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His hands had always been rough. The grooves of his finger pads deep like the valleys of mother nature, every marking a tracing of twine– A unique set of patterns etched and carved straight into one’s body since birth. It was a mark of humanity nobody could change– A completely entropic process that was unpredictable; irreversible.
His being born made him– A life unveiled into the world through the violent folds of life, screaming and crying, minutes from dying. The minutes that were fought off with every breath, minutes that compounded, like a budding flower blooming. With every sigh, with every inhale and expansion of his lungs that he fought for, suffered for, was a life yelling into the vacuum of the indelible cosmos. With every skill, every dreary moment, every flit of feeling, with every rush of adrenaline, it was an arrow into the dark. It was his fight, it was his howl into the deepest of nights.
And still, it was never enough. Even if the sun still shined its annoying hue, even if the sky pelted its rage onto the ground below, even if the streetlights hummed with faulty wiring, even if the summer haze buzzed with cicadas and the sound of shimmering swelter, it was all never enough. Being surrounded by life and sensations never meant that he would absorb any of that– It simply was. Everything was borne of everything. And so was he.
Today however, none of that really mattered. It was a decent day, decent enough for him to take a pause and let it all sink in. His hands slick with thick motor oil, the hairs on his arms stuck uncomfortably to his skin as he felt the sweat bead below in between the mucky layers. The heat emanating from the engine was almost an idle hum, the cool metal spanner rightly resting in his palm, light glinting off the sides and breaking off into nowhere.
As he passed the spanner from hand to hand, he closed his eyes and let his lashes flutter against his eyelid. Awash with a golden glow, the grimy mechanic let himself bask, a heat-starved cobra in the hot summer air, uncaring of the lurking, inevitable night.
–
Speed.
That was all that mattered.
With a gentle nudge, the terrifying roar of the 200-headed horse, caged beneath a hood and blind to its exploits, reverberated through the entire contraption. With another minor suggestion, the great beast reared its nether-damned head, whinnying as it tore off into the night, its gallops burning into the wind.
With every chattering exhale, the terrible machination sent jolts of unbridled excitement, practically trembling beneath his gloves. The worn leather creaked and groaned, protesting the exuberance of the new disaster, but Driver only held onto the textured steering wheel tighter.
Speed. Driver only needed speed.
As if hearing its master’s prayer, the vehicle bellows, dashing off into the indigo horizon. It heed Driver’s every beck and call, bending to whatever will those hands dictated. A harsh stop when Driver slams the brakes, a click when Driver wrenches the engine into reverse– Everything that Driver needed was beneath those fingers, beneath the leather driving gloves that suffocated everything it beheld, just like it did to him.
Driver’s left hand turned the wheel fluidly like it was an extension of his body, and his right hand worked out every kink and minor application that pulled the entire operation together. It was routine– Monotonous, but still nerve-wracking routine. A routine that conjured a phantom hand to reach right into his skull, pulling on the hippocampus like it were a squeeze toy. And almost all of the time, Driver always ran.
It wasn't always like this.
Somewhere in between his gut and his heart, flattened and squirreled away like his diaphragm, was the knowledge that his hands were made to be much gentler. It was the resonance that harmonized with the whistle of the wind, a whisper of nature as he balanced Benicio as gently as he could within the crook of his arms. Arms that felt too thick and clumsy, arms that could never even dream of having even a tenth of the gentle disposition that ran through every sinew of Irene.
To be grimy, to be dusty and to be wrong was all he knew how to be. Silent violence lurked in every corner of his body, it ran taut through his muscles, it was contained within every tense exhale, every prolonged stare that made others falter. He never liked speaking much, and lack of dialogue never helped his case. So there he sat– Ears pricked and paws fidgeting as he leaned back on his haunches, slitted pupils that stared through slices of ocean; waiting.
That day, his hands warm from the heat of another body, he knelt down on the faux wood flooring and prayed. He clasped his filthy hands together and sent an earnest plea to whatever devil angel or god that would hear the growls of a mutt. Driver’s cold heretical heart beats as one with the pulse of this city of stars, for a moment becoming one with every other human on the grounds of Los Angeles, with hopes and dreams for a better future. He prayed long and hard, hoping such a threadbare camouflage would conceal his reprehensible self.
He prayed that his hands would be dirty no longer. He prayed that the strength so crucial to survival would atrophy, and he could melt around the edges, just to hurt the life he carried in his arms less.
He prayed that he could reach beyond what he was borne into.
He hated the feeling of second skins. Anything that clung incessantly to every crevice of his pores– Lotions, skin-tight clothing, some bandages even– He would scrub off, even if it meant shaving off a layer of skin and dead cells with it. Anything that wound itself too tightly around his neck, anything that constricted his ribcage too much, anything that tied him down in any way– He loathed all of these.
His pair of trusty leather gloves were absolutely something he considered second skin. The too tight gloves– Proportioned wrongly with its knuckle holes sliding down to the back of his palm instead of staying at his knuckles where they belonged– were made of a thick, suffocating material. Completely unbreathable, asphyxiating slabs of rubber and clamminess, its rough edges welded shut and jammed up the worst possible corners of his hands.
