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He drives home with half an eye on Rust, afraid he’s going to expire right there in the fucking passenger seat because wouldn’t that just be like him.
Swears to God the road never used to be this bumpy. If he was taking it any slower they’d be in neutral and still every jolt of the car draws a tiny switchblade breath from Rust, like he’s shaking apart at the seams.
“Just drive, Marty,” and there he goes again, answering a question Marty never asked out loud.
When they arrive, he starts to think it was a goddamn catastrophic idea to take Rust out of the hospital. He’s been gutted at his core, and whatever adrenalin rush had carried him through the parking lot is gone. Marty stands at the open car door and tries to help him stand, but this is what you call a doomed venture.
Rust is silent, drawn. Defeated.
“Come on,” and he gets one hand under Rust’s knees and the other around his shoulders, bears his weight. He’s not heavy, which is a concern.
“You gonna carry me across the threshold now?”
“Yeah. That gonna be a problem?”
“Just never had you pegged as the sweeping kind, Marty.”
He holds up one middle finger behind Rust’s left shoulder, beyond his field of vision. Pretty sure he saw it anyway.
*~*
Maggie calls. Word travels fast at the nurses station.
“What in the hell are you thinking?” she half-hisses down the phone, like she’s trying to breathe the words right into his brain.
“Right now, I’m mostly thinking how it’s nice to be home.”
“Don’t be cute. You were never any good at it. The kind of internal injuries he’s got, he was barely fit to be in a wheelchair, never mind whatever the hell the two of you are doing.”
“He’s sleeping, for Christ’s sake. He wanted to get out of there–“ and he cuts himself off before he says the part about how Rust’s spent enough of his life in hospitals, because does she know this? No need to blur the lines further.
She sighs.
“Make sure he doesn’t raise his arms above his head. Nothing that’s gonna engage his core. If he rips those stitches out…”
“I know.”
*~*
The first time he hears Rust crying in his sleep, he tries not to listen. Feels like he’s intruding, never mind it’s in his own living room.
He used to be better at not hearing things.
Maggie had sent over a script for sleeping pills, knowing Rust as she did. They work.
He hovers in the doorway for too long, not turning round, not leaving. Imagining what happens behind Rust’s eyelids.
His own dreams are strange, now. Not quite dark and not quite bad, but fluid. He’ll be in the old house with Maggie and the girls, sun, life, but the air will feel wrong and their voices will sound afraid, and the sense of vague dread will hover over him all day after he wakes.
He never dreams of Carcosa, nor the Childress house, and for that much he’s grateful. Has to wonder, though, what deep corner of his mind they’ve been folded into.
*~*
“I’m curious. Which part of your philosophy dictates that a man must leave his hair uncut to the point of decomposition?”
“Grooming is what happens when pageantry meets convention. Man’s twin impulses to please his fellow man and to deny the inevitable decay of his own form.”
“Oh, Christ. Forget I asked.”
“Lucky for you, my outlook on all this means I’m not gonna put up much resistance when you come at me with those scissors in your back pocket.”
Rust and his goddamned third eye.
“Yeah, well, here’s the thing of it – I figure either you ain’t gonna be washing your hair for the foreseeable, or I’m gonna be doing it for you. Either way, that business needs to go.”
“Have at it, Marty,” Rust shrugs. “There’s a kind of rightness in you cutting away years of dead cells from my head.”
Marty doesn’t know exactly what to make of that. But he sure takes pleasure in throwing that coil of matted hair in the dumpster. Has a weird momentary impulse to burn it.
*~*
He’s positive Rust doesn’t know he’s doing it.
Over breakfast he watches for any hint of anything, acknowledgement, shame, rage. Nothing.
Marty had hovered beside him for a long time last night, even sat on the edge of the bed and reached out, because the sounds coming from Rust were making him ache.
What had stopped him? Damned if he knows any more. He wants to ask Rust about dreams and his daughter and his definitions.
“You gotta get your stitches out,” is what he says instead.
