Name: starphotographs
Story: Universe B
Characters: Milo
Colors: Clean Again 8 (Beautiful Lengths), Admin Yellow 19 (“The thing about striking out on your own is that‘s usually how you end up”) Alien Green 25 (“Where the hell is it all going to end?”)
Word Count: 3,325
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Choose not to warn.
Summary: “Imagine how you’d feel if your whole life turned into a job you couldn’t stand” -Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor
A day in Milo's life on Earth.
Note: Questions, comments, concrit, anything works!


A Job Well Done

I’ve been here over a month, and I still never wake up knowing where I am.

For that moment, everything is as it was. I’m lying on the sofa bed. My brother is still asleep on his mattress behind the couch. A day like any other. Then I open my eyes to fluorescent lights. I’m lying on a narrow metal bed. There’s a needle in the back of my hand. And I’m alone.

A day like any other.

Not a morning goes by when I don’t spend the better part of an hour trying to convince myself that I haven’t failed.

I haven’t, have I?

I couldn’t have. I don’t even need to worry about that.

Because, after a fashion, things turned out just the way I’d wanted them to.

My brother is warm and safe and free, and I assume he’s being taken care of. I don’t have to stay on my feet at the plant all day. I can lie down for as long as I want. In fact, I don’t do much else. They feed me more often than I feel like eating. The temperature in the room feels so neutral that you don’t think about the air all around you, and the mattress isn’t hard or soft enough for comment. If I’m in pain, they’ll give me something for it. If they have to do a procedure and I’m scared, they’ll give me something for that, too. Then I’ll drift in and out for the rest of the afternoon, not a thought in my head. Certainly, no nerve-wracking thoughts of day-to-day survival. If I have to cough, I let myself, no matter how messy it might end up. I have no one to look strong for. Someone else is doing my laundry. I’m comfortable and well-kept. Life, as I predicted, is easier here.

And I have no idea what happened to Kit, or what he’s doing. Just like when I worked all those double shifts to save up enough money to come here, this building is my whole world. I have no past or present or future or self. I’m a point on a line, a part of a pattern, a litmus strip, an incubator. A subject. An object.

But, I need to believe I’ve succeeded. Otherwise, everything I worked so hard to accomplish was pointless. I can accept that I’ve given up everything. I went in to this with the idea that I would. What I can’t accept is the possibility that I didn’t get anything in return. What drives me crazy, is that I don’t have any way of knowing. I only got to see half of what happened. So I tell myself that this was a better end than I’d been expecting, anyway. That nothing I did was for me in the first place. I’m a little less than relevant. Just a spent fuel canister, breaking up and falling to the ground.

And this really is my best-case scenario after all.

*****

There isn’t much variation between the days. Not that there really was before, granted. But, in here, it’s bad enough that I feel even more like going to sleep just reverses the last sixteen hours, so I can live them over again. I wake up, I tell myself things really did work out in the end. I run that thought in to the ground, then someone wearing scrubs comes into my room to fiddle with me for a while. It’s not always the same person, so hey, I guess that’s a difference right there. But, they all act the same, so it doesn’t count for much. They’re like I was at the plant. Eyes down, efficient, unsmiling. Going through the same motions, over and over again.

Every day, I think of telling one of them that I know how it feels, and that I’m proud of them for a job well-done, but I always decide against saying anything at all. No reason to drag things on for another handful of minutes that I’d have to sit through. I’m just like them. Eyes down, efficient, unsmiling. Enduring the same small violations, over and over again.

This stretch of identical days. This job that we both have to do.

I cough and spit in a cup. Then, having gotten started, everywhere else. Some guy, only about my age, scribbles on a clipboard, strings of numbers to record that today found me lethargic and feverish. Which, if anyone was wondering, I could have told them myself. I swallow my unmarked pill. He rotates my IV, this time choosing an awkward spot on the soft underside of my upper arm. In a few days, it’ll be somewhere else. I keep having to retrain myself to move around it correctly. I nod at him. He nods at me. And again, I’m alone. Still sitting on the edge of my bed, I run my tongue all around the inside of my dry mouth, trying to strip off the taste of iron and decay coating the back of my throat.

*****

Some days are more exciting. Like when I accidentally receive a med tray intended for Greenwood, Miles upstairs. Sometimes, I’ll get to hear the clipboard person swear before they rush off to correct the mistake, which is pretty entertaining.

Provided you don’t have much going on.

Miles doesn’t have tuberculosis, so he isn‘t getting the same drug. I actually don’t know what he has. Or, really, anything else about him. I’d ask the staff, but I don’t think they know anything, either, other than that he isn’t Green, Milo. Hell, going on how often this happens, they don’t even know that much. His room number is a mirror image of mine, so he isn’t directly above me. All my late-night efforts to hear if he might be shuffling around up there are in vain. Not that I still don’t, occasionally, try. This, too, is entertaining.

If, again, you don’t have much going on.

The only other break in the routine is when the whoever is making me cough in the cup that day decides that I’m not bringing enough lung parts and blood clots and crud to constitute a good sample.

