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1 – again and again

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Even before the Terminal was finished, it was bringing things to the town. At least, that was how it felt, when the construction sites began appearing. Places that had seemed permanently etched into the town, that would always be there, places that I hadn’t realized I would miss or ever have to miss, vanished overnight, and in their place left promises, planted like seeds all around us, promises that would inevitably be broken when the money that didn’t exist ran out. When that happened, the building sites were left to fester and rot, the construction work not valuable enough to continue, while the land it stood atop was too valuable to sell. The buildings they replaced never returned, and all that remained were skeletons of phantom buildings, lying abandoned throughout the town.

One of these building sites stood near the seashore, close enough that you could feel the sea breeze on your skin, but far enough from the docks that the noise from there blended with the other sounds of each day. I used to go there a lot. Me, and quite a few others. I’m not sure how it started, exactly – one person found it, told another, and then it spread. I remember how it was explained to me, the first time I went there. Me and some others were taken by someone from another class – the same age as me, but an Older Brother, who never stopped being so even when apart from his siblings.

"It’s not like a site where they’re still workin, and it’s not like a place that’s finished.” He said, trying to explain the importance of the place. “There’re no rules for kind of place this is. It’s like...it’s different.”

Even back then, it was obvious that his explanation was practiced, rehearsed and passed down, added to each time. Why it had never actually become an explanation in that time was anyone’s guess. I couldn’t judge, I think I said the same thing to someone else, when I came with them at another time. Besides, it felt true. The place hummed with a kind of different possibility, where things could be done that weren’t normally done. Normally, it was drinking. It’s where I had my first beer, choking it down over the course of an entire evening, trying and failing to pretend that it wasn’t making me sick to my stomach. I tried smoking for the first time there, too, and did an even worse job at keeping my cool. I saw people have sex for the first time there – real sex, not on a screen – and fear kept my cool for me, in that instance. And it was the first place I saw someone scratch a door into a wall with a piece of rock, open it, and step through.  

That first time, though, the vibration that ran through the stonework and up my spine was something I found unnerving, uncomfortable. I was too young to really understand what it meant, and far too immature to make proper use of it. While one of the people I came in with had their first beer, I wandered around awkwardly, looking for a place to slot myself into that I had never found in these people at school or outside of it, as if just being here would magically change myself or them.

In the end, on one of the unfinished half-rooms on the ground floor, I found a dirty, plastic table that someone had dragged in from outside, covered in stains that I couldn’t identify. I sat at it, alone, searching my pockets for a deck of cards that I had brought with me, hoping that someone would see them and come over with their own deck, and save me the agony of having to ask the others here if anyone still played a card game that everyone in school had collectively grown out of years beforehand. When I couldn’t find it, I looked up, and found myself looking at a police officer sitting opposite me, staring out from his gas mask through wide, opaque lenses.

The taste of dust lingered in my mouth, and my joints ached as if recovering from exercise I don’t remember doing. My fingers were the worst: stiff, painful to stretch out from their resting place, still coiled around some phantom thing that they once held. Further down from that, there was a dull, persistent ache beginning in my wrists and travelling up my arm, pressing inwards near my shoulder, but that, at least, faded the more my thoughts lingered on it. I felt like my body had been awake, moving or being moved on its own, but that I hadn’t kept up with it - that I had been asleep at the wheel.

The place my body had brought me to was cold and bare: there were the suggestions of presence, but it was all façade. The table I sat in front of was almost bare, and had none of the stains of its twin that I had sat in front of moments and years ago. It was occupied only by a slim folder the police officer was idly browsing through. A noticeboard hung on the right wall, but without notices. Most of the left was taken up by an enormous mirror, reflecting the bare room, but with a traffic light, blinking its yellow light on and off, inside it.

I knew that that place and time where I sat on that table in the construction site was a long time ago, but I felt that I was just there, a few moments ago, with as much certainty as I felt that I was now in what looked for all the world like an interrogation room I had seen on cop shows. It didn’t feel like a memory, and I didn’t feel like I was a child then, but neither did I feel fully like an adult now. In both moments, I felt the same, the years between that moment and this one feeling as inconsequential as the seconds between the heavy exhales through the police officer’s mask.

