Hang On To Yourself
by Lyle Hopwood
part 1
I wake, exhausted.
His plaintive seagull screech rises unattenuated.
Richard Robinson, I think. You bastard.
Beside me, Taira wakes in one moment from deep sleep to full alertness. “Richard Robinson,” she says. She does not frame it as a question.
“That awful bookstore...” I begin. I shake my head to clear it. The motion only solidifies the feeling of intense weight crammed into my skull. “His damp bookstore. And that city. I can’t bear to return, Taira. A metropolis teeming with prehumans.”
Taira holds me. It’s no use. Human sinews cannot anchor me here. When his call comes, I’ll slip away again. I can hear him now, that screech, that siren call.
“Why did he link to me? We have nothing in common. There’s no morphic resonance linking him to me over thousands of years, no chain to bind us together.”
Taira does not answer immediately. The sky, visible through the glass arch of our home, our taiga doma, lightens visibly, the colors saturating. We watch in silence. “In the dawn light,” she says at last, “you will not be so melancholy.”
The line suddenly pulls tight. It grabs at my gut, not my head. I know where the tug leads. For a moment, I smell the damp pulp of a mass of paperback books. Then the line slackens, and Richard Robinson’s keening wail fades, at least for the time being.
“How does it happen?” I ask Taira, though she knows no more than I. “We hate each other. They imagine we parasitize them, and we consider them monsters. We sicken each other.”
Richard’s perpetual cry of inadequacy and despair grows louder. It underlies everything about him. And, therefore, me.
Taira raises her voice, knowing it drowns out the ambient scream. “There are so many of them. Millions in New York alone, and only nine hundred of us. You were bound to be called, Pavl. You cannot break the connection. You must find some pleasure in being there. It’s the only way.”
I feel the last supports, drawn out thin, snap and fail. Headlong, I rush into blazing light. Catching my breath, I look down. I see not my feet, but the leather shoes of Richard Robinson. Surrounding me, I see the miserable rotting volumes of Richard’s beloved bookstore.
Their greater number is not an explanation, I decide. If that were all, they would call each other. But they choose my kind.
The customers — there are several — turn to look at the wobbling Richard Robinson in concern. I straighten up and wave my arms, shooing them like sheep. The customers part, blubbing backwards like fish seen through the glass of a bowl. I hear them whisper, “Taken! Taken!” and push out through the door.
I run the ill-fitting Richard body back to the verminous Richard apartment. I lock the door, Richard’s chest heaving with exertion, and sit him awkwardly on the floor.
Not quite the same articulation of the knees.
Now, I must make him let me go. I have tried this before, always unsuccessfully.
I am unsuccessful again. Richard lies on the floor, his thin internal wail surrounding us and defining the limit of our dyad. He stares miserably at the blisters on his scalded hands. The pain I caused has not made him let me go.
That cry! Literally, a lost soul’s lament. It burns like a drip of acid. Abruptly regretting the torture, I climb to Richard’s feet and head for the door. A walk may clear my thoughts. If I am to be confined here, I may as well learn my way around. From his head, I drag the location of his cohort’s bar.
Leaving the door open — Richard looks wild-eyed back at it, but it’s too late — I limp him to the street. Faces turn to him as he passes. There’s a whisper that follows him. More and more. The last days. An epidemic. An invasion of parasites. Richard’s eyes drag along the scene, resigned and uninterested. I snatch a newspaper from a passerby and walk on, ignoring the protest. I try to read and move Richard along the sidewalk. The headlines I can make out, but the small print requires Richard’s cooperation, and every word is a modulation of his constant thin scream.
Oh, Taira. How do I get back to you? This filthy city, its rats and cockroaches, its people, makes me miserable. There’s nothing here to compare with my beautiful doma and my uncomplicated world. How do the other Riders bear it? Taira has told me some even enjoy it.
I push through the door of the bar, shouldering the standing drinkers aside. They part without protest, sensing even in the gloom my presence animating Richard. I seat him at a table and acquire a drink. Richard’s automatic reactions carry him through transactions like this. The first time, he had been afraid. Now this coxwainship has become familiar to him.
“Richard?” We look up. A woman stands over him. Richard recognizes her and his heart beats faster. The scream that fills his psyche swells.
No, I think. Not a woman. Taira is a woman. This prehuman is a she, at best.
“I followed you in. Buy me a drink? I need someone to talk to.”
Buy it a drink? The situation gradually clarifies, as I drag clues to contemporary behavior from the unwilling residue of Richard. Buy her a drink. Comfort her. Take her home and comfort her more personally.
