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Chapter Text

Doc Worth gets me a job as a nurse, and after that Worth's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, to conquer death you only gotta die. For a while though, Worth and I were something very nearly like friends.

People are always asking me if I know Doc Worth.

With the barrel of the gun knocking against the roof of my mouth, Worth says, "we ain't gonna die, really."

I know this gun. It was the first gun I ever held. In England you don't just hold a gun, like you hold a coffee cup, the way people around here do. I picked it up pretty quickly. There's something user-friendly about guns, like they want you to shoot them, neat little safety buttons and smooth-pull triggers brushing up into your fingers.

Shooting came natural to me.

"This here," Doc Worth says, "this ain't death. We're gonna be legends, carry on walkin' while the rest'a these bastards get old. Waste away. Get th' fuckin' Alzheimer's."

I tongue the barrel into my cheek and say, Worth, you terrible cunt, you're thinking of vampires.

The building we're standing on won't be here in another ten minutes.

There's about a million ways to make an explosive. Doc Worth knows them all. And me, I know them too, because Worth knows them. A lot of people think that it's some big secret, the making of bombs. If everyone could make them, thing would be blowing up all the time, right? That's what I thought, anyhow. But it's easy. All you need are the ingredients.

The building we're standing on won't be here in ten minutes. If you take enough blasting gelatin and wrap it around the foundations columns, you can topple any building in the world. The trick is directing the blast where it needs to go—it's all science, all delicate theoretical precision and dirty, practical application wrapped up in one. Focus the destructive force. Think clearly. Tamp it down with sandbags.

Once upon a time, I wouldn't have thought Worth was capable of this. Now I know better.

Worth and I, at the edge of the roof, and the chartreuse dawn breaking over the jagged edge of downtown. I really hope this gun is clean. I know it probably isn't, but I can't do much about that.

Guns taste like iron and soot.

This gun had better be clean.

The world trade center went down vertically. It collapsed like a star sinking into a black hole, sucking up a chunk of city into its empty space. The place where we're standing is going to be a point in the sky, negative space, in just a couple minutes. Somehow that's more unsettling than the fact that Worth has a bullet aimed at my reptile brain, ready to send me tumbling down to a void just like this god damn building. That reality is somehow more comprehensible than the idea that in a couple minutes, there won't be any way to return to where I'm standing now.

That old saying, how you always kill the one you love? Well you never stop and think that the one you love might kill you first.

"This's our world now," Worth says, grinning down the sights, "yers 'n mine. Don't belong ter none'a them dust bags, no goddamn George Washington's gonna take credit fer it now."

Looking crosseyed down at this one last thing standing between me and Worth, it hits like a baseball to the head that this isn't really about philosophy at all. Well. Maybe it is. But Doc Worth's philosophy isn't like regular philosophy.

This is about Hanna.

Worth and Hanna and I. Hanna wants me, Worth wants Hanna, I want… something. We all want something. We want too many things. Worth always sees the clear solution, the bright white laser line between point A and point B. Worth always knows exactly what to do to get what he wants. After a while, you get used to it, you start relying on it, even. Accidentally or on purpose.

This isn't about love as in caring. This is about property as in ownership.

Worth may know what to do, but Worth's solutions are as cold and razor-edged as the scalpel he carries loose in his pockets. Just as precisely efficient.

Maybe he's got a point about the legend thing. Maybe not. No, I say, just wait a second. Nobody knows the whole story, not like I do, right?

Dawn is breaking.

I tongue the barrel of the gun to one side, soot and saliva, and I say, if this is about being a legend, Worth listen, I can make you a legend. If we go out here, nobody knows. But I know, and I can make it happen. I can make you a legend. I was here from the beginning.

I remember the whole goddamn thing.

All of it.

-X-

It's a year ago.

The bench in front of me squeaks, screws older than I am protesting under the oncoming weight of another body. It's amazing how much body we lug around. Pounds of fat and bone wrapped up in a thin pink case, slung around under the power of a brain twice the size of a fist. Marionette limbs dangling from their wooden cross.

The man sitting beside me gets up, after a few uneasy seconds of wringing his hands, wondering if he has anything worth saying. It's his second time coming to group, and he's not sure, not yet, that anyone cares. Of course no one cares. When you stand up on the podium and tell the room how your sheets are a suckered monster wrestling you into the lightless thousand pound atmospheres in the deepest trenches of the ocean, nobody sees you standing there. Nobody hears you talking. They're too busy hearing themselves saying the same thing.

I never speak.

I've been coming for a couple years.

You walk down the street and everything from the color of your shoes to the expression on your face is a wide open display for the rest of the world. You brush your hair, shave whatever you've been told to shave. You hear female coworkers talking about each other's shoes, writing up their critiques on the living art performance they're putting on for each other. Tonight's exhibit, Marylin's undisguised crow's feet. Tomorrow night, Marylin's undisguised suicide.

You spend your whole life trying to be perfect, and you think that if you just please this one person—one more person, you've just got to get it right one more time—eventually you'll stumble your way into some kind of fucking nirvana where everything is exactly, effortlessly right and you won't have to worry about pleasing anyone ever again. You'll be a conduit. You'll be perfect.

At group, no one is looking at you. And if they are, you've at least got the satisfaction of knowing they're just as miserable—maybe more miserable, you can only imagine—as you.

The man next to me gets up. He's pretty young, actually. Possibly not even old enough to drink? There's just a split frame of a second where his eyes are toxic dump-grounds green and pointed right at me, and he looks so jagged at the edges that I wonder what kind of anvil life slammed him down on.

When I first started going to group, I held my shoulders a lot like his. It takes a long time to fully grasp the idea that they want you to be miserable here. At group you soak yourself in misery, feed on it, wrap your shaking fingers around its neck while the organizer goes on and on about coping mechanisms. Every group is different. Tonight's is for abuse victims.

