Entropy and Sorrow's Kiss

And he heard that other voice again, the one that came in the night...

'But of course you do; all humans do. But some bargains are more dangerous than others, Alan...'

They rode up to the fourth floor – together – in silence, and Burnett walked beside the older woman down the pale green hall past the nurse's station – to Joan's room. He knocked on the door, and when he heard a faint noise he poked his head in. Joan was with a nurse who was holding a pink plastic container under her mouth to catch vomit that seemed to issue from nothingness, to reach out for solace from the illness within. He felt himself pushed aside as Joan's mother rushed into the room. Without saying a word she went to the sink in the bathroom and a moment later came out with a damp washcloth – and with that in hand she went to her daughter's side.

And so a mother sat on the side of a hospital bed, holding a damp rag on the back of her daughter's neck, trying desperately to reclaim a sundered past.

After several minutes the nausea passed, and Joan lay back exhausted, sweat running down her face, the front of the pale blue gown soaked through with sweat and vomit. Mrs Dickinson ran her fingers through her daughter's hair, wiped the sweat away with her washcloth. For a brief moment mother and daughter seemed fused in time – they were one – yet in the silence of this infinite confusion each seemed a pale echo of the other.

And as such, time passed slowly. Joan was discharged a few days later.

And the real war was set to begin again.

+++++

Within moments of arriving at Joan's house, mother and daughter found their uncommon ground and were soon making a thorough examination of the ruins each claimed as her own. They sat unperturbed on thrones of righteousness, hurling accusations and recriminations at each other until their wounds were raw with electric hate. Burnett wondered which of them would fold and retreat first. Neither seemed willing to give in, willing to give the other the satisfaction of an easy victory.

Burnett seemed to flow easily into the role Joan's father must have found cast for him, cast as if in cold stone, and he began to understand the dynamic as he watched mother and daughter. He watched as they tore into each other – and he found if he interfered they both turned on him and attacked him with a fury he had never imagined women capable of. He returned to work, took what comfort he could in life on the streets, but as each wounded day ground to a close he began to dread returning to Joan's house.

Yet as days turned into a week, and weeks veered mercilessly towards a month, he found that his efforts had wrought some modest gains; Joan was stronger, her appetite had returned and she was gaining weight between chemo sessions. Her hair – gone after the first few rounds of chemotherapy – was a constant source of misery to Joan – and wonder to him. So much identity was wrapped up in hair, Burnett thought. Curious to cling to vanity, he said to himself, as if that alone in the end was all that mattered – but it mattered to Joan.

Joan had lost so much weight that none of her clothes fit – they hung on her like discarded rags, and the tortured wastelands of her wounded chest screamed like an accusation each time she looked at herself in a mirror, yet somehow she still saw herself as whole, felt like the same woman she always had been. When a counselor had asked about prosthetic implants, Joan had very nearly bit the poor woman's head off.

So many contradictions, Burnett thought.

Her mother seemed to come and go from the house like an errant tide. She would roll in quietly, bringing misery and discord with her return, and then she would flow away in a rush that left peace and confusion in her wake. Burnett tried to get Joan to talk about her mother – and the life that must have been so utterly chaotic during her childhood – but to no avail – there was just no fire without fuel – and Joan's fire had burned too hotly for too long. He looked at her during these moments and saw the little girl trapped inside, lost and confused and so vulnerable, and he understood in a rush that Joan still needed those wounds in order to make sense of her world, that without them she would lose her sense of herself. As pathological as that was, Burnett knew on an instinctual level not to intervene within that vast terrain. That was a battle he could never win. Not now. Not ever.

The weariness that continually assaulted Joan had taken it's toll, too – she had no will left to fight anyone but her mother, so deep were those wounds – and Burnett wondered if she would have the strength to fight her disease if she tried to do even that. But Joan and Alan grew comfortable with each other, grew to respect one another for this late gift of honesty. During those last days and nights that Burnett and Joan had with one another, they found a love and understanding for each other that neither expected. He nourished her with his acceptance of her past, and she sustained him with the simple love only a battered child can share. They touched, and in the touching they comforted one another as vast storms gathered before them.

