Osiris Rising

by Will Kolbrener

Crescendo

And it’s just like pulling the trigger–over and over again.

The clicking. The hammer, the bang, the bang, the BANG.

And then the blood.

*          *          *

I’m in my therapist’s office, sitting on some cushy reclining couch. It smells like it’s from an antique shop, and that rotting but fresh wooden smell sits in my nostrils while he talks, tapping his little yellow, number two pencil on that plastic clipboard, one of those transparent green ones. You know, the ones that your old phys-ed teacher used to slap on his thigh as he yelled at you to do another lap? Another wheezing, furious lap?

I realize he’s talking to me.

“And so you wanted to punch them?”

            Over and over again, you don’t even know.

I want to talk; my lips keep protesting. Teeth screaming at me from the inside of my mouth; bone on bone on plaque, creaking back and forth and held in place by soft pink pillows.

Yes.

He stares. He has these grey eyes that I can always feel searing into the side of my face whenever I come here. I don’t think I’ve ever looked at him once, even in one of these sessions. I always glance at him from the corners of my vision, because I think that if I actually look at him, his grey, burning eyes will simply melt my own right out of their sockets and into little brown and white puddles on the floor.

“Non-communicative relationships aren’t exactly the healthiest way for me to help you get through this. Maybe if we talked, I could–”

I cut him off, my shoes hit the floor with a clack as I slide off of the couch, and I throw a little marbled, black and white notebook into his lap. I stare at the wrinkles in his forehead. Little, peach colored tsunamis flow over the space above his eyebrows that’s just beginning to perk up. Surprise, surprise, old man.

My hand hovers over the quartz doorknob, and I can feel his eyes again. My neck is burning. White and hot and numb like a branding iron is pressing onto my skin.

*          *          *

And just like that, I’m gone. I’m blacked out. Fucking hung over on the park bench again. My hair–matted to my face by the hot summer sweat that decided to give me a surprise shower while I was sleeping.

            And again, you’ve gone and made something of yourself. A bum, imagine that?

Not now. Please, not now–I don’t need your goddamn backtalk in my head. If I had a quarter for every snarky comment you’ve made up to this point I would be stuck under a crushing mountain of money with my bones turning to dust under the weight of the coins.

            You could have talked about it. Surely, other people are having these problems with the things inside of their heads.

Are they, though? I’ve never seen another patient in the waiting room when I’ve either gone in or out. It’s always empty plastic black chairs lined up against the white-as-hell wall. The ones that hurt my eyes when I stare at them for too long instead of the gossip magazines on that little glass and metal coffee table right near the door, you know?

            You mean the–

Yes. The gossip magazines. The ones with half naked swimsuit models on the front that always advertise the next “STEAMY CELEBRITY SCANDAL” and the “BRING YOUR SEXTAPE TO WORK DAYS,” printed just like that on the glossy-ass paper right above their beautifully photoshopped hair and their uncannily perfect faces.

            I hate them as much as you do, you know.

I know. For I am you, and you are me, and we are one and the same. I’ve run this over in my head too many times to count.

And yet, here you are, still hungover and laying on this park bench.

Correct. You are smart, aren’t you?

And who’s responsible for getting blackout drunk?

            Don’t patronize me.

            Now you’re the one backtalking me.

You’re ridiculous.

The wood that presses against my cheek lightly grates the side of my face as my mouth grows into a grin. I’m not really looking at anything, but my gaze falls upon this little old woman. She’s wearing  this baggy beige coat that seems to hang over her shoulders like ratty, burlap-colored drapes, and she’s just staring. Staring at this big, old oak tree. It’s massive, absolutely huge from where I lay on the park bench, and it looms both over the old woman and me. It’s as if it’s about to pick her up with its leaves and branches and swallow her whole.

She just looks and stares at the thing. Her eyes seem to be glassy, white.

My grin fades as I keep looking, and my gaze falls upon her little, shriveled, old mouth. Blood begins to trickle out of it. Dribbling past her lips, down her neck and onto her old, beige coat.

Drip. Dripping. Splattering into little pools on the worn asphalt at her feet.

I blink. Her cane clatters to the ground, and she falls to her knees. Her arms are outstretched in an empty embrace.

It was as if she was praying to a giant, false wooden god: The oak loomed big and green and omniscient above her, and the leaves slightly rustled against the breeze, as if they were waiting for an offering that would never come.

She stays like that for a few moments. Standing in a big, empty hug, just waiting for the tree to bend down and wrap its branches around her–wanting, so desperately, for mother nature to return the gesture.

One…

Two…

Mother nature must have been having a bad day.

And then, the woman collapses sideways. Crumpling into a puddle of beige and grey flesh.

Three.

Stillness.

The wind blows lightly, the leaves rustle again above my head and over the old woman… and then I roll over on my bench, and go back to sleep.

*          *          *

Osiris is the Egyptian god of death. Osiris is also the name of the little square of silicon and metal implanted into the front of my brain. We all signed up for the project.

Signed up?

            We all were forced to sign up. My mistake.

