Room

The room is empty despite the clutter within. This had once been their room. He had use of the room but he’d never owned or possessed it. That was not how he was. He’d thought this was a universal truth that applied to all homes. Believed that they shared a place together that they filled with love and in so doing they’d imbued it with the very essence of who they were. For him, true homes were haunted by the living and in that haunting the dwelling came alive.

Now he stands within the stifling confines of a tomb. Any ghosts present reside within him. This a place of loss and death. The emptiness of the room hurts. He finds himself thinking of the beautiful vacuum of space. A sleeping beauty who would crush and end him in the first kiss and embrace. He shivers with an eternal cold. His gut lurches and runs into a wall of terror that dazes it into submission. He stands within Medusa’s lair. All the hearts she’s touched turned to stone. Hers a fossil of a childhood she has grasped in her fist and flung into a dark sea that will never return the sacrifice of self to her bitter shores on the waves of a quiet hatred.

He wants to leave. This is not for him. He remains a creature of magic. A fleeting miracle with a purpose yet unknown. And yet he’s compelled to move within the mists of a poison that crumbles the mortar of his life. Forcing himself through an ordeal of unmaking that would see his walls come tumbling down. Stubbornly entrusting himself to the spark within and its capacity to guide him towards a becoming that was always meant.

He has to mean this in order to make it count. Here in this room is the inverted grail that he must unearth in order to stem the flow of his life blood. If he means to live again, this is the quest that would heal. Righting the cup and with it the wrongs of pasts that were not his own but now own him as a result of dark conquest and foul loss.

The portal to the truth is unlocked. The unease of this discovery is almost debilitating. A sense of a trap that is yet another echo of the trap he’s been enmeshed in for an age. He leans closer as he eases open Pandora’s box to see what he already knows. This merely a light that he turns upon what was already there. The truth resides within him. It always has. His timid disposition parted him from the words that were his. Now he returns to the fold.

His expectations here in her inner sanctum are of secret lives that are closer to what she really is. The comedy and tragedy of the masks she has presented to him have worn transparently thin. This now is the veil lifted. Scales she has painstakingly painted upon his eyes fall away.

As he stands over the keyboard, the screen lights up revealing an array of tabs. All of them windows into other fantasies. Tea leaves for him to discern reality with. Reading a future that he has been deprived of. A fist opens in his guts and releases butterflies of sadness. This is not happening. This is not his place. There is nothing here for him.

Nothing.

That single word rises above him. Monolithic. He is a helpless babe in the cold shadow that bears down upon him. There are tears, but they lay deep within him. A constant waterfall of mourning.

He opens the first tab and his expectations are met head on. This a concierge service of pain. There are photos of her. Some repurposed. Others taken for the purposes of this media account. She seldom shares the photos she’s taken on her phone. Not with him. Not in this life of his.

Clicking on posts he takes in the adulation. She basks in it. He goes to the private messages on this account. His breath is so shallow it almost fails in his chest. The content is graphic. She encourages sordid praise and stokes those erotic fires with promises of acts of betrayal. The photos here leave nothing to the imagination and yet his imagination is bolting through fields aflame with shock and confusion.

Now the silent tabs stand squarely before him. An army intent upon his complete destruction. A distraught voice demands he retreat. Tells him that what he does not know will not hurt him. That lie cuts deep. All the way down to past hurts. He has to know. He will know.

The next tab is more of the same. Her but not her. She is displaying herself wantonly and lapping up the attention. His stomach does cartwheels. This is not his version of her. But that is all she is. A version. A skin. Beneath that skin lurks something that is predatory. He feels the hunger of it gnawing within him.

The tabs seem to grow in number as he systematically clicks through them. They form an orderly queue and he duly gladhands them in turn. Numb now, he convinces himself he is beyond hurting when all the while he is burning with the pain of a betrayal beyond reckoning.

Then everything turns and he is falling further than he knew was possible. The dark plan is revealed to him. And in its revelation he understands that it is without end. There is no freezing stop to it now. Something deep within him pushes him on. He cannot stop. He does not cease even as he sees himself rendered upon the canvas of the internet.

And somehow he knows. As he scrolls through the first fake portrayal of who he is. Who he is supposed to be. This is more than the theft of his identity. This is the abduction of his very soul. He issues forth a croak from the back of his throat as though his voice has been stolen. And in a way it has.

Opening this inbox he reads messages that he could have written were he to have been in the grip of an insanity that twisted him into a craven creature. His body thrums now. There is a high pitched keening sound in his ears. It will take him three more tabs before he realises that he is making the sound himself. The cries of a child in distress. The cries of a child who knows that hope never comes. No one is coming to save him. No one knows. And even if they did, they would have no clue as to what they could do to haul him out of the dark trap that has been set from the moment he met her. Besides, none would willingly venture into the darkness that is enveloping him. Here be dragons. This is the dark that keeps children awake at night. A darkness that consumes.

The last vestiges of his sane mind continue to attempt to make sense of what he is seeing. A fool’s errand. There is madness in trying to find a logic to the fantasies of a sick mind. In the tabs that he is now calling Her Tabs, she is giving herself over completely to secret lovers. Providing more than he has ever seen of her to strangers on the internet. Somehow he knows that this apparent act of giving everything is not what it seems. The revelation of the tabs shows him that there is no giving here or anywhere else. There is only taking. All of this is a device fabricated to consume. She is all-consuming.

