I’m a changed man… I don’t even know if man is a suitable word anymore. I’ve changed before, as I will again, as we all do. But this is… different. I suppose I’m sending it here because I hope it’ll be read and then lost. And my act of recounting it will let it disappear, if only for a little. The following story I’m sharing is comprised of a blend of journal and memory that will recount the last five days of my life until everything changed again and I re-paid my debt that should have been settled long ago.
***
“I promise, every piece I take will be painless. So long as you promise to do me the same kindness when it’s your turn,” he said.
How many times had I heard those words? How many times had I said them to him? How many times had we made good on that deal? How many times had we not? Everything has a price. Everything.
I didn’t know I was paying for anything, or paying with anything until Sunday morning. My usual nightly ritual of waking up right before dawn with a guttural scream was uninterrupted. The dark of my room blocking my vision allowed me to feel the texture of drenched sweat in the sheets and scorch in my vocal cords much more vividly than I ever preferred.
Another dream. With him within. There weren’t many dreams I had that weren’t with him. Black stubble around the chin and jaw, those piercing blue eyes, that crooked smile. A table made of wood, soldiers with pikes and polearms around me were feasting, he was next to me. A great battle on a field, my feet splashing up blood in puddles, he marched beside me. Topless women in a brothel squeezing good coin out of patrons, he was across the bar a lady in his lap and mug raised to me. No matter the place, no matter the context, he always showed up.
The endings were always the same however. The inside of a dark chamber with stone walls, lit by an unseen sconce. One of us in the other’s arms, it always changed, pouring blood and bile from a wound. A cloaked figure standing behind us holding a chain weaved through severed fingers and tongues. It touches us, searing pain shooting into our brainstem. It’s then I wake up.
Trying to wipe the memory of the cloaked figure from my mind until our next nightly meeting, I brushed the hair away from my face back atop my head. Something about it felt off in my hand, like new tufts grew overnight. I reached up with the same hand and felt the strands to find the same feeling between my middle and ring finger. My ring finger. Like the hair passed through it as if incorporeal. Slowly my other hand rose and met its counterpart and felt around the fingers. One. Two. Three. Four. Four. Four?
With a worried gasp I shot up from the sweat soaked mattress, ran to the wall, flipped the switch, and was illuminated. It was gone. The finger was gone. Between the first and second knuckle a patch of skin grew over the knob like an age old wound.
“What the fuck?!” I muttered under my breath, my panic taking away any potential for shouting. “What the fuck?!”.
I dashed back to the bed and scanned the blotches of perspirant for any sign of red. Nothing. Rifling through the sheets next I found no detached appendage hiding within the folds. The digit had disappeared, leaving nothing but a half inch lump of flesh as a goodbye.
My next surprise was the clock on my wall chiming 7:00am on the dot. I was gonna be late for work. Leave it to America to pressure you into feeling bad for a late clock in when you’ve just lost a finger. But I needed the job and I couldn’t handle finding another. And how do you explain that? Someone would notice. Lena would notice.
I swallowed my fright best I could and scrounged around my 400 sq/ft hovel for a solution. In a drawer rested my sleek winter gloves which I had retired for the season seeing as how it was July. But I was out of time and out of answers so on they slipped and out the door I went.
* * *
If, in orientation, a company states they are a “family” do yourselves a favor and run. The Super Steal Grocery had it plastered all over their slideshow when I showed up on my first day and after three years I can say without a doubt if there’s a hell it has numbered aisles. I stepped into the fiery automated gates of the Super Steal, heart still pounding and mind still racing as to the location of my extremity.
“Just get back from the slopes?” A woman’s voice called out. Lena’s voice.
I snapped my head to the origin of the joke to see her standing at her usual spot at the check out. Her hair done up and clothes picked out as the rulebook specified. She smiled and waved at me. I eked out a nervous grin and started to raise my injured hand, stopped myself, lowered it, raised the other hand, and waved back. A joke from Lena usually warranted a response from me so when I abruptly walked away into the maze of shelves, she glowered.
