Hypoxia

(this piece mentions death by self-harm, grooming, and domestic abuse)

A man peers down at a woman.

He is dressed in a modern black suit, skin alabaster white, and every feature on his face cat-like and curious. His one hand–adorned in great jewels from faraway lands–is tucked into his pant pocket. The other hand lays dormant at his side.

His twitching fingertips is what the woman is drawn to at first. Black spots obscure her vision, and an arm is slung over her midsection. She’s sitting against the farthest wall on the fifth floor of the Northshire Apartment Complex, chest rising and falling in a steady, rhythmic fashion. She licks her parched lips, glancing up at the man. She looks for the gateway to his soul in a set of breathtaking eyes–bluish-gray; the calm before the storm.

Then, she looks past him. A mere tilt of the head, accessing the shrieking woman at the end of the corridor. She’s on the phone with the police, eyes running with tears and mascara streaking down her face. A chuckle escapes the woman on the ground, lighting up her cherubic features as she asks, “Are you real?”

The man raises a brow inquisitively. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Because people are like cattle. Quick to frighten.”

“I could say the same for you, Rajini Rai.”

Rajini–newly named–tilted her head back, a subdued thump! resounding off the wall as she laughs. “What are you supposed to be, exactly? A god? A devil?” Her eyes were at half-mast with hazel bursting in its center.

The man tilts his head casually before making himself comfortable. He leans against the wall adjacent to her, crosses one foot over the other in a sensible lean, and then his arms fold over his chest, pondering words. “I’m just a visitor passing through. Thought you’d like the company. It’s been a long day for you.”

“A long few months, to say the least,” Rajini returns plainly.

“That you have. Tell me about it. Maybe it’ll get your mind off all… this,” he airily mentions, gesturing to the screaming woman down the corridor, the neighbors popping their doors open in morbid fascination.

Rajini releases a sigh, though her face twists with slight discomfort. She straightens to the best of her ability, then peruses her memory. “Home life was chaotic. My father’s unexpected stroke left him in a coma. I had to make the decision to pull the plug against my mother’s wishes. She blamed the whole thing on me,” Rajini laughs at that last part. “She wanted him to be the sole breadwinner. Living in California, the most expensive state in the whole fucking country, and refusing to chip in a few hundred bucks whenever he asked sent him into that, not me. I did the best I could.”

The man listens intently, his brows furrowed, his stormy eyes on her and her alone. “It’s not your problem.” A look of surprise encompasses the girl’s beautiful face. She looks younger, stronger, healthier. Like all her dreams are just out of reach, like her laughter can be heard thundering off concrete half past 3AM, just the way he remembers. “One’s birth is nonconsensual. You didn’t ask to be here, to be a punching bag for your miserable mother or your failure of a father.”

“I loved him, though,” she corrects with a bit of heartbreak in her eyes.

“We all love broken things. That’s why I’m here.” Rajini laughs again, the tears that were on her lash prior to the man’s arrival long gone. “Your father’s passing wasn’t what broke you.”

“Neither did my mother, buying a one-way ticket to Bangladesh. Can’t really say she left me here to fend for myself. I didn’t want the bitch. Couldn’t take care of her even if I tried.”

“25-cent ramen packets and overdrawn bank accounts is how you’ve been going,” he muses with a sigh.

“I could care less about that. I knew I had a limited amount of time left. I wasn’t going to jail. You see this pretty face? Think I’d last a day there?”

At this, the strong, lethal features of the man softened. A heartfelt laugh–something akin to a songbird’s call–releases and echoes over Northshire’s fifth floor. The mayhem is subdued and faraway. A calm lingers over the two, tucked away against the far wall as if sharing secrets the others would die to know.

“You want to hear the rest?”

“I want to hear you,” he says profoundly.

