oblivion whitley | pk

o b l i v i o n .

"The future can't
be real, I
barely know how
long a moment is"

She found me in the den last night crouched behind the desk, fingers over my mouth and one hand gripping my phone too tight.

"There you are darling," she said to me, one hand on her hip and the other dangling by her side.

I watched her quietly, watching the way her face sometimes seemed magnified and sometimes seemed hundreds of feet away. I screwed my eyes up tight and waited for her to settle into position. Just choose one face today, I wanted to tell her, but it's pointless, she does not listen to me. She never does.

"Oblivion," said Fatima, "It's time for your medication."

Resistance is futile. I don't have the strength to fight her. I don't know if I want to. Something in me can't. There's a broken bone inside that never healed properly and it's crooked. She's stronger than me, healthy and lean.

I don't know where I went.

She pulled me to my feet and the room spun so badly that I nearly collapsed against her side. My body felt weak, numb. I didn't drop my phone, I held it tightly, half of me forgetting why it was so important to hold onto, the other half knowing it was my only hope.

My wife wrapped her arm around my waist, supporting me easily. I weigh nothing anymore, I'm likely to float away.

"If you ever need a peacekeeper, call someone else," he said and then I watched him turn and walk out of my life forever. He was in a white uniform and there were fresh stripes on his sleeve. I didn't get to ask him what they meant. There wasn't any time for us.

Sometimes I dream about that.

I can remember his face in perfect detail, the nervous way he'd asked to speak to me before my wedding. His father had been in the room adjacent, listening to the conversation, gun pressed to my father's forehead. The door had been slightly open, just enough for me to see but hidden from Jasper's view.

"I don't love you."

I said that to him.

I wish I hadn't.

Watching Jaspers shoulders fall with hurt, his chest tighten as if I'd just punched him, and tears that I'd never seen him cry before then hurt worse than the idea of his dad shooting my dad in the head.

"I don't love you," I'd said but that was a lie. I was waiting for him to call me out, to tell me I was lying. We both knew I was, I was a terrible liar and Jasper knew it. Something about the way I could never sit still and the way I never stopped smiling should have told him. My stillness and blank expression should have been a tell.

He didn't catch it.

"Oh," he'd said, in a way that sounded as if I'd shot him.

I watched him deflate.

"I never did," I said to him, only when his father released the safety on his gun and the click reverberated in my ears.

"Call someone else."

I was good about that at first. For the first few days I didn't call him once.

I'd stare at my phone at three in the morning and stare at my empty inbox, waiting for anything from him.

"You are not allowed to tell him anything. If he calls you, you don't answer, is that clear?"

I'd nodded. They were clear.

I wanted to hear his voice.

If I could hear his voice, it'd be ok.

My new wife wanted me to sleep with her but I'd never been with a girl before. Jasper was my first love and my only love. I didn't even really remember how it was supposed to work with girls. I was eighteen years old and had just finished crushing myself into the dirt.

She stopped asking after the first few days and started taking it instead.

I'd always been small, a little bit weak.

I'd never really had a growth spurt. In grade ten I'd gone from 5'4'' to 5'5''. I'd never needed to be tall or strong, I'd never worried about it before. Jasper was the strong one. He was tall and safe and warm.

It hurt the first time. She was rough and I was drunk.

The second and third time it hurt too. I struggled. I shouldn't have. She hurt me, turned my eye black.

"Hello," I said softly to Jasper's voicemail at four in the morning, the Tuesday after I was married, "Jasper can you call me?"

"I miss you."

I didn't like the taste of alcohol but I liked the numbness it gave my limbs when they were sore and everything hurt. It made it easier too when my wife wanted to sleep with me. It wasn't so bad then. If I was really drunk I could pretend that I was with Jasper.

When I was drunk I was braver.

I called him more often but I always got voicemail.

"I know you said to call someone else....but can you call me back?"

"I need to explain things to you, I love you."

"Call me back, it was a lie."

"Jasper are you getting these?"

"Hello."

"I love you."

I started to worry.

How was he supposed to know that I loved him if he didn't answer my calls?

I wrote him notes and letters instead, walking to his apartment every few days, sometimes twice a day to slip a letter under his door.

Jasper never read his junk mail or bills, I knew that. I bought special paper and folded it. When touched it would form into a paper crane.

I don't think he read them. I wrote them to him anyway.

"I miss you."

"It was a lie Jasper, your father made me do it. Please call me, I can explain everything if you call me."

The alcohol stopped working.