My first group was for depression. When my last shrink moved away years ago—he never said why, and you don't just pry into your shrink's life—he pointed me toward group therapy as a kind of concession for leaving so suddenly. I think that must have been the last one my mother signed me on with, and he'd lingered in my life long after I slammed the window down between my mother and I. At the end of our last session he pulled a sheet off a tiny notebook, small enough to be a kid's journal.

"Here," he'd said, "I know you'll want to find a new psychiatrist soon, but I'd urge you not to snap up the first one you see. Take your time, find somebody right for you. In the mean time, I think you should go visit one of the depression groups in town. Talk to some people who know what it's like."

I didn't go.

The kid with the sizzling green eyes stalks up to the podium. You don't have to say anything here that you don't want to say, and the councilor reminds him gently, as his crooked fingers—bones mishealed?—grip the podium edges.

"I'm Veser," he tells us, snapping it out in front of him like a banner, ready for battle. "I don't want to be here."

Later, I'm standing in the middle of the room during the portion at the end where they encourage us to share our stories one on one, bond with each other, cry a little. Veser finds me, his hands tucked into his pockets, like a dog scenting out the tracks of some unidentifiable animal. Lion or bear? Rabbit or rat?

"This is so dumb," he says to me. God, he really is young, isn't he? There's a hopeful note buried under the camaraderie of that proffered cynicism. He's not fooling anyone.

I tell him not to be a judgmental douche, because even group night can't make me perfect.

Fast forward to eleven months ago. It's abuse victim night. I carry all the ghosts of all the bruises and broken bones of my fellow group-goers to a seat on the bench in the basement of an Episcopal church smashed between three stories of insurance sales and a law firm. Down in the basement, the whole squashed building opens up like a second big bang, full of florescent lighting and half-eaten donuts. Veser goes up to the podium for the second time, tells us that his mother disappeared over the last week. He doesn't know why he's sharing with us.

By the half-eaten donuts on the plywood table, he wrings a Styrofoam coffee cup down to clump of springy white flakes.

I ask him if he's okay.

"I didn't even love her," he replies. Flakes shred into smaller flakes. It's snowing in the basement of an Episcopal church smashed between three stories of insurance and a law firm. "She was a shitty fucking mother. I don't even care."

Okay, I say.

"She didn't love me," he says, "it's not like I didn't know. I'm lucky she didn't drown me in the bathtub."

Okay, I say.

"It doesn't matter where she went," he says. "I wasn't planning on seeing either of them ever again anyways."

Okay, I say.

"I'm not crying," he says.

I think you kind of are, I reply.

Veser Hatch cried, and suddenly everything was beautiful. I told him everything he wanted to hear. That night I was an empty vessel. I was a funnel for all the ugly crackling wretchedness of the world to come pouring through. I am the sewer system. I told him that it's not dumb, not really; I told him that we're all miserable in the same way, and it's better to be miserable together than miserable alone. I told him that love doesn't matter, because you can't untie yourself from people by not loving them.

I told him all the horrible, beautiful thing he ever wanted to hear.

And I was perfect.

-x-

Group therapy is how I met Veser Hatch. It's also how I met Hanna Falk Cross.

Hanna is the worst thing that's happened to me in seven years.

On Tuesdays I have Abuse Victims in that Episcopal church in the briefcase-loafers-wristwatch heart of downtown. It's convenient, more convenient than Depression Night at the edge of the city on the community college campus or Alcoholics in the rec center of a smalltime gated community, and I can walk there from work if I stay late enough at the office. It's not hard. I used to leave at four thirty. Now I'm lucky to get out by six.

Hanna sits in the row behind me. In my perfect circuit of bargain bin misery, he's a chunk of rock blocking the flow. He's smiling, he's frowning, he's listening. He's sympathizing, you can see it on his face—his presence is an alien thing that fills me with so much sourceless rage I can't even breathe.

I'd forgotten what it's like to be this angry.

The pipes are shattered and leaking.

Someone stands in front of me and opens their arms in this utterly breakable plea for a hug. She's someone I've talked to before. This is supposed to be the one time I can stand being touched, the one time that mundane things like germs and sweat and dirt don't matter to me, because I'm a living conduit and petty fleshy things are the concerns of people still scratching away up the ladder to nirvana. It's supposed to be, but Hanna is watching me from across the room with his frazzled red hair and his staring eyes and it's not, it's not at all and I'm an empty leaking shell and I can't stand the feeling of this girl's skin.

All this rage is pooling up inside me with nowhere to go.

He's looking at me, and I can't find that hot bright center of life. Perfection slips through my fucking fingers for the millionth time in my life, and he's patting some poor bastard on the shoulder like he's trying to understand—

He doesn't belong here

He doesn't belong here

He doesn't belong here.

Bright blue eyes, so bright they're like someone took a chisel to the sky and mortared the chips around his pupils. Dark curves of purplish skin under the rim of the eye socket, like he has anything to keep him up at night. He can't be any older than Veser, this bloody tourist who's been the fly sitting on the wall of my groups. Depression. Bipolar. Alcoholics Anonymous. Abuse Victims.

He's been in every one of my groups for the last week, and my skin feels like its peeling off my bones.

The firm where I work has me doing at least three projects at a time. I get done with one logo and the boss comes by with an advertisement, and this mechanical loop goes on and on with pistons going up and down, this Rube Goldberg machine goes wheeling around and around dropping the boot on the lever for the thousandth time. Light a wick. Roll a marble. Who knows what the hell it's supposed to do.

You get half way done with a travel pamphlet and word comes down the telegraph wire.

I've bit my cheek so many times my mouth is the floral print on a 1950's wallpaper.

Veser finds me by the donuts, his hands shoved in his pockets, he's a junkie who can't admit he's hooked. He pretends, at first. He always does. He says lame, lame lame lame, like it'll rewrite the instinctual need to rejoin the conduit, finish the circuit, and for the first time in eleven months I want to scream lame lame lame with him. I don't know how to do it anymore. Hanna is watching us from across the room and I can't remember how to climb this ladder up to Nirvana, and Veser is looking at me like he's waiting.