“You aren’t in any trouble.” came the voice from across the table, a voice run through with a kind of affected, artificial depth that disguised any authenticity beneath it, but kept the serrated edges of the threat alive. I wanted to speak – felt I should speak – but any voice I had was at the bottom of a deep well inside me, far from my body, which sat trembling on a seat that felt painfully familiar to the one I sat in this morning, a time that felt so far away from where I was now. When was this morning? How many days or years had it been?

I felt sick. I wanted to vomit, but all I could do was cough. It hurt.

The police officer did not react. “Ray?” he asked.

“What?” I responded. It took effort, and it came out rough, but the fear of what would happen if I didn’t respond.  

“Your name. Ray.” He paused, then clarified. “R-E. With an accent. How do you pronounce that?”

“No, I…I’m sorry, there must be some mistake.” Each word cut against my throat as I forced it out, but each one cut less, each time. “That isn’t my name.”

“You said it was. When we asked.”

Ice froze my veins. I certainly didn’t remember doing that, but it felt like I had been parachuted into a body that had been acting of its own accord for some time now. I didn’t know what it had done without me.

“No!” The panic filled my voice, and I strained to bring it back down. “I’m sorry, I don’t…that’s not my name. There might be some mistake.”

Saying that felt like a far more terrible mistake. There was nothing to see in the police officer’s mask, and looking into the eyes only felt like I would drown in them, so I pulled my eyes away, and searching for something else to look at, and found the mirror. I saw someone sitting exhausted and panicked sitting across the way from the cop, an image I had seen so often on TV, one where other cops would be waiting and judging an interrogation like this behind a two-way mirror just like this. I realized very suddenly what I had found myself in, and I forced down a dry heave.

“Hey, we’re just trying to make sure everything is straight. Ok?” the cop said.

“I know, it’s…I swear, it’s not my name.”

“Why did you say it was, then?”

I had no answer. My stomach churned, and I felt the sensation of invisible fingers around my throat, not choking, but pressing, enough to make their presence constantly known. My eyes watered.

“I…I don’t remember. I swear.”

I thought I could hear something like a laugh from inside the mask. The officer turned to face the mirror, as if making an aside glance to an invisible audience. I followed their gaze, back to the mirror, as if I could see whatever they were seeing. What I saw instead was something stranger: blurred images emerging from the me in the mirror, like afterimages in reverse, and a darker blur over them, moving faster, with confidence. The first blur became clearer the more I looked into it, and I realized that I was looking into another image of myself, but one where my clothes were even more ragged, and as the image solidified, I saw a raw, purple welt on this other me’s cheek. There was a kind of snap, and I felt myself being pulled at a speed I didn’t understand, like a cord wrapped around my neck pulling taught, and in the space between one second and the next, I was dragged through minutes until I caught up with the other image of myself, lying on the floor, a sharp ache throbbing in my cheek. I looked up, through a gap in the floor between several of the floors of the construction site. Near the top, I saw the police officer, staring down at me, and soon he was joined by others on the other floors, a sea of eyes burning into me with looks of concern, disgust, and bemusement. I saw my own face among them.

I slowly climbed to my feet. My head pulsed with throbs of pain in time with my heartbeat. I could feel myself wanting to cry, but I forced it down. That was the last thing I wanted everyone at school to see. I looked down, at the little crack in the stonework beneath me, and the blood that spilled from it. I saw it from a different angle, before, but the sight of it still made me want – need – to be sick. I stumbled backwards, through a doorway, and tried to throw up, but painfully dry-heaved instead, the phantom fingers around my throat having followed me from the interrogation room.  

