Intentional Dissonance (15 page)

“You’re the one that thinks I’m beautiful. I don’t look in the mirror and think that. It’s a quality you give me so if anyone should know ‘how’ I am beautiful, it should be you,” says Michelle.

He thinks about it for a while and then leans forward and kisses her on the forehead.

“I guess that’s fair,” says Jon. They are quiet with each other for a while, and then Jon carries on, “Why do I hurt the way I hurt?”

“Why would I know that?”

“Because,” and Jon hurts so much right now, it hurts so much to say, “because you’re from my head. You can see things in there that I cannot.” He is crying so softly. Michelle looks at him and frowns a little. She nods.

“Because the chemicals in your brain come from your father. Because your gift is a curse. Because you have seen too many things. You have heard and read too many words. You have too many ways of describing your hurt. It is not a dull ache. It is a sharp, intricate thing inside you, twisting and turning as it cuts throu—” Jon’s startled by a sudden rustling behind him. Edward is awake and next to him.

“Who the hell is that?” Edward asks and immediately, Michelle fades and disappears.

“No one.”

“This is kind of fucked up. Is this like a porn thing? You imagine some broad to bang and then she’s there?” asks Edward, trying not to laugh.

Before he knows it, Jon is across the room with a pistol he’d taken from the remains of the Peace Carriage cocked and pointed at the heart of Edward’s trunk, black flames licking him up and down.

“What the hell?”

“Don’t you ever call her that ever again. Ever,” says Jon, breathlessly.

“Who? What the hell is going on? Is that Michelle?” asks Edward.

Jon slowly returns to himself and the violence leaves his red eyes.

“I’m sorry, Edward. I’m sorry, I just wasn’t expecting you.”

“I’m going to ask again, what the hell is going on?”

“I can’t tell you,” says Jon, turning away from him.

“Why not?” asks Edward, taking Jon by the shoulder and turning him back around.

“Because I can’t.”

“We’re running away from every Peace Ambassador in the last city on Earth, hiding away in an old warehouse and relying on each other to survive and according to what you’ve told me, the world might be ending, again, in less than a few days and it might be your fault. I think you can tell me,” says Edward.

“She’s a girl,” says Jon.

“I can see that, I’m a tree, not a fucking moron. She’s obviously a little more than that,” says Edward.

“She’s the only girl I ever loved,” says Jon.

“The one that got away?” asks Edward.

“Calling her ‘the one’ implies that there were or have been others. There haven’t,” says Jon.

“You’ve only ever loved one woman in your whole life?” asks Edward. His eyes are wide.

“Yes,” says Jon.

“That’s crazy,” says Edward.

“Maybe. It’s just me. Maybe I’m crazy,” says Jon.

“I know you’re crazy. I just didn’t know you were that crazy,” says Edward.

“She’s just the only thing I think of when I think of love,” says Jon.

“How long ago was this?” asks Edward.

“What?”

“Her. This. This infatuation. When did it start?” asks Edward.

“When I met her. When I was sixteen,” says Jon.

“When you were sixteen?!” exclaims Edward.

“Yes. From The End onwards,” says Jon.

“Is she really a ghost?”

“She’s a part of me that I don’t understand,” says Jon.

“And you can’t just get over her?”

“She’s like a cancer in my mind and some part of me knows that she’ll be there until I die. Some part of me knows that she’ll kill me. There’s nothing I can do that she won’t be in. I could drink water and it would taste like her lips. I could stare at the sky and the birds flying by would be there like the first time we kissed. And you know what? None of it was real. Not one moment. She’s was my whole life and now I’m left with nothing but the fragment of a broken memory. Less than a moment. I built my heart around her in the time it took to smoke two cigarettes.”

“That’s a bit fucking much, is it really that bad?”

“She ruined my whole life.”

“Were you happy when you were with her?”

“Yes.”

“Then she didn’t ruin anything. What happens or happened to her doesn’t even matter. What happens to you now, that’s the important bit.”

Jon is quiet for a moment.

“Thank you, Edward, I think.”

“For what?”

“For not being the rest of the world. For not being alien,” says Jon.

“I think that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me,” says Edward.

Jon is surprised to find himself friends with a tree and mythological assassin. And soon, he’s sleeping in a warehouse with them. But the girl he thought he loved haunts his dreams and doesn’t give him any rest.

Chapter 18

Now

The gentleman put in charge of Kurt Cobain’s guitars picks one up and starts to play. He plays Polly. He knows it’s about a girl being raped. His mother was raped. His father was a rapist. He’s never told anyone. Now only this guitar knows. He whispers the lyrics to the dark room he finds himself in. Then he starts to cry, wretched, heartfelt sobs that wrack his body.

The doctor’s hesitant to lean against the side of the plane, even though he’s tired. He knows if he wants to rest his head on the plastic wall next him, others must have wanted to, too and probably had. There’s an ancient civilization’s worth of sweat and untraceable but imaginable humanness in that wall. Maybe they disinfected it after every flight. Probably not. They probably just told people they did that. But they really didn’t. Lies are cheaper than disinfectant. He doubts they have enough people left to run that tight a ship. He tries to ignore it. This plane is the only way to travel long distances, even for someone as high up as him.

The last plane on Earth flies past a looping crash. Someone had once tried to save a passenger airplane with an emergency teleportation field in front of it, but they’d messed up something and now the plane just teleported 1000 feet from where it was and then crashed again. The people in the cabin had screamed for their lives and held the hands of the ones they loved a million times, never knowing that they were always going to die and that also, they were never going to die.

