Written for entropicalia for the 2008 xmas_rocks exchange
| This story is a work of fiction and therefore completely untrue. No harm or libel is meant or implied about any of the individuals named within this work and it was written without their involvement or permission. No profit is being made. |
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He contemplated the notebook in front of him. He should write something. That's what writers do. They're compelled to write at all times. Everything means something and writers are supposed to recognize the significance, record the occurrence in question, and present it in such a way that sends normal peoples' minds in the direction of the meaning—hopefully figuring it out for themselves before someone else said it aloud. But Roger didn't want to write. He didn't feel like it. At the moment he felt as useless as the masses. What was there to say about his life that wasn't already blatantly obvious, he thought from a high perch. He liked to pretend that most everything he thought about life was apparent, clearly evident, although he knew deep down that his mind was always ticking, always extracting things, people, actions, reactions. Most people didn't always pull things apart quite so roughly. Absence. He put a hand to his head and rubbed his temple in hopes that a frustrated stance would help churn his inner author. He mulled over questions he always asked himself. What does it mean? How does it affect people? How does it affect me? Column number one: long term effects... Column number two: short term effects... Subcategories: ...on the mind...on the spirit...on the body...on
the people... His methodical planning continued as he filled the pages with blank spaces—boxes to be filled in with his thoughts when they came to him. Preoccupied in the contemplation of those spaces, he drew random scribbles in the unallocated places on the page—first little stars, they came easy enough. Out of sheer diversion from his work he allowed himself to draw a moon, one side of it pitch black with small white slips of uncolored paper slipping through, defying obedience. He smirked at the drawing noting how appropriate it was that this symbol was somehow serving as the metaphorical wall between himself and his paper—the one thing he didn't want to think about at the moment and yet there it was flowing out the end of his pen. He shook his head with a slight smile at his own thought process and leaned forward placing his elbows on either side of the notebook so that his head was staring at it straight on, defiantly. It only took thirty seconds before he leaned his head into his hand and the pen began sketch again. He let his pen flow, drawing long streaming marks down the margin of the page, but tried to keep his eyes on the words he'd written. Absence. What does it mean? For a moment he actually considered getting a dictionary to simply give himself a point of reference, but ultimately decided it would be too ineffectual. This was about feeling not correctness. How does it affect people? How does it affect me? The lines underneath Roger's pen converged into one point about the third hole-punch in the paper where round clamps would go, his eyes staring absently at the hole as it his pen ran off the page and inside of it every time it reached that point. He continued to do so until he felt the ink-soaked paper almost tearing underneath the sharp point of his pen. He thought vaguely that the hole looked like a comet with cords of black streaming across the sky of stars he'd drawn previously, like a map, a connect-the-dots leading towards the moon. Why did everything have to lead back to Dark Side? he thought shaking his head—a star burning itself to bits after passing the moon. Roger childishly put and hand down over the moon and cringed when his mind immediately threw out the word "eclipse" as he covered the lunar symbol completely. Perhaps to mock the presence of that symbol, he set his eyes on the bottom of the page aggressively, challenging himself to face this side of the paper. The longer he stared, the more his eyes flitted back to the hole in the paper. Absence. I know, he thought to himself. "I know, Syd...I know." He heard himself speaking aloud, but quietly, just to himself. It was almost a mumble, attempting to answer some unasked question of which he wasn't even sure of the origin if there even was one. The words resounded in his mind and he dove down deep to find the question to his answer, if one existed. He laid his head down beside the paper and drew circles, his black pen creating rings around the hole. ——- Roger jumped when a burning piece of ash fell from his cigarette onto his black dress pants, swatting his hand at the offending object and in the meantime knocking a few pages off the table in the control room. David looked up in surprise—to Roger's flailing hands and then to his