When the Corps. came, they overthrew our government and bombed our cities to ashes. They herded us into little, city-block size concentration camps. They took us, en masse, and cut open our heads.

            And now, we all have little silicone and metal squares in the fronts of our brains, right? Weren’t we promised “enhanced abilities” like “increased attentiveness,” “immunity to cognitive degeneration,” and “lightning-fast reflexes?”

Yes.

            But–?

            Side effects included (but were not limited to) memory loss, blackouts, brain hemorrhaging, auditory and visual hallucinations, dementia–

Also, schizophrenia.

            You don’t say.

I do say.

I think, therefore I am not insane.

Maybe. I think too, you know.

            All I see now are the Osiris insignias painted on the side of the burned out, blown up buildings. All I see are bodies and skeletons that strew the streets with flesh and bone and flies and empty faces filled with sorrow. All I smell is fury and fire and rot that clings to the air around me and the grey sky above me.

Osiris looms over them all. A giant blood-red cube, flattened onto the ashen brick that flashes past my eyes as I stroll through the torn up streets at a leisurely pace, my hands shoved into the pockets of my new beige coat with a little bloodstain down the front that I just can’t seem to scrape off.

I don’t really like to think about my memory. I remember emotions, but not many events. Feelings, but not faces. Smoldering grey eyes that come from all directions and sear burns down the back of my neck without any semblance of whose eyes they are in the first place.

I remember being angry. Very angry, very recently. I also remember being in love, but I can’t piece together with whom. That was nice, the intimacy. It purged the red from my vision that I was seeing so often. Like a soft pillow was smothering me all the time and putting a damper on my emotions. Made them all fuzzy and warm. Filed down the edges, you know? So I couldn’t keep stabbing myself with them in the my arm or my leg or my face whenever I did something impulsive, to try and stop myself from doing something impulsive in the first place.

Whenever I think about the little chip in my head, I get scared, so I don’t think about it too often.

*          *          *

FIRE, ALL CLEANSING FIRE”

They’re chanting now, and it’s getting dark. The sun is throwing off starbursts of orange from the edges and tops of the burned out buildings. I plant myself on a little pile of old computers and crunched up concrete a few feet out from the edge of the chanters.

“FIRE, ALL CLEANSING FIRE”

It’s kind of melodic, really. They dance and dance around that circle of sharpened metal poles planted vertically into the ground.

In the middle of the circle is a head. A human head. I stare and blink, realizing that I’ve seen it before-–no–felt it before. Felt it’s presence before, somewhere. It’s a woman’s head–a beautifully macabre display.

It reminds me of someone I had once danced with long into the sunset’s dying glow. Someone that I had given all of myself to. All of the pain and the fury and the passion, and all of the happiness and love in the world. Someone who had taken all of my emotion and my insides and stomped all over them without a second thought.

Then again, it could just be another piece of gore.

“FIRE, ALL CLEANSING FIRE”

“FIRE–”

And then they stop.

Silence.

The head glistens with some sort of liquid. It’s wet with something, and the hair’s matted down over the eyes. The glassy grey eyes.

One of the chanters, short and shrill and frail, growls. She pulls out a little box of twigs from her tattered denim pocket and removes one. It’s topped with a little red bead.

She looks at the twig for a moment through her raggedy blond hair, matted with dirt. She looks at it, and makes a noise from the bottom of her throat as she brings it down to the side of the box, and strikes.

Sparks.

Flame.

She quickly flicks it up to her face to stare again, and she opens her mouth, wide and gaping and black this time, and full of yellow, crooked slivers.

            “FIRE!

She flicks her wrist, and the little flaming twig goes careening out onto the head.

Ignition.

They begin to dance again. Circling around the little ball of fire and flesh and burning hair.

That’s the beautiful thing, isn’t it? Even in this city of madmen, this city of the now state–none of us know what’s past or future because all of our brains are broken.

All that we know is here. All that we know is now. And all that we know is destruction, and fire fits the bill–perfectly.

Everything dies eventually, but we’ve just found a way to kill it even faster.

            Fire. All cleansing fire.

*          *          *

I like to think that I don’t like to fight in the first place. That I can talk someone down from their seething fury with the soothing power of words.

            The man in front of you begs to differ.

Man?

            In front of you. He’s fucking pissed.

Oh.

Suddenly his fist is driving into my stomach, and I’m stumbling backwards and out of breath, my back hitting a burned out brick wall. I clamp my eyes shut and wait for the next punch, but I’m left just standing there with my back to the brick and a silly, squinty look playing across my face.

When I open my eyes, I’m greeted by the sight of a child lying on the ground. Twitching, convulsing. His back arches every few seconds and then crunches downwards onto the coarse concrete conglomerate rubble that coated the city a while ago. Residue from the bombs. I wait a moment.

I step over him, straddling, and I slump down to my knees and place a hand gently on his chest, holding him down. His taut face reminds me of relief. Of long nights cradling something warm and soft and breathing in my arms, swaddled with love.

He’s still seizing, only gently now, twitching again.

I blink.

The flat of my other palm has found its way to his adam’s apple.

            Push.

What?

            Crush.

I blink.

