[garbage] was shaken from his cloud of contemplation when the geo hit a pothole, he felt his spine jarred and his teeth clicked shut. Coral’s cold hand was still in his, she was watching as the hospital complex loomed in their windshield, tall and domineering. Filled now with enough painful memories for a dozen lifetimes.

“Home sweet home.” She said. [garbage] answered with a nervous chuckle and swiped his hand out of hers to rub at his face. He had a dull insistent headache.

“I’m so tired.” He said.

“Yeah you drifted off a bit there. They’ll have coffee.” She found a parking spot not too far from the front entrance and they made their way inside. The bright glare of fluorescent light didn’t help [garbage]’s headache. He and Coral approached the front desk and explained their reason for being there. The prim receptionist directed them to wait. [garbage] slumped against the back of the faux leather couch near the front desk. Coral drifted past him and fluttered into a seat of her own.

“He said he was trying to kill it.” She said. [garbage] picked up a magazine from the table between them, opened it, and stared at the floor. The plastic faces and bubble font of gossip watched him from his hands. At length he closed the rag again and looked at Coral.

“If he wanted to kill it he could’ve asked Don for a bore. And he could’ve asked me for help.” The slap of the magazine against the table was loud enough to bring a sharp and slightly disapproving look from the woman behind the counter. [garbage] rubbed at his face again, pressing his closed eyes with his fingertips and grinding his teeth. “Or he could’ve just left it alone. It’s been months since it’s bothered us, now it has our scents again, now someone does have to kill it. And I’ll bet you it isn’t him that does it. He couldn’t the first time, why would he think anything’s changed?”

Coral watched him like he was a pet bird in a cage, ruffling about angrily, speaking a language it didn’t understand. She was leaned forward, trying to hook [garbage]’s eye, but he stubbornly fixed a black spot on the hard carpet floor with his red rimmed eyes.

“He wants a safe future for you two.” She said.

“Well I just want to be with him now. We should be camping with Don. If that thing wanted to sneak up on us, years down the line, we could deal with it then. Why does everything have to be perfect as far into the future as we can see? Why does our present have to be offered up like a sacrifice to some invisible tomorrow?” He was still staring at the carpet, where a smattering of tears had made several more dark spots around the one he watched. Coral sat back, abandoning any hope that she’d make a connection.

“He shouldn’t have done it.” She agreed. “But I don’t think he’s lying either.” [garbage] uttered a choked derisive sound. “Then you don’t know him like I do. Lying is as easy as crafting to him. He lies like he lies with his props. Made to look more real than reality. Made to be bought because to do anything else would be stubborn denial. Even his truths are freshened up, painted and cut to size. He probably doesn’t even realize he’s lying when he is.”

Coral took up a lock of her matte pink curtain and set herself to twirling it in her fingers. [garbage] wiped his eyes on the back of his hand. The air in the waiting room was sterile and conditioned. It smelled like citrus and antiseptic. Periodically, the door hushed open, admitting a couple, a group, a few stragglers. The murmur of emergent discourse wrapped a shell around them as they engaged themselves with waiting for the bowels of bureaucracy to gurgle along and admit them through one of the many locked sphincters of the expansive hospital building. Coral’s phone dinged and she bent forward again, sweeping her hair behind her shoulder as she did.

“Don’s on his way.” She said.

“He should just stay on the coast.” [garbage] replied. But Coral just sat back again, nestling into the silence. The familiar boredom and bright lights, high ceilings and hushed agency, stretched along and carried them half an hour more before a man in teal scrubs and an ID lanyard poked his head through the magnet-locked double-wide doors calling “[garbage]? Coral?” [garbage] looked up at last from the gunshots of wet on the floor and he and Coral allowed the gentleman who called them to lead them at last along shining tiled floors in wide hallways, past groans and murmurs with no names to a sectioned off area divided by curtains scattered with dark blue dots that formed a gradient into solid color where it limply suspended above floors that were cleaner than the plates [garbage] ate off at home.

