I didnt want to be my Aston Martin.
I liked driving it. I liked the smell of it. I liked being able to get to where I wanted to be when I wanted to go. But my Father bought me that car two years ago. Its not mine, even if I did accept the gift.
I didnt want to be my Giorgio Armani aftershave.
I liked the manly, yet delicate musk it gave me. I liked the way the bottle could fit perfectly into my leather toiletries bag. I liked how women would kiss the nape of my neck and then Id taste the scented alcohol on their lips. But a scent is a scent. Pheromones. Nothing more, nothing tangible.
I didnt want to be my high-rise apartment.
It was my signature. My birthright. My family crest. Everyone knew me for my penthouse, and I knew everyone because of my penthouse. But it was bricks and mortar. Iron and steel from exploded stars, pieced together by men my Father paid but would never associate with in public.
Over the years, Id watched myself in the mirror slowly become a piece of furniture in my Fathers life. Still, unmoving, expected and obedient. I did what I did because it was my duty. I felt in so many ways that my entire existence was to fulfil his idea of what a sons life should be.
I didnt want to be my Fathers legacy.
So I stepped away from the mirror and left Edmund behind. And from there, I set out to be what Ive since become.
I decided that the black marble ring should sit on my wedding finger. Its one Id chosen from my somewhat emasculating collection of jewellery. I liked the way it blended in with the night, and had a strange bright sheen to the black coating, as if light shining out from the darkness.
A single raindrop fell from the overcast night sky and splashed like a fresh fruit on my left hand, trickling little streams of liquid down over the ring. I wiped the back of my hand on the front of my skinny-fit black jeans.
Its funny, I never realized how lean and trim my legs were until after Id spent ten minutes forcing them into the skin-tight denim. I wasnt sure if I was comfortable, but I looked good. I wore a tight fitting black woollen hooded jacket, and had painted each of my nails black.
My dark hair was slicked to my skull with gel and my right wrist was adorned with a silver manacle. Seth shook his head as he stood next to me in the rain, lined up to enter the club called Eternal.
I cant believe youre dressed like that. He said, arms folded over his chest as his eyes trailed over one of the garage band posters that littered the brick wall to our right.
I cant believe you didnt. I grinned at him. He was dressed like Seth. He was Seth. The Seth mask. The Seth brand. The Seth puppet. Dark blue jeans and a simple plain blue T under a dark leather jacket. I told you this place was an alt club.
I didnt think you were serious, he murmured back at me and flinched to avoid the shifting spokes of purple hair that jutted from the Mohawk of the girl in front of us. He screwed up his lips in distaste.
I was just excited. I rarely lie. I turned back and looked over the strange heads of the people lined up behind us. The line had stretched down Little Collins Street, and left into the cool cobblestone alley where the entrance was. When wed arrived, wed been right at the back, flecks of rain dancing down from the dark sky onto us, but now I could see the door to the club.
A big bald guy with a sordid attempt at a goatee and a tattoo on the back of his head was checking Identification before letting people through an open cast-iron gate, down some concrete stairs into the brick building within the alley. I could hear a steady, distant pound of music through what I could only guess was well sound proofed walls.
We shifted a little further forward in the line, and I took another moment to apprise the talent that had presented itself. There were some interesting girls here. Girls Id never seen outside of movies and magazines. Girls with parts of their heads shaved, girls with skin so white it was like paper. Girls with more metal in their face than in their car.
I allowed myself a momentary grin of barely contained anticipation.
About five minutes later the rain started to pick up as we reached the cast-iron gate. The big bald guy put a hand on my chest to stop me from heading into the club. I smirked up at him and presented him with my I.D. Seth did the same and after a few moments of incredulous reading, he handed them back ushered us in.
The gate was fastened shut against the interior wall with a padlock and deadbolt. It immediately dropped down into three concrete steps, which led into a hallway of cool brick, just a few meters down. There was an archway in the brick wall that opened up to reveal an iron spiral staircase going descending to a place I couldnt see.
Seth blinked a few times, and we both looked to the desk that stood next to the archway, and the two women that were behind it.
The first was a girl with long purple hair, braided and tied back tightly into a ponytail, a few spare braids hung down past her ear. She had icy-white skin and bright red lipstick, the glow from a laptop computer on the desk reflected off her facial features as she looked up to us.
