sympathetic cityscape

we’re playing words with friends. sitting in mutual silence, her at the diner counter making tea and me in one of the booths with my own long cold cup of tea. i couldn’t drink it. i don’t know why. clara’s been reluctant to do this kind of thing, ever since what happened. i can understand why. i did have to focus on something, though. i couldn’t just walk through that building and look at what was happening, and all i had was the solid glowing rectangle of my phone, pouring light across my hands even as they got bloodier and bloodier. tunnel vision, you see. if i focus on something i can block out everything else.

like screaming, or the extended snap of bones breaking and warping, the slosh of my shoes through blood and every other kind of bodily liquid, the wet slap of flesh hitting something solid, and the gentler, more extended sound of something perhaps less wet and more dry, like a layer of outer skin, sliding down to pool there on the floor, among clothes and the shredded remains of a shoe. 

imagine those times when you wake up in the middle of the night, perhaps crammed uncomfortably on a friend’s couch, with some kind of cramp in your ankle, crawling down to your toes. on instinct the toes curl, trying to stretch out the muscle and loosen the pain. think about the phalanges and the metacarpals folding, joints bending, and then those small delicate bones pushing up and through the skin and out. there were holes in one pair of fine black leather shoes i walked by, a series of five, aligned with the toes, ranging from small to large, little pieces of flesh stuck as if they had scraped off against the edges of the puncture from the bones. i cannot imagine with how much force those bones must have been broken, severed from the rest of the foot, and pulled up and through. 

like they were suspended on strings.

so how can i blame her? for being frightened, and silent because of fear, and distant? i can’t. i hid myself for a while too. how worth it would it be, to turn on the spot and disappear?

i frown down at my phone. after a moment, i play adjudicator and send it, turning off the screen. for a moment, barely visible in the dark pane of glass, i see it smiling back at me, waiting.

i almost flinch despite myself. every word here is a synonym for witnessing. for just a moment, for one wretched moment, i watch clara closely. i say nothing. i look for those dark lines, the map of eskew, crawling across her skin. i wait for the moment that will shred this reality to pieces and replace it with the one that i am sometimes convinced that i did not escape. i wait for clara's features to warp, to change, to be obscured. but she looks at me, waiting for an answer, and i look back, waiting for her transformation. it does not come. maybe it will never come. but that, on its own, is also like eskew, i know, to lie in wait and let me sink into security. then it will strike, and i will be vulnerable and terrified and unable to defend myself. this is why i am always on guard. because the second you get comfortable, the second you think you're safe --

well, you're never truly safe. anyone who visited eskew for a little while would know what i mean. at all hours, eyes watch, walls meet at odd angles, streets shift, and there is no such thing as permanent safety. only the kind of delusion that can preserve your sanity for small moments at a time. those precious moments of clarity were what allowed me to plan my escape, and then to fail, and then to plan again. hope springs eternal, as they say, even when you wish it wouldn't. sometimes i think that was my truest problem. i couldn't stop seeing escape. i couldn't stop imagining an other, an outside-eskew, even when it tried its hardest to give me whatever i wanted. even when it offered to let me escape on its terms, which would still be part of eskew in some sideways way.

that means the question is genuine. it means it's clara asking, and not the city. do i want to be revealed and seen? do i want to be witnessed? why else would i make the recordings? at first i had told myself it was a way to rationalize and communicate, during the very opening minutes of my talk on how and why. but by the end i was asking for more than listeners. i was asking to feel less alone. i was asking to be less alone.

i fold my hands around my tea for the warmth. i imagine how pitiful it must sound when i say it aloud, and part of me doesn't want to voice it at all. "i suppose so," i say, sickly at myself. "but who doesn't?" that's a weak defense and i know it. there's no substance to it. it's me putting more words out into the world as if trying to obfuscate the fact that i do want to be seen. i do want to be witnessed. it was comforting to think of someone else listening to my stories and believing me. it was comforting to imagine that i would not be seen as a liar, or deranged, or attention-seeking.

if i wanted to seek attention, or if i was making it all up in the way authors do, wouldn't i make a happier story, or at least a happier ending? one where i was the hero? where i never succumbed to anything, where i beat eskew back with sheer force of will? where the best thing that happened to me wasn't a kind of half-survival?

it must be strange, to see someone you probably thought lost. i told valkyrie cain and skulduggery pleasant once that eskew was unescapable for those it wanted to stay. that they were a rare, rare thing -- travelers who would likely be permitted to leave. they could show me an exit and i doubted i would even be able to see it. yet here i am, escaped, gone, elsewhere, and yet not truly escaped because i am, once again, the bearer of bad news. it would be nice to show up with good news for once, but it has been so many years since i have been anything but a collection of ill omens that i doubt i'd know what to do with it. i don't know what to do with most good things that come my way.