He's waiting.

He's willing.

"Excuse me," I say, scraping for politeness up and down the flesh in my throat. "Excuse me."

-x-

Someone popped the cap off the soap dispenser. I jam my hands into the pearlescent pink goo, up to the wrists, cover every inch of skin that ever shook a hand or grabbed a doorknob.

Hanna is here tonight. Hanna was there last night. Hanna will be there tomorrow night. His arc reactor eyes keep me up at night, staring, like a light blazing through my windows, burning away the shadows I need to sleep.

Tomorrow night I'll talk to him.

I'll be polite. I'll be removed. I'll point out to him that he doesn't belong here; I'll advise him to spend his nights elsewhere. I'll tell him it's insensitive to keep coming. I'll tell him to stop faking it, he's only embarrassing himself—we can all see he doesn't belong, everyone can see it.

Mr. Cross, I'll say, Mr. Cross whoever you are

Get out Mr. Cross

This is the one kind of freedom in my life

And you're ruining it, Mr. Cross

You bloody tourist

Get out.

Chapter Text

I fall asleep in Denver, I wake up in Washington.

Sometimes I think, if we crash then I won't have to do this again. I won't have to do anything again, ever. Sometimes I think, let's just crash, okay? Let's just down this stupid airplane in a field somewhere and kill a few dozen cows and thirty nine people and me, and be done with this.

And I fall asleep drowning myself in flat ginger ale and apologizing to the woman next to me for things I could never begin to explain to her.

This is how I met Doc Worth

Doc Worth is a doctor, or at least he'd like people to think so. In the sense that a doctor is a kind of certified practician, Doc Worth is as much a doctor as a janitor is a museum curator. Because of his nature, Doc Worth only opened shop at night. If you had a problem that needed shadow as much as thread, you found Doc Worth.

There are day people and night people. Everybody knows that. Me, I'm a day person. I used to think I could never work nights.

I fall asleep in Sacramento, I wake up in Phoenix.

I'm sorry I'm so sorry

A bird flies under the turbine and an air pocket rattles the cockpit and I'm sorry

I wouldn't wish thirty nine people and countless cows dead, I promise myself.

In his offices—more than one city, more than one in a city—Doc Worth solves problems. You've got a broken bone, that's a problem. You've got a nasty reminder from an affair? That's a problem. You've got a dealer six feet under? That's a problem too.

Doc Worth can solve it.

He doesn't charge as much as you'd think. He's in and he's out, and you never know which night will leave you swearing and beating on the door of a back-alley hidey hole till the sun comes spilling over the garbage bags and the roaches, like a pitcher of bright yellow oil. He never charged me.

The worst thing about Doc Worth is that he doesn't give a shit about anything. Doesn't care what he looks like. Doesn't care who his patients are. Doesn't care where his supplies come from. Doesn't care if he missed a client or if some sad sob bled out on his doorstep while he was out in another office.

I have no idea how many of my sleepless nights he was out there working.

Doc Worth has two different types of clientele. There's the first kind, the bums and the jerks. Loan defaulters. Racketeers. Too poor to go to the hospital, or too long of a record. No point in looking through their history. Then there's the second kind, the senators wives and the gangsters, the ones who can't afford to be seen in a hospital. The key in both situations, Doc Worth will tell you, is not to ask questions that don't matter.

Where's the wound. What did it. How long ago.

Nothing else matters.

The cabin of the plane is swirling with five hundred different mutations of the common cold and two wailing children, all suspended in this little pocket of steel and air suspended thousands of feet above the surface of planet Earth. We are a comet full of yawning hostesses and purse-lipped businessmen checking their watches. Why don't we all burn up in the atmosphere? Nobody seems to know, except maybe the plane makers and the pilots. Everyone else, we take it on faith.

Doc Worth is a lot of things, but talentless is—unfortunately—not one of them. He never says where he learned it all from, and while it's hard to imagine him ever stepping foot on a medical campus, it's harder still to imagine him opening a book with his own two hands. Maybe it's magic. It's not the least implausible option, but god knows I've seen implausible options. Worth knows what he's doing, down to the last flicker of fingertips over shredded skin. He sees the clear laser line from point A to point B, and he doesn't take a single thing on faith.

He knows it or he doesn't know it. But most of the time, he knows.

I wake up in San Francisco.

Doc Worth can fix a person; if there's something wrong, he can make it right. Give him the time and the tools, and he can do a fair number as a plastic surgeon.

I wake up in Austin.

He won't admit to it easily, but Doc Worth takes pride in what he does. He likes a challenge. A complete fuck up. He loves to work on other people's botched jobs. You might think that a guy who would sleep in his chair at the office, who kicked his shoes up on the desk and hit patients when they talked too much, you might think he'd have work ethic as shitty as his personality. He doesn't.

Doc Worth was made to play Frankenstein.

I wake up in Sarasota.

You know doctors, you know what they ought to do. Keep clean rooms, watch their bedside manner, explain what they're doing. But a janitor isn't a curator, no matter how well he knows the museum.

Sometimes Worth takes souvenirs. There's a shard of bone from a messy femoral fracture sitting in the cabinet of his main office, in between two bottles of valium. I wonder if someone out there misses it. Sometimes I imagine a man, all grown up and gone straight after his disastrous stint in the Crips, maybe the Bloods, with a wife and a baby and an odd little depression just above his knee. Fixed, yes, but wrong.

Imagine you're a doctor, but you're irritated and you're lonely, and this skin graft won't take. You spend your life in and out of this office, mostly in, fiddling with countless faceless bodies under the florescent light, a lifetime of work shattered over a thousand patients who may or may not remember your last name. Maybe there's a suspicious bandage on your stomach tomorrow.

If you spliced some of yourself in there, would anybody ever know?

