Doubting the Flare

By Casey Brooks

            Somewhere there is a heartbeat on the bus. To sit upright was a seldom ignorable terror, no matter how much has been lost. It makes it bulge out, defiling form and function. Today was different, the earth was, for the first time, in transit with a radiant body. Its light melted away the sticky mold that was a life resigned to semi-consciousness. Before arrival, the stage was washed-out in shadowy things. Performances on it were terrible to watch and easy to make. Before the light could leave and he could long to go back to living without a mind, he hopped on the bus with the intention of riding it as far as it could go. Hoping against hope to follow the arc of the unknown stellar passage from which the light emanated. To feel forever the energy its mysterious warm radiance granted. When he wakes he’ll know that this body, known only to him, will have severed their personal relationship forever.
            Inside the ancient dreamer a trial is being rewound. With each heave of heavy heart the fat inside him presses upward, and with each jolt his muscles constrict, strangling his veins. Pressure causes these once blind organs to feel and carry within them all the weight of sense. They feel whatever may be wrong inside. Tumors, polyps, lymphs, inborn quirks? One beneath the shoulder blade, one beneath the heart, another beneath the left armpit. They hold the dreamer in a piercing grip as if at the sharp fingertips of a hateful claw, torturously freezing them in place. They try to dream of a vessel to enter. One outside themselves, strong enough to live and brave enough to want to.
            This, like the celestial body, will abandon him. All has been bound to each motion in the heartbeat, body fat, muscle bump, tumor-polyp-lymph-quick-claw assemblage. They writhe and haul hoping to break the line in vain. Built too sturdy in years, each forebears the other in raving acquiescence. The vessel hears it all before becoming. The hateful choir sings alone, each voice along the riser walled off from all others. The world this form would fall to sounds a grate on which they will be dried to a burnt offering. They will not exit the void.
            Outside Jordan Bogart is around middle age and using his right hand to twirl the few unmatted extremities of long ratty hair that dangle on the shoulders next to him. He won’t take it too far: occasionally daring to slide a tepid index finger through the buttons of his neighbors sunset blue rose laden blouse to feel what’s smooth within. He blames the aggressive gasping and starting on his artless hand and will lay off while things settle down before going at it again.
            In his other hand he holds a phone to his ear and continues a decades long argument with his mother. After hours of attention a careful listener could glean what went unshouted in familiarity. Jordan was once manageable but a recent outburst, involving the shattering of a glass in front of a support group, told everyone that he could not live as his own.
            He still pretends it was years of war with her that had whittled him down to a surrendered homecoming. That he must come back and bury the time in the city away where he’d aged a decade and a half in idleness. The wasted years have trapped hope into diminutive localities. Waiting in public places, droning on screens, and events, no matter how small, to eat the time. Too many nights swallowed whole with offensively strong beer, exhaling smoke into small tenement blinds, long terrors over the phone. Just to exhaust enough of himself to turn the night over on a bug-infested mattress.
            The big city will be different. What’s there has already been thoroughly suffered down. There are places there that will meet Jordan again and free him from his fears. A restaurant that once fed him into an overweight youth may now warm him with a living. It all may connect into something not yet seen.
            Still at home of course, but only to sleep. Mostly in motion. Living a life worth being told. With the conversation over he cops a more aggressive feel from the too unwashed for anyone to care sleeper before losing interest. He begins to question the only part of the story he wishes weren’t there. Why didn’t she want him gone as bad as he did her? He settles on an answer; the impression his hell-tested youth had left on her and good nature, made her fear for what he was when wandering the open world.
            It’s hands off now as the bus comes to a stop. The struggle between nerves that had been so much more than a nightmare has ended. The dreamer had hoped to wake and see in the other passengers something not there on entrance. Lives spent too far from the others they’d loved on their ways to be reunited, others running from ones they no longer love towards one more chance at pride, maybe a few beautiful ones taking the obvious next step on the sacred straight and narrow. At the very least to hear a sigh of relief for standing’s sake. But only heavy physiologies of guilt and burden get off. Bearing in their persons a gravity so grave that each step makes the ground seem to bite at their heels. He grabs his backpack and holds it tight against the unfamiliar heat pattern along his chest, strangling the now wretched again spill-over.
