requiem /'rekwiem/, n. (oft. cap) 1. Rom. Cat. a. the mass
celebrated for the repose of the souls of the dead. b. a celebration of
this mass (Requiem Mass). c. a musical setting of this mass. 2.
any musical service, hymn, or dirge for the repose of the dead.
****************************************************************
Jordie thought he'd been falling forever, that the dull grey was all there ever had been. He wasn't even sure he was Jordie anymore, there was just a notion that he had once existed, but no more. No solid memories, just random flashcard thoughts that seem to fill the entire universe (inky hair, inked flesh, bright red screams and a tangle of flesh "...the only pure thing left in my fucking world is wearing your disease..."), complete emptiness that defied description and the feeling of being utterly violated were all that remained, the scrapbook of a once complete soul, now reduced to a primordial stew of emotions; ready for rebirth, for vengance, peace. The ground seemed to rise up to him and once again the world exploded.
He woke to an incessant pinching on his skin (am I whole again?). He pressed the balls of his hands to his eyes, relearning the sensation of touch. Waving his hand in the general direction of the pinching, he heard an explosion of silken feathers and an indignant screech that sounded vaguely like a crow. "Oh...fuck..." he cursed, his voice sounding hollow and unfamiliar. ("What is it?" Jordie queried, fingers tracing the freshly inked skin. "Judas," came the reply, voice like shattered crystal, "He has beautiful black angel wings." "Raven wings...I think they're supposed to be raven wings or crow wings or something.")
Spidery lashes shuddered and Jordie opened his eyes. The sun rose and set, like some dodgy time-lapse photography effect. Shadows writhed and melted on the sand. No stars to get drunk on, no moon, just the hyperkinetic sun and sand, sand that apparently went on forever, because Jordie couldn't see anything else. Except for the goddamn stupid bird, its ebony feathers glittering midnight blue under the desert sun. It made a sound as if to clear its throat and caught Jordie's glare with her own fiercely intelligent gaze. "What the fuck do you want?" Jordie demanded, the wind whipping sand and grit into his already blood-shot eyes. "I think you know," came the reply, voice like hardcandy...like Tobey's. Jordie swallowed hard, "I have NO FUCKING CLUE," half indignant, half scared witless. Then the bird smiled, it may have been a trick of the light, but Jordie could have sworn the goddamn fucking thing smiled beguilingly at him as it told him, "You will." And then he was sinking and spinning and drowning and falling again.
****************************************************************
It was the singing that woke him this time. That and a god-almighty, unearthly scream. For an instant, in the darkness, he thought he saw a beautiful drunken angel. Then the pain took over again and black dissolved to red, the only other tangible thing being the crow's voice - hollow reassurance under the circumstances. Flesh knitting back together, days-dead organs kicking back into action, dusty lungs gasping back to life as stitched lips passed their first breath. The stench of damp soil clawed at his freshly awakened senses. Drifting in and out of reality under the guileless eye of the ever-present crow, (half way between the gutter and the stars...beautiful, so beautiful) Jordie saw, not for the first time, how lonely, futile and full of utterly pointless beauty life was. Such a simple insight, that, under the circumstances, should have just disappeared as quickly as it had surfaced. He wished he had the luxury of numbness that the grey visceral mass of death had provided. He wished that he could just shut off his brain - every thought burned to the very core of his existence. He wished that this technicality, this loophole that had allowed him to return would just fold in on itself and disappear. Jordie convulsed hard against the dew-dusted ground, teeth beared then relaxed again and opened one eye to the stars...the stars? "Oh for...Where the fuck am I now?" He opened his other eye and, looking around, wondered for a second whether he was actually an extra on a Tim Burton set. Dead trees cut ghostly figures and seemed to whisper all around him under starlight. Calloused claws dug into his skin through his ragged clothing. He raised his head, narrowed his eyes at the bird and spat "You! I need to have a stern talking to you!" He recognised this place. He knew that somewhere close by stood and especially gnarled tree, the legend "Jordie loves Tobey loves Keenan" indelibly carved into it's weeping bark, couldn't think to count how many times he and the rest of the towns fashionably desperate children gathered here to get exquistely drunk and visciously fuck amidst the sandle-wood scent of baptism oil. Matching scar for scar, each keener than the next to out-cool, out-alienate, out-despair. But unable to find the words to break this apathy, few would actually garner the courage to move beyond the belljar of suburbia. Lying there, leaves tangled in his hair, his eyes never once leaving the stars, pondering all this, he knew what he had to do, had known it since first seeing the crow in the desert, though he didn't know why. His memories were crisper, more vibrant than they had ever been in life. All but one, that is. The all important missing link as to why he was here - how had he died? Without that knowledge, what good was his plight? Fuelled by unfocused sadness and vengance, he'd probably just end up damaging himself again. "But that's where you come in, right?" He asked the bird hopefully. She cawed with what Jordie recognised as astute false confidence, her head bowed against the realisation that she couldn't hold her own against him this time. Keeping stride, dead leaves crumbling underfoot, Jordie watched the bird dodge and weave in time with his own erratic heart beat.
**************************************************************************
The air was sticky and sickly sweet, making him think of foreign market places and candy-coated city lights. But the suburb was just as grey, just as colourless as he remembered it. A few rusted out car husks the only thing ruining the dull perfection of the setting. Taking a deep breath he raised his hand to knock on the familiar door, but it swung open violently before he had a chance to. "About fucking time!" Tobey chided good naturedly. The first time he'd caught sight of Tobey she had been on a neon-lit carousel at the town's Midnight Fair, lips parted in a silent, child-like giggle, drowned out by the tinny carnival music and the screams of patrons on far more ferocious rides. The first thing he had thought was; "Those lips could tell beautiful lies". And they had, but now, 3 years later, she stood before him, looking like cheap poetry, smelling of cinnamon sugar and cigarettes, feeling like a copy of a copy, like an actor playing a well rehearsed role. The raw innocence in the spark of her smile long since dulled, the fire in her eyes reduced to a few indignant embers, only the throaty catches in her voice spoke of her caustic tenderness. "Ahh, sorry," he began, "had a slight crisis...you see I spilt black hair dye on my NIN cd."