The other woman was standing behind her, she was older, and had black hair, and was wearing a corset with frills. Evenly spaced in each of her cheeks sat a single piercing that caused her soft white flesh to dimple. She looked us both up and down before purple-haired-braid-girl spoke, Fifteen dollar cover charge tonight, boys. She said.
The older woman behind the first spoke up before Seth could get to his wallet, No, its their first time. She said. Its Tuesday, theyre in for free.
The purple-haired-braid-girl looked over her shoulder to the woman, then back to Seth and I, and shrugged. There you go. She said, and gestured to the Archway, have fun, she added as an afterthought.
Well see, Seth muttered behind me. I ignored him and approached the archway slowly. I placed my hands on either side of the portal and looked down; the rusted iron stairwell descended deep into the ground, at least ten meters. The echoes of hard clangs and clicks of rubber shoes on the metal surface shifted up to caress my ears.
I smiled, and pulled my head back again, looking up to the words which had been spattered haphazardly above the archway in red paint; If Not Eternal, Eternal As Me.
You right? Seth asked, and pushed at my back.
Im left, I told him, and began a hasty descent down the stairwell. Seth followed but a much slower pace.
Whoa dude, careful. He said. Im not sure how stable this damn thing is.
Try not over thinking things, Mr. Sears. I told him, and looked up the stairwell, where I could see his feet taking the steps each one at a time. I smirked, and looked down, before I began moving again.
The air was cooler the deeper I went, and finally I reached the bottom of the well. The music thumped heavily, thrashing guitar and rapid drums. Another arch in the brick work stood before me, more red paint spattered above the entrance to the club proper; Shed All Hope, Ye Who Enter.
Id spun around as soon as Id heard my Father enter his bedroom. He wasnt supposed to be home for days, hed just left for Paris three hours earlier. I clutched the item Id found in his wardrobe tight in my hands behind my back, foolishly thinking he wouldnt check.
Im twelve years old, and Im terrified.
What are you doing, Edmund? His baritone voice slithered out from his throat, his right hand dropping the Versace suitcase at the door. He was silhouetted in the light that filtered in from the hall, into the dark bedroom.
Id left the lights out, even though I thought I was alone in the house, it had given me an additional sense of security, hiding in here amongst the darkness, padding in barefooted over the lush grey carpet, the heavy walnut-coloured drapes pulled shut across the floor to ceiling windows, the immaculately pressed doona and sheets that sat tight around the mattress absent of even a single crease.
This place was full of ways for me to have left clues of my trespassing. Id been smart, but not smart enough.
It was one thing to have accidently knocked a suit down from my Fathers wardrobe and hastily put it back, only to have him notice the misplaced fabrics when he arrived home. It was entirely another thing to have been caught in the act by my menacing, barrel-chested patriarch.
Edmund. My Father intoned again. What are you doing? The shadows of the bedroom obscured the features of what I knew to be an only recently shaved face, covered in flesh that was loosened having forgotten the tautness of youth long ago.
My Father had worn a grey and black beard for as long as I could remember. But two weeks ago, hed shaved it. I found it unsettling that I couldnt properly recognize him.
I kept my eyes on the floor, my heart stuttering in my then thin body. My fingers squeezed tightly around the object as I slowly dampened it with sweat.
Suddenly, the grey-suited body of my Father took five huge paces toward me. I stepped back away from him but he slid one massive hand around my upper left arm and pulled me away from the entrance to the wardrobe.
What do you have there?! He growled, I winced and complained about the pain his grip was causing me, but he didnt let up, not until hed pried the photo frame from my hands and inspected it himself.
He stood up, staring at the photo behind the thin pane of glass, the image painted in the muted colours that trademarked all photos from the nineteen seventies and eighties. His face relaxed and for a few silent seconds, he stared at the picture.
I thought perhaps hed forgotten about me.
Id stared at the photo a long time myself. Of all the things I thought I might have found in my Fathers wardrobe, - money, jewellery, cigars-, I never suspected to find a box full of old framed photos.
Some were so old they were in black and white. I could recognize my Father in his youth, along with other men all dressed in suits, posing and smiling in a restaurant for a camera. There was another picture of him in a beret, smiling through a thick black beard with the Eifel Tower in the distance.
There was another photo too, one where he didnt look as happy. He had on a thick cashmere coat, and his beard was beginning to grey. Flecks of snow fallen upon his shoulders and he was standing in front of what I would later come to realize to be the coliseum in Rome.
