notes: Happy birthday to Jacci.

“All the bridges are burning that we might have crossed.” – Leonard Cohen.


There is a moment of near dizzying happiness when Lyle’s fingernails break and blood wells on the wall, staining grey to red. There is a colour, he thinks wildly, under the grey there is a colour and it is red. He watches it dry: the slow process of bright red turning to deep crimson to near black and nearly brown where it’s thin. Haemoglobin, he thinks, platelets and oxygenation. He imagines himself as a single blood vessel travelling his body and names all the aortas he would trace before finally dripping from the cuts in his fingertips. The fingertips themselves are stiff, almost unfamiliar from the developing scabs. They could almost be someone else’s, another person’s hands and body. Someone else, he thinks desperately, someone else not here.

The blood dries on the grey walls and Lyle doesn’t think about the passage of time. He doesn’t count the days – there is nothing to count down to, precious little to count from.

There are no air vents, no way out, and for once Lyle doesn’t have an answer.

There are no cameras in his room. He cannot be sure. Maybe there are hundreds – little bugs and microphones recording his every breath – but Lyle cannot find them. The paint is smooth and flawless, the concrete floor the same. The bed offers nothing, nor the linen or the mattress. You’ve been wrong before, he reminds himself, and then dismisses the thought as too painful.

“No one knows you’re down here,” Jarod whispers to him, as if he knows his thoughts. “And no one will until you give me what I want.”

Lyle stares at the blank, grey walls. How long has it been since they caught him? How long has it been since Jarod last visited? He tries to feel anything but relief from the monotony – to summon the outrage that once burnt so brightly.

(Please, please don’t leave me here again.)

A whisper. “What do you want, Lyle?”

(oh please, please)

He can’t – he can’t answer that, not with simple words. (kill you, hate you, let me out-out-out, don’t leave) Eyes slip close and he’s Marilyn fucking Monroe lining up sleeping pills so neatly; he’s JFK never even seeing the gun, and it doesn’t matter he only ever watched them die because they’re not here in this kingdom of nothingness.

(please)

Lyle’s spent his entire life watched but here there are no cameras. There isn’t of his life that isn’t on record. First with DSAs and, later, by newspapers and people. Now no one watches, no one’s there, no one cares. There’s not a single thing to say he exists except the feel of his own body and Jarod’s visits. He’s all alone --

(A thumb tracing his nape, “I can give you all you want.”)

-- except.

In the first hours of his capture Lyle imagined torture – flashing lights, sleep deprivation and needles under fingernails. He imagined brainwashing and Sydney telling him “just help us, Lyle, please.” Those things he thinks he could stand. He could visit places in his mind to escape the pain.

He never imagined this – this boredom and monotony and endless, lonely grey. Grey until it’s all he knows and all he sees. Grey until he forgets there are other colours at all and he has to look at his own bloody fingerprints on the wall to assure himself. He wishes Jarod would visit, so he could kill him, or just to have someone to talk to.

There’s nothing to do but think. (Not about that.) He uses three different methods to work out the hundredth digit of pi but it only lasts an hour and he knew it anyway.

His mind drifts, as it always has. He wonders if the boy’s safe, if he got away with his father. He wonders what Major Parker is like, how the boy is fairing in the free world, and if he has a name other than Gemini.

(“Their plane was shot down.”

“You’re lying!”

“Maybe, but you’ll never know.”

Don’t think about that.)

The walls are too close and too far away. He wants to touch them to assure himself they’re real, that all of this is real, but can’t bear to because then he’ll know that it is.

(“She died on the asphalt.”

“Liar.”

“You’re right; she died on the table when they tried to remove the bullet from her back.”

“Liar. ”

“You’ll have to earn the truth, Lyle.”

Don’t think about that either.)

A nutritionally perfect meal slides under the flap but he doesn’t touch it, just so he can feel the hunger. It’s a feeling, something they can’t take away. Instead, he breaks each dish down to its components – spinach, lentils, asparagus. And even further – vegetable: relies on nitrates and photosynthesis.

He thinks of the nitrogen cycle – follows through its conversion until it starts to decompose. He thinks of Emily, who may be in the ground already, becoming part of the cycle. Aerobic and anaerobic bacteria breaking her down in ammonification, a process only slowed by the embalming– no, don’t think that at all. Jarod lied, Emily was alive on the asphalt when he left her, when he jumped on the motorbike and tried to escape. She’s his huntress, practically a force of nature. What was it he once said? The only things left after a nuclear apocalypse would be cockroaches and a woman named Emily.

Cree craw toad’s foot he sings to himself until his voice cracks. He rubs his hands up and down his arms, but it’s not cold in his room – cell – and feels nothing like a mother’s touch.

“I was taken from my family. They stole me; I’m not sure how old I was. They kept me locked up for thirty years before I managed to escape, and then they spent 3 years trying to catch me. Even sent someone I’d known when I was growing up here. But I was – am – smarter than them, and I managed to get away.”

They’re listening. He knows.

They have to be.

“I had just found my father when we discovered what the Centre had done. They made a clone of me - not content with one of me to enslave they created another. Told him I had killed his parents. I had to tell him he wasn’t… that he was a copy, never even intended to be his own person.

“I had just found my father when they took him again. And then Emily and Bridgette screwed everything up by arriving at the airstrip and Emily was shot trying to save Mr Charles.

“I don’t even know if they’re alive, if Jarod was lying and only one survived. If she’s alive…”

There’s no reply, and after a minute, Lyle wonders if he spoke at all.

Before people had science and knew the Earth wasn’t the centre of the universe they called it melancholia. They renamed it with the advent of new sciences, in the 1900s, and called it neurasthenia. Now it survives as a nervous breakdown: "snapping" under immense pressure, mental collapse or mental and physical exhaustion.

This, Lyle decides, is what Jarod wants from him. He’s already killed Lyle once, but stopping his heart in the cold of that machine apparently wasn’t enough.

Jarod doesn’t like things whole, perhaps because he isn’t. Trapped in his father’s shed – no, pity not the monster. Remember what he did to Che Ling and the ones that may have come before her, the ones who will come after.

Remember what he’s doing to you.

Lyle’s been a psychiatrist – listened to people, watched them for signs and helped them be treated. One raised him, for God’s sake.