Fiction: The Leopard

I know you were running from something. Not in the literal sense, but in the sense that something was chasing you, hunting you down, and, in your panic, you didn’t know where you were going.

It took me a while to suspect that, of course, since you slammed yourself into my body in a way that was instantaneous and complete, right down to a cellular level. That was real power. It was hard to conceive that you might have anything to fear from anyone else. But there was the fact that my body held you, and you struggled, like a leopard in a trap, panicked, bloodying us both. It took me a while to see it that way. At the time, I was panicked and bloodied, myself, and thought all that panic and blood was mine.

My memories are confused. I was walking down the sidewalk, on my way to work. It was midnight when the bus arrived, timely as ever, at the stop where I disembark and turn left, walking past the closed magazine kiosk, the closed shops, to the heavy, steel door that only opens with the guards’ keycards.

Only this time I didn’t make it to the door. I remember the magazine stands’ heavy wooden doors, with the racks mounted to the inside, blowing open, and the magazines and newspapers and cigarette papers swirling and combusting and making a sky-bound bonfire, one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

I remember you opening your eyes and I could see through them to the flat screen TV, a leopard bounding after a gazelle, attacking its flank. The sound was off. The machines were clicking and whirring and beeping and you didn’t know where you were. The sounds were too much. You were writhing and speaking a language I didn’t understand and you were so there that I didn’t know I was still in the body that used to belong to me. I thought I was dreaming.

The nurse came in, then left, then the doctor came in with some male nurses, and they held you down and injected you with something and it didn’t help because you threw them all off of yourself and got off the bed and fell down because your body was broken and you didn’t understand what a body was or what broken was or what sound was or what help was and I felt so sorry for you.

You must have gone into shock from the pain because you let them lift you back into the bed. Or maybe whatever was in the needle finally kicked in. But they strapped you down this time.

My girlfriend, Abby, was allowed in at some point. I was so happy to see her. You didn’t recognize her, of course. You flinched when she rushed toward you, her makeup smeared and her eyes red. But she grasped your hand and you didn’t overreact as you had with the medical staff. She would have brought it to her cheek, I think, if your wrists weren’t restrained.

That’s my first memory of understanding that I wasn’t dreaming and that something else, something horrible, was happening. Things were distant, like the way a friend’s voice sounds when you’re speaking through pipes at each other. The sight of her was distant, the feel of her hands on yours, the sound of her voice.

“Oh my God, Mark,” she breathed, “I’m so glad you’re not dead! Oh, sweetie, I don’t know what to say. Your parents will be here soon. They’re driving up from Baltimore. They couldn’t get a flight. How are you feeling?”

“Uh me gad mak,” you growled. Abby drew her face back from yours a small amount, her expression changing from one of relief to one of fear. She looked over her shoulder then back to you.

“Mark? Should I get a nurse?” she asked.

You bared your teeth. In retrospect, that was kind of funny, because you didn’t know what teeth or lips were, of course, and yet you were expressing your emotions and feelings so perfectly with them. It was like you had been infused into the body that used to be mine. You weren’t wearing it like a suit, you were your body, you just didn’t know it yet.

As humans -- any creature with gestational and/or adolescent periods, really -- develop in the womb, and then outside it, they go through repeated periods of integration, linking input with response, cultivating the nervous system first, even before the heart starts beating. And, as children, that is recalibrated and refined through every growth spurt. You, however, having only ever been spirit, had to recalibrate yourself to fit your mind and body. And it was a slow process, infinitely slow compared to how quickly your new body adjusted to you.

Once my parents came and took you home, to my home, I mean, Abby was distant and uncertain and my parents told her they appreciated and loved her but she was by no means beholden to who they thought was me or to helping you learn to act like a normal human being.

I could hear them talking about you. They didn’t talk about things in front of you because, even though you were spouting nonsense, they didn’t want you to know how heartbroken they were, afraid they’d have to spend the rest of their lives caring for you, or else put you in a home, where you might hurt yourself or someone else.

Your body healed more quickly that it should have. I don’t know why. I don’t even understand how the supernatural world works. Is it only energy? Is it like the jump from synapse to synapse, fleeting but, still, lasting? Certainly energy of some sort. An energy that healed the bones and the skin and the sinews in-between. Within a week you were prowling my room, from bed to desk to locked door and back again, searching, learning.

