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Jon wakes up alone, his skin prickling with gooseflesh from the now open window, the shattered glass from the ruined pane surrounding him like a demented halo. It is instinct more than anything that has him sitting up, his palms scraping over the broken glass. If he bleeds, he does not feel it. He is drawn like a puppet on strings to stare out of what remains of the window, his eyes locking on the discolored sprawl of the sky, as the rain pounds down.
It looks back at him.
A sound escapes his ragged throat, sore from speaking. He is unsure if it is a laugh or a sob, and he does not care, in the moment, to differentiate. It is a soft sound, but the running recorder catches it all the same.
The recorder catches it all: the sound of the rain, the sound of his uneven breathing, the distant sounds torn from things that might be throats.
But it is still too quiet.
Jon’s breath catches more violently as reality slowly reinstates itself, with all its awful truths. He cannot tear his gaze from the glimpse of what the world has become from outside the window, and he cannot help but notice that for all the distant screaming, it is too quiet.
He is alone.
It is exactly what he deserves, but it terrifies him beyond all remnants of reason. “Martin?” he gasps, though he is not sure how much of it is intelligible. His throat feels as though something has clawed and crawled its way out of it.
There is no answer.
It is a fumbling process to get to his knees, and then to his feet. His palms, pushing up from the floor, are torn to ribbons and knit new before he can care to feel the pain. “Martin!” he calls out again, strangled, wild eyes tearing around the cabin.
The walls creak at him, as if in laughter.
He does not know what lies out to meet him (he knows, he knows, he knows, and he cannot stop the knowing ) but it doesn’t matter. He flies out of the cabin all the same, skidding in the crimson dirt made slick with rain. He calls Martin’s name into the torrential downpour, screaming it as if his ragged voice might overtake the sounds of suffering that cover every known frequency.
He screams Martin’s name even though he knows, he knows, he knows.
When he reaches the pair of cracked, rounded glasses, overturned, abandoned, in the middle of a wasteland in a place that was once a trailing, gravel-lined road through the rolling, green fields, that is when he understands.
The place where Martin is should be more aptly called the place where he isn’t, because no one is there. The people that are not there know so little about themselves, but even they know that much. The people that are not there know that no one is looking for them. The people that are not there know that no one loves them. The people that are not there know that they are not there, that they will never be, and yet that does not stop the hurting as if they were.
That does not stop them trying to remember what they never have been.
The place that is not there is not a place that Jon can see. The people there are not allowed to be seen.
Jon walks there all the same.
The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. He knows this. The wasteland he has created will not let straight lines exist.
The wasteland he has created and the god that laughs at him from on high would rather the journey be long. So it is.
Jon walks, and though he knows whereabouts the place that is not there is, he cannot see it. He cannot see him, and with every moment he draws closer, he loses another shred of himself, of his mind. He has become convinced that all he needs is more strength, that with just a little more, he could tear through the fog of that not-place and draw him out again.
As it is, those he comes across exist now solely to fill that ravenous need.
The recorder takes to running at all hours. His throat should ache with how much he speaks, with how much he extols, but it does not, though the spaces between the words grow shorter and shorter with each chronicled terror. Eventually, his body supersedes the need to breathe.
Eventually, his throat bubbles with enough blinking, fluttering eyes that it ceases to work entirely.
The recorder crackles and picks a voice for the Archive, and then there is no need for such trivial things as vocal cords. Analog and static overtake voice and breath.
This suits the Archive fine. It can see the place that is not there more clearly now.
The Archive knows the man is here. It knows that the man is crying. It knows the man does not remember. The Archive can only know, as it wanders those foggy halls, its eyes raking over the not-people.
The Archive can only know, though it feels nothing. Nothing that belongs to it, at least. It is too full of fear that is not its own to be anything of itself.
It knows it needs to find the man. It knows there has never been anything more important. It also knows why: because it loves him.
But this means nothing to it.
It knows, but it does not understand.
