One day, disaster fell upon the land
everyone cried out for a helping hand.
O God, O Angels, O Heavens above,
but their mortal helpers had finally had enough.
No doctors or nurses, no guardians or friends,
no one showed up that day or ever again.
And the people wailed to the sky
Why hast thou forsaken us to die?
But the sky didn't answer. Indeed, it never would.
It was up to average humans to do all the good.
And maybe if they had received so much praise,
they would have shown up in those final days.
***
***
I had also jotted down some prose, and since the poem is incomplete, I decided to post this along with it. I think it loses focus near the end, but I was tired of working on it. =P
Context: This is actually from the same world as Bridget & Caleb, but totally different characters. Here Roxy, a revolutionary involved with Camp, is thinking about Cody, who's a partial alien that can regenerate even if her body is blown to bits and who is more than a little messed-up in the head. You would be, too, if you were an immortal death machine.
She thinks she's a monster. It laces every word, every action, an identity that thrills and haunts. She flies into rages so unearthly it takes a taser to bring her down. She strips and shouts and wraps another stolen car around another sign. And she laughs out of nowhere, laughs hysterically as if life just whispered the greatest goddamn joke.
I've watched her drive the needles deep into the veins, watched her pop and snort and imbibe anything, anything so long as it will get her high, even knowing her body will metabolize it in hours and retch or sweat or shit the toxins out. She cannot get addicted. She cannot OD, not permanently. She says the universe doesn't care enough to give her consequences. Maybe that's why she makes them for herself.
She'll go a week without eating, until that metabolism wears her thin and weak, until she's sitting on sidewalks, glassy-eyed and dull, staring at rain, people, drifting garbage. On a bad day, she'll break necks without thinking. On a good day, she does it for a reason. When I met her, she came with a number and a nickname that translated to 'white death'. With my typical, tactless wit I called her Codeine, and I introduced her to music, to fashion, to night clubs and drugs. Oh, the blessed drugs. The first time she melted her brain on cocaine, I freaked and had her half-buried in the backyard. Then she grabbed the shovel, heaved a wad of putrid yellow something on my shoes and asked for meat. Raw.
"I like the dying," she says. "I like the moment when everything goes, and it's all free-floating in the void, mystic-like, like you can almost believe in a something else there, cause when it comes down to it, nothing's just as good, yeah?"
Yeah, but it's an awful lot of horror for that momentary release, and she does it for the pain as much as the peace. You've gotta watch her on days where the rage has nowhere to go. You'll hear a bang and find her head blown off or turn on the news to see her driving a little Volkswagon through a shopping mall, waiting for the cops to come and gun her down. "Can't help it," she'll say. Cause monsters do what they do, and that's die in the end. Die till the sequel.
"Can't always have sophisticated villains like Price," she says, working her way through her seventh beer. "Sometimes, it's just gotta be the ugly, bloodthirsty alien bitch exploding outta your jelly bits. No thinking required. You just see it, and you know"
What she can't seem to understand is that, to me, she's something more than a hackneyed device. I'm not in to quickie hate, and she's a complexity I downright love. I don't have a word for it. Magical, divine, a goddess or angel. It all seems too frilly and shallow to really describe the being she is. I've never been one for religion, anyway. We're all sparks in the cloud, and when we die, at best our data gets absorbed into the archives. More likely, our system just dies like a fried harddrive, its information never to be seen again. Someday, humans will stop their petty shit and figure out a way to back us up, robot bodies extending into near-infinity, but until then, we're just fragile prototypes of our potential selves.
And Cody, she's some kind of marvel, an organic thing that never dies. No, that'd be unnatural, and then she'd be right about the monster bit. She does die, but her system doesn't fry. Somehow, inexplicably, every cell is coded with the blueprints of what she was at the moment of death, and they communicate to reassemble, regenerate, rebuild. What comes back is not the same Cody, not physically the exact atoms and particles, but it's the same blueprint, the same machine rebuilt from whatever material is at hand. (The butchers love me now. 'Hallo, guv'ner. I'd like another half a cow.') It's always filtering, repairing, adapting, working at every level to keep its meta-form alive. Imagine all the computers in a network rebuilding the ones that blow out, recoding its data, recreating to a level of precision beyond human comprehension. Wild.