But the photo Id found was the one Id stared at the longest. When my Father had caught me, Id been in the process of putting all the other pictures back, but I wanted to keep the one Id found.
I wanted to keep the one with the smiling blonde woman in a hospital gown, grinning up adoringly at the camera with startling blue eyes and the limp, ball of fresh flesh of a new born baby with a streak of dark hair over its head curled up and bundled in her arms.
I took my Fathers softened silence as an opportunity to ask what was on my mind. Is that me? I said, and rapidly added, is that Mum?
He turned his cold eyes on me and regained his stern demeanour, placing the photo face down in the basket with the others, before closing the lid and putting it back up on the top shelf behind some shoe boxes.
You have no right to be going through my personal things, Edmund. He told me. I wanted him to hit me. To tell me I was wrong. To tell me he was disappointed in me like I heard other peoples parents say to them. Instead he just turned around and looked puzzled when I hadnt moved. What are you still doing here? Get out. He pointed to the door.
I walked away slowly, head hanging down, and kicked the doorway as I went. I walked down the hall and into the stainless steel kitchen, the harsh sunlight of the summer afternoon filled the entire penthouse through the tall windows with a powerful yellow aurora glow.
I sat up on the kitchen bench and took an apple from the fruit bowl, biting into it as I looked back down the hall. My Father had his head poking out of the doorway to his bedroom, watching me. We lingered on each other for a moment.
Then he withdrew his head and shut the door.
I became lost in the pulse of the club as soon as Id crossed the threshold of the staircase. I think Seth had been behind me, but I couldnt hear him. I couldnt feel him. All that I was, all that I am, and all that I wanted to be existed in the place I stood in. Then, now, and forever.
It wasnt as large as Id expected. Red neon lights lit the place from the brick-work ceiling, the luminous tubes criss-crossed and twisted to draw an image similar to that of The Creation of Adam. I didnt waste much time admiring it.
A guy pushed past me. I didnt care. Even if I wanted to care, wanted to say something, I was lost in him. He wore a mask made of pleather, strapped around his face with an elongated false nose as thin as my index finger and as long as my forearm. His vest was made of silver chain and I could see the red markings it left on the skin of his neck. He kept walking, weaving his way through the gyrating crowd toward the bar.
I hadnt seen eye-slits in that mask.
The bar itself was made of ebony wood, no stools. It was a club bar, just a thick throng of sweaty bodies clinging to it like bees to their mother-hive. The tender wore no shirt, and his chest was shaved, a ring in each of his nipples linked with a chain connected to a piercing in the back of his neck. He was bald.
Above the bar hung a large cardboard cut-out of a heart. It was painted pink, as near as I could tell. In black, the words fuck my throat were scrawled across it with thick lettering.
The dance floor was ahead of me. It was the largest area in the club. From here, it just looked like a sea of heads of varying sizes and styles rolling over and over, creating a storm for the ship above them, while hands moved beneath the screaming waters to caress and pull where nobody could see.
Night water was black. I closed my eyes and dived in.
Id never felt a current support me so easily before. It washed over me, and I drank deeply its waters of false-safety. My eyes were shut as I felt the liquid sprawl over my chest, my arms. Bare flesh seaweed here, a sneaking, prying shark-of-a-hand there. It was fine. It didnt matter who, or what it was. I was here, and this was part of me. The ocean dominated me, and I thanked it with my revel.
Hot breath on my neck eased my slumber. My eyes remained closed but I felt a dainty hand sneak its way up my side. A silent fish, looking for its midnight feast. And this fish had rows of serrated teeth. Nails scratched down my abdominals in a fiery caress and I finally let my eyes sliver open.
I was in the middle of the sea now. I couldnt see her face properly. I couldnt hear her. The music was a constant thump. An audio numbness that was constant and easily forgotten. She was kissing someone. Someone who wasnt me, but her hand was raking at my belly.
The left side of her head was shaved and she had an iron bar in her septum. This fish at my stomach bit into my belly button and a jolt of pain shivered up my chest, fanning my heart. Slowly, I let my eyes close again.
This was home, but why? It was so foreign, so different, and yet this vast ocean of madness welcomed me home as if Id never left. It wanted me, and I wanted it. As I laid there, drowning myself in the brine my brothers and sisters stirred from their dreamless sleep and rose of up from the sea to reclaim the world as their own.
I felt better in this moment than I ever had at any other point in my life. My mind raced, but only momentarily, through all the fantastic moments of my past. It began with Kiah. It ended with death.
