#I subscribe to the 'you can at least prep yourself for disaster' school of thought

[apparitionism]

Appreciation 3

Considering the prompt “Culture/Holidays/Anniversaries/Special Occasions,” I first thought of how anniversaries are a keeping count, with the hope/expectation that the count will continue. That went nowhere, so I wondered: what makes a given day holy? How do we—why do we—sanctify? Still no luck. Then: what is a “special occasion”? Do we know it when we see it? Do we know it for what it is when we see it? Or do we perhaps resent it? That seemed a bit more productive.

The “story” for this day’s work (which follows day 1’s “Architecture” and day 2’s “Bridge,” in sequence at the very least) goes a little like this...

Worry

Adam Phillips, “Worrying and Its Discontents.” On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1993.

  [W]hat worries are used for—what kind of medium of exchange or currency they become in one’s relationship with other people and oneself—may be as revealing as what prompts them. (The question may not be “What are you worried about?” but “Whom is this worry for?”).... It is, of course, easy to forget that worries are imaginative creations, small epics of personal failure and anticipated catastrophe. They are, that is to say, made up.

  [....]Worrying implies a future, a way of looking forward to things. It is a conscious conviction that a future exists, one in which something terrible might happen, which is of course ultimately true. So worrying is an ironic form of hope.

****

“I have to go home,” Myka says, and Helena hears worry. Just a quaver.

“Has something happened?” she asks, but obviously something has, or Myka would never have said “have to.”

“Sort of,” Myka says.

Helena braces herself.

“My dad’s getting an award.”

Well. Not what Helena would have predicted, certainly, given Myka’s tone, but then again Myka does from time to time imply, and even perceive, catastrophes where none exist. A bit ironic, that, given how often she suggests that Helena tends to escalate unnecessarily.

She waits for Myka to continue, but no additional words are forthcoming. To bridge the silence, she says, “That’s... good news?”

“I never had any idea he was doing what they’re giving it to him for.”

That doesn’t seem fully responsive to Helena’s question—or is it? Keeping her voice neutral, Helena asks another: “Which is?”

“Giving books to kids. Books. To kids. Not kids kids, but older kids, and not just any books—textbooks, things they say they want to study—sciences, literature, public health, architecture, stats, archaeology, everything. I can’t believe it. Can you believe it?”

Helena knows her own belief is in no way the issue. She stays silent, and Myka continues, “So now I have to go and say ‘sorry I never knew you were doing this amazing thing.’”

Silence again, now from Myka. Helena waits, waits... then waits more, but because silence should not last forever, as she is sensing this might, she breaks it with, “How did you learn about this award?”

A break it was, for it looses a flood: “My mom called and told me. Then I went and read the press release. Because there was a press release! And then I did a whole search, and I found all these articles in the paper about this—about him doing this—for years, and it was just local to start, but then he was able to scale it up statewide, so I guess I have to say those ‘sorry I never knew’ words, not to mention, ‘sorry I assumed you weren’t capable of this kind of thing.’”

Myka doesn’t tend to pace, but she has paced throughout this overflow, walking the length of the bedroom, door to night table and back again. Helena, who has been sitting on the bed, is loath to interrupt the physicality of her thought.

As Myka reaches the door for what may be the fifth time (Helena hasn’t kept count, so unnerved was she by the pacing in the first place), she seems taken aback to find herself there, or to be faced with its implacable physicality. “No, that’s wrong, about the sorry,” she tells it. “It’s ‘sorry I never even thought about you as someone who would do this kind of thing.’” She lays her hands on the surface, perhaps in thanks for the insight, then comes to the bed and sits next to Helena. She breathes out—Helena knows that exhale for irritability—and says, “I just figured out how not to resent him so much. But now I have to appreciate him.”

“You don’t have to do anything,” Helena says. That may not be what Myka needs to hear, but Helena expects—well, hopes—that Myka’s response to her having said it will make something clear.

“What about your father?” Myka demands.