I stopped working.

I started going to the parties that Jasper and I had never gone to while in high school. They were for the rich, young men and women with nothing better to do but get wasted.

Someone offered me a needle I took it.

Someone offered me a line I took it.

I stopped asking what it was.

It was better like that.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?"

I looked up at him and felt like the entire world was tilting sideways instead of me standing. I was lying on the couch and he was standing on the wall. The floor was the wall instead. They were all dancing on the wall. I wanted to tell them that wasn't how gravity works but I don't think they would have heard me above the music. I could hear him though.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing fucking Oblivion?"

"...I'm not fucking Oblivion," I said to him, "I'm Oblivion?"

Jasper grabbed the needle from my hand and he nearly threw it onto the coffee table in anger. It was littered with empty beer cans and lines and cigarette butts and pipes. "The fuck are you on?" he said and he was angry. I could tell.

I wish I could feel like that. I wish I could get angry.

I thought about it but there was a cinderblock on my chest and all I felt like doing was crying. I couldn't cry at the party.

"I don't know," I said to him.

"You don't fucking know?"

I'd never seen Jasper so angry before. I should have been afraid, apologetic. I raised my hand above my face and stared at my fingers, studying the way none of them stood straight. What had happened to my bones? What had become of them? When I was born they had been perfect and beautiful. Living had changed them, made them different, crooked.

I had become crooked.

"You could be injecting literal poison into your veins," Jasper said to me, still angry.

Good.

I wanted to tell him I was happy.

He was there with me, I wanted to tell him I was glad.

"Stand up Liv."

I was too tired.

I didn't know where my feet were.

"Why?" I said.

"Because I said so."

I sat up slowly and things became strange then. I began to walk on the walls too. I stumbled, tilting towards what used to be the floor, unnerved and confused.

Jasper was gone again.

I thought I saw him leaving, back in front of me, immersed in the crowd. There were stripes on his shoulder, on his brand new white uniform. He'd turned away and said, "Call someone else."

My white rabbit.

My bird.

There was a sculpture in my very first art show. I had been sixteen and on the verge of throwing up from the nerves. Jasper was there, hand in mine as we waited for the doors to open. I didn't know how I was supposed to stand up to society's expectations of what my art should be. I was the child prodigy son of two renowned artists.

"Don't worry Liv," Jasper said, squeezing my hand.

I didn't anymore.

My first piece, a bird made from wire and paper swooped over the heads of the crowd in dips and arcs, dressed all in white with lines on his wings, his feathers drawn on. He was flying.

My bird flew.

I left the party that night, crawling on my hands and knees out to the car where a driver was waiting for me.

I didn't go back to it.

The next day when my wife was running her nails down my chest and tearing my skin open and I was wishing I was drunk I went into the kitchen and drank chocolate milk instead.

"Jeeze Liv, you really like chocolate milk huh?" Jasper asked me when we were ten.

I'd laughed and told him, " 'A course! Mom never lets me drink it so I get it when I can."

I wrote him about that for his note that day, about the chocolate milk at the cafe we always used to go to together on dates. It was my favourite place to get it. We used to sit on the same side of the booth and work on homework together.

"Hello, it's been twenty months since I saw you. Do you miss me? Do you think about me? I think about you all of the time. I think about you so much that it hurts. I hope you're happy and warm. I hope you met someone else and everything is okay for you. I hope you're doing well like your father wanted, that you're a hero. I hope you're helping people like you wanted. You're a good man Jasper. You're the best man I know."

I folded that one into a frog before I slipped it under the door.

I wondered if I wished hard enough, if he'd come.

"Nothing is gonna change how I feel about you."

The sounds of the party were still ringing in my ears, jacket slung over my shoulder as we left his father's fancy dress dinner three hours too early. Jasper held my hand in his and there was a strange feeling inside my stomach, it was a mess of knots.

I felt strange, dizzy.

"Promise?" I asked him.

"Promise," he said.

He'd promised.

I'd stopped sculpting and making art, there was none to make.

There was nothing I wanted to make.

There was nothing anymore except the empty quiet of the house I shared with my wife. The clock in the hall ticked into late afternoon loudly and she was always gone at appointments or events.

I stopped going out.

I'd lie in the dark, one hand wrapped around my phone.

That's all I'd do for hours.

Sometimes I'd imagine my phone was ringing and I'd answer it and Jasper's voice would be there on the other end, tinny and muffled but his. I missed the way my name sounded out of his lips.

I was unable to fathom it anymore, everything I had lost.

