Rob Thurman - Blackout

“Aramaic.” I sat down on the one small plastic chair provided for those who wanted to wait. Yawning, I finished the thought. “Ishiah wrote it for me. Figured it was the one language you probably didn’t know.” And wouldn’t be able to read until he was ready to hear it and I was ready to tell it.

“There are many dialects incorporated through other languages, regions, time periods… .”

I dozed off, and I couldn’t blame the alcohol. Faced with death by boredom, my brain took the only other way out—unconsciousness. When I woke up, it was morning and I was in my bedroom at home. I wasn’t in bed, though, and my knife-practicing wall no longer said Screw you .

It said something worse.

Something that was getting damn familiar.

AbominationAbominationAbominationAbomination-AbominationAbominationAbomination.

I wobbled for a second as I woke up or realized I was awake. It wasn’t that easy to tell the difference between the two. I was in bare feet, sweatpants, and a T-shirt. It was cold. We needed to get that window fixed. I hated the cold worse than I hated Niko’s tofu. The wall in front of me, the knife wall, was covered with that scarlet word, from as far up as I could reach down to the floor. My hand was cramping and I lifted it up to see the pen I was holding. The red was ink, not blood; that was something.

“You’ve been at it for three hours. I gave up trying to wake you up after the first hour. This, naturally, means you will never drink again.”

Sleepwriting; it was better than sleepwalking, I guessed. I dropped the pen as I turned. Niko was lying on my bed, which was neatly made with fresh sheets and a blanket—a pillow too. Fancy schmancy. “How’d we get home?”

“Cab. You were upright, technically, but not especially coherent. You went to sleep on the sidewalk while I unlocked the door and then woke up, only to pass out again here on your floor, which, lucky for you, was as always padded with your dirty clothes. I thought it might be a good idea for one of us to be conscious in case the spiders returned. I made your bed and have been here since.” He sat up, indicating the gauze wrapped around his biceps. It showed about half an inch, the rest covered by his own T-shirt sleeve. Removing the tape and bandage and pulling up that sleeve, he revealed a black and red band similar to the one I had around my arm but written in a different language. “All of this following getting a tattoo I did not want or need because you insisted it was in something called The Good Brother Handbook .”

“Yeah?” I studied it with interest. “What’s it say?”

His eyes narrowed and there wasn’t a trace of the dry humor I’d seen once or twice when he wasn’t forcing himself to live a lie. “Don’t get my brand-new sheets there wedged up between your ninja-ass cheeks,” I said, providing all the humor and then some. “I remember what it says. Maybe I’ll tell you on Christmas. Don’t go researching ancient Aramaic and spoil the surprise trying to read it yourself.” I did remember too, and I didn’t have a hangover. For someone who didn’t drink often, I was still expert at it. A natural talent for fighting off toxins, the fun kind and the spider kind, that was me.

Yesssss. Never weak.

I moved back to my original position, facing the wall. No one was going to need any help reading that. Covering the entire thing was that one word. Abomination . My subconscious had a thing for that word when it came to monsters, a real obsession. First, it whispered it in my head and now it spelled it out in reality, covering every inch, every single inch.

Except …

Precisely in the middle of the wall were six different words in letters so much smaller than the others that they were barely noticeable. AbominationAbomination-Where are your brothers and sisters? Give them to me AbominationAbomination.Abomination. “I gotta say”—I scanned the entire wall—”I’m an industrious worker in my sleep.” Abomination , I ignored. My subconscious didn’t like monsters—or part of it didn’t; that was perfectly clear and had been from day one. And from day one when I thought monsters, I’d also thought automatically abomination. But the other thing written on the wall …

Where are they? Your brothers and sisters? Give them to me.

Selfish.

Where?

Where?

Where?

It was what she’d wanted in the park. That was what she’d said after demanding I give them to her. My brothers and sisters, and as far as I knew, I had only the one. Ammut, the bitch, making demands I couldn’t meet because I didn’t understand. I couldn’t wait to catch up with her. Goodfellow better have his socialite/cougar trap all but ready.

Wait. When they’d brought me back from South Carolina, that had been scratched in the concrete in front of our place. Where are your brothers and sisters? She’d always wanted that from me, whatever that was, from day one.

I reminded Niko of what was carved out front and said, “Now we know for sure what the ‘them’ is in the ‘give them to me’ love note she left yesterday. You’re positive we don’t have any other brothers or a sister hanging around? Maybe Mommy Dearest sold one in a Walmart parking lot for booze?” I groaned as I massaged my hand and sat down next to Niko on the bed, practically bouncing off the snug, hospital-corner-tight army blanket. “You going to tell me what happened in the park now? Before you sent me on my vacation down South? I told you what I remember. Why don’t you tell me?”

He gave up on that particular deceit—liar, liar, pants on fire—and this time told the truth. “I don’t know.” What came after that sounded true too, but uneasy as if he didn’t know, but he’d started guessing and his guessing would be good. He was too smart for it not to be. He had his suspicions, but he wasn’t sharing them—a different type of deceit, but deceit all the same. “I don’t know what Ammut wants or what that means.” He rolled off the bed and stood abruptly, then gave me his back with the next words. “I’m the only brother you have.” I wonder if he knew that sounded more like a question than a fact. “And she has no reason to want me. I won’t taste any better than any other human.”

I didn’t call him on it. Niko was so far over the edge in this mess that he was going to have to ride it all the way out. The lying and half-truths were nothing compared to what else he’d done, something completely outside his moral code.

I’d seen that moral code this week or so. He’d walk back three blocks to give back change to someone who hadn’t charged him enough for a PowerBar. He was loyal to his friends, devoted to me, possibly pathologically so, loved a vampire—seeing past the outer monster to the core of the true woman beneath, and had given up vamp nookie to babysit me until the amnesia passed. He’d raised me from birth—what person did that if they weren’t functional parents? Not even brothers did that, but this one had. The guy had honor in a way that almost eclipsed the word itself.

What he was doing now, not only lying, but doing — he’d be punishing himself so thoroughly on the inside that I didn’t need to add to it.

One time had been enough for me to figure it out—one time and a spider in a box. New toothpaste plus memory relapse. That and the constant harping on my dental hygiene. Brush your teeth, brush your teeth. He was worse than any dentist. I didn’t have to be a genius to know where he was putting the Nepenthe venom. It was only enough to keep me from recovering any further memories. Keeping the status quo, thanks to the box o’ spider he’d FedExed to Robin—one of the few memories of that day I’d hung on to.