face confusedly. "Just trying to look lively is all." Roger raised his eyebrows and David smiled politely, quietly—as was always the case now when he was in Syd's presence—and went back to doing whatever it was he'd been doing. And whatever it was, Roger knew it was some strategy to get around the fact that Syd wasn't actually doing anything they asked him to do. David rose and made for the control panel, asking Syd something through the intercom. As always he received some message that was indecipherable. Roger rolled his eyes and leaned against the frame of the glass window, staring out at his estranged friend. Syd was sitting on a black stool in the middle of the room, hair strewn out as usual—a bit straighter and stringier than it had been in a while. He strummed his guitar weakly, staring at nothing so it seemed, nodding his head to no particular beat. Roger ran his tongue over his teeth and took the last, long drag from his cigarette as David breezed past him and to join Syd in the studio. Roger followed, realizing how useless he was being that day. When he caught up, David was talking to Syd who was hunched over top his guitar, with his head wrenched up in what looked like the most uncomfortable position and seemed to be observing the fellow guitarist rather than listening to him. "...so if you could just..." Roger overheard David explaining. The bassist waltzed out onto the wooden floor where the two were located and stood beside the stool to see what David had written on the paper. He decided that he definitely agreed, it made complete sense to him, but he was sure that Syd would glance over the paper and ignore it like he'd being doing all day and all week—or the entire session for that matter. "Right," Roger nodded as David was nearly coming to a conclusion. "Yeah." David looked thankful for his input somehow. "So it will, you know..." he motioned with his hands and Roger nodded accordingly. "...yeah it will just go like..." he added more hand motions where neither of them could really articulate what they were trying to say. "...and just land you know—" "Yeah, ever so softly like that, no...yeah that sounds great like that," Roger answered and crossed his arms over his chest. Silence filled the room as Syd stared at the paper indefinitely. Then suddenly David was rambling endlessly, trying in vain to express to Syd the importance of the technique they were trying to implement, but Roger knew it was pointless. He looked down at his old band mate and almost shook his head in disappointment. He was so angry with the man—boy—for just...being the way he was. He didn't know why Syd had to be so damn stubborn or why he wouldn't just talk to him. Roger had so much to say, so much to ask. Somehow when things started going bad, he always said he'd talk to Syd, but he never did. Not about him drifting away from reality necessarily—no, Syd had never been quite to down to earth anyways—but about how was they drifted apart from each other. Or more like Syd allowed himself to be carried away from him without so much as a backwards glance. There was so much that Roger wanted to say—even now when they barely saw each other enough to talk much less anything more—things that explained the depths of all these problems that had arisen between the two of them, how heartbroken he was that Syd let himself drift away from him, how painful it was for Roger to have to go through this alone because no one understood the way he felt, no one, and how angry he was that he had to hide it all while everyone was saying 'Oh poor Syd, poor little genius,' when Syd, Roger would have liked pointed out, was the one who let himself fall into this trap. He'd called him and called him, but Syd just had to go out and play and now this was the mess he'd gotten himself into. But of course there was no way he could expound on the depths of his soul when Syd would barely even answer yes or no to a cuppa. Syd nodded slowly at first and then a bit faster as if to say, "Yeah, okay I get it now," but no words came and he placed the paper at his feet. Roger stared at him as his hands went back to the strings, strumming the first bit of Dark Globe, fingers still nimble and white against the dark brown of his guitar. Roger's mind wandered into the little pinch in his heart that pulled so slightly at the sight of Syd's hands—so familiar, so clean and beautiful like the rest of his body and somehow they'd become inherently foreign to him. Those same fingers that used to poke at his rib cage on warm mornings when space could be allowed between the two of them, that used to clench into Roger's hair ravenously whether it be in rage or in long, playful strokes, the same fingers that made a habit of tracing hearts on Roger's back when he thought Roger was asleep—those same guitar calloused fingers, recallable by a touch-memory were running across the strings of the guitar and