Worth asked me that once, while he was packing up his bottles of gin and oxytocen. How much of yourself could you fuse away into other people, before someone noticed it? I thought he was going to talk about chimeras.

He said it was the perfect solution. Minimal fuss. Eliminate the middle man. He wasn't talking about chimeras.

I wake up in San Antonio.

I hate traveling.

When you fly, your space is divided into sliver sections and passed around to the rest of the passengers. Your world ends at the edge of the arm rest. Even if you fly on a nearly empty plane, you still don't get more than a slice of the seat—empty, unused space stretches out beside you like the branches of the Tree of Knowledge. All that nothingness, and the claustrophobia grabs you by the shoulders and pulls you back into the headrest. This is your seat.

The firm is a contracting graphic design base. It's the upper middle class of graphic design firms. We own thirty percent of the market. You don't claw your way up to thirty percent of the market without knowing how to win a customer.

Us? We meet you on your own terms.

We send me.

I'm not good with no. I'm not supposed to be running around, shaking hands and talking politics with men in suits. I'm supposed to be making things.

Why can't you do both, my boss says.

Er, I say.

Two years now, and this is my life, ending one flight at a time.

Here's how it happens.

There's a layover in an airport with a name like Jefferson Regional or JFK National, some dead president of a country I like to pretend I belong to, stamped over the doorway of a place that never had a thing to do with politics. White planes land and leave like cells pumping in and out of this giant heart, load up the oxygen and replenish the starving extremities. I have a half finished project waiting for me at home. The layover was supposed to be thirty minutes long two hours ago.

Doc Worth drops his battered black bag with the little red cross into my lap.

"Hold this, will ya?" he says.

I see his hands first. They're spindly, like spider legs, and they're flicking away at a lighter with the pink silhouette of an anatomically impossible woman emblazoned on it. Click click spark. Snick snick whirr.

"I'm sorry," I say, "Do I know you?"

"Should say ya goddamn don't," he answers. Smoke curls out of his lips.

I've always hated smokers.

"I don't think you're allowed to do that in here," I tell him, hands tightening compulsively around my luggage. I used to take a couple suitcases with me wherever I went, full of shampoo and clothing and books, but eventually I had to give it up.

Worth slips the cigarette out from between his teeth, lips pulled up on one side like he's got a nasty joke hidden under his tongue. He gestures towards the room at large. "Who's gonna stop me?"

The gate is empty. Even the company gate keepers have found better things to do than wait for this prodigal flight to arrive.

Me, I want to say.

Me, I don't say.

Doc Worth drops into the seat beside me, and he smells like smoke and other people's misery. His legs are so long that when he slumps down in his seat he can kick his ankles up on the seats across the aisle. I'll never understand where or when he got it out, but his hands have gone from fiddling with the lighter to shuffling a deck of cards, cutting them on the nearly-concave length of his stomach. He slips three cards off the top of the deck, one after another. Three seven ace.

"Could you," I start, and the words catch in my throat before I finally cough them up, "could you not? Here, I mean."

Worth restacks the cards, cuts them again. "Could I not what?" Three seven ace.

"Please?"

Worth looks up at me, rolled white paper wedged in the corner or his mouth, bobbing when he talks. I think of Freud's cigar.

"Weren't anglin' fer a please," he tells me. "Could I not what, 'xactly? Not breathe? Gonna hafta be more specific."

"Oh," I say. "Could you not smoke, please?"

Three

"Could," he says.

Seven

"Won't," he says.

Ace.

You know how sometimes you look at person, and you try to imagine that they had a life before they knew you? Well Doc Worth had been around for a long time before I met him, but that day, it seemed to me that he had sprung fully formed from an awful shadow of one kind or another in the B12 Gate lobby. Maybe from the distant screams of children down the hall, like some bizarre satanic fairy.

"Please," I repeat, this time through gritted teeth. It isn't even that the smell of smoke particularly bothers me. You don't smoke inside. There are laws against it. It's not what people do.

There is no benefit to a cigarette. The chemical effects on the human body are, to say the least, deleterious. Lung cancer, throat cancer, second hand smoke and asthma. Sing it like a jump rope chant. All the ways you can poison yourself to death. Why not drink a thimbleful of bleach every morning instead.

Doc Worth's pink, dry lips form an O. Toxic smoke breaks across my throat, below my line of sight.

I just look at him.

"Gonna do somethin' about it?" Worth asks, cutting the deck again. He doesn't even look up as he talks. Three seven ace, the most useless magic trick I've ever seen in my life.

My shoes are very interesting, suddenly.

"Yeah," he sniffs, "didn' think so."

Three.

I swallow down the rage that's bubbling up. Have you ever had that kind of rage, the kind that hurts you like it's heart burn? It isn't nice. It can go septic so easily.

"Are you some kind of magician?" I ask him, gesturing towards the first face-up, his grimy off-white cards. At that moment I don't know this, but in the course of their history those cards were pulled out of a dead man's grip on three different occasions. There will be a fourth.

Seven.

"Ya know what the next card's gonna be?" he asks me, flipping the black seven over in his tapering fingers. Those are fingers that have picked shrapnel out of a chest cavity. Those are fingers that have run up a woman's thigh, and beyond it. The card turns over and over.

"Ace," I say.

He grins at me, pale pink gums showing over his yellowed-ivory teeth. The seven goes down. He gestures towards the deck, with its top most card tilted uneasily over the waistband of his destroyed dress pants. Your draw, his slightly curled fingers say.

There are turning moments, moments in time when everything tilts uneasily on the head of a pin.

I don't mean for my knuckles to brush his stomach, but my hand is unsteady as it reaches for the card. I draw. I flip it over.

These turning point moments, sometimes they're innocuous.

"Queen," Doc Worth observes, eyes wide under high eyebrows, a perfect mime of surprise. The pink flash of his gums ruins it.

Other times, you can feel a turning point in the air.