Tobey scrunched her nose a little, her version of a smile, "Yeah, well you look like shit."
"Why thank you! I was going for wasted, pathetic, dead guy, but hey 'like shit' will do." After a moment of contemplative silence, she rolled her eyes, took an effortless flying leap at him and somehow managed to catch her arms around his neck and tangle her legs around his waist, almost bowling him over in the process. He could feel her fingernails carving crescent moons into his back, even through his t-shirt. He'd barely had time to steady himself and realise that Tobey was sobbing violently into his shoulder, before her sobs had calmed to sporadic hiccups. "What did you expect?" She gulped, "An endless barage of witticisms? Me to rant poetically about the ebony feathers in your hair? All I want to do is sit somewhere dark in my quasi-post-enlightened stupor," Her bruise-coloured eyes seeming more tired than usual. She fell silent for a moment, finally taking in the entirety of his ensemble - tattered attire, leaf-ladden hair, earth-encrusted finger nails, "But first things first, you need a fucking shower."
***************************************************************************************
Dead-boys need enlightening, blank spots in their memories refreshed. He'd been in the bath for close to 2 hours, scrubbing and soaking and soaping until he almost didn't feel numb anymore, letting the tepid water muffle the outside world, drowning out all but the sound of his heart's perfunctory beat fighting to rid his body of whatever excess fluids then finally giving in. There wasn't any music coming from Tobey's room. He found her in the family room, eyes staring dully at the muted television screen, long-forgotten cigarette dropping ash onto a photograph laid on her lap. "They don't believe me," She spoke without turning to look at him, "They didn't believe me right from the fucking start." She held the photo out for him to take, her eyes still not moving from the screen. "Even after I showed them the bruises and the welts and every-fucking-thing else. They still didn't believe me. Reckoned that you and Keenan had just run off together, that I did this to myself. For fucks sake, does this look like something I'd do to myself?" She looked him in the eye for the first time that evening and held her wrists out to him as if offering a sacrifice, or maybe even a prayer. Encircling both skinny appendages were angry rad gashes, accompanied by yellowing bruises. "You know how screwy I am, but does this look like something I could even do to myself?"
"What the fuck happened?" He queried, voice soft, but hands clutching Tobey's wrists so tight he could feel bones grinding slightly under his fingers. He could sense a tired mixture of grief and anger in the tears that welled in her eyes. She shook free of his grip violently and turned her attention back to the TV, "Just look at the fucking photo, Jordie." Though it was only a few months old the photo was already worn and a little faded. Three figures stared, unblinking, back at him from the once glossy print. Three figures pressed so tightly together that their pale-skinned features seemed to almost melt into each other, their inky hair seeming to be one big tangle, framed by smoke and hazy lights. The middle figure had his tongue out, eyes squinted laughingly, his tongue-stud glistening moist-silver. Jordie's stomach suddenly felt completely rotted. He could almost feel the innumerable Jack and cokes that had been swimming in his stomach that night, the way the smoke in the club scratched at the back of his throat, the way the steely morning air rushed at their skin as they left, music still ringing in their ears. It had been times like this that they had actually felt as young as they were, forgot the usual desperate need to be saved, to want to save each other. "Keenan..." Jordie found himself whispering, fingers brushing the photo. If Tobey could weave beautiful lies, then Keenan was just a plethora of contradictions. Keenan with his genuine, cherry-blossom smile and the still-tender snow-white lines criss-crossing his forearms. The three of them had loved each other so much that they often forgot there was a big old fucked up world out there. When it hurt too much to look at him anymore, he shifted his gaze to Tobey's image in the picture. Her face was half hidden by her dark sheath of hair, but Jordie could still make out the fiercely protective stare she had set on Keenan. He felt his heart twitch a little in realization. So, caught up in his own morbid form of nostalgia, he replied, more to himself than Tobey, "But you did have something with this didn't you? Not whatever happened to your wrists, or whatever happened to us, but you're the reason I'm here now, aren't you?"
She looked levelly at him, quickly stubbing out her cigarette on the wooden arm of the chair, "Look at that photo and tell me you don't feel anything - not grief, not anger, not anything - and then we'll talk about who's responsible." And in the flourish of angry foot steps and foot steps and slamming doors that followed, Jordie could have sworn he saw a freshly weeping tattoo peeking out of the waistband of her panties. He caught up to her sitting crosslegged in the middle of her room, eyes closed, waves of vitriolic music crashing from the stereo. She hadn't moved a thing since he'd been here last - magazines still lay discarded, a notebook with her obsessively neat hand writing staining the pages threatened to fall off the bed at any moment, CD's spilled out of an open backpack. She only opened her eyes when he pulled her to her feet, pushing her belly down onto the bed, forcing her to breathe in the dust and shampoo scent of her pillow. And she didn't flinch when he lifted the back of her thin singlet, exposing the sharp angles of her shoulder blades, or when he pulled at her rainbow-printed underpants to reveal the fleshy curve of her back. "What the shit is this?" He demanded, roughly thumbing the vivid tattoo, half expecting it to shiver to life under his touch.
"Don't play dumb - ignorance doesn't suit you, babe."