Serialised novel:

EDVARD TUSK: without his face

A novel by Pablo D’Stair

[Part 11]

The sound of a baying train reminded me of the orange tone of late night parking lot lights caught in mist, in predawn or set in relief against the purple of a sky promising coming rain, put me in mind of wandering youthful heartbreak, a listless sense of joblessness but no obligations—little memories of middle of the night early-twenties roaming, cold nosed, smoking a cigarette and waiting for a lover while formulating an excuse I’d give to my girlfriend for my tardiness were lazily over me, a sting to my eyes from fatigue.

I was sitting up on the bed, some of the room lights on and an odour of stale to everything—my orientation seemed wrong and when I lay back (yes, there was an inside-outness to the room) it seemed distinctly I should have been facing the wall in a different direction.

I chuckled, recalling tenderly how I’d played that game as a child of making myself feel I was facing one direction instead of another, willing myself to feel stood when rested the floor—but soon the ache was more pronounced and I sat up, doubled over, bringing my hand to my face, the contact causing me to yelp, excruciating pain turning my stomach and making my next breath feel caught in the spine at the back of my neck.

I was bloodied, my hand seemed mutilated and was caked in a semi-moist scab all the way into each crevice between fingers, my arm shaking, tingling limp from lack of circulation, shirtsleeve a gore, blood around the sheets, my pants, the odour now a weighted presence the same as if two people were seated, crowded to me.

I began to shudder, spasm, no control, and my eyes shut, blood and air gnarling in competing hisses behind them, chugging sounds rising from my gut to my nose, ears clogging, clearing, each time with a screech like two porcelain balls being ground into each other.

Woman

I tried to stand, but immediately (almost farcically) my legs went out from under me—it was as though I had no legs, a truncated torso hopping from bed to carpet, needles of nausea riffling through me as my leg numbed and twitched involuntarily from the odd angle I had landed on it.

And I saw a shape—thick—of a woman on the floor. I knew instantly that is what I was looking at—a woman—but stared—all else calm, suddenly no pain—for an amount of time that felt instant and month long—tilting my eyes about as though idly trying to figure out what the thing could be (just some shape, a shadow crossing another resembling something, a cloud that almost looked like something but was drifting just exactly too quickly to focus on the impulse of recognition). It stung when I tried to stand (ridiculous, I didn’t move an inch, felt like veins snapped from upward strain, a flower trying to tense itself out by the root) and then—I think I was crying, the sound of a whine and something like a starving cat begging seemed around me but also outside of me—scootched myself, tick by tick, rough tugs of whole self, as far from the sight as I could.

Pictures

Backing against the room wall, the body still visible, I averted my eyes to the television screen and clapped them there, fast, wanting the faint hiss of the flickered pictures to burn them out, corkscrew out my understanding after, somehow dissolve me into two dimension some finger would click off, power outage disappear. Had I been abducted—someone taken me in my sleep? Did they know I was still alive? Were they coming back for me? How long had I been in this room—was it the same motel even (it seemed it, yet didn’t) or had I been transported, unawares?

These questions (a madcap succession of them, out-of-body, as though I was flipping through a television programming guide, the synopsis blurring together into a paper-grey, ink-black tinted breeze to my face) assailed me and it was only the returning of the pain—thundering and omnipresent, my total body just a sack of anguish—that broke me to the more immediate concern of discovering how wounded I was.

(Was that woman dead?)

I blubbered as I peeled my shirt from my body, cringed at the pain to my fingertips undoing my pants front, squirming free of them.

I could not tell where I was hurt, other than the gash to my arm, the full pierce through my hand—my head now heavy, as though filling with muddied fluid, the fear that my legs were broken, perhaps my skull fractured, that whoever had been my assailant had left me alive only because they knew I would not last, would roil out slow, my last moments nothing more than the ripple on the water of a cheap toilet only half-flushing.

Detachment

Then a wave of absolute quiet, my head tipping forward, warmly and with detachment, watching my chest brown with splotches of blood from my face (or from the ceiling, I felt I didn’t even care which) an balmy protective sense of closeness around me, as though sleep would take over and I’d dimly dream myself out of my physicality, get lost in torrents of random half-thoughts manifesting themselves in languid afternoon nap sensations.

Maybe, this was the moment in a dream where the dream feels unendingly real but will be woken from, that maybe this was the moment in every sleep one might so pressingly feel but never recall (a theory that I had always entertained as a child, that there is a series of questions one asks every night before sleeping.

When the distinct sensation of knowing one is waking every morning come, absolute but questions which could not be recorded by the brain, new each time, life ticking them each day into a kind of cumulative sense of delirium, some residue left that by old age would become either a comfort or terror when, knowing one is asleep, the questions do not return—this the knowledge of death which, as with waking and sleeping, will be wholly known and irrevocably unknown).

Nonsense

But these nonsense ideas petered out. I even made fun of myself—breathing hard down my nose to see if I could increase the spillage of blood I now knew was leaking from there—cat-calling my ineffectual philosophy, mocking my feeble mind for not even being coherent to itself.

“The hell to do you mean?” I heard (kind of) a voice like mine through a pile of damp cloth asking, some hint of a lilt to its pronunciation that it was putting on airs of treating this as a joke, crease lines of terror, though, sounding through in each syllable.

I called to the woman—though I doubted it was audible, didn’t know was I calling or pretending a scenario where I was—asking was she alright, was she alive, if she could just move even the teensiest shift to let me know. And my eyes closed—head swimming with pictures as though I was watching her sit herself upright, feel at her face, adjust it as though a party mask left on, her just having passed out drunk—then when they opened she was moving toward me, almost upon me, the shock of this sight so powerful my body returned to its full strength.

She was brandishing something sharp, thin, brought it down into my leg before I was able to take her by the neck and heave her, face first, into the wall beside me (sound of the impact, the granular give beneath my gripping palm sickening) her full weight immediately resting on me.

As I pulled the weapon from my leg and (without thinking) stabbed it into her (some indeterminate portion of her back or side) while I got standing, staggered a step, the struggle ended now all sense of power leaving me (thankfully I wound up on the bed, facedown into mattresses covers and vaguely worried I wound drown in the wet of my own breathing.)A distinct sense of knowing what time it was, how long it had been since my return from the restaurant came over me.

I became cognizant of (it felt exactly) how long the span of time between my lying in bed in my room tracing ceiling shapes (this was not my room, another knowledge assuredly absolute) and coming to, sitting on the bedside in this room, just fifteen, twenty minutes earlier.

But just as distinctly, I felt the gouge of missing memory for the time between those two points, no whisper of image, merely a tactile sense of excised time (the same as it would feel to know a doctor had removed a rib—or rather it felt like I was physically aware of wet clay having been sewn into me, tucked into some recess no amount of feeling my outside would reveal).