Apokalypsis

Only the mother acknowledges me at first. My body knows that it’s her by the timid creak of the door, the mellow footsteps padding the carpet. In the beginning, she sits in the rocking chair in the corner of the room and just watches me. I always lack self control in these earlier stages. It’s for the best that she doesn’t come too close.

As the days go by, she grows more comfortable, and I more self aware. Her hands encircle my wrists over the chains they’ve bound me with, and she rocks back and forth while muttering things like where has my daughter gone? I slowly realize that I like it when she’s near. Her body is warm. She scurries away as my nails start to scrape at her flesh.

When he finally comes around, the man takes a more direct approach. Then the mother storms in and snatches the knife away. I hear them arguing in the hall, screaming at each other until she threatens to leave. The cadence of their voices tells me that this is a play they often perform. They trudge through the lines like underpaid actors; in the end nobody leaves, and nothing changes.

Today he looks me in the eye for the first time, so I decide to speak. “I’m cold,” I tell him. He sneers at me distrustfully, but it’s true. There's a vicious draft in this room, all two of its windows flung open without a care for what's let in, or for the fact that it's the middle of winter. Post-it note doodles and to-do lists flutter on the walls like moths. The wallpaper, once a vibrant pink, is faded to a somber, rosy grey. My chest aches, rattled by a developing cough and that familiar, bewildering nostalgia. He leaves me there, shivering.

On the other side of the door I hear him speaking to mother again. His voice is calmer now. Resigned. “Maybe once it’s dead, my angel will come back.”

When I wake the next morning, my first thought is that I’ve been buried alive. I claw my way out, legs scissoring their way free until I emerge from the warm nest of blankets. It’s the first time I’ve slept comfortably through the night. When the man enters the room to deliver my breakfast, he doesn’t glance my way.

Of the two of them, he’s the most impossible for me to understand. Cruel, I thought at first. Immovable. Most nights, I hear him weeping through the walls.

***

The girl I absorbed gave herself willingly, but it’s not because she hates her life. Love has always been at the center of her solar system, the point around which everything orbits. But love is a kaleidoscopic thing.

There are moments that can alter the story forever. There are words that can never be taken back, chains of syllables branded so deep that a simple “that’s not what I meant” does nothing to smooth over the puckered wound. When something can’t be erased, it’s easier to run away from it. She ran away from home once, then was brought right back. And everything shifted from there.

They’ve never talked about that night. Not even once. From the surface, it would be feasible to say that nobody involved can remember it at all.

Memory is a monster, and even I have come to fear myself. We shy away from what is uncertain, what cannot be defined. I think that’s the reason why this host’s heart beats so close to my chest. Of all the lives I’ve now come to live, I still don’t know who I am. She doesn’t either.

So when I reached for her that night, she reached back. For a moment, we simply embraced; two ambiguous identities sifting through the dark, blindly fumbling for a way, any way, to be understood.

***

I’m always disoriented immediately following the integration. It’s like being reset, or what they would call a “rebirth.” I have to adjust to the fabric of the world, now swaddled in yet another layer of reality. The host’s memories brush up against me like cobwebs, filaments of recollection straining to weave themselves into my core. I start to remember myself, too.

I don’t know much about my species. My original memories are buried deep, stretched thin around the time when I first arrived here. It took some time for them to realize what was happening, and by then it was too late. They began calling me the “Memory Eater”: the parasite that burrows itself into the consciousness, that drinks up its memories until the host has been entirely absorbed and integrated into the ever expanding hive mind. This is not the extraterrestrial contact they had anticipated so eagerly. The grimly accepted projection now is that by the end of the decade, there won’t be a single original left. If only I could work as efficiently as they say.

I can’t stay still for too long. Eventually the hunger gnaws at me, the yearning to overtake, to become, to engulf and morph and encompass a new consciousness, a new soul, a new purpose. Like any other animal, I must eat. I must propagate. I’ll continue to starve, continue feeling like a hollow, lifeless husk until I’m finally able to be everywhere, to become everyone that I am not.

***

When the door creaks open again, I instinctively perk up. But it’s not the mother that slips into the room. There’s something asymmetrical about his face today. My eyes zero in on the line of demarcation where he nicked himself shaving and simply gave up halfway through. I feel a pang in my chest that must be fondness. For better or for worse, he’s never been one to give a damn about appearances. He sits down in the chair.