The man, who looked like he was eight hours into a second twelve hour shift, or asleep and unaware he was even working at all, parted the curtain with a flash of hollow plastic on tracks sounding sterile, revealing a bed that looked like a recreational vehicle, upon which Gus sat up against a pile of pillows and the rear half of the V-shape the bed had bent up into, wearing a foreboding expression and crossing his arms. An IV bag of clear liquid was suspended above him on a metal hook. His sallow countenance brightened when they entered.

“Just ring for us if you need anything Gus.” Said their guide, who then pushed the massive shower curtain closed and disappeared. Coral stopped by the bed to give a brisk gentle hug before joining [garbage] in a too-familiar heavy square chair along the wall. [garbage] was working a fist like he held a mass of modeling clay and watching the wall. From beyond the curtain a constant susurrus of sneakers on tile, cheery phones ringing, and clicking keyboards filtered in. The room was dimmer than the outside, but still bright, as every room there was, even, somehow, the dark ones.

“I’ll probably just be here for a few hours.” Gus said. The stale silence that followed was heavy and hard. [garbage] was tracing a web of cracks near the ceiling with his gaze.

“That’s good, you don’t have to stay overnight?” Coral asked, trying to squeeze some brightness into the moment through tone of voice alone. But even her genuine contralto sounded strained and put on.

“No, they’ve seen too many OD’s to admit every one. One I get some saline through me I’ll be free to go.” Gus implored [garbage] silently from the bed, his red eyes seeking redder. His taught line of a mouth was pressed white. [garbage] studied the cracks, jaw tense, fingers rolling and gripping at nothing.

“[garbage], I’m sorry.” Gus said. His normally strong voice was weary, his eyes widened and his arms still stiffly crossed. One long tube dangled from the back of his hand. It was like watching a ripple tear across a sheet. [garbage] stiffened from the center out, sitting straighter, arms extending, he turned to finally regard his boyfriend in the bed across from him. A wicked grimace pulled down the corners of his mouth, his chin trembled even as his thick eyebrows knitted to form a V.

His every muscle seemed to jump at hearing Gus’s soft apology. Tense and frayed, [garbage] opened his mouth wide, as though to wail or shriek. Strands of saliva stretched from his top to bottom jaw, then, just as abruptly, but with a jarring clam control, he closed it again.All his muscles were relaxed. His pupils were slightly dilated and his fists released. He calmly watched the pair of people sharing his space.

“Garbage.” Gus breathed out. “I really fucked this up.”

“Hello.” Said Garbage. “Yes, you did.”

______________________________________________________________________________

[I stand, as sitting feels too vulnerable. I want to greet Gus and Coral, it’s been a while since I’ve seen them. But time really is of the essence here.

“Gus, I spoke with Zachariah last night,” I say. From his widened eyes I can tell he doesn’t want to hear from me at all, whoever I spoke with, whatever I have to say. He’s swept the blankets from his legs, as if he’s planning to jump up from the bed and bolt, howevet tied he is to the IV creaking up above him.

“Hi Garbage,” Coral offers.

“Coral, do you have a book on you?” I ask her. She busies herself sorting through her expansive crocheted rainbow bag. Gus is scooting to the side of his bed. “Gus, calm down, will you? I’m not here to beat you up.” He eyes me warily. “You didn’t go to the through, did you? Null said none of his work showed you boring in or out. Where were you?” Gus settles down a bit but his eyes still show white all around the iris. He keeps his hand planted next to him on the bed, shoulder tense, ready to make an escape.

“I was in the worm’s tunnels, where else wouldI go to kill it?” he spits.

“Where else indeed. And you know that means it’s on you now? And, subsequently, on us? You know that’s put everybody you know at risk? What kind of fool plan is it to jump into that creature’s cave alone and naked, knowing you can’t best it?” With this I wake the prideful Gus. The Gus I need for the fight to come. His eyes narrow and his teeth set, I prod him one touch more, just to make sure: “You should have at least asked us for help if you were so set on this idiotic plan.” That does it. Gus emerges.