Even though the doctors had found no evidence of brain damage, my parents decided to treat you as though I’d had a terrible stroke. They brought in word cards, children’s sing-along DVD’s. And it worked. You learned. You learned so quickly. And one of the first things you said was,

“My name is not Mark. I am not a sign on paper.”

Abby had moved out of our bedroom, was sleeping on the couch. But, once the burns healed, she snuggled with you, made you and my parents dinner after work. It was painful to feel her hold your hand and then, later, once you seduced her, to feel you penetrate her and to orgasm inside her, to feel that intense sensation like dry silk wafted on a gust of air.

“What is your name, then?” my mother asked. You did not know.

I’m still not certain how angels and spirits came to be named in the Bible and the like. But it no longer surprises me that they all were violently physical. How else can a thing of energy express themselves and their surprise at becoming physically manifest? You smashed nearly everything in my room, just to see and understand the laws of physics. You had no concept of beauty, of treasure, nor of appreciation, only pure confusion and, out of confusion, the single-minded determination to understand.

Before you could fuck my girlfriend, you had to understand that people were different from desk drawers and papers. 

The more I pondered as I watched you, the more it seemed that each spirit must have their own energy signatures. Maybe they never know anyone else exists, each one operating at their own frequency, “Hello, my name is 20 megahertz,” and freaking out if they get cycled up or down and suddenly discover an entire world’s worth of Other.

I was so wrapped up in witnessing your transformation, in watching you devour a chicken wing, bones and all, my parents trying to make you understand that we don’t eat the bones. In watching you learn finesse as you nibbled at the insides of Abby’s thighs before tonguing her clit, making her cum so hard she had to clamp a hand over her mouth to keep from waking my parents. I had never been able to do that to her. I had my human hangups, whereas you leapt into each learning opportunity, prodded by a powerful mix of desires -- to know, to create, to destroy -- unrestrained by cultural and social concepts.

At first it seemed to me that you were never sad or regretful or unhappy with your situation. But I learned differently once you began to write. You wrote, “Mark, Soree I rip yur payper.” Then you ripped it up and ate it, I think because you knew my parents would have been upset by it.

By that time you were letting my parents call you Mark. By that time, Abby had moved out. I think maybe because you were becoming socialized. Instead of gleefully ignoring boundaries and seizing her as a beloved prize, a complex puzzle, a light that brought joy to your eyes, you now understood that, when dressed and in the company of my parents, it was rude to lift her skirt and push up against her. I think maybe she interpreted it as you choosing my parents over her, but it was simply the next step in the process of recalibrating yourself.

As for me, I was so lonely at first. Watching you was my only distraction from that. But that’s alright. I mean, I chose to believe it was alright because I was so helpless that railing against my captivity, my marginalization, would only have left me broken and mad.

I chose to believe I had recovered from the shock of losing my body and was experimenting, myself, trying to extend beyond the link I had with you. I wasn’t getting very far at all. I felt like a ball of baitfish, tracing around myself. There were no clues about how to use myself, the energy of which I was composed, because there was nothing to push against, nothing to break apart, and no one to help me. If I hadn’t been so in awe of you, if I hadn’t been rooting for your success, I would have been jealous that you had my parents there to help you, while I had no one.

Nothing I tried was successful. I finally admitted to myself that I was stuck with you, a vestigial thing, until the flesh died and we were free. I started feeling detached and found something of a comfort in that, like watching a movie.

My parents moved you into their home. You went willingly. They sublet the apartment, had a professional mover come and take away all the things you hadn’t broken, a professional cleaner took away all the things you had broken. The only thing that was really yours, since they were making all the decisions, was the journal and pencil they’d given you. They were polite, they didn’t read what you wrote. If they had, I think they would have had you committed.

“I never imagind this,” you wrote, “a plase beyond myself, with lif that is not my lif. It is butiful. I am gratful.”

I could have written that, myself. You were beautiful.