            He opens the bag’s thin lips without setting the zipper’s teeth apart. Through the narrow gaps between he watches articles of clothing cling to an invisible form. They mimic something like dance. Never to enter. They just won’t fit. 45 minutes left. He’ll be there. No going back now. There’s going to be a tomorrow.
            And a few more after arriving. Wandering less and less as their memory drifts from why he’d left. Narrowing into a false familiarity. In the city that would’ve promised rebirth, were it not for the new sun's absence, he holes up in bathrooms for a modicum of safety. It feels like his abandoned home again. He will sleep wedged in the axes of great concrete fulcrums. An e-scooter stops nearby and the terror of exposure takes its course. He lifts it from the ground and carries it on his shoulders up the stairs of the elevated metro track that encircles the city's skyline. It beeps when paid for. Now riding it down the narrow lanes of rail. Acting out the old urban horror of a plane flying too low, threatening the pride of highrises. Some see him there but can find no will to intervene.
            The tracks carry on empty like this for longer than he’d imagine until the headlights come. Fear has passed and regret has set in. He now wants to fly off the track and slither away where anyone who’d seen couldn’t find him and take the time for inland routes home to be sure of this. Living there off invisible sums without a word, pardoned.
            When trying to escape the track he clips the rail too late to go completely untouched. The strong force grazes him and he spirals while falling. It’s night and the ground beneath is remote, unlikely then that anyone would see. There are roofs closer than the ground. Considering his surroundings this seemed as good as crashing got.
            But were knowing eyes’ watching, they’d have seen how this would end. Having lived enough to understand what happens to incapable appendages in their shameful over-extensions. How they fall in front of every eye they can capture and gather all the shades of filth in the particle sick air before landing.
            He falls on a transformer above the power station beneath the tracks. There is a great arc flash that spreads across the surface of his body. He bounces off the box and falls into the tangle of barbed wire on the fence nearby. He hangs there gurgling in agonized disbelief. Thin strands of blackened flesh and polyester fan outward from their primary mass. Melted to a semi-liquid that clings to what it can. One strand sticks to the box and lightly sizzles from its continued heat. Fabric has melded into flesh and all color has been burnt away. Save for those in the bag that now float away looping in the breeze.
            He thinks he’s always been hanging there, foul and abstract. Suspended precariously on the wall by a lazy tether. How it hangs more important than what it ever could’ve been. Heavy with layer upon layer of clotted acrylics. Not to be touched and never to set. Caution: Wet Paint.
            The world continued for a great time after he burned. Eventually reaching a day where the ignorance of self this tragedy required was unthinkable.
            There is a story, though seldom believed, that it happened at an impasse. A flare had all but destroyed our world, setting our best minds inward to find the fatal flaws we could no longer afford. A great need to reshape our world into one livable again using only the clay of human capital was felt by all. Drawing upon what had already been suspected and what was discovered, they would find individual nature and fate’s exact relation and route out all purposelessness.
            The day is now. Raich Orland is swimming in a sea of panic, deaf in submergence. Stimulants that sit open on the table will peak soon. The waters begin to clear and the screaming starts again.
            They are sitting firmly on an austere tuscano chair. Trying to look past the thick condensation of visual snow on the surface of their eyes and find what little of themselves they recognize in the tall mirror ahead. Their cycle has begun again, vacillating between the choice to use blunt force on their mind and propel themselves through life and wanting to let it pass.
            They consider trying to keep up an effort to make a forgery of a better future. Something to stare at for a feeling of warm regret while on the unwelcome path that will be set today.
            Nothing has changed Raich as much as a place of their own. It was a gift from their parents for having made it to the end. A month’s stay alone in a small room. They still remember opening the door for the first time. The apartment all but empty save for a low to the ground table in the room’s center. On its surface laid an envelope dark pink and laden with stickers of lacey styrofoam hearts. “Try not to be too hard on yourself”.
            Before, while living at home, they would watch the walls mold and nothing more as the room became a pile. It was poor character that they would begin to care about their surroundings only when no one else was in them. They have fallen into routines for the first time and occasionally feel presence of mind. It begins with them obsessively combing their hair as they listen to unbelievable tales of people living outside the city playing on the radio. They are ignoring this now as they recall years of disinterested conversations they’d harassed the hallways for.
            In the few conversations they could force the subject seldom changed from the stipend.  From near the beginning of Raich’s generation everyone of pretesting age had been granted incomes of temporary scripts, varying in size based on performance and expiring after a ten day break. Simultaneously markets had begun to appear sporadically in unannounced locations accepting these and only these scripts. Everyone understood that this had been coordinated and entailed something about how the world would change in the coming years. Though how was a matter of pointless speculation.
