He Is Becoming Unhinged: Part 2 of 2 [Short Story]

Read the first part here

"I used to be somewhat of an Earth historian, Osiris, and back in the day doctors would use leeches to suck the bad blood out of someone."
"Yeah," I said, "I know."
"Do you?" He seemed amused, "Of course it didn't work. Not like their medicine has ever really worked. Now, the concept. The concept was good, but not the execution."
"You seem like you're just trying to confuse me."
"Am I? Listen carefully. We've got to cleanse your blood. The leeches. With the leeches."
"Leeches?"
"Metaphorical leeches. Tell me how you've been feeling."
"Terrible. Can't sleep. Can't eat. And I'm beginning to think I'm going insane. No, not going, already there and deeper in it than I ever want to be. Some nights I can't even look at Sam, because I get this crazy feeling I'm going to open my mouth and something is going to crawl out, something big and spidery, and suck her face off. My skin feels itchy, I've got a constant fever, and last night the ceiling fell on my head. Kept screaming 'the ceiling's falling! the ceiling's falling!' It took Sam a good fifteen minutes to calm me down. Had to convince me the ceiling hadn't fallen. Was in fact, exactly where it was supposed to be."
"Excellent," my psychiatrist said.
"How can any of that possibly be excellent?"
He smiled to show me all his teeth. "I'm sure that it will soon all, ah, fall into place."

This earth doesn't belong to me anymore. This earth is in fact, biting my head off. I watch Samara sleep, and wonder if the pattern of her breathing was always like this, always this up and down and up and down, if her body always sloped and curved and reached the ends of her fingernails as it did now, if she had inherited her body from the Appalachians, if all people just naturally mirrored the contours of the landscapes around them.
I tried to remember where we met. Couldn't remember. I tried to remember if I loved her or the first time we had sex or if we were planning to get married. Couldn't remember. I tried to remember, with her eyes closed, if she had blue eyes or green. Couldn't remember. She became this stranger doll, a sweet but distant skin, her head, even her smell, now seemed so foreign to me. I pressed my body against hers to try to recollect what we were. What we used to be. But my body was thinning, passing right through her. I was losing this body, and as a consequence, I was losing her.

"Why am I here?" I asked my psychiatrist.
"Because we have an appointment. Or did you forget?"
"No, that's not what I meant," I said, "I mean why am I here? On Earth?"
"I can see you're progressing quite well. Asking those questions. Many who have forgotten, such as yourself, resist the change. Cling to their lives here. Congratulations, Osiris, you're destroying your human life with unparalleled ease."
"Just tell me why I'm here."
"You're here to facilitate the immigration. We're trying things a bit differently this time. The last time we tried to move to another planet it ended up being a real mess. Skies on fire. People screaming. Dying. Seas boiling. An apocalypse the biblical would be proud of. We come from a very strange planet. A very warm planet, you see."
"I don't see."
"Of course you don't. Silly of me."
"So we're going to move here, our...species, and all these people are going to die."
"Oh goodness me, I hope not. No. You, like several of your friends, who we've had reborn into human bodies, are going to facilitate the change. Help our two species co-exist together."
"How?"
"Do you know what a portal is, Osiris?"
A portal. Something goes in. Something comes out. It's hard to think of two vast distances being connected inside of you when you're organs, your head, are dissolving bit by bit, but I knew what my psychiatrist meant all the same.
"Yes," I said, "I know. But I don't understand."
"Do I need to spell it out for you? You're my number one portal. One of these days, soon, I'm going to be able to stick my fingers straight through you."

My psychiatrist says in the end everything is going to be all right, everything is going to make sense. I'd like to think I can believe him.

Once at the office I looked down at my keyboard to discover the letters no longer made any sense. I knew that I should know them, had known those letters before, but I could not reach them. Could not touch them. As if they had been there, but were never really real. My tongue rejects the words I know I should be able to speak. I can be talking and it is like I come across huge holes in my memory that cannot be touched. I stop speaking. I crumble in phrases. I crumble.

"Your speech capabilities will come back," he said, "No need to worry about that. Just part of the process."
I wanted to ask where I was ending up, who I would be by the end of this, if I would be anyone at all, but I didn't speak. Couldn't speak.

I once had memories of a mother and father, a German shepherd named Lasso, elementary school, and endless blue beaches. I once had memories of a first kiss, so clumsy I bumped noses, memories of highschool prom where my date told me to stop chewing my nails so much, just like my mom, memories of upturned houses and upside down ships and prayer books that flipped over like dead birds, that prayer I used to pray when it all just seemed too much:

Dear god, make me a stone. Make me a stone.

I say that I once had these memories because recently when I turned back to them I realized they weren't real. None of them were real, because they all felt wrong, broke apart when I examined them too closely, didn't mesh, coalesce. Memories as easily forgotten as the body turning against me.

