Damned
Rotting floorboards creak like an old, tired body. The pipes are dry like a gaping mouth on a Saturday morning. The corpses of mice lie next to half chewed electrical wires. Wallpaper peels, giving up and letting go. Dirty mattresses collect dust in the two bedrooms across from each other. The house is a mausoleum of moth eaten furniture. The lower windows are boarded. Grainy yellow light streams into the hallway of the second floor, breathing life into the dilapidated building like a life support system. When it rains, the drenched wood heaves and sighs. The house cries, spilling its tears for those inside until it drifts to sleep, waking to mildew and drying tears. Every day it draws closer to collapsing on itself and consuming its inhabitants.
A bibliophile’s abandoned fortress, built upon the ruins of an indistinguishable living room, collects dust in the dark. Light seeks entrance through cracks, casting weak, sporadic filters around the room. Particles of dust dance in the sunlight and melted candles top surfaces like trinkets brought from far away. From the corner, a concentrated light hovers around the fortress like a wandering tourist. In the darkness, a vague outline of a man behind the beam of light scavenges through the mounds of texts. He sifts through piles, stacking books on top of each other with a quiet thump. Sporadically, he stops to leaf through books before slamming them on top of the others until he halts completely, speaking clearly to another whom had not made himself present before, “Hey, check this out.” However, another cannot be seen in the room, yet a voice, quieter and timid replies, “W-What the hell?” The other’s voice shakes as he laughs, “Yeah, looks like psycho boy liked variety.”
Thump. Thump. Thump. Pause. Thump. Silence. Darkness. The individual with the flashlight emerges from the void, and ascends the staircase in the foyer with a book in hand. The individual with the quieter, timid voice does not follow. He is nowhere to be found.
Upstairs, light floods the hallway from the windows, throwing shadows on the walls as the morning fades into afternoon. The male stops before a door for a moment, his face stern and body rigid. The door ajar, he peers inside before entering. Carefully, like a sneaking child, he opens the door, mentally willing it not to creak.
A young woman is nested in the room, atop an old, dingy mattress strewn onto the floor by its previous owner, resting quietly, or so it seems. Her presence seemed to throw the room off balance. She was like the new born Christ, swaddled in rags and lain in a trough as she slept upon that dirty mattress, covered by moth eaten blankets, yet so quietly the male lay down his book to take up a damp rag to wipe a day’s grime from her face, as she had done for him years ago. For weeks she slept without indication of waking, yet he remained, waiting like a person of faith waiting for the return of a vague individual. Kneeling, he whispered for only mice to hear before rising with the book under his arm to leave just as quietly as he came.
If he had a body of his own, the owner of the quieter, timid voice would have been leaning against the wall in the hallway, sporting a nonchalant look of amusement. The one called Silas issued him a curse as he stalked off towards the window, where he rested against the wall, the floor creaking beneath him.
Hours passed, and the sun departed with flashes of orange and red thrown across the sky. Silas closed the book, leaving it by the window. He sighed, surrendering to a similar derelict mattress as that across the hall, lying on old, unknown stains as his consciousness flickered away. His body remained undisturbed as minds wandered through limbo, until one crawled to the surface, sending ripples through the body. The body had awoken as Sen. Unchanged, but distinctly different, like a person wearing another’s clothes; the clothes are the same, but the person wearing them is not.
Sen turned to his side, and clambered off the mattress, rolling onto the floor, countering the calculated movements of the other. As he stands, the body slackens into a slouching stance, and his feet drag as he patters across the hall to push open the door and quickly whisper, “Good evening” to the unmoved body in the room. The door is left ajar as he leaves.
. . .
Hour after hour, from evening to the witching hour to those dreary early hours of the morning, he toyed with discarded broken pieces of a computer, left to rot in the corner of their room. His brain compensated for the other that should have been lying on the mattress, so when he looked behind him for no more than a moment, there he was, asleep on the mattress.