"No such thing as magic," Doc Worth tells me, shoving the seven and the three haphazardly into the heart of the deck. "Things ya know, things ya don't. That's all."

A buzzer blares, somewhere down the terminal, and the floor is absolutely empty save the two of us. Doc Worth introduces himself. Doc Worth tells me an awful joke about a mortician, and I choke on trying not to laugh. He is an ever-changing, unknowable thing, as much a wink as an upturned middle finger.

After a while, he reels his legs in and goes to stand—and with me in the chair and him slumping upward of six feet, Doc Worth is a lightening rod in a rolling, silent sky. He pulls the black leather bag out of my lap, leaving twice recycled frigid airport air in its place.

Manners compel me to offer up the queen, but he waves me off, won't take it. He tells me he'll get it back some other time.

Turning points come in the strangest places.

Some time later I flip the card over again, idly, and find seven digits scrawled across the grimy off-white edge.

Doc Worth leaves me the Queen of Spades, and his phone number.

-x-

Domestic Abuse Survivors only has one other male member. He's gay. He's the kind of gay that makes you think of shoes and handbags and tiny dogs, makes me think of well kempt little flats on the upper class side of town, and wine tasting parties, and HIV widowers. He thinks I'm gay too.

He sits next to me every Tuesday. Brian. Brian George. He has such a normal name, such a normal face, except for the lightning bolt scar carved down from the forehead to the mid-cheek. He wears glasses to hide his ruined eye.

We go in a circle, reintroducing ourselves for the thousandth time, and it goes like a chant, this call and response. With this ritual we rinse away all the expectations of our daily lives, the need to be strong and the necessity for silence, the incidental identities we've picked up along the way that have nothing to do with the breaks in our bones and the cracks in our souls. Accountant. Debter. Artist.

Hi.

The punch line of Brian's story is that the eye could have healed up without much trouble, if his boyfriend had just let him go to the hospital.

Hi Brian.

Tonight there's another man. He clearly doesn't belong—his skin is too white and his hair is too orange, he's like a candle raging in the middle of all our soft, cool darkness.

Hi Hanna.

Group leader Anna smiles at him, nods, thinks that it's so nice that we're getting more men, thinks that it will help the girls to be exposed to men who were also victims. We can relate. We can share. But Hanna is a fraud, Hanna can't relate. Hanna is the faker. Hanna is the disappointment.

We start with Sharing Time. Brian tells us how he's coming to terms with his handicap, learning to wear shades in lower lighting, how he still reaches out for his ex-boyfriend in the middle of the night. I want to pat him on the shoulder as he talks about the glasses he's picked out, how the wide rims keep people from noticing the worst of it.

In group, Brian never wears glasses. I think I've never found the absence of something so beautiful.

Hanna is looking at us, and right now I wouldn't know how to move my hand if there was a manual sitting open in my lap.

Reaching out is simple. How many muscles does it take the arm to move, to lift and aim and fall, how few muscles would it take? They say it take forty muscles just to frown. I bet it takes less to move an arm. Oh, it's simple alright, but that doesn't mean it's easy.

This is supposed to be my time. To cry, if tears come. To hold hands, if I want. This is my freedom, my only freedom, stripped of everything but this circle, this circle that will introduce itself again next week like a new birth. If it wasn't for Hanna.

Hanna, the blockage in my perfect circuit.

Hanna the interloper.

Hanna's the one who doesn't belong. It's him. Hanna's eyes are bearing down on me, blue and piercing and curious, evaluating, and I stutter when they ask me if I would like to share this time.

I don't, I never do. But now I feel as if I should have, as if this was expected of me.

Fake.

Tourist.

Brian is real, sitting beside me, ruined eye wet and white with reflected florescent lights. Purple highlights under his eyes, under his scar. He is handsome, and ruined, and no one will ever notice the first past the second. Brian, mild Brian, Brian and his cold, empty bed and his gooey tears, Brian and his uneven voice as he tells us about his boyfriends, Brian is the real thing. Brian is ruined, and Brian is perfect.

I could be perfect, if it wasn't for Hanna and his burning blue eyes.

Group leader Anna claps her hands together and tells us what excellent participants we are, what excellent people. Now, she says, I want you to reach out to your neighbor.

Now, she says, find someone special. Tell them how special they are.

Now, she says, find someone, and give them a hug.

Hanna's eyes lock with mine, and for the first time in weeks, I feel more angry than empty.

I take three steps across the floor and bring my arms up around Hanna, mechanical and stiff, and grab him tighter than his skinny bones probably prefer.

Now, she says, share with them. Tell them something about yourself.

Hanna's smaller than me, standing face to face he seems so much smaller, and I want to laugh, want to shake him. Get out, Mr. Cross. Get out, get out, get out.

Now, she says, go on and cry. It's okay.

"You aren't an abuse victim, are you?" Hanna says, tilting his head, bright and wide and evaluating, does he never stop looking?

"Neither are you," I say, but it comes out broken and dry and I have to swallow mid-syllable.

"Nope," Hanna says. "Not me."

Around us, people are talking lowly to their partners, people are nodding. Brian has a young brunette girl in a fragile embrace, with her head on his shoulder, and I want that. I want it.

"Why are you here?" Hanna asks me.

Somewhere along the way, I became unaccustomed to feeling things. Emptiness is swallowing up the rage again—I am hollow, I am nothing encased in ceramic nothingness. I am out of practice.

"Why are you?" I counter.

"Well," Hanna whispers, "I started out following up a lead in Depression a few weeks ago, but it turned out ot be a dead end. I tried AA too, but I got nothing so I was going to pack it all up until I noticed you!"

Hanna's rule of thumb, he tells me, is to never ignore a guy who won't tell you his name. He tells me it's unprofessional.

When Hanna gets excited mid-whisper, it's like being shot in the ear with a leaking balloon.

"So I guess, I was hoping we could talk," Hanna goes on. "I bet you have a lot you could talk about."

