#//Doctor who jumpscares you around the corner and sends you to hospital

[desertomb]

Moonlit Scents...

[kylo-wrecked]

His mind is a flat black mirror casting back the silence in a well’s depth—a silence he can see but not savor, a silence that dampens and weighs down the bones. 

This is his brain on quetiapine. These are his veins and esophagus flushed with saline. This is starched linen thrown over a dead CRT. These are flat sheets wrapped and fish-tailed around safety mirrors drilled into spalling green cornices. Surface body bags. Nuts, bolts, and feet hospital cornered. 

This is Ben Solo, a name. Hollow and alone. Tag it around his big toe. 

There’s a Greek word for this hollow, synonymous with vagabond, obscure, deaf, mute, blunted, and noiseless. A word that remarks upon so much, the letters taste like a sentence in absentia. After all, the word was echoed at him in the Boiler Room by a brief knifing of a Cretan transfemme, who told Ben he was empty. 

Maybe he should have asked her what to do when people become mirrors. Face them, all rays and noise? Invent and invert, turn them into corpses and ants? Take their names like a coin from behind an ear. 

Nurse Ant becomes Nurse Racket when she starts talking, and only Nurse Glassman after the good doctor cashes in his nine minutes—eight on Ben, one pondering the ghost CRT—and because Rachel uses names like black market currency. Buys a fresher body for the shutterbugs to swarm, a better room for the boss, and wouldn’t Nurse Glassman look nice with a rose-red lip? Like a prettier Ethel Mertz? So, tickled, Nurse Glassman returns with armfuls of white cloth, bedcovers to waste on Ben’s ‘theatrics’ and ‘the dramatics.’ 

The oaks outside tremble but there’s nobody to see them. 

“Gawd.” Rachel’s bob slashes her upper shoulders. She aims her small, sharp nose and microbladed brows at the hanging light fixtures, crushes her nape and Marc Jacobs collar back to keep her mascara from running. She says, “Gawd, I should’ve listened to Nan.” 

Warding streaks off her Glossier cheekbones, she says, “I can’t push back Detroit. You can’t make Detroit happen while this is happening.”

Blinking tears back over her eyelines is a talent she picked up at Stonybrook. 

“This is happening, Ben. I’m missing my baby sister’s ceremony f’this. Gawd.” 

‘This’ is code for the last hour and a half. ‘This’ is code for a long broken promise. ‘This’ is code for annihilation. 

She pushes the chair back, brisk as her bob, with an expression as tart as the orange slices tipping her French gel manicure, and the legs scream on the scratched wood vinyl. Rachel rises. Pressing her purse to her chest, she makes lemons at a ghost mirror, then Ben. 

“I’m not sitting shiva f’you.” 

The weak, flickering neon in Ben’s smile flashes, ‘No Service, Just Severance.’  

And Rachel knows that is a golden promise she could break her teeth on. And the wind spins leaves into the gutters, where they become damp, saturated irrelevance like just about everything else. 

— 

In the time it takes three angles to meet and loop a knot, Rachel makes a million phone calls. She archives Signal and sends WhatsApp messages until her fingers lose joints. She reroutes fifty thousand emails by blessed automation. Time finds Rachel with raccoon eyes anyway, hives boiling up her Liberace-style shirtfront, pressing herself against the heavy green door as if trying to keep the lid on a haywire rice cooker. When she turns, she’s jumpscared by a polyester tie that greets her at about eye level. 

Cripes. Two stiletto clicks clockwise, and she agnizes the sensitive eyes—to the sun—color of bleach inlaid in a sett and rough-hew jaw, growing out of the neck it’s strung around. Fluffing her caramel layers back into shape, Rachel rewets Chanel-flavored lipgloss and simpers. 

Forget the black hand making a fist. 

“Y’re fucking my salary,” Rachel tells the tie. 

Forget the ambling and humming ‘Nurse Racket,’ Steven Grant’s glum ‘varsity skinhead,’ and Rachel’s ‘subway token thoughts’ about how Ben has nasty little nicknames for just about anything, how she misses Henry Street and should have gone to Fordham Law. 

“Pawse!” she chirps. Slipping Holly Golightly’s sunglasses over mascara bruises, she snaps a quick, covert pic of the navy suit jacket clenching tense shoulders, the dour bald head in the background. Call it insurance. Sleeves the phone; echoes.