So much for clarity. “What about him?” Helena asks. This truly can have nothing to do with her own father; she is sure of that. One then-now dissimilarity Helena has been completely unable to impress upon Myka is the difference between children’s understandings—expectations—of their parents. She won’t try again now, however. “I can say he never provided books to the academically ambitious. As far as I know.”

“Ha! See? All we know for sure is that Colorado Springs never gave him the Spirit of the Springs Award.”

“I doubt Bromley has—rather, had—such an award.”

“Are you sure, though? Because you might have to do this weirdo reassessment too.” She’s trying to equate, or at least to identify cognates... but where none exist. “You might have to do it now. Let me google your dad, and we’ll see what he—”

“Myka.” Helena has googled her father. All her family members. “If I might reorient you.”

“To what?” She actually has her telephone in her hand.

“Appreciating one aspect doesn’t mean appreciating everything. I myself am evidence of that. Haven’t I done some things worthy of appreciation?”

“Of course you have.”

That’s Myka’s “reassuring” tone, and while Helena would like to sink into its warmth, here she raises a hand to move it away, saying, “But by no means everything, correct?”

“But extenuating circumstances,” Myka says, yet with a sickly cast; she’s of course discerned where this argument is going.

Helena nods. “I’d like to imagine so,” she says, and follows it with what she knows Myka doesn’t want to hear. “Your father might claim the same.”

That earns her a peevish, “Why are you defending him?”

“I’m defending myself. If you take your critical stance to its logical end, I suffer as well.”

Myka sighs overdramatically. “Don’t make me do this.”

While Helena doesn’t want to be didactic (well, some of the time), she feels she has to say, “I’m not making you do anything. What I’m making is a selfish argument about the ethics of praise and blame.”

“Okay, supergenius,” Myka says, and her use of one of Pete’s preferred sobriquets makes her continued agitation extremely clear. “You did make the argument. You made it so well that you have to come with me. Don’t argue. It’s a rule.”

Helena had expected Myka to follow that with a softening smile, but none seems to be forthcoming, so she tries to inject some lightness into the scenario. “This seems a rule of quite recent invention. And limited applicability.”

“Do you want to fight me on this?” Myka asks, with no lightness at all.

Helena tells the truth: “Not at all. I want to observe how you deal with this.”

“Sociology,” Myka groans. “Great.”

It is sociology, and it has to do with a difference Helena has difficulty grasping fully: Myka is always anxious of going home (or “home,” for that word stands in for “my parents’ house in Colorado Springs,” a linguistic shorthand that Helena initially and mistakenly found offensive) because, as she had put it when Helena pushed her for an explanation, “I don’t like who I am there.” Helena can’t deny her interest in this strange, modern slippage (strange because modern? or strange and modern?) between child-self and adult-self... or perhaps it’s world-self and home-self. In any case, yes: sociology.

Myka says, “I know you like to watch me lose it.” It’s not quite an accusation, more an acknowledgement, a this-is-what-I-let-myself-in-for acquiescence.

“Not true,” Helena says, but she has to concede, “however, I’m fascinated by the circumstances under which you do.”

“I really need to keep it under control for this. Can I?”

Because Myka does in fact sometimes “lose it,” Helena says, in the interest of accuracy, “I have no idea. “

“Come on, don’t be like that... have an idea! Be that supergenius! Help me do it!”

Helena takes her seriously. She tries, “You might recognize that children received help. And the effect on them is most likely objectively good, regardless of the effect on you.”

It doesn’t rise to a level supportive of “supergenius,” Helena is reasonably certain... but it does give Myka pause.

After thinking, Myka says, “I was the kind of kid he would’ve given those books to.”

“As I understand it, he did give you books. Perhaps little else you found to be of value, but books, he did give you.”

“Are you defending him again?”

“I’m stating what I understand to be a fact. I believe this entire situation will be enhanced by attention to facts.”

“And not feelings?” They have had numerous facts-versus-feelings debates. Some have occurred out loud, in explicit terms... but some have been subterranean, glints off the vast waters of uncertainty that lurk between and below them.

