Ash Cinema Page 4
The tears fell till he swam through them and curled himself into himself and held together only by the strength of his arms and fingers, fading fast.
He did not whisper. He did not make a sound. Curled fetally in silence, the words written but not said, he tore a glance to the flower, its light upon him, calling through the silence, burning him from the inside and turning his skin to ice. Hands touched his eyelids and he closed them, skin goosepimpled everywhere. Exhaling, it fell from him, inhaling, he drew another in, another with the skin and body of memories and regrets. The other plunged down his throat and his stomach burning erupted. He heaved, dry and painful, until a petal was in his mouth, then another and another, and a stem, and the wings of thousands of butterflies grazed every millimeter of his millennial skin.
***
He opened his eyes and felt the decay deep inside. Stiff from head to toe, lungs full of glass, head pounded by mallets. His sight did not focus but funnelled and the edges blurred like cataracts.
The flower in bloom, the notebook in disarray. The floor was clean, spotless, the air absent of dust. He sat up and pushed himself to his feet, the effort buckling his knees and arms, vibrating viciously with exertion, but he found his feet. Shuffling, he turned on the tap but black sludge came instead of water, the steam rising from it, scorching the air. The windows as impenetrable and dense as before, the fires invisible, the city vacant, the clock, 3:19, unchanged or a full revolution.
He wiped his face and coughed, the glass in his lungs shifting, poking through, battling his breath and sucking it from him. Knees on fire, back numb, arthritis tearing and combusting his movements.
it is me
youve found me
and i
you
do you belong to another
or to me
or i to you
do not stop
but bring me back
speak
write
cast out the flower
it steals you from me
and i from you
it will not stop until you live
free
you carry the chains of the past
you must choose
the past
or the future
they cannot exist together
regret
or hope
me
or you
i love you
have searched through the millennium
for you
even though it burns
and it does
it burns alive from the inside
it will not last
it burns because of you
because of us
because of sebastian
your dreams brought life
they brought death
sebastian
he dreamt this all
he dreamt the beginning and end
i have known him
he spent decades in an apocalypse
within himself
i love you
but you must choose
For years I pretended to be you to bring you back. I walked in the shoes of your ghost, wore the weight of your life. The first five years were the hardest and when I thought, truly believed, even, that I could bring you back in some way, even if it was through losing myself in you, to give up the person I was to become the person you were. I gave all I could but it was never enough. It started with a hole. I dug a hole. I bought a shovel and began to dig. I dug for hours and then a man came by and asked me what I was doing. I told him I was digging a hole, and he left, but returned a while later with a shovel and dug with me. By nightfall another man came by with his dog and a shovel but did not ask any questions. He hopped down with us and dug. When morning came we were too deep to get out so we kept digging until a handful of people came by with shovels and started digging us out of the hole and by the following night there were maybe twenty or thirty of us digging, and when the morning came a young boy asked what we were digging. In unison, I am digging. Singular, I as a we, and we as an I. The boy, not content, asked why, and they all stopped, looked from person to person, but I dug on. They began to talk for the first time and they all wondered why they were digging a hole and the first man who joined me said, This man started all of this. They crowded round and stopped my shovelling and asked me why I was digging. I said I was digging to make a hole, and so I dug on, and some of the people joined in. When will the hole be finished, some said, and I told them that holes are never finished until they are full. By then the spell was broken and many of the diggers dropped their shovels or brought their shovels home with them. There was only me and a young man left in the hole and he asked me if I would keep digging. I nodded. He asked why. I am looking for something, I said. For what? My body. He stared at me for a long while but I kept digging. There were no bones there. Not mine or yours. The man left a short time later but I dug until the moon shown high above me. Deep in the crater I caused, I sat in my hole within the larger hole and waited. I did not sleep or dream or move. I sat in the hole until morning came once more. I had not eaten in days but that is not why I abandoned the hole. It did not work. I waited for you to come into me, for you to be me, or me to be you. I remember the way you sat in that glass box deep in the earth that took us a year to excavate. The illusion worked and we could swim through the earth, through the walls of this hole so deep, and it never looks fake. That is what everyone seems to ignore, the technical aspect, the impossibility that we achieved. At that time, it was the longest single take in film history, but no one even bothers to mention it. No one talks about the brilliance of your performance. Your stillness, the silence, the sounds you chose to make, and how they make it human. I tried but it did not work. You know what I thought about down there? Nothing. Not you or me or anything. I disappeared in that hole, in a hole I found inside me that I never realised was there. You dug it. Your hands, your nails, your blood, your death caked every millimeter of that cavern inside me. Down in that hole within a hole, I fell deep into the hole you left in me, and my plummet did not end until the sun rose blushed above and I was filthy from days of digging and not sleeping. There is a darkness that happens in the depths of night spent in the depths of the earth surrounded by the lifesource of graveyards and plants. Within that blackness was nothing but more darkness, more blackness, more nothing. There were no thoughts and there were no sounds. A stillness and silence complete. In the morning, I knew that we achieved perfection with you in that hole. It will forever be hated, or at least as long as this world lasts, but we met perfection that day, and I think it is what claws at this cataclysm, why it is the catalyst to the end. We are never ready for perfection and it destroys us when it happens, even if only for an instant. You destroyed me. Why did you leave me? Why did you die? Did you kiss me, even though you were gone? Did you miss me, all those days I failed to follow?