And with it, the refreshing joy of rebirth. Born again in the image of what I was meant to be. Where, and who I was supposed to be. I felt something wet and warm on my neck. The unmistakable stroke of a strangers tongue. But this one had an ice-cold bead in its centre. A clam with a soft, present pearl.
I then realised that Id never kissed a girl with a tongue-piercing before.
Here at once I was my own man. I didnt wear a mask. I had no false face. Here I just basked in the glow of the others who chose to move against the gilded structured bars that society had placed around them.
Bars that normal people feared to bend. Those same bars I was just learning that I could snap. The people here, swimming in this ocean with me were the truest people Id ever met. If the faces and actions of the attendants at my birthday were stripped bare; theyd all be like this.
After a few minutes I pried myself away from the wanting arms of the sea and walked toward the bathroom. It was just a hole in the brick wall the shape of a door, leading to a passage which turned sharply to the left. I noticed that above the entrance way the male and female signs where blurred.
Unisex bathroom.
The walls in here were painted black, and the caged lights above flickered, giving it a strange feeling of a fractured reality. A guy covered head to toe in swirling tattoos stepped past me and I slithered in by him, moving to the closest stall to relieve myself.
I heard some people talking while I did my business. It was strange hearing female voices. I smiled. It was different.
I flushed the toilet and stepped out, moving toward the twin stainless steel sinks embedded in a black marble top, a single, huge mirror sat before them.
I turned the tap and ran my hands under the steaming water.
A girl stepped up next to me and began to wash her hands too. Pass the soap? she asked. Without looking, I reached out with my black-nailed hand and took up the squirt-bottle of liquid soap and handed it to her.
Her fingers laced over mine as she took it, and I looked up.
My heart shuddered.
She was probably the most beautiful girl Id ever seen. She smiled at me with red lips and took the soap dispenser, placing it on her side of the sink. She had straightened, maroon coloured hair highlighted with streaks of orange and red, held in place with a black bandana.
She wore a black leather skirt that snuggled tightly to thighs clad with dark leggings, trailing all the way down to the tops of ankle-height two-inch-heeled shoes with white, military lacing.
A leopard print thermal sat nicely under a tight blue and black vest, covering up what parts of her arms, belly and chest the vest would have left exposed. Her finger-nails were painted in varying shades of red, purple, dark green and blue.
She looked back at me with her green eyes a few times. She wasnt disturbed by my staring. In fact, I could tell from the growing smile on her face that she liked it. She was maybe even intrigued by it.
I watched as she rubbed the soap into the soft skin of her hands, the tap gushing warm, white water and washing it away down the sink. The deep bass line of the music in the club belted through the walls predatorily as she leant into me, her hand reaching right across me, to clasp the roll of paper towel on the other side of my sink.
I only leant back a little bit, our eyes locked on each other as her sultry face came closer and closer until it sat only a bare few centimetres from my own. I could smell her lipstick and perfume. I exhaled slowly. I wanted to kiss her. I could feel the back of her arm pressing against my chest as her steely fingers pulled daintily at the end of the paper towel.
My eyes remained on hers, biting into each other. She breathed in as I breathed out and the bass line intensified as the heavy drums broke in.
Then, in one swift motion, her fingers stripped away a portion of the towel and she leant back, drying her hands, her attention focused on the slowly dampening towel.
I realized I was still leaning in the same position Id moved to when shed reached for the cloth, and so I straightened up. This was strange, Id never felt like this before.
For the first time in Well, for the first time, I was nervous about talking to her. Shackled down, my social prowess blunted and thrown away for some unknown reason.
She screwed up the towel and threw it into the bin at her feet, before turning to face me and leaning one of her perfectly feminine hands on the marble bench.
I looked back to her with a shaking gaze.
Can I buy you a drink? And as the words left my mouth, I realized Id become Jacob Lettington.
She sniggered and shook her head. No. She said simply, but then narrowed her gaze, as if sizing me up, evaluating me. I work here. She paused and stood up straight, checking her appearance in the mirror. I wanted to tell her the mirror was envious of her. So how about I buy you one, Edmund?
Sure. I managed. She grinned and walked out, brushing past me as she did. As soon as she was gone, I brought my hand to my chest and furrowed my brow, starring at the floor. What the hell just happened?
I didnt want to be my car, my scent, my home or a prodigal son. I just wanted to be with her. For Eternity.