I had been coming to the construction site for nearly two years at this point, and had grown used to the rhythms of it. Sometimes people got hurt, sometimes badly hurt, but there was a strange kind of elasticity to the injuries people tended to get. They were funny, and always healed, never leaving any lingering damage. I remembered that I had seen someone break their arm here, something that I had only ever been aware of in the abstract, something that happened in the past when arms showed up in casts to school the next day. A friend, Rowan, had found these exposed metal rods buried into walls on one of the upper floors, arranged into a kind of ladder that bridged up into a floor that had no stairs leading to it. He tried to climb it, but one of the rods snapped under the weight of his foot, and his arm caught one of them on the way down.

It wasn’t the sound of cracking that unnerved me. I had expected that, imagined that, when I saw all those casts. It was the way his arm was after it, bent into a shape I had never seen in another arm. That vibrating sense of possibility ran its finger up my spine, and I shivered. I didn’t think bodies could do that. I didn’t think they could be that. I wanted to touch his arm, find the point where the broken bone connected to the others. Seeing it didn’t feel like it was enough – I needed to feel it, to understand that it was still a part of him – how it was still a part of him.

Why was I thinking about that now? I looked down at my arm. It wasn’t broken, not bent in that kind of way, but there was a dull ache in it. I felt the same as I sat with Ronan waiting for his lift to arrive, my head filled to bursting with scenarios where my arm broke like that, trying to shake away the goosebumps I felt imagining each one. I looked back through the doorway I stumbled through, at the crack in the floor, and the blood sinking into it. I remember when I looked down at this before, the last time I was in this moment. I didn’t remember everything I had thought and felt then, only the feeling of noise created when all those thoughts melted together. Seeing that sight again, I pulled two things out of the cacophony of that memory: the strange feeling of sadness that the body that fell had not twisted or changed in the way Rowan’s had, and the feeling of total fear at the police officer.

I felt a hand grab at my arm, in the same place where the ache lingered, and felt myself pulled, and put back in the chair in the room. The police officer walked around the table, and stood back in the chair.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

It was the question he had asked so far that I felt least capable of answering.

“I don’t know what happened.” I confessed.

“You fell.”

Bullshit, I thought, feeling the left side of my jaw throb with pain, the lingering aftermath of a punch that I hadn’t felt, but my tight throat held the words down. I was surprised at the anger. I had brought something with me, back from the construction site: the vibration lingered in my chest, and I felt a kind of energy that rose beneath my fear.

“If you aren’t ‘Ray,” the cop began, “then why were you saying that when the first responders found you?” The words “first responders” struck me, and left a tiny bit of lucidity. “You were still saying it when they handed you over to us. Over and over.”

For the first time, I seriously began to consider what was actually happening. My first thought was that this was about the crack the boy left in the sculpture, that I had been caught at the scene of vandalism. But all of this was starting to feel so much more serious than that. Even though the thought of it coming through the respirator of the cop in front of me was wrapped in this intense, barbed, wrongness, the need for some kind of solidity won out. I did my best to explain how I was feeling, and to ask the cop what had happened. He was silent for a moment after that, and not for the first time, I thought about how much I hated these masks that cops wore now, how it was impossible to read any kind of expression or thought on their face. Finally, he turned a few pages on the file in front of us.

“Earlier today, there was an explosion at the transport terminal.” I felt like another explosion had gone off in my chest. “You were found near what we believe was the epicentre of the blast, conscious. You wouldn’t respond to questions other than repeating the word ‘Ray’. First responders took you into custody, and you were brought here. You understand?”

No, was the first thing I thought to say. All of this felt less and less understandable, less and less real. I had dozens of questions in my head, all of them merging into a familiar kind of noise. I sorted through them, trying to force one out.

“Was anyone hurt?”

“Yes.”

The explosion in my chest fell into the pit of my stomach.

“You think I did this?”

“Just curious.”

“I wasn’t involved.”

“That’s for us to decide, don’t worry.”

There was no disguising how badly I wanted to be sick, now. My breaths came hard and fast while my fingers tried to curl into the table they rested on, looking for any kind of grip and finding none. I was sliding out of myself, out of awareness, becoming distant. I wondered if this is how I had felt before. When I didn’t respond for another few moments, the police officer flipped to another page of the file and turned it around to show me.

“Do you recognise this?”