One night, shortly after her mother had left in the wake of a particularly bitter series of assaults, they sat on the patio in the back yard well into the depths of the night. They held each other's hands, talked of simple things and looked up through fast passing clouds at brief starscapes, and they wondered aloud at how things might have been. If only. Once upon a time.

Oh, how he wanted to love her.

Oh, how she had wanted to be loved.

Oh, how the clouds raced by.

+++++

He came in from work one afternoon – still in uniform – and they were fighting. Not just yelling and screaming – no, this time it was much worse. Joan was pulling her mother's hair, entangled in strands as deep as memory, and her mother had a hairbrush out and was hitting away blindly at her daughter. He stood in the kitchen mutely watching these two children wailing away at each other, undecided, lost. He watched as Joan pulled at her mother's hair, then her clothing, then he winced as the hairbrush swung through the air and connected on the right side of Joan's face.

Instinct took over, and Burnett ran into the living room and grabbed Joan's mother by the arm and he flung her away, but he held onto her wrist, twisted her to the floor and as he did so he jumped to her side and took out his handcuffs and with practiced ease bound the woman. Joan watched silently, panting through a twisted, blank look painted on her face like a grotesque mask. As Burnett looked at her he thought at first she was in shock, but then some distant animation in her eyes held him and told him she was more than aware of what was happening. He could never have believed it possible that Joan would have enjoyed watching her mother's downfall, but that was what he saw in her eyes.

The older woman struggled to stand but Burnett pushed her back down with his foot, and this force was followed by a stream of invective filth that seemed to issue straight from the darkest pits of Hell. Burnett looked at Joan's mother with curious detachment written all over his face – like he was examining an insect under a magnifying glass – and yet he wondered what to do next. She was calling him a worm, a pencil-dicked faggot, an ass-licker...there was no end to the practiced assaults that came from the woman's mouth... she assumed the weaknesses she had found in the various men she had ritually abused throughout her life were of a kind, that all men would wither under the furious weight of her words. She had buried her humanity under the weight of a million self-deceptions – yet Burnett feared it was buried far too deeply for a mere mortal's redemption. The words she hurled around the room seemed to mirror her struggle for dominion over the demons that must have taunted her all her life, and as her words grew meaner, their ferocity seemed to weaken under the realization she had ventured too deeply into uncharted depths. By exploiting human weakness, she had simply revealed her own, and now surely would understand there could never be any redemption, only a withered reckoning.

And then, suddenly, the older woman shivered and turned on her back, then grew still. Her eyes were wide open, fixed, unseeing, held perhaps by some distant memory, then her breath came in ragged little gulps that soon became the only sound in the room. Burnett watched her for a moment, then bent down to undo the handcuffs shackling her wrists, and though he stepped back as soon as he had done so, ready to dodge the next assault, it never came. She turned onto her side again and brought her knees to her chin and presently began to rock herself. Her eyes grew wider still, haunted perhaps by visions of the future that was like an unchecked fire waiting, watching, ready and willing to consume her tortured soul. Just what had she done, Burnett wondered as he watched tears run down her face. Just what bargain had she made?

Burnett recoiled as Joan's laughter danced around the ruins, then he helped the older woman to her feet and carried her to the spare bedroom. He placed her on the bed and ran his fingers through her hair for a long time, then he left the room, turning out the light as he closed the door.

+++++

He carried Joan back to the hospital a few days later, when the vomiting began again, but her mother did not come. The doctors came to her room and talked quietly with her while Burnett waited reluctantly outside the stale room in the waiting area down the hallway, and no words were needed when he came back into the room that day. Joan was looking out a window at the branches of a barren tree as they danced in the eddies on the other side of the glass, the other side of life...

'What was on the other side?' Burnett thought as he watched her face.

'What is waiting for us out there?'

He came and sat by her and held her hand, yet for the longest time she hardly knew he was in the room. She seemed content to focus on the branches, on the stale remnants of this life, so caught-up was she still in the echoes of her father's despair.

