Promethean: Chapter 3
Escape
Follow these links to read: Front Matter & Ch. 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7,
He shrieked! He cursed! The throbbing would not end. His leg would twitch and he would wince, eyes watering in reflection of what felt like a gross miscalculation. He bit his hand, pounded the counter, and called himself words and names he usually saved for others. Having rarely felt uncomfortable before, pain was foreign, taking him to a place he had never been. Regret formed as sweat crept down his skin, pooling in his palms. He wondered if it was blood, for he had never seen either once. Reconsidering his options, he hopped on one leg to the appliance that could instantly heal him and said, “Doc, I…”
“Here to heal!” said the automated physician.
It would last a second. It would not cost much. It would take the misery of his broken toe and in that exchange also take his hope of escaping the benevolent routine misery of this lucent grotesquerie where he was a sojourner lost sightseeing in fanciful enthralling enmeshment; an aberrant world his bones knew was not home, so a small one called out in its squeaky voice to be broken and leave this place costing him everything; contrivances taking imperceptible bites of him, murdering him inchmeal. The pinkie on his right foot swelled burgundy. The first of his flesh escaping. Its little strength encouraging the rest of him. He said, “Disregard.”
“Be well. Goodbye,” said the surgeon living in his wall, retracting a robotic arm by first reeling in the twenty-five filament extensions of five feminine fingers: five microscopic wires protruding from the tip of each digit, each tipped by tiny talons, giving Doc supreme dexterity, wielding god-like ability.
“Bye, Doc.”
Opening the lavatory’s medicine cabinet, he withdrew a bottle of pills. He flushed the pharmacological release and slammed the toilet seat, counting his tears wasted if he caved to further temptation. The wall flashed a number: -25,000 credits. He sighed.
Into the mirror he gazed, eyes on tenterhooks. From his pupils an outrageous silhouette emerged, wild and unrestrained, reaching skyward as if to grasp his lashes and pull itself from that bottomless locker hidden in his most remote domains, stretching through his intestines, coursing in every inch of artery and vein; no effigy—an entity. He breathed. It spouted. He blinked. It sank. He washed his hands, watching ten worms wrestle over which hurt worse: the cherry pulsating on his fringe as he stood in the lush holographic turf of his bathroom, every projected blade irritating his ballooning distal; or the day-to-day tedium dissolving his proximal.
Via cursed glass, a temptation arrived. “You meeting us at Weaver’s Theater? They’re showing a new rapture, advertised as better than their last pleasure-fire. They’re calling it Empyrean. Say it transforms the audience into pure light. Lasts only ten seconds, but for a duality, that’s a long time.”
Smiling, he responded. “I cannot, for I must rest as I have broken my toe, and the pain, you may expect, is keeping me home. Should I perish, for so great is my present suffering, visit me encoded in the ethereal tombs. Bon voyage, farewell, adieu. Buy my ghost a drink at Weaver’s. I prefer their joy juice.”
He received no reply. By evening, he figured they counted him lost. This he expected, for true friends were few, and of those rumored, he had none, as those kinds of people were rare, one he wanted to become. Lying on his fake suede sofa, foot elevated, he refrained from abundant amusements and seductions encompassing him. He envisioned a journey of untold years to unknown places, pushing off as a corpse to be reborn at sea; a vacuous man sent into the billows, returning to the beach only if deemed replete; heavy in the holds with anointing oil, flesh rendered by trying so that he might provide light and heat.
Engulfed by boredom, he began to change, starting with that outermost layer. The layer above the layer, where the man becomes air, where the world is first felt; that surrounding space where you are more than yourself: you are experience foremost. The air pricked, crushed, lifted, twisted, crawled, chewed, and gnawed at his green fortitude. Multitudes of molecules possessed by rectifiers became mephitic fiends drinking his agony as he grieved, not for his toe, but from ennui. Yet he did not succumb to that all-surrounding ease.
The throbbing increased when Doc, the siren, called from down the hall, begging him to stop. Sensing his suffering, she slunk from her closet, finding him with his head buried under layers of pillows. Again, she offered to mend him, and with her lithe hands she offered more, sashaying her fifty fingertips on his back; her sinuousness a dance in cadence with a clerihew she purred into his pulse. “I can heal and please.” Hearing her in him, feeling her on him, knowing what she said was true, he cried, and by that salt his resolve grew. “Doc,” he said, “I want this, not you.” Rejected, she left him with a mechanical hum.
Midnight came, and out of that grim harbor he hobbled as an inexperienced pilot, anxious for the morning tides, those that risked returning him to old habits. His sacrificial toe would be nothing but a cenotaph for a man he had never known, who died in a place he had only sensed; a death caused by his trepidation, begetting an apparition that would forever haunt him. Hardly sleeping, his dreams were of shattered screens, windows peering between lives and possibilities, capricious mirrors of constant carouse and effervescence, hallucinations teasing contented homeostasis; a scrapbook pathography soothsaying his days should he stay in this geography. At sunrise, he rang the front desk and said, “Mr. Wilde is dead.”
Chapter 4