Lithium, Chptr. 21 – Xperience Fiction

Lithium, Chptr. 21 – Xperience Fiction – by Liam Sweeny.

Mel was limp as the cop walked him out of the holding cell and down a long hallway, absent of doors except for on at the very end, with a square window intermeshed with wire. Safety glass, though to Mel, it didn’t look safe at all. He visualized himself putting his hand through it like it was liquid and pulling it back out. He was cuffed, and talking to the officer, who merely grunted and nodded and said “Okay” as though what Mel was saying was a script memorized.

The cop walked him through the door into the lobby. Andy and Hope were sitting on a row of bolted-down benches. Their features softened; they looked relieved to see him. He couldn’t understand their faces; the features were two prominent, eyebrows and noses bulging, cheeks puffed out, like they were full-sized homunculi in dirty clothes.

“Miller,” the officer shouted out as he uncuffed Mel, who rubbed his wrists by force of habit. Not that he could feel pain right then. Hope and Andy walked over to him, caressing his shoulders on either side. Their touch didn’t register.

“We were so worried about you, dad.” Andy said. “We need to get you somewhere. It’s your meds; you need them.”

“I’m okay, just a misunderstanding,” Mel said. “I just need to keep painting. That’s how you get to Carnegie Hall – practice.”

The cop went behind the Plexiglas-shielded counter. “Miller.”

Hope and Andy walked Mel over to the embedded speaker. The officer slid a strip of paper into the opening in the Plexiglas.

“You’re getting an appearance ticket. You are to appear in L.A. County Court on April 2^nd. Failure to appear will result in a bench warrant for your arrest. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

Mel nodded yes; Andy and Hope shake their heads ‘no’.

“Will the museum people be there?”

“I don’t know,” the officer said.

“I’ll invite them,” Mel said.

“I wouldn’t do that,” the officer said. “You harass them, and you’ll end up spending your free time in the County Jail.”

“Officer, he needs help.” Hope said. “You see that, right?”

“Look, ma’am, it doesn’t really matter what I think. He was asked if he felt like hurting himself, or hurting others, and if he said yes to either of those, we could hold him on a seventy-two-hour psych. But there’s just too many looneys to hold everybody that’s off their nut.”

“So where do we bring him?” Hope said. “He’s a danger to himself whether he thinks so or not.”

“Bring him to the ER,” the officer said. “But they’re going to ask him the same two questions. You want to help your friend, get him to agree to go. Get him to lie if he has to.”

They walked out of the police station into the warm California night. Mel was watching the clouds in the sky turn in on each other, overlapping and underlapping in geometrical patterns that he knew were happening for his eyes only. Hope and Andy were distraught. He didn’t know why. The three of them were a good clip ahead of the void. Or were they? Andy was crying, and Hope had a tremble rippling across the flesh of her arm.

“Don’t worry, guys, I put the painting in the gallery. Now the void is trapped. It can’t get us anymore.”

“Mel, there is no void, honey,” Hope said. “You’ve been through a lot and you need medicine. We’re going to get you help.”

“You don’t want to go to the ER,” Mel said. “It’s Extreme Retribution. If we go there, they’re get revenge on us for all our wrongs.”

“Dad, what are you even saying?” Andy was holding in sobs. Mel wondered why. They were on a good path; they needed to see that.

“I’m going to take us to a portal that will take us back to Albany, Andy,” he said. “Hope, you can come too. You can come, and you can destroy Debra with the touch of your hand. You can suck her up into you and make her bad energies good. You can be you, and her, and you again, and we can get married and you’ll be Andy’s real mom.” He turned to Andy. “Wouldn’t that be cool, kiddo?”

Andy sat down cross-legged, put his head in his hands and let out a torrent of tears. Hope knelt beside him and hugged him.

A bus came. Mel perked up. A bus could get him to anywhere in Los Angeles, and if he talked to the bus driver long enough, the bus driver would tell him all the secrets of the city. He would tell Mel where all the portals were. He looked back at Hope and Andy and they were looking at him, then the bus. The bus started to curve in toward the curb. It opened its door with a hydraulic hiss. Two people who’d been at the stop lined up to get in and Mel stood in line behind them. Hope ran over to grab his arm.

“No you don’t,” she said. “You do not get on this bus right now. You don’t leave us, you hear me?”

I have to go. I have a destiny,” Mel said. “I have to save you two.”

“My God, Mel, you can’t even save yourself,” she said. “You need help.”

Mel pulled himself away from her grip and got on the bus. He fumbled in his pockets and found the two dollars he’d spirited away in case they needed to buy something, which they hadn’t had to for their whole journey. He slid the two dollars in the bull collector. He felt another tug at his sleeve. It was Andy.

“Dad, please, get off the bus.” Andy’s voice was weak, his cheeks shiny in the paths of his tears. He was falling into the void; they both were, and he didn’t yet have the tools to pull them out of it. He’d have to keep them from pulling him in himself.

