Christmas story 2020
Blood Pudding
Chapter Two: As Red as Any Blood
"When Proserpine had dismissed the female ghosts in all directions, the ghost of Agamemnon son of Atreus came sadly up to me, surrounded by those who had perished with him in the house of Aegisthus. As soon as [Agamemnon] had tasted the blood, he knew me, and weeping bitterly stretched out his arms towards me to embrace me; but he had no strength nor substance any more, and I too wept and pitied him as I beheld him. 'How did you come by your death?' said I. - Homer, The Odyssey, Book XI
...Reality shutters and unshutters itself.
And then I shudder — and realize it's me shuttering and unshuttering reality — me blinking.
I'm awake again. Conscious. A weak-eyed, blinking consciousness. But conscious.
Conscious. I wonder about that word, 'conscious', about its relation to another word, almost the same, 'conscience'. — How are they related, not so much the words, but the things? I suspect that the more conscience, the more consciousness.
Maybe that's why I've felt dead for so long, why feeling dead feels familiar. As my conscience has died, my consciousness has been constricted.
Maybe. I don't know. I'm dead.
No, wait, I'm not. My head still hurts. I'm cold all over but can touch warm blood on my middle, my stomach.
There was a time when I couldn't stomach blood.
That seems a long time ago. A lifetime ago.
I didn't want to come to LA.
It's home, you see. I haven't been home in a while. Years. I couldn't face it, and luckily, somehow, the job never demanded it.
And I especially didn't want to fly to LA the Saturday after Thanksgiving. The throngs of flyers, all overstuffed with turkey and family, all eager to be home, all starting to project Christmas. For better or worse.
For better or worse. Those words were once spoken over me and someone else. Someone dearer to me than my life itself. We didn't get heaps of the better, but we got heaps of the worse.
You see, I'm a spy because of a spy. Because of her.
It's a long story, the whole story is long, and I don't believe I have time to tell it. On the clock here, I am. I believe I'm dead, after all. Dying.
Anyway, it's a long story. TLWT: Too Long, Won't Tell. Just know I wasn't a spy when she walked into my life. I was a spy when she walked out of it.
And then I abandoned my life because she abandoned it. Why not, it was empty, and who wants to sit glumly in a repeating chorus of regret, the dismal, auto-tuned, muzak soundtrack to your empty-shell life? Alone in Burbank.
Bourbon on ice. I could use a drink. Parched. I thirst.
Anyhow, I wasn't a spy but I became one. She was always a spy. Maybe there was a moment, a specious present of dubious length, when she was not, or when she wavered, when it seemed like we might both escape from spying, from its omnipresent shadows of turning.
But that moment was spoilt before its shaky resolve could be steadied, acted upon.
It wasn't her fault, none of it was. Not the spoilage, not what came after the spoilage. Not even what happened today.
She left me, you see, and became a spy again, fully a spy, nothing wavering.
Well, maybe there was another moment of wavering, later, but I'll get to that. I hurt too much right now to add that revisited hurt to my sum of current hurts.
My head and my stomach hurt enough. No need to burst my heart.
Not yet.
So, I turned spy. I followed her into the dark.
I was, it turns out, good at it, at being a spy, depressingly so. Not at first, but I had a leg up, an advantage, a gift, and it just took me a while to understand how to use it.
I worked for the CIA. Or I work for the CIA, or I will until I finish bleeding-out, exsanguinating. ex-sanguinate.
Ex. My ex. She works for the CIA too. Those three letters eclipsed the other three, MRS. But, as I said, and you should believe me, — I'm a spy, sure, but why would I lie now, to you? — it wasn't her fault. And, although I call her my ex, I should add that she's still my MRS, my wife. We're still married — legally, technically, you know? But that's all, so, ...ex.
I lift my bloody left hand, squint, and make out the empty spot on my left ring finger. I don't have my ring on. I was undercover, unmarried undercover. But I have the ring in my jeans pocket. Not either of the deep pockets but that little shallow pocket — the watch pocket? right, the watch pocket — above the deep right-hand pocket. It's dangerous, carrying the ring, even hidden there, but I feel...let's just say that without it I don't feel like me. Or maybe the ring's all the me that's left, that gold circle, my last vestige of and my only hope for decency, normalcy.