inwardly Roger would admit to himself that although he could never forget the way those hands felt when they made their way along the most intimate parts of his body, a small part of him feared they would never again be capable of that unpredictability and passion they once basked in, now only resigned to repetition. Roger jumped when David came over the intercom again not even realizing he'd even left the room. "Syd...is it 'Poppy birds way' or 'Poppy bird sway'?" he asked, pen poised at the ready. Roger didn't even have to look, he knew what David was doing. Syd sniffed and seemed to be thinking for a second, but Roger didn't wait for an answer. He suddenly couldn't stand to be in his presence any longer. It destroyed him inside to know that he felt the way he did, that he couldn't even remain in the same room as Syd, knowing there was a time—although he never would have admitted it—when he could barely stand being in a room without the guitarist. There was a time when Roger would have pretended he could predict Syd's reactions and stances without seeing them merely because he liked to think it made them closer somehow. Syd's voice rang out to David as Roger left the room and when he turned Syd was still sitting with his neck craned upwards, what he was looking at Roger couldn't tell and he forced out of his mind the idea that he really didn't want to know. He prayed that it would be five o'clock already and they could leave, citing their gig later that day. This day had been particularly rough even though this was a good song in Roger's opinion. Sometimes there were good days, sometimes Syd seemed almost cooperative, but those times were few and far between the bad and really bad days and it angered Roger so deeply because he knew that if only he could get Syd to communicate with him things would be so much better, even when he knew these thoughts were in vain. Roger couldn't, for the life of him, understand why he'd let himself be dragged into this mess. Or why, when he finally got back up to the control room, David had to look so utterly confused every time Syd let the words tumble from his mouth so generously, so carelessly—sloppily. Roger almost smirked condescendingly as he crossed his arms and sat back in a chair, staring at the man behind the control panel. It wasn't difficult for him—or anyone in Roger's opinion—to deduce the guitarist's reasons for being there. It was evident in the way his guilt-ridden brow crinkled up at any moment he had to step back and survey the situation they were in, to look at it—Syd, wherever he was, the music, whatever it was, and himself, wherever the hell he was supposed to fit into this reconstruction—the lines on his face would wrench together, lips pursed faintly and sometimes, when it was a day past difficult, he would seemingly loose all control of facial expression, allowing that pointed eyebrow to arch noticeably. He knew David didn't feel completely responsible for Syd's decline, no, of course not, after all Dave was still a man, still an English man and he would never afford himself the luxury of feeling quite so helpless or self-indulgent, respectively. And David still had a good head on his shoulders, one that knew no matter how much he was pained and grieved about their ever-declining friend, no amount of heart ache could pull Syd out again. So David would continue to push and prod the man along, all the time bubbling with this desperation inside, silently praying for the day he'd walk in the studio to find Syd walking with that bounce in step again, playing in the same time signature for more than twenty seconds, or maybe just talking. To be completely honest with himself, Roger pitied David—David who seemed to feel it was necessary to make up for everything that was never done for Syd—not only paying for himself, but for everyone's debt—again not because it was his fault, but because someone needed to do it. Roger wasn't about to indulge in that sort of thinking. He knew it wasn't his fault that Syd was the way he was. He was there because he knew Syd could toss out a good song if he chose to do so. Roger was quite pleased with the way Dark Globe was coming out and he knew Syd could do it even better if he wanted to. But that's what David didn't understand. No one knew Syd like Roger did. There was a small bit in Syd that constantly yearned to defy, to go against whatever anyone said just because he could—just because he was pretty enough to not only get away with it, but have people follow it—not necessarily in malice but merely to playfully test the borders, to see if he could balance on that thin wire. Roger knew this because in quiet moments, Roger called him out on it jokingly and Syd would just shrug his shoulders and smile—one of the few times Roger had ever seen the man blush. David had no idea about that side of Syd. There was a side of him that was slightly