When that happens, they have to leave for a few minutes and come back with a real doctor.

The real doctor, in his infinite wisdom, takes the cup and hands it to me himself, as if his presence would scare my body in to compliance, or something. Usually, second time’s the charm, and everyone stops bothering me.

Once in a while, when I’m still not doing something right, they lead me to another room, where I lie down on a metal table. The cup guy who had me that morning straps a mask over my face and fills it with something that freezes my throat. I can’t swallow or feel my insides, and I panic. Ever since they started giving me the really good drugs for this, I can only panic quietly, until something cranks the dimmer switch in my brain all the way down to where the lights turn grey and flicker. I lie limp and mute, unable to comprehend anything more complex than how painfully cold the metal feels against my back. How terrified I am of whatever is being done to me. They wait for me to come down to this level, and then they get to work. The doctor runs something into me through my nose. I need to gag and can’t.

I panic. They don’t notice.

Something dislodges in my lungs. The pipe or whatever it was tears itself out of me. They wheel me back to my room. I sleep like the dead for the rest of the day, while someone I’ve never seen tries to work out what my body is trying to tell them. Down in that lab, I’m not Green, Milo. I’m a few graphs and notations and cultures assigned to a string of numbers. I’m a point on a line, a part of a pattern. How I respond to that unlabeled pill might shape the future. Someone’s future, anyway.

Not mine, of course.

After the procedure, I bleed about twice as much as usual for the next several days.

I wake up in the middle of the night, lungs overflowing, my own body asphyxiating itself. Unconcerned with anything that doesn’t involve getting everything cleaned out before I suffocate, I explode, noisily, in all directions. I make a huge mess and eventually fall asleep right there in the middle of it, wet and sticky and too exhausted to give a fuck. Morning comes. The next guy, holding the next cup, tells me that this is pretty normal, and nothing to worry about. My skin feels stiff. My hair is glued to the side of my face. I’m not worried. I just want to get cleaned up and go back to bed.

The two times they did worry about it, they took me in to get cauterized. On my end, it didn’t feel any different from the sample extraction that got me there in the first place.

I lie, limp and mute. The metal table is cold. I need to gag. I can’t.

*****

Today wasn’t one of those days. In fact, I coughed so prolifically that it actually went in my chart. Meaning, that the guy with the clipboard made a note of it, and that I managed to get a little bit of splatter on the paper itself. And a few drops on the poor guy’s shoes, for good measure. Which wasn’t a big deal. He just told me he’d have one of the doctors look at me, then got on with the routine. None of the people working on this floor are all that bothered about me being as contagious as I am. Apparently, they’re all vaccinated. I think, lucky fucking them.

I sit on the edge of the bed. My mouth is sticky and foul and metallic. I spit in the wastecan, which changes exactly nothing.

Someone, a different person this time, but wearing the same scrubs, brings me a tray with some cereal and other crap on it, which I don’t touch.

…I mean, I touch it, in the literal sense, but I don’t eat it. I just sort of disassemble everything.

I dump the tiny box of cereal out under my mattress. People have gotten after me for not eating before, and I’m getting sick of hearing it, so I do my best to keep up appearances. I try to at least get some of the milk down, but blood and milk don’t really go together, so what little I swallowed instantly came back up, right into the carton. No way in hell I was drinking that, so I folded up the spout and placed it back on the tray, mentally apologizing to whoever would have to take it to the trash. I used the juice to swish out my mouth, which actually worked pretty well, and I tried to finish it, but it seemed overly sweet and burned the back of my throat, so I gave up on that, too.

I miss actually wanting food. When I try to remember the last time I felt hungry, I can’t. Before I got here, I could at least reliably choke something down in the morning, but I guess it’s harder without as powerful a motivator as “don’t pass out and hit your head on a concrete floor and get fired.” Which, of course, eventually happened anyway. Well, someone did catch me before I hit the ground and cracked my skull open, but the rest stands.

Maybe the part of my brain that regulates these things just kind of quit. Maintaining homeostasis isn’t worth the effort anymore. Time to close it all down.

I have no past or present or future or self.

Maybe it’s psychosomatic. Maybe my body gave up because I did. Maybe I’m getting weird from being shut up in here all the time. Maybe I just miss my brother too much.

I didn’t want him to see me like this, but I wished he was here.

I didn’t want to leave him, but since I’d left him anyway, it didn’t matter. Even if I was dying, I wanted him next to me.

I didn’t want to die alone, but I would.

And it would be nothing more than a statistical blip. A number that didn’t show up in the reports anymore.

I’m a point on a line, a part of a pattern.

Even now, here on Earth, I’m just stringing one day along into the next, seeing the job through. Only this time, I don’t even have a good reason. Or any real tasks to complete So my job, this time, is really just existing.

I lie back and let them do whatever they want to whatever is left of me.

I’m always glad to be of service.

