Post by Kyle Shane on Feb 29, 2012 17:04:07 GMT -5
"Storm's gathering in the west," he remarked idly, as his left hand did the slow trace down the glass window. The cramped little room, overstuffed with it's books and little degrees on the wall, seemed busting under the weight of it's professionalism and groundedness. This was a little office where everything was clinical, rational and could be found in the index of a psychology textbook you'd read in college. In short, this was a world where your entire world could be taken apart, retooled and put back together in better working order like a slowed-down pocket-watch.
It was, possibly, why he'd come. After all the abstract craziness of the past few, weeks? Months?, whatever, he'd come to sort this all out and get some perspective. But this owlish woman, sitting in her high-backed chair with her slate-gray suit and her lousy Payless shoes... blinking at him and fidgeting with a pen. He could bare his soul, but would she understand, or just write him a prescription? Kyle raised an eyebrow, and sighed a bit. She was watching him, expecting more.
"So, after you had that misunderstanding with your father about pulling your weight around the house, what happened? How did you and he come to terms?," she said, yellow pad and pencil poised and at the ready.
"The old man and I never got along on terms," Kyle shrugged a little. "But I see him now for what he was, lonely and pushing people away from getting too close." That seemed like pop-psych, pat cliched bullshit to Kyle, personally, but the therapist nodded. "And do you feel like, maybe he imparted some of his methods for dealing with people on you?"
Kyle's eyes narrow, "What do you mean?", he asked quietly, but the therapist was writing again. Kyle hated when they wrote. And, now, he felt somewhat ridiculous coming to a new-age faith healer for easy answers about how to put his strange world into perspective. "It's just," the owl-eyed woman with her thick glasses and terrible shoes rationalized without looking up from her pad, "Based on what you've related about your inability to connect with people."
"I never said that," Kyle said, eyes squinted. "Well, no," she hemmed, "but it was read between the lines. Have you ever had a loving adult relationship, Kyle?"
"Well, I-" and his jaw clamped shut. He thought of all of them. Detective Kiel... no, she felt something for him, but it wasn't love. More an innate belief in something deeper. Paige, but no... she never really saw him at all, and he only thought of her as an ultimate prize to be won. And then there was Array...
"I guess it's hard for me to let anyone get close," he said, finally. That felt like such a weak admission. And not, entirely genuine. There was one person he would always hold close. And there, he thought of his mother, and the moment just days before. The entire world, many worlds in fact, at stake as all reality was tearing open at the seams. Worlds bleeding together and continuities shattering apart, letting darkness from beyond in to this world, evil old gods that wanted to corrupt all that was left in darkness. He remembered offering his body up to be the sole host and being overwhelmed by the influx, the rush that was the flood of all the pure negativity and evil in the world consuming him until we began to burst, to shred, to tear open. And, in those last few minutes as he took his possessed form back into the void the old gods had come from and exploded, he remembered his mother, and how all of this had sprung from a single gift, a rose on her grave. In those last few moments as his bursting body popped like a darklight pimple spewing it's innards back into the void, she was with him again. "Kyle," she had said, holding her boy in her arms. And he was a child again, reborn, all the untainted promise in the world, free of the darkness in that perfect, endless expanse of white. "It's not your time, Kyle. All of this has been undone, because it never happened. You fixed it."
"But I want to stay with you, mom. Stay here, in the nothingness. In the void, where it's safe," and so he did. No conflict anymore. No more pain or struggle, or effort, or constant brooding over the right path. The end of the trail. He just fixed the biggest mess ever, even if one of his creation. Didn't he deserve to fade into limbo happily as his reward? But no, she was smiling gently, looking into his eyes with eyes that were both tearful and proud. "Not your time yet, kiddo. There's still a lot for you to do."
And so, here he was... and, as he sat there, these thoughts running through his head in the span of a clocktick, he wondered, how he could ever make the doctor understand?
"The main thing is," she said, as Kyle circled around back to the couch - which prompted him to snort, what kind of therapists had an honest to god, leather couch anymore? "this sense of disconnection you've felt since your trip back to your old home-" His euphemism for the time trips back to the trailer he lived in, to see himself and his parents at a happier time when he was a baby, "Did it come from seeing old memories and bringing up your need for some method of closure, that you never got with your father?"