"I'm having a thought," I told my psychiatrist.
"Well," he said, "That's original, but unfortunately, unnecessary. You're nearing completion of your treatment program, just in time too. We've scheduled integration for ah, next month, it appears."
"And what happens during integration?"
"Don't worry your pretty little head. Just keep taking your medicine. Are you beginning to remember?"
"Remember what?"
"Your past life. Before Earth."
"No," I said, "but then, I can't remember much of anything."
"No matter," he leaned forward, patted my knee, "by next month you'll be rid of this body, and why, then you and the rest of the subjects will be struck by the ten ton hammer of realization. Nirvana."
"Will it hurt?"
"What kind of question is that?"
"Nevermind then."
My psychiatrist rose from his seat and went toward the door. With his hand on the knob he paused, cocked his head like a dog, smiled his odd, off-white smile.
"Osiris?"
"What do you want?"
"Don't be silly, my good man. Of course it'll hurt."

Samara no longer sleeps either. We make hesitant love, if you can even call it making love when your skin is slipping away from your bone, when you can feel yourself sliding away, losing the feel of the body, the skeleton, losing the feel of another. She stands by the window in her black negligee and bare feet, sober and yet completely aware of being sober.
"Elliot?" she asks, and at first I don't answer because I have already forgotten my name. She looks at me. Only then do I realize she wants to speak to me.
"Samara."
"Look out here," she says, "The sky. Did it ever use to be this bright? There seems to be so many more stars."
I want to tell her those aren't stars. Instead I keep silent and swallow the pills.

"Integration is coming," my psychiatrist said, "Aren't you excited? I feel perfectly giddy."
I said nothing.
"Osiris, I said, aren't you excited?"
"I can't feel my fingers."
"Excellent. We're nearing the end here."
"Am I really an alien dissolving false memories, or a human losing all the memories I ever had?"
"I suppose I should say we're nearing the beginning. Yes. The beginning"
"Are you even listening to me?"
"Did anyone ever tell you you're too much of a worry wart?"
"Tell me you're at least listening to me."
"Of course I'm listening. I'm your psychiatrist. And soon you'll see all your fears are unfounded."
"I'll see that I'm really not human? I'll regain my real memories?"
"No," he said, smiling, "You'll see that when you get right down to it doesn't really matter either way."

Samara tells me one night that the stars are falling.
"Sam," I say, "Why did you stay with me for so long?"
"Come over here," she says, pushing back the window curtains, "Look, in the distant. All those little explosions. And the sky. It's so bright. Never seen it so bright. Is this like a lunar-eclipse? A backwards lunar-eclipse."
"No," I say, "I think it's the end of the world."
She turns to look at me for a brief moment. Turns back toward the window.
"Sam."
No reply.
"Sam, why do you stay with me?"
No reply.
"You know," I said, "I think I've always felt disconnected from people, like there is this black blur separating us. I always thought if I got close to someone that blur would focus in, that I wouldn't feel like that anymore. But the darkness between us never really goes away."
No reply.
"Why do you stay with me?" I asked again, "is it because it's easy? The safe thing to do?"
"Well," she says without looking at me, "I love you. I suppose."
"You suppose?"
No reply.

It doesn't matter. I'm slipping too far away. The stars are falling out of the sky, exploding in the earth, making the windowpane glow, making her face glow. I leave the room while I still have control of my feet. A portal, my psychiatrist says, I am a portal, and as I leave the apartment and nearly fall down the concrete steps to the parking garage, I can only think it's about goddamn time. I leave the parking garage and stumble into the city. The burning city. I'm falling. No, this body is falling, unsticking from the bone, becoming boneless, I am becoming boneless, losing beat, pace, structure, carcinogen, medulla. The stars make the skyscrapers shimmer before impact. No, not stars. Not stars anymore. Ships.

My psychiatrist finds my body shivering bird-like on the concrete. I want to tell him the name he gave me, Osiris, doesn't make any sense. Doesn't make any damn sense, because I was never put back together again, just taken apart, pared away, but I can't speak. He sets his briefcase down on the concrete beside me. Rubs his hands together.

"Osiris," he says, "It's nearly time. A new beginning. It's like spring time. Ah! Gorgeous."

They are coming through me, he says, their world is coming out through me. I can see the gray snow capped peaks of that dying planet from a thousand solar systems away, I can see the oceans crashing and burning on the shores beneath my stomach. My world is being pulled into me, Appalachians and Ancient History museums, blue skies drawing themselves into my eyes, dusty American roads and Southern valleys sloping down into my bones. Integration, he says, immolation. People run past me in the streets. Cars stop. People gape. At the end, they're just going to gape. Integration. Did he say integration? Immolation. The world is coming through me. Spinning, pushing past my fingertips, peeling my skin.

"Osiris? Can you speak anymore? Don't just lay there, come and explore our new world."

I have no body, yet I cannot remember what I was without it.

"Oh, dear me, you can't speak, can you? Not to worry. Bodies are terrible things, separate us from the consciousness of our planet. Without a body, we'll be free. All of us. It'll be so much better. You'll see."

I am floating. I am trying to make my lips move but they do not belong to me anymore, they belong to the stars flaking off my eyes, my skin, the bounce glow of sunsets turning gray.

"It'll be so much better. You'll see."

Dear god, make me a stone. Make me a stone.

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