The Winchester Revision: Chapter Six
6
So here he is. He’s made it this far. There’s only one more piece.
Chuck says “I will not write gay porn,” out loud to his goldenrod walls in a voice that sounds like mountains crumbling and knows he is lying.
It is untrue that writers write. Writers don’t do shit except go back later and check for bad grammar. Stories write and writers just hold the fuck on until the rodeo is over. Stories are self-propelled and writers drink themselves stupid so they don’t have to know the feeling of hurdling on through the darkness while they ride that crazy train all the way to the end of the line. And when writers come back around, hung over and sick, they find themselves in a dense and unpleasant jungle full of tigers and pythons and monsters altogether less reasonable.
Like gay porn.
He bites his thumb in frustration and shouts in pain when he feels a sharp sting as the thumbnail splits apart. Chuck looks down at the fissure, white at first and then red as the blood begins to swell up and out. His body is turning on him, becoming fragile and brittle. He should be frightened out of his mind.
But, perhaps, there is too little of his mind left. The shadows are very close around him now. They frame his vision in black and make it easy to forget the weather. Make is easier to forget there is a whole world of heroes and villains and people in between who will go on living after tonight.
So this is the end. Whatever happens now, it’s all he has left.
Chuck just can’t believe his last act as a living man will be to write gay porn.
x0x
The hospital was keeping John for a period of at least twenty-four hours on suicide watch while he detoxed. Sammy had fallen face first into his mattress, still fully dressed, and Dean had closed the door so the kid could sleep. Cas was sitting on the couch and watching Dean like he was a tower about to topple down.
Outside a storm was breaking across the sky.
Inside…
Dean had a number crushed in his hand, it was scrawled in his own chicken scratched on the back of a receipt he’d had in his pocket with a pen that was only half working. It was the number he was supposed to call tomorrow to talk to John.
What the fuck was he supposed to say? What could he say that he hadn’t already been screaming at his father for fourteen years? Why would John suddenly start hearing him now? If anything he was farther away than ever and Dean’s voice, when it mattered, had never been very loud.
Cas shifted so that he was sitting on the very edge of the couch cushions, leaning in Dean’s direction with a gaze that could cut atoms apart. Dean turned out the light to get away from it. He was exhausted and pissed at himself and he needed an outlet, or a distraction.
Cas had stayed. He was the dark shape on the other side of the room, flashing into view and then away with the distant strikes of lightning, his hands folded between his knees. The shadows played tricks on Dean’s eyes, as the windows cast two shafts of distorted light, like severed wings, across the living room to Cas’ figure.
Dean’s shirt was still wet from where Sammy had cried into it.
“I think I fucked it up,” Dean whispered into the darkness. He crossed the room and stood over Cas.
There was no such thing as God. But people died anyway, some of them killed themselves while other people had to go on living.
He felt like he was floating through this moment as a casual observer, everything was happening from the outside in. Cas reached up and added his own pull to the heavy tug of gravity. Dean crumbled apart quietly, slipped to his knees and bent his forehead forward to rest it on Cas’ thighs. Cas was present like a guide or a guardian, he threaded his fingers through Dean’s hair and warmed the back of Dean’s neck with warm palms.
“Tell me,” he said.
The future was supposed to be a lonely place. It was where people changed their minds and grew old and passed away. It was where global warming melted the earth and Spielberg fizzled out and Hollywood crumbled under its own bullshit. The future was the place where Rome fell, where the Buddha went to sleep, the future was a place Dean shuddered to think about.
He always thought Werner Heisenberg summed it up rather well.
Uncertainty.
But the past was worse. The past was certain and it could not be changed or rewritten.
Dean breathed in, his subjectivity smashing into sharp focus around him, the scrape of Cas’ jeans against his stubble, the tickle of Cas’ fingertips at the nape of his neck. The sound of the thunder outside. His feet were cold and his face was hot. The brush of Cas’ tie against the side of his face as the other man leaned over him like a shelter.
