Hour one: Me pounding, pleading. Slumping. Turning.
Hour two: Me and the shell.
Hour three: The glow, beginning. Spreading.
Hour four: My hypnotized attention. Our conversation, me and it—that thing; not something which really seems to register, actually, on the purely visual scale.
Cajoling, flattering. Saying: My love. Saying: You know I will honor my promises.
The glow increasing steadily throughout, meanwhile; a slimy glitter. A blazing smokeless cloud, pillar of salt-white fire. A certain sense of boiling. Of moving outward, then—inward. Saying: Soon.
Soon, soon.
And in hour five . . .
* * *
The Waiting Room door clicks open, admits four—Doctor and goons, the original three-pack, already braced for action. They see me on the floor, face-down; the declining line of my limp back, head clutched in hands, shadow-rapt. No more light, bright or otherwise. No more shell.
. . . this quintessence of dust . . .
“Bastard ate the fucking thing, fuck your mother,” I hear one blurt. And think:
You could say that.
The Doctor kneels, waves them closer. One kicks me over. They see my face, hesitate as one—
. . . this noise . . .
—and I feel my hands knot, my insides furl. I feel them start to reel away from me, then stop dead—sway, dazed. Instantaneously lulled. All of them, Doctor included, plunged into a kind of half-intoxicated trance brought on by my—(its)—proximity. Like standing next to a generator, invisible energy pouring off me in waves. Drowsiness seeping in through the pores.
I feel their fear, like I feel my own. And I feel what was once inside the shell—what’s now inside me—sniffing at it: My mental tastebuds, gearing for the feast. My mouth, watering. The glow rekindling, a slow flame under my skin. This radiance looking out through my eyes, bruising them from the inside with the pressure of its glare.
. . . in my blood . . .
Disconnected, surfing the current: A battery. A contained conflagration, run on incipient panic. I lever myself up with both hands, mirroring the Doctor. Look around. See them return my look, all of them—helpless not to.
“Bet you wish we were back in El Salvador now, fellas,” I remark. Conversationally.
And I feel it let go of me, the thing, exploding outward like a concussion bomb-blast: Blow out the bridge, bring the bulkheads down. Crush the goons back against the Waiting Room walls. Crumple the Doctor in on himself. A surge of pent-up energy, driving me upward—haloed, paralyzed, cocooned in power. Catapulted into some pupa stage, lapped in adrenaline and brain-opiates. I feel the shell’s former inhabitant slip away from me, in search of fresher fields, and my terror surges, babbling. I match it, promise for promise—set myself up as its carrier, its willing Judas Goat.
Succor and repair me—love me for real, like you love yourself—and I will bring you prey and praise.
A modern Prometheus for the century’s end: Eat my fear anew each day, that I may live forever. Trying my level best to make it understand, through instinct rather than intelligence, that I’m not just a host—not just some new flesh shell for it to hide and sleep in, hibernating until the next best thing comes along. Wordlessly eloquent, I vow to trade keeping myself in a constant state of fear and pain for a vaccination—however temporary—against the whole concept of death: Death by drowning, by slow suffocation, death here at the bottom of the deep black sea, in the pressure-drunken final fathoms.
Making sure to also point out—with strictest possible attention to detail—that if I lose my personal identity, then I won’t know what I have to be scared of anymore.
And you’ll starve.
I hover, wait for its reply. Until the words come, soft as necrosis. Cells collapsing. A lie for a lie:
Time means nothing . . .
Yeah, yeah: To you.
. . . to us.
* * *