Not needed at the moment, I fall back on the bed. At rest for now. I stare into the white light until it etches a green rectangle into my eyes. When I close them, it burns orange, and, eventually, it fades. Right in time with me. The extra painkillers I’d been getting since a bad episode of chest pain two days ago make it hard for me to tell if I’m asleep or awake, but either way, I can’t keep my eyes open. Lying there, half-dreaming for I don’t know how long, I have one coherent thought:

I want to go home.

I’m not home; but I’m not here. At least for however long.

*****

I wouldn’t have to be so alone, if I didn’t want to be.

But, all of us are probably thinking this.

There’s a common room with some furniture and a television. And most people here do use it. Sitting in a daze for hours, watching Earth through a screen. The blue skies and crowded streets, a sun that hurts our eyes, even on film.

In here, the only way you can know you’re on Earth is the gravity.

Holding your leaden bones to the mattress in the morning, weighing heavily on your limbs all day. Even my hair feels dragged-down, hanging listlessly across my face, falling back over my eyes every time I try to push it aside. Still coated in metallic blue powder, now saturated with more humidity than I was used to, drawn toward the floor by the immense mass of an entire world.

Gravity pressing you into the couch, you sit, and watch the people on the screen dashing around like it was nothing. And to them, it was.

If you’re used to heavy air.

If you hadn’t been deathly ill for years.

In here, gravity is just the last straw. And break your back it does.

You’d think we’d talk to each other, but we don’t.

Even with all we have in common, no one feels much for conversation. For one thing, the masks they have us wear make things hard. On this floor, all eight of us have tuberculosis, but we all have different strains. If we cross-contaminated, it could skew the results. So, we wear these white masks, looking as if we were the doctors here. Our voices are muffled. And besides, our minds are all elsewhere. A world away. We sit, watching all the lucky Earthlings frolicking around, not laughing at jokes we don’t have the right context to understand, waiting through ads for products we can‘t buy. I breathe and re-breathe the same contaminated air, my breath hot and dank, polluted with infection and warmed by all the busy, terrible activity inside of me.

At least, I used to.

Again, it’s depressing. No one talks, anyway. Hearing everyone else struggling to breathe as much as I am kind of upsets me. So lately, I only wear the mask for a few minutes, to duck in and abscond with some books and magazines to read in my room.

I read until it’s time to go to sleep. I try to, anyway.

It was early evening when I finally rose from my nap, or my stupor, or whatever it was. Head aching, eyes filmy, still exhausted. The breakfast tray was gone, and from the looks of it, the next two never came. I decided to distract myself from feeling like crap by reading some cheap sci-fi paperback I’d yanked from the common room the night before. I was halfway done, and could probably finish, if I could only concentrate. But, concentration doesn’t come easily to me anymore.

Our minds are all elsewhere.

And mine was probably just wholesale going to shit. I wasn’t eating enough to make up for how much blood I was losing, or even how much energy I wasted coughing. I was drugged up around the clock. I didn’t have anything interesting to think about, and my brain was starting to forget how. All I needed to know how to do was lie on a table and spit in a cup. To let people stick me with needles. To panic in silence. Hell, in those cases, dropping a few cognitive levels was probably more an asset than anything else.

Reading wasn‘t part of the job.

Without anything else to occupy it, my brain sifted through all kinds of irrelevant thoughts, holding them for as long as it could manage before letting them float off.

I wondered what Kit was doing.

I wondered if he thought this was worth it.

I wondered how I even managed.

When I planned all this, when I was working double shifts to get enough money, when I got fired and told Kit we were leaving immediately, when we took the train all the way from Iron Hills to Hyperborea and snuck on that freight ship, when I pulled the hull breach alarm and rushed us onto the escape vessel… Through all of that, I was just as sick as I am now. More overworked and neglected. But, I escaped a planet, on my own.

Today, I can hardly get out of bed.

When I couldn’t stand, I stood. And I ran. The only thing keeping me upright was the idea that I was doing it for a reason. That it would all pay off, and then I could lie down and rest, knowing I’d saved us. A job well done.

Did it? Did I? Was it?

Is this the plan taken to its logical conclusion, or is this just me finally admitting defeat?

Again, I can’t know. And that’s the hardest part. I never expected some great payoff. I knew the deck was stacked against me. Towards the end, I wasn’t even expecting to survive. But I wanted Kit to know what I’d gone through for him. And me to know what I’d gone through for both of us, and that it hadn’t all been pointless.

The idea of heroism hadn’t even occurred to me. All I wanted was to know that my efforts had meant something. That I didn’t fight and suffer and push myself just to end up right where I started, and that it was all worth doing after all.

That, if I could go back, I’d do it all again.

I still don’t have my answer.

*****

I think for a long time, staring at the ceiling.

The lengths I went to, the fear and love that drove me, the destruction of my body. Our final, violent separation. How I’d be remembered. My body in an unmarked grave, or my cold, skinny ass laid out stiffly on a table, reeking of formaldehyde, with squeamish medical students looking down on me. If this was what I’d been planning all along, just because I didn’t, and still don’t, see any other options.

A few hours later, someone else comes in.

My second unmarked pill, my sleeping pill, a glass of water.

A day like any other.