Bone Pattern

Fisher's Story- September 6, 2014

Back again, to my laptop and my blog.  Back after uneasy sleep and unquiet dreams.  I will finish the story of what happened yesterday.  I will tell you what Lydia told me.

We stood in the glimmering light of candles surrounding the sleeping form of her brother.

"Fisher was the one who wanted this, who wanted the deep.  I would have been happy enough with my books and a job and a quiet apartment in the evening.  Not my brother.  He left on long walks at the small hours of the morning.  Attended underground art events. Searched endlessly through thrift stores and junk shops.  He started avoiding my gaze, refusing to go with me to Barnes and Noble, and turning down gifts that were insufficiently old.  So I started to follow him.  I joined him on his walks at dawn and dusk.  Rose in the middle of the night to go see how the moonlight reflected off the bricks of a particular crumbling building. But I was always trailing  behind, as he ran on ahead.  Even as I tried to follow, to join him where he went, I could only glimps his shadow.

You need to understand, Fisher was brilliant as well as beautiful.  Dropped into our quiet family he could not be satisfied.

Nights began to pass in which he did not return home.  When he did come back, it was with charcoal blackening his fingertips, with ash in his hair.  He spent hours in the shower, and emerged shivering.

One night, I woke up and he was standing over me.  Dripping from the shower. He said he had to show me something.

He let his towel slip lower around his waist.  It was smaller then, the hole.  A coin sized tunnel into him, just above his navel.  

'I think I made a mistake,' he told me.

That night we tried everything to heal the hole in his center.  Rubbing alcohol hurt him, stung the edges of the wound.  Worse, the heat that burned him open flared up enough to set it on fire.  It was a terrible few seconds before I smothered it with a towel.  Butterfly bandages only increased his pain until he ripped them off.  They did not close the wound.  Days passed and it grew.

One day he realized he could put his whole hand into himself and feel nothing within.  Only hot stirring of air.

Not long after that, he began to sleep more and more.  Our family took him to doctors who diagnosed him with chronic fatigue syndrome, with anemia.  With all sorts of things.  Not one of them even acknowledged the hole in his belly.  He tried to point it out and they sent him to a psychologist.

The next night he took my hand and forced it into the hole.  There was a smoldering heat at the edges, but nothing but empty space within.  I could find no edges.  A universe seemed to unfurl within my brother's slender body.  I spread my fingers wide, probing further in.  I only stopped when the heat at his skin threatened to scorch my shoulder.  He looked down at me and I looked up at him.  And then I felt something brush my fingers.

Soon after that, he died.  In the shallow world he died.  And was meant to be buried.  I saw the truth, though.  Saw his eyes moving beneath his lids.  So I brought him here.  Well, first I took him to the Weaver.  She made him that shroud.  Helped me find this place, and make it liveable.

He isn't dead here. But he does not live, either.  Maybe one day he will wake up.

I don't know everything that he did.  I know he wanted to become more than he was.  He was everything to me, but it wasn't enough.  He wanted the deep, wanted to become it, or control it.  He wanted its dust to permeate his pores and leave him transformed.  I guess he got what he wanted, in a way.

Whatever he did, he did in that room beneath the temple.  He burrowed down beneath the city to find a darkness sufficient to take within himself.  A place untainted by light.   Something he meant to sustain him against the impure penetrations of sunlight.  The darkness and the deep burned its way into him.  And now he is little more than a vessel for it.   He took something into himself, and now it dreams within him.  

I can only wait for him to wake.  For the thing within him to wake.  Either one."

That is the story that Lydia told me.  Beneath the streets of Denver, Fisher found a darkness untainted and he took it into himself.  Below that trapdoor.  

I want to see that place.  And I want to never have heard of that place.  Both at once.

Before I left, I stared into the darkness at Fisher's core.  I tried to make out movement within.  I saw nothing.  I saw enough.

Eventually, Wayland brought me home.  Back into this shallow place.

But I know Fisher is there, sleeping.  

I know there is still something waiting beneath the street.

I just don't know what to do about it.