My body leaned forward, tentatively. It took a few seconds to realize that I saw the terminal inside the photo, the same place where the sculpture stood. Some parts were recognizable, and I saw more of it the more I looked, but the shape of it, the impression it left, had changed. Someone had scratched away the surface, leaving only the skeleton of the building beneath. Or a construction site. On the ground, among scattered pebbles, in front of where the sculpture once stood, I saw a crack in the ground, and a mark, spreading from it. My first instinct told me what it was, but I pushed that thought as far back down as I could. I forced my eyes away from the familiarity and fell upon graffiti that wasn’t there either in the Terminal or the construction site. Dark paints made hands made of indistinct, ugly materials in the shape of other hands, each one holding each other in their grip, and above them there was a perfect, smooth sphere, made of glittering white. Even though I was sure I hadn’t seen it before, I felt a pang of longing familiarity as I looked into it that turned more painful the longer I stared.

I was drawn to it. Reaching my hand out to touch it, I ran my fingers across the paint, still a hint of wetness lingering on my fingers as they pulled back from it. The officer said something, but I couldn’t hear it. All I could hear was the sounds of the docks in the distance. I looked down at my fingers, and saw that they were shaking, their tips pale, cold crawling down them and through my palm.

No. Not cold. Something else.

I felt an impact against the back of my neck, that came so quickly that the pain trailed behind the movement, only arriving after it had slammed and pressed me up against the wall, already replaced by stinging pain running through my jaw. I opened my mouth to scream, but the arm pressing against the back of my neck pressed harder, and all I could let out was a desperate, choking gasp. Realizing I couldn’t breathe, I tried to push my hands against the wall, needing to get away from it, but everything I did just made the arm at the back of my neck press harder and harder, and eventually, a hand came and pinned one of mine to the wall. My throat getting tighter and tighter, I found my remaining free hand moving towards my head, trying to force itself between my head and the wall, and then across my own head, reaching for the arm behind me, feeling my own arm growing more and more limp the further it drifted from me.

There was a lightness in my head, and a lightness outside of it. That’s where I was, away from that moment, away from that body. I was here the last time I was here, when it was still a construction site, but now a definitively abandoned one, the rules having become as concrete as the lingering foundations, and the vibration long gone away. I still went, occasionally, but I was the only one. That’s why I went – to be alone. On the last day I did, a couple of weeks before I left for university, I climbed to the tallest part of the site I could. I felt light-headed there too, as if I was high enough that the air had thinned out, even though I was only a few stories up. Walking closer to the edge, the feeling left my body. I wasn’t there, anymore. I could feel myself, my body, somewhere far, far away. I remember smiling then, but now, in that moment, all I could feel was the pressure on my throat, the suffocation. I hadn’t gone anywhere at all. I was going to die in the same place I had been born. How could I ever have been stupid enough to think it would go any other way?

My vision blurred. I didn’t know whether it was through tears, or for lack of air. I just knew that my feelings blurred with it, and I didn’t mind it. Shapes in my eye grew indistinct, shapeless. The view from the top floor, the blood-filled crack on the ground, the table beneath my cheek, all became one, and I went with them. Except for one thing: a tightness in my chest, starting inwards and pushing outwards.

Maybe it’s what made me push too.

As I did, the hand holding mine against the table let go, and I lunged backwards, sitting up in the chair, taking in deep, hungry, desperate breaths. Feeling rushed back into me, slowly, and awareness wasn’t far behind. It caught up with me just in time to see the cop sit back down in his chair in front of me, adjusting his uniform.

“Are the injuries from the blast causing you pain? We could get you some painkillers, if you like.”

I reached my hand up, past hair covering my eyes, and felt something drip down my forehead. I looked down at the photograph, still on the table. The hands in the graffiti were stained with blood, old and dried. I glared across the table at the cop and said nothing. I rubbed the drip away as it fell across my cheek, mixing it with tears.

“I don’t recognize it.” I said, glaring at the cop. My voice was scratchy, croaky, but steady, steadier than it had been since I first came here.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“If you cooperate, we can get this over and done with so much faster.”