“Mmm. When?”
“This afternoon. They’ll tape it up, apparently. And we gotta go out to eat after. Somewhere that serves actual food.”
He’s lost weight from all this – no great tragedy there – but it’s Rust who still looks like a bag of bones and Marty can’t shake the feeling he won’t recover, not fully, not like this.
“Why’s that?”
“Because neither of us can cook for shit, and you’re about three missed meals away from extinction.”
Rust sips his black coffee in silent accord.
The meal turns out to be one of Marty’s better ideas. The food is great and the beer is better and for the first time in months he doesn’t feel like there’s a lead weight in his chest.
Rust gets to talking about a case he worked back in narco, an undercover job that required him to play dumb, like educationally subnormal dumb. It has more comedy to it than tragedy and it’s the closest he’s going to get to shooting the shit with Rust Cohle.
“It was always smooth for me, undercover, checking into someone else’s skin. Any human life is a series of masks; mine were just conscious. And constructive.”
“And you were good at playing dumb.”
“I was too good, man. Whole days passed and I could swear my head had been empty. Thinking in words, not sentences. Concepts. The broad strokes. Felt natural, after a while.”
“There’s a pretty fine line between a guy who talks slow and deliberate ‘cause he’s a genius, and a guy who talks slow and deliberate ‘cause he’s slow.”
“Correct. And it got me to thinking how much easier life would be. For those stupefied souls with double-digit IQs, ain’t nothing much that fazes them. Just getting through the day’s all. Fantasy football, blooming onions, one base instinct to the next. Oblivious. No room in their heads for trouble.”
“Did anyone ever tell you you’re sort of a superior son of a bitch?”
Rust looks at him, hard.
“You still playing that card, huh?”
“What card would that be?”
“You always liked to figure yourself the everyman. Meat-and-potatoes, simple pleasures, not much of a thinker. Couldn’t relate to a word I said. Far as I see there’s no cause to pretend any more.”
He doesn’t answer.
“You and me, we ain’t separate like we were, Marty. What’s in your head’s in my head.”
“I can positively say I don’t have the faintest notion of what’s in your head, Rust.”
He wishes Rust would stop looking at him.
*~*
It’s four nights before he hears it again.
“Rust,” he says out loud before even thinking about it, walking straight towards the couch. No more.
He’s dead to the world, curled on his side and twisted up, shaking so hard Marty can almost feel the strain of it on his newly sewn-together skin.
“Rust,” he whispers like a prayer, shakes him. Runs a hand across his salty-wet cheek. “Hey.”
And then I woke up, he’d told Marty at the hospital, and of all the broken things he’d ever said this was the worst.
“What are you seeing?” he murmurs now, gripping Rust’s trembling shoulder, trying to anchor him down.
He remembers a night seventeen years ago, January of ’95. Rust at his door for dinner, drunk. Shaking. Shaken. Drinking coffee and trying hard to hold it together, and even before Marty knew why it struck him as sad, the way pain seeped from Rust like pheromones.
There are places where the light can’t reach.
Rust keens like he’s coming apart, and Marty pulls him upright as soft as he can manage and holds him close, saying Rust, Rust, Rust.
The last time he’d held Rust, in the devil temple they’d both thought was the end of all things, he had barely made a sound. A gaping hole in his gut and he’d never looked more at peace.
Now he cleaves to Marty with an iron grip and sobs, no longer asleep at all, and there’s a part of him that still hopes never to wake up, every time. Marty can feel this on him, the hopeless rage at still existing.
He says ssssh without meaning anything by it, because he’s not interested in quieting Rust. This noise feels essential, like when the air is clammy and the storm’s all that will clear it.
Sssssh. The sound has something of the wind about it, like white noise.
Later, Rust lies against him and feels impossibly small, face jammed into the right angle where Marty’s shoulder meets his neck. He thinks he falls asleep awhile, maybe, but time starts to lose meaning and the night feels endless. When he closes his eyes, he sees spirals.
In the darkness, they clasp together.