Life was not a story. Sam read his books and took from them, shaped his life and his ideas around those things, but monsters weren’t real and heroes died out quickly because they were the only people not running away. Time and space worked in conjunction so that, as far as the Universe was concerned, there was no such thing as ever after. If life were a story, then Dean would be reading his own ending in Cas’ touch and the racing of his blood, hot as Hell in his veins and surging in time with the tempest outside.
If life were a story, Dean would be realizing that this was an apex he’d been hurdling towards since the beginning. And the way he turned his face and pressed a kiss to Cas’ thigh would only be the culmination of his greater destiny or some shit, not a decision he was making against all his better judgment. The hitch he heard in the breathing above him would be only another confirmation of this is meant to be, and not Cas’ hesitation. The slow drag of Cas slipping off the couch to his knees, face to face with Dean, would be time memorizing each of their heartbeats for posterity, not a reflection of how wrong they both knew this was. The flippant, butterfly quality of the first kiss-hardly felt, barely there-would be the mutual consent of two people falling carefully in love and not the question: Are you sure?
If this were a story, as Dean slid his hands up Cas’ chest to his neck and Cas finally coaxed Dean’s mouth open with his tongue, they would both be thinking At last. But from the jittery fumbling of his own fingers and the careless scraping of Cas’ teeth, Dean could tell they were both actually thinking: Fuck it.
“Cas-“ Dean gasped at the hot mouth at his neck, the friction of Cas’ stubble sending the lightning down his chest to the bottom of his stomach and farther down still. There was a hand working it’s up under Dean’s t-shirt, pushing it up and over his head. Dean yanked on Cas’ tie until it came free and started on his buttons. One at a time.
“Dean?” Cas queried in a voice of heat and velvet smoke, pulling another lavish kiss out of him.
This was a future place. Somewhere Dean had never been before, and because it was in the dark it had yet to be observed, Dean knew that he could make it anything. Cas had a firm hand on his hip and was pushing a thumb beneath the waist of Dean’s jeans. Cas was pushing Dean’s boundaries and Dean was relinquishing them, one by one. In the flickering confusion of the noise and the light through the windows, Cas was unmistakably the brave one, leading the charge with his patient mouth and impatient hands. But it was Dean’s words that would determine the shape of this event.
Dean could have asked for forever, or for love, for understanding. But he was lit up like a pyre with need and when Cas’ hand smoothed forward and popped open the button on his jeans, Dean surged forward and sucked away all the remaining questions from Cas’ mouth. He trailed his tongue across to Cas’ ear and growled: “Fuck me,” in a voice that made it clear he wasn’t asking for anything.
Cas pushed Dean down onto his back and started stripping away layers until Dean was naked: “Fine,” he said. “But you must be quiet or you’ll wake Sam.” He licked a network of vines over Dean’s chest and traced an agonizing circle around Dean’s cock with his fingertips. Cas moved himself lower, flickered a passing taste of his tongue over Dean’s erection before he sucked his own fingers into this mouth and pressed one, wet and chilled into Dean’s ass. Dean arched his back away from the unforgiving scrape of the rug, pushed against the intrusion and closed his eyes against the dizzying movement of the shadows on his wall.
Cas was slow at first, working Dean open with the same endless patience he used to teach. Dean was spread out like an essay or a map before him, just an object of his careful scrutiny. He watched with a tipped head and a curious expression every squirm and twist of Dean’s body. A smile crept across his face when his fingers struck Dean’s prostate and Dean hissed and tried to find purchase on the rug. There was nothing, he was on a plane of friction with nothing to slow him down.
Until Cas stood up and left him, split apart and aching, alone in the room. Dean lay still, quivering, feeling the tickle of the wind squeezing in around the window. He kept his ear to the floor and listened for the returning thump of Cas’ footsteps. Because he was listening, he heard the first of the raindrops fall. They struck the window with immediate force, like individual but poorly aimed bullets, and the cascade of the storm followed.
