Estimated oxygen time: 16:47:24
The first thing I noticed when I woke up was the horrible whistle of exiting air. A leak.
Then came the pain. My left shoulder felt as if it had been split open. I dared not touch it. My head ached; my eyes protested when I tried to open them; my throat was rock-dry. Indicators of blood loss, I noted. I breathed, and the pain spiked suddenly; I tried to move slowly, but that caused another spike of agony—the spear must have sunk into the shuttle’s interior, pinning me in place.
Did Vempress miss, or did she choose not to kill me?
I opened my eyes, consciously choosing not to look at the wound. I was still in the shuttle, where I’d been sitting before, but the door was open now, letting in faint third-hand light. I checked my visor; the readout didn’t make sense. Sixteen hours. Last time I’d checked, while talking to Yael, I’d more than nineteen hours. Had I just sat here for more than three hours? No, of course not. I hadn’t been breathing that air but leaking it. I’d been leaking time.
I struggled to place the facts-puzzle into an image that made sense. I remembered hearing someone scream, but I didn’t know if it had been me or someone else. There hadn’t been pain in the sound, but fury. I had a feeling the others hadn’t fared much better. Something had obviously gone wrong. Of course it failed. What else could have happened?
And now I listened to the sound of my life escaping through a narrow hole. I turned slowly; I couldn’t move my neck without stretching my ruined shoulder. I saw the butt of a spear sticking out of my flesh, and forced my eyes to follow its path into the wound.
The hole in the bag was hemorrhaging oxygen. Cloth flapped in the weak stream. Blood from my own veins had also leaked, partially blocking the exit as it dried. The physical pain, worse than any I had ever felt, was secondary to the terror of leaking air, leaking blood. The fluids that I needed to keep inside of this little enclosure in order to not die. I thought I had to be in shock.
I wasn’t sure how much time had actually passed. The numbers on the display were dropping quickly, each second ticking far faster than a second should, and for a moment I thought I might be falling forward in time. I tried to block the hole with my hand, but I couldn’t bring myself to press on the wound. I couldn’t even think of pulling the spearhead from the wall behind me so I could move.
The light changed—not the soft transition of asteroids rising and setting, but something blocking the entrance. I looked up and saw her stark silhouette against the brighter rock. Her face was hidden in shadow.
“You lied to me.” Behind Vempress was another suited figure, droopy and beaten.
I didn’t answer.
“You betrayed me.” Her hand rested on the blade at her side as she floated closer.
“That’s impossible.” I felt a deep calm. Let this be my final rebellion. Let all this pain be over. “I can’t betray you. We were never allies.”
She grinned. I saw a cold certainty in the grin. An oxygen leak comes with uncertainty, a chance that the suit might get fixed. But the hate in the lines of her body, against the bright backdrop, the hyper-cooled scorn in her voice, were perfect, flawless. There was nothing to fear in that certainty.
This is it, I thought. I felt as if I were about to take part in one of the most meaningful events of my life—like the birth of a child, or a wedding. I wasn’t surprised that I wasn’t afraid; I’d accepted this a long time ago. Come on. Bring it.
But as she came closer, there was that grin again, far too wide for mere murder. The calm dissipated and fear took its place, a crescendo leading up to the moment when she grabbed the spear end in both hands. Even that little pressure was enough to cause a jolt of blinding pain.
She took a long, raspy breath and wrapped her fingers around the metal. Please, I wanted to say as she placed one foot on my chest, but my lips didn’t move. She straightened suddenly, and pulled the spear out of me with ferocious force. The sound of metal scraping bone, though not as loud as my wailing or Vempress’s laughter, rang nauseatingly clear, and I will not forget it for the rest of my life. The pain became all of me, blotting out everything else. I may have tensed or curled, screamed or wept. Perhaps she moved me, flipped me over, handled my suit. I wouldn’t know.
After a long while, I opened my eyes, found the floor mere centimeters away. She was crouched on top of me with her foot on my good shoulder, tending to the hole in my bag. She used tape to seal it, as well as the skin itself, pressing it with her thumb, making sure it stuck to the perimeter of the wound. It hurt as it touched the raw flesh, but it blocked the leakage immediately. The numbers on the visor slowed down, but they were still dropping too fast. She turned me over and I felt the same pain at the back of my shoulder as she sealed the exit wound. The ticking slowed all the way down. She made me spread my arm out so she could wrap another layer of tape around my shoulder, under my pit. As I sunk into oblivion again, I wondered why she was using so much tape on me.
#
Estimated oxygen timer: ???
Someone was talking to me, trying to wake me up, but I didn’t want to wake up—I wanted to sleep until I died.
