X.1121 [ dreamtime . eddy | broadcast mind ]
[ooc: backdated to the 21st. I swear I set out to write a log…]
.. A normal person would have fallen asleep with their face mashed into the keyboard. No, a normal person would have gone home and gone to bed. In fact, a normal person wouldn't have this job at all. So that's all right, then, because this job was everything, and if Daniel Trepkos was still impossibly awake and functioning, then it was all part of a whole.
He could have had company in the lab: Jessie had offered to stay, but Daniel wouldn't have it. It was beyond the parameters of the internship-just what they were both starting to want and he, at least, couldn't allow.
.. No, that's not right. Or right it may be but it was long late. (Long past. Too late.) He had allowed. Or she had taken the decision out of his hands. Though even that was something he had allowed, because he was her advisor, the professor, the adult, and she… was much smarter than he was when it came to people, so why not defer to the expert. Being focused on people limited her (along with everyone else) in the possibilities of nonpeople, and nonpeople being the vast majority of existence he wasn't saying he preferred her priorities to his own, but since dealing with people was disproportionately necessary to get on with the rest, she… it could be useful.
.. That's how it started but that too was past… and now her hands were sliding down his shoulders from behind and loosening the tie he'd forgotten she'd put on him a day and a half ago and now undoing the button revealed from behind it and he leaned back into her breath and breasts and breathed her in and allowed himself too to be diverted from majority of existence and into that narrower but sometimes necessary realm…
.. 'I don't want love. I haven't time for it. It's weakness. I am a man, and sometimes I want a woman. When I've satisfied my passion I'm ready for other things. I can't overcome my desire, but I hate it; it imprisons my spirit; I look forward to the time when I shall be free from all desire and can give myself without hindrance to my work. Because women can do nothing except love, they've given it a ridiculous importance. They want to persuade us that it's the whole of life. It's an insignificant part. I know lust. That's normal and healthy. Love is a disease. Women are the instruments of my pleasure; I have no patience with their claim to be helpmates, partners, companions.'
She rolled her eyes and plucked the book from his hand and tossed it onto the bed. "Charming. And totally inapt."
"Are you sure," he asked, mildly, distantly, objectively, "you're not romanticizing me because it suits your own desires? How can you be sure it's inapt?"
She leveled her gaze on him. "If you were like that, I wouldn't like you one bit, and I wouldn't stay in such a situation."
"I could be hiding it."
"If that were you, you wouldn't bother."
He couldn't trust the 'I wouldn't like you or stay' argument, but this one-"That's sound."
She smirked. "I know."
'You should have lived at a time when women were chattels and men the masters of slaves', I said.
'It just happens that I am a completely normal man.'1
.. Her head rested on his chest the way it had in the best moments in life-
It doesn't matter. Who you are. Scientist. Artist. Politician. Teacher. Explorer. We profess to thrill at higher goals, but there's nothing so tangible, so heightened, so verifying of life as the simple, the base, built-in, unevolved, instinctive; what we can't anticipate or control, seek or obtain, but what merely happens to use: the touch from the right other person.
He wanted to break off the stem that had burst from her throat. It was harmless now but it didn't belong in her. It had invaded, manipulated, and killed her, so slowly. It had turned her into a monster.
He didn't have that excuse.
He carried her farther on. He didn't notice as his arms began to ache then sear, as his steps grew less steady, as his throat and lungs began to burn. He noticed belatedly, when he sank without meaning to against a wall and let her fall lifelessly (which she was; and so was he, to hold her) to the floor, her head still in his lap.
It is possible to keep walking until you can't anymore. It's not a decision you make. It just happens.
He put her head back on his knee, and put his own head back against the wall of the cave. It burned, everything burned, especially his eyes, but he kept them open, watching the patterns it made: the steam, the ash, the particles that danced, the molecules that drifted alone until they found each other- pure accident, all accident, no deliberation, no agency, no intent;
the parasite had also been an accident… there are no willful enemies in nature…
You can no longer claim any knowledge of nature.
He hadn't the strength to lean over and kiss her. His fingers reached for her face, but recoiled in case they should find the alien instead. He managed to reach far enough to grasp her fallen hand.
The steam would suffocate before it cooked but he didn't really notice. He certainly didn't care.
This is what I worked for. Worked so hard for so many years. Against so many obstacles and adversaries. ...Which they weren't... there are no adversaries... who was I fighting but myself...
He knew he was hallucinating, to think her hand closed around his, but he went with it willingly.
Choking to death can't be missed or imagined away.