“I didn’t want to risk your lives!” He yells. “I wanted to be done with it, and I wasn’t naked, I was armed with a book!” As if on cue, Coral finds her book with chirped “aha!” and hands it up to me.

“That might not even work and you know it,” I counter Gus. “To bore inside a bore is an untested method, even Null has no idea what it does. You may have erased yourself as well as the beast.” Gus frowns back at me, undeterred. “We know it can be killed and we know how, you should have come to us.” Gus opens his mouth to argue but I shake my head minutely and he snaps it shut again. “I’m going to talk to Madam Par. We need to corner this thing. Together. And we need her to find the corners. You two wait here and watch the book. If it freezes, come in after, but only then. Otherwise, watch for words. I’ll sort this out. And if it comes here, just run. There’s no point getting killed before we have to.”

I drop the book, open, to the floor, and focus in on my relationship to [garbage]. Gus is fuming but I know he’ll do as I asked.

“Good to see you Coral.” I add. Then I step down on the frosting book and break through to the manor.]

______________________________________________________________________________

“I can’t hear him at all,” [garbage] says.

[Tell him you can, but only very faintly.]

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

“Well, sometimes I catch a word, or just a sound. That might be him. But otherwise nothing.”

The doctor sits opposite [garbage] at a metal table built into the floor. He looks serene and mildly vacant. His balding head shines in the artificial light. [garbage] can vaguely make out the reflected shape of the long tube fluorescents in his greasy brow. His dark thick eyebrows knit together. He folds his hairy hands on the empty desk. Next to him on either side are two tall nurses, both male and both pushed back from the desk, looking ready to launch themselves around it at the drop of a hat.

“That’s good. Can you tell me about your outburst, the day before yesterday? What brought it on, from your perspective?”

[garbage] lifts one leg up and levers it over his other knee. He’s leaning back against the chair, tapping fingers almost urgently, an uncracked morse distress call all in gibberish. The code equivalent of a whining dog behind a door.

“I don’t remember it.” He says. The doctor nods as though [garbage] is a banal book whose character took a turn predicted chapters back. The stale warmth of the meeting room, and its close quarters, act as a swaddle, pressing in its sweat aroma intermingled with a citrus antiseptic memory of that morning’s cleaning.

“That’s very serious.” His doctor says, half to himself. He seems to start reaching for something, his hand minutely twitching forward, then returning to its twin in folded still repose. A nurse’s stomach whines a bit, a sound that’s muted, muffled ty the fat and skin containing it, a mild petition heard by all for all the room’s stale silence. [garbage] feels as though he can detect the heat enclosing each of the three men across from him individually, like warm blooded auras, stifling him.

“I’d like to keep you on the third floor for now, [garbage], see how you continue to respond to the (_____). And we can see about bringing you back up to the fourth floor in about a week. I’d highly recommend you go to the group on anger management in the meantime. It’s held every Tuesday and Thursday. You might find it helpful. I’m also going to start you on (_____). Now this is commonly prescribed for depression, it is an antidepressant drug. But it’s also used for anger, as it has a calming effect of most patients. I think it’s best to address your anger psychotropically, that is, with medication. Blackout rage is not to be taken lightly.”

[garbage] assents non-verbally. He seems to only half hear his doctor however. When they conclude their meeting, he’s directed to a new bedroom, a little down the hall from where he’s spent the last two days. He gathers all his papers, scribbled thick with words and names, and his black leather journal, blank and heavier than its form, cold still to the touch. His new room has no desk, but it does have one more bed, with each bed bordered by a stack of simple shelves on their outsides and roughly five feet of floor between them.

[garbage] shoves his papers unceremoniously into a pigeonhole, but takes the book with him when he scrunches at the head oof the bed. He wedges the journal in the space between his knees and face, spread open to a pristine, if yellow, middle. His roommate isn’t there. The other bed is cluttered with clothes and twisted sheets. A pillow lays on the floor between the beds. Gently, [garbage] rocks, his searching eyes just inches from the book. The sunlight angles in from filthy windows, double paned and bolted securly, seamless against the cracked concred surrounding them, which looks as though its polished-smooth but flaking paint was rolled across it ten years back.