I rushed to the stockroom, slapped on my name badge, and spun around to dash for my first u cart when I was stopped in my tracks by David. My manager, the ever watching eye dressed in powder blue and horrible kaki. A man of which you get the impression his much younger wife starts drinking at noon. Apparently she started earlier today as David’s face was not pleased. Not pleased less than usual anyway.
“It’s 7:35. Did you know that?” he sighed.
“I was awa-,” I began, then cut off by David’s nasally, piercing drone.
“Twenty minutes. As opposed to 7:15. Your start time,”.
He had this way of getting to a point without ever really arriving at it that drove me crazy. I stood there in silence. He stared at me expecting a response to a question he never posed. But apparently my silence was good enough as he grunted and moved on to his next subject.
“What’s with the gloves?” David snarked.
“Oh… uh…” I looked around for any help, luckily I found it stacked all about. “The boxes,”.
“The boxes?”.
“Dry hands, y’know? Figure I’d try something different,”.
“Gloves are not a uniform standard. Get some lotion. And show up on time,” David finished, then quickly walking away before I could respond.
I’d would’ve worried more about David if I thought he’d be worth the capacity to worry. After that ordeal I stormed off, a cart stacked with various super processed cereals, and got to work. If it wasn’t for the empty finger sleeve of the glove getting caught under heavy tins, I might’ve had five seconds of a clear mind. But that wasn’t in the plans.
I mean really it wouldn’t be a clear mind, how could you not constantly think about it? Between the mac and cheese boxes and the peanut butter jars I hypothesized theories. Perhaps a parallel dimension butted up against ours and other me, minus one counter, and I fuzed? Or maybe I hadn’t woken up yet, a vivid dream mimicking my life trying to parse through years of trauma symbolized in a lost finger? Had I lost it a long time ago and through some complicated self delusion thought I had it? But why would I decide today of all days to let the delusion go? None of my calculations added up, as you would guess.
Almost done with the day and not nearly done with my panic, I was caught off guard by a tap on the shoulder. Turning around I saw a receding hand with all fingers counted for, connected to an arm, connected to Lena. She smiled at me. I smiled back.
Lena was the only person in this town or in my life I could really call a friend. She had moved here with her parents last year to finish out high school and worked part time. I trained her and she immediately weaseled her way into my life, a feat all my past friends said was impossible. She had good magnetism like that, knew who to pick and who they were. I mean I’ve been out of school for almost 8 years and she’s almost out. That’s a very creepy combo if you pick the wrong “pal”. But she never did. She was good like that.
“Hey, nerd, what was with this morning?” she asked.
“I-I mean I was already late and-” I stuttered, and she laughed.
“I’m fuckin’ with you. I was just wondering if we’re still on for Tuesday,”.
Tuesday. I had completely forgotten. The boardwalk festival. It was her first and as she put it she ‘wanted a townie aka me to show her all the good digs’. I didn’t know how I felt about being called a townie. Or being one.
“Yes. Definitely. Still happening. Yep,” I covered my absentmindedness.
“Good. Now get to it glove man,” she said as she walked away.
“Glove man? You’ve done better,” I called to her.
“I’m sure I will later,” she answered back one last time.
Bouncing between my existential dread and the plans with Lena made the day go by pretty fast but not enough to forget to punch out and leave as soon as permitted. As I exited the Super Steal I was warned to a presence at my right side. Before I got a chance to look, the presence spoke.
“Sir?” he asked me.
I turned around, and at the sight of the man another medical miracle happened upon me. In the onset of great fear or shock sometimes the lungs will reverse their function and squeeze the breath out of themselves, leaving a pseudo suffocated feeling within the user. I was pseudo suffocating.
The seemingly homeless man had that black stubble around the chin and jaw, those piercing blue eyes, that crooked smile. Him. From within. The man who only my dreams allowed visitation. Right in front of me. Like he leaped from my brain onto the pavement.
“I think we should talk,” he said.