A nurse came in and moved to change the IV in Joan's port, but Joan turned to her and whispered "there's no point, no point..." – yet even so, the nurse smiled, ignored her plea and bent to her task. Joan had neither the will nor the strength to resist, so she turned back to the window and resumed watching the withered tree as one vial of death replaced another; she seemed not to react at all to the new solution as it was driven into her dying veins. To Burnett it seemed as though she was gathering what strength she had left for one final battle, and he tried to place his own battered reserve of feelings behind the wall – for a little longer.

He watched her watching death and screamed a silent, helpless scream.

Oh, how he hated this thing called death, and the coldness that consumed everything when he thought of death. He had simply reached a point in life where he saw no reason behind death, no purpose to it's coming, and so, in the end he wanted nothing more to do with death. He had stopped attending funerals after his parent's services, and he no longer went to the memorial services of fallen officers. In recent years, without knowing why he turned his head when he passed a church or temple, feeling perhaps the anesthesia of institutionalized grieving, the 'closure' other people sought, would always elude him. He saw the only thing left inside those ornamental walls was a cold, hollow emptiness, ceremonies of grieving that made no sense. Death made the happier moments of life feel shallow and delusional – truly purposeless, in other words, because the religious impulse struck him as fundamentally flawed. Those poor souls kneeling in fear, he saw, were so consumed with their pernicious abnegation of death that they forgot to live – they banished reality to the shadows of mysticism and explicit hypocrisy and gave thanks to an absent God. But now, when he looked down at Joan all he felt was an unbearable emptiness. He could see no comfort in her passing, no purpose, just a shattered soul moving towards nothingness.

"A bargain met, as you can plainly see," said the shadow to the soul.

"Did I not tell you it would be so?" the Keeper said. "Did you never believe?"

__________

"Just hold me, Alan. I'm cold."

Those were the last words she spoke; they were the last words he heard her speak.

He had been beside her on the hospital bed as he listened to her breathe, her broken body reaching out once again for the comfort of existence, for the promise of memory. He put his arms around her and held her to his breast. He listened to her breathing for a while, comforted himself that these simple mechanisms of life still came, and he told her that he loved her again and again as her breathing grew weary – and then stopped. He remained there by her side for a time, then pulled himself off the bed and walked from the room.

"Is she gone?" Joan's mother asked when she saw him walk from the room.

He had ignored her and walked by her and would have walked on forever, but he stopped when he heard the woman laughing – and he turned to meet the extremity of her need.

Tears were running down her face, black streaks of cosmetic tears that convulsed within the echoes of her laughter.

"So, you think you loved her?" the woman screamed as she fought to restrain the terror that welled up inside her tortured soul. "Just what makes you think she could love you, that she could have ever loved anyone but herself? You poor goddamned fool!"

Burnett walked back to her, stopped short of the woman and looked at her with an undeclared mix of hate and pity in his eyes. He didn't know what to say...what to think about a despair so absolute it could negate all human compassion.

He stepped closer to her and kissed her on the forehead, then he pulled back from her. The woman appeared too stunned to respond, but then she stood on her toes and kissed Burnett once on the lips.

"Thank you for loving my daughter," Joan Dickinson's mother whispered.

Burnett took her hand and they walked from the hospital, neither knowing what the rest of the day might bring, knowing only that all their yesterday's had just slipped through their fingers.

Part III: Tracy

Seven Weeks Later

Alan Burnett walked out of the Assistant Chief's office and headed down the dingy hallway towards the Patrol Division briefing room. He stopped at an old, worn-out water fountain recessed in the hallway and pushed a little round button on top – the button's chrome had worn away ages ago and was now just a shiny brass thing that seemed little more than an echo of another time – and as it had for almost fifteen years the old gray box rattled when he pushed the button and sent an icy stream of water – straight up his nose. Burnett cursed, as he always did, and stepped back, then slurped the cold water – before it turned warm. He stood and wiped the remains off his mouth with his hand, then he threw errant drops to the floor with a careless flick of his wrist. He looked around, took his bearings and continued on his way to the briefing room – lost in cascades of furious emotion and feeling more than a little disoriented.