When I saw her last, before today, my ex, my wife, she was not wearing her ring, and there was no sign she had been, no tell-tale circlet of white skin.
I force my hand into my watch pocket. God, the pain! Hardly strong enough. But I feel the ring, pincer it out of the watch pocket. Pain blackens my vision, already dim in the dark, I slip it on.
Sigh.
If I'm dead, I want to be wearing it. I want to die as me. I want to die as her husband, not just as a spy.
I blacked out from the pain.
I'm not sure for how long but I am conscious again. Everything's dimmer, but I don't know if that's the deepening of night or the slow, episodic extinction of my consciousness.
It makes a kind of sense, I suppose, that I am dead at home, in LA, that I'm dying in LA. Full-circle. Full-circlet.
I am reminded of my ring. I move my thumb to my ring finger and feel the band there. Merry Ex-Mas.
I'd laugh if it wouldn't kill me.
She left me five years ago.
I never imagined I could change so much in five years, but I suppose the five years I spent with her before she left me should have made it clear how much I could change, how much she could change me. For better or worse.
She always worried about that, changing me for the worse. She tried to protect me from her life, her past, but I got pulled into spying anyway, pulled down into it. (There's no up in spying; take my word for it.) It wasn't exactly my fault, not at first, and I didn't do it because of her. — Well, maybe I sorta did. I just wanted to be with her more than I wanted anything else.
I still believe she left me because she was protecting me. From the worst, the worse. She said she didn't feel it anymore, love, and maybe she didn't but she still wanted to protect me.
I understand now, as I didn't then, why she was desperate to protect me. The five years since she left have changed me for the worse. I've done things — I have — things I never imagined myself doing, inconceivable, inconceivable things — and, yes, sadly, I know what that word means.
I've done inconceivable things. Nothing funny about any of them; I'm no glamorous-black Dread Pirate Roberts. Just gritty-black CIA guy, Agent Me. — After all, fiction's the realm of probability, real life's the realm of the inconceivable. I understand that now. I understand it too damn well.
We all tell ourselves stories about what we will and won't do, and we should. But we should also know that those stories function from one angle as resolutions, from another as predictions, and, from either angle, they can be unhappy: resolves fail, predictions prove erroneous.
Sorry. I can't seem to tell my story in order — beginning, middle, and end. But I want you to understand — not to understand everything I understand, the bloody stuff, the red stuff, Dear God, no, I wouldn't wish that on anyone, not even you — but to understand me. Maybe to forgive me, or just tell me it's okay.
I don't want to be dead and leave behind no one who understands, understood. Maybe she does, but I'm not sure. I couldn't tell you. Her eyes are still so hard to read.
To understand all is to forgive all. — Is that true? I wish you would tell me.
But I will tell you, okay? Let me tell you some of what I've done. A quick review of the lowlights, the agonies of my defeats. Defeats. Agony.
Now that I think of it, Faulkner took his book's title, As I Lay Dying, from Homer, from a speech by the shade Agamemnon. Agony. Agamemnon believed he was dead — and he was.
In Homer, in Hades, I guess you can be dead, and believe that you are dead. In Homer, you can believe past dead.
I look around, moving my head slowly, just a little. Shit, it hurts, hurts a lot; the movement and pain dizzy me. I'm so weak and still weakening, my strength running out to pool on the floor.
There's a Christmas tree across the room, floored, lying on its side, ornaments strewn in confusion, the angel that had been on top broken. Its wings are shattered.
A knee-jerk impulse to repair it seizes me. If I weren't dead, maybe I would repair it. Glue it back together, good as new. I used to repair things, not break them.
The floor reeks with my blood, red as any blood, but black-looking in the dark. The scent of blood and pine surround me.
But I was going to tell you about my lowlights and I need to do that before...before, well, you know. Confession's good for the soul, right?.
And none of this will be news to you, not exactly.