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Treason
by Nicola
Rating: PG
Spoilers: #2.22, 'The Telling'
"Sydney . . . ?" Agony sucked the plea from my chest between laboured breaths.
"No."
The next question formed indistinctly in my mind, as I blinked past splinters of darkness. I couldn't see his face, but I felt sure if I had been able to, it would have been glowing angelically.
Crazy. The stupid ecstasy of pain.
He came there looking for you, of course. He came looking for you, and found me instead. As a journalist, I probably would have characterized that as irony: quirky fragments bound up in sarcasm; the pepper of a good story. In these new, broken days, I tend to call it fate.
I took a long time to heal. After Taipei, I was a walking bruise; like hamburger meat pummelled and pounded and finally tossed out with the trash. But I healed quickly; bruises faded, skin shed; emergency root canal performed at the hands of a no less sadistic dentist in LA. The slit in my abdomen made by Francie—not Francie never Francie—was so much less ostentatious; the scar I bear now is crude and paltry, barely noticeable to the naked eye.
But I almost died. There, on the bathroom floor, in his arms. Clean white sheets sheared into makeshift bandages; fingers frantic as they tied me up.
I woke up in hospital a week later, and you were missing and the world didn't seen to turn properly anymore. Weeks bled painfully into months, and I was still bruised inside.
I guess it's time for the excuses. How could we? How could I? There are no real excuses I can give; only clichés. I suppose clichés become clichéd for a reason. I always hoped the "best friends make the best lovers" cliché might someday apply to us; it seems whoever might be Up There has some sense of humour in dealing me the "best friend's boyfriend" cliché instead.
More clichés: it was a dark and stormy night when our fates become inexplicably entwined. Actually, it wasn't. It was a blandly fine day, entirely unremarkable, except for his presence. The sun was shining: blue skies are so continual in LA that it's easy to forget how beautiful sunshine can be. It's the first day I can remember clearly after you were gone. I was out walking in the hospital's grounds, when suddenly—inexplicably—he was there: tall and stoical . . . so much like you, really.
It was about 4 months after you disappeared. I should be more specific: it was 4 months and 5 days before I sold you out.
People were calling all the time for me then; my parents, Amy, friends I'd all but lost touch with (we really knitted ourselves into a tight group, you, me and Francie, didn't we?). They all wanted to know how I was feeling.
The short answer is: shell-shocked and devastated. The long answer I still can't put into words: I only remember seeing something of it flash in his eyes that day: infinite sadness lit with sunshine.
I'm not being truthful, even now. It wasn't sudden, clock-stopping love. It was a slow, heady realization which seeped further inside of me with every hospital visit; every glance and touch and smile that made he feel he knew.
7 months, and I was pronounced better. Fighting fit and healed everywhere but where it mattered. I was free to go . . . with absolutely nowhere to go.
With Francie—not Francie never Francie—deceased, and you presumed dead, the apartment was cleared and sold on. My name was never on the lease; I guess, technically, I was never even there.
Moving back into my parents' blandly comfortable suburban split-level would have felt like too much of a regression. Amy was living with a new boyfriend; a blue-haired artist who insisted on calling me "friend" for no discernible reason. I had vaguely decided upon staying at a cheap motel while I got my shit together. It seemed suitably seedy and transient.
He showed up on the day I was due to leave.
It never seemed like he was visiting me, all those times he simply showed up. It was almost as if he was just passing by; in the neighbourhood. Even as he drove the 15 miles out of town to the hospital; rode the elevator to the eleventh floor — it all seemed coincidental.
Fancy seeing you here.
I must have been babbling — you know how I do that when I'm nervous. I told him all about my woeful, homeless situation. In that obliquely magnanimous tone he possesses, he told me he had an extra room; it was supposed to be a guest room, but he never used it, so why waste money on a motel? Somehow, by the time he left, it was settled. I would move in immediately.
It's not what you think.
We were more like strangers than lovers, or even roommates. Days would go by without my speaking to him. We were ghosts, gliding carefully past each other in our quiet deaths.
He still went to work every morning at 8:15; suit and tie, perfect frown. He worked late constantly, often clocking 100 hours a week. I, on the other hand, slept all hours of the day, rediscovering the sleeping patterns of my years as a student. I was still on paid leave; I guess the government felt bad about my gaping wound. I kept telling them I'd return to work . . . soon. (I knew I never would.) I sat up at night, reading crime novels and listening to him sleep.
One night I woke up at 11pm to find the apartment empty. Six hours I spent in silent, hammering panic, devastation rising around me with every minute that ticked by as he still did not return. I thought he was gone; shot in mundane cold blood, like Francie, or silently stolen away into nothing, like you. I had visions of a service at the church; his apartment being cleared and sold on — hollowed grief and another piece of my heart robbed.
He arrived home as the sky was lightening and turning the blackness into a shade of grey. I saw the look on his face, and I remembered.
One year. One year since.
He was crying, and I knew the tears were coming from somewhere unthinkably deep inside. The CIA had drawn the line at 3 months; that's when they'd stopped looking, and stamped missing-in-action in smudged red ink over your papers. The sight of him, newfound hopelessness spilling from old grief, and I knew that his line was a year.
I could barely breathe, let alone think. I couldn't not touch him. I put my arms around him, almost surprised to find solid warmth rather than mere ether.
I still can't find the words to explain how I felt then; the degrees of pain and sadness that fluctuated in my mind, a culmination of every second of the 365 days that you'd been gone. We tried to find them that night; we tried the excuses and the clichés. The only truth I found was the softness of his lips and the sense of clarity it brought.
We watched the sun rise on a new day. He did not go to work that day, or any day afterwards. We stayed at home, in what had strangely—inexplicably—become our home.
The year that followed was a quiet one—truly quiet, unlike the repressed internal clamour of the year before. We were still trying to figure out each other, and this fledgling thing we'd built on foundations of devastation. Figuring out the world as well — a world without you in it — would have been overwhelming.
I found a job at a socio-political new-age magazine, whose monthly print run was less than 1000. They couldn't pay much, but by the same token, they didn't care about my patchy work history.
I was walking home from work about a month ago (1 year, 10 months and 2 weeks since you disappeared; I still count the days — I want you to know that), when I stopped to look in an antiques store on the edge of town. Maybe antiques is pushing it; it was a junk shop. The ring glinted up at me from a box of rusty gold ornaments.
I didn't mean to buy it.
But I was out the door, a month's wages poorer, before the part of my brain that alerts me to my own idiocy kicked in. I carried it around for a week in my breast pocket — bouncing against my heart for seven more days without you. I was almost sure I would never give it to him.
He got a job in a bar. Just a part-time, casual thing — I think he's had too many ropes anchoring him down for too long. He says he hates it, but I see him smile more serving behind the bar than I ever did when he was serving his country.
On the seventh night, he arrived home at a little past 3am. He smiled and kissed me hard enough to know that he'd been drinking. He found the ring as he tugged playfully at my clothes, the shiny loop of my own tragic necessity spilling into his hands.
He says he'll never take it off. I know he's lying, but every time it glints (like sadness lit with sunshine), I can't help but smile — just like I can't help but love him.
I don't think I was really sure that I was in love with him until the call came — saying that you're alive and he doesn't belong to me anymore. Still more clichés; still more irony.
September 2003
Muse music: 'Treason' by Velvet Chain; 'This Time Imperfect' by AFI
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