Not long after my parents moved you to their house, to the room I’d grown up in, my mom took you to an appointment at the hospital. You had been interested in death and you asked her if you could visit the morgue while you were there. She was obviously uncomfortable but she was trusting you more and more as time went on and now she was letting you make a lot of decisions and there were so many things you wanted to explore: the zoo, the police station, the mall; everything you saw on TV or read about you wanted to visit. So she made an appointment to visit the morgue, after your physical.

The physical exam was boring. They didn’t discover me, of course, and all the other damage that had been done had healed. The doctor kept saying it was inexplicable, marvelous, miraculous. My mom just smiled and nodded and added that you were recovering mentally and emotionally as well.

The morgue was cold and bare. There were two cadavers there, both female. The mortician was kind and answered almost all your questions about death as best he could. You asked if you could touch the bodies. He said yes. You touched the prettiest one first.

Looking back, I think I was sucked down through the nerves. That, if I ever existed as something physical, even as simple as a collection of electrons, I must have existed in your nervous system. Through the nerves and then through the pores of your skin, perhaps, and into the nervous system of the cadaver and then my senses were flooded with input: the sound of my mother gasping, the sight of the fluorescent lights above, the feel of your skin against mine, the cold stainless steel at my back, the sharp smells of chemicals.

“My God!” yelped the mortician.

“Mom?” I said. My voice was hoarse, my throat dry. I coughed and rolled over on my side. I heard clattering noises, mortician instruments falling to the floor. Then a blanket was folded over me. I started to shiver uncontrollably.

“Stand out of the way when the EMT’s get here,” I heard the mortician say.

“What did you do?” my mom asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Not you,” she said.

“I am --” I realized there wasn’t any point in talking. I began to cry.

When the EMT’s came I asked them what my name was. They didn’t answer, just said they’d take me someplace warm and a doctor would look me over. They asked if I hurt and I realized I did.

“My stomach,” I said.

They put a mask over my face and I fell asleep.

The same nature channel show was on when I woke up, with the leopard and the gazelle locked in a bloody embrace, surrounded by sand and parched grass and shrubs that looked dead or dying.

I turned my eyes from the TV to find you looking at me.

“You’re Mark,” you said.

“So are you,” I said.

We grinned at each other then.

“Where are you from?” I ask.

“From myself,” you say, “That’s as best as I can put it. I was just me for a very long time, I think. Then there was something there with me, something that wanted to eat me, though I wouldn’t have described it that way then. I can describe it that way now because I know what it is to eat.”

You looked expectant so I nodded to let you know I understood.

“It was like waking up,” you said, “Like having a nightmare and realizing you’re having a nightmare, you see, and waking up in order to escape the nightmare. Only instead of waking up and being alone again, I wake up in your body.”

“It’s not mine anymore,” I say.

“You don’t want it back?” you ask.

I shake my head. I’m admiring you the way I used to admire you when you looked in the mirror over the sink. You make your body look so real, so immediate, in a way I never could.

“I wanted to apologize,” you say, sounding urgent, “I made a huge mess --”

“I know,” I interrupt, “I saw it all. I’m not mad.”

“You’re not?”

“No. No, I’m not. I’m,” I pause, look down at my hands, my slender fingers. The two last fingers on the left hand are in a splint. I forget what I was going to say. I push the sheet down my torso to reveal a neatly-stitched incision. I feel the incision with my right hand. I feel the recovery happening on a deep level, beyond even the cells and past the molecules and into the atoms, into the electrons and neutrons and protons. At last I have something to push against, something to anchor me, something to swing around and around. It is singing this beautiful song, an aria made of trillions of voices, sweeping me up in emotion.

“Why are you crying,” you ask.

“I’m so grateful,” I sob, “Just like you.”

And you reach out and touch my hand and there’s this feedback, but nice, comfortable. The opposite of cancellation, like we’re even more powerful together than apart.

“Can you feel that?” I whisper. You nod. I’m feeling your touch on my hand but I’m feeling it everywhere. You unwrap the splint. My fingers are whole and healed. With the other hand I try to pluck out the stitches before they’re embedded in whole flesh but I’m not fast enough and I have to resort to acting on the molecular level to get them out, but I can get them out.

You are unfazed. You probably think everyone can do this sort of thing. You don’t know what your power has done to me, but I know. I know I now have the same power. I have had such a long time to think about what I would do with it, and now I am a leopard, too.