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The scars on Jon’s face made it harder to shave, so he put it off longer than usual these days. He wasn’t taking stubble as a signal anymore, but let his facial hair grow into scruff before he dared take a razor to it. He didn’t like it much. He didn’t really like how he looked with a beard coming in—it was almost dysphoric. But he felt stupid for feeling that way, so he let it happen. His brain was now remarkably adept at accustoming to the constant feeling of imbalance, something warped, something wrong with him, so he assured himself it wasn’t a big deal. He was more worried about taking the opportunity to hurt himself if he tried to shave with that old regularity. He did not think himself suicidal or prone to self-harm, before. But he held the razor up to his face and, in his mind’s eye, he saw himself bringing the knife down on his fingers which refused to detach from his hand, and worried that the question of whether he had those same regenerative abilities under any circumstance of self-harm would be too tantalizing for the Eye inside him. And he felt guilty at the idea of conducting such experiments around Martin, even though Martin wasn’t the all-seer around here. He was.
But it was relatively easy to keep away from the scars on his face. Relatively. The scars on his hands were a different story. He’d always been bad with taking care of his hands: picking at his nails and the skin around them, often until they bled, and often not caring or even noticing when they did. He just didn’t like having nails longer than the bare minimum, or having his skin toughen and callus around them, and once he started, he didn’t care enough to stop. His fingertips were often raw, stinging. It worsened after Prentiss. He couldn’t help but pick at the scabs. The little hole in the center of his left thumb pad was the one he had irritated the most. And then he was plenty preoccupied with bothering the burns gifted from Jude to his right hand. They were all healed now, scarred over, but he certainly hadn’t made it quite that easy for his body to repair itself.
A bad habit was what it was. Like the bad habit he’d recently gotten into of staring down strangers until they surrendered their worst memories to him. He’d been forced to stop that one. But at least he still had this one, he thought defensively, degradingly, guiltily.
He wondered if Michael had felt guilty about the first few people he lured into that yellow door, like Helen said she had. Maybe he hadn’t, because the resentment inside of him had to be taken out on someone, and the thing that he became had to be fed. Maybe at first he hadn’t felt resentment at all. Just the same willingness to destroy himself in order to protect others that Jon had felt going into the Buried. Or maybe Michael had only felt that fear. Maybe he’d never stopped being afraid, right up until the knob that opened into Jon’s death refused to move in his long, clawed hands.
It made Jon’s head hurt to think about avatars of the Spiral. Sometimes he thought he was beginning to understand, what with the unending sensation of wax being melted and reformed into an impossible shape that followed him nowadays, from his first waking moments into his dreams. But he was probably underestimating the amount of identity confusion that came with becoming part of the Spiral. All the other avatars he’d met seemed comparatively stable: monsters, but comfortable in their monstrosity. Maybe he was the outlier there.
Then he thought about Martin, though. Martin was an outlier in that way, too. He remembered what Martin said: “You know, I think it always did.” Martin had fought his god, too. Jon trusted Martin to be a better person than him. Martin was better than him at not hurting people. He remembered what Martin said: “Nothing hurts here. It’s just quiet. Even the fear is gentle here.” Fear of what? Hurting other people? He shouldn’t have to fear that. He was so much better at avoiding it than Jon was.
He remembered what Martin said: “You don’t want to blind yourself. You don’t want to die. What you want is a reason not to do those things, so you come to me.” Jon trusted Martin’s perception of him better than his own. So he tried not to think about the way he was peeling his skin off, the resurfacing memories of attempted amputation, and what that meant about what he wanted. He could believe in the mindlessness of it. He could not trust himself.
He remembered what Martin said: “Everyone’s alone, but we all survive.” He didn’t want to survive. Just survive, he meant. He didn’t want to melt. He didn’t want to starve. He’d gone to Basira and Daisy, Georgie and Melanie, Helen—all in that time of indecision. All because he could not survive alone.
He remembered what Martin said: “I really loved you, you know?” He didn’t know. He couldn’t ask. He couldn’t open his mouth, move his lips in such a way to form the question. He couldn’t take the answer from Martin, either. Even though he was so hungry for it.
Was Martin hungry, too? Was it the Lonely’s hunger, or was it his own?
Jon rubbed his eyes under his dust-coated glasses. He was thinking too much about other people. Questioning things in them that he couldn’t even answer in himself. Kind of pathetic, really, since his whole thing was supposed to be knowing. But he guessed the sight the Eye had given him did not encompass self-knowledge. That was probably the point from which he and Jonah diverged. Jonah had never needed the Eye to be sure of himself. But the more Jon felt himself sinking into its great iris, becoming its pupil, the more he felt himself forgetting how to move at all.
He pressed his palms aggressively into his eye sockets. Thinking again. Think about something else.
He looked out of one of the cottage’s few windows. Cream curtains drawn open. Grass stretching out in gentle rolling hills. Poa pratensis, he knew.
“You’re useless,” he said to the Eye, which did not blink.
He fell asleep at some point. The inability to distinguish the exact moment at which he ceased to be awake was pronounced in him. He wandered in a land of monsters, but for once, they weren’t the literal ones that often tried to kill him and those around him. They were things like failure and shame, which had no faces, but he could see them as well as feel them: sharp stabs between his shoulder blades, dull aches under his knuckles.
He wondered where abstract fears, like those of responsibility or intimacy, fit in with the entities. He doubted that such fears were not powerful enough among the human population to warrant emerging as entities. So they must be subcategories within the existing ones. He wondered: was responsibility the Web, an obligation to things that you cannot control, or the Buried, being crushed under the weight of things you cannot handle? Was intimacy the Flesh, the body itself, or the Eye, being known? Maybe there were different flavors of each. After all, the entities themselves bled into each other, a terrible watercolor that he found himself walking through each day.
He wandered in a land of monsters until he found Helen’s yellow door. It opened soundlessly and he realized the dream had been silent all along. He walked through the hallway and looked at himself as he passed by each tall, ornate mirror. His hair was long. He needed to shave, but he would wait a few more days.
He blinked at himself, with all of his eyes. He blinked again and saw more. He was scared he was going to starve to death, and he was scared of his next meal. Maybe if he got lost in the hallways, he wouldn’t need to eat. Or sleep, and dream. He never saw Helen do any of those things. Then again, he hadn’t seen her in a while.
He kept walking and staring at himself. He wasn’t looking where he was going, he was only looking at his eyes and they were looking back at him, but he knew when to go straight and when to turn. He felt a small twinge of disappointment in his empty stomach when he realized this couldn’t really be Helen’s hallway, because the layout made too much sense. He stopped walking and realized that since he was dreaming, he didn’t actually need to blink. He got many more eyes after that, and he just stared at them and their impossible existence and long lashes until he woke up to cows mooing in the distance.
The Eye didn’t tell him how long he’d been asleep for, and he didn’t really need it to because it felt like he hadn’t slept at all. He didn’t know where Martin was, and the Eye didn’t tell him that either, so he just sat and waited for the next tangent to enter his mind, like an iron pole entering his skull.