They have yet to address so much... but for now, Helena says, “Feelings? Not if you intend to go home and take me with you. Feelings won’t help with that.”

Myka shakes her head. “That doesn’t make any sense, because I’m pretty sure feelings help me intend to take you with me. Because if not for feelings I wouldn’t intend to take you with me. I’d just go and do this thing, which I know I have to do, without you.” That sounds like everyday, resolute Myka. Then she softens. “But I’m glad—and grateful—that I don’t have to do it without you.”

She kisses Helena, as if a seal on the confession.

Not that Helena wouldn’t have known both her gladness and her gratitude to be true—but that Myka has spoken it aloud is new. And she’s done so seemingly without any of the resistance that, Helena has inferred, has adhered to Myka’s earlier, implicit acknowledgements that rigorous self-sufficiency might perhaps have its drawbacks, and consolation its... consolations.

Her inferences may be right; they may be wrong. But she is glad—and grateful--to be the person, now, whom Myka admits, via spoken invitation, to her concerns. To her catastrophes.

END

Note:

In these seven days of appreciation, I’m playing, extremely loosely, on sestina construction. I’m not writing a sestina stanza to go along with each part of the prose, but pieces of possibility are floating around in my head, so here’s what might be today’s stanza of that dream-poem (though any bit of poetry—or “poetry”—I purport to write is never anything more than a pastiche of an admired other):

“I have to go home,” she says, speaking worry and fear of the here-to-there bridge, as imagined catastrophes gnash at her voice. The family gathers as weighty architecture, each wing freighting mass on the scale, time-grown heaviness stressing the house.

[adventk-blog]

                                             — ARE YOU WHO YOU WANT TO BE,

       introducing KIM YUKWON, a MUTANT, under the moniker of MAMBA— and currently a believer of SEPARATION. age ( twenty-five ) and gifted with the ability of DEMON SUMMONING, they are currently working as a FREELANCE CRISIS FIXER.

WE ARE SO MUCH MORE THAN STORIES,

“Fellowship of the Eternal Life” made all the papers. A single seven year old child found alone in the disaster prepped underground bunker of religious zealots. Ankle deep blood pooled the child’s feet, and no explanation of how it all happened or where all the adults of the cult had gone. No bodies. No weapons. Only sticky wet remains of some carnage the child only half remembered. They called it a murder-suicide, the case quickly left dusty and unsolved in the depths of the most obscure unsolved conspiracy mystery blogs.

The outsiders Bishop Father would have called heretics–didn’t believe him of course.

No that wasn’t quite true. They definitely believed he had been kidnapped as a baby by his estranged father and kept locked away underground for seven years. The stories about Bishop Father Kim–it was hard not believe. The rituals. The torture. All his many “mommies”. How Bishop Father Kim had chosen him to be “a special offering to the heavens”. A child god on Earth that would rain righteous power on all heretics. There was the black door, the sulfur and Bishop Father Kim’s special “shakes” that if the believing didn’t drink from, all would be punished that much worse. However they didn’t believe him when he talked about: HER.

“Ladies don’t have claws or red eyes like roses child.”

He begged to differ.

Byul had very red eyes.

Like scarlet–and they had been glittery that night like gleeful rubies as it had popped Bishop Father’s still horrified then sightless eyes into a cheerfully humming vermilion mouth. It had winked at the little boy chained down to the iron cot then, about the only thing “human” it’d done since it had first appeared tail lashing and claws impatiently tapping metallic hollow sounds on his cot that was both prison and refuge.

Stop talking about me to them doryeonnim.

“I can make you show yourself! Then they will believe me.”

Can you now? Really little one? Tell me boy, can you make me do this thing you say before I eat out their hearts?

