There comes that awful Sunday afternoon when I find her lifeless body on the chaise longue on the veranda.
Her eyes are open, but she’s dead.
I mean, she’s literally fucking dead. Not breathing. No pulse that I can detect.
I freak out.
Hyperventilating, I drag her off the chaise onto the boards, start to perform CPR as best I remember from the first-aid classes a quarter of a century ago.
One … two … three … How many compressions was it again between breaths? Twenty? Thirty? How many breaths?
I wonder where the hell I left my phone. Nearest hospital must be Colac. Will they send an air ambulance?
‘What are you doing? Please stop. It hurts.’
I leap back so hard, the back of my head smacks the windowsill. I hear a great bell ringing in my skull and see stars, like in one of those old Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Possibly little tweeting birds, too.
She’s sitting up, rubbing her chest, looking at me with concern.
‘Poor Benjy Wabbit! I’m so sorry for frightening you.’
‘Mercy, you weren’t breathing.’
‘Wasn’t I? I’m so absent-minded.’
‘What? You forgot to breathe?!’
‘I didn’t think. I’m too used to living alone. I do leave this lying around sometimes, when I go off.’
‘This? What?’
Go off where?
‘This.’ She opens her arms, looks down at herself.
‘It’s not really mine, you know.’
Ten minutes later, I’ve stopped hyperventilating.
‘You assumed that I’m from this “side”, this plane of existence. It’s a reasonable assumption. But erroneous.’
We’re in the lounge, surveying the damage that my resuscitation attempt has done to her ribcage.
‘So you’re not human. You’re a being from another dimension. R-i-i-ght.’
‘Right.’ She cups and lifts her left breast. ‘Ouch. There’ll be a lot of bruising, but I don’t think you cracked any ribs.’
I force myself to concentrate.
‘Please don’t tell me you’re one of those lizard people, like in V. I really don’t want to find out I’ve been fucking a giant gecko all these weeks.’
‘Don’t worry. If it helps, I don’t have what you would understand as a corporeal form.’
‘Yeah, nah. Doesn’t help at all.’
She looks perplexed; wondering perhaps how to deal with this crepuscular level of dimness.
‘You’re a disembodied intelligence inhabiting some kind of robotic shell?’ I suggest helpfully. ‘I’ve been shagging the Terminator?’
It’s hard to think of a less apt comparison to the form in front of me.
‘Be serious, Benjamin! Mercy was a real person. María de las Mercedes Rivera García was a clinical psychologist, just as I told you. A brilliant one. She helped many people, alleviated a great deal of suffering.’
‘There’s a lot of past tense going on here.’
‘Indeed. Her own suffering was real, too, you see. For years she fought for her life. In the end, the struggle was too much. She decided that she had no further use for this body, this mind. As she slipped out of it, of her own volition, too late to be saved, I slipped in. It’s a good, strong body – rather beautiful, don’t you think?’
She stretches, twirls by way of illustration. There’s no denying it.
‘And an agile mind, a generous soul.’
‘I’ve been screwing a corpse. Well, that’s just great.’
‘Don’t be horrid! I’m as alive as you are.’ She comes close, so close that her gaze is a little cross-eyed, her breath mingles with mine. ‘What you see, what you experience, is part her, part me. Like you, I’m a symbiotic, composite lifeform.’
‘Like me?’
‘Most of the cells in your body aren’t human. Your gut biome’ – she rubs my belly with the back of her hand – ‘is as important for your mental state as what’s in here.’ She strokes my forehead with long, cool fingers. ‘You’re a community which is pleased to think of itself as a unitary “me”.’
‘Sure. I’ve heard that idea before, but it’s … different.’
‘Not as different as you imagine. I know you’re struggling to understand this. Relax, sweetie. Accept.’
‘I’m not the sort of bloke who accepts things he doesn’t understand.’
‘Actually, you are. Humans have to be.’
‘The puny Earthling can’t grasp the complexities of the universe?’
‘Not yet, puny Earthling, not yet.’ She presses my face to her throat, kisses me on the forehead. ‘You’re really in your infancy, as an intelligent species. You’re trying to run before you can walk.’
‘Oh?’
‘Having grasped a few concepts, you’re rushing to apply them to everything, as if they were universal rather than local and particular,’ she whispers, then pauses to worry my earlobe with her sharp little teeth. ‘It leads to amusingly erroneous conclusions.’
‘Such as?’
‘To explain how your empirical observations fit in with the theories your chap Einstein dreamed up, you needed to invent a form of matter there’s no evidence for, and assume that most of your universe is composed of it – that and a form of energy which conveniently also can’t be detected.’
‘So dark matter and dark energy aren’t real?’
‘Well, they’re as helpful for understanding the workings of existence as unicorn poops and fairy farts, let’s put it that way.’ She kisses me on the nose. ‘Remember some time ago I said there are no boundaries, only connections?’
‘I vaguely remember you saying that, yes.’
‘I didn’t just mean in terms of humanity and the biosphere. I meant on a much larger scale. The largest.’
‘I’m not getting you.’
Possibly the understatement of my life.
‘Your scientists, bless their little cotton socks, are proceeding on the assumption that the same laws are applicable everywhere and always. That isn’t the case. There are no real boundaries in the multiverse, Benjamin.’
‘Half a mo. What happened to the separation between the planes of existence? The “other side” we were talking about before? The cracks in the walls you were helping to heal?’
‘That was just a metaphor,’ she says, unbuttoning my shirt. ‘You came up with it, and I went along with it, adjusted it, to help you conceptualise something that’s almost impossible for you to grasp.’
‘So, in reality … ?’
‘In reality, infinite universes with incompatible rules of physics are constantly interacting at all scales from the quantum to the infinite. Existence isn’t a stately dance, a minuet or a waltz. It’s mayhem, a rave where all the party-goers are off their faces on different drugs, listening to different music on their headphones, colliding with each other, sometimes jostling and repulsing, sometimes copulating and reproducing, occasionally murdering and devouring.’
‘Wild.’
‘Indeed. Now, since we’ve brought up the subject …’ She flicks her incisors with the tip of her moist pink tongue, that way she does.
I don’t know who or what you are, Mercy, but if you’re mad, bring on the insanity.
Next week in Blind Spot:
Chapter 15: Progress Report
The final chapter!
Acknowledgement of Country: This story is set on the lands of the Djargurd Wurrung, while the author lives on Wadawurrung country. I pay my respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.
Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction. Characters, institutions and organisations mentioned herein are the product of the author’s imagination. The locations are based on real places.
I knew there was something off about that woman.
Interesting. 👏👏👏.
It’s too soon to announce the final chapter, Steve. 😔