The old man's head hung, his skin sagging, his lips parted, but not in muttered syllables. Shallow breath, his eyes closed, but not tight. The room, silence. No movement but the flow of his blood, the wheeze and crackle of his lungs. The air beyond the walls stagnated as a cloud. Neither light or dark, day or night. Only grey.
Time crawled, paced, circled the apartment, but touched nothing beyond the man's age. He picked up the pen again.
Why do you say nothing? I write if only to fill space. To make sound, scratch through this silence. I need that plant there as I need you. Without the plant, the outside will take me. Without you, I long for the outside to take me. Why do you not speak? One whisper, one heartbeat, one more kiss. I will not dream again. I will not exist beyond this letter to you. These letters to you. Please, write. Live. My love is a waterfall and yours is the snow falling. Your patience will kill me, has killed me every night for years, even the ones I forgot you, breathed without you. Here is the pen. Write write write. I cannot hear you. I hear nothing. Sing for me in silence the way you did. I will know. I know I will know. Please.
&nbs
p; He placed his head on the back of his hands on the table, and closed his eyes, held his breath. Waited.
The flower danced at the otherside of the apartment. The petals brighter, its light stronger. The walls washed purple, the air filtered through a purple haze. The scent reached him at the table, waiting. It entered his lungs, the sweetness of forgotten love as purified by the biology of plant. He spoke his name, the two syllables into the mist, cast adrift like a drunken boat. The plant took them in, and another aroma cleared the apartment, the mist gone. It reached his lungs and his tear ducts opened, his throat caught by the heart falling out of his mouth.
Please, he said. Please, touch me.
He turned to the clock, 3:19.
A scream rose in his throat and bounced about his teeth until he swallowed it down, pushing his heart back to his chest. The scent of him and the scent of the flower mingled in his lungs and turned to sulphur, muck, tar. He coughed and coughed till his bones brittled and his lungs cracked.
He picked up the pen again.
After the hole came the PI. Back then there was such a thing. You would not know now, but the world has changed immeasurably since your death. Phones are everywhere, even in pockets, and they do more than can be explained without describing the technological revolution that occurred postmortem. I called for days looking for a female detective. When Sebastian imagined it, it stopped seeming unique, but it was painfully so. After a week I found her but she was in LA so I moved there. I bagged up my life and took a bus south and found a room to inhabit. It turned into a hole to match the hole you left. Nothing inside but a mattress and me and the one suit I could not part with. I told her I wanted to meet her, said I had a case, and she gave me an address and a time. I got lost. You know how hopeless I always have been with directions. I wandered the city all night, not even certain I was close. It rained, even. I did not think it rained in LA. For some reason I still do not. The fires make sense but not rain. I think that is why it did not shock me, the city burning down every year. I suppose you have not heard. It began a few years ago and most on the globe were unaware until now. Every year LA burns down on the lunar new year only to be born again by the first full moon. It is an old story, about the stars and the sky and the moon, but I have never heard it. A man tried to explain it to me but I could not listen, did not care. It was enough that LA died every year only to be born again, sometimes better, sometimes worse, but never quite the same. Back then, LA was still a city of roads and people, no longer one of dreams, and not yet one of gods and demons. Starless, always, though. She left a message on my machine and asked where I was. Not asked but demanded. I phoned her in the morning and made up an excuse, something less embarrassing than being lost, but I think she knew. I met her that night. Took a taxi this time, and handed him the address, let him make sense of it. She was taller than me with wide shoulders and big breasts. A swimmer's body, strong, but pretty. Wavy hair like women from old Hollywood and shallow hazel eyes, a slim nose and square jaw. She asked me what I needed. Missing person, seven months, here is a photograph. She asked if you were an actor. He was, I said, but disappeared seven months ago. This was six months since your death, mind. Where was the last place you saw him? Home. Where was home? Here, LA. Address? I gave one I did not think existed. She never wrote anything down but somehow