Kent Kelly - The Cage

I may be weak, daddy. I may have always disappointed you after you lost Patrice. But I am Sophie. I’m alive.

She tried to rise up off her knees, and failed again.

Alive.

She grieved for Tom, but the horrible guilt welling in her heart felt like its own hollow of all-consuming nothingness, a dead star of gravity where her sorrow and love should be. The enormity of what she should be feeling, the honor she should be giving that great and undying love, engulfed what little she could give and made a mockery of its frailty. She was hollowed, defiled. Shamed.

So ashamed, she thought. So unworthy. I lived, and all the others? All the good people, all the deserving ones, Tom and Jake and all the rest, they all died. In flame, in horror. Souls for the White Fire, ashes for the Archangel.

She moved her head back under the water, ran her fingers through her hair. And what, she wondered, was she truly guilty of for being there? Survival? Life itself? She did not know. She knew only that she should feel more, that the numbness spreading through her mind was threatening to destroy her.

Another minute below the water, another. Time was nothing there and neither day nor night could reign where only the false lights glowed against the shelves and concrete slabs, where the dust powdered down and the servo-motors whirred.

So many. Ashes, all.

A strange sound crept out from behind her, where her back had shifted and smeared the waters upon the wall. She slipped and the pain went straight up into her shoulder.

Get up, hon. Now. I’m counting to ten. Don’t make me shut off that water.

A wild thought flicked into her mind, that if she failed to rise again this time, her father would be standing there with the belt. From death, from the finality of the real. He would rise and she would see that clenched and solid hand against the glass, the hand that —

No.

She had the strength, then. She had to. The pain no longer mattered. It was simply something that was a part of her now, something to be sacred and ignored, like her beating heart, like seeing, like breathing. She rose, teeth clenched, refusing to cry out again. The falling waters clicked off as she pressed the aluminum plate beneath the spigot. The glass door tilted open, seemingly of its own accord.

There’s someone out there.

“Don’t be a fool,” she whispered. She had not yet decided if talking to herself was the key to her salvation, or merely another path toward her annihilation.

There’s no one. No one.

She left the shower, walked around the hanging light and its strobe of lazy shadows still twirling back and forth. Slowly. And what did ‘slowly’ mean? What could be the nature, then, of unrelenting time in a world of one?

In the great room she found a clean blanket beneath the work table. She lifted it, shook it out like a great white flower upon the air, and wrapped it around her shoulders. She stood there oblivious to all but the most primal sensations of her surroundings, shallow breathing, dripping water, sparks dancing somewhere in a blown-out socket. The smell of ozone, the coppery taste of her own blood where she had bitten into her tongue.

All of this, all of this under my control. What am I supposed to do? How can I do this all alone?

Perhaps, she thought with a disconcerting idleness, she would press her way through the vinyl seal into the back rooms, devolving, moist and shriveled and disintegrating, pushing through the leaves of plastic and so crawling back into the womb, Failure, you’re nothing if you are alone, nothing, find the gun locker there and select the easiest gun barrel to push into her mouth.

And why not?

She would die for Tom, if she could keep herself from thinking long enough to pull the trigger. Yet even as she thought this, a greater clarity washed through her, purifying her grief with the frost of its fading purity and leaving only a solemn resonance in her mind:

He is dead.

There is nothing left of me.

Nothing left of the person

I was this morning.

Mother, bride, anthropologist.

No more.

Like a spider, I need

to walk out of my own skin

and be reborn.

I need to be skinless,

fragile,

to be new again.

But without Tom, without anyone, what did any of this matter, after all? The entirety of Sophie, the past-self who had been fractured yet threaded together and nearly made whole purely through the joy of Lacie’s love for her—

(You can’t survive this all alone, you were and now you are not, don’t remember)

—The strong and bitter woman who could grieve, who could mourn and feel in secret, had been torn into tatters, winged remnants fused into the lost cinders of a world that was returning now to ashes, a once-world that lived no longer and was burning, burning.

For the unsettling arc of several seconds, seconds which seemed to stretch into unbreakable filaments of eternity, Sophie believed she understood where her old self had died: the shower. She had left herself there to rot, behind. She had walked out of her skin and the door had closed itself. Or had she done that?

There is someone else in here, someone else in here

Someone

Else

Daddy, no —

Yes. There was someone else inside the shelter, and it was Sophie. Lost Sophie, dead Sophie. She had walked outside of herself, leaving her body far behind. Of course.

The light. The tunnel.

Honey, Lacie, wait for me!

I’m coming

I’m coming

ingggg

She only needed to open the shower door and see.

She could cross the great room once again, open the shower, and see her own wasted corpse there staring back at her, gaping with a shock-wide mouth of horror and wild black eyes staring with sightless revelation into forever, into the mind of God. If she could just cross this room, Yes, I understand now, I died and this is Hell, let me see myself so I can understand —

(Fluorescent lights flickering in their cages, like souls, like the negative-imaged eyes of the blackened and burning Archangel himself, O Death, O clarion)

— The room seemed to elongate like a series of endless nightmares made of door and table and shower stall and spinning light, And in the shower I am dead, I am dead in there, daddy I’m coming out now don’t look at me I’m sorry I used all the hot water, and the room stretched further until it was an endless hall of broken aluminum shelves and wrecked work tables and morgue freezers, she needed to open the shower, she needed to see her own corpse dead and screaming there in the corner with the water dripping down its breasts and filling up its mouth, she needed to drink that water and touch her own body’s tongue, Yes, she needed to drink and touch that tongue with her own, so that she could be reborn…

What is happening to me?

She froze in place on her way to the shower.

Stop this, she thought. Stop it. There’s no one else in here. No one. Then: You’re going insane.

Another step, tilting her head to try to discern if there was a huddled body there behind the still-dripping waters, the dead droplets that were misting down inside the shower. Then, the girl-voice, the Sophie of old was singing within:

Tom, Tommy. Oh, Tom. Lovely Tom. He died for us. He died to save us, Sophie, ready to be killed. Knowing. Knowing with all his heart, that we would go and find her, oh our Lacie, we would find her or die in the trying.