Cas returned with a bottle of lotion from the bathroom. He put it down on the low coffee table and then removed his own clothes. One article at a time, dropping each one on the couch and out of the way, on top of the pile of Dean’s already discarded articles. When he was done, he settled himself on the rug over Dean and squeezed a generous amount of lotion into his hand.
“Remember,” he whispered, “silently.” Then he slipped his slick digits inside and trapped Dean’s grateful moan with his mouth.
Dean obediently kissed back and stifled the rest of his sounds. The storm outside was making them for him anyway. Battering moans and groans out of the tree limbs and bumps out of the shingles. Dean took the pleasurable burn of being stretched open with quiet grace and he bucked into the heat of Cas’ mouth with little more than a few ragged gasps. And when Cas pulled his hips up and pushed himself inside, Dean bit his lip and turned his face away and breathed through it.
But when Cas began moving, when he leaned closer, hips stuttering forward, and Dean saw in the incomplete light of the storm the desperation on Cas’ face, his control snapped, and little words and sighs began to trickled out of his mouth. Cas tried to hush him, murmuring soothing promises as reached down and used his hand to pull Dean right up to the edge. The windows were shuddering under the fury of the misplaced gale. Dean’s vision was just beginning to slide away into a sharp darkness that had nothing to do with the absence of light, the charge in his spine coalescing at the bottom, curling up to explode, when Cas grabbed his neck and put his lips to Dean’s ears so Dean could hear him.
“Dean,” he groaned lowly. “Shut up.” His hand twisted over the head of Dean’s cock and his thrusts became erratic. Dean, if he wasn’t being well and thoroughly fucked into incoherence, would have pointed out that it didn’t matter, the storm was making a louder racket than they were.
“No,” he gasped instead, and then moaned “Yes,” and “Oh fuck,” and came with the force of those first raindrops, as a tumbling catalyst to greater tremors. Cas made a noise oddly like a chuckle, and stumbled in his rhythm before freezing, following Dean’s down and collapsing slowly onto Dean’s chest.
The storm was still going, but all the strangeness had gone out of the room leaving a comfortable daze.
Dean waited until the pressure of Cas’ body on top of him turned into discomfort and then pushed at Cas’ shoulders.
“Bed,” he groused. They gathered up their piles of clothes and carried them to the bedroom where Cas put his boxers back on and Dean dumped all of his things onto the floor. They crawled into the bed and tangled themselves together.
Dean was exhausted, warm and loose, and sleep pulled him quickly out of the world.
In the last haze of his consciousness he thought he heard Cas rumble:
“I’m sorry.”
xxx
In the morning the storm was over and everything was frozen ice again and Sam was gone.
Dean stood in the doorway to Sam’s empty bedroom and told himself it would be stupid to
panic. Sam’s shoes were gone and his jacket was gone. His bed was made, except for the book with the black binding discarded on top of it. Dean picked it up, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe in gold on the binding; the title page had been ripped out. Dean let it fall back to the bed where it bounced heavily. Sam liked to get up early sometimes and go the library-The night after Dad tried to shoot himself?-or go for outdoorsy walks to think - before eight in the morning on a Wednesday? - Dean was imagining disasters where none existed yet.
When he called Sam’s cell the bookshelf rang.
Dean jammed on his boots and was halfway out the door before he realized he wasn’t alone in the apartment, Cas was standing half naked in the living room calling his name. Irritation he couldn’t explain flashed through him.
“Sam’s m-gone out. I’m just going to find him,” he said. Concern and something stranger (like knowledge?) crossed Cas’ face.
“Shall I-?”Dean didn’t let Cas finish the question.
“No. I’ll be back just…I got this.” He shut the door before Cas could reply and was down the stairs and out the door.
xxx
The ceiling was really quite hideous. The paint was peeling and the plaster behind it was stained with water marks and mildew.