I remember things now; how that young girl spontaneously decided that she wanted a rocking chair one day, after seeing one propped up in the meticulously curated furniture store display. I begged and pleaded for all of one afternoon, and like many of my requests, this one was met with resistance. He shouted himself hoarse over the audacity that I would even ask, stomped around in a huff for days, then came into my room one morning with the painstakingly constructed chair dragged behind him like a carcass, his palms perforated with splinters.

“I hope you like it,” he said gruffly, “or I broke my back for nothing.” I recall few other times I hugged him so tightly. I sat in that chair for about a week, rocking myself back and forth as I skimmed through my current book, before it became yet another surface for me to hang my dirty clothes on.

“Are you going to kill me?” I say, deciding to break the silence. I don’t see anything on him that can hurt me. Nothing visible, anyway.

“What’s the alternative?”

“I’m not going to do anything to you if you let me go.”

The man looks at me with that you think I’m an idiot expression. “You expect me to believe that after you’ve taken over half the world?”

Half is surely exaggerating, and a hostile takeover is a gross mischaracterization. I lower my eyes out of habit. “You’d be surprised at how many people welcome me in.”

“Why the hell would they do that?”

“Most of you claim to want to be in control, but you really find free will to be stifling. You seek out purpose. You desperately crave to be imprisoned by meaning. Humankind rattles at the bars of the cage, begging to be let in.”

“Did she?”

“Yes.”

The man hesitates. “Did she love us?”

The answer falls from my lips. “I do.”

“Did she know that I love her?”

I root around for the answer, but the truth is dissatisfying for the both of us. “I don’t know.”

His nostrils flare, and I see that familiar rage color his cheeks. His body lurches forward, his hands twitching with intention. In seconds he’s crossed the room, towering over me.

“This body will die, but the others won’t,” I tell him calmly. “You won’t be killing me, you’ll be killing her.”

It’s true that hurting this body would make no significant difference in the grand scheme of things. But in this point in space and time that I occupy, he is my father. I think it might break my heart.

He tosses the key at my feet. “She’s already dead to me.”

***

The night is brisk, but I’ve grown used to the cold. This body hasn’t left the house in weeks, and I eagerly sip in refreshing gulps of air. It does little to satiate me, but that’s why I’m leaving. I know those people and myself too well by now to force them to see things my way. It wouldn’t feel right. It wouldn’t make me… I guess happy is the right word. I can’t absorb them. Not like this.

I don’t make it very far before she catches up to me. I feel her cool fingers clamp around my wrist, stopping me in place. I spin around to face the woman - my mother. Her face is crumpled in desperation.

“What are you—”

“I spoke to your father,” she stammers. “He doesn’t... we both don’t know what to do without you, sweetie.” Her tone becomes scolding, cracking around the edges. “You shouldn’t run away from home again.”

My throat tightens, my eyes welling up. I touch my face. The tears are both hers and mine. I am her, now. At least I think that I am. What else is a human soul truly composed of, aside from its memories? I’m starting to think the way they do, to question and doubt myself the way they do. This woman standing in front of me, that man in that house — what are they to me?

“Please come back. You’re going to catch a cold.”

I want to argue, but I have no strength left. She leads me back the way I came, through the dense thicket of balding trees, all the way down that winding road to the small patch of land that, for a time, was the entire world.

With every step, a current runs through me, and I see it all again: the tears and the turbulence, the shouting matches and open ended arguments. The peaceful days where everything is perfect, where we laugh until we cry. The endless ways in which we take each other for granted.

It see it all again: the night I run away, my father drives in circles around town until he finds me sprawled on my back in the middle of a baseball field. The starless sky threatens to swallow me whole, to engulf me in its meaninglessness. The ride back is as silent as the dead. Nothing will be the same again, I think. Nothing at all.

But when we get back home, my mother is making tea in the kettle for me. She fusses over me until I drink it all, then ushers me to bed early. It’s the coldest night of the month. I feign sleep when my door opens, as my father shuffles across the room and drapes an extra blanket over my shivering form.

There were wrongs that were never righted, betrayals without apologies. But forgiveness seems like flimsy, counterfeit currency now. What’s real are the memories, as tangible as my own skin and bones and blood.

The door opens, and past melts back into present. The afterglow of youth is warm on my cheeks. I feel fuller, lighter. The moon hangs above our heads, round and heavy like a ripe fruit.

She looks over her shoulder at me, beckoning me in. Like a child, I cling to the tail of her shirt and follow her inside.