malicious, a side that was capable of using people, hurting people, of abandoning people—and Roger felt like he was the only person who'd ever seen it. As such, he couldn't say anything about it as he'd become the victim of a stoning, the pathetic hangers on shaking their heads at him. No, he would just sit back and watch David, along with everyone else, baby Syd into infancy and then maybe, when someone tried to throw him into a loony bin, Syd would wake up. The take came and went, Roger trying to zone it out—he only came back into focus when he heard David cursing. "Shit," he said looking at his watch. "It's already after 5:30," he slammed shut a notebook. "Do you have to change?" Roger shook his head as he rubbed his eyes, thanking God wherever he might be, that it was time to go. "Can you..." he started and Roger waved him away, knowing he was simply asking him to clean up. He paused and rubbed the bridge of his nose as David hurried out of the room, keys jangling in his hand. After a moment passed, he roused himself to get up and began shoving papers together in an almost careless manner. He only hoped somebody had something he could take before the show because he was miserable. "Leaving, then?" came a voice from the door. "Yeah," Roger answered, refusing to look up at the man. Syd moved around in the little room, but Roger went on doing whatever, inwardly screaming at David to hurry up. How had it come to this? Roger thought to himself. How had it come to Roger not even being able to stand in the same room as Syd without exploding in some negative emotion? "Was this one right?" he asked and Roger simultaneously boiled and fell apart inside at the hopeful childish tone that adorned Syd's voice. He couldn't work out this muddle of emotions and they fused inside him, sparking into resentment at being impossible to separate. "What?" Roger asked shortly, almost snapping at Syd who didn't seem to notice the bite in his voice anyway. When Syd didn't answer, Roger assumed he was talking about the take he'd just made, but refused to supply him with an answer if he couldn't even respond to a simple question. Roger shook his head as Syd sat on the edge of the main control panel. Roger's mind told him to just keep quiet before he said something he regretted, but he couldn't keep his heart from controlling his mouth. "Well if you're talking about the take, it was the exact same as the one you did before, and the one before that and the one before that because you..." he trailed off finally controlling his anger somewhat. His eyes flipped up to Syd who was looking in Roger's direction, but not quite at Roger. He mumbled to himself angrily as Syd sat stationary. "I don't even know why I drag myself down here every day." He leaned over to look down the hallway for David. "I can't even understand why—" "Dave's here because he feels guilty..." Syd supplied knowingly. Roger turned back to him half in surprise at being answered coherently and half in defense. "You bastard," Roger seethed and shook his head, but Syd didn't acknowledge him—the statement or the tone. It seemed he'd been there for a moment, for a second a glimpse even though it was just a few small responses and questions. He probably wasn't there anymore, but Roger continued anyways. He had to. "That's a hell of a thing to say, you know?" Roger surged through the room towards Syd and stood right in front of him. "The least you could do is tell him not to feel that way—the very least! Because it's not his fault," Roger seethed, unaware of emphasis he put on his words. "You know it's funny," Syd began softly as if Roger weren't talking to him, as if he were initiating conversation, "the way you finish each other's sentences like that." Roger paused for a second, his eyes growing wide. He stared at the top of Syd's head as the guitarist looked at his fingers in his lap. "What the bloody hell's that supposed to mean?" Roger's counter-attack was on auto-pilot and he spoke before he even knew what he was saying. He really wasn't sure what Syd had meant by that, but if it were anyone else, he'd have known exactly what they were trying to say with a statement like that. "Syd!" he barked, to which the man in question actually did jump slightly and look up at him. "What?" the guitarist asked calmly, his voice, his eyes fresh to the conversation. Roger studied his face—it was the same face. The same face. Surely it had to be the same man on the inside. Surely he was hiding in there somewhere and any moment he would jump out and tell everyone what a joke he played on them—a joke that Roger had been waiting out, hoping the punch line would come for two years now. That face, that body that encapsulated this slowly sinking aura was the only thing that kept him hanging on—believing that Syd was still there, exactly the way he'd been before. "Say something," Roger shouted suddenly. He looked at Syd