That one made Kyle tilt his head a bit, and he had to admit that it was an interesting thought. Certainly, the mental image he had had in his head of the raging alcoholic who came home from god knows where with whiskey on his breath and a leather belt ready to strap the skin off a young boy's backside, did not jibe with the smiling, mild mannered, bespectacled man who had filmed a baby boy's first tottering steps or laughed along with his wife as they splashed water in the tub.
Put simply, which one of these memories was not like the other?
"Closure in what way, though? Dad passed away." Kyle said, thinking quietly.
"I just think it bears looking into, to examine what kind of person he really was and come to realize that he was the person who most had a hand in molding you into what you are. In a lot of ways, Kyle, you must see that you are your father's son."
No. Never. Kyle turned his face back to the window, and those increasingly dark clouds on the horizon, gray-to-black.
He left the office a short time later, deep in thought. "You are your father's son," she had said. The receptionist accepted payment and gave Kyle a card with his next appointment, which he accepted unthinkingly. He strode from the office as the wind buffeted him, turning the scarf around his neck into a flapping tentacle smacking him in the face. He thought of Patrick, shouting that Kyle had taken a life that should have been his, that he received a love from Eric Shane that he never appreciated. And his brother, now locked away in the psych ward in Boston Medical Center... the puppet of forces beyond his understanding, filled with loathing and amplified desire... but he was more pure in his conviction of want than anything Kyle had ever experienced. He wanted the love of a father that Kyle only knew as a raging monster.
And it was true. Kyle felt off his game ever since seeing that, and what he had to go through, and being given his shot to finally end it all but walking away, only to start all over.
Closure? He had, by definition, spurned the closure of his story by ensuring it would go on. It seemed safer to stay, but it also didn't seem like him. He was a competitor, first and foremost. He knew that and accepted it with pride. Competition had, in that "other place" that was his day job, broken down to be so pathetically simple and yet grating to the very fiber of his core that it felt like the greatest chore in the world just to drag himself to an arena. That was a symptom of the malaise. Yet he had been offered a break, a reprieve... and he turned it down. What else was there to be said?
Closure... or new beginnings, new openings, new opportunities. He wasn't tied down anymore, shackled to a system that felt like drudgery and toil. He felt free...
But also ill at ease. Because there WAS a storm coming, he saw it in Array's eyes as she sat on the bed the night after. Clad only in a 2011 Boston Bruins Stanley Cup Championship jersey, her long, coltish legs wrapped up Indian style, she sat on the bed, staring out unseeingly with a cig burning between her fingers. This was a girl, like Patrick, like Kyle, who had been touched, infected, filled with an unspeakable ancient evil, who had seen horrors no mortal had ever witnessed, that could have driven somebody mad. She had tried to filet Kyle with a knife, had watched cackling with her demonic teeth and tongue lashing over him as her fellow dark demon infested cohorts had broken Kyle's bones, had unleashed a plague of darkness upon the world. And yet there she sat, smoking. He watched her from the doorway.
"What do you want to say, Kyle?" she asked without looking.
"I'm not sure, after all we've just been through, I have the words," he said honestly.
"You had the words before you went through the portal. You said something to me and I want to know if you meant it, or if it was just another mind game." Her voice was hard, and so, so much older than her seventeen years.
"I'm not sure what you mean, but I haven't ever played mind games with you," Kyle protested.
"Don't be stupid, Kyle. We MET because you played games with me, 'Wow, I can't believe that an intelligent and beautiful specimen like you would waste your time in a party with these spray tanned bunch of sorority girls with daddy issues,' your fucking words," she looked at him, eyes squinting dangerously. "And you took me away from the party and fed me enough liquor to not be able to stand and fucked me silly and you know what? That's fine. I put myself in that position and I knew I was being used. When you left school, I went with you because I knew you were a user, and a manipulative, arrogant ass, but hell, so was I."