Every second of being submerged beneath that strangling seal was another second of abyssal, humid numbness. It was an active reminder that buzzed against his skin, heightened and almost paralyzing– All too real and all too much. Every inch of dastardly material, every stitch and seam, he would feel it with an almost intimate sort of epiphany, dragging his consciousness kicking and screaming into the present and into the real.
So he only reserved it for the filthy, lowly moments. The moments when he needed to be there, the moments when he wished he were anything but. The moments when Driver needed to pull himself back into his own skin, wrap it tight and smother it beneath flesh and a blank expression. He reserved this hell for he who deserved it, for the Driver who tore off into the night carrying on his back the sins, sinners and the sinned. The one who scorned the divine, the one who looked away from those he could not gaze upon.
Every day he wished that he wouldn't need the gloves anymore. But today he puts the shackles on once more, and he scrounges up a pair of sunglasses he had never used in forever. As he did so, he prayed that his gloves would end up like that, that they would be thrown into a cabinet, unseen and left to rot.
He would have never known that the divine had heard him, and that divine had curled their paw.
–
It was all as unavoidable as a falling tower of cards. He would watch as each shoddy bolt he had affixed in the capricious machine blew off, and he would close his eyes as the water came gushing in. Each lap, each wave was another unpredictable, yet so very predictable set of actions. A gunshot, or two or three or twenty four– A strike, or three or five– A stab, or two or none. He never bothered to count, and he never will.
It started with Standard. With every turn of the wheel as Driver’s heart pounded, his pulse leapt with the awareness that this was it– A dead road that ended in a ditch. Then he swerved and he swerved, and Driver’s life crashed out of control.
As the water rose, he found himself wading through, just barely, carrying the Driver who sinned on his back. He felt those hide-damned hands wind its way around his neck, freezing him in place and curse the skies, did it work. A knife on a precarious edge, balanced on the scales of chance, a guillotine breathing down the hairs of his spine, dull enough to break but not to bury. He paused and heard the water drip drip trickle, his breaths and thoughts unreliable like the whorls on glass.
Next it was the pellets in his arm. It hurt, unbelievably so, and it was as dizzying as Dionysus– Leaving his upper arm a bloodied, mangled mess strapped down by a tight white bandage that strained and protested every time he curled his fist. A physical scar and mark of his ineptness, his utter inability to keep everything held together. For how strong and ruthless his arms were, nothing could stop the gush of blood muck– The water that seeped through his fingers in controlled drops, drowning him and everything with it.
He didn’t understand anything that was going on. Tears pricked his eyes as he carried the Driver on his back, each step laboured with the weight of breathless panic. He couldn’t do any of this, he was never made for this. He was made and born to scream, to cry and die laughing like a human, to live and scamper free in a field. A body carved and moulded to be broiled in a kiln of passion and emotions, tempered by the waters of love and tenderness. Dips and curves of skin made to have lips lay between the crevices, only for those same ambrosial embrace to be torn away from him with a patter and howl.
He picked up the shattered pieces of a consciousness and an ideal, holding them up to the light of the sun, to the God which humans worshipped since ages long forgotten. He burned and cut himself arranging the molten menagerie– Each piece a fractured essence, a glowing answer to the question of his many selves– And he made the Driver. Driver, who with every stamp of its muddied hooves, claws that swiped and yanked triggers outside of his grip, made the red soak much deeper and into his very bones. A Driver who looked back on himself and chose that he was no longer worthy.
A Driver who was born to be merciless, who was born to know, born to shove its talons into shreds of leather, born to make the decisions that hurt. A Driver who almost heaved his guts up when facing Irene, who saw its arms elbow-deep in ichor and decided to take off sprinting. A Driver who latched its mandibles onto him, orifices leaking as it bled its venom into him over and over. A Driver desperate to metamorphose– pushing its way through his very soul in a bloody burst of escape, holding him down under the water to drown and to swim away.
As he lay down on the hood of his car, clutching the wound that barely hurt, he wondered when exactly he drowned, and when exactly the lines started blurring. The dark red blood he bled felt almost unreal. He half expected for it to run clear, so that he could have the undeniable proof that something was amiss in his biology. So he could get in his car and drive away without any regrets, biting the wind as he raced into the night.
He trampled every flower field that he passed. It was a constant– A law of thermodynamics. A familiarity that ran as sure through his veins as the consciousness that ran through his hands. As sure as the tendons and muscles that curled into his bomber jacket, scuffed and worn through the wash of fire and poison. It was the strangest sensation– An envelope that felt only comforting and served as a ghost of a true hug, suddenly felt strangling.
His heels crunched into the asphalt, and he imagined the shards of his own armour right there on the ground– A ringing tremble of ultimate destruction. Something about his own skin felt wrong, and he shivers. A reticulated weave of scales, hair and horn shudders, and he imagines that was what drops on the ground, not a duffel of bloodied money. As he climbed back into the car, he felt like a new person. Even clutching the probably fatal wound, he felt the swell of melancholy-infected hope.
Forever borne– He sheds himself and claws off into the horizon.