Sam sniffed and rubbed at his eyes. He should have thought to bring some water; his throat was dry. The wind, creeping in between the decrepit walls and the busted out windows, had carried the empty plastic bag, traces of the white powder still sticking in its corners, to the far wall where it was trapped beside an old empty beer bottle. The wall was covered in black and red graffiti: song lyrics, misused pentagrams, proclamations like Meg wuz here. The title page of Sam’s favorite book was smeared with the remainder of the drugs and pinned underneath Sam’s elbow. A corner of it had been torn away and rolled up to make a tube.
He’d also brought the blank envelope and the newspaper cutting with him. He couldn’t say why.
There were supposed to be ghosts here: two tormented brothers that had trapped each other into eternity with love. Or maybe with love and something else altogether more unconventional.
“I’m sorry,” he said out loud to the empty house, “but I can never remember your names.” The wall paper was coming down in thick chunks shaped like continents. It was patterned with the paintings of a repetitive rustic country scene, horses and wagons and faceless women with parasols. The plaster behind it was brown and yellow.
Sam sniffed again and twiddled the rolled up scrap of paper between his fingers. He wasn’t going to be useless anymore, not just Dean’s little brother, he was going to find the truth in this haunted, run-down place and then he was going to go home and use it to rebuild his family. He’d start with the foundations, sick since he could remember, and expand upwards. Sam was going to make bridges with his bare hands, and he was going to dig right into the bottom of John Winchester until he found the poisonous center and he was going to suck the poison right out.
He’d been here since five, waiting for the first of the sun to see by.
After a time Sam realized how cold the wind was and how hard the floor. His clothes, insufficiently wrapped around his body, were scraping and corrosive. Sam sat up and began to strip them off. The chill was delicious on his naked shoulders and back.
Sam sat in the House of Usher in his underwear, legs folded. He could see all the grains of the floor, he could hear all the holes in the walls, and if he tried, he could imagine all the histories of this house. He was very good with stories and details and holding them inside of himself.
That was him. Sam Winchester. Receptacle of other peoples’ stories.
Sam began to giggle. There was a wonderful fountain of mirth rising inside him, a grand appreciation of the humor in his life that he had somehow missed previously. How funny was disaster? How unlikely and misunderstood and…beautiful somehow.
The brother’s had died beautifully. So had Mary.
Mary Winchester, who had pretended she believed in angels just so her eldest son could sleep at night after she was gone.
Sam lay back onto the dirt, the wonderful dirt, of the floor and laughed. It was so difficult to see how things were connected when you were bogged down by morbid perceptions of reality. How could anybody come to reliable conclusions looking though a glass that skewed everything into its worst possible manifestation? Mary talked about angels to give Dean Winchester peace and John talked about angels because he’d known they didn’t exist and Dean never talked about angels because maybe he knew they did. Perhaps he’d met them, perhaps they were everywhere and Dean was frightened by them.
Maybe Cas was an angel. Or Gabriel. They were angel’s names.
Sam heard his name from somewhere in the house. He didn’t answer them, the ghosts would find him on their own, here in his sunlit haven on the dusty floor, beside the old cigarettes and dead leaves and the corroded belly of a cast iron woodstove behind his head.
The problem was becoming clear. It was all about perception, about what people saw and what people thought they saw and what other people thought those people saw. So it was only a matter of Sam seeing what John saw, and then teaching him to see it different. The difficulty was that John had seen a lot of things. John had seen his sons growing up without under his own demonic influence. He’d seen his wife buried at thirty five. He’d come home in the middle of a summer day to see her sprawled across her bedroom floor with a hole in her skull and a gun in her hand, his son refusing to be coaxed from the closet.
And these looked like ugly things. But they weren’t, not really, because-
“Sam?” Hands on his face, wonderfully frozen hands. Blue eyes and dark hair and kindness. It wasn’t the ghosts after all, but Cas.
Sam hadn’t expected to see him and it derailed his epiphany for a moment. He smiled and patted Cas on the arm. The blue eyes-they were rather the color of the sea weren’t they? Or usually were, today they were the color of the bruise fading on Dean’s face-flickered around the room and landed on the far wall by the beer bottle and the plastic bag.
