#enteries

  Ecclesiastical fenestrations cast prismic light into the scaffold ribs like captive rainbows but could not penetrate the underbelly, where stone walls wept ⎯ windowless, their long alleys, narrowed like spires until they converged to a single door  . . .

           Behind it,    truth.  

  B led me down, down into the quiet core where the tear drop lanterns grew dim and died in the night held hostage in our home’s roots. We groped along the walls together, blind but emboldened by the other’s company until he found   it  and pushed open the door.

   Within ⎯  a curtain of light bleed inexplicably from the basement ceiling, like daylight piercing a forest canopy. 

  Resting beneath it’s glimmering veil was a long, polished  b o x  perched on spiraling iron legs that penetrated the concrete floor like the roots of Methuselah. 

    ⎯    Richly veined, it’s scarlet mahogany surface was like that of the floorboards in the halls above, making the  c o f f i n  both familiar and as disquietingly foreign as friend that one has not seen in many years.

    As I drew up to it’s side, my perspective shifted as though I was sinking imperceptibly into the ground, until my line of sight was even with the base of the smooth varnished lip. 

I was suddenly small... Like a child.

    I pressed my weight onto my toes and reaching out blindly, my fingers meeting the chilly facade of the closed lid.

   Dust or static created a strange, phantom-velvet texture, overlaying the polished surface beneath my touch. 

Then, I glided them down,   d o w n

  until my fingers met an indentation . . .

      ⎯  The edges sharp as engraved stone.

  Foreboding grew as I followed the carved line, it enlarging, 

  e l o n g a t i n g , 

            the size of it traced beneath my fingers,  a trail that for an instant I thought might stretch all the way to the foot to crease down it’s throat  ⎯       

           But then ...  I felt it curve ,    slope .

    It was an answer waiting.

         What   l e t t e r   was cut  into the wood⎯ ?

   Startling awake, I opened by eyes to the shimmering sunlight that had penetrated my dreams ... 

 My body, hot and aching with words left unsaid,

       ⎯  " ... I don't want to know . . . "

   ⎯   11:13

   Can I even call what he is doing to me betrayal?

  The desperate hammering of my heart is the same ear filling thump, coming hard against the door as I hid behind it’s brass lock ⎯  Backup’s heel; the buckling, booming rattle of his rage in the background of my agonizing desire to  

just.  

       be.   

                   a l o n e  . . .

                I suppose, I may finally have it. 

This is my fault.    

   In my desperation to delay the end of this game we've spent half our lives playing, I lost sight of my principles. Perhaps, my escalating insincerity and his giftedness, made this ultimately inevitable.

Experience has left me few doubts of his semi-clairvoyance but only now am I considering what his precision implies...

  That there is a fated nature to it all. 

  That I never had a chance.

 It took two ego-bruising weeks, driving my exhaustion bone-deep, before I began to consider that the passion that had sustained me for nearly two decades was fading. My spirit had withered with the effort to reach it more depleting. I began to wonder, if I simply wasn’t good enough to solve this one. 

    Just as despair took hold of me, B's index finger came uninvited over my shoulder and pressed into the screen ⎯ creating a rippling prismatic bulls-eye over one photograph in a sea of over one-hundred-twenty.

 The answer.   The next fatality.

 He handed it to me, without having asked.

 ⎯  Cooperation is forbidden;  it complicates the variables and the validity of the existing hierarchy, it obscures where our loyalties truly lie... 

     I knew it and took it anyway.

      Because I am not who I should be.

   They wouldn’t be questioning him now, if I had not created a trail in retrospect, justifing my  intuition . 

    A thread of truth could be enough to hang me.

   Facing the possibility of losing all that anchors me, I am  on the precipice of a terrible epiphany — choking on the question;  ⎯  " Where does the person I’m trying to be end, and who I am begin ? "  

    I once believed that who I was could be distilled down to it’s essence, that if the parts that did not matter could be cut away;

    the fingers that brace me,

    the feet that carry me,

     the sight that leads me --

   What was left would be  me  ,  a tiny piece of the universe that had becoming miraculously and unmercifully aware of itself...   And, that I could never truly lose myself.

    I am beginning to doubt that.

   And with a fascinated horror, I am beginning to realize that I simply don't know how to be anything other than what I have been trying to be for the last seven years... I don't think I would know who I was if everything but my life was taken from me.

`

   Staring down the barrel of a derelict future, the prospect of my life coming to an abrupt end is disconcertingly comforting...

    Actually,     in the darkness of a loss of this depth,   the alleys that pave the way to massacres are unnervingly clear ...

   and I don't know if who I am beneath Alternative is above  k i l l i n g    y o u    a l l  ...

      That prospect is no longer unthinkable.

    I once asked a senior pathologist if the difficulty of dismembering a body was a limiting factor for suspects, to which they warned me to be careful of assumptions because   almost  anyone  is capable of  almost  anything — given enough time and determination.