The dumb, lucky fucks who made her -- found her's more like it, but they did carve her out of her mum's belly and feed her rapidly-growing self, so I'll give 'em that -- wanted a super soldier, and damned if they didn't make one. It's not that she loves violence. Or maybe yeah, she does. And hates it, too. Imagine, the thing that makes you who you are, the thing that gives you pride, being the same thing that drives you batshit. The thing that kept you locked away, prodded and abused. The thing that perpetually separates you from all the vulnerable, short-term lives around you.
She's died more times than I can count. I tried keeping track, but it got depressing, morbid, and when she found the tally, I told her it was government databases hacked, then crumpled the page and tossed it away.
"What'd ya do that for?" she said.
"Dwelling on the past is for old farts in rockers and nursing homes."
"...yeah."
So she keeps on dying, and I don't keep track, but some days are harder than others. Some days I see and hear the pain of the reanimation, my stomach turns at the stench of meat and sloughed off toxins. Some days, she turns away, sticky in the afterbirth, and I feel the shame roll off her like bloody sweat and slime. She stares at her skin for hours after she's bathed. She doesn't want to be touched.
Some days, she claws the skin off and has to bathe again. We don't talk about it. Her rule, not mine. "Whazzit matter?" she'll mumble. "S'not like I'll die."
Does she understand what death means to other people? The ever-approaching march of Death's bony feet? Can she make sense of these breakable things snuffing out all around her, and is it sympathy she feels, or is she just trying to hold on to one of the few things she has? I can't always tell if I'm friend or beloved or pet or security blanket. I'm not even sure how much she differentiates in her head. I remember the dog. Sweet All-Spark, I remember that dog... the way she wailed with its head in her arms while its blood cooled and congealed on her jeans. Over an hour, she held that dog. And she calls herself a monster.
No monster mourns like that.
But I see it in her eyes, feel it in her touch - the ever-present fear that one day I will be the dog, and if it's me in her lap, then who will talk her down? Who will hold her while she quakes and shudders through the madness? Who will hold together the tattered edges of her repeatedly shredded heart? What would stop her from bringing the world to ruin?
Some days, I think she would leave me, if she didn't need me so much. My mortal frailty terrifies her as much as her own immortality and rage. Her hands touch me and pull away. Her body lies next to mine, and she stares with scrutiny, as if she could divine the thing that makes me finite and change it.
She wishes there was some way to protect me from afar, to never be close enough for the backlash to hit me. Like a guardian angel, she'd be happy to hover and watch, but that's a lie. It was isolation and loneliness and exploitation that created her rage, and like so many abused children, she sometimes longs for the familiar. The violence, the chaos is where she feels at home. The Great Destroyer, that's what she's doing here. That's our goal, innit? Tear down the world and try again. And what then? When she's no longer needed as the Angel of Apocalypse, when there's no more need for a guardian to hover over me? Our goal is to make her usefulness obsolete.
Before then, I'll have to make her drop this good and evil dichotomy. I've never believed in angels. I don't need an invisible figure whose life is chained to my service. To be with Cody, to see the love hidden deep in her ice-blue eyes and feel the heat in her pale, pale skin, to feel her body relax and see her lounging around like any regular girl, I would risk life and limb for that, because I know she tries with all her might to be something for me, unaware that she is already enough. So I'll hazard her wild rampages and hold her when she shakes, and when the end comes, however it comes, I hope I leave her better, healthier, able to survive beyond me and my brief mortal span.
Heaven, if there is a Heaven, can keep its fettered angels. For as long as we have breath, Cody and I will guard each other.
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