"Oblivion, they want another show from you, you have to make something."

I made something more then.

I knelt in the studio I'd rented since I was thirteen and my house had become too small for my projects. Above me stood a marble monument, a white piece of blank rock, staring me straight in the face.

I used to know what they were, the marble pieces. I used to be able to look at them and dig the sculpture out as if it had been there all along. My chisel knew what it was doing better than I did. It always knew.

That was before.

My tongue was dry and heavy in my mouth. I wanted to drink.

My skin was itching for something, for a needle's sting or anything at all but I refused it. My chest was sore. My wife had pressed her palms into it to keep me still, from trying to squirm away as she fucked me.

The sun was set and the light was dim in the studio. I saw the city blinking in the dark out the large windows and I felt heavy. There was nothing left inside me, nothing left to give or take but it was heavy.

I stared at the marble in front of me and I took my phone out. I tried to call jasper.

I got his voicemail again.

Two years of only ever getting his voicemail and I still tried.

"Hey Jasper, me again. It's Liv. It's your Liv......"

I didn't know what else to tell him.

"I'm always yours."

I wanted him to know that.

"Always."

I shut off my phone then, I always did before when I worked. I liked to immerse myself.

I walked over to the door and I slid the bolt, locking it.

I needed to be immersed.

I brought file to marble then, knife to bone and I chipped away at the hinges of the sculpture until it opened up.

I didn't know that it was going to be home emerging from my knife and file but my fingers knew it before I did. There home came, out of the rock, those eyes and that same chiseled jaw. Jasper's face had always been sharp and angular even before puberty. I shaped his curls out of the stone and his eyes, blank and empty came staring out of the rock too.

I worked feverishly, sweat dripping down my forehead and pooling in the space between my shoulder blades. I remember wiping my forehead with the back of my hand and accidentally nicking my arm with the knife.

Blood, red and strange beaded quickly along the line.

My arms shook with exhaustion and I lowered my tools for a moment, fingers flying over the wound.

Marble dust inched it's way inside and it stung.

It was good.

Here was Jasper, coming out of the rock, here he was finally. To punish me, hurt me, speak to me, do anything.

He was here to give me what I deserved.

I took the knife and pressed it against the skin on my inner left arm, drawing a long cruel line. I grit my teeth and a hiss of pain came out with the drawing of my blood. It was good, I deserved it.

I deserved that pain.

I looked up at Jasper's head, still half resting in the rock.

"You hate me, right?" I said to him.

I drew the knife over my skin again, more blood came out. It was red and quick to come. It fell on the white tarp beneath me, dripping slow at first and then quick. It stung. It hurt. I deserved more, worse.

I hated me too.

I'd ruined my life.

I'd ruined my entire life.

I drew a line across my right arm, right up it, long and crooked and deeper than the last.

"If you ever need a peacekeeper, call someone else."

Blood dripped onto the tarp and I watched it fall, strangely happy about it. Finally, there was something happening to me for the first time in years that I could control; I was making it happen to myself.

I drew another line.

Another.

The marble became stained with my blood.

"Oh Jasper," I said to him fondly, slightly drunk, "I miss you so damn much...even if you hate me. I miss you."

I dialed his cell again, sitting down on the floor because my legs were too tired.

"Hello," I told his voicemail, "I think I fucked up again."

My words came out slurred.

"Not the first time...maybe the last ah ha."

It was funny.

I laughed into the phone until the line went dead because the message was too long and then stared at my screen until it blurred.

I was tired then so I slept.

There were sirens after but that was a long time ago and the memory has faded.

"Oblivion," said the man in the white coat, "It's time for your medication."

I opened my mouth and let him place three pills into it. My body moved before I realized, like it had been predetermined. I wasn't sure if my body moved faster than me or if I was moving slower than my body.

I wasn't sure.

He left me alone then and I checked my phone.

No new messages.

I shut my eyes then.

I slipped off the white bench and walked out into the hall, ears catching on an odd beeping sound.

I walked for awhile and then the beeping sound faded and I came across another.

I followed that one instead.

"Oblivion," said Fatima, "It's time for your medication."

I followed her quietly into the bedroom, the floppy white ears of Mr. Bun trailing along behind me. I held him loosely by his stuffed paw in my right hand, my phone was clutched in the other.

"Lay back Oblivion."

I did as I was told and she took my sock off of my foot.

She took a needle and she stuck it between my toes.

I didn't feel it when she started to unbutton my pants.

My head was in the clouds.