And thats how I met the girl who would kill me.
I liked driving it. I liked the smell of it. I liked being able to get to where I wanted to be when I wanted to go. But my Father bought me that car two years ago. Its not mine, even if I did accept the gift.
I didnt want to be my Giorgio Armani aftershave.
I liked the manly, yet delicate musk it gave me. I liked the way the bottle could fit perfectly into my leather toiletries bag. I liked how women would kiss the nape of my neck and then Id taste the scented alcohol on their lips. But a scent is a scent. Pheromones. Nothing more, nothing tangible.
I didnt want to be my high-rise apartment.
It was my signature. My birthright. My family crest. Everyone knew me for my penthouse, and I knew everyone because of my penthouse. But it was bricks and mortar. Iron and steel from exploded stars, pieced together by men my Father paid but would never associate with in public.
Over the years, Id watched myself in the mirror slowly become a piece of furniture in my Fathers life. Still, unmoving, expected and obedient. I did what I did because it was my duty. I felt in so many ways that my entire existence was to fulfil his idea of what a sons life should be.
I didnt want to be my Fathers legacy.
So I stepped away from the mirror and left Edmund behind. And from there, I set out to be what Ive since become.
I decided that the black marble ring should sit on my wedding finger. Its one Id chosen from my somewhat emasculating collection of jewellery. I liked the way it blended in with the night, and had a strange bright sheen to the black coating, as if light shining out from the darkness.
A single raindrop fell from the overcast night sky and splashed like a fresh fruit on my left hand, trickling little streams of liquid down over the ring. I wiped the back of my hand on the front of my skinny-fit black jeans.
Its funny, I never realized how lean and trim my legs were until after Id spent ten minutes forcing them into the skin-tight denim. I wasnt sure if I was comfortable, but I looked good. I wore a tight fitting black woollen hooded jacket, and had painted each of my nails black.
My dark hair was slicked to my skull with gel and my right wrist was adorned with a silver manacle. Seth shook his head as he stood next to me in the rain, lined up to enter the club called Eternal.
I cant believe youre dressed like that. He said, arms folded over his chest as his eyes trailed over one of the garage band posters that littered the brick wall to our right.
I cant believe you didnt. I grinned at him. He was dressed like Seth. He was Seth. The Seth mask. The Seth brand. The Seth puppet. Dark blue jeans and a simple plain blue T under a dark leather jacket. I told you this place was an alt club.
I didnt think you were serious, he murmured back at me and flinched to avoid the shifting spokes of purple hair that jutted from the Mohawk of the girl in front of us. He screwed up his lips in distaste.
I was just excited. I rarely lie. I turned back and looked over the strange heads of the people lined up behind us. The line had stretched down Little Collins Street, and left into the cool cobblestone alley where the entrance was. When wed arrived, wed been right at the back, flecks of rain dancing down from the dark sky onto us, but now I could see the door to the club.
A big bald guy with a sordid attempt at a goatee and a tattoo on the back of his head was checking Identification before letting people through an open cast-iron gate, down some concrete stairs into the brick building within the alley. I could hear a steady, distant pound of music through what I could only guess was well sound proofed walls.
We shifted a little further forward in the line, and I took another moment to apprise the talent that had presented itself. There were some interesting girls here. Girls Id never seen outside of movies and magazines. Girls with parts of their heads shaved, girls with skin so white it was like paper. Girls with more metal in their face than in their car.
I allowed myself a momentary grin of barely contained anticipation.
About five minutes later the rain started to pick up as we reached the cast-iron gate. The big bald guy put a hand on my chest to stop me from heading into the club. I smirked up at him and presented him with my I.D. Seth did the same and after a few moments of incredulous reading, he handed them back ushered us in.
The gate was fastened shut against the interior wall with a padlock and deadbolt. It immediately dropped down into three concrete steps, which led into a hallway of cool brick, just a few meters down. There was an archway in the brick wall that opened up to reveal an iron spiral staircase going descending to a place I couldnt see.
Seth blinked a few times, and we both looked to the desk that stood next to the archway, and the two women that were behind it.
The first was a girl with long purple hair, braided and tied back tightly into a ponytail, a few spare braids hung down past her ear. She had icy-white skin and bright red lipstick, the glow from a laptop computer on the desk reflected off her facial features as she looked up to us.