“I am cooperating. I’m telling you the truth. I don’t know what happened, and I don’t know who did it. I didn’t even know there was an explosion until you told me. Ask a question I know the answer to, and I’ll answer it. Anything else, all I can say is the truth, which is that I don’t know.” Words came up through my head, like I was remembering them, even if I had never said them myself. Maybe they came from one of those cop shows I felt like I was in right now. Whether it was smart or not, I spoke.

“Am I under arrest?”

The silence that followed was almost as suffocating as when the cop was choking me, and seemed to last for far longer.

I thought of the boy’s smile again, and I felt the pressure in my chest press tighter.

Finally, there was a long, exhale through the cop’s mask. They closed over the file in front of them and stood up. “Listen carefully.” He said, and I did. “You aren’t being charged, for the time being. However, your movements, from this moment forth, will be watched. You are not permitted to leave the town, and attempting to do so will be taken as a sign of guilt. We’ll have another conversation soon.”

I didn’t respond. The cop didn’t wait for one, either.

“We acknowledge that you accept and understand the situation, and the potential consequences, especially if you do not immediately contact us with information about what we are treating as suspected dissident action. Failure to comply will result in you being treated as an affiliate of said dissident action.”

Again, I said nothing, but the droning continued on as if I had. Despite all the threats, I could feel my heartbeat calm, adrenaline dissipate inside me. The bruise on my cheek beneath my eye and wound above my forehead throbbed with pain, but more than that, I felt the same suffocating heat from the morning. It was the first time I felt like all of that happened this morning, and not a long time away from now. When it was time, I let myself be taken out of the room, and the exhaustion that I had been fighting back hit me the instant I passed beyond that threshold. I moved like I was on strings through the station, barely understanding or feeling what was happening around me, taking in only impressions, snatched words and statements, before finally being left alone in a waiting room with a couple dozen others.

When the cop had told me that there had been an explosion at the terminal, I didn’t doubt him. It felt real, it felt true. But the building I was led through didn’t feel or look like somewhere managing the aftermath of a bombing. I didn’t know what that was supposed to look like, admittedly, and given that I hadn’t been in one in a decade, I didn’t really know what ‘normal’ looking like for a police station, now. The officers moved about at a leisurely, measured pace, and hardly looked like they were rushing to manage a disaster, though who knews what they looked like under those masks. There were other people in the waiting room, some looked tired, some looked hurt, but all of them were silent. I sat with them. Did I look like them, like I hadn’t survived a bombing? I wanted someone to panic, to scream and shout, to do something urgent, to make me feel like something had happened, and I didn’t know why. Maybe I just wanted something to distract me from the heat. I hadn’t even registered until now that I was still wearing what I was wearing back at the Terminal, the shirt clinging uncomfortably to my body through pools of sweat.

How was I going to get home? I felt like I could barely walk, and I couldn’t afford a taxi. Would taxis even be running, if a bomb had gone off? Would the trains? Why wouldn’t anyone tell me what I was supposed to do? Why wouldn’t anyone help me?

I reached into my pocket, looking for my phone, and breathed a sigh of relief I didn’t know I was holding in when I found it. Its battery had died, but at least I hadn’t lost it. In a way I was glad it had died: who was I going to call? I didn’t have any friends who lived here. Everyone was back at university, or in other places. I knew one person who had a car and could possibly drive down from the city and take me home, but I knew I would never call them. I didn’t want them to see me like this and I didn’t want to see him like that. And the idea of calling my parents and having them pick me up from the police station tore my stomach into ribbons from too many different directions.

Instead, I just waited, either for an answer, or for someone to tell me to go. I sat listening to the sounds of murmurs around me, but not any of the words. I looked at a tv that was on in the waiting room without watching it. On the screen, a talk show host sat at a desk, speaking to a man dressed in astronaut outfit, sitting on a sofa. His helmet was as reflective as a mirror, and through it, I could see a sea of empty seats. From the tv, someone said that they had come to help, but something had gone wrong, or that something was wrong with the place they were in. I think they said something about gravity, that the gravity was too heavy. I remember them saying that they were supposed to say things, teach things, but they had forgotten all of it. They had become full up of other memories and had lost all their own. They said that they didn’t want to die. The astronaut clapped. The interviewer laughed and asked another question.