            A favorite of Raich’s to bother was Kevin “Custom Character” Maher, an elite performer with consistent expectations of higher and higher stipends. His schedule took him to further regions of the building than the hall’s general public. Raich would seek to know where in the building he’d gone and how much more he may have been learning there. But conversation never left the stipend.
            CC's entire allotment, as he would share, went to supply himself for the year with an annually expanding list of poly-syllabic vitamin/chemical compounds to support the progressive and healthy growth of his mental faculties. This was a subject Raich could never invest themselves in for the sake of personal inaccessibility. All they had gained from CC’s drifting self-talk was that his thoughts would race ahead of theirs on their own accord and without fear of crashing.
            For Raich the break had meant struggling to ignore the prospects of hard to care about small stipend markets. They would waste the time away pacing to forget. But now living alone they had resolved to spend this last break on something.
            Raich went for the first and only market they had found toward the end of the last day. Inside a long counter went across the leftmost side of the building. Along the counter side ceiling was a plastic menu lit up by dull bulbs behind their yellowing translucent plastic. Beneath this and behind the counter playground furniture was bolted to the floor. Taped to the walls were frameless pictures of silk robed demigods sitting cross-legged on lilies floating through mountain passages on winding rivers. Municipal maps of the pre-flare city and fliers announcing long-past festivals were pinned to cork boards across from the counter.
            Rugs adorned the floors and blocked the windows. Bookshelves were filled with music magazines, cookbooks, and encyclopedias. There were spinning-wire book racks containing pulp novels. Gaudy patterned sundresses, button-ups, heavy peacoats and misshapen suits of unbecoming candy-colors hung from hangers on clothes trees. A few pieces of wood-carved furniture faced the door from the other side of the building. The room was only lit by the stained glass of table lamps which caused a tired and faint polycolor reflection to appear on the surface of each tarnished object.
            Raich purchased whatever they could of this in a hurry. The table and the mirror where they sit now, a dresser drawer containing clothes too archaic to wear, a mauve rug with a great gray petaled flower at its center whose thorny tendrils extend across its surface to its corners, where they loosened their grip for dough-faced lions and lambs to lie together in open air.
            Their stipend had amounted to the interior of a half month home. They've taken to cutting pictures and phrases out of print and placing them around the room. A black and white head-shot of a recently immiserated man, a vampiric tired-eyed giant lying naked and bleeding in a shallow pond, the Creation of Adam split where fingers would’ve met, violent text on the surface of the mirror.
            They’ve lost track of time recalling these things. When Raich checks the grand plastic clock on the wall, the kind they use to teach children the time and to allow those going blind in nursing homes to see, it’s too late to do anything else but not quite time to leave. What’s left of the time before their final assessment is that portion where nothing is worth starting. Their exhausted mind begins to drift again. As much as they can recall of time passed appears to them as disconnected frames. Each hour reclaimed’s reflection seemed to forcefully vault over their shoulder and scream something terrible too quickly to be understood. The room began to conform to this pattern, habits formed became the shout. They felt the urge to tear it all down, burn the pages and clothes, smash the furniture, deface every image, stay deaf and never understand. But there wasn’t time. Soon their fully developed mind will be picked apart and their future will be displayed in front of them.
            They stumble out of the apartment. Across the hall Sarah struggles to jiggle her walker through the door. She is holding something like a briefcase made of clear plastic. Through it Raich can see at least a dozen separate cupboards for different pills. They scanned her over briefly for what she may be treating before passing.
            Raich had visited her home once before when she used to share it with someone else. There used to be a reclining man with her, Daniel. At that point the two were merely the company of anyone to each other. During the visit nothing went unsaid. By Raich’s guess they were arguing about having wanted someone else to be there. If this person had never made it or had left was never revealed; though it may have been a child. Daniel had artless timing with cruel humor. His forceful mid-sip allusions to the unpleasant absence splashed into his drink like a heavy stone. Blame would ripple across its surface and splash droplets on his chin that would slide through the craggy short hairs and onto his holey shirt. Sarah eventually fled to her room and hunkered down silently as he kept talking to the door. Raich didn’t know when he’d left, they’d never seen him before visiting, but they could tell he had gone by the way Sarah never speaks.