The other woman was standing behind her, she was older, and had black hair, and was wearing a corset with frills. Evenly spaced in each of her cheeks sat a single piercing that caused her soft white flesh to dimple. She looked us both up and down before purple-haired-braid-girl spoke, Fifteen dollar cover charge tonight, boys. She said.
The older woman behind the first spoke up before Seth could get to his wallet, No, its their first time. She said. Its Tuesday, theyre in for free.
The purple-haired-braid-girl looked over her shoulder to the woman, then back to Seth and I, and shrugged. There you go. She said, and gestured to the Archway, have fun, she added as an afterthought.
Well see, Seth muttered behind me. I ignored him and approached the archway slowly. I placed my hands on either side of the portal and looked down; the rusted iron stairwell descended deep into the ground, at least ten meters. The echoes of hard clangs and clicks of rubber shoes on the metal surface shifted up to caress my ears.
I smiled, and pulled my head back again, looking up to the words which had been spattered haphazardly above the archway in red paint; If Not Eternal, Eternal As Me.
You right? Seth asked, and pushed at my back.
Im left, I told him, and began a hasty descent down the stairwell. Seth followed but a much slower pace.
Whoa dude, careful. He said. Im not sure how stable this damn thing is.
Try not over thinking things, Mr. Sears. I told him, and looked up the stairwell, where I could see his feet taking the steps each one at a time. I smirked, and looked down, before I began moving again.
The air was cooler the deeper I went, and finally I reached the bottom of the well. The music thumped heavily, thrashing guitar and rapid drums. Another arch in the brick work stood before me, more red paint spattered above the entrance to the club proper; Shed All Hope, Ye Who Enter.
Id spun around as soon as Id heard my Father enter his bedroom. He wasnt supposed to be home for days, hed just left for Paris three hours earlier. I clutched the item Id found in his wardrobe tight in my hands behind my back, foolishly thinking he wouldnt check.
Im twelve years old, and Im terrified.
What are you doing, Edmund? His baritone voice slithered out from his throat, his right hand dropping the Versace suitcase at the door. He was silhouetted in the light that filtered in from the hall, into the dark bedroom.
Id left the lights out, even though I thought I was alone in the house, it had given me an additional sense of security, hiding in here amongst the darkness, padding in barefooted over the lush grey carpet, the heavy walnut-coloured drapes pulled shut across the floor to ceiling windows, the immaculately pressed doona and sheets that sat tight around the mattress absent of even a single crease.
This place was full of ways for me to have left clues of my trespassing. Id been smart, but not smart enough.
It was one thing to have accidently knocked a suit down from my Fathers wardrobe and hastily put it back, only to have him notice the misplaced fabrics when he arrived home. It was entirely another thing to have been caught in the act by my menacing, barrel-chested patriarch.
Edmund. My Father intoned again. What are you doing? The shadows of the bedroom obscured the features of what I knew to be an only recently shaved face, covered in flesh that was loosened having forgotten the tautness of youth long ago.
My Father had worn a grey and black beard for as long as I could remember. But two weeks ago, hed shaved it. I found it unsettling that I couldnt properly recognize him.
I kept my eyes on the floor, my heart stuttering in my then thin body. My fingers squeezed tightly around the object as I slowly dampened it with sweat.
Suddenly, the grey-suited body of my Father took five huge paces toward me. I stepped back away from him but he slid one massive hand around my upper left arm and pulled me away from the entrance to the wardrobe.
What do you have there?! He growled, I winced and complained about the pain his grip was causing me, but he didnt let up, not until hed pried the photo frame from my hands and inspected it himself.
He stood up, staring at the photo behind the thin pane of glass, the image painted in the muted colours that trademarked all photos from the nineteen seventies and eighties. His face relaxed and for a few silent seconds, he stared at the picture.
I thought perhaps hed forgotten about me.
Id stared at the photo a long time myself. Of all the things I thought I might have found in my Fathers wardrobe, - money, jewellery, cigars-, I never suspected to find a box full of old framed photos.
Some were so old they were in black and white. I could recognize my Father in his youth, along with other men all dressed in suits, posing and smiling in a restaurant for a camera. There was another picture of him in a beret, smiling through a thick black beard with the Eifel Tower in the distance.
There was another photo too, one where he didnt look as happy. He had on a thick cashmere coat, and his beard was beginning to grey. Flecks of snow fallen upon his shoulders and he was standing in front of what I would later come to realize to be the coliseum in Rome.
But the photo Id found was the one Id stared at the longest. When my Father had caught me, Id been in the process of putting all the other pictures back, but I wanted to keep the one Id found.
