For the Summer Olympics on Caesar's Palace.
So... This is a sort of experiment, I guess. It's hybrid prose with a good load of nonsense.
The rest and recreation room at St. Mungo's Ward for the Criminally Insane is
surprisingly cheerful. There are pictures of children and children's pictures on
the walls. There is bright circus music playing from the stereo, and I think that
just by looking and listening I might go insane—for real, this time—until I see
you, sitting in a sagging grey sofa by the window, a shadow of light with your
silvery hair and pallid skin and gelid blue eyes, looking like what should really
belong in a rest and recreation room in a ward for the criminally insane. And you,
you are stone; you are lifeless; you are a statue I can't help but touch; you are real.
"I'm a psychopath," you say as soon as I sit down beside you, as a warning, maybe because I look too soft. "I've been here since I was twelve. I killed my father. I tried to plead insanity, but I played the part too well. I was supposed to be sent to Sisters Rosa down the street, and I would have gotten out in a year. Unfortunately, they found me out and sent me here. And St. Mungo's won't let you go no matter how well you act." You look at me, trying to see through my glasses. "What did you do?"
"I killed a man," I say, and my lips twitch, and my hands twitch, and then they can't stop twitching.
"You bastard," you murmur, and you take my fingers and press them between your palms. "Where did you get that scar?"
My lips tremble. I blink; I try to blink the scar away, as if I can see it running between my eyes, and then running back up my forehead to where it first split open. Your hands are warm and dry, and the sweat from mine is moistening them like tears.
You frown. "Everyone has scars," you say. "Some just aren't as visible as yours."
"Show me yours," I whisper. I clutch your hands, afraid you might take them away because of what I just said.
"I don't have any," you say easily. "What kind of psychopath would I be, then?"
"Everyone does," I repeat. "You said everyone does."
"I don't." You're stubborn. You slip your hands away from my slack grip, and then I start trembling again, my fingers a blur.
"I don't want to be here," I say. My throat is closing and everything is cold. "I want to be home."
Your lips touch my ear. "It's okay," you say, almost as a command, but your voice is soft. "Hey, it's going to be okay."
And then I know that you are not some fucking psychopath.
The nurses are fat and stupid here at St. Mungo's. The doctors administer
too many drugs. The patients love their serotonin too much; they are the
best performers of depression. We live in a hallucination—"My mother
took me to an art museum once," you tell me, holding my hand, "and all I
saw was blood in the paintings."—there is red in all the corners of the room,
red and green and blue and violet, and a buildup of white noise, of black
noise, and of bright circus music becoming all too loud—"She pointed at a
picture of a woman tying a scarf around her neck," you continue. "'What do
you see?' she asked me, because she was already worried about me. 'I see
blood,' I told her. 'The woman's bleeding.' She was naked, you see. What else
was I supposed to see?" So I point at a picture on the wall of the rest and
recreation room. "What do you see in that?" I ask you. And you stare at it
for a long time, and I know that you are not what you say you are, because
anyone can see blood in a painting if they try. And blue eyes can't see red.
"It's a knife," you say finally. "The blade of one, cutting through a net of veins."
"It's a needle pulling thread," I contradict, "through an eye."
You tilt your head, smirking at me. "I don't see it."
"You can't see it."
You take your hand away from mine. You've figured out by now that your hand is my drug. And I've figured out that the hands of a killer aren't warm and tender.
"Let me see your scars," I press.
You shake your head before remembering, "I don't have any."
"What really happened to your father?" I ask.
"I killed him," you reply, quickly enough, and I decide that you're telling the truth.
"But why?"
"I hated him." This time, I can't believe you.
"Maybe he hated you." I don't know where the words came from. Maybe I'm the psychopath, because there always seems to be one, lurking in the deep dark crevices between one person and the next.
Your hand, curled into a
fist, flies into my jaw. It
hurts, because that was
the hand that gave me
comfort. "Fuck you!" you
scream, and more, "Fuck
you!" and I see stars and
taste red. But somehow
you've made me see clearly,
and so I say, "I'm sorry."
"We're here to help each other," you say the next time we meet, your knuckles
bruised and my jaw cut. "We'd better make the most of it, so let's stop trying to
get under each other's skin." I nod in agreement and slide my hand into yours and
lay my head in your lap and close my eyes. We breathe as one, and we fall into
insanity together. I can't explain it, but I need you. It's like something above
us has connected us, and I didn't know until the moment I saw you that it was
always meant to be like this. The universe is insignificant next to you. "What are we—
"—doing?" you ask as we grip each other in the dark, your fingers brushing my collar and mine braced against your back.
"We're staying alive," I whisper.
Fumbling, you kiss me, your hands roaming over me, not sure where to touch, perhaps looking for my hands. My glasses slide off my face and fall off the side of the bed, into the unknown somewhere, but I don't mind; I can't see anyway.
You stop; you're shaking, and I hold on to you to keep you still. Your fingers find the scar on my forehead and trace its long, jagged line.
"You should go back," you say, swallowing dryly, "to your room."
I respond by trying to kiss you again, only I miss and catch the corner of your mouth instead. Or maybe you moved.
The nurses of St. Mungo's are fat and stupid. The doctors are paid too little to care. But the cameras are always watching and never lie. Security will be here in a moment, thinking that I have broken out, thinking that I am off to kill again, but I need this. You are special. You are something unforeseen, and I don't know what it is about you but I will find out.
And it doesn't seem like you want me to leave, either, because there are things we've done in the dark that we would never dare to do in the bright room with bright music, and you move away from my scar and begin tracing the rest of my face. I close my eyes. We breathe together.
