The Worm in Every Heart

Up ‘till he’d met Carra, at least. ‘Till she’d sat down beside him in study hall, her sleeves pushed up to show the desperate phantom scribble circling one wrist like a ringworm surfacing for air; looked right through him like his head was made of glass, seen all his ugly, hidden parts at once, and shown him exactly how wrong he’d always been about the nature he struggled to keep in check at all costs, the fears—formless and otherwise—he’d fought against tooth and nail all his relatively brief, bland, blind little life.

How restraint wasn’t about powerlessness in the face of such terrors at all, but rather about being afraid of your own power. Its reality, its strength. Its endless range of unchecked possibilities, the good, the bad—

—and the indifferent.

I remember how freeing it felt to not “have” to watch myself all the time, at long last; nobody else was going to do it for me, and why should they? My first impulse, in every situation—as I well knew—was always to the angry, the selfish, the petty. I tried to be kind, mainly because I’d been so rigidly inculcated with the general Taoist/Christian principle that doing so was always the “right” thing to do. But even when I managed a good deed here and there, I knew it to be just so much hypocrisy, nothing more. It was the least I could do, so I did it.

Parental love is a matchless thing; if it weren’t for that, most of us wouldn’t have a pot to piss in, affectionately speaking. But even at its most irreplaceable, it’s still pretty cheap. Any ape loves their children; spiders lie still while theirs crawl around inside them, happy to let them eat their guts.

The only reason anybody unrelated is ever nice to anyone else, meanwhile, is as a sort of pre-emptive emotional strike—to prevent themselves from being treated as badly, potentially, as they might have treated other people. Which makes love only the lie two brains on spines tell each other, the lie that says: “You exist, because I love

you. You exist, because you can see yourself in my eyes.”

So we blunder from hope to hope, hollowed and searching. All of us equally incomplete.

And after all these years, still the sting comes, the liquid pressure in the chest and nose, the migraine-forerunner frown. Phantom pain. The ghost without the murder.

But what the fuck? That’s all it is, ever. You want to be loved. You tell other people you love them, in order to trick them into loving you back. And after a while, it’s true. You feel the pull, the ache.

The vibrato, voice keening skyward. The wet edge. Every word a whine. Weak, weak, weak, weak, weak.

When I say “you,” of course, I mean “me.” This is because everything is about me. To me. Why not? I’m the only me I have.

Truth is, none of us deserve anything. We get what we get.

And the best you can ever hope for . . . is to train yourself not to care.

Ahead, Ryerson loomed; residence row, with a Second Cup on either side of the street and competing hookers on every corner, shivering aslant on their sagging vinyl boot-heels.

I paused at Gould, waiting for a slow light, and put one itch-etched palm to my chest—telling myself it was to chart the ache’s progress, rather than to keep myself from jarring the light’s signal free with a sudden burst of excess entropic energy. Felt the charge building in my bones, begging for expression. For expulsion.

Some opportunity to turn this—whatever—I felt myself tentatively beginning to feel safely outward, without risk of repercussion. To evict the unwanted visitor, wash myself clean and empty and ready for use again, like any good craftsman’s basic set of tools; make myself just an implement once more, immune to the temptations of personal desire.

What had I cut myself in half for, in the first place, if not for that? Scarred my heel, halved my soul, driven Franz and Jen one way and Carra the other, busted the Black Magic Posse back down to its dysfunctional roots so I could be this arcane study group’s sole graduating student, its unofficial last man standing. And all to immunize myself to stress and fear and lack of focus—to free myself from every law but that of gravity, while still making sure I could probably break that one too, if I just put my back into it. Dictator For Life of a one-person country, my own private Hierarchical Idaho.

Because if the effect wore off, however eventually . . . well, hell; that would mean none of the above had really been worth the effort. At all.

I hissed through my suddenly half-clogged nose at the very idea, but nothing happened. The ache remained.

And grew.

But: Something will present itself, I forced myself to decide, more in certainty than conjecture. The way it always does.

And sure enough—soon enough—

—something did.

Just past Ryerson proper and into the shadow of St Mike’s, moving through that dead stretch of pawnbrokers’ shops and photographic supply warehouses. I glance-scanned the row of live DV hand-helds mounted in Henry’s window, and caught his lambent shade flickering fast from screen to screen to screen: Him from the theatre, from the Khyber. That particular guy. He Who Remained Nameless, for now.

But not, I promised myself, for much longer.

I was already turning, instinctively, even as I formed the concept—half-way ‘round where I stood before I even had a chance to recognize more than the line of his shoulder, the swing of his hair, the sidelong flash of what might be an eye: A mirror-image glance, an answering recognition. And stepping straight into the path of some ineptly tattooed young lout cocooned in a crowd of the same, Ry High jocks or proto-Engineers out for a beer before curfew, with gay-bashing one of the options passing vaguely through what they collectively called a brain. Who called out, equally automatic, as I elbowed by him:

“Hey, faggot!”

An insult I’d heard before, of course, far too many to count easily—not to mention one for which I currently had both no time and exactly zero interest, within context. So I tried to channel the old Jude, who’d always been so wonderfully diffident and accommodating in the face of fools, especially whenever violence threatened; dodge past with a half-ducked head and an apologetic, “no speakee Engarish, asshore” kind of half-smile, teeth grit and pride kept strictly quashed, as long as it got me finally face to face with my mystery man at last . . .

Except that Mr. Hetboy Supreme and his buddies didn’t actually move, which meant I couldn’t do much but hold my ground, still smiling. And when I took another look, the guy, my quarry, that ever-elusive, unimaginably attractive him—he was long gone, of course. Anyway.