Nothing to do with Ur. Only me.
When I spoke again, my voice was quiet, the words for me, not for it. “I know how you work now. I’m weak and broken and flawed and fake, and I still beat you, you motherfucking fucker. You’re living on borrowed time. I’m going to finish that diagram, and I’ll squeeze you to pulp between diagrams. And I’m going to tell people exactly how to stop you, just in case something happens to me. There’s nothing you can do about it.”
I picked myself up, still careful of the glass. My body felt too light. New birds were perched on the thicker growths of branches that had grown where flesh had been ripped away.
My eyes fell on the graffiti.
“I won,” I said, my words very small in a dark, still, silent Toronto.
■
My life in Toronto, reduced to the contents of cardboard boxes that sat out in the hallway.
Half my furniture remained. The futon, the table my television had sat on, my coffee table. My toolbox was gone.
Joel had forgotten me, his memories piecing together the best available explanation about this mystery client who had taped out a diagram at the edges of the apartment, and he’d packed away my things.
He’d replaced the bathroom mirror. I stepped in there, and I gazed at my reflection.
I’d nearly forgotten what my face had looked like. I hadn’t seen it for weeks.
Except for some markings around my blind eye where Ur had torn the eyelid, it was still my face. Pale, with a dark circle under the one eye, some branches and darkness around the blind one. Amid those branches, three birds were clustered together in the corner where the tear had happened. Beady black eyes standing out from my flesh in three dimensions – one bird in profile, the other looking out straight on. Three eyes visible in total, matching the general curvature of my eye socket. I blinked, and they blinked slightly out of sync with me and each other.
I was a vessel, and the spirits would fill in the gaps in the way that made the most sense. If I was damaged, they’d shore me up, but I’d become less me. Already, some of the branches were raised, the skin rougher.
The conclusion was simple enough. I was operating on borrowed time.
I’d mentally described a handful of others as being capable of straddling that boundary between human and Other. Comfortable in both worlds, just ugly and freaky enough to be Other, but not so much that people couldn’t explain it away.
Seeing those three beady eyes standing out from my face, I wasn’t sure I’d pass.
I was less able to pass in public than Midge, the four-hundred and fifty pound hillbilly cannibal murderer.
I grabbed a washcloth, and I got it damp. I gave my face a thorough scrub. The water was almost black as I wrung the cloth out. I scrubbed my face again for good measure, and on the second wringing, the water was almost as bad, leaning a fraction closer to black-brown or black-crimson.
Five more washes and rinses, and it still turned out more grime than not. Like trying to wash dirt or vacuum up a beach. No amount of scrubbing or vacuuming would change the fact that there was more dirt and sand than one person and one tool could clean up.
My arms, too, were more black than white tone, a dense forest of branches, littered with feathers and small prey birds hiding in their midst. Chickadees and sparrows. I was pale, and no amount of rinsing at the sink was going to suffice to get my hair clean.
When I was more or less as clean as I could get without actually stopping to take an actual shower, I found a box and began going through the contents until I found clothes.
I pulled on a fresh t-shirt and boxers. My sweatshirt was closer to me than my jeans, so I grabbed it, contemplating throwing it away.
It was tattered, torn in spots, thanks to Ur. Frayed wool stuck out to trace my collarbone, at the collar of my shirt.
It was dark, and it wasn’t dark with grime. Seen in the right light, it was just… darker. In the exact right light and position, I could see that same essence rolling off it like a kind of smoke, as if it were a recently extinguished candle. Brown-gray smoke, the faintest aura, clinging millimeters away from fabric.
“You went through the Drains too, huh?” I asked my sweatshirt. “A little less real, a little more spirit. And you were a gift, too… shit.”
I pulled it on, then my jeans. Clean socks and my winter boots. My first aid stuff was in my toolbox, and my toolbox was gone.
I tore up a t-shirt using the blade of the Hyena, and I wrapped my left hand. The wrist of my other hand had already healed. Or, in more exact terminology, the spirits had already filled in those cracks and gaps. The skin was particularly rough there.
What happened if they got my whole hand? Would I lose control of it?
I left the rest of my stuff where it was. I traced walls of the apartment with my hand as I walked out.
“I guess I’m giving you up too,” I said. “Bye, apartment.”
I didn’t linger.
I reached the garage, and I felt a moment’s trepidation, seeing how dark the place was. It made me think of Ur, and the Drains.
But fear didn’t have the same hold on me. I’d faced down my greatest fear and called it false.
Would that I could do the same with… fuck. What did I even call this? ‘Despair’ was so melodramatic.
But… despair all the same.
The bike was gone.
Maybe it was in storage. More likely, if Joel had no memory of me existing, he might have deemed me a squatter.
If my bike wasn’t sold, he’d probably sell it sometime soon, or give it to one of our friends, same as the toolbox.
My life, taken apart, the bits and pieces scattered.
I could build something that resembled it, but I would never quite have it back.
A part of me wanted to stay, to try and scrounge up those bits and pieces.
But it would be an illusion. It would run contrary to the reasons I’d left the Drains. Those reasons had given me the strength to fight my way free, and I couldn’t deny them.
That desire to stay and find my bike, to reach out to Joel and see if he had any word on the subject, it was a desire to be the old me.
I’d never really had a proper trial to face my future.
Was this endless well of grime and the state of my clothing supposed to suggest that the Drains hadn’t quite let me go? That that place could pull me back in if I wasn’t careful?
If so, this might well be my trial.
I turned my back to the empty space, because I didn’t like the feeling that stirred inside me when I stared at it. My thoughts were on Rose, the danger to my friends, the state of Jacob’s Bell, the lawyers, grandmother.