* * *
Oh, Richard. You are transparent to me. Your motives are base and your methods crude. Your failures are many. No wonder you send those mental fishhooks into my opal doma to drag me back. Even I can improve on your efforts, and you know it!
I listen for my taunt to cause a change in the modulation of his constant shriek. I don’t hear one, but I realize something for the first time: the horror he feels lurks not inside him but under him, like a creature entombed alive beneath a dirt floor. The howl of despair emanates from an existence as far below Richard as he is below me.
The she names a drink for me, and I reproduce the words phonetically for the barkeep. I am not surprised to see the glass filled with a blood-red fluid. I watch her drink as she reads the newspaper, upside down to her, without difficulty. My world supports no wild animals. I have no key to handling the bloodthirsty female. But I know she will speak when ready.
I realize I have been running Richard’s finger around the wet rim of his glass, producing a singing tone from the slip-stick effect. She looks up, suddenly, and Richard’s finger produces a squeak that shocks our finger. I stop, embarrassed. If she notices Taken oddness around Richard, she does not remark on it.
Perhaps Richard is odd anyway.
She speaks to him. “My priest told us Satan is getting stronger.”
I make a noncommittal noise in Richard’s throat.
“But I don’t agree. I think we are getting weaker. It’s not like something evil forces its way inside. It’s more like... this is what happens when nobody’s home.”
I make an encouraging noise.
“People no longer have enough personality to hang on to themselves.”
I wonder if that’s correct. Nature abhors a vacuum. Richard is definitionally vacant.
I watch the way her chin moves as she talks. She’s so unlike Taira, yet a true antecedent. The lines of construction are the same. The balance of the head on the torso. I realize I am staring. I speak to cover it. “People need to discover their purpose in life and pursue it relentlessly.” I am unsure if I have supported her thesis, but it feels correct.
She smiles and raises her Bloody Mary. “Dear old Richard.”
I raise my drink, and she notices my hands for the first time.
“Did you burn yourself?”
“Accident. Hot coffee.”
“You need burn cream.” She snaps into a brisk efficiency.
I remember Richard’s plans for her. “Why don’t we go back to my place and I’ll find some?” I ask. I stand and try to fold my newspaper. It crumples into a shapeless heap, and I leave it behind.
Richard’s loser scream changes pitch, protesting the move.
We walk along the sidewalk, her arm in mine. Some pedestrians sense the wrongness and cringe away. She notices none of this. The hard edges of the concrete buildings unfocus as we approach, the perspective skews, as if seen through an odd lens. Uprights lean away. I smell the scent of Taira, and the sun dims as twilight reestablishes itself.
And I’m lying in the doma, Taira’s beautiful form above me. “I could tell you were coming back,” she smiles. “You were stirring for a while. Aren’t you glad to be out of his mildewy bookstore?”
I nod, disoriented. She leaves to prepare food. In her absence, my head sings with the nausea of temporal dislocation. If that’s what it is. Perhaps I have lost my grip on reality. No, I’ve lived here all my life. And I could not conjure an apparition as complex as Taira.
“I’m so glad to be back!” I shout across at Taira, and she smiles at me. But deep in the recesses of my mind, unwanted, I can hear Richard Robinson’s unappeasable wail. Still demanding, like a fretting infant, someone to come along and solve his problems. My mood retrenches. “Talk to me. About anything. It anchors me. Tell me again why the protohumans died out.”
“The protohumans — the City People — died out in the twenty-first century, less than a generation after your Richard Robinson. What records we have show that they gradually fell into anarchy.”
“Go on.”
“Our culture arose from the ashes of theirs. Because we can’t date the interregnum accurately, we don’t know how long it took. Guesses range from one to two hundred thousand years.”
“Why did they die?”
“Faced with insurmountable problems, they abdicated their own lives. Their existence was hateful to them. Some natural law of resonance called in a successor.”
Her words echo the City Dwellers’ so closely that I sense déjà vu, doubled, as if I had two skins. The two borders to my being are not precisely contiguous. The feeling of unreality grows.
“Why don’t the City People receive our bodies when we leave?” It seems to me that there should be a reciprocity.
“I don’t know. Perhaps, in the thousands of years, our bodies have outgrown their skills. Who cares?”
“And their abdication led to the Dissolution of the Cities?”
She pauses. “No, we led to that.”
The link destroyed them, but it must equally destroy us. We are inextricably bound.
“Pavl, there is only one thing you can do to ease the pain: build a life you can enjoy, so you spend your time as Richard Robinson in contentment. Promise me that you will do that.” She is preparing for a trip, and she is worried what will happen while she is gone.
* * *
Copyright © 2023 by Lyle Hopwood