“I got one better: You stchupped my salary—wearing that tie. What I’ll tell Miss Ariana Huffington either you Hollyweirds draw out my day.” Tap-taps the face of the Piaget clasped around an aching wrist. “I gotta make the last ten minutes of my baby sister’s graduation.”

Click-clacks down the desolate hallway, stabbing the elevator button with a French tip until it dings. 

“She’s starting at LIU in the fawl! Like a normal person.” 

Normal until the nursing program roiled and spat Rachel’s baby sister into a hospital resort, and the best part of her day, after wiping some rich schmuck’s ass, would be the compliment she receives from a woman who needs bedsheets for mirrors. 

The elevator doors wheeze, and at that moment, Rachel and Soldier exchange a glance in which lives the silent acknowledgment that they were born in this city, in the mythology of making it here, to make it anywhere, and won’t be laid to rest in temples, buried with riches, immortalized in street signs and sun-faded smiles on diner walls. Destined for a world’a dead leaves. Gutters. 

— 

His mind is a flat black mirror, like a dummy scrivening device. 

“Kophos,” Ben croaks, his vision swirling with sun motes, heat filtering through split blinds, oak stars blearing in his peripheral vision.

Tree-rich green—it reduces cortisol. All those stress hormones, Rachel says, wresting the blinds. Rachel, he thinks. The whole fucking level’s green. 

After Rachel leaves, the mirror paint starts cracking, and his mind’s flaking obsidian. 

“Kophos.” 

Ben says the word again; doesn’t know why; perhaps one last hold out for magic. It’s a corvid cry, evoking crows that have learned how to become car horns, or dogs, or women, hanging on telephone wires. A mimic. An echo. Black mirror showing blunted, noiseless futures on a cracked pane. There’s a long pause between the closed door and Rachel’s voice, and Ben discerns footsteps, slow and measured, and he feels criminally hungry. Something he craves is imminent, looming—something he wants and doesn’t want, on the other side of that door now. 

There’s no magic word for when the door opens again. Nothing Ben can do but watch it open with a semi-craned throat, washed-out profile half-submerged in sterile cotton, and nose bent against stuffing. Eyelids heavy as wet wool drooping over blown marbled pupils. Lungs full of water, stomach a dark well, bottomless as empty. 

Nurse Racket drops a coin in him: he has another visitor. Now, isn’t that nice? To him, she says, he’ll feel better in no time now, part of the world again. To the visitor, she offers simplicity, saying only, go on in, hon. Like Ben doesn’t know who she’s racketing, like he should be surprised and overjoyed. 

Maybe he is surprised, in a way. Surprised by the tricks people play on themselves, surprised by his reduced authority. Without Rachel here to gas things up, he’s a bad liver with a one-year warranty. Surprised by the taste and color of his fear—surprised at how fear crawls up from the well of himself, spidery and white as a moon. Conspicuously bright. 

If Ben called the crow word three times, he could have disappeared, folded in on himself like a black hole. But even if there were magic words, they were too late. He typed sorry; he typed never mind. 

Ben twists helplessly, rolling a grafted lump of shoulder on its side, neck and head following in kind, the word no an alarm ringing in his skull. The IV is gone, yet he remains tethered, amp-eaten muscles in massive arms splayed in impossible directions, shipwrecked. Where’s the rest of his body. If he can’t feel it, can it be seen?  

He groans, pleas inaudible. 

No, please—not like this. Not Steven’s cologne mixed with an indeterminate cold sweat trespassing inches. Triune sense of proximity. Outline of a dark suit that could belong to any of them. Weight of three shadows over the bed. Not like this. 

“Can’t be good for you,” he hacks. Tang of blood or plain regret. “Place like this.”

Is that his voice? That brittle, red plexi you could punch through with a sheet-wrapped fist? Ben’s neck snakes away toward slatted daylight and the oak branches. It hurts too much to laugh; he wants to, just—he’s got a scooped-out stomach. Squeezes his eyes shut. 

“You…” 

Shouldn’t have come. 

Ben still has a heart, and it’s beating him.

@silverjetsystm

isn’t. Pathological. Grant almost laughs through canine poking thumbprint, text burnt on the insides of his eyes.