“Sam, what did you take?” Cas asked hoarsely. “What did Lucifer give you?”
Sam handed him the envelope. Mother of Two Shoots Herself in Harrison. Castiel read it and frowned.
“This is not what I meant,” he said, but he looked alarmed.
John had seen the last expression on Mary’s face and the inexplicable one on Dean’s. He’d seen the broken front door, the bloody footprints. He’d seen what he’d done to Dean by leaving him alone with his mother on just that day.
Even the neighbor had seen Dean at the window.
Wait.
“Sam,” Cas was saying with more urgency.
Dean had been standing at the window almost right after the shot. The window on the far side of the room, standing in the window right after the shot. There was no way Dean, seven years old, had made it down the hall and across that room, strewn with blood as it was, with his dead mother in it, all the way to the window to be seen seconds after the shot, unless…
“Sam, talk to me,”
“He was there already,” Sam gasped and tried to push himself upright. “Dean was watching when it happened,” He looked up at Cas to see if the gravity this was being understood. That Mary had killed herself with her son in the room, that after all of her precautions and soothing angel stories, she had taken a gun to her head while Dean…
“Why didn’t he ever say anything?” Sam asked. Cas’ frightened and sad blue eyes looked like they might have the answer, but they didn’t give it away.
xxx
Castiel found him in the back foyer of the old house, almost naked on the floor, wearing nothing but his boxers and a wide smile, his face turned into the sunlight. He laughed when he saw his visitor and gave Castiel’s arm a comforting pat while he muttered to himself. His gaze followed the dust motes in the sunbeam and the ghosts of abstractions that were not apparent to Castiel.
“He was there already,” Sam said, hazel eyes snapping into focus and boring into Castiel.
“Dean was watching when it happened. Why didn’t he ever say anything?” The newspaper article was crumpled in Castiel’s hand. He let it fall to the ground as he tried to think of an answer. Sam’s pupils were dilated and the lucidity dripped away from his expression.
Then he was laughing again.
“Why can’t I remember their names?”
Of the brothers? How could that possibly matter?
“Sam, we should get you dressed and get you home.”
Sam shook his head.
“No, no,” he said though his mania, “you should stay here with me.”
Cas had been helping Sam hold his head up, he let it rest softly back down on the floor.
“You must wait,” he said. “I will return soon.” Sam shrugged and turned his face back into the sunlight. He palms drummed a familiar rhythm that Castiel couldn’t place on the floor boards, something slow and patient. Whatever it was it made Castiel’s hair stand on end.
Castiel walked, his footsteps echoing, to the front door where he’d first entered and called Dean from the front porch. His exhales crystalized whitely in front of him. Dean picked up
after the first ring.
“Cas, what--?”
“I found Sam.”
“What? Where is he?”
“The old haunted house across the street from the cemetery.”
“Yeah, I know the one you mean. Is he--?”
“He is…on something. But doesn’t appear to be in any immediate danger.”
A pause so sharp it was painful. “On my way,” Dean said roughly and then ended the call. Castiel put his phone back in his pocket and considered the lonely one-way road. The unlikely isolation of this place was chilling, exiled by tall trees and thick grass, with only the graveyard to watch over it. He thought about the brothers who had lived and died here, undisturbed.
From within the shuffling sound of a chuckle, followed by a wavering song.
Castiel went back inside to the youngest Winchester. The singing stopped when he entered the room.
Sam’s lips were blue and his fingernails were white. His face looked drawn with the contrast of sun and shadow. From his stillness no one could have guess that he’d been so jovial a minute before. He appeared to be wasting away. Castiel knelt beside him and reached for his scattered clothes.
“Sam,” he said gently. “Dress yourself.”
Sam sat up, dirty old leaves were stuck in his hair. He licked his blue lips. He seemed to be on his way down.
