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.
A text arrives from Parley, early Tuesday morning:
Out of town. Don't know how long. Don't throw away my socks I'll be back. Briefcase under my bed.
If retrieved, the briefcase can be found fastened by a sturdy combination lock, as easy to sort out as... well. Having access to Parley's mind.
Within: A cornucopia of *papers*. Stacks of papers, some printed on clean white computer paper and stapled together, some torn line paper from spiral notepads, covered in notes written in Japanese, Russian, English. Dates and times, names replaced by kanji or incoherent collections of letters and numbers. Newspaper clippings with words highlighted in multiple colors, others circled or underlined. Some with specific words crossed out at precise intervals as though some hidden message could be found between them.
There are folders as well, their contents more orderly, if more grim - meticulous notes on a Latverian laboratory. Detailed blueprints of Oscorp telepathic shielding technology, its range and limitations, some of the experiments performed with it.
There is a fat blue folder named Heroes for Hire, containing promotional material and log-in information for the business's website and Twitter feed. A second folder of research and case information for Clair Basil.
There is one folder titled simply Em.
And a strangely optimistic spring green folder, standing out from the rest, containing careful notes and research planning for a mutant memorial. And a list of reminders to speak to Dusk. To J. Holland. To Hive. Written in an inappropriately un-cryptic purple gel pen.
There are a few Pog, a lock of dark hair. A stack of rubberbanded hundred dollar bills amounting to $5,000. The top bill has a smiley face drawn on it in ballpoint.
And finally, a letter, tucked away in a sealed envelope, with Parley's precise penmanship marking the front with: 'mirror mirror'
It simply reads:
11-15-13
M,
If you're reading this, I have either directed you to this envelope or I have been gone for a long enough time that you've gone riffling through my things.
Enclosed, you will find the access information to my email and bank account; I trust you to decide how best to use it. Preferably it will involve periodic hashbrowns. The rest of this case's contents are now yours as well. Please see that the appropriate folders are delivered. Thanks.
I don't know how one would write a letter like this save in profound paranoia. It all seems so silly, doesn't it? What else does one say?
Be happy. You deserve it.
There are still things worth remembering.
-ET
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