Rajini rests her head back against the wall and closes her eyes. “So my mother leaves. Abandons us here like a dog you’ve kept in the family its whole life, made it feel loved and wanted–though that last part is a crock of shit. My sister… I don’t like to say her name–” Olivia Rai “–but she loved this guy. Loved him ever since she was too young to be loving anyone. He groomed her. You know this, though. Everyone knew it. But when she turned eighteen, it was out of my hands. Out of the law's hands. Couldn’t call her a runaway, but an adult. Couldn’t say it was pedophilia if she was legal; all that jazz. He was bad news. Too bad I was worse.”

The man doesn’t want to ask this next part, but he has to. Just so he can have it shared in the space between them. Just so he can relieve her of this burden. “What happened to Olivia?”

Rajini opens her eyes slowly, glances at him as if the weight of the world is crushing her. “He killed her.”

The man knows this. By the Gods, he knows this. He knows everything about what happened to Olivia Rai, because it was plastered all over the news. That a woman who’d been groomed and abused and then put up like a lamb for slaughter didn’t have a chance.

The man knows that this guy, the unknown who Rajini doesn’t care to name, beat Olivia to an inch of her life several times before. Nurses, police officers–they all have the reports. What good are those if one refuses to do something with them? What good are those if one is too afraid to try?

That’s why Rajini’s here. Because that man got off too easy when he ‘accidentally’ smashed Olivia’s head against their granite countertop, killing her on the spot. Yes, he beat her before, the courts knew that. Yet he seemed so forlorn and guilty, like he actually didn’t mean to when he was a calculated predator.

The man knew otherwise.

So did Rajini, who left her shoddy little apartment–the one she’s paid for out of pocket–in the projects, sauntered her way to Northshire, knocked on his door, and pointed a knife right at his heart.

“I’m not a fighter,” she explained hoarsely. “You see that man? There was no way in hell I could get a hit on him if I wanted.”

“So you did what you could,” the man nodded solemnly, turning to stare down the corridor where the man–Ezra Porter–stood with blood coating his wifebeater, screaming, “She stabbed herself! She stabbed herself, I swear to god!” And perhaps it was the shock of it all, but he was still holding that knife, forging overlapping prints along the handle.

“Are you… real?”

The man looks back at Rajini. His naturally stern features break when realizing how pale she’s gotten. Her eyes are at half-mast again, the hazel in her eyes clouding. He finally leans down, pressing one knee against the unforgiving floors. He reaches out with both hands, takes her face in hand, and says, “I’m real, Rajini. I promise.”

She’s weakly shaking her head. Her arm, which was slung around her midsection, starts to loosen. His eyes fall to the three-set stab wounds that’ve completely torn her stomach open. She’s lost too much blood.

“You’re God, aren’t you?”

A chuckle escapes him. His lips pull up in a smile, and his eyes crinkle at the corners. “I come to collect people’s dreams. You’re on the cusp of sleep. I’m only just waiting.”

Rajini seems indifferent to this answer, but with her fading life essence, a sudden burst of wakefulness claims her. “What do you think I’ll see?”

“You’ll see that little bird you had in your home for ten years. The one that couldn’t be without you, prone on your shoulder when you worked, rubbing her face against you when you slept, stole away into your handbags whenever you went out for coffee.” She laughs, pulling a smile from him too; all teeth. “You’ll see an endless assortment of books in an atheneum, waiting to be read. You’ll have all the time in the world for it. The Wolf of Oren-Yaro, The Eye of the World, Legendborn–all the things you tried to make time for but couldn’t.”

“All that, and you never said I’ll see my sister,” she points out.

“Some things…” he says with candor, “...we find with a little adventure. That’s what makes the best dreams, after all.”

Rajini is fading fast now. She’s heard what she’s wanted to hear and the man feels her fast-beating heart start to slow. Her skin is flushed cold and pale, and the sound of thundering footsteps can be felt throughout the building, though they’ll be late in reaching her.

“I didn’t ask you your name,” she states with a hint of disappointment.

“I am Mazakel, Lord of Dreams,” he returns.

Those are the last words Rajini hears before she dies in that long corridor at Northshire’s Apartment Complex with God as her witness.