In one hand, which rests below the page he studies fruitlessly, a marker is gripped. A plastic ridged capped elementary utensil advertising oatmeal tan but which, he’s found, produces instead the color that a wetted brush would make when pulled along a page. He asked for another pencil, such as he had back on floor four, but was informed that the rules are different here, and the ink scarce dry-nibbed little tube of ghostly color is all that he’s allowed. He pulls the cap off and optimistically shakes it, quick qhip motions that he knows are more a hopeful ritual than helpful preparation, then, he carefully writes a single word around the center of the paper laid before him.

Madam Par.

Just as it did the hundreds of other times he wrote the same, and even before he lifts the meek utensil from the book, the lines he writes to form the letters start to vanish, leaving that discouraging silent pale expanse behind. They seem to disappear as water would, evaperating in a shrinking line that follows th speed he’s written them. The color of the words, like wetness on the page, encourages this evaporative action’s quality, so that he feels as if he’s writing lines on a mirror or a glass window pane on a cold day, watching condensation briefly spell his singular request. The dry air quickly snatching it away.

His rocking speeds. The wall behind him catches him and pushes forward every stroke. He flips the pages, fanning the cold book air up into his face again, eyes twitching left and right across it, searching but falling on nothing. Then, as suddenly as the words were lifted from the page, he smoothly lifts the book and uttering once, not loudly but with great conviction “Fuck!” He whips it hard across the room. It flutters, snapping in the air like a burst of startled birds, then slaps against the wall and falls to rest, inanimate, at the joint of wall and floor.

[garbage] spends a moment from his bed inspecting it, glowering as he rocks, but the page it opens to is blank like all the rest as far as he can see. He’s spent the last two days in urgent occupation with the empty frozen tome, trying everything he can think of to resuscitate its mystical properties, and everything he does only furher compounds his growing suspicions that he’s nothing more than a delusional mental patient entertaining himself while he slips ever deeper into the hole of insanity. He misses Gus. He wonders what’s become of his love, who, last he saw, was propped up, gaunt and glassy eyed, at the edge of a threadbare old gray couch, next to a skull-faced naked woman, amber bottle loosely grasped in thin and dirty fingers, lost to the world. He misses Coral and Don, too, who are one floor above him, if they aren’t in that fucked up world they all met up in, if in fact they did, if they exist at all.

He wrote the name that Gus gave him on every page of the book, even on its covers, its spine, he wrote his own name, he wrote Gus and Don and Coral, wrote hello, wrote fuck this book. He tore its pages, only to feel them melt away right in his hand and regrow from their ragged stumps like snowflakes branching out and filling up a page-shaped mold. He soaked it in water from his sink, until the whole damn thing was molting away into pulp and filling the basin, until all he had was a stiff leather clamshell with little beginnings of ice sprouting out along it. The muck in the sink began to thin and soon the pulp became a powder, the water just cloudy, then clear, and the book reassembled in his hand.

When he wasn’t folding pages that then uncreased, or cracking a spine that knit itself together, he was searching, ceaselessly flipping around and scanning every inch. It wasn’t entirely fruitless, which was why he was constantly doing it. On occasion, at infrequent and irregular interval, he caught a word, a phrase, or a name. These he carefully noted on the printer paper pages he was given, until he had a sort of second, loose-leaf book of mostly names, which offered him absolutely no insight, but felt important.

The book sits unassuming against the wall. [garbage] rocks there on his bed, watching it, until the light begins to fade. The red sun dips down below the concrete building. He remains there, for how long he’s unsure, just gripping at loose folds around his legs and pushing off and back against the wall. He feels a bruise begin to form along his spine. The room begins to darken and enfold the shapes within it gently into muddied obscurity. The light from the hallway angles artificially in, revealing the vague form of the bed in front of him, his bookshelf, and the cold anonymous lump of the offending book.