He’s clawing at me. At my arms. There’s tears streaming down his cheeks.

He doesn’t understand.

Neither do I.

            Crunch.

 

Fermata

 

My mind is kind enough to leave me one clear memory, though. Sometimes I sit on this park bench and just like to go over it again and again, like a man with a single movie to watch and a theater all to himself.

I remember the EM blasts. The riots. Something was going terribly wrong with everyone’s little chips of silicone and metal in the front of their brains, and so the crowds of people had suddenly thought it a good idea to go straight to the heart of the problem by ripping each other apart.

I remember watching from a park bench, quietly looking at the chaos from a bubble that was all my own. My personal VIP spectator’s seat.

The fireworks were spectacular. Bright and blue and beautiful, pulsing the crowd every few minutes. And every time someone was caught in the brilliant blue aura, they just dropped. It was as if a switch on the small of their backs had been flipped off, and they just collapsed onto the street with their eyes wide open and their faces frozen in a facade of their current expression.

One of them managed to come up behind me and began choking me out with a crowbar. And the light that usually kept at the sides of my vision grew and grew. Bright and visceral and tangible–

until a man in blood red riot-gear with a cube printed on the front threw a little, metal cylinder at me. It shrilled, high and piercing. And then it blew up, and took me and my mind with it into oblivion.

*          *          *

Oblivion isn’t so bad. I visit this place whenever my head decides that the real world is too much for it to handle, and it just seems to take me here for a little while. I never know how long I’m here for, but it’s always pleasant to visit.

I have a friend. I have a little house by the seaside with some lawn chairs out on the sand, and the sound of the waves always rocks me to sleep whenever I’m tired. Sometimes, I sit with my friend at our little table on the beach with its little green umbrella blowing in the gentle sea breeze, and we chat about things. The waves. The sky. The shattered silhouette of the city behind us, with the skeletons of once-skyscrapers that seem to paint the horizon.

“I think I killed somebody today.”

I can’t remember, everything’s so jumbled up in here.

            “Oh, the house? Yeah, I’ve been meaning to pick up around the library and the kitchen. I feel like I make too many things too fast. And everytime I make something new, it somehow ends up ripped up or burned or shattered on the ground.”

Maybe you should take better care of the place.

            I narrow my eyes at him.

We stay like that for a while. The wind picks up, and then dies down again. The waves sing to us and the sun hovers over the horizon, casting tangerine over the water in broken bursts of halogen and blood.

He seems to flicker from across the table. His presence twitches, as if the breeze is trying to separate his silhouette from his body. I open my mouth,

“Did I kill somebody?”

*          *          *

I’m back on the park bench. The same one that I sat on when I first visited the inside of my head.

I don’t remember how long ago the riots were, but my broken mental-clock tells me they were a long time ago. Now, I see no riot-police on the streets that throw little metal cylinders that explode into blue auras. Now, all I see are the bombed out buildings and the newly-dead bodies that lay face down in the streets.

The bodies’ chips stopped working. I don’t know what happens to us when our chips stop working, and I’ve never talked to anyone about it.

What do you think happens after we die?

            I’m not sure, do you know what happens after we die?

I asked first.

And?

Do you want to find out?

                                                                        *          *          *

I am not a religious man.

The crumbling stone and marble stands in giant pillars around me, chunks of concrete and conglomerate stone pile the floor. Benches; shattered and splintered. A few stand, as if waiting for the congregation to come back into the sanctum from a long interlude.

I’m stumbling. Twirling, whirling around in the light that streams in from the shattered stained-glass that lines the walls. I can make out some of the religious figures within the panes; maybe Jesus? Maybe God? I’ve forgotten the rest of their names. Their faces are distorted by the spider-webbed cracks that seem to float next to Saints whose names are long forgotten and saviors who have been shattered by the concussive force of the bomb blasts. Haloes and half broken faces and bright red sun, and all I see in their eyes is disappointment; angry, glaring looks.

My foot catches on something, and I fall to my knees in the center space between the shattered wooden seats and the light and the glowering glass faces that tower over me. A giant podium stands before me, empty. And for the first time in my life, I feel the compulsion to pray to it–this false wooden God. The conduit to the sky itself.

I stretch out my arms, and I feel my veins. My skin. My blood and bone, the dirt under my fingernails and the scrapes on my knees from the fall, and I close my eyes. Feeling, just for a moment the breath. My breath.

I hear the remnants of the doors open behind me, cracking slightly on their hinges and scraping the uneven, crumbling floor. I hear his footsteps resonate faintly as his shoes clack towards me. There’s a rustle as he pulls something out of his coat.

I open my eyes, and there’s a little pool of blood pit-patting on the grey, concrete floor where I’ve been kneeling. Dripping down my chin and making a little, crimson puddle. My vision is becoming blurry and something cold screws itself against my temple–I’m holding something.

There’s a metallic clack.

In this moment, you are weak,

And it’s just as easy as pulling the trigger–

but all of your sins shall make you strong,

over and over again.

and they will help you break right through this prison’s walls.

The clicking,

For you and I are one,

The hammer.

and we are one and the same.

And then the–