Everything was just a loop, stretching into infinity.

No matter, thinks the doctor, he’s on his way to meet somebody important. Someone Jon loves. Someone the doctor can use. And he smiles.

Chapter 19

Now

“What have you got there?”

“This is the rope that Ian Curtis hung himself with.”

“Who’s Ian Curtis?”

“He was the lead singer of a band called Joy Division. He killed himself when he was 23.”

“Do you think the doctor can use it?”

“Have you ever heard Joy Division? The doctor can use it.”

Jon wakes up from his dreams; it is the smallest mercy. He hasn’t dared to go out to find more Sadness and the withdrawal is killing him inside. The doctor’s voice still echoes in his head, “I will find you.” They have to move. They’ve spent too long here. Jon just has to stay out of his clutches. He tries to forget about it as he stretches and walks around the warehouse. A growing part of him just wants to be alone with his sadness and his memories of Michelle. He hears a scratching noise from one of the side rooms and instantly freezes. With the most hostile illusion he can imagine at the ready, slow dark fire burning over him, he peers round the corner. One Eye is scratching on an old wooden desk with a knife. He’s drawing a picture of a park in a small city. There are kids playing with a ball and a family enjoying a picnic and a couple kissing beneath a tree. It’s phenomenal.

“That’s amazing,” says Jon, forgetting his own problems for a moment. It’s the first thing that’s moved him in years that didn’t involve drugs. One Eye doesn’t stop, doesn’t even register that Jon’s there. Jon gets the impression that One Eye always knows what’s going on around him, even before the things around him do. Jon sits and watches him for a minute.

“For an assassin who doesn’t talk, you’re actually quite a nice guy, One Eye,” says Jon.

One Eye stops and looks at Jon. He scratches with his knife and writes into the wood, at the bottom, quickly,

Many artists are nice people.

“Not all artists?” asks Jon.

No I wouldn’t say that. There’re different kinds of artists and one of the kinds are nice people. They create because they want to describe the world to others so that they won’t make the same mistakes or so that they’ll know what to look out for. They’re extreme empaths and if you’re extremely empathic, you’re extremely good at communicating and art is about communicating a feeling from a thing to a person. Because sometimes there are no words for feelings. Sometimes feelings cannot be painted or sung. They must be delicately inscribed or viciously carved into the thing and then when someone holds that thing or looks at the thing, the feeling must leap from the thing to the person and then it lives in their brain forever.

How does this make great artists nice? Niceness is symptom of empathy. It means you understand how someone else feels and if you understand how someone else feels, it nearly always means you care about them and if you care about them then you’re nearly always nice to them.

What about artists who aren’t nice people? They’re just nice people who cared too much for a person or a world that hurt them too much. So now they chase the world and people away. Or else, they just do tricks. They’re very good at tricks and that’s what their art is. Tricks can make you laugh or cry for a while but no trick is funny or sad forever. So I guess those are good artists, not great artists.

A blaze of wood chips follows his carving as his knife finishes slashing the paragraphs of text into the wood. It’s the most One Eye has ever communicated to Jon and for some reason, he’s shocked by the depth of One Eye’s opinion. Jon wasn’t sure he felt anything at all.

“Were you once a great artist, One Eye, before your vows, before you were turned into a silencer?” asks Jon.

Was I a great artist? I don’t know. How do I feel? We are products of a maker who does not tell us what we are supposed to be. He does not include an instruction manual. We must guess at the need in the world that we fulfill, and then do our best to fulfill it, trusting that we are doing the right thing without ever knowing beyond a sense of purpose in our gut, that we are doing the right thing.

Jon doesn’t understand but he nods and walks off, leaving One Eye to his art. One Eye was part of a group of protectors and assassins who spent their lives in the service of others because they’d once done something so terrible and so unforgivable that they were damned to spend the rest of their days with their faces and bodies wrapped in black cloth, their tongues cut out by some cruel Peace Ambassador. It’s an alternative to killing people because there are not many people left to kill. It had to be chosen, a way to suffer that still allowed the person suffering to be of some use to society.

Jon had unwittingly saved One Eye’s life by breaking down his cell door during their escape. And now One Eye will be with Jon until he is indebted to someone else or he dies. He will sleep next to him on the floor or outside. He will sacrifice his last morsel of food without thinking about it. He will live, kill, and die for Jon.

Jon does not know this yet. All Jon knows is One Eye reminds him of a comic book he used to read when he was a child.

Chapter 20

Now

Sylvia Plath’s last diary entry. It is packed carefully next to Donald Crowhurt’s ship log.

Jon wakes with a start. Visions of the life he and Michelle had or could have had spent the night crashing through his mind. There’s a noise. The sound of whispering. The sound of people trying to be quiet and failing. Gravel crunches under a boot somewhere outside. Fuck.

“Edward,” whispers Jon and he shoves him. Edward’s eyes open almost immediately but Jon holds him tightly and tries with all his might to say what needs to be said with only his eyes: please keep quiet, please, don’t say a word and Edward seems to understand. Jon can see flashlights outside the building; they’re being held low but they’re there. Jon crawls over to where One Eye should be sleeping but his sleeping bag is empty. Jon hears the first scream. Then gunshots.

Fuck.

Outside, One Eye works his way through a team of five Peace Ambassadors, weaving in and out of the shadows like a snake in tall grass. He throws open the factory door, covered in blood and waves his hands at them, saying without words, ‘follow me.’ They grab their things and go, running through the streets.

“We can stay with Emily,” says Jon.

“Who’s Emily?”