Sometime during the night, the other must have awoken, for his smooth voice crept upon him from behind, “What’re you doing, geek squad?” If he could see the other’s face as he lay still on the mattress, he would have seen his lips pull from his teeth into a smirk before continuing, “Trying to build a bomb?” The muscles in his face twitched as his hands stopped moving. “To blow me up?” The voice was like that of a ghost, haunting him incessantly. Behind him, the other rose upon the mattress. “Why don’t you just...” He could feel blood boil in his veins, eating at him like poison injected into his bloodstream as he slept. Silas’ smile widened as he whispered, “... Blow me.” Annoyance gripped him, and impulse grabbed one of the other’s moisture ruined books piled on the floor and threw it towards him. The book hit the wall, and fell pathetically to the floor, as phantom laughter echoed in his ears.
Sen and Silas’ relationship could be described as dysfunctional, emotionally abusive, poisonous, codependent, and ultimately, self destructive. They are two little princes fighting like lion cubs, their soft hands clawing at each other’s throat, only to collapse in a heap with their frocks spilling from their shuddering sides as they lie laughing on cold marble tiles. They were mere children when their paths crossed. They laughed like brothers and fought like soldiers. Like children, they played tyrant and citizen when all crumbled into an unsteady frame of what should have been their life. They were soldiers without a general when she disappeared. Silas built his empire as Sen wept. His weakness was a crime, and Silas was the judge, the tyrant, the executioner. Tears were an early Christian’s professions of faith. Speaking up was a threat to the empire. Refusing to act was treachery. The empire collapsed. The tyrant cursed, but the citizen basked in silent relief. It was nothing more than a game gone too far, but nothing has been quite the same since.
After a period of silence, the owner of the quiet, timid voice spoke, “Y-you know she’s... going to be m-mad about the b-bike.” The other, who should have been lying on his back on the mattress sighed, “Yeah, I know. She’s going to have our ass for it.” He paused, his lips cracking into a smirk, “Probably melt us down and make herself a new one.” They laughed together on opposite sides of that dilapidated room. Their differences are so great, they could be on opposite sides of the world, and still be drawn together, as if their legs were tied together or their hands bound to each other. In one body or two, they’re inseparable.
They had only each other as company for weeks as they tended to the sleeping woman like soldiers to a commander, dutiful and patient. Like dogs, they had been forced to scram, to flee from their place of hiding. She became their wounded leader and all were not far from hunted animals, so they took solace in the decaying shell of a house. God himself could only wonder how they managed to find such a place, rotten all the way to its foundation. In this time, cooperation was not longer a choice, it was obligation, for without her, they were irretrievably lost at sea, left to descend into irrevocable ruin. Day after day, they wait for her return.
. . .
When either the silence of the room or the inactivity of his counterpart became too crippling for him to bear, Sen departed, uprooting the settled, stagnant air with the creaking of the door. His footsteps were light, but no quieter than those of his companion, and no more tangible. To see, to hear, to touch Sen was to perceive Silas, for they are no more separable than two children stemming from one abdomen.
On the lower floor, soft candlelight nestled within a nearly empty room flickered upon a piano more ancient than its place of resting. Its flesh was rotting and it barred its innards like cannibal’s teeth. Clothed in dust and left to die, it rested against the wall, where it would breathe its final breath. A bench stood before the damned, trying not to collapse. Sen sat to one side as if making room for the other to lean against his shoulder with a knee drawn to his chest. Gently, like a tentative child, Silas whispered, “Play us a song, baby boy” his voice caressing the other’s cheek, a poor substitute for a careful stroke, like a small child stroking a pet. Beneath his fingers, the piano howled its woeful cry like a dying animal, tired and out of tune into the early hours of the morning like a dirge for the forlorn house.
Times such as this are evidence of their bond. They are two souls born of one, eternally inseparable, no matter how hard they try. In one body or two, they could never survive alone. They are each other’s Achilles heel, but they make each other strong. The pieces of a single soul spilt into two can never be whole. They are not whole unless they are together. Through anger, hatred, death, and fear, they are together. Every moment of their existence is a trial of their bond.
The piano died, the stars yawned, the house screamed as its front door was forced open. For the hours until dawn, the twin soldiers sat together on the rubble once considered to be stairs jutting outward from the house like a deformation on its face, watching the sky until the sun burst forth in streams of color, beckoning the sleeping back to consciousness once more.