I knew it was in her brain and would leak out if I split her head open. More details invented, mixed with the real, and her search began. I remained in LA for six months, subsisting on hope and the thought that I could become you if she does this right, but she did not. She said she found you but lost you and that she could not continue because all roads were deadends. I thanked her and told her that you were dead. She said What, and I said, louder, Dead. Her mouth hung open, disgusted, but I left before I heard what came from her hanging lips. I imagine it was rude and incendiary but I stopped caring for the living without you. I had this image in my head that she would figure it all out. She would confront me over whispered conversations, over trails and clues, that she would fall in love with me, obsess over me, and then realise that it was all a lie, that you were dead, had been forever. And then I would die at the moment I was most you, taken by the hand of god, the way I wrote it, and she would be left with only herself, perfect. I came to understand it all so much more, understand Sebastian and myself, so much more the deeper I plunged into the lies we invented for films no one would ever see. They were all lost for so long. For half a century, only to be brought back to life after our pursuer was also long dead. He left his heart and his desire to his biographer, and she found us, found our deepest secret, and I, only I, relived the premier that killed us all, me, you, Sebastian, and now it has killed the rest.
The tears stained the page, blurred the ink, tickled the edge of his nose, and his arm numbed from the cold. The cold covered the apartment and every inch taken by frigid air that came from nowhere. Is it you, he said, his breath condensing before him.
He fell to the ground, his bones rattling, and the images faded, evanescent hands reaching after him, the burn of ice at his center, and the wings of a thousands insects.
***
The clock read 3:19 and he shivered himself to wakefulness to find the apartment sweltering, his body drenched with sweat, his skin slick and moist. Petals across the floor, strewn about as if torn and kicked but the flower unwilted, not wavering in the heat. He crawled arm over arm to them, his legs numb, hips on fire. He touched the petals, carefully, an index to one and it sizzled out of existence beneath his finger. And so, too, with the next and the following eight. The petals gone, scorched into the fake wood of his apartment.
The flower blossomed in furious shades. Covering his eyes from the blaze, he held his breath and pushed away, aging and hurting more and more. He slapped his legs awake near the table and waited for the blood to flow again, to bring them back, but they did not.
Pulling the bud from the plant, he swallowed it, closed his eyes, and fell through the floor.
***
A purple mist, his mouth tacky, his fingers loose, a millennial fire peered through the haze past the windows. He sat up and looked through each window. Tiny stars flickered through. The plant bloomed and it spilled over the bowl it lived in, inhabiting the entire table, growing up the walls and over the floor, growing right onto him, tendrils attached, their fiery touch of bitter cold stung when he separated from it.
Standing up, he stepped away from the plant consuming the apartment, blossoming within him and stealing his life by giving him a new one. His steps weakened near the notebook but he sat and read to make it not a lie.
come back to me
come back to me
come back to me
come back to me
come back to me
come back to me
come back to me
come back to me
come back to me
come back to me come back to me
come back to me
come back to me come back to me
come back to me come back to me
come back to me
come back to me
come back come back come back
i need you
love you
love
i breathe and pray it works
i kiss and hope you feel
i sing the silence and promise too
i belong to you
came back for you
dont leave me
you have eaten it
chosen it
life
life past the end
life without past
i will follow you
even if you dont remember
even if you cant hear
even if you cant feel
even if i never existed at all
i will belong to you
dont die
dont leave me here amongst the living
this millennial funeral
i came for you
wont you rise for me
a sea of life
an ocean of memories
inside you
i weave through them
i have seen your life without me
more than what you told
i have seen so much
you were always with me
but i left you
dead
i didnt mean to
dont be angry
dont be sad
i came back
for you
for you
i saw you plunge into our dreams
into sebastian
you lived his dreams
the ones you helped write
the ones you sang for
the ones i breathed life into
genevieve
i miss her too
sebastian
but mostly you
there was never more than you