OUD sits at the bottom of their alphabet soup recipe. Not a top shelf ingredient like DID. Nor does it sit with the bargain bin spices like GAD and MDD.

[Solo is typing...]

Scars fade with oils and massages. With quitting it. Neither Grant nor Lockley are the ones who jumped them over. Steel spined Grant carved a line and they’ve stuck to it since February 2022, far too late to heal the scars in the family. That matters.

In these handful of seconds, ticking to a minute, minutes, he understands Spector. The cravings. Next window is marked Sterman.

Do you have space for an emergency afternoon appointment? – SG

Beginnings, their own beginnings, have no place in SMS. DOB July 20, 1984. Plus or minus months, years. Illinois, Missouri, New York. Too many doctors, too many misdiagnoses tossed like a toddler tossing spaghetti on the wall. They figured it out eventually. Who needs all these pills when the real issue can be talked through? Doesn’t matter at this very second. Doesn’t matter unless the right person asks at the right time.

Solo finishes typing. Burst of laughter. nevermind; sorry.

[631-XXX-XXXX] I can’t do this anymore. [773-XXX-XXXX] What’s the point of you if you can't do this?

Grant can rationalize it. Weigh it against prior experience. The body hunches, gripping the phone, brown eyes distant. Grand Seiko 4522-8000 continues to tick on their arm.

This glass office isn’t a 1 to one of any office in the front. Close by in the second bedroom, in a better world, would have been set up for a child. Nor is it the one Soldier drives him to. Here, it’s when the sunlight glints off skyscrapers’ scales. Framed movie posters rotate on mood.

A flurry of papers stacked up neatly on the inbox tray since last time he was here. Sighing, he skimmed through each, chair wheels silent against glass to gray file cabinets. Quarterly statements, dailies, invoices, bills are filed in two different cabinets – business versus personal. Latest text records, the HEX code of Ben’s eyes join a jumble of Motown and Pier numbers in a Vantablack folder labeled ‘Solo’ until a lone envelope sits on the heavy wooden desk.

That’s been there for years.

Pulse Hi-Beat fast, he deliberately doesn’t look at the posters on the wall for fear of what it would reveal, crossing gray carpet to the door, opening corpo America office door to a synagogue’s first floor meeting room frozen in a 90s kid’s eye who doesn’t see the natural wear and tear of the blush walls, the scuffed wood floor. Polished wooden beams gleam on the ceiling. A brass chandelier modernized electric candles hangs from a Star of David mosaic.

Spector blows smoke out a charming 1925 window. His breath is also clouds. Promise written all over his face, he continues to ash a 7 year streak of cold turkey, he doesn’t acknowledge Grant taking a seat in an ergonomic office chair.

Lockley’s boots drown out the Hi-Beat for blessed seconds. Suitably grim, he kicks the door shut in front of the pigeon’s face. “Mishpocheh only,” he mutters, waving a hand, flopping in a diner chair to Grant’s right. “Time for chazara. Make it quick. I’m--” gesturing between Spector and Grant with his left hand, sucking his teeth. “-- workin’ overtime.”

The mercenary is white phosphorus capable of burning through his own bones. The financier counters. What does responsible support mean to them in this stage of recovery. Exchange of personal remarks. Who’s inner arm crooks are broken out. Who’s nails are chewed to the quick. Rocking chair creaks. Spector flinches.

The cabbie listens, mediates. Wets careful lips.

“Think he got anyone else who’ll show up?”

Gray matter oatmeal congeals to the green bowl on the end table. “Hrnn.” Phone falls out of death grip hand. Body stands with some effort, rolling his neck, his shoulders. Steven leaves the phone where it lands, finishing the getting ready process late. Dresses in summer weight navy and a hideous DSW tie. Future-proofs Spector.

Then, he returns to the phone.

[Boss] Need a pickup ASAP. If I don’t respond, come up. We’re going to Lenox Hill. - SG [Boss] I need you to come in with me. – SG [Soldier] 👍

No new messages. Implications abound. Still.

[Grant] On our way. - SG

By the time Soldier pulls up, Grant’s thumb and pointer fingers are black ink. The stationary is clean despite hastily written words. Khonshu continues to observe even after the front door is shut and the lock engages.

@kylo-wrecked