Yet it felt like the hand that closed around his pulled on him-through the walls of the cave, through the molecules of the air, through a strange turn, into cooler air, blanketing Mist…
.. He awoke choking with hands full of ash and his back against the Door .. so terribly cold-
[1The Moon and Sixpence ~ W. Somerset Maugham, Penguin paperback edition pp.143-4]
.. A normal person would have fallen asleep with their face mashed into the keyboard. No, a normal person would have gone home and gone to bed. In fact, a normal person wouldn't have this job at all. So that's all right, then, because this job was everything, and if Daniel Trepkos was still impossibly awake and functioning, then it was all part of a whole.
He could have had company in the lab: Jessie had offered to stay, but Daniel wouldn't have it. It was beyond the parameters of the internship-just what they were both starting to want and he, at least, couldn't allow.
.. No, that's not right. Or right it may be but it was long late. (Long past. Too late.) He had allowed. Or she had taken the decision out of his hands. Though even that was something he had allowed, because he was her advisor, the professor, the adult, and she… was much smarter than he was when it came to people, so why not defer to the expert. Being focused on people limited her (along with everyone else) in the possibilities of nonpeople, and nonpeople being the vast majority of existence he wasn't saying he preferred her priorities to his own, but since dealing with people was disproportionately necessary to get on with the rest, she… it could be useful.
.. That's how it started but that too was past… and now her hands were sliding down his shoulders from behind and loosening the tie he'd forgotten she'd put on him a day and a half ago and now undoing the button revealed from behind it and he leaned back into her breath and breasts and breathed her in and allowed himself too to be diverted from majority of existence and into that narrower but sometimes necessary realm…
.. 'I don't want love. I haven't time for it. It's weakness. I am a man, and sometimes I want a woman. When I've satisfied my passion I'm ready for other things. I can't overcome my desire, but I hate it; it imprisons my spirit; I look forward to the time when I shall be free from all desire and can give myself without hindrance to my work. Because women can do nothing except love, they've given it a ridiculous importance. They want to persuade us that it's the whole of life. It's an insignificant part. I know lust. That's normal and healthy. Love is a disease. Women are the instruments of my pleasure; I have no patience with their claim to be helpmates, partners, companions.'
She rolled her eyes and plucked the book from his hand and tossed it onto the bed. "Charming. And totally inapt."
"Are you sure," he asked, mildly, distantly, objectively, "you're not romanticizing me because it suits your own desires? How can you be sure it's inapt?"
She leveled her gaze on him. "If you were like that, I wouldn't like you one bit, and I wouldn't stay in such a situation."
"I could be hiding it."
"If that were you, you wouldn't bother."
He couldn't trust the 'I wouldn't like you or stay' argument, but this one-"That's sound."
She smirked. "I know."
'You should have lived at a time when women were chattels and men the masters of slaves', I said.
'It just happens that I am a completely normal man.'1
.. Her head rested on his chest the way it had in the best moments in life-
It doesn't matter. Who you are. Scientist. Artist. Politician. Teacher. Explorer. We profess to thrill at higher goals, but there's nothing so tangible, so heightened, so verifying of life as the simple, the base, built-in, unevolved, instinctive; what we can't anticipate or control, seek or obtain, but what merely happens to use: the touch from the right other person.
He wanted to break off the stem that had burst from her throat. It was harmless now but it didn't belong in her. It had invaded, manipulated, and killed her, so slowly. It had turned her into a monster.
He didn't have that excuse.
He carried her farther on. He didn't notice as his arms began to ache then sear, as his steps grew less steady, as his throat and lungs began to burn. He noticed belatedly, when he sank without meaning to against a wall and let her fall lifelessly (which she was; and so was he, to hold her) to the floor, her head still in his lap.
It is possible to keep walking until you can't anymore. It's not a decision you make. It just happens.
He put her head back on his knee, and put his own head back against the wall of the cave. It burned, everything burned, especially his eyes, but he kept them open, watching the patterns it made: the steam, the ash, the particles that danced, the molecules that drifted alone until they found each other- pure accident, all accident, no deliberation, no agency, no intent;
the parasite had also been an accident… there are no willful enemies in nature…
You can no longer claim any knowledge of nature.
He hadn't the strength to lean over and kiss her. His fingers reached for her face, but recoiled in case they should find the alien instead. He managed to reach far enough to grasp her fallen hand.
The steam would suffocate before it cooked but he didn't really notice. He certainly didn't care.
This is what I worked for. Worked so hard for so many years. Against so many obstacles and adversaries. ...Which they weren't... there are no adversaries... who was I fighting but myself...
He knew he was hallucinating, to think her hand closed around his, but he went with it willingly.
Choking to death can't be missed or imagined away.
Yet it felt like the hand that closed around his pulled on him-through the walls of the cave, through the molecules of the air, through a strange turn, into cooler air, blanketing Mist…
.. He awoke choking with hands full of ash and his back against the Door .. so terribly cold-
[1The Moon and Sixpence ~ W. Somerset Maugham, Penguin paperback edition pp.143-4]