The Archive stalks into another of those foggy rooms, raking over the shivering, terrified not-man there who looks at it with wide, fearful eyes. And yet, the Archive sees a glimmer of hope in the dull blue of them. The Archive knows that for all the not-man’s fear, he is wondering if the Archive knows who he is. Knows his name.
The Archive does. The Archive will never tell him, because he is not the man it is looking for.
The Archive turns away, though the eyes on the back of its neck linger hungrily on the not-man’s shaking sobs.
The Archive searches single-mindedly, and it no longer understands why. Only that it must.
The Archive looks down on countless more of the not-people, drinking in their unsatisfying terror, before it finds him.
The man is sitting in a chair in the middle of a fog-filled room that has no windows and a ticking clock. The man looks up at his entry, his face pale, leeched of color, tear tracks streaking his round cheeks.
The Archive goes still in the doorway, staring at him.
The man on the chair visibly swallows, staring back with wide eyes, though the Archive can sense that he is not afraid, at least not of it.
“Do...do I know you?” the man on the chair asks. Another tear slips down his cheek, but his sorrow is, for the moment, forgotten.
No one knows anyone here, the Archive should say.
Instead, the word that comes out of the recorder is, simply, “Martin.”
The man on the chair blinks at him, his breath shuddering. “That--”
“Martin,” it cannot help but say again. The word is twisted in the static, but audible.
The man on the chair slowly rises, and he is no longer the man on the chair. “That’s...I’ve heard that name before,” the man says, staring at him with those wide, tear-filled eyes.
There are so many words at the Archive’s disposal. The Archive has its pick of descriptors that could have given voice to the subtle terror in the way the man’s voice trembles because he is afraid of being told otherwise, of being told he is wrong, that he has never had a name at all. The Archive and the recorder that is its throat burns to chronicle that trembling fear.
The only word that comes out of the recorder, broken and cracked, is “Martin.”
The man looks at him, color fading back into his eyes. He takes a step closer, slow and afraid, but determined. “Do I know you?” he says again, but it is less of a question this time, more of an inkling, a looming realization.
The Archive watches as the man comes closer. There are so many things it wants to say. You’re here. I’m sorry. I found you. I love you.
It no longer knows how to say them.
“Martin,” it says instead, choked, through the static of the recorder.
“That’s me,” the man breathes, taking another, quiet step along the floor, “isn’t it. My… my name.”
“Martin,” the Archive says, watching him come closer, a breath away.
“Martin,” Martin echoes, tasting the word in his mouth. He studies the Archive, when it should be the other way around, and says, on a breath, “it’s funny. It sounds more... right when you say it.”
“Martin,” the Archive says, and though there is no emotion in the mechanical way it comes through the recorder, the way the syllables break on the static sounds almost like a sob.
“I know you,” Martin says, his brown eyes soft, roaming over the Archive’s face. They never falter, never catch in terror at the eyes that are no longer in the correct places, no longer of a correct number. His eyes simply look at the whole of it, and they fill with tears again, though he still looks as though he hardly knows why. “What’s your name?”
This is not a question the Archive knows how to answer. It says, “Archive.”
“No,” Martin says, shaking his head. His hands, steadier than they have a right to be, come up to cradle the sides of the Archive’s face. The eyes there flutter closed, twitching against soft palms and then, slowly, sinking back under the skin. “No, that’s not your name.”
Martin looks at it, and the Archive thinks it understands what it must feel like to be Seen.
“Jon,” Martin says, and the Archive shudders, breathes, loses its footing.
Martin follows it to the ground, still cradling its face like it is made of fine china. “Jon,” he says again, and it is too tender a word for such an awful creature.
The Archive shudders again. Ink leaks from the corners of its eyes like tears. “Martin,” the recorder wails.
Martin should be afraid of it. Martin only holds it closer, wrapping his arms around it, pressing his lips against its wiry hair.
“Jon,” Martin breathes, and the Archive knows exactly what that word is full of, the multitudes that that word contains.
And the Archive breathes, lungs spasming, long since unused, the eyes there fluttering closed.
And Jonathan Sims finally says, through his trembling, ruin of a throat, “Martin,” and it still means everything he could ever intend it to mean.