I think that’s what I heard. I don’t remember the words. Some things are hard for me to remember whether I’m remembering them or imagining them. Maybe I was just dreaming. I felt like I was always slipping in and out of awareness, on the verge of drifting off to sleep, before I felt a pang in my chest, and jolted into lucidity for a few more precious seconds. Every time, I thought I heard the voice of the boy from the terminal.

The-way-things-are is only what we call the disappointments we have accepted.

It’s a bomb.

Can I show you what I mean?

 The words kept echoing, the voice becoming more and more familiar each time. I didn’t know whether I was learning or remembering.

An officer eventually came to tell me I could go, but not without reiterating what the cop in the interrogation room had told me. It could even have been the same cop, for all I could tell. I nodded dumbly, unable to do anything else, and stumbled out alone.

It was night, now – actually night, with the sun having gone down as far as it ever did now, which meant that at least 12 hours had passed since the interview. Since the explosion. The entire day had vanished, eaten up by whatever the boy was carrying in his bag. The air was hot, and the rain fell in these short, warm drizzles. I hadn’t realized just how much I had been craving the simple taste of fresh air until that moment. It was like waking up from a dream I had forgotten I was having, or climbing out of my own grave – I felt rejuvenated, alive for the first time in hours.

I made it just across the street to a bench before I collapsed into it.  

I sat there for some time, breathing in and out, thinking about nothing else. I was too tired for that. I don’t know how long I sat there for, but it was long enough for the night to get a little darker. It was only when my breathing slowed, became more relaxed and measured, that I heard the distant sounds of the docks, and realized where I was.

The bench I sat on faced the police station that I had just stepped out of. It starkly reflective, covered in windows polished into mirrors, divided by lines of concrete. But years ago, the bench faced an abandoned construction site in the exact same place. I had never been inside this police station before, so I had no way of knowing from inside. I hadn’t come back here since I moved back here after university, just like I had never gone back to any of those old places I used to frequent, terrified of being recognized as a failure that had come slouching home to die, even by the brickwork. It was stupid to expect that it would remain an abandoned construction site forever; this kind of thing is what it was always meant to be, and yet, it felt...wrong. It felt like something had been taken, something important, and ground up into nothing. Every moment of possibility every night spent at that place was replaced with something that made me feel like this. And what was the point of it anyway?

The things I felt in that moment were stupid. I knew they were. This was just a place we used to play, when we were kids. It was nothing more than that. But I needed that nothing. But I still felt angry. I still felt my nails digging into my palm as I clenched a fist, pressing them in deeper and deeper until the skin was left indented, reddened and tender. The tightness in my chest had burst free, had spread to every part of my body, and I finally recognised it for what it was, or what it used to be. That same feeling of possibility that I felt every time I went here, that had brought me through school and into university, that I thought I lost back there. It had just changed, mutated, rotted into the peat of the bog that remained inside my chest. And now it felt like it was everywhere, now it felt like it was alive. Now it felt alight.

The boy I met this morning had caused an explosion. He had hurt people. He might have killed people. The thought of that made me afraid. But I thought about the cop who had left my face throbbing with pain that made thoughts difficult, about the people who built things like this in places like this, while the time we all had left was numbered more in days than anything else, and it made me want to hurt them almost as much as it made me afraid of them.

When did he stop being so afraid, that he was able to do what he did this morning?

Burning. That was the word he had used. That was how it felt. I just didn’t have a word for it, before now.

I was burning, and I needed to know if he was too.  

But I was also tired, and I felt like I was experiencing my next six hangovers all at once. I didn’t want to stand, and I really didn’t want to walk. But I wanted to sleep here much less than either of those, especially with the police station right in front of me, so I forced myself up anyway. I looked up at the moon through the holes in the construction site scaffolding, before I started the walk home.