it was a surprise, after flitting through enough worlds not touched by eskew, relieved to know that maybe, just maybe, it was sated with whatever space it had crawled into.

as if i don't know which world it destroyed. as if i don't know which world i gave it access to, the one i sent my transmissions into like signal flares and watched them die again and again. it was my fault this time. but now, i think, it will eventually try to reach everywhere. then there is no more not-eskew, and only eskew, and maybe that's the eventual end. that, in itself, is a kind of punishment for eskew. nothing to witness it but itself, and i know that feeling, and how hollow that is.

in that way, even if i lose, perhaps i earned some kind of victory by persistence. it's the only thing i've ever been good at. but for now, i am still in the midst of a long-running war. no direct battle. just a long and desperate skirmish, trying to make sure eskew gets only what it has. it's constructive, i think, for everyone to learn to use what they have and not overstep once again.

so it's for that reason alone that i find myself, as if by fate but maybe more by will, somewhere unlike the places i am used to. london was london. eskew sometimes seemed to take notes from old eastern european architecture, rain-soaked and dismal, though the latter was nothing new to me. this doesn't look like that, and i know exactly where to go because i know which places have been touched by eskew. people are sometimes just places, too, with interiors and exteriors and many selves moving through them. this is something i have learned about myself, including in the places where my reflection momentarily peeks through. in panes of glass and puddles.

when valkyrie invites me in, we sit at her table drinking coffee, and i try to explain what happened. maybe she knows. how i am barely solid. how, for a moment, when i brushed past her, maybe she felt nothing at all, or only the whisper of presence. i died and then i did not. i found myself between. then i stayed.

or perhaps soon i will fly outside the bounds of any story, and then that will be that. both are comforting for different reasons. i cannot say i am adverse to an ending, and yet, all at once, i think i am fundamentally frightened to die, which is a kind of change that is different from all the rest.

so. until then, a story. i think often about how things might have happened differently. the night before i wandered into eskew, or eskew found me, or i found eskew -- and i suppose the semantics of my travel matter less now -- i took an offer. a college friend, you know. clara. i forget now what she was majoring in. something about math, and physics, or something in that regard. i wish i could show her some of the things i've seen, the physical impossibilities and the city's bending streets. but back then we were just going to travel the world. she had a book, a hundred and one places to see.

@consequntial told me: "we could go anywhere we pleased, to the edge of the world if we liked, and come back when we wanted to."

i almost said i couldn't. but what did i have to keep me in london? a history degree, no real goals or aspirations, a life trapped in an apartment with a woman who spent every minute she could telling me that i was a burden who had brought nothing into the world and would leave nothing behind. even when she was asleep, i'm sure she dreamed of it. so i thought of escape, and i thought of getting away, and of course i said something about a week. and clara said that we shouldn't wait. i think she was worried that i would back out if we waited that long, which was likely. i had even less of a backbone then. i still have very little now.

well, i have none now, which is a development i wasn't expecting. so that is... something, too.

so we said we'd go the morning after next. we'd get on a train and start going. and of course the following night was awful, so terrible that it pushed me out of my apartment and into the london streets. most people would perhaps call a friend and vent, or find somewhere to hole up and wait it out. i didn't want anyone to help me. so i walked, and i kept walking, and i -- or eskew -- it went however it went, i mean.

then i disappeared. we never went on that trip. i hope she went on it without me. it would be a shame for her to just wait. maybe, at some point in this flight, i will be able to see it. i've been told by riyo that i was only gone for a few months according to her, even if for me it has been over a decade. my hair is greying now, earlier than it should be. perhaps eskew has stripped years off of my lifespan, too, with everything else it has taken, or perhaps i was just terribly stressed for the past few years. that's true also. 

i don't think clara would recognize me if she saw me. perhaps that's best, too. i have always been at my best as a ghost, and never real.

i hope she’s alright. if we meet again, i doubt it will be only five months since i was gone. without eskew there to hold the threads of time in the way it would like, i would think, like the space, it loses slack and unravels. it could be years. decades. more. i could never see her again except as a gravestone, or as bones.

THE HERMIT - it’s a skill, to look inside yourself, one you have mastered. the endless corridors and shifting thoughts are mapped to very carefully. this all takes time, of course. and those twisting hallways are so very difficult to map. it would be so easy to get lost. you know this space so well. wouldn’t it be a lovely place to stay? so well-known and comforting. why go back? how nice, how easy, to dissolve, to hide from the rest of the world and all the people in it. why bother, when you are so good at looking inside yourself. like enlightenment, the self. retreating this far inwards is like retreating just as far out, into the vast ether. so comforting. the thing that was you looks at the thing that was the old woman. there is no you anymore. goodbye.