Then, in the space of his eyes flitting to and back from the door, a new shape, brazen and dark, appears. He stops his rocking motion. He squeezes his eyes shut and reopens, sure it’s only an after-image, the carbon copy of the door he glanced at. But it remains: a square against the wall above the book. He lets his legs fall straight. The buzzing sensation of sitting still after rocking for all those hours cradles him loosely. It is the unmistakable shape of a firmly closed door.

He swings his legs around the bed and stands up, body slightly trembling, his heart in his throat. Before he can begin to approach the thing to see it closer, to gauge its physicality and test his sanity, it starts to open. He remains frozen there, watching as a line of orange light, wavering and dancing, broadens to an entryway. A woman stands in it, silhouetted by the firelight beyond. She’s tall, her head almost high enough to brush the jamb above, and she’s wearing an exquisite evening gown, which looks sleek and seems to cascade from her hips in intricate turns and gathers.

“[garbage]?” Her voice is honey on a blade. All firm authority and measured affirmation. [garbage] watches her, her slim waist and bountiful curly night-black hair. She takes a step into the room, away from the healthy flickering glow behind her, and when she does it seems as if she walks through a plane. The parts of her that break the plane, framed by the black and turning door, are transformed into something else. Her breasts and legs are first. They don’t change shape but what they’re clothed by does change. A pencil skirt appears and quickly ripples back across her when she enters [garbage]’s room. A tidy blouse, all white and trimmed with blue spreads over her, across her arms.

“I know it’s you.” She says. Her voice is a dare to argue. [garbage] sees her face in the light from the hall. Behind the door frame it glowed with radiant health. When it passed through she became merely human, not the angel he glimpsed.

“How do you use the books?” [garbage] says. He feels around his back to tenderly massage the bruise on his spine, then stretches rigidly.

“I don’t know.” She states “They aren’t my method. Talk to Null, if you want to learn. But we have other business. Come.” She stands aside a touch, a mere indication that she expects his willing accompaniment beyond the door. She is devoid of hospitality and warmth, but not malicious. She brooks no argument.

He pads toward the door. When he reaches her, he bends to pick up the book. She may not be able to use it but he feels almost naked without it by this point. As he passes her, setting his shoulders for the crossing, he smells the heady aroma of a fine perfume, carried by cinnamon and smoke. She walks through at his side, her gown and glow washing back over her, and the scent shifts as well, from the complex liquid amber to one of rose, singular and muted. The door is pulled to when they cross.

______________________________________________________________________________

It has to be her. Maybe she got my message. She said she couldn’t use the book but she had to find out I was looking for her somehow. Whatever. It has to be her. When I walk through the door I’m surprised to find it doesn’t chill me. But I guess it’s not a frozen hole I’m falling ass over heels into. We enter what looks like a hallway, one that curves ahead of us gradually. The moment I step through I feel a sudden weight at my hips. I stumble a bit because it feels like I’ve been grabbed around my waist by whatever nefarious creatures might exist in the Through. But when I look down to check what has me, I find instead that a belt has materialized, much like the changing gown that Madam Par is sporting. It’s a black and silver band cinched tightly. Real silver by the look of it. All shiny and dancing with the red orange light that bathes us from the sconces along the wall. Attached to it and swinging loosely from its loop, I’m pleased to find the sword that Don gave me last time I visited here. The emerald swims with light. I place my hand protectively on the hilt. At least I’m not following a preternaturally knowledgeable woman into a dark fantasy hallway unarmed. Though I don’t know a damn thing about swordplay so there’s that.

Madam Par sets off down the hallway without looking back, and I follow her along. If Don was right, she can help me find where Gus is, and I’m willing to take any chance for that information

“Don has already told you who I am, and how I can help you,” she says, echoing my thoughts. She turns her head only slightly when she speaks, so I speed my walk until I’m next to her.