    It is particularly poient in this moment as I contemplate how long it would take me to pick all your locks and strangle you in your sheets ...

  Slip thallium into the soup, listen to you all miserably puking out your corroding insides as metallic venom slithers into your brains before they can get it  o u t.

     Trace the opulent halls with ignition fluid following up to your doors with you barricaded inside ... praying for smoke to coat your lungs, to smother you from the inside.

       Watch B crawl out to see the carnage.

      see it dawn on him that this is no accident,

      see a genuine response  — unadulterated by his intellect or prevarication — just raw, bleeding instinct from this animal I've called my friend, becoming at once so mortal and so equal to me, that we can end this era of our lives together in violently, intimate truth ...

   Maybe you would understand, if everything you were was on the brink of utter erasure. You might find that you aren’t who you thought you were either.

  The truth is, I am afraid that if I cannot have it, I can't find it within me to recognize that I owe it to my species, to civilization itself, to let B take it from me.

     Not in this way.

      I don't know how I thought this would ultimately end,   If B would wrench victory from me or if I would wait on a tragedy to eliminate my part in all of this...

  But not betrayal, not when it's my fault.

   I think I was resigned to carry forward indefinitely,   — losing pieces of who I thought I was to the current I've been fighting against,  believing that if I only kept going, and never stopped, I might outrun regret and what could have been.

  Maybe I believed I would rekindle faith again — in myself, in this path, in leaving a better world for the next  A .

  Maybe a world one step closer to not needing an L at all.

 If nothing had stopped me, one day there would have been nothing left but Alternative.  He is not a mask one can take off when it becomes inconvenient, he is a skin you sew yourself into slowly, until his integrity is what's keeping you intact..  A has become a deathbed I realized too late I was making.

        But,  it isn't that I never thought of leaving.

   I could walk away...

   Wandering like a ghost, unhindered by past or societal taxonomy, exempt from the yokes placed on young men to make them whatever is most useful; armed with bibles or guns or shovels to do what needs to be done.

  But, my freedom is overshadowed by the total absence of certainty, my purpose swallowed up by a life concentrated on survival. — Adrift, I know there will be no rescue when any there was lies six feet under and rotting.

        I have no one.       I am no one.

  I know many resent their safety nets while accept cliff sides nesting sleepless vipers. I don't envy them, despite being in freefall myself.     —  At least, I don't have to go home to fight more battles than those I am already losing... 

   That is why I don't resent Wammy's House.

 This path spared me what will haunt so many others — I've no memories captured in the immoral chirons of media posts or infinite digital clouds.

 The voices and faces that once comforted me have been slowly pulled ever-deeper into my conciousness, my mind quietly eating itself alive,   —  

the way nature intended

   I never had the opportunity to agonize over unwashed sheets, holding the last trace of their scent, because there was nothing left for me to hold onto.

  My loss left no footprints for me to follow.

  All I have is the implicit memory of sunlit lilies draped over searing black coffins and the lingering hope that it would mean something ... someday.

 Maybe that's why this is so hard to give up.

   I don't want it all to amount to nothing.

     I have become nothing but    t h i s  , now.

        I am nothing without   t h i s . 

        If he takes everything from me,

         I will leave L nothing to salvage.

I don't want my motives misconstrued.

   What I will  do  with the Backup does not make him collateral damage in my private catastrophe.

                   He is   not   a martyr.

 I am not inspired by a hatred of B for his opportunism,

   It is not that he doesn't deserve victory, it is that, if he turns on me now, he has proven he has no honor.

  An L without honor is a monster of limitless evil.

  I am recovering my friend's body

   and incidentally sparing you an incomparable tyranny.

  I cannot speculate on how Wammy's has shaped B's psyche, but he has always had a recusant character  ... and he knows I can keep a secret.

⎯  "Why did you do it?..."    He sucks his teeth at the question as though there's room for doubt, as though he could delude me too.   ⎯  "You didn't have a good time at the party, Alt’ ?"  I watched him begin idly digging into his coat, the collar billowing around his face, his complexion is a sickly pale against it’s dark grey tweed   ⎯   "You've gone too far this time. "  He knew it, but I wanted nothing to be ambiguous about where I stood.     ⎯   “You're not taking this seriously. Someone could have been killed. You could have been, I could have been- What is wrong with you? ”   He pulled something from his slacks and only when he struck it against his heel did I recognize it was a match. He shook his head at my indictment but gave no indication of noticing that I had taken a step back.    ⎯   “No, you wouldn’t.”   His face turns, dark lashes casting sleepy shadows over the clinquant daylight caught in his eyes.     I'm struck by how young he looks    For a fleeting instant, I'm acutely aware that the teenager I'm standing next to is the same boy that played hide and seek with me in the meadow, long before we cared where this path was leading us.   And, I am scared that if he turns a meager smile on me, I might forget all the heart ache he's caused. I might remember ... what it felt like to meet my wild-eyed friend at the fenceline and escape what brought us here, immerse ourselves in a world far away from the homesickness and disappointed adults and the fear of what would come apart next. When our hands would meet on the sun-warmed bars, metal and skin becoming homogenized heat that bound rather than separated us in a way that felt timeless to my seven year old senses, when it never crossed my mind that one day our fingers would grow too big to fit between the gaps...     Standing together on the grassy nole, the breeze combs tender fingers through my hair and I sigh quietly as we watched the dining hall being assessed for damages, the smoldering aftermath of what should have been a re-birthday now the scene of a bottle rocket's explosion.     The blossoming, radiant morning rang with shrill alarms and the sharp scent of flash powder like heaven at war.    B lit a cigarette and perched it on his lip,   allowing the silence that fell between us tell me everything I needed to know.   Outrage swelled within me like a rising tide.  He didn't think I deserved an explanation, I'm just another pawn caught up in whatever game he's playing,