who just shook his head at Roger as if he were annoyed and confused. Roger moaned loudly and grabbed his own hair for a second. It was driving him crazy. Syd was driving him crazy. Roger started laughing at himself out loud. "You're driving me insane," he said in sinister glee, "the man everyone calls a loony is driving me insane." He turned to Syd who was just looking at him in some kind of apprehension. It looked almost like he was half trying to really contemplate what Roger was saying and half like he were studying Roger as some indiscernible piece of modern art. The bassist laughed at himself, finally allowing himself to truly consider that maybe he was the butt of this so-called joke, that maybe the Syd he knew really was gone and everything that had ever been between them really was truly over forever. The word forever echoed in Roger's head as his laughter ceased into deep heaves of breath—this realization overwhelming him beyond his sense of reason. Unexpectedly and without warning he grabbed Syd by the collar of his shirt and swung him around, forcing him against the wall. Syd seemed to move with his motions and showed only a slight strain of reaction which looked to be confusion rather than pain. "Do something!" Roger yelled in his face, hoping, wishing, praying he could reach him, that he could jar his Syd out of that deceitful body—the Syd that would have already smashed a tape over his head or started tickling him in response. He was manic. He knew he was being completely erratic, but he couldn't help it. Syd wasn't alright, he wasn't just waiting for the right moment to come back—he was gone. Gone, and there was nothing Roger could do about it. He'd lied to himself for so long, told himself that ever since things had started going wrong between them that Syd was the perpetrator, that he would switch off this Syd that found all these pretty playthings more important than the music, than the band—than them—when it became boring for him. But that time had never come. He'd left the band and this wasn't a game at all, it wasn't something Syd was just choosing to do because he could—he had been wiped away, the cheerfulness and bounce dissolved into a thick solution of late sixties everything and Roger was left to wonder why it had to be Syd while the man in question wandered around in space. "Come on, just react!" Roger begged in desperation, "Do something, anything, just—" Roger's verbal attack literally evaporated when he realized Syd's eyes were rolling back minimally and slowly coming to a close. Shock filtered through Roger's body, seeping down through his skin until it reached his heart, striking out of time with the beat that had so suddenly begun racing, running, resounding in his ears. The feeling seemed to be stuck—absorbed there, as if his heart were a sponge filling to capacity with the disbelief running relentlessly, freezing water from a cold, steel kitchen faucet. Syd's eyes were hidden behind his eyelids now, slightly darkened by what used to be thick lines of black pencil, now the color slowly fading away and smearing into the oils of his flesh that covered over his eyes—just a shadow of black, a mere remnant of the whatever event had roused him to place it there, whatever had the power over him to draw action out of his body—whatever it was, it wasn't Roger and it hurt him more than words to admit to himself and that it would be that way indefinitely. Syd was wilting underneath his touch like a picked flower—as if he were literally dying in his arms, too far gone for anyone to call for help. Roger's body filled with the desperation to his fingertips, emanating from his heart and running rampant, twisting and turning until it became indistinguishable from rage that was threatening to implode as it pumped wildly through his veins. "Can't you hear me?" Roger whispered tightly, his head pushing against Syd's face desperately to prevent it from falling sideways. "Where are you Syd, please talk to me," he demanded. Syd mumbled and turned his head away from Roger's as if he was trying to shut out someone rousing him from sleep on a teenage Saturday morning. It was becoming increasingly difficult for Roger to hold up the other man's weight and as they began to slide down a tiny fraction of the wall, what was left of Roger's ragged hope began dissipating from him slowly like a balloon deflating. "Syd, no you don't...don't sleep. You can't leave me, please..." he begged shamefully, letting these words leave his tongue for the first time, his voice threatening to crack in this futile frustration. He shook the man slightly. "Syd!" he yelled finally fear taking over. "Don't you dare!" he screamed and slapped Syd across the face, the back of his hand connecting with the guitarist's jawbone painfully for both of them. Syd jumped straight up, somehow a hand finding his face, his eyes widened in shock, finding Roger's—they