This is the Day

Carl's big blue eyes are faded and convey an inner agony. She once so loved his blue eyes, but their lustre was another thing lost to the past. They were growing old, deteriorating physically and mentally, ghosts of their former selves. A pair of walking derelict houses, vacant lots. He pushes back in his chair and she gets a partial sight of the room he's in. It is tiny and has walls painted a milky white. There is a green door facing the webcam. Normally when she spoke to him he was in his apartment which seemed light and airy and had pale blue walls. Julia is appalled by how she looks when she sees herself in the top right hand corner of the screen. No make up, her face puffy and aged, hair scraped back in a desultory manner. The high resolution has exposed them both. Carl looks like he is trying to move his jaw and get a few words out but it is beyond him. It is a bathetic spectacle, like he's had a stroke or a brain injury. They stare blankly at each other for what seems to Julia a lengthy period of time. She looks at the time. 16:21. Julia apologises for how she looks.

"Well, you will look rough," says Carl, raising a half bottle of vodka to his lips. He'd told her before they turned a blind eye to boozing so long as they did it out of sight and kept it amongst the infidels. Julia is desperate to unload on him but seeing him so troubled makes her reluctant to do so. Jesus, he looks like any bad news would give him a heart attack. Where is he?

"This is the site office. Been a long day....all clay and smokeless fire...."

Julia wants to tell him about the man, about her fear she is going crazy and how horny she is and she can't stop thinking about the young guy at the gym screwing her and finishing off on her tits. It'd kill him she thinks. Looking at him she knows already he will never come home.

"You've been....you've been," starts Carl, waving a cigarette at the webcam.

"What..." beseeches Julia.

"You've been...."

The HD effect is unsettling Julia. It is like she's watching a Blu Ray, accentuating the unreality. Visually stripped bare the pair of them, middle aged and fucked. There's a knock on the green door. Carl puts his head in his hands and lets the cigarette drop from his lips. The knocking is fast and hard.

"Aren't you going to answer it," asks Julia, her head suddenly full of insect noises. She notices her image is unmoving.

Carl stands up and walks to the middle of the room. Julia can now see he is wearing blue jeans and is barefoot. Carl stands staring at the door with his back to the webcam. Julia's image has now vanished from in front of her.

"The green door Carl"?" says Julia, not knowing why. She feels like someone is speaking through her, using her like a corporeal wind up doll. The knocking has now slowed down, a heavy rap now and then.

"Aren't you answering it?" rasped Julia.

"I don't need to. The door is wide open..."

He turns and walks back to the table and stares blankly at her. The knocking stops.

"It's been open a few years...."

Then the HD goes and its back to usual Skype interaction, the image pixilated and choppy, fragmented and out of synch. Carl's drawl is ahead of the slow twitches of his pupating representation.

"You've been seen out with someone, " spits Carl with a trace of contempt. It takes the image a good few seconds to catch up with the words.

"Who? Tell me what's been said." Julia demands.

"Someone."

"Whose been speaking to you?" demands Julia, hurt and defensive, but also feeling a little guilty because she'd been day dreaming about the gym guy's dick being in her mouth and pussy.

"In here," says Carl, tapping his forehead with his index fingers. The images are now clear and in perfect synchronicity with the audio and the Skype feed is coherent. He sits back and drains the bottle of vodka, then turns suddenly and hurls it at the wall. It is the speed and violence of his action which upsets Julia more than the sharp crack of the glass shattering on contact with the wall. Carl lights another cigarette and gazes idly at her. The bottle smashing triggers something in Julia and she tells him everything in a juddering eruption of words and hand gestures.

"Well, you would have a visit," says Carl.

"What do you mean? Tell me...."

"Hidden inside the womb you know, that's what they said out there..."

"Carl, stop talking in fucking stupid riddles and tell me. What's going on, what's happening...."

Julia is galvanized by his cryptic offering, furious and demanding. Carl was a model of taciturn masculinity, albeit with a thoughtful and sensitive side that she had found irresistible. He loved his boxing and rugby and had simple and unpretentious tastes and a pragmatic outlook on life, he was certainly not the type to spout elliptical rubbish. She feels normalized briefly, shocked by her own use of profane language and the intensity of her response which cut through her nausea and enervation. Carl shrugs indifferently.

"I'm sorry," he says expressionlessly.

"Just come home...forget the money....I can't...I can't take it anymore...I need you here..." says Julia.

"We'll see."

"See about what?"

"I am so sorry...."

"For what?"

"We'll see."

Carl starts to choke on his words and wipes tears from his eyes.

"Jason will be alright you know ...everyone ends up haunted by something."

Then the image of Carl freezes completely yet the door swings open behind him affording a glimpse of a dark corridor. Julia walks over to the work top and pours herself a glass of red wine and lights a cigarette, white noise in the background. It's the last one in the packet.

When she returns the Skype feed looks like a third generation VHS tape, the picture wavy and in need of tracking, brown and white blotches dancing across the screen. Carl is sat back in the chair holding the shattered neck of the vodka bottle he'd just broken. It is like a glass dagger. Carl sticks it in his neck puncturing his right carotid artery. The wound is wide open and Carl looks shocked at it all, like he can't believe what he has done. The blood has sprayed the webcam, like someone had trained a shower head of the stuff onto the monitor. At first it seems like a joke in the poorest taste, she half expects a reveal to a box of tricks, but his reaction and the pig noises he is making trying to breath while choking on his own blood convinces her of its verisimilitude. We'll see. He leans forward to kiss the screen. Blood now veils the monitor. 16.38. That awful wheezing noise again, as he tries to inhale through the open flap in his neck, Carl reduced to an out of tune flesh harmonica, all bled out.

Blood now obscures the display. Julia presses her lips against the screen tenderly, full of a love that transcends the horror of it all, and then tries to scream but it won't come. The laptop logs itself off and she hears the jaunty Microsoft sign off tune. She's suddenly creased by what feels like the worst migraine ever and her head is filled with the sound of Carl's dying porcine whisper, a hoarse exhalation that grows in intensity till she feels her skull is going to crack but it takes her mind off the shit she's just seen. Julia stumbles towards the kitchen door. There's a message written on the white door for her in medium size lettering and it has been freshly applied. It reads 'She sees.' Julia touches the letters and presses her face against the door.

The substance used to convey the message has a smell and texture redolent of menstrual blood. Julia now is beyond words, of human comprehension, of any sense of normality, in a place beyond the use of language to communicate the quotidian with her mind no longer able to respond to the stimuli of the outside world. She was now somewhere different, hung up in chains of nerves, marked with blood, calm to the point of indifference and stumbling amongst the bones that live.

Julia lets herself go, surrenders her grasp on what perceives to be her sanity and realises she is undergoing a blessed deliverance. She feels cool and clear inside. Julia walks into the living room which has already been consumed by the winter darkness. The plasma television is on, showing a foetus in a jar smiling at her, then it cuts to her mother being prepared on a morticians slab followed by a shock edit to the guy from the gym screwing the hole in Carl's neck post mortem. She is not touched by the mash up. Julia crosses herself, closes her eyes and waits. She sees. When Julia feels a presence behind her she opens her eyes and turns. The man is there, he is a man she can now see, with a face like a boiled egg. He is wearing brown leather gloves, which he plunges into his blank countenance. When it is parted Julia can see multitudes and is granted the knowledge that she is legion. And then she is free and finally it comes. Jason is distracted from his killstreak by a valediction of glacial laughter.