ArchivedLogs:Vignette - Pillar of Salt

Vignette - Pillar of Salt
Dramatis Personae Parley
In Absentia	2014-02-25 Even the best laid plans...
Location Elsewhere
From mindless heavy night, dawn in words: "-a debit card, state ID, social security card.  Outer pocket contents-" A voice somewhere is listing off.  Listlessly, he is thinking: …damn,  they're going through my pockets. "-thirty-two cents in change. Pocket knife. A cell phone. Inner coat pocket-" He thinks: damn quite a lot. Grits his teeth. Then sloughs off the bones of his body like liquid skin. Back into the gloaming. -*- To the prissy tempo of machine beeps tracking a heart rate, it starts out standard: "Yo. You're awake now." "Yeah, don't sit up too quickly." "You've been out for twelve hours." He drags a hand down his chest; his clothes were different. The material snaggy and organic. They didn't make scrubs  out of warm dyed wool. Nor he notes do laboratories have huge windows overlooking a frozen yard with a duck pond. "Einen Lewis Turner. Known currently by the name… Parley." "Birthday, August 22nd. Mother, deceased. You have a father a younger brother living in Kansas." More absurdly: "…Virgo. Huh." He turns over onto his side, retches like a dog. Digested gazpacho, red and sour, whole kernels of corn, scraps of nacho chips slop into a shallow bowl. "Yeah, that. Sorry." The man says. He's young. Barely older than Parley. But wild hair. Wild bodied and powerful. Damn. "That's one of the side effects. It should wear off any time now. We're pretty cautious about bringing people here." Looking into the shallow pan the contents swimming in chunks still connected to his mouth by a string  of umbilicus spit he thinks: This is not one of my better moments. This other person's mind is raw with the trenches of war. It flays and shrieks. Ra-ta-ta-ta-tas and erupts with mushroom clouds, hurricanes of black crows, and he says: "I'm Arsly." And Arsly's eyes glowed red in their pupils. Parley isn't hearing him. He can't. There are too many papers and phone calls and emails to be doing this right now. It clutters and pours cold and unpleasant like snow flakes melting on wet eyeballs. His Netflix queue and eye appointments and ice skates. Hair dryers. Tattoos and tabloids. Cage and Holland. Clair and Osborn. There was going to be a home to be a harbor against the storms. ...And more selfishly there were those that required no doing, that he still wasn't done with yet, in this life. Mirror. Anima. Dusk. The hidden landscape behind Tessier's cool mind. Emma Frosts's pink lips folded over white teeth and her hands  folded over a white handbag. There was a line in a poem, wasn't there? He can almost remember it. "Dawn."  It comes out slow and sludgy to the roomy cabin quarters. "Federico... García Lorca." Arsly has no answer to this. He sits like he's a guard on duty. Except with a crooked knee, sketching charcoal on newsprint. And eats tunafish on rye. Parley listens to himself persist for no reason at all, quoting mushily: "Dawn arrives and no one receives it in his mouth. ... Dawn in New York... groans on enormous fire escapes searching between the angles for spikenards of drafted anguish." The words are chunky and retching. And laughing, a little. Because he can taste the bitter backs of his teeth. He never liked poetry. Is this hysteria? he wonders folding his hands over his eyes. Arsly stands, sighing. Says, "We'll do this later." -*- They did. The airstrip is a naked gray flanked with snow dusted with salt and streaked in runway paint forming flat arteries against the pavement. He doesn't have time for this, he'd told them. They'd said: That's the best time to disappear.  It's when many things happen at once that accounts are not made. He argued.  There's been no lack of opportunity to vanish in New York City. He has projects that needed finishing. Thinking of the Lofts. And how the minds there ached and sucked deep like dry tooth sockets. There were projects everywhere, he'd been reminded. And then asked: Is there anything here you're doing, Parley that couldn't be done just as easily by someone else? And he never hated them more for promising: "There is a greater use for you." He hadn't answered. Because he was asking himself: When did this come to be about pride? They allowed him to send a text. In a different era it would have been a letter. Ink and paper to smell and touch. That would crumple and age with time. Now, it's the passage of thumb over a touch screen. No discernible handwriting. They didn't have to, Arsly told him later as they rolled and bit one another.  And lay tangled and damp like new born birds in their shattered shells. The London sunlight caging them in bars through the window blinds. They didn't have to let him send anything at all. But that will be later, elsewhere, elsetime. Now is an airplane, rolling slowly to a stop. Sending their hair whipping back from their faces. The guard's hands resting firmly on their firearms. Now is a ladder rolled to its door. Now is a look back,  like Lot's wife standing over the destruction of Sodom his eyes searching over the white dunes and the smoggy New York skyline in the distance for want of a lost city. Or a choice. Or an argument. He could ragdoll to the ground. He is aware of this. Grasp at the ice and tarmac until his nails bend backward, shout I'm not done yet. Not yet. Just a little bit longer. And steels himself instead with a silent plea slung out into a forming blizzard: Don't die. A promise: I'll be back. And now there's nothing at all. But ice and snow and painted lines beneath a gravel of shattered salt flakes.