“Do you think Dean would take his own life if I died?” Sam asked seriously. Sam was only sixteen, but he was fiercely intelligent and thoughtful, and there was a certain wisdom in him, something very different from Dean’s practical acceptance of the world, that made all his questions seem big.
Castiel didn’t have to think about it long.
“I don’t think he would need to Sam. I think your death would kill him.”
Sam’s nodded.
“I know,” he took his shirt when Castiel handed it to him and pulled it on. “Do you think that’s what happened to Dad?”
“I don’t understand.” His socks were next.
“When Mom killed herself. Do you think it killed him too?”
The heavy sound of rumbling suddenly ended outside. Castiel hadn’t even noticed it’s presence until it was gone. Sam turned his head to watch the doorway, lay back down so that his head was in Castiel’s lap. The sound of a car door slamming. Castiel had the urge to put his hand on Sam’s forehead and he didn’t stifle it. He was part of this tangle now, the Winchester’s had him wrapped into their conjoined destinies.
Dean came running in, his boots strangely quiet on the old wood when they should have been shaking the whole house down. He stopped when he saw Sam, half frozen and not yet fully clothed in the early spring sunlight.
Sam was done smiling. His face was pale as his big brother approached. Castiel wanted to withdraw, but he was helping Sam sit upright, giving him something to grip and lean against. Dean didn’t say a word, but he hauled Sam to his feet and helped him back into his clothes. Then he drove them all home.
Castiel stood, a stranger again, in Dean’s living room and waited while Dean put Sam back into his bed. Dean ignored him when he came back out and made straight for the kitchen, forcing Castiel to follow.
“Dean-“
“How did you know where to find him?” Dean asked without turning around. The faint smell of propane drifted over as he lit a burner on the stove.
“Sam told me about it, two days ago. I saw him in Gabriel’s office.”
“Who did this to him?”
There were at least four answers to that question, and all of them were true. Castiel went with the last in the list, the most obvious one.
“He did it to himself, Dean. You saw the-“
“Did you know, Cas?”
He hadn’t, how could he have known?
But, the furtive guilt on Sam’s face Friday afternoon. Gabriel’s hands in his pockets, asking Sam to tell Castiel the story about the brothers. Lucifer’s pleased greeting and fond farewell.
“Yes.”
Dean didn’t ask him why he hadn’t spoken up about it. It was because he’d been pulled into the curse of the Winchesters. The silence and uncertainty that had bound Sam and Dean together their whole lives was a huge thing, sweeping and encompassing. It had swallowed Castiel whole and muffled him. It even censored him now, when he could have been apologizing or telling Dean the words that were all clogged up in the back of his throat.
Like that Castiel had not gone into last night with wild abandon, had not been throwing them both off the deep end. He’d slipped to his knees and taken Dean, rode through that storm with him, because it felt like that was where he was supposed to be.
But the choices were all Dean’s.
“You should leave,” Dean said lowly.
“Yes,” said Castiel. No.
It was Wednesday morning. He had classes to teach. Castiel called a cab and went to school, feeling drained and bruised.
He should have just gone to his office and prepared his lessons. But the minute his foot was on campus he was furious. He went to Gabriel’s office, he practically ran there, every footstep a count of his heart. How quickly he’d become protective of a boy he barely knew. But then, Sam Winchester wasn’t just a kid, he was Dean’s kid brother. And Dean was-
“Gabriel,” Castiel forced his way through the door.
Two figures looked up at him.
“Castiel,” said the president of the college. Crowley smiled graciously and waved Castiel inside. “We’re having coffee and scones, would you like some?”
Castiel looked at the white pastry box on Gabriel’s desk. Could a person eat scones in the middle of a crisis? Could I really teach class? He was forgetting something.
Crowely stood up.
“Come now, don’t just hang about in the doorway. Take off your coat,” he reached out and assisted Castiel with the coats removal, ushering Castiel towards a chair. Gabriel’s jester, seated primly on a pile of books, was watching him closely. Castiel was suddenly overcome with a dizzying sensation of apprehension. When he turned, Crowley was frowning at his coat, hefting it up and down in one hand.