mirrored the fear in Roger's own eyes and Roger clasped his hands around Syd's face at the mere glimmer of life behind his eyes. "Roger," Syd said meekly and pushed at him, attempting to push him back against the wall opposite them, and Roger allowed the action, letting himself be moved—reveling in the feeling of emotion in Syd as they stumbled across the tiny room. His back hit the other wall with a thud, his head connecting with it painfully, but not nearly enough to cancel out the feeling of ecstasy that was to come when Syd pushed his entire body against Roger's—their lips connecting in complete and utter disarray. Roger was trying to enfold him in his arms, enclose this moment, this Syd, as to never let him escape again and Syd was clawing at every inch of Roger, his nails digging into his skin through his clothes, pulling at them as if he were drowning and Roger his only hope. Roger took all he could and Syd gave all he had—and then just as quickly as it had begun, it was ending. Syd was slowly becoming less responsive to Roger's ceaseless attempts at resuscitation. Roger thought he might be crying now, he could taste someone's tears on Syd's face as he begged him to stay through kisses...but Syd was loosing control, slowly slipping back under even though he was safely in Roger's arms. "Syd?" he called. He didn't know why. It was folly, but he had to say something and how he regretted it. Syd responded merely by opening his eyes—showing Roger what he would remember for the rest of his life—lifeless, black eyes staring back at him, so close, still moving and yet they had to be the eyes of someone else. The color that someone had placed on top of his eyes now seemed to penetrate the skin, bleeding into and flooding out every drop of existence from the Syd's eyes. They said and gave nothing but the message of an empty space inside as large as the one between them in spite of their bodies still being pressed together—a space threatening with all it's might to pull Roger inside to black, to darkness if he let them. ——- The hole in the paper stared back at him mockingly, its black border becoming more and more profound. He stopped suddenly, pulling the pen away from the paper. When David had returned, he had put an arm around Roger and pulled Syd away in silence, helping him to the car underneath the influence of whatever he'd taken moments before. Roger hadn't protested. He'd let Syd be carried away from him like the tide from the shore. It was all he could do when Syd had been caught in the rip current. He couldn't remember how many times he'd seen Syd after that day, but it didn't matter. Everything that had been anything between them had died that day when he looked into Syd's eyes and saw nothing staring back. It killed him inside. All the countless moments he'd spent thinking of Syd from the time he left the band until he worked with him on Madcap and he never realized just how much hope he'd had encompassed in him, how much of that illusion that everything would somehow be alright had still been standing strong in his mind. There'd been some part of him that truly believed he was the one facing reality—that he knew Syd and that he was going to be alright when he wanted to be alright—when really it was everyone else that had accepted the loss a long time before he had. They knew they'd have to live with Syd the way he was at that moment...Roger had been trying to pretend Syd had never changed and it was stupid. It was so stupid. And it hurt like hell. The strange thing about absence is, Roger thought to himself as he stared at the word on the paper, it doesn't just create this one isolated space where that person once was. It creates this giant black hole that has the ability to suck the life out of other parts of your life leaving holes there too—whatever's missing, whatever's lost—wherever it showed up in your life, there's a tiny space there left unfilled. For a long time, Roger couldn't go to lunch without thinking of what Syd would order. He couldn't go to the beach without thinking of their trips to the Isle of Wight. He couldn't look at the stars and not wonder where Syd was, what he was doing, if he ever thought of him. The question Roger was searching for just wasn't there—there wasn't one, because there wasn't a Syd to ask it. And it was the same no matter where he looked. There was always something that was missing—in life as in those black eyes he'd never forget—it wasn't what he saw that made him feel the way he did then, the way he did for a long time and still sometimes now when he thought of Syd—as if a part of him died all over again every time. No it wasn't what he'd seen, it was what he didn't see, what wasn't there that scared him—no signs life, no signs of love, merely the promise of lingering space, of empty time staring back at him. Absence.
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