No he probably couldn’t. Scratch that: He definitely couldn’t. Byul was very fast. Scary fast. He’d seen it with his own eyes, one minute it had not been there behind the black door, and then was and he hadn’t been able to stop anything. One by one claws had ripped the fellowship apart. Then the screaming mommies. Black walls and red rain became one. It of course saved Bishop Father Kim for last. Laughed like some much heavier thing while it painted what had been his father’s “Fortress of Truth, Belief & Righteousness” in his own crimson gore. Then the delicate monterous thing the boy feared he himself had brought, would dance across the warm sticky of the floors, a soft burp on it’s lips before squatting down to rip off the metal cuffs that had been the only constant in the child’s young life.

“Why Byul?…”

Because the sound of your pained squeals no longer pleased me doryeonnim, and I more importantly I grew tired of that boring dank hovel with no amusements you keep calling me to. Now say thank you–it’s only fair.

“…T–thank…you?”

After all, the outsiders pulled him from the dark, and because of Byul everything changed. He had a name of his own once more. One from before Father Bishop Kim had made him one of the “chosen”. Kim Yukwon didn’t wear metal cuffs, and had an aunt and an uncle who loved him very much and never stopped looking for him. They wanted him to come live with them now.

“You can’t do bad things here Byul.”

“Bad” things are relative. Best learn it before you get much older. Sometimes bad is better.

He wasn’t sure what Byul had meant. Still the uncle and aunt were kind. They owned a catering business and restaurant. They helped him to forget, at least for a little bit. For a time he was like them. An outsider among the sun. He learned to read and go to school with others his age. He ate foods that didn’t burn and curdle in his stomach until he wanted to die, and yet never did (which would have been a mercy). The hissing raging voices in his head that had once kept him awake before went silent for a time.

Even Byul’s “visits” stopped.

Unfortunately it was just as Bishop Father had taught them behind the black door, there were no safe places in the outside world. He found them after returning from a high school overnight trip–they had been dead so long that even poor aunties bound arms had gone blue and cold. A robbery the cops said. Wrong place , wrong time. He understood none of that. All he knew was first and only true family he had ever really known was gone.

Of course he blamed her first.

“YOU DID THIS!”

Bah! You call me finally in so long a time and for such lies? Your own kind are far worse than me. You know that better than any other.

Byul had him there. He had always thought people were better than the inhuman creatures that whispered dark things to him in his head, but he had been wrong. Again. He’s not sure why he did it that night. Maybe it was HER smug tone, or maybe it was just the bitterness of knowing that he was always going to be alone with the monsters in his head. It didn’t take those monster whispers to not sound so bad after all. Nor did he even pause to think about it when he finally turned those monsters free to hunt down the poor bastards, still drunk and guiltless about what little scrap of happiness they had taken from him.

Hah! So you do have a spine in there somewhere Juinnim. Their screams for mercy were glorious, and I can still taste the sweet salt of their tears. Feel better now?

He didn’t.

It was better that way.

THERE IS FLESH AND BLOOD BEHIND THESE TALES,

Overall Yukwon is uncomfortable expressing any kind of natural affection and emotion to other humans. The scars of living in a cult and the part he played in it’s demise (thanks to Byul, but still), haunt him. His experiences in the “outside” world haven’t helped. Aside from that he’s hyper aware that his demons (the literal ones) feed on even the slightest lack of control and human corruption, and that he must maintain a fine balance between being part human and part vicious monster wrangler and unwilling tour guide. However, he tries not to hurt others (well at least not those who don’t deserve it) because of a misplaced sense of guilt and duty–but he won’t allow anyone too close either (if nothing more than for their own good.).

Yukwon also has the ability to see what needs to be done in any sticky situation and then get it done. And why not? It’s what clients pay him to do–handle their “ugly” things and secrets in the most efficient and discrete way possible. He “handles” said situations decisively and without the slightest bit of the usual natural reservations to fear, pain, or danger most other human beings have. This may make him come across as “cold”, unfeeling or even emotionless to the casual observer. He’s not, but weakness, illogical emotions or even a too strong desire, is like a demon beacon. Most demons are always looking to hitch a free ride out of The Void via Yukwon’s body. Overall, Yukwon avoids non-clients as much as he can and mainly deals with the demons, as their needs are far simpler to anticipate and he always pretty much knows they eventually want to stab him in the back (and perhaps then lick the blade or something immediately after.).