     ⎯   "Why are you-?...           Are you trying to tick me off ? !" He inhaled.      soft, unruffled. 

      Uncaring.   Not even meeting my eyes.   ⎯  "You are .... your most endearing when you're angry, you know that?"  His words carried on the smoke exiting his lungs, mirroring that pouring out of our home's windows between crashing booms.        — "Direct and honest. ... For once. The right girl will appreciate that about you, you should stop wasting time and find her."   He smiled around the smoldering stick in that way he does when he knows he's made a clever move and wants to say without saying ‘what now?’   I could viscerally feel my flushed rage. He's the only person I know that can belittle me with such a thorny effect, making me feel petulant and ridiculous for expecting anything from him, like he owes me.  ⎯  "You'll put yourself into an early gave with those, B."   I wanted it to be true.    I want to spite him.

Maybe I want him to die right now.   If one of the agents mistook us for intruders and shot him here in the blood-velvet reeds, then my company would be all he had. Then, maybe, he would appreciate that I’m here and what that really means, in spite of it all.    Instead, B pulls the cigarette from his lips and flicks it against his fingers, letting ash fall like loose petals to the breeze.    Careless.    —  "Ironic you would say that ..."   Cryptic.  It's as though he wants to rile me up. He should know by now where he is provocative, I am unrelenting — because I have to be, because I have to survive him.   In my periphery, I take notice of the unfamiliar security moving in our direction and feel a twinge of fear that I should be more careful of what I wish for.  But I don't move, there's nowhere to go and I admit there is an unexpected ounce of relief in the approaching danger. Though I'm not certain where it's from...  — "There are so many... did they bring them here for us? Do you think it has to do with the bioterror case?"  ⎯  " I considered that."    He said with another flick of his cigarette.  —  " But, there's not enough unrest.         No lock down, no interrogations, no medical testing, no travel bans. We’re going head-long into this, it's inevitable. It's a matter of when, not if, but we aren’t there yet... I warned him— about K, about X, about Y— but he won't listen.      I did it, so when this is all over, he'll know I was right and he was wrong."    "He's unreachable..."

—  "He is. But, he would notice I breached security and slipped into his case files and left him a puzzle to follow. If he pieced it together, he knows someone's predicted who won't make it out of this alive."   More than the fire and the guards, I am astonished by his lack of concern for self-preservation.    "Christ— He might think you're part of it!"  — "Maybe. Maybe that's why they are here, because as far as I can see I've either failed or he was never here to begin with."   Bewilderment is followed by a surge of understanding that spreads over me like ice water,     "You did this to flush L out..."         ⎯ " P r o r s u s. "    Exactly.

This is what it feels like to wait for the end of the world  Only for it not to happen...         —    B said nothing.     Battling a remarkably bloodless gratitude, I stumble to find something to say — anything in my lightheaded shock that's replaced the black-buzzing distress... but nothing comes.    He begins to walk away, just as  thank you  begins to form unsteadily in my throat, but there emerges the smallest prick of dissatisfaction at this outcome that leaves me feeling too ashamed of being ungrateful to speak above a whisper .        ... it's a macabre disappointment.     I realize I have been holding onto a poisonous hope that B would show his true colours, that I would be exempt from our abiding alliance, I would have enough reason to take control, —  that my end would be a turning point, that I could choose to burn it all down and not be fated to disappear quietly...      Now, I've returned to the same indecision that will most likely lead to exactly that.       But...  I cannot ponder further how I may outmeuver fate, why he chose to continue a more difficult path with me as an obstacle, nor confront the calamitous fear lurking within me —   I cannot risk the possibility that this will ever be seen.   I cannot justify condemning us both,       though that was my original intention.    In the end,    I didn't want my last chapter written by speculators.  I didn't want the flaws in their design to go unaddressed, the way they must remain while I'm alive to suffer the consequences of failed propriety.        I wanted them to know why.   Now, no one can know these things ...       I'm afraid that no one ever will,         that by the time the real end arrives,           I will not recognize it's here... 

   Of all the secrets I've kept, I think those that I know will die with me terrify me the most.