“Let me fucking go,” Mel said “Just let me go.”

Andy’s face covered itself in shock as he let Mel go, as the bus door closed and the pistons raised as it continued its route.

***

The windows were windows to the mortal eye, but Mel saw into their depths. He could see the stories of the shards, at the subtle direction of the words in the signs plastered over the walls, hiding the fundamental truth of those walls. It was a code. Words weren’t words, but abbreviations and anagrams for other words. For messages from the void he was seeking. Because Andy and Hope were in that void, and he would save his son.

He made it to the art store in the embodiment of his ancestors, the explorers and the timekeepers who felt the dry, holy air from inside his skin. They moved his feet and translated the wind through the palms and the sound of characters making catcalls out of their cars, cars like the one Mel couldn’t have because cars were for corporeal beings and he had ascended.

He was given the art store by the cops, who had driven him by it as they took him to the station. And that was the reason he had to go there, to rest after being witness to this building of sacred artifacts.

A loud noise brought Mel’s attention to the car in front of him, hoking, challenging him to move. And he did, but not to shrink from the challenge. The driver didn’t know it, but Mel was protecting him from the abyss that his anger could open up. He was power, and power was danger. He had to go to the bathroom, but if he didn’t do it just right, he’d pollute the rivers with his waste. Therefore, the pain in his stomach made him double over, grabbing the art store wall. He needed to get inside. He could shield his body in there and hunt for the artifacts that would unlock the void. The tool that he could wield against the Dark Provost that to help Andy in his clutches.

He pulled at the door, but it was locked. It must’ve been warded because locked doors opened for him. He walked around the corner and into the back of the building, intent on smearing a blood sigil that would melt the back wall and tilt the store and all it held into the maw of Mel’s cloak, but instead, he found a basement window cracked open. It was a message from the dimensional guardians that he was meant to breach the art-store arsenal.

The alarm sounds shook Mel. This wasn’t supposed to happen. He belonged there; why did someone boobytrap his natural home? Art stores were for artists, just as churches were for angels and strip clubs were for demons. Who set the alarm? Who was the intruder of the natural order?

Mel was undeterred. He pulled a canvas off the shelves and he ran around, searching for the paint kit that Betty had. It must be there. Betty’s tent was a portal to wherever he was, and the paint kit should’ve fallen through. But it didn’t. Or did it change its form, as the wooden box with gold trim he saw on the shelf before him?

He grabbed it and ran for the back door. The alarm was loud and glaring, designed to keep him from opening portals and performing sorcery. He decided to leave through the back door, hoping beyond hope that it would take him to the bus stop. To where the void held those he loved.

Mel hunched over behind a dumpster that would’ve made a fine home for he and Andy and Hope. They could use cardboard and build off it, stitching pieces of tent into it to add color, and maybe finding a wire spool for a table like they had at the camp, only smaller. Andy would grow up and move to a dumpster down the street, and they would get together for holidays and birthdays and marriages, and Mel would paint a portal in the dumpster wall going directly to Andy’s dumpster, in case of emergencies.

The void’s groomsmen were after him, their sirens even louder than the siren the void put in the art store. They were corporeal; they had white and black cars, because the void robbed the universe of color.

Mel spent a time behind the dumpster that couldn’t be measured with clocks, not even the atomic clocks that they used to keep the time of the atom bombs they launched when they didn’t think people could see it. Mel could see it. He could see everything; so many things he needed a bigger mind to hold it all. He needed to paint a portal to deeper folds in his mind… maybe he needed to have it tattooed on the side of his head? He wondered who would do that. It would be an honor for them. He envisioned a tattoo artist creating the portal and marveling, as it would be the most important moment in their lives. In fact, it would be the most important moment in the history of the universe.

Mel got up and grabbed his canvas and his toolkit and started walking down the road. The void’s groomsmen hadn’t cried from their black-and-white cars for enough moments to give Mel passage. Only he didn’t know where to go. He walked until he saw a street sign.

“Butler”

“But-l-ER.” But-, butane, a flame? ER, a med? Must be a hospital. L? Is that the direction? Did he need to illuminate the hospital to heal the sick against the void? And if the void is there, aren’t Andy and Hope there? He had to go to the hospital. He had to follow the blue ‘H’ signs. But he had something to do first.

Mel walked until he found an abandoned building. It looked like a garage, which would work because he didn’t need garages, because he was incorporeal. He could use the garage, or whatever he would transform it into. He found it much easier to get into than the art store; no sirens, no warding, no void. It was dark and filled with soot and grime, which gave it earth and earth gave it standing in the universe. It would work for any and every purpose Mel could dream into being.

He would use what destiny had endowed him with to create the ultimate portal; one that would save his own son.