AND EVEN MONSTERS CAN LEARN TO WEEP.

Demon Summoning Yukwon’s body is a living “portal” between the planes of Earth’s physical reality and the opposite physical reality of “The Void”. Human’s through the ages have called this alternative realm many things due to religious belief, superstition and myth. In reality, the “The Void” is simply an ancient realm set in levels (12 to be exact) and is one of the many parallel dimensions that runs concurrent to Earth’s own space and time continuum but predates humanities evolution. The denizens of The Void are more primitively powerful, vicious and lacking in societal concepts of morality that bind human communities. Yukwon can communicate mentally with as well as move the beings that reside in The Void instantaneously to Earth without much more than a thought. These native creatures (known as “Demons”) see the human populous as entertainment (and food honestly). Demons are intelligent, sentient, supernaturally inclined and highly acquisitive. They can reason, think, communicate–but they aren’t and have never been humans, twisted souls, nor “angels” (as commonly mistaken). They however are definitely drawn to and empowered by the immorality and malice found in the darkest recesses of the human psyche. Still these “monsters” surprisingly put a high value on concepts of caste, power hierarchy, “trade” and “bartering” so much so that they can be enticed to not lay waste to everything in their path–for a price.

            APPLICATIONS : –Demonokinesis (Mental control over demons.) –Familiar Summoning (Is able to summon a specific demons over and over again by name.) –Banishment (Can “force” unwilling demons back to The Void.)

          LIMITATIONS : The foremost and by far biggest weakness of Yukwon’s ability are that all demons are highly intelligent, extremely predatory, sentient and self-aware. Even when they are summoned and bound to do his bidding, a demon retains it’s own darkly inclined agenda. Demons are not “pets” and cannot (will not) be house broken to the rules that humans subscribe to. They are as complex as any human if not more so (while also completely lacking in any sort of conscience, honor or higher moral motivations). So summoning them is kinda akin to summoning a feral great white while seasoned in chum. This unpredictability makes them extremely dangerous to deal with as they are always looking for a “chip” or weak spot in Yukwon’s control.

LESSER LIMITATIONS

–Yukwon always has to have tattooed precautions, as any demon can easily turn on him putting every human in the vicinity in danger.

–Byul is the only demon Yukwon can summon by full demon name as a “familiar.”

–Demons are neither omnipotent nor infallible as myth portrays them.

–Yukwon hears curious demons of all levels in his head all the time and as a result he takes several medications designed for auditory hallucinations to muffle them.

–Demons can be injured and even killed (good luck with that)!

–Yukwon’s demon familiar Byul for it’s own amusement, occasionally will put him in non-lethal danger to “see what will happen”.

–Yukwon can’t create a demon, only manipulate the motivations of existing ones.

–Yukwon is only strong enough right now to summon demons from low caste levels 12, 11 which are basically “imps” (and sometimes a very weak 10).

–Sometimes a summoned demon makes the given situation they were summoned for worse.

–Yukwon risks “demon possession” of his own mind with every summoning, the weaker his mental state the easier it is.

–Summoning takes an immense mental toll on Yukwon at anytime since calling a demon and keeping them under control usually requires him to be privy to all their innermost thoughts–and all demons generally have really terrible ideas and thoughts.

–The bigger the demon (or closer to level one they are), the more mental force Yukwon has to exert to deal with them–too big a demon shows up and he could very well have a stroke or brain aneurysm.

–Sometimes summoned demons of different hordes will get into violent fights with each other and last waste to everything around them despite Yukwon’s attempts to control the situation.

–Every summoning requires “payment” (or offering) for the demon. Most like human blood and/or flesh.

–Demons have much more limited powers in Earth’s “realm” than they have back home, mainly because of the rules of Earth physics differ immensely.

THREAT LEVEL TWO.                           02+ BRWN, 04+ RSLNC, 06+ INTLCT, 07+ WLLPWR, 03+ FGHTNG, 02+ SPD