“You’re madam Par” I say.

“Yes. Lucy is fine though, you aren’t a client. I’m also sometimes called the Magnate.” Pride swells in her voice at that, and a wry smile twists her generous lips. As we walk, the corridor continues to curl to the left. The walls are of blue gray stone. I wonder to myself if I’m in king Null’s castle hallways again. But I toss that notion quickly to the side. I somehow doubt the two share quarters. The stone floor feels unnervingly warm beneath my sock feet, as if it’s heated from below, or alive and warm with blood. The sound of Lucy’s short heeled shoes against the floor taps out our passage. The echoes issuing out are also unnerving, but in a way I can’t quite comprehend. It’s as if they aren’t quite in synch with the sound they follow, like they’re reverberating through a different space.

I realize with a grim and familiar astonishment that they have the selfsame echo I remember from the coast. The hug point spiral cave reverberated in the same way. With that memory now in mind, I can’t help but find that the curling passageway smells faintly of the sea, and its walls are not so smooth, as I’d once imagined. Why had I imagined that? In fact, the sand beneath my feet is just the same as hug point as well.

“[garbage].” Lucy says. I look up at her face. She stares back at me. “Don’t get distracted. We have business.” The gentle scent of roses ambushes my nostalgic view. The floor below is bare. The walls are glassy smooth around us. I realize I’m standing still. How long has it been since I stopped walking? “Focus on me.” She says, and sets off again. I follow, keeping her industrious pacing frame in my vision. We do have business, and that's finding Gus. Let the nature of this place be a mystery, I only need Gus.

“So you know what I want.” I say. The sconces drift past us like flickering ships on a river of stone.

“You’re looking for someone,” She says. I’m careful to keep my face half turned toward her. Her eyes look brooding in that light, but at a sway of shadow as we pass a flame, they shift, her eyes becoming studious, measured.

“My boyfriend, Gus.” I say.

“Your boyfriend Gus,” She tests the words. I feel a demure consternation wash over me and my cheeks redden slightly, but I can’t place why her lightly derisive repetition of my words should warrant it. I try to shake it off.

“Don said you’d know where he was, and you could tell me how to get him out.” I say. Her wry smile flashes back, with an added passing aura of contempt.

“I know,” She says. “I bet it cut him deep, admitting I know more than him..” I remember Don’s ritualistic condemnation of Madam Par. Abruptly, she stops so that I pass her, my eyes slipping off her face and falling to rest on a patch of wall that looks, I notice with crawling horror, a lot like Jojo’s scar webbed leg, the lines just so, the pocks stained through with shocked curiosity, even its color. I can’t believe I thought it was gray. It’s pale pink-cream with angry glittering red diagonal lines. I feel a firm hot hand envelop my shoulder and turn to see if a staff member has come into my room to tell us to stop playing Starfox.

Instead my eyes relock with Lucy’s Again the soft aroma of rose overcomes me. My face reddens a bit again, a flush that crawls up over me, heats me like the embarrassment of younger years.

“You are precocious aren’t you?” Lucy looks amused, derision glosses across her polite smirk. “Well we’re here now, so it doesn’t matter.” She indicates the door she stands before. It is its sister’s equal, black and tall. Lucy opens it to reveal the room beyond, and stands aside again, inclining her head sardonically. The room beyond is a spacious office, severe and modern. It’s decorated with a palette of carefully muted blues and grays, reminiscent of the stone walls in the corridor. But the wall length windows along its rear reveal a different world from the castles and encampments of the Through. A broad and sprawling cityscape, from thirty stories up at least. It’s unmistakably downtown Portland.

The office is sparsely furnished with a shining dark wood desk, a sensible mesh back swivel chair, and a row of bookshelves filled with alternating books and abstract phallic and yonic sculpture, gleaming onyx black. In the corner, a large doberman sleeps on a circular velvet bed, its long nose resting across its brown paws. Lucy holds one arm up away from the door, as if to usher me in. I step through, and into her office.