I wanted to keep the one with the smiling blonde woman in a hospital gown, grinning up adoringly at the camera with startling blue eyes and the limp, ball of fresh flesh of a new born baby with a streak of dark hair over its head curled up and bundled in her arms.
I took my Fathers softened silence as an opportunity to ask what was on my mind. Is that me? I said, and rapidly added, is that Mum?
He turned his cold eyes on me and regained his stern demeanour, placing the photo face down in the basket with the others, before closing the lid and putting it back up on the top shelf behind some shoe boxes.
You have no right to be going through my personal things, Edmund. He told me. I wanted him to hit me. To tell me I was wrong. To tell me he was disappointed in me like I heard other peoples parents say to them. Instead he just turned around and looked puzzled when I hadnt moved. What are you still doing here? Get out. He pointed to the door.
I walked away slowly, head hanging down, and kicked the doorway as I went. I walked down the hall and into the stainless steel kitchen, the harsh sunlight of the summer afternoon filled the entire penthouse through the tall windows with a powerful yellow aurora glow.
I sat up on the kitchen bench and took an apple from the fruit bowl, biting into it as I looked back down the hall. My Father had his head poking out of the doorway to his bedroom, watching me. We lingered on each other for a moment.
Then he withdrew his head and shut the door.
I became lost in the pulse of the club as soon as Id crossed the threshold of the staircase. I think Seth had been behind me, but I couldnt hear him. I couldnt feel him. All that I was, all that I am, and all that I wanted to be existed in the place I stood in. Then, now, and forever.
It wasnt as large as Id expected. Red neon lights lit the place from the brick-work ceiling, the luminous tubes criss-crossed and twisted to draw an image similar to that of The Creation of Adam. I didnt waste much time admiring it.
A guy pushed past me. I didnt care. Even if I wanted to care, wanted to say something, I was lost in him. He wore a mask made of pleather, strapped around his face with an elongated false nose as thin as my index finger and as long as my forearm. His vest was made of silver chain and I could see the red markings it left on the skin of his neck. He kept walking, weaving his way through the gyrating crowd toward the bar.
I hadnt seen eye-slits in that mask.
The bar itself was made of ebony wood, no stools. It was a club bar, just a thick throng of sweaty bodies clinging to it like bees to their mother-hive. The tender wore no shirt, and his chest was shaved, a ring in each of his nipples linked with a chain connected to a piercing in the back of his neck. He was bald.
Above the bar hung a large cardboard cut-out of a heart. It was painted pink, as near as I could tell. In black, the words fuck my throat were scrawled across it with thick lettering.
The dance floor was ahead of me. It was the largest area in the club. From here, it just looked like a sea of heads of varying sizes and styles rolling over and over, creating a storm for the ship above them, while hands moved beneath the screaming waters to caress and pull where nobody could see.
Night water was black. I closed my eyes and dived in.
Id never felt a current support me so easily before. It washed over me, and I drank deeply its waters of false-safety. My eyes were shut as I felt the liquid sprawl over my chest, my arms. Bare flesh seaweed here, a sneaking, prying shark-of-a-hand there. It was fine. It didnt matter who, or what it was. I was here, and this was part of me. The ocean dominated me, and I thanked it with my revel.
Hot breath on my neck eased my slumber. My eyes remained closed but I felt a dainty hand sneak its way up my side. A silent fish, looking for its midnight feast. And this fish had rows of serrated teeth. Nails scratched down my abdominals in a fiery caress and I finally let my eyes sliver open.
I was in the middle of the sea now. I couldnt see her face properly. I couldnt hear her. The music was a constant thump. An audio numbness that was constant and easily forgotten. She was kissing someone. Someone who wasnt me, but her hand was raking at my belly.
The left side of her head was shaved and she had an iron bar in her septum. This fish at my stomach bit into my belly button and a jolt of pain shivered up my chest, fanning my heart. Slowly, I let my eyes close again.
This was home, but why? It was so foreign, so different, and yet this vast ocean of madness welcomed me home as if Id never left. It wanted me, and I wanted it. As I laid there, drowning myself in the brine my brothers and sisters stirred from their dreamless sleep and rose of up from the sea to reclaim the world as their own.
I felt better in this moment than I ever had at any other point in my life. My mind raced, but only momentarily, through all the fantastic moments of my past. It began with Kiah. It ended with death.
