Ghosts

Written by Anakin McFly

two men sit by glass windows at sunset
light flaring gold on the still waters of the lake
rippled gently by breeze.

on the table between them: two glasses of wine
from Sutton's vineyard, sweetly dark on the palate
as night falls.

"he's still out there," one says, his eyes
distant with mute madness. He whispers: "I can feel him."

Alex has never seen him like this before.

The desperation when he turns to him breaks his heart: that he should ever look to Alex that way, seeking assurance, seeking comfort, as though Alex were an equal, a mentor even; not a creation.

Alex doesn't know what to say. He has nothing more to offer than his presence, and he tries to convey that it'll be all right. But the role is ill-fitting, blasphemous even, that he should be the one to do so.

How can you feel him? he wants to ask; but stranger things have happened, and he still doesn’t – perhaps none of them do – fully understand the strange connection that bond each of them to him. And Neo... Neo was special. Not just in his powers and his destiny, but in what he had meant to the actor, and the ineffable bond that developed between them in the last days. Some part of the actor had died with him. Alex was sure of that.

“I hear him screaming,” the other man continues, and he’s shaking, the empty wine glass trembling in his hand. “What if he’s in pain?”

Alex reaches out and gently takes the glass from him. He sets it down on the table next to his own, and then he just looks at him, not knowing how to answer these questions, how to be the steady one, here, when his creator is broken beside him, clinging onto the last threads of sanity and warmth in Alex’s house. It’s the one place he can talk about this death. It’s the one place that makes it at once so painfully real, and yet offers an understanding he will get nowhere else for grieving the death of somebody who was not supposed to exist. He cries out at the void his departure left behind and the scar it scorched across his heart; for he had loved Neo like none of the others, and no amount of fictional justification could make it right, not when he wakes each night with that screaming in his mind and his skin stinging with ghostly chill.

“Neo?” he sometimes gasps, in those moments when the presence feels so real. Nothing ever answers, nothing even as tangible as in childhood memories of white-breasted jackets floating in for a moment to share his realm, nothing but an acute sense of a fragmented soul without a body racing feral through code, through the Matrix, through the distance between them, struggling to reform itself into a whole that, perhaps, could never be again.

(but the Oracle said...)

He gets up from his chair in restlessness. Drawn to the windows, he places his palm against the cool pane and tries to lose himself in the textures of this foreign world. Alex follows quietly after to his side. In the glass, their reflections, superimposed over the living lake: Alex composed, clean-shaven, put together, and next to him an older, scruffy twin, hair wild and uncombed, his quietly pained face starting to show evidence of its many seasons.

Alex drops his gaze and places a comforting hand on the other man’s back. It helps if he doesn’t look at him – if he doesn’t remember who he is, imagines he’s just another friend, a stranger – but then the trembling body beneath his hand heaves with a gasping release of tears, and suddenly Alex is holding him as he cries.

“Alex,” the other man whispers, as a father to an almost-lost son, his eyes squeezed shut against the tears and his arms wrapped around him in the ever-present fear that he could lose him too – he could lose all of them, them who had never lived, but for now Alex was here, and real, and solid, and alive, his heart beating next to his, his body warm and impossibly real. Older than Neo’s, and sturdier, but it was the same blood that flowed through all of their veins, the same magic that made him and brought them together, the same bond that knitted their souls in kinship, and here... in this room, in this house, in this moment... he is home.

Alex hugs him tight. He still can’t bring himself to say his name. The breath of vowels tingle unspoken on his tongue. His mind disassociates itself from this moment, the impossible meaning of who the actor is, the dreadful weight of responsibility he feels bestowed upon him.

And he gazes out onto the silent lake, suddenly lost upon its waves.

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