“Would you please say something? I’m sorry, but I think you’d rather I woke you up. Hey.” A hand touched my shoulder—the good one, but it still hurt. “You can sleep when you’re dead, right?” His voice was muffled, far away, as if the speaker was behind glass.
I woke up.
David’s face in front of me, lit in visor violet, was the only thing I could see in the darkness. The door must have been closed again.
I was still in the shuttle where I’d been sitting before, I was pretty sure, still in the same dirty suit, now glued to me. Something was missing, though, and it took a moment to identify it. The oxygen timer. My visor wasn’t there. The helmet that was supposed to be on my head wasn’t.
I brought my good hand up, slowly, to touch the glass, and the glove touched my face, instead. I scratched my nose, savoring the slight, precious comfort. I breathed, and my breath condensed into fog, visible where it obstructed David’s helmet. The air was very cold, but it was air. The door of the shuttle was broken, so there should have been no seal. And if it was sealed, how the hell could it be opened without killing me instantly? And where was my helmet?
I tried to move, but something cold frost-bit the side of my neck. My gloved hand traced a structure of metal bars welded together, holding me to the wall. Like Nina. Like Yahushua.
“Hey, buddy,” David said, and I slowly let my eyes focus on him in the darkness. There was an expression of deep sorrow on his face. Fresh grief. His bag was closed, and I figured all of the oxygen in the room was coming from my own air supply. Vempress’s air supply.
“How are you feeling?” he asked, his voice barely more than a whimper. It wasn’t surprising that he would use every ounce of energy he had to tend to others.
Full consciousness meant full awareness of the pain in my shoulder, and how tired I was, how dry my mouth and throat were; How long it had been since I’d felt like a human being. In my entire life, I had only felt worse once. “I’ll live,” I said finally.
He didn’t laugh.
I rubbed my face again, finally getting around to the itch at my nose. It was an interesting sensation, even with a glove on. I’d forgotten how natural it felt. I looked at him. Now that he was done worrying that I’d already died, and saw that there was nothing he could do for me, he was forced to tend to the grief he’d come here with. “What happened?” I asked. “Where’s Vempress?”
He shook his head.
“Tell me. I need to know.”
“I can’t,” he said, looking away. “I… don’t know how.”
He was ashamed of what happened, even I could see that, but I had to find a way to get it out of him. “You know,” I said, “You haven’t confessed yet. Whatever it is you need to say, should be easier as a part of your confession.”
“As a part of a confession...” He frowned. “I can try,” he said, as if everything was manageable if it was a part of a ritual, part of a tradition.
He took off his helmet, and turned off the comm. Only I could hear him there, through the air locked in the shuttle, and him only me.
“In the name of Line Pythia,” I said, as loud as the pain allowed me. “I am your confessor.”
#
“Can you help me understand what that means?” David Ezra Cohen asks the man sitting in front of him in his cozy little clinic. The man asked David to call him Bar. Even with his face buried in his palms, he radiates a type of dominant energy David is quietly envious of.
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“It means… Do you know that feeling when you’re high, or drunk or after you’ve had a really good fuck, and you happen to look at the mirror and you realize that’s what you look like from the outside? There’s a contrast between how you feel, and how you really look like, and your brain’s too fucked up to smooth that difference out for you. That’s how I feel, every time I’m off the lion, I mean, in my down time, when there isn’t any danger or anything to do. I wonder if what I’m doing is enough. I’m trying to be a good person, but I don’t know if I really am. Especially after doing this to you.”
This isn’t even therapy, not officially. But he had asked David to talk, and David obliged, refusing the under-the-table payment. When had he ever refused a person who needed someone to talk to?
“What have you done to me?” David asks.
“I thought they wouldn’t catch me, and that they wouldn’t hurt you. But there are more and more “cleanups”—someone disappears, and not just everyone they’re close with, but literally anyone they might have shared any information with, disappears with them. I knew it was a risk and I still came here.”
“What did you know? Help me understand what you’re going through.”
“I knew I might drag you in, but I was losing it. I thought that if I kept it together, I’ll be good enough to avoid them. But they’re closing in on me, and if they throw me out, they throw you out too. Perhaps people close to you, too, if they think you told them.”
That’s the first thing that makes David worry, not that he will be thrown out, but that Nurit, his wife, might lose her life because of his actions. He immediately decides not to tell her. How would it help her to know? “They, in this case, being the Shadow Man you told me about?”
“You got it.”
“So if I understand correctly, you’re feeling guilty for the fact that Shadow Man might decide to kill me?”
“I thought that’s obvious.”
“Sometimes, even obvious things need to be said aloud. Like how, for example, you’re taking responsibility for someone else’s action.”
