11Author's note: To anyone who is following my other WIP - no, I haven't given up on that, I just haven't been able to write for that story recently because I couldn't get this one out of my head. This is a highly experimental piece for me, not like anything I've written before, but I wanted to try something different to get myself excited about writing again. I'm aiming for very short chapters this time without any of the unnecessary filler that I so often fall victim to. Also just a warning, this story contains some heavy spiritual themes and although I don't feel like they'll be offensive I know that can be a touchy subject so I wanted to mention it up front. Let me know what you guys think!
Chapter 1: Spider Fingers
Through a tiny crack in the worn cement wall against his back Jordan could feel a whisper of frigid December air, but inside the building it was as damp and muggy as a summer evening after a long, hot rain. The sticky skin in his mouth tasted salty, as always, and he sucked and released slowly and methodically to the beat of the music reverberating through the small, stifling room and rattling his bones. He could feel every pulse of it in his teeth, through the strange skin that he worried between them as he rolled his head trancelike, back and forth against the strange shoulder.
How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
But it wasn't so strange, truly. Not anymore. The venue was new of course, but it was always new, he rarely went to the same place twice. It was people that were all the same. There were different shapes of people, different colors. There were different contours of different necks that fit differently in between his teeth but at the root of it all they were just people. They all bled when he bit too hard, when he forgot where he was or what he was doing, clenched his jaws and tugged, and when that happened their blood always looked black in the sparse, sultry light of whatever dark corner he was shoved into.
The sleek arm braced against the wall beside him slithered in a bit, bony fingers grasping at his ribs and curling in like a spider's legs. Jordan recognized his cue, had done this too many times to play ignorant, so he swept his tongue over the patch of flesh he had been working on one final time and then let his head fall back against the wall. The other spidery hand zipped in, four fingers and then a thumb closing in on either of his cheeks, pressing together and forcing his lips to open. Another pair of lips crashed into his, pushed forward with bruising force, and he could feel tepid breath swirling in his mouth. The taste was unfamiliar perhaps, some sort of acrid smokiness that he couldn't name the source of, but all people breathed and this man was no different.
"You like that?" a gravelly voice croaked into his ear. "Sexy little fucker, you want some more?"
It was the first time he had heard the man speak and the first time he had been asked to speak back. Speaking wasn't usually on the agenda this early in the evening. He had nothing to say anyway so he panted and moved his hips and parted his lips a little further, a combination that he knew drove men wild because he had done it so many times.
The fingers on his face began to crawl down his throat and around to the back of his neck while the other set scuttled over his abdomen and straight down the front of his pants with a deft sort of quickness that suggested the strange man wasn't new at this either. "Mmm, yeah," he crooned, stroking the base of Jordan's hip bone with a stiff, callused finger. "Show me how much you want it, baby."
And they that wasted us required of us mirth...
It wasn't terribly unusual, this feeling he was experiencing tonight, the churning pain in his gut, like an enormous rat was gnawing on the inner lining of his stomach, thrashing its long, bald tail around his insides. He craved the chilly, stinging wind of the outside world, the rush of his lungs being suddenly filled with cold air. It didn't have to do with the man with the spider fingers either, the one muttering raspy obscenities in his ear. He wasn't handsome by any means but he also wasn't exceptionally unattractive. Jordan never looked at the men's faces anyway, he didn't care. If they had hands and lips and blood and breath, if they could twist his hair and shred his skin, make him shudder and burn, show him something ugly and ungodly, then that was all he needed. Anything to get him out from under the eye of the one who was always watching.
"Oh, baby…" breathed the man – hot, moist breath that tickled the inside of Jordan's ear and made him twitch and cringe and want to pull away. "You're so sexy, baby. Let's go out to my car."
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song…
Jordan twisted his head to the side, scrabbled with the insistent hand that was stroking him almost brutally in an effort to get a reaction that was never going to occur, and said, "No," in his strongest, clearest voice.
The man backed off a little bit, squinting at Jordan in the low lighting. "What?"
"No, I don't want to," he repeated, even louder this time over the aching pound of the music.
"What do you mean, you don't - "
But Jordan was already pushing past the man, one hand clamped tightly over his mouth and the other balled into a fist, pressing deep into the soft space between his navel and his ribs.