He was quiet, and hung his head, biting his lip. She turned herself on the bed to fully pierce a hole in him with her gaze. "That's right, Kyle, I was using you to get laid and get primo weed. But the more I hung out with you, the more I thought I felt something different. And, when you were going into that portal, you said something you probably think I forgot. When I was possessed and was in the process of tearing you apart, you said something, and you probably think I forgot. Wanna tell me what it is?"
He just stared at her. She stood, walking over, pointing a finger in his face, "You said you cared, Kyle. You said, when I asked you, whether you cared about the entire world falling apart over my body, you cared about me. When I asked what you were fighting for, you said it was for me. I won't let you run away from this, Kyle. If you care, tell me. Fucking TELL ME."
He looked up, staring her straight on, but saying nothing.
"Give me a reason to stay. Because just using you, and letting you use me for a lay, isn't enough. But if you fucking care, if you ever cared, tell me," her voice was softer now, almost pleading. "Don't push me out. You're better than that, Kyle."
Again, he said nothing. She nodded her head, giving a sardonic 'oh this is great' smile and throwing up her hands, "Then tell me something. Tell me it was just you being an ass. Tell me you were saying something I wanted to hear to get my guard down. Come on, do it."
Kyle had started to say something, looked away, looked back at her. Her green eyes were piercing, searching the words written in his face. He opened his mouth and said...
Well.
He snorted, now, as the wind whipped the scarf around his neck. He looked up at the sky. Reflecting, as the clouds rolled over like some fog machine from hell spewing it's blackening mist over a stage. The wind picked up even more, gusting and bursting into him. And the therapist's words occurred to him again. "Have you ever had a loving adult relationship, Kyle?"
"I just think it bears looking into, to examine what kind of person he really was and come to realize that he was the person who most had a hand in molding you into what you are."
"In a lot of ways, Kyle, you must see that you are your father's son."
His pocket buzzed and vibrated like a nightmare wasp. His iPhone. He pulled it out as he snapped out of his reverie looking and the sky, and he saw an unfamiliar number that, still, popped up with a caller ID that read "MIT".
He felt the tug again, he felt like his efforts to put the strangeness of his life into a workable, logical and rational perspective were fading as he felt a pulling into the next bizarre chapter.
Closure? Not for him...
New openings though...? Perhaps...
And, with a cracking sound, thunder burst and the sky let loose with a torrential downpour, pelting him unmercifully with rain.
The storm was here.
It was, possibly, why he'd come. After all the abstract craziness of the past few, weeks? Months?, whatever, he'd come to sort this all out and get some perspective. But this owlish woman, sitting in her high-backed chair with her slate-gray suit and her lousy Payless shoes... blinking at him and fidgeting with a pen. He could bare his soul, but would she understand, or just write him a prescription? Kyle raised an eyebrow, and sighed a bit. She was watching him, expecting more.
"So, after you had that misunderstanding with your father about pulling your weight around the house, what happened? How did you and he come to terms?," she said, yellow pad and pencil poised and at the ready.
"The old man and I never got along on terms," Kyle shrugged a little. "But I see him now for what he was, lonely and pushing people away from getting too close." That seemed like pop-psych, pat cliched bullshit to Kyle, personally, but the therapist nodded. "And do you feel like, maybe he imparted some of his methods for dealing with people on you?"
Kyle's eyes narrow, "What do you mean?", he asked quietly, but the therapist was writing again. Kyle hated when they wrote. And, now, he felt somewhat ridiculous coming to a new-age faith healer for easy answers about how to put his strange world into perspective. "It's just," the owl-eyed woman with her thick glasses and terrible shoes rationalized without looking up from her pad, "Based on what you've related about your inability to connect with people."
"I never said that," Kyle said, eyes squinted. "Well, no," she hemmed, "but it was read between the lines. Have you ever had a loving adult relationship, Kyle?"
"Well, I-" and his jaw clamped shut. He thought of all of them. Detective Kiel... no, she felt something for him, but it wasn't love. More an innate belief in something deeper. Paige, but no... she never really saw him at all, and he only thought of her as an ultimate prize to be won. And then there was Array...