“Baddies are going to do bad,” Bar says, “That’s a given. But I put you in harm’s way, for my own benefit. I’ll understand if you hated me.”
David haven’t even considered hating the man. “If I remember correctly, you told me you were falling apart, when you asked me to start talking. That the pressure is getting to you.”
“That’s an excuse. If I fucked you over, that’s something you won’t be able to forgive me for.”
“Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do. If you apologize, I’ll forgive you.”
He sighs. “Ok. I’m sorry I took actions that put you and your loved ones in danger.”
“Apology accepted. See? You’re taking responsibility for other people’s actions.”
“What am I supposed to?”
David slows down. This is the part that is the hardest for people to accept, and he wants to make it as easy as possible. “Focus on the work in front of you—if there is still something you can do, you should do it.”
“The things that I’ve uncovered… It’s good that you don’t know about it, but it’s big enough to that I worry about you either way.”
“Then focus on spreading the news, if that’s what you need to do.”
“And what are you going to do?”
“That’s between me and my therapist. You didn’t come here to hear about me. But you can rest assured that I’ll do what needs doing.”
Bar, whatever his real name is, seems like he had let something into his heart.
David comes back home, late into the night. His wife is out. He goes to the bathroom to take a piss and notices a bunch of short pubic hair in the toilet, obstructing the reflection of the white light on the ceramic. She’s off on a date, then. That’s what they agreed on, but he can’t help but feel there’s an element of provocation in leaving evidence for him to find. Even if she only dates women, there’s a part of him that’s jealous, that’s bitter about not being enough for her.
He washes his hands even though he didn’t actually touch anything dirty, and as he dries them, he notices that his towel is taking just a little more space than Nurit’s, on the rack. Hers is crumpled, and he knows that the moisture in the folds will turn damp if he doesn’t attend to it. He straightens the fold gently. Now his towel is a little folded, but David doesn’t mind.
He holds her towel for a moment longer, and thinks about their marriage. He’s grateful for her companionship, but worried that she could have done better. The lack of sex is a problem, obviously. You don’t need to be a trained therapist to know that it’s crucial to a partnership. But he just never found himself comfortable with the concept. The inherent brutality of it, the loss of control. They tried a few times, using several approaches, but it scared him, like some drug-induced experience. He knew exactly what Bar was talking about.
He knows that only an amateur would make the mistake of jumping to a conclusion based only on neuroanatomy, but the fact that in human males the amygdala, that part of the brain that regulates fear and aggression, becomes highly active during sex, while in females it doesn’t… It haunts him. He tried to satisfy her while maintaining control, but the more he tried, the less she enjoyed it. That was all a long time ago.
A week passes without hearing from Bar again, and David keeps busy, managing not to think about it. Nurit certainly can’t suspect anything if he doesn’t even remember something is going on.
A buzz at the door jolts him awake. He gets out of bed, mumbling something calming to Nurit as he exits their dark bedroom, hoping her sleep wasn’t irreparably disturbed. Maybe it’s a patient. One of them, Vered, used to show up, back in the tougher periods, but she’s been holding it together so well lately.
He presses a button by the door, letting his voice be recorded and transmitted outside. “Who is it?”
“Police,” a gruff voice answers. David starts to panic. If one of his patients has gotten themselves in trouble… He opens the door, unsure how he could help in such a case, and is surprised when they tell him that it is him who’s under arrest.
He doesn’t understand what is happening, and they don’t explain or let him talk to anyone as they take him into custody, don’t give him a chance to ask what exactly they are charging him with. There is no law that prohibits you from talking to people. He hopes Nurit isn’t too worried about him. She’s a doer, by nature—solves problems by confronting them head on—so the fact that she doesn’t make contact with him for the week that he’s in prison means that she finally found a wall that was too tough for her to bulldoze. He wishes he could comfort her. Or anyone. It’s terribly lonely in prison.
All he can do to occupy himself is to try and understand what put him there, but his mind doesn’t deliver any reasonable solutions, just an ominous sense that he’s going to be thrown out. But why? He hasn’t hurt anyone.
Finally, the day of the trial comes. The mystery isn’t instantly solved—the judge and two lawyers speak quickly, cutting in and talking over one another. Somebody says something about a sex offence, but the only person he’s been remotely sexually active with is his wife, and he can’t even conceive of hurting her.
No one asks him anything, so he doesn’t say anything. There’s talk of the evidence being ironclad, but he doesn’t know what said evidence is. Is there any? When his clients come in with the anxiety of being falsely accused and tried, he tries to treat it like any other anxiety about dangers that aren’t really there. But he really is here, and the danger seems very real now.
When the time for him to speak finally comes, he doesn’t know what to say, how to defend himself against an unknown accusation.
