interior organs jumped from their moorings, most rupturing, others squeezed flat. The lungs that must have gathered air through the irregular funnel-shaped face on the way down before the body flipped over burst like overinflated balloons. But the worst thing was the noise of hitting the ground, that same mulchy-mushy-crunch that Sydney had made, except I heard it from the inside, where it was louder and more scary, and the squashing of substances and the snapping and grinding of bones could be felt (no, there wasn’t any pain involved).
The collision almost jolted me from Moker’s body, but I kind of bounced—or reverberated, to be more accurate—before settling into it once more. I sensed there was nothing left inside, no more memories and no more functioning. Now, in every way, it was an empty shell; and it was time for me to discard it. I sat up and the carcass remained where it was.