"I guess it's hard for me to let anyone get close," he said, finally. That felt like such a weak admission. And not, entirely genuine. There was one person he would always hold close. And there, he thought of his mother, and the moment just days before. The entire world, many worlds in fact, at stake as all reality was tearing open at the seams. Worlds bleeding together and continuities shattering apart, letting darkness from beyond in to this world, evil old gods that wanted to corrupt all that was left in darkness. He remembered offering his body up to be the sole host and being overwhelmed by the influx, the rush that was the flood of all the pure negativity and evil in the world consuming him until we began to burst, to shred, to tear open. And, in those last few minutes as he took his possessed form back into the void the old gods had come from and exploded, he remembered his mother, and how all of this had sprung from a single gift, a rose on her grave. In those last few moments as his bursting body popped like a darklight pimple spewing it's innards back into the void, she was with him again. "Kyle," she had said, holding her boy in her arms. And he was a child again, reborn, all the untainted promise in the world, free of the darkness in that perfect, endless expanse of white. "It's not your time, Kyle. All of this has been undone, because it never happened. You fixed it."
"But I want to stay with you, mom. Stay here, in the nothingness. In the void, where it's safe," and so he did. No conflict anymore. No more pain or struggle, or effort, or constant brooding over the right path. The end of the trail. He just fixed the biggest mess ever, even if one of his creation. Didn't he deserve to fade into limbo happily as his reward? But no, she was smiling gently, looking into his eyes with eyes that were both tearful and proud. "Not your time yet, kiddo. There's still a lot for you to do."
And so, here he was... and, as he sat there, these thoughts running through his head in the span of a clocktick, he wondered, how he could ever make the doctor understand?
"The main thing is," she said, as Kyle circled around back to the couch - which prompted him to snort, what kind of therapists had an honest to god, leather couch anymore? "this sense of disconnection you've felt since your trip back to your old home-" His euphemism for the time trips back to the trailer he lived in, to see himself and his parents at a happier time when he was a baby, "Did it come from seeing old memories and bringing up your need for some method of closure, that you never got with your father?"
That one made Kyle tilt his head a bit, and he had to admit that it was an interesting thought. Certainly, the mental image he had had in his head of the raging alcoholic who came home from god knows where with whiskey on his breath and a leather belt ready to strap the skin off a young boy's backside, did not jibe with the smiling, mild mannered, bespectacled man who had filmed a baby boy's first tottering steps or laughed along with his wife as they splashed water in the tub.
Put simply, which one of these memories was not like the other?
"Closure in what way, though? Dad passed away." Kyle said, thinking quietly.
"I just think it bears looking into, to examine what kind of person he really was and come to realize that he was the person who most had a hand in molding you into what you are. In a lot of ways, Kyle, you must see that you are your father's son."
No. Never. Kyle turned his face back to the window, and those increasingly dark clouds on the horizon, gray-to-black.
He left the office a short time later, deep in thought. "You are your father's son," she had said. The receptionist accepted payment and gave Kyle a card with his next appointment, which he accepted unthinkingly. He strode from the office as the wind buffeted him, turning the scarf around his neck into a flapping tentacle smacking him in the face. He thought of Patrick, shouting that Kyle had taken a life that should have been his, that he received a love from Eric Shane that he never appreciated. And his brother, now locked away in the psych ward in Boston Medical Center... the puppet of forces beyond his understanding, filled with loathing and amplified desire... but he was more pure in his conviction of want than anything Kyle had ever experienced. He wanted the love of a father that Kyle only knew as a raging monster.
And it was true. Kyle felt off his game ever since seeing that, and what he had to go through, and being given his shot to finally end it all but walking away, only to start all over.
Closure? He had, by definition, spurned the closure of his story by ensuring it would go on. It seemed safer to stay, but it also didn't seem like him. He was a competitor, first and foremost. He knew that and accepted it with pride. Competition had, in that "other place" that was his day job, broken down to be so pathetically simple and yet grating to the very fiber of his core that it felt like the greatest chore in the world just to drag himself to an arena. That was a symptom of the malaise. Yet he had been offered a break, a reprieve... and he turned it down. What else was there to be said?
Closure... or new beginnings, new openings, new opportunities. He wasn't tied down anymore, shackled to a system that felt like drudgery and toil. He felt free...
