Bugs Bite

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Ghosts And Accusations

Ooh, the remorse in the crack of his voice just then. Had Avish never taken her out for a drive, she would still be alive. But how could he believe that? Why should he believe that?

All those times and he had never crashed. It was the man's fault. It was all the man's fault. Everything bad that ever happened was the man's fault. He was always there for cruel moments.

I am always there for you, old friend, the runes on his hat had read.

He will always be there for you, dying Grandma had said.

Yes. And he was there. Evermore and forever. For the vile moments, for events he wished had never occurred in the first place. But he never did anything to stop them. Though he very well could. Avish knew. He knew the man now like the back of his hand.

It was so easy to blame him. He just had to point his finger and say yeah and it was all the man's doing.

And it was justified. If anything ever was, then this was justified.

Had it not been the man inside his head which had led to the accident? Had it not always been the man when something happened? Was he always not there messing up and doing nothing fucking productive?

'. . . Mom said she didn't remember calling the ambulance that night after Dad passed out. I saw you. It was you, wasn't it? Because it's always . . . you. You are the root to every fucking problem I have!'

Another seizure of coughs. Avish heaved himself up on the bed with the support of his arms, but it was a futile shot.

'Protect me, do you? From myself? Well, guess what - fuck you! I just . . . lost my Mom. I've lost everything.'

The man listened patiently.

'Take Antra too, will you? Take the house, kill my friends! Take everything! Will that give you peace?'

The man had to intervene. 'What has to happen, my friend, will always find a way to happen. Irrespective of me, irrespective of you, irrespective of all that any being in the universe conspires. No web can catch a kraken, Avish, and I hope you realize you are accusing me of unimaginable things. Things I would never dream of doing in the dreariest of circumstances.'

'So you dream, do you? I never knew that.'

Avish laughed, but the laugh developed into a rasp, the rasp into a cough, and each cough disgorged a hundred swears.

'You know,' Avish calmly said, 'she always believed in guardian angels. And I always thought that's what you were.'

The man moved - or rather, glided - towards Avish, his feet looking like smoke and never touching the ground, but Avish guessed that was just the medications taking reins.

'Don't you come near me,' he said. 'Don't you fucking dare.'

He tried to sit upright again, failed spectacularly and met with the man's eyes. Or at least his one good eye. There was a pastel shade in there too today, and a ruddy brush of blood grazing the usual seaweed shine.

'You're no guardian angel,' Avish finally said.

And then something unexpected happened. The man's other eye, the left one, the atrocious one, it slowly - Avish could see the effort it took the man to open it - very slowly, dauntingly, slid upward, and Avish saw . . . well, what he saw he did not know, nor did he want to know.

But in future, he would be lying in his bed wondering what it was, exactly, that he saw in there. And conclude that it was, more or less, the man's life represented in an eye. He would realize that the man wasn't only Bhoo, he was called by a lot of other names, innumerable names, by countless different souls. All souls tormented, gaping holes in them that the man was attempting to fill with the wry mud of hope. All souls decaying, dying from within. Avish saw a sickle, bloodied. Figurines of the Jen (whoever they were). Grateful for the man's presence at some point, and later condemning the same. All souls, though divergent and disparaging, ultimately of one essence. The same essence as his own. One of the souls was his. He recognized it, Avish did. It was a golden orb, surrounded by a shapeless, mobile cage; it was a trap you could only enter and never crawl out of.