She Hit Me and It Felt Like a Kiss

She Hit Me and It Felt Like a Kiss

ONE

The world must be gone because no one’s crying anymore. The sobs became drier, then disappeared. I heard every snuffling face get yanked away, thrown up into the acid clouds or smacked down into the acid seas. I want nothing more than to hear someone wish they’d never been born, gasping to draw breath so they can curse existence. I would guess I’m becoming deaf, maybe becoming dead, except the final sound was the fading whoosh that came just before the everlasting silence began. If a gigantic pane of aluminosilicate glass slides free from the highest tower’s window, I’ll long to hear that reinforced crystal shatter even though it will just fall into the void forever.             

If I didn’t suddenly hear my teeth start chattering, I wouldn’t even know I’m frozen but alive. Sudden buzzing, fuzzing sounds surround me. Now noise rattles every part of me even though I don’t know where I am. Now I have a headache that feels permanent and everything is cold.

#

I watch a small bot’s spindly legs amble in through the missing window. It blinds me with crisp light and takes video even though I don’t remember being famous. I’m lying in a high-end hotel suite but don’t recognize the layout and this doesn’t seem like my place. I’m fuzzed on who I am, fuzzed on what I’ve been doing. The officer is fascinated by my ignorance of my own recent whereabouts. She waves someone over and makes him check my wound even though she looks like she wants to kick my face. She says she’s Dr. Elija, so I’m unsure how much of her interrogation is criminal versus how much of her interrogation is medical. I had the best buzzing headache ever. Now that I’m suddenly aware it’s a wound and not just blinding pain, my fun has dried up. I reach to rub my brand new wound, but I can’t figure out where my buzzing head has gone.

“I can’t find my head.”
“You say you don’t know where you are or where you’ve been.”

It isn’t a question, so I don’t answer. I can’t tell if she thinks my innate zombie nature is an act or just fancy packaging that hides my gooey center. I’m having trouble seeing out of my left eye, so there are two of her. Both of her have on similar black leather corset dresses and are wearing matching red visors. The twin that is farther away is loftier, more imbued with madness, and has wavier dark hair. Maybe the tall, farther away twin has been chewing on static. The expression resonating without meaning, I can’t remember what chewing on static is.

“Ow,” I say as a medic tries to do something to my forehead near my left temple. I say, “Ow,” again, louder. He’s so close to me he’s blurry. I can feel him shake. I’m comforted knowing the medic guy’s as cold as I am. Or maybe he’s worrying I’ll die on him. I’m alone on most of the shit going down, but medic guy understands that frostbite is descending to infect us all. Or understands he’s about to keep me company while I go numb and don’t come back. Number one when shit’s going down involves letting someone else know. Number two involves going down with the shit.

“He needs to be evaced,” says the medic.
“He needs to be everything-ed,” says Dr. Elija.

Then both versions of her angular body come toward me. She doesn’t bend at the waist. She cocks sideways at the hip, fast like a lunge. I flinch as she comes in, but all she does is say, “Rushed staples, a mess of glue, and a wire hanging out of your head. You’re going to lose that eye. You’re going to learn to hate me when you wake.” As somebody touches me, I hear her say, even harsher but not to me, “Get this soldier out of this depressurized icebox. Now!”

She doesn’t mean I’m a soldier. She means she’s a soldier. I am not Dr. Elija, I just know it, even though I don’t know much at all.

I’m passing out again, my new forte.

#

If you told me I was on a skimmer ducking out of the tower and down toward a trauma center in the warrens, I would’ve asked you why I was drowning in milk. I would’ve sprayed bubbles and told you that the milk was being treacherous. We would’ve all had to wonder what the fuck we were doing in a burning rowboat. I would’ve told you that the worst thing I’ve ever done, ever, was… Shit, even if I were ten times more lucid, I don’t think I could tell you much about what I’ve done. I would make things up and then try to blame the milk, maybe tell you that there was magic blood in the milk and that’s why the milk could catch on fire, but I would be stalling for air. We would row and row until the froth made it impossible to breathe.

I would try to picture her, but her face looks like a red balloon that has just been trained how to kill. I don’t know who she is or who I am, so an unfamiliar pattern is becoming familiar.

#

I keep asking how long I was out. Eventually, when the guy tells me “Day Eight” for the sixth time, I realize he has been telling me over and over. I thought he was asking me the “date” I arrived, as if I was supposed to somehow know what day it was or what day it should be. He seems misshaped, dwarfed or scrawny. I don’t know how long he was waiting there. There aren’t any cards or flowers or get well jugs of champagne adorning my miniscule sickbay. I’m tied down and the tiny enclosed space is dimly lit. I can move, but only side-to-side in a way that’s not going to get me out of the bed. I figure there’s an IV and a catheter in me but I can’t really tell.

I try to remember anything from before and can’t shake any recollections from the frozen block that is my head. I tell myself that some memories have to be inside somewhere. I try to convince myself that it’s nice to have forgotten whoever I was and everything I’ve done, but that doesn’t fool me either. Considering how ignorant I am of who I am, it’s surprising how I appear to suck so hard at fooling myself. So I decide to sleep some more, hoping a fuzzy nightmare will snuggle up to my ear and tell me who I am.

Daria recognizing patterns of code in static.