            Raich leaves the complex and enters the crowd. Exposure turns them off. Always living for private walls, indifferently or less so, was a poor choice of adaptation. To tear it down wouldn’t change much now. They blink and are at the station.
            The tracks went downwards along the hill. Raich had often heard unlikely stories about the evolution of the tracks. That they had been built from repurposed roller coasters. That at one time a steel cable was attached to the tailend of the car and reached out to wrap around a spool at the end of a distant concrete hall where a long procession of sturdy hands would pull the cable to return the car to the top of the hill. There were many grandiose stories to fill in what was missing of the past.
            Nothing more comes to Raich until the car arrives. Stepping inside they recall that the floor of the car sinks in minuscule intervals the more weight is placed on it. The further it sinks the louder the music inside plays, preemptively quieting the voices of the passengers. As the car stalls Raich presses down and slowly lifts their feet from the floor, pretending to themselves that they could hear the sounds begin to fade.
            In the seat across from them, a well-dressed man is on his way to work. He had in his lap one of those near forearm length chronicle books. It was an uncommonly modern edition for such an archaic passtime. Raich knew only very little about this practice, such as the fact that these books remained so sizable out of a tradition to grant each year’s description its own individual page, regardless of length.
            This was the youngest man Raich had seen reading one. His proud upright posture and self-contained smile unsettled the other passengers when their glances crossed over him. People had told Raich that the many different editions of these books were a kind of perpetually authored folk-tale. That their readers believe that toiling past generations would shout a number, consider it a year, and say something about it as a kind marching chant. This could carry on until exhaustion and the next marcher would take their turn with another year until satisfied with their description of it. Raich was not aware of why these announcements meant anything to their readers. He stares warmly at the page as the car travels to its destination.
            Raich exits and scans the crowd as it dissipates. Most scatter into the streets surrounding the station until they are out of sight; others approach the collection of mounted binoculars to watch the distant mural. Raich decides to look it over again as well. Their eyes land on a drawing of the mass they will soon join. Those waiting by the door of the testing facility. They are likely asking each other what the test contains as they often had on days before. Some of what will be there, like measurements of digits ratios and brain scans, is already agreed upon.
            Finding out the specifics of the test often occupied Raich’s imagination as well. That no one who’d taken it shared anything about it only drove them deeper into speculation. Hypotheses and potential ways to test them would often flood their mind. Hypothesis; what happens inside is so unpleasant it can’t be shared. Experiment; Watch carefully how their eyes sink when it’s mentioned before they go quiet. Hypothesis; what happens inside may only be unmentionable after one’s results arrive. Experiment; go door to door seeking someone whose haven’t. Raich had tried this before to no avail, all those who answered sensed immediately a time-consuming and emotionally burdensome conversation just by the knocker's nervous demeanor. After enough attempts they had considered waiting by mail slots to intercede results but thought better of seeking out such an unlikely event. Hypothesis; what’s in there is perfectly built to remain hidden. Experiment; see if you hide it or simply forget.
            They tilt the binoculars up from the crowd by the doors and towards the roof of the tower. There it covers the mouth of a federal eagle hovering behind it. From the roof, metal antennas extend and red lights at their peak shine in front of the bird's eyes. A tear drops below one of them smearing the red light over a small section of the mural's foreground. The sigil's wings expand far along the confines of the wall. At the end of the wing on the side of the weeping eye the bird holds the back of an upright man who solders a great electronic board in affirmation. Inward and approaching the tower another man bends with the weight of many translucent mobile electronics saddled to him. Their insides are made to look like hearts and neurons behind an x-ray. Slouching further is another. At first glance he appears to be a pack animal sinking into the mud but he is the prior man and the weight of his cargo has driven him into the earth.
            A senior hides his face in the opposing wing. His hair flies violently from his head, as if each strand were ejected by the pressure of built-up grief bursting through his skin. One of the hairs takes the shape of a signature which an artist on bended knee behind him reaches towards with his brush. Would-be empty space is filled with extensive annotation. This mural amounts to the vulgarity of a monumental political cartoon along the surface of a distant superfluous wall built to incredible dimensions for all to see. Raich has extensively read the annotations surrounding the hyper-anatomical baby drawn behind the artist. A cold chill climbs down their spine. They shutter and remove their eyes from the lenses.