"No," I say.

"No, you don't want to talk, or no, you don't have anything to say?"

"No," I repeat, getting desperate.

"Come on," Hanna wheedles, "what are you coming here for, if it isn't for the sharing? I like it too. I used to watch talk shows, you know, to hear stories about people. I always liked the really bad stories, does that make me a bad person? I hope that doesn't make me a bad person. It's just that when people tell you the really terrible stories, you feel like you're—I dunno—like you're connected to them I guess."

"Like a circuit," I say.

"Yeah!" he answers. "Like a circuit."

It's easy to feel like nothing matters, Hanna tells me. He gets dicouraged, sometimes, and tired, but these evenings make him feel hopeful.

Hopeful.

Yeah, he says, hopeful.

I want to ask him what he finds hopeful about Brian's hungry red scar, the exact thickness of the tip of a miniature Eifel tower; what he finds hopeful about the missing-tooth ache of Brian's cold white sheets, and the razor toothed specter of past boyfriends already looming in his doorway as he searches for his keys at night-

This isn't hope, how could anyone mistake it for hope?

This is rock bottom.

Around the room, people are breaking apart. Hands on shoulders. Wiping eyes.

"Look," I hiss, "just leave me alone, okay? Just let me have this. You can have Depression and Alcoholics, and I'll take the Abuse nights."

Hanna's firelight eyebrows meet in the middle, and he looks hurt for the flash of a second. "What about Bipolar?"

"We can split it," I say, hurried. Anything to get this over with.

"Well," Hanna replies, drawing himself up—suddenly you can tell that he must be stubborn, really stubborn, when he decides to be. "Maybe I want Bipolar. All of it."

"We can't both go," I tell him. That would be worse than nothing.

"I don't mind. You're the one who has the problem."

Around us, people are parting.

"That's not fair!"

Alright everyone, let's have a moment of prayer.

Hanna crosses his arms. "You can have Bipolar," he offers, "if you promise you'll meet up with me."

Everyone join hands.

Hanna holds out his pale hand. There's a T-rex themed bandaid over his mount of moon.

Dear Somebody Somewhere

Forgive us for all the things we want

Deliver us from the things we need

"Fine," I say.

Give us this day our daily Prozac

Lead us not into temptation

"Here's my card," Hanna says, satisfied.

Amen.

Chapter Text

A bottle of hair gel is the reason why I came to live with Doc Worth.

If anyone knows that a bomb is just a drop of carbonic acid away, it's the TSA. Flyers, we know it too. The looming, raw memory of Nine-Eleven has been sanded down and smoothed over by a thousand trips through the metal detector—by countless three AM trudges through the stygian security detail post, buzzing wands scanning belt buckles and watches. We live our lives in a shade of dull, throbbing orange. The security warning migraine. How many eyedroppers have lost their lives to prodding, latex sheathed hands?

Before I came to the US, I had never been in an airplane.

Other people, when they think of flying they think of hijackings mostly. It's all bright and dramatic for them, tears and tragedy and last minute heroics as one man stands up in defiance only to be shot down again. Crying children huddled next to their mothers. Lovers making their final phone calls to their widowers in waiting. Grand.

We've been on code orange for years now.

If my flight had been hijacked, I suppose I would have been displeased. Theft and suicide, what kind of day is that. But I've been suffering through these orange tinted migraines for so long that I'm not sure I could summon up the energy to do anything grand. I think I'd just sleep.

One pilot, another pilot, you'll get to the ground either way.

You learn to live in single servings, living the Code Orange life. Hotel shampoo sizes. On my first business flight, I packed two suitcases and a hefty carryon bag. On my last flight, I had one small, wheeless box. Inside, enough shirts for five days and enough trousers for four. One jacket. A shaving kit.

A bottle of hairgel.

Someone called in a bomb threat, the TSA agent tells me, while we wait at the shadowy corner of the concourse. An airport is like a temple. Out there, in the lobby, you have the laymen and the moneychangers. Inside, you have the faithful. Down in the cockpits, the holy of holies.

It's not that your hairgel was actually a bomb, the TSA agent tells me, helpfully; it's just that with the threat being called in, we couldn't be too careful.

The TSA agent tells me to sit down somewhere. One time zone away, my smallest bottle of hairgel is sitting in a dumpster with dog slobber all over it. My one little act of rebellion, blown up like the bomb it wasn't. Just goes to show you, doesn't it.

The TSA agent is reading a book about the Nat Turner rebellion. He gives me a bright look when he catches me reading the title, but I'm tired. I'm too tired to listen to this man tell me about these slaves who lived almost two hundred years ago. I'm too tired for anything, really.

It's 3 AM, and I just want to go home. I've got ten feet of mod-shag carpeting in StarBurst White waiting for me to drag my feet over, I've got a Crimson Silk duvet and 1200 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets in eggshell white. The airport is the same gray color as a cancerous lung.

At home, I've got a state of the art drawing table that I hardly ever use anymore, pockets and drawers for every tool I've ever collected, all the fine points and diagonal cut thin handled calligraphy brushes, paced together perfectly and gathering dust while I click away in business-issue photoshop and fly half way across the continent at 3 AM.

At home I've got three coats of white paint over hollow walls, silver engraved covers over the faulty outlets. Maybe if I cover them with something fancy enough, it won't matter that they come and go and blow fuses regularly.

The first time a lightbulb shattered on me, I bought insurance.

At four AM, the TSA agent lets me go. My stuff is still two states away, but, says the TSA agent, at least you don't have to go to a hotel.

I don't ask how he knows I live in this city. Maybe he's seen me before.

At least you can go home.

Home is a condo on the fourth floor of a building on the artsy side of town, and at that moment neither the TSA agent nor I know that I cannot, in fact, go home to it.

My hairgel, which contained no explosives, I will probably never see again. My condo, which also contained no explosives, I won't be seeing again either.