But also ill at ease. Because there WAS a storm coming, he saw it in Array's eyes as she sat on the bed the night after. Clad only in a 2011 Boston Bruins Stanley Cup Championship jersey, her long, coltish legs wrapped up Indian style, she sat on the bed, staring out unseeingly with a cig burning between her fingers. This was a girl, like Patrick, like Kyle, who had been touched, infected, filled with an unspeakable ancient evil, who had seen horrors no mortal had ever witnessed, that could have driven somebody mad. She had tried to filet Kyle with a knife, had watched cackling with her demonic teeth and tongue lashing over him as her fellow dark demon infested cohorts had broken Kyle's bones, had unleashed a plague of darkness upon the world. And yet there she sat, smoking. He watched her from the doorway.
"What do you want to say, Kyle?" she asked without looking.
"I'm not sure, after all we've just been through, I have the words," he said honestly.
"You had the words before you went through the portal. You said something to me and I want to know if you meant it, or if it was just another mind game." Her voice was hard, and so, so much older than her seventeen years.
"I'm not sure what you mean, but I haven't ever played mind games with you," Kyle protested.
"Don't be stupid, Kyle. We MET because you played games with me, 'Wow, I can't believe that an intelligent and beautiful specimen like you would waste your time in a party with these spray tanned bunch of sorority girls with daddy issues,' your fucking words," she looked at him, eyes squinting dangerously. "And you took me away from the party and fed me enough liquor to not be able to stand and fucked me silly and you know what? That's fine. I put myself in that position and I knew I was being used. When you left school, I went with you because I knew you were a user, and a manipulative, arrogant ass, but hell, so was I."
He was quiet, and hung his head, biting his lip. She turned herself on the bed to fully pierce a hole in him with her gaze. "That's right, Kyle, I was using you to get laid and get primo weed. But the more I hung out with you, the more I thought I felt something different. And, when you were going into that portal, you said something you probably think I forgot. When I was possessed and was in the process of tearing you apart, you said something, and you probably think I forgot. Wanna tell me what it is?"
He just stared at her. She stood, walking over, pointing a finger in his face, "You said you cared, Kyle. You said, when I asked you, whether you cared about the entire world falling apart over my body, you cared about me. When I asked what you were fighting for, you said it was for me. I won't let you run away from this, Kyle. If you care, tell me. Fucking TELL ME."
He looked up, staring her straight on, but saying nothing.
"Give me a reason to stay. Because just using you, and letting you use me for a lay, isn't enough. But if you fucking care, if you ever cared, tell me," her voice was softer now, almost pleading. "Don't push me out. You're better than that, Kyle."
Again, he said nothing. She nodded her head, giving a sardonic 'oh this is great' smile and throwing up her hands, "Then tell me something. Tell me it was just you being an ass. Tell me you were saying something I wanted to hear to get my guard down. Come on, do it."
Kyle had started to say something, looked away, looked back at her. Her green eyes were piercing, searching the words written in his face. He opened his mouth and said...
Well.
He snorted, now, as the wind whipped the scarf around his neck. He looked up at the sky. Reflecting, as the clouds rolled over like some fog machine from hell spewing it's blackening mist over a stage. The wind picked up even more, gusting and bursting into him. And the therapist's words occurred to him again. "Have you ever had a loving adult relationship, Kyle?"
"I just think it bears looking into, to examine what kind of person he really was and come to realize that he was the person who most had a hand in molding you into what you are."
"In a lot of ways, Kyle, you must see that you are your father's son."
His pocket buzzed and vibrated like a nightmare wasp. His iPhone. He pulled it out as he snapped out of his reverie looking and the sky, and he saw an unfamiliar number that, still, popped up with a caller ID that read "MIT".
He felt the tug again, he felt like his efforts to put the strangeness of his life into a workable, logical and rational perspective were fading as he felt a pulling into the next bizarre chapter.
Closure? Not for him...
New openings though...? Perhaps...
And, with a cracking sound, thunder burst and the sky let loose with a torrential downpour, pelting him unmercifully with rain.
The storm was here.