***

The hot air was a malevolent presence, guarding the tomb in which Mel had sealed himself. He was starving but he couldn’t eat, thirsty in a desert and alone in exile. His greatest work was propped up on a shelf that survived whatever conflagration had rendered the garage uninhabitable. It wasn’t an easel, but had he a need for one, one would’ve crossed his path in the armory he raided.

He stared at the canvas in between swipes of his face. His son, imprisoned in jagged strokes and globules of oil that wouldn’t mix or spread the way it did when he was up hour after hour, on the ready to walk in to he and Debra’s makeshift nursery to attend to his son’s malaise. Now his son was trapped in hell with the woman providence set in Mel’s path, and his hands were bound by incompetence when only they could free the iron locks of his love’s damnation.

He walked over to the canvas and held it in both hands. Andy’s face, his innocence, his joy and merriment were trapped in colors and textures that Mel knew intimately yet couldn’t call up to stand against the turbulence of thought that came with his terrifying new omniscience. It couldn’t be Andy, and the dove surrounding the monster that formed in Andy’s place couldn’t be Hope. It couldn’t even be a dove, just a vulture waiting to jump out of the portal when Mel slept, to pick at the ghost trying to escape.

Mel cried out and threw the unfinished painting across the room, quaking in syncopation to the frequency it made as it bounced off the wall. He sunk down to his knees and buried his head in his hands, buried his tears in his skin, that he might soak them up and cry them fresh.

He abandoned Andy to the wild. He failed as a father. He didn’t deserve to have this power, and the power knew it. It was leaking out through his every creative motion and formed clumps and strokes unrecognizable to all but the damned. And he was now damned, so why didn’t it make sense to him? He started to cry again, a lone speck in a dark, vast, indifferent, and uncaring universe, in a structure of reality that was even more vast and indifferent. He felt the weight of this infinitesimal doom and it pushed him to the ground. He was hungry. He was thirsty. His eyes had not tasted rest in three days, and he saw teal and purple waves of aura in the shadows.

He managed to crawl over to the painting, no small feat in an oily concrete floor spackled in nails, screws, and twisted shards of shaved metal. But he made it and maybe he was bleeding, and maybe that was the price he needed to pay the void to let his son see the sun again. To let Hope ascend to the sky to be her namesake and shower down on the city of Angels. For her to be an angel and come to lift him out of a burnt-out building and make his divine work whole again.

Mel wasn’t coherent when a figure climbed in through the window he had smashed to get in. He was numb to the touch of a palm on his shoulder, and cold to the feel of a pulse in a hand that clasped his.

“Melville, Jesus, are you okay?” She said.

“You’re dead, you can’t be here. The void has you.” Mel said. “You’re here to trick me.”

“I am as real as you are,” Hope said. “We’ve been looking for you for three whole days. You just ran off after you got arrested.” Hope lifted Mel up into her arms and cradled his, rubbing the hair from across his forehead.

“Andy’s outside, muffin. I figured one of us shouldn’t be guilty of B&E.”

Muffin. Only Hope called him that, and only out of love, and the void could imitate her but not her love and was this her?

“Hope? Where are you?”

Hope was choked as she spoke. “I’m here, muffin. I’m here with you. You ran off. We’re in a garage and you ran off and there’s something wrong with you, Melville. You need help.”

So there it was. She was there to get him help ascending to the dimension that she existed in, to where she had rescued his son and he was now in a seat of immortality. She was of heaven and Andy was of heaven, and he would be there as soon as he got help. But for one thing.

“Was dying hard?” Mel asked.

“Melville, nobody died,” She rubbed his head. “You’re not going to die. Your mind is sick. We’re going to get you to the hospital, and they’re going to get you back to normal and on your meds. I’ll visit you every day, I promise. I’ll make sure Andy’s okay too.”

“Andy’s okay,” Mel said. “He’s ascended into heaven. He is the Son, and someday I will be the Father and you will be the Holy Spirit, because you’re Hope, and your name is who you really are.”

Mel could hear Hope sob.

“Please don’t be gone,” she said through her sobs. “I need you, please don’t be too far away to come back.” She rocked Mel back and forth, as he let words flow that spoke of deep origins and profound secrets and Hope sat there and listened to his madness and tried repeatedly to bring him back to the sooty garage on Butler Avenue. She had begun to voice her worry about Andy outside when the crunch of glass announced to her that Andy was inside.

“Dad!”

“Andy, he’s gonna’ be okay. He’s just sick. But we found him and he’s going to be okay.”

Andy ran over to Mel. Mel looked him in the eye and started to proclaim him to be divine. Andy started to cry, and Hope got up and walked him toward the window.

“What do I do?” Andy said, and ultimately there wasn’t anything he could do to fix his dad, because she didn’t know if he could be fixed.

“Help me bring your father outside,” she said. “We can’t have him trespassing when the ambulance gets here.”

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