“That’s settled, then,” the judge says, looking back at the screen. “Call me for the proceedings, ok? I wanna watch when they airlock this pedo.”
Oh, David thinks numbly. That thing. Right.
His mind has somehow managed to walk around this, but here it is. Yes, he had those videos on his computer. And yes, he watched them. Many times. And yes, he paid for them. And yes, technically speaking, he was aroused by them. Sexually aroused.
David has come to terms with the fact that there’s a part of himself that he’ll never like. A part he’ll never accept—not only because of how he’s internalized society’s scorn, but also because he suspects that it reflects some deeper wound within him; a hidden, bitter helplessness. When the Prime Minister spoke of the “slimy little perverts, taking their damage out on the world,” it struck fear in David’s heart—because of the threat in them, but also because of the possibility that they were true. That the… tendency was nothing more than a manifestation of the desire to be in power over something, anything, in this chaotic and scary world.
He tried his best to deny this part of him, and most of the time he succeeded. Repression isn’t a bug of the human psyche, but a feature, and it’s served human beings for as long as they’ve needed to fit into a society. He pretended to be a normal, healthy person, to his wife, his patients, and even himself, forgetting what he was until the time came for another guilty, compulsive binge.
But even if they were true, the prime minister’s words didn’t make David a bad person. He’d never touched a child; never even watched a video that wasn’t one hundred percent computer generated. He didn’t even buy them from Earth, even though Earth’s had more than enough computing power to spare, and sold custom videos dirt cheap–because it was illegal to buy any labor from Earth, for fear of it outcompeting all Ceresian trade. No, he paid Ceresian artists, like a good citizen should.
David found long ago that nothing served as a better distraction from the world’s endless, needless cruelty than those simulated visions of purity and beauty. But he would never hurt anyone. It’s the only thing in his life he has always been certain about.
Isn’t that enough? What’s more heroic than to have evil inside of you and guard the world from it? How could he be punished for that?
When he looks at the judge’s face, he realizes that it doesn’t matter. People can make you guilty just for holding something in your head, be it a thought, a desire, or an idea. He should have known. He did know.
Even so, he thinks that there’s a chance someone might notice that he isn’t the kind of guy who’d harm anyone. Maybe there’s another committee, someone else he can talk to. Surely, no one could pull the lever on such a harmless guy. He’s in denial, even in the airlock, suited up. The guy behind the glass avoids eye contact. David thinks that it must be a very hard job.
The airlock opens, and the leftover air whistles against his suit as it pushes him outside, into space, and there is no more denial, no more shocked optimism. This is really how it ends. He looks at the star-filled sky, and terror engulfs him. He thinks—and it’s the most shameful thought he’s ever had—that if he’s paying the price, he may as well have done the crime. Maybe they’re right to throw him out like garbage.
Blackness descends on him, crushing him. The stars themselves are judges. The suit is tight, small, and there is no escaping it. Never. This is the worst thing one person can do to another: leave them by themselves, truly by themselves, and they immediately begin to die.
A voice he doesn’t recognize screams in the darkness.
A couple of hours later, he’s now sitting by the airlock, waiting for a newcomer to arrive. Yossi has gone to talk to someone else, and though the loneliness bears down on David, he endures. He knows that nothing else will keep Yossi from collapsing under his own weight, and he has to let him go, to do whatever he thinks he has to do. Of course, he’s excited for the arrival of someone new, for a chance to be useful, himself.
The newcomer emerges out of the airlock in a halfway catatonic state—unable to move but bravely fighting for control over herself, her body rigid even as she floats, her small fists pinned at her side. David doesn’t need to see her face to see how hard she must be clenching her teeth. She floats up, screaming that scream he now knows so well. Even before she lands, he knows what he should say to her, and how: She’ll need to be comforted with a sort of robustness, and her quest for safety will be an aggressive one. What a blessing, to know what needs to be done.
But she never does lands. She reaches the apex of her ascent and drifts to a stop—and something quick and dark snatches her and flings her against the lip of the crater with a thud and a breathless gasp David hears on comm.
They bounce with the energy of the impact. “Are you watching?” Vempress says. She’s hanging onto the limp woman’s oxygen supply, crouching like something that is clearly not human. He hears the mockery in her voice, as if she’s seen deep inside him and knows what will hurt him most. The woman’s face tells David that she’d be screaming if she could, when she realizes, at the exact same moment David does that, that Vempress has already put a wrench to the piping of the oxygen tank.
“Watch closely, Pythia,” the hoarse voice says. “I want you to remember this.” As if it’s a response to something he did. But what could he have done to her?
After Vempress unplugs the oxygen tank she takes off, making a sound that is clearly not a chuckle, leaving David to comfort the dying woman. It takes a very long time.