“Get-get the fuck away from me,” I stammered. If it was a hallucination: I didn’t want to talk to myself in public. If it wasn’t: I had no interest in whatever he brought with him.
I sped walked my way down the parking lot, glancing back at him to which he gave chase but only for a moment before falling back.
“It’ll only get worse until you talk to me!” he shouted across the concrete and cars.
Nope. I had clearly snapped. I had problems, some of which affected me since childhood. But never had they manifested. Literally. I glanced back once more to see the man had gone, then immediately whipped out my phone and dialed.
* * *
“I told you Dr. Adler I just need a new prescription,” I told my therapist after being scurried into his office. “I’m not doing well off of them,”.
“Well my boy I haven’t seen you in some months, I think a session would help me understand,” Adler motioned me to sit. Reluctantly I did.
Another billable hour, good for him. Dr. Adler was my therapist as you may guess. And at this moment the only thing keeping me from blurting out a delusional rant was the fact his office couch’s springs were stabbing my ass like a downed gazelle.
Dr. Adler had the same wording condition as David, although he was paid too while David was just born annoyingly vague. He pulled out his notebook and casefile on me and got to work staring me down and scratching his chin at me. I got to work figuring out a way not to be sent to the hospital.
“I’m feeling… unstable. Like all of the pieces of me aren’t there?” I tried to explain. Don’t blame me, ironic metaphor was all I had.
Adler scribbled a word or two down. “And what is the source of this uneasy feeling?”.
“I don’t know. The nightmares won’t stop. My job is hellish. I have a pick of the litter for sources to my problem. But I know the solution which is why I’m here for my medicat-”.
“Your mother, did she reach out at all since our last session?”.
This is what I meant, he asked this knowing the answer already. And I know he did it because shrinks want you to get to the answer yourself for impact. The only problem was we had this mother breakthrough 4 years ago. See, I was a paying customer and Dr. Adler knew without better quality treatment there was nowhere else to go for me. But then I wouldn’t pay him anymore. So he took a note from the bible of all television stations: if all else fails, re-run it.
But there was a snag with his approach: it was something completely different. It was a missing appendage, a dream talking to and following me. I had lulled Adler into a sense of routine, that there was no more to me. Why would he have reason to assume something else? He wanted to go no further because to him I was open and shut. I couldn’t go any further because what was happening to me only happens to padded cell patients. I knew I just needed the meds, so I played along. Open and shut.
“No, she has not. I told you we went no contact,” I said quietly.
“Does it maybe hurt you that it’s so easy for her to respect that wish?” he asked.
“No. I don’t know. Maybe. But I know it’s for the best,”.
“People with trauma sometimes develop an unhealthy relationship with it. For the first time your life is becoming stable and thus you feel the opposite because it is ‘uncharted territory’,”.
He wasn’t wrong. But he scored a goal on a completely different field than mine. My mother was a touchy subject for me, one I don’t care to go into right now. I knew I wasn’t going to get anything from him. I didn’t really, from anyone. I was never one to have groups of friends or family until Lena. And I knew I couldn’t tell her either. I was used to being lonely, but the feeling of loneliness always rears its head to remind you in new and piercing ways. An unsolvable puzzle that made you not only the solver but the puzzle itself, enthralled in its twisting mazes leading to nothing.
I played along with his act for the rest of the session, both of us catching one another staring at the clock. I stood up at the chime of the hour, he stood as well handing me a script and I exited. I spent the rest of the night downing a pill with water, staring at my ceiling until my eyelids could no longer take the weightless weight of sleep forcing them to shut.
* * *
He layed in my arms this time, crimson leaking from a slash to the stomach that had found its way also exiting the mouth with each rattled breath. The heat from the hearth warmed my back inside my armor, I wiped the blood away from his mouth.
“Anything?” the woman said, her chains with bloody pieces strung around it clanging about as she paced around us, taking us in for all our mortal weakness.
“Anything. Just save him,” I say back to her, desperation stuck in my throat.
And of course, after all of this, I woke up again.