The grand reveal of what she is disembowels him with the knife of his already knowing. He knew all along but refused to accept the truth of her. He was active in his own deception and in this he is ashamed. He has become a lumpen, stupid thing. Clumsy and ugly he shuns his own existence.

Which brings him back to the open tab and the accounts she has made in his image. His tabs. In the dead of night she has flayed him alive and filled his stolen skin with the stuff she is made of. Appropriated his essence and corrupted it. As they have made love she has breathed in his very soul and tortured and experimented upon it until it has become the travesties before him. She has made of him a monster in her own image.

His entire body is now thrumming at his resonant frequency. He is at breaking point. His eyes vibrate in their sockets and as he loses his focus upon the screen he sees his desperate, reflected image forever trapped in this moment of pain beyond pain. As he sees himself a gout of self-hatred rises up within him. The terror that flails at him as he experiences his need to burn himself away almost unhinges his mind. But then he sees her.

Now she is reflected in the screen and at first he wonders if she is real. Whether any of it is real, including him. His life has become a nightmare. But he knows he will never wake up from this trap. His real life and his real self are forever denied him. She has done this to him and she is smiling. The smile is what tells him that she is real in this place of lies.

He turns around. Unaware that he has not bothered to straighten up. Cowed in the face of all she has done to him. She is staring at him with unconcealed rage and hatred. She stands before him naked. Unlike any of the salacious images she has used on those tabs of hers. Her nakedness is both beautiful and ugly. She is the inherent conflict of art. The beauty of the apex predator eying her prey. The grotesquery of the most fundamental of betrayals. The betrayal of love and of humanity. Her own humanity sacrificed at the altar of her dark cravings.

He gazes upon her truth at last. A small voice within him whispers, she told you she loved you. She really did whisper sweet nothings in his ear. The paralysing poison of promises unfulfilled. This image before him is the carrot he has slept walked towards throughout their time together. The promise of her is an eternal end.

Only now does he attend to the objects she holds aloft as though she were in a religious procession. Clutching at artefacts with ancient meaning. This tickles him. There is no meaning here. There are only the black flames of her nihilism. He feels the heat of her hunger as they stand facing each other. A heat he mistook for passion. She was the one. She told him as much and he believed her.

This though is beyond belief and in this vacuum of meaning he is made dumb. His face a puzzle as he looks from the kitchen knife in her right hand to the hammer in her left hand. That hand is clad in a blue latex glove. She asked him to buy a pack of those gloves for her only last week. Her hands red and raw from the upscaling of a chair she was working on. A chair meant for this room. He wonders whether she’ll ever finish that project. Another feint. A distraction from the real project; him.

“They’re all your accounts,” she tells him.

The words hang between them and he struggles to discern the meaning of them in this alien atmosphere. The sound of them is foreign. Her voice grown cold and unfamiliar. He shivers and swallows down bile. Wishes he could be sick. Yearns for the escape of the involuntary motor function. A rebellion of this compliant body of his. But he knows it will not happen. He is beyond saving. Has been for some while. He is a foregone conclusion of loss. When it comes to it, even he isn’t coming to save him.

They’re all your accounts.

He doesn’t have to think this through. Not really. He already knows. He knows everything. Always has. The knowledge has lain within him. Locked in a secret room that she held the key to. Now the door is hanging from its hinges and the truth of his predicament is gaping wide open.

In an approximation of this, he opens his mouth as though to say something but the vacuum of her lair robs him of the capacity to form words that count as she raises the hammer and begins their final act. She lifts the hammer between them and he does not blink or flinch as he anticipates the arc of the twin fangs of the claw towards his head.

This is how it ends.

A disjointed thought that fails to land. She brings the lump of metal down towards her forehead and the room shudders with the sound of the sickening crack. A curtain of blood unfurls down her face and through her new mask she grins at him with an insanity that grabs him by the shoulders and shakes him violently. The ground beneath him has vanished and he hangs there in a state of incomprehension. And yet he tastes the danger. Knows he is in the worst trouble of his life. A tear trickles down his face. A tiny lament for what is to come.

Her silence is her confession. Bringing him the peace that he thought would forever elude him. He smiles and for a moment she pauses. A fleeting expression of confusion passing over her features. Then she is matching his serenity with cold hate as she places the point of the knife against his chest and pushes it forth.

He gazes into the obsidian glass of eyes that open onto a soulless wasteland as they stand in a final lover’s embrace and his smile widens as the welcome piercing of his broken heart fails to occur.

She missed the mark, he thinks to himself. This is fitting somehow. Falling short. Missing the point.

He doesn’t remember laying down. Sees her face as she leans over him and greets the image with warmth. Feeling the caress of her fingers upon his face. Frantic and passionate as she claws at his skin. Harvesting his flesh under her fingernails. Another act that affords her control of the narrative.

“Happily ever after…” the words ride out into the space between them as he breathes his last.

“What?” she says to the dead man beneath her.

She will never understand the meaning of what he said. Nor the defiance of the love he held for her even at the very end. The part of her that would understand is trapped in a room that will forever be locked and hidden away. The palace of her mind has a wing of such rooms, and the halls and corridors she wanders are fallen to rack, ruin and decay.