            When Raich arrives at the true crowd waiting by the door they are appalled at how much it’s grown since the time it would’ve been painted. From its edges they try to find a tranquil cluster to stand in on the inside. The whole mass shakes like it feels an impatient rage waiting to consume them. They close their eyes and join it. Inside no one dynamic can sustain itself. Many lie catatonic on the ground while above their eyes arms lash out at anything they can grab. Small fires are built there and around them people shout over the crowd to each other. It had been all that they'd feared it would be, they lost themselves, the passage of time, the ground they stood on in matching the crowds' panicked extremes. It seemed to carry on forever, as they had been warned, until there was a vast silence following a loud metallic shutting.
            Outside the waiting crowd two are trying to leave the city. He sees them from the sentry along the border. The sun has not yet set. They are bright-eyed, nearing the end of youth and crossing together not knowing if they are allowed. They stop and huddle together while still in sight. Racing their palms across the surfaces of each other's faces they let out speech volume shuttering whispers. They walk out hand in hand.
            The Sentinel’s seen all anyone could from where he was confined to. From the long ago start of looking down from the sentry he’s tried to be accepting of it all. Today he struggles and sifts through the wastes of what brought him here. He questions how anyone who knows him well enough could ever think he belongs in a place like this. He’d been allowed to furnish it but never did, save for an ashtray. He fears what objects can do. He used to take them and feel their potential as instruments. But now he watches. He feels he’s become a man for whom nothing happens outside of captivity and slinks down into his chair.
            Raich has wandered the city sleepless day and night since release. They cannot return home to watch the heavy walls, to feel the ceiling stare at them from above and wish violence on the space they’d built only to abandon, they will not wait for the mail. They are sinking further into the light that clouds their vision. They can feel it rush through the pulse in their eyes as they unknowingly enter a small park.
            How have they already forgotten? They try to find exactly when they stopped being able to remember but can’t reach past entering the crowd. Maybe if they recall what was said about the inside from what they’d heard about it before entering they might make some connection. Something about physical measurements. But they cannot remember being measured. What of them could’ve been measured? There was nothing they could recall from within and little they could remember of what they thought before.
            They are strewn out on a bench, blind and running the same helpless attempt to remember over and over again until they hear the sound of something working in a frenzy nearby. They wander through the bright lights towards the sound.
            As their vision clears they see several workstations of wildly variant natures circling a manic attendant. A pick-set and locks laid out like the curvature of a spine on the red brick ground. Several whiteboards around a mathematics textbook filled with microscopic but flawlessly hand-written equations, a canvas with only a negligible fraction of a painting attempted on its surface, an atlas with arrows and boxes drawn all along the page it was opened to, a hydrology textbook on top of a pile of individually printed petroleum reports and at the center a long thin telescope with both astronomical and logical charts laid all at its feet pointing towards the moon.
            “What are you doing?” they ask.
            “Mitchner method” he replies.
            “What?” they answer, which goes ignored.
            The longer Raich watches this from their newly regained vision the less they can consider this process to be anything but an elaborate delusion. The attendant runs between each of the venues they’ve laid out for themselves and remains there for only a matter of minutes, interacting with each in a careless fury.
            “May I?” they ask as they reach for the telescope.
            “Yeah, sure,” he says.
            They saw there, on the surface of the moon, something living in a grotto of queen anne’s lace. The exposures of its partially skinned surface grafted over with a pale white slurry of clotting dust. It slithers agitated ,as if seen, before stopping to press its eyelids shut. It opens them again before desperately mouthing something to Raich in slow deliberate motions.
            They did come home that night. Furniture remained intact. Walls still imprinted on, ceiling still watching. Lying there in bed Raich was emptied of everything. Fate did come in the mail and they had lived it out as it came. All the while guessing at what the empty syllables mouthed to them could’ve been. “Love of god swallowed your mortality, to seek my valley condemns you to die, once it is in front it is yours no more, try as you may there was not another, taken on too much heavy lie deathbed, don't try too hard to remember what's past, something small around you contains this all”.
            Life in a chair. Enclosed there in the narrow area between foreign walls. They spent it filling the stranded creature's lips with ever more possibilities to be struck down. The mouthed phrase, Raich’s tenuous source, obscures. Questions bloom in the gulf between as only something to fill what’s left.

About the Author:

Casey Brooks was born in 1998 is a writer living in Virginia. This is their debut work.