The whole road is closed down coming in from a Highway which the city council long ago renamed a cheerful "Sunrise Street", forgetting that a street doesn't roll on for a thousand miles through desert and mountains and shatter across sand on a beach days and days away.

The fire trucks are your first tip off.

You buy furniture, you tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple of years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled, then the right set of dishes, then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug.

Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things that you used to own, maybe now they own you.

Ten years of meticulous collecting have just gone up in smoke, and I'm standing without a suitcase on the pavement just beyond the yellow caution tape line. If I rush in, could I save the crimson silk duvet? The Gosher original oil on canvas with the minimalist black glass frame? Could I save the calligraphy brushes, one use, next to new and not even a bristle out of place? What about my carpet, I got it on sale for fifty percent off during the Black Friday rush and nearly broke my arm getting it to the counter, couldn't I salvage that still?

The air smells like smoke. Not the warm woodsmoke smell of a fireplace in winter, not the clean grey smell of a coal grill in May, not even the sweet creeping smell of cigarette smoke seeping out from between cracked, grinning lips. This is the toxic bitter scent that remembers drywall and plastic, rayon lampshades and patent leather shoes. This is the sour breath of something that's recently gorged itself on the gutted entrails of your life.

If only it wasn't for the fluttering yellow caution tape. This is a crimescene. This is a dangerzone. Please leave this to the professionals. I couldn't cross that line any more than a vampire could cross a threshold uninvited.

A house fire is a monster that is best left to designated slayers.

My friends all have the same dining room table with the authentic mahagony woodgrain, we all got our granite countertops from the same catalogue, which we found time after time in each other's bathrooms, where once upon a time I knew they used to keep pornography. Why are their tables still polished and set, and mine is a grisly murder scene? Charred legs. Fingers twisted in the yellow caution tape, I wince at the grisly mental image of my desk blackening as it roasts, enamel bubbling grotesquely over its exposed surface. And here I'm standing powerless while it happens.

The building manager is standing not too far away, dressed in dress pants and an over-long t-shirt, the most dressed down I've ever seen him. He tells me they think it was the wiring, and I remember every single time I called him about a blown fuse, or a sparking plug, and I say nothing.

He tells me it started on the east side of the building. Fourth floor, they think. He tells me this because I'm the only one who will listen, the only one who isn't crying or frantically dialing their cell phone. I don't think he even knows who I am. That I lived on the east side.

A house fire is a cancer that destroys the whole body in one raging explosion.

Nat Turner was a slave who killed his masters. Not just the man who owned him, or the overseer who beat him, but the whole family. A wife in her sleep. Staff. Weren't they complicit in the same evil as the man who expressly held the deed to his body? Nat Turner was brilliant. Nat Turner killed sixty white people in the space of two days, decimating plantations all around the epicenter of his revolt.

And I look up at the fourth floor window oozing black smoke into the 5 Am darkness, and I think for a moment, how would a slave feel if you came into their home and slaughtered their master in his bed.

My phone was in my luggage. My wallet is in my pocket. In my wallet there are two cards, two numbers, for all they meant to me they must be the only numbers that ever existed. All inventions from the telegraph to the party line were leading up to this moment, these two numbers wedged into the center fold of a homeless artist's wallet.

There's a payphone down the street.

I jerk both cards free and shove the wallet back in my pocket, run my fingers over the bent edges on them both. The Queen is creased down the middle, but the black lettering on the business card has started to fade at the top.

Three coins.

Seven digits.

Hanna picks up. Blaney, he says, stop calling me. I don't have the rent yet, okay?

I swallow, and slam the receiver down on the hooks.

No, I can't call Hanna. That was stupid. Hanna wouldn't understand, Hanna never understands anything—besides, it would be like losing, wouldn't it? Wouldn't it?

Three coins.

Seven digits.

Worth answers.

Nat Turn's rebellion killed more than a hundred black participants, but not many people talk about that. Mostly they linger on the sixty white deaths, the civilians, although what is a civilian really, when the soldiers are civilians too.

Worth agrees to meet me at a bar.

-X-

When we invented Fight Club, Worth and I, we had both been in fights before. School fights, you know. But the difference between Fight Club and a punch out in a bar after you're pissed drunk and someone took a swing at your friend is like the difference between a breathing, grabbing person and a stack of pornography.

Deep down, we all wonder. If you've never been in a fight, you think about it, you try to imagine what it must be like to break your fist on somebody's nose, no holding back, and you think it must be like screaming and screaming until your throat gives out and you've puked up every awful emotion you've ever had. When you have been in a fight before, sometimes, you remember.

What knuckles feel like in a high speed collision with a collarbone. Stupid, untrained school fight moves. What words sound like when they're dripping out of a split lip in a trail of blood and spittle.

You remember.

Worth had been in plenty of fights. Sometimes I wonder if that was his way of expressing affection—if, in some terrible way, Worth wasn't in love with the whole world.

I was the only one he'd ever asked first, though, which in a way made me special. I guess.

We met at a bar. I told him about my condo. He laughed, smacked the table, ordered me a beer. We talked.

You start out, Worth told me, you don't know what you want. You buy all this shit, you think it's gonna complete you. It doesn't. So you keep buying, Worth said, and you keep buying, and you think that you're getting closer but you can't get closer to something that don't exist.

I drank my beer. A lot of people, they think they want the world.

"Yeah," Worth said. "Lotta people get hungry fer it after a while."

Now why, Worth said, would a man get to jonesing for a duvet when he can have a respectable addiction like Meth.

I drank my beer, and avoided eye contact.

Worth had no respect for people who got addicted to things without their consent.

"You wanna talk about bein' complete," Worth said, around a mouthful of beer, "the fuck's that mean anyhow? Look at you, picture perfect apartment just about bled ya dry, an' d'you feel any closer ter perfection than ya did five years ago?"

No.