"What was the name of the man you killed?" you ask absently as the tips of your fingers hover over my lips.
"Show me your scars, and I'll tell you." My mouth touches you as I speak.
"I asked first," you retort.
"I've been asking first."
So you unroll the sleeve of your shirt and put my hand on your wrist. There's
nothing there, only your smooth skin over raised ridges of veins, and, when I
stop stroking, your faint pulse struggling against my thumb. "What is it?" I ask.
"Something black," you reply. "Now, your turn." But I don't tell you; I kiss you
instead, and sometime during the tasting of my tongue, you forget you had a
question. Then, the door opens and hallway light spills in, catching us as one,
pressed tightly together. Then, I am taken away, and the hallway lights become
flashes of pain behind the lids of my eyes and sounds of thunder and forks of
lightning and the buzzing of the electroshock therapy machine. "His name is,"
I mutter, over and over. "His name is. His name is." Because I have to tell you,
and it's this unfinished business that's keeping me alive. "His name was—"
"His name was Riddle," I say, and those words use up all of my breath.
Your face morphs slowly into an expression of confusion. Your hand twitches over mine, as if you want to pull it away. "Tom Riddle was my father," you say.
No. This can't be right.
No. Everything is wrong.
No. You're fading away.
No—you, who were so
real, who were the only
tangible thing in this
hallucination. How
could you have been
only a figment of my
imagination?
every—
thing—
is—
unraveling—
I can see you now, trapped in turmoil, standing by the slate-surfaced lake among the silver reeds. Your clothes are wet, your hair damp, your cheeks glistening like crystal with droplets of lake water.
"We are fucked up, Potter," you state, and I can tell you were crying even though your eyes are bluer than ever.
"Don't go," I say. "Please."
You laugh; it's the laugh of a maniac. "I killed my father."
"You didn't," I beg. "It was Riddle who did it."
"But it might as well have been me." You say it so matter-of-factly that it makes me want to tear your tongue out. But I can't move. "If I had just did what Riddle said," you continue, biting your lip. "If I had just run the errand—it would have been my last errand, too."
"No!" I scream at you. "No, can't you see? It never ends! You have to cut it away. Please, please, Draco. You didn't kill your father."
"He did it to teach me a lesson." You look down at your feet. "I belong to him, now. Riddle is my father."
I run toward you. I raise my fist to hit you, but I can't seem to bring it down. "Shut up," is all I can say. "Shut up. Shut the fuck up."
But you continue, "The only way to get rid of him is to take myself away from him—and away from the world."
You turn toward the lake, longing in your eyes.
"No." I take your arm and pull you away. Your feet follow readily, but your mind is sinking itself below the frigid water, letting go of the air. "Come with me. We'll go back home."
We go to your empty house, because mine is filled with my nasty uncle and aunt and cousin. We crawl into your bed, and I try to hold on to all of you with my shaking arms. Soon, you grow tired of me.
"Come here," you say, getting up and pulling something out of your closet. "Look at this."
It's a bulging burlap bag. You let it fall from your arms, and when it hits the floor, bricks of cocaine spill out.
"I don't know what to do with it," you say, and you start to cry, and then in a frenzy you pull off your wet shirt and flee to the bathroom to scrub your wrist with soap and water, trying to erase the dark mark Riddle branded you with.
I take your hands away from you, gently, and cradle them. The faucet drips. "Draco…" I whisper your name like an enchantment.
We curl together on the bed. I find hollows on your back and kiss them until you are shivering. My burning lips find your icy ones, and something in me soars. I've never had you this close before. I try to keep you warm as we fall asleep.
But when I wake up, you're gone, and I run to the lake, still half-dreaming. The surface of the water is still. Your shoes are sitting near the edge. I scream your name to the sky, and it echoes in the valleys and beyond.
There's too much I haven't said to you, so I restrict myself to saying what I should have said the day before, "It doesn't have to be you, Draco. It could be Riddle." I take off my glasses; their metal is too cold and heavy against my ears. "Riddle can be the one who dies. I'll kill him for you. I will kill him, I promise."
Weasley and Granger from school don't understand what it is
about you that has me so enamored, but they don't know what
it is like to be sans parents, a bastard of the world. They haven't
ever lost a mother; they can't fathom why you sit in class and
cry every day, why you spit venom at anyone who comes near
you. They think you're spiteful, but I know you're hurting. "What
do you want, Potter?" you demand of me, in typical Malfoy fashion.
"I'm sorry," I say, and my hands twitch, "about your mother." You
glare at me. "What do you know about her?" you say, still
defensive, because I wasn't there when she lost her hair; I
wasn't there when she vomited after her medicine, or when
she gripped you and your father's hands and whispered, "I can't
do this anymore."—I can only imagine. "I lost both of my parents,"
I tell you. "They died in a car crash. That's where I got this scar."
"Everyone has scars," you say. "But not all of them are visible
like yours." I ask, "What about yours?" You shake your head,
and that's when I know you feel just as much as the rest of
us, perhaps even more. "They haven't healed yet," you say.
And the next day you're gone, just like that. There is only sunlight where you once sat. I sink down beside the indentations in the sofa where it seems like a body—your body—has just slumped into the cushion, and I pretend I can see you out of the corner of my eye.
"I killed a man," I say to the vase of flowers on the coffee table. "I tried to plead insanity, but I played the part too well. They were supposed to send me to Sisters Rosa down the street, where I could have been out in a year. Unfortunately, I ended up here. You see, they found out I was some sort of psychopath." I pause and try to draw your scent from the acrid air. There is nothing familiar. "Maybe I am. I haven't been able to feel anything since you left."
FIN?