And with it, the refreshing joy of rebirth. Born again in the image of what I was meant to be. Where, and who I was supposed to be. I felt something wet and warm on my neck. The unmistakable stroke of a strangers tongue. But this one had an ice-cold bead in its centre. A clam with a soft, present pearl.
I then realised that Id never kissed a girl with a tongue-piercing before.
Here at once I was my own man. I didnt wear a mask. I had no false face. Here I just basked in the glow of the others who chose to move against the gilded structured bars that society had placed around them.
Bars that normal people feared to bend. Those same bars I was just learning that I could snap. The people here, swimming in this ocean with me were the truest people Id ever met. If the faces and actions of the attendants at my birthday were stripped bare; theyd all be like this.
After a few minutes I pried myself away from the wanting arms of the sea and walked toward the bathroom. It was just a hole in the brick wall the shape of a door, leading to a passage which turned sharply to the left. I noticed that above the entrance way the male and female signs where blurred.
Unisex bathroom.
The walls in here were painted black, and the caged lights above flickered, giving it a strange feeling of a fractured reality. A guy covered head to toe in swirling tattoos stepped past me and I slithered in by him, moving to the closest stall to relieve myself.
I heard some people talking while I did my business. It was strange hearing female voices. I smiled. It was different.
I flushed the toilet and stepped out, moving toward the twin stainless steel sinks embedded in a black marble top, a single, huge mirror sat before them.
I turned the tap and ran my hands under the steaming water.
A girl stepped up next to me and began to wash her hands too. Pass the soap? she asked. Without looking, I reached out with my black-nailed hand and took up the squirt-bottle of liquid soap and handed it to her.
Her fingers laced over mine as she took it, and I looked up.
My heart shuddered.
She was probably the most beautiful girl Id ever seen. She smiled at me with red lips and took the soap dispenser, placing it on her side of the sink. She had straightened, maroon coloured hair highlighted with streaks of orange and red, held in place with a black bandana.
She wore a black leather skirt that snuggled tightly to thighs clad with dark leggings, trailing all the way down to the tops of ankle-height two-inch-heeled shoes with white, military lacing.
A leopard print thermal sat nicely under a tight blue and black vest, covering up what parts of her arms, belly and chest the vest would have left exposed. Her finger-nails were painted in varying shades of red, purple, dark green and blue.
She looked back at me with her green eyes a few times. She wasnt disturbed by my staring. In fact, I could tell from the growing smile on her face that she liked it. She was maybe even intrigued by it.
I watched as she rubbed the soap into the soft skin of her hands, the tap gushing warm, white water and washing it away down the sink. The deep bass line of the music in the club belted through the walls predatorily as she leant into me, her hand reaching right across me, to clasp the roll of paper towel on the other side of my sink.
I only leant back a little bit, our eyes locked on each other as her sultry face came closer and closer until it sat only a bare few centimetres from my own. I could smell her lipstick and perfume. I exhaled slowly. I wanted to kiss her. I could feel the back of her arm pressing against my chest as her steely fingers pulled daintily at the end of the paper towel.
My eyes remained on hers, biting into each other. She breathed in as I breathed out and the bass line intensified as the heavy drums broke in.
Then, in one swift motion, her fingers stripped away a portion of the towel and she leant back, drying her hands, her attention focused on the slowly dampening towel.
I realized I was still leaning in the same position Id moved to when shed reached for the cloth, and so I straightened up. This was strange, Id never felt like this before.
For the first time in Well, for the first time, I was nervous about talking to her. Shackled down, my social prowess blunted and thrown away for some unknown reason.
She screwed up the towel and threw it into the bin at her feet, before turning to face me and leaning one of her perfectly feminine hands on the marble bench.
I looked back to her with a shaking gaze.
Can I buy you a drink? And as the words left my mouth, I realized Id become Jacob Lettington.
She sniggered and shook her head. No. She said simply, but then narrowed her gaze, as if sizing me up, evaluating me. I work here. She paused and stood up straight, checking her appearance in the mirror. I wanted to tell her the mirror was envious of her. So how about I buy you one, Edmund?
Sure. I managed. She grinned and walked out, brushing past me as she did. As soon as she was gone, I brought my hand to my chest and furrowed my brow, starring at the floor. What the hell just happened?
I didnt want to be my car, my scent, my home or a prodigal son. I just wanted to be with her. For Eternity.
And thats how I met the girl who would kill me.