"That," Worth announced, "is 'cause we got this fucked up idea'a what perfection means. Think it's buildin' up towards somethin'. That's the protestant in us. Like yer gonna come up right if ya keep tackin' all this bullshit onta ya. 'S artificial."

The hell would you know about?

Worth took another swig. "All I'm sayin'," he told me, "maybe self-improvement ain't the answer. What're ya improving toward, anyhow?"

Worth talks about self destruction.

Addicts, Worth said, either die addicts, or they get some kinda moment of revelation. Sky opens up. You die an addict, or you break yourself in two. Those are your options.

At the end of the night, I pulled out my keys, grabbed the check off the table. Worth looked at me like a disappointed teacher and snatched the check out of my hands. Yes, he said.

Yes what?

Yes, you can stay with me.

But I didn't even ask.

Worth told me, we're gonna have to work on that. You got to learn how to ask for what you want.

Worth took the check and paid with an utterly destroyed hundred dollar bill.

"Course," he added, "Ya wanna stay with me, yer gonna hafta do somethin' fer me first."

My mouth went dry.

"Nah, nothin' like that." Worth tapped my chest, twice, and grinned down at me. "Want ya ter hit me."

Hit you?

"Hard as ya can. Break sommat if ya like."

I don't think so.

"What, ya think I'm gonna call th' cops on ya? Lookit me, do I look like the kinda guy oughter be anywhere near a cop?"

No, no. It's just.

Worth grabbed my hand, closed it up into a fist. Paused. He pressed my knuckles into the valley below his cheekbone.

"C'mon. Lesson number two, take what ya want. Don't worry about all that pussy manners oh I couldn' shit."

Two pitchers of beer, and I thought about his awful crooked teeth and his jutting yellow collarbones and I said okay, okay. I'm parked out back. Let's go there.

You don't know what approval feels like till Doc Worth winks at you. You don't know rage till he holds the door open for you and curtsies.

So we went outside, and I asked Worth how he wanted it.

Worth said, "Don't care."

Well I don't want you to blow a bloody gasket on me if I hit something important.

Worth said, "Ya don't?"

...Are you sure.

Worth said, "Fuck me up."

So like every other guy on his first night in Fight Club, I did that wide-swinging sort of pitcher's punch where you lose your balance one step in and your fist mostly falls into the other guy. I nailed him in the neck.

Fuck damnit, I said, that was terrible.

Nah, Worth said, that was great. And then he hit me like a gunshot to the chest, and we fell onto the hood of somebody's shiny black sedan. The car alarm went off.

We looked at each other, Worth rubbing his neck and me twitching my fingers trying not to prod my chest, and Worth grinned.

"Hit me again."

So I did. And that was how Fight Club started, me and Doc Worth whaling on each other in a parking lot. I stopped caring. When the bar closed and the people came out and watched us and shouted at us and whooped, I didn't care.

I was fighting with Doc Worth, but I wasn't fighting Doc Worth. Instead of him, I was getting my nails into all the broken things, every glitch and hiccup and locked door, the ink stains that wouldn't come out of my best jacket and the building manager who wouldn't fix my outlets and Hanna who stole my groups. My mother. My boss who scheduled me for another flight when I had a project due in a week.

It didn't fix anything, the fighting, but fighting isn't supposed to fix anything. It transcends. My art school friends, they used to go to meditation circles and hot yoga. With a tooth loose in my jaw and my dress shirt ground into the asphalt, I felt like Buddha.

Worth doesn't care about presentation, doesn't care about looking right or doing right by anything or anyone, so that first night my knuckles were scraped raw from the shadow of a beard on his face. He looked like he was wearing lipstick. I asked him, lying halfway underneath a truck, what he'd been fighting.

My father, he told me.

I never had a father.

Maybe you don't need one.

When you're fighting another person in Fight Club, it isn't personal. It's almost enlightenment. There's no animosity, no hate—before I busted Worth's lip and camouflaged his neck black and blue, I couldn't stand that prick. Lying under a truck, with my cheek swelling against the pavement, I think I loved him.

The guys in the parking lot, they saw it. They wanted in on it.

Worth and I, we were happy to oblige.

When Fight Club meets, Doc Worth lays down these rules we came up with together. "Most of you," he says, "yer here cause'a someone broke the rules. Somebody told y'bout fight club."

Doc Worth says, "Well ya better all shut yer traps, or ya better start yerselves another fight club, cause next week we're gonna cap you lot after the first fifty, an' the rest'a ya kin go kick around the kiddie pool fer all I care. You set up fer a fight soon as ya get in, and if ya don't want a fight ya get right the fuck out. Plen'y a men who do, an' I better not catch ya takin' up their spot."

"If thissus yer first night at fight club," Doc Worth says, "you gotta fight."

Guys like me, even if your parents weren't divorced in the first place, we never really knew our dads. Guys like me, we go to Fight Club because there's something else we're too scared to fight. Guys like me, pretty soon, we stop being so scared.

A lot of guys who meet in Fight Club end up best friends.

Doc Worth doesn't talk about where he came from. Doesn't talk about his past. Sometimes I imagine he's just like me, with the single mother and the bills—sometimes I think, no, he must have fallen so much longer and harder than me. Sometimes I think, a rich house in the suburbs with wealthy parents and maybe a sibling, good grades, shiny shoes, he must have started out so high. Doc Worth is Lucifer.

Doc Worth shrugs off his coat with the grungy fur trim, Doc Worth peels off his button down, and Doc Worth lays down the rules.

Worth talks about self destruction. He talks about freedom.

In a presentation in the office, my boss is clicking through the powerpoint slides with the bouncing clipart wedged between every empty line. If the client's assistant is eyeing my black eye down the length of the conference table, I can promise you it isn't because he wants to take up the medical profession.

Worth talks about self destruction.

I'd like to say I kept my distance from the topic, but that would be a terrible untruth.

A week later, our client's assistant stripped off his shirt, stepped out of his shoes, and tapped me on the shoulder.