“What on earth do you keep in this thing?” Crowley put his hand into the inner pocket and Castiel remembered too late what he’d forgotten.
In Crowley’s steady hand the black colt appeared, drawn out of the pocket like a sword from a sheath. Castiel met Gabriel’s silent eyes first.
“Ah,” said Crowley. He opened the chamber, closed it, and handed the gun to Castiel. “I can’t imagine what that is for, but I imagine it means you’re fired.”
Gabriel rose slowly from his desk, a half-eaten scone in his hand. He was drawn, mournful, as if the gun had been a practical joke he’d misplayed.
“Cas-“ he started.
“Of course,” said Castiel numbly, meeting Crowley’s gaze. “Shall I--?”
Crowley considered the gun.
“I won’t report it, it’s unloaded. Reasons for termination classified, etcetera, or however the board wants to phrase it.” He tossed Castiel the coat. “Just bugger off for now. I’ll work out the details after I finish my coffee.”
So Castiel went home. He walked up the long steps to his apartment and through the door he never locked. And then he stood in the kitchen and picked off all his scabs while the clock crashed on through time.
Downstairs, the silence began. He recognized it at once, felt the goose bumps rise on his arms. And Castiel realized, for the first time, whose silence it was. It didn't belong to the girl, nor was it an extension of Dean’s. It didn’t belong to the other tenants of the building or to the neighbors, or the spaces between the walls.
Castiel had been given a chance to break it and he broke a mirror instead.
And the same wind sang and the same waves whitened,
And or ever the garden’s last petals were shed,
In the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had lightened,
Love was dead.
The silence was his.
x0x
Chuck stops writing.
There are tears in his eyes. Monsters in his house. Madness in his mind.
On another continent, he knows, Sam and Dean are struggling with their day to day. In another plane of existence Castiel is fighting a war alone. Chuck could predict every lie they were all going to tell each other, he knew them down to their guilty pleasures, to their futures, and they had never known Chuck at all.
Still, he should have said goodbye. He could have at least sent them a postcard.
I’ve revised your story, he could have said, and it isn’t what you think it is.
They all think he is a prophet, when they think of him at all. Did they ever think of him as a friend?
Listen, I know what the monsters are.
They aren’t hell, or a coming war. They aren’t evil spilling out from some primordial wound in the skin of the universe, they’re just the other side of the coin. That’s it. And without them people are the monsters.
Listen, there is still time for you.
That’s the one he should have sent. Un-signed, no real goodbye. Just a little friendly advice from the writer they thought they knew.
Take care.
He’s so tired. Chuck pushes the laptop weakly to the side and puts his head down on the table. He faces the horizontal plane of his keyboard levelly, from the perspective of a forgotten spoon on the tabletop. The key are like a jagged horizon smudged with the natural oil of his fingertips. And each mountain, immovable now as night falls and his power leaves him, is one twenty-sixth of the alphabet, one small percentage of his language, his bridge to the entire world.
Even God uses language, it turns out.
So maybe words aren’t the mess, maybe they’re not the problem. Maybe it’s the people who read them.
Listen,
The shore is roaring outside, half a mile away and distant with the cries of gulls. The heavy warmth has gone out of the wind, replaced with a glassy chill.
He’s at the end. The story is over, both of them, and since he was only the writer there’s no use for him anymore.
Chuck closes his eyes and thinks that this is what dying is. It’s going to sleep without the answers to your questions, listening to your own internal metronome running out of momentum. Slowing down. Stopping.
Not a breath shall there sweeten the seasons hereafter
Of the flowers or lovers that laugh now or weep,
When as they that are free now of weeping and laughter,
We shall sleep
And on the other side are all the stories he ever had, filed away encyclopedically, and he could reread them forever, but he could never revise them again.
Chapter Seven