An hour before shift change and already the room was filling with cops, mainly over-eager rookies wanting to impress their shift sergeant. But on this Monday, which happened to be his 'Friday', Burnett could not have cared less. He didn't impress easily anymore, not even on a good day, though he could still remember wanting to impress any and everyone when, once upon a time, he had been a rookie. Still, those days were long gone, and most of the time he felt like he'd seen it all before, done it twice, and in the end these eager kids looked nauseatingly naive to him, just as he must have looked so many years ago.

And while the world had changed over the intervening years – changed in ways it hurt to think about – the job at hand hadn't. People still needed Cops as much as they hated them. Houses continued to be broken into, convenience store clerks were robbed at gunpoint, old ladies were raped, and kids were still beaten by predatory parents. Cars kept running red lights and killing people, speeders lost control of their cars and ran off roads into trees, kids in trucks tried to beat speeding trains, and occasionally airplanes fell from the sky. Burnett had seen all these things and more, and his soul was numb from all the hate and fear and pain that filled this life. He was tired of all the suspicious eyes that met his arrival at a crime-scene, or whatever the latest outpouring of man's inhumanity happened to be, tired of all the hate thrown his way. It was hard to want to help people when they so obviously hate you, he thought.

And this, he said to himself with a laugh, was the world all these rookies wanted to change. They were all – to a person – dedicated to the proposition that they could – and would make a difference. Burnett knew these kids were seriously delusional, and he almost wanted to laugh.

All the rookies in this dilapidated briefing room had just finished nine months of Academy, learning – hopefully – everything a kid might possibly need to learn in order to survive long enough on the streets to really begin to understand the real rules of the game. Most did, and for the past few weeks it had been Burnett's job to spot the ones who couldn't – and get rid of them, fast, before they got into real trouble. He looked out over this inland sea of expectant faces, looked at all the lonely idealism that hovered in the air, apparent to none of them – and he sighed. He sighed and surrendered to the memories that held him together on days like this...and he seemed to...drift away...

As he drifted on tidal streams of memory, surrounded by the echoes of another life very much like his own, he suddenly thought of his grandfather, and the incongruity of the thought jolted Burnett. As he sat looking at the sea of tables and chairs peppered with navy blue uniforms, out of the blue he could just make out his father's voice. All the dedicated young faces arrayed before him reminded him of something his grandfather had once told him, and the need to hear his voice once again startled him back into the present. He had forgotten something. Something vital. Something he had forgotten from time to time, only to have the lesson drilled back into his head like a bullet when understanding left him. There was something his grandfather had wanted him to remember, needed him to remember, and today that need was pressing inward, making itself known as if through an encroaching feeling of dread.

Burnett's grandfather had flown fighters in the Navy during the Second World War, and had gone on to fly for American before a heart attack nailed him in his early fifties, and yet to his last day Burnett's grandfather had lived and breathed flying. Flying not simply as a passion, not simply a metaphor, but rather – it had been a calling, his one true reason to be alive. He'd trained more than his fair share of pilots – mainly 'Jet–Jocks' transitioning from the military into the more sedate reality of hauling people from sea to shining sea – but even with these military prima–donnas his grandfather's maxim held. And while he had been gone now for decades, he could still hear that clear voice bouncing around within the shaded vaults of childhood memory.

"Remember this, Alan, because one day it may save your life. There is nothing more dangerous in the world than a pilot with two hundred hours of flight time."

It was a simple lesson, yet a hard one to grasp.

Their is, his grandfather wanted to tell him, nothing as dangerous as someone just out of training, as one who thinks he or she knows everything, but has yet to realize how little they truly know. These miscreants get cocky, they get over confident, and they fuck up big-time when they do. They get hurt and occasionally they get killed, and sometimes – when they fly jets – they get a bunch of people killed.