Some nights it worked. Some nights he could find a way to go far enough underground that he couldn't be followed by anything unfaltering or forgiving. Some nights, for a short time, he could forget that God existed, forget everything except for the feel of slick skin against his own and the taste of musty old pillows in some run down hotel room, but some nights he couldn't. Some nights he felt sick and guilty and desperately alone, the kind of loneliness that a strange man from a strange bar couldn't come close to curing, and tonight was one of those nights.
He burst through the creaky old door at the front of the bar and the second that first gasping breath of cold air hit his lungs he felt himself full of the spirit again. There would be no escaping it tonight. He gulped it in, stretched his arms up towards the sky and spread his fingers wide, trying to cast off every little molecule of sweat and saliva and sour smoke that the strange man had left on his body. The sky was massive, a deep indigo velvet that stretched unspoiled above the sleepy skyline of this strange little town, and the stars glittered brilliant as crystals from where they sat nestled inside it.
When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?
The guilt hit him like a knife in the back, out of nowhere and with a force so great that he stumbled forward into the cold stone wall at the other side of the dark alley. "I'm sorry," he whispered, pressing his scraped palms against its surface and squeezing his eyes shut to push back the sting because he would not lose it, not tonight, not after so many long months of holding it together. "I'm sorry," he said again, a little louder this time. "I'm so sorry."
"Sorry for what?" demanded a gruff, irritated voice from somewhere off to his right.
Jordan turned his head and peered nearsightedly into the blackness of the alley. He had left his glasses in the car. "What was that?" he asked nervously, his heart rate picking up. It was late at night and he was far from home. No one knew he had come all the way out here, but he'd had to. He'd been to every club and bar and underground rave within sixty miles of Sacramento and he was running out of options.
"I asked what the hell you're sorry for!" the voice repeated angrily. "You bust out here and wake me up yelling about how you're sorry, well what the fuck for?"
"I didn't know you were here, I'm sorry - "
"I damn well know you're sorry!" the voice interrupted. "Now get your skinny ass over here so I can see who you are."
Jordan considered running, just taking off and hoping that his short, out of shape legs would carry him away faster than the other speaker would be able to catch up, but then the door behind him burst open again as two clearly drunk patrons stumbled out into the alley, and he actually got a look at the person he had so obviously annoyed. The drunk couple paid no attention to either of them, just turned the opposite way and staggered towards the main street, their arms wrapped around each others waists, giggling madly, but Jordan took a step closer to the emaciated figure at the back of the alley.
He was dirty and unkempt, curled up on the ground against the cement wall of the bar and wrapped in a thin, grimy blanket, and despite his trepidation the night was so cold and the spirit so newly fresh within him that Jordan could not walk away, could not turn his back on another human in such a position. He squared his shoulders and walked towards the man, towards the solid stone wall at the very back of the alley where there would be no easy exit.
All was dark again, the door to the bar having banged shut as soon as the two patrons had exited, so Jordan couldn't see the man's face but he could see that he was rising, slowly pushing himself up to a sitting position with one thin, bare-looking arm. "You don't have a coat!" Jordan exclaimed in surprise.
"What's it to you?" the gruff voice asked warily.
Jordan didn't answer. He wasn't much good at talking to strangers face-to-face, wasn't much good at talking to anybody besides perhaps his father and his brother and the coworkers that he interacted with on a necessary, strictly professional level. He just unzipped his own jacket – although truthfully with its thin, cheap material it wasn't exactly made for spending winter nights outside – shrugged it off, and held it out to the man. It was better than nothing. "Here," he said.
The man hesitated a moment but then reached up with a shaking hand and closed his fist around the hood. Jordan didn't know if the shaking was from the cold or from alcoholism or from something else like Parkinson's disease, and he didn't know what he wanted it to be from either. All of those options sounded wretched and he wanted nothing more than to be able to give this man a house to sleep in, a warm bath, something good to eat, and someone sweet to care for him, but if there was one thing that Jordan knew more acutely than anything else in the world it was that he himself didn't have the power to save anyone.
Without his jacket he was starting to shiver a little too and he badly wanted to get out of the grungy alley, away from that seedy bar and the man with the spider fingers, so he hastily reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet, removed a few bills – he couldn't even see what they were – and wordlessly handed them to the man on the ground.
The bills were snatched away much more greedily than the jacket but Jordan didn't let himself judge, just forced a smile that probably wasn't visible anyway when the voice barked, "Thank you. God bless you, man."
"God bless you too," he murmured, and then shoved his hands in his pockets, turned, and walked back to the main road.
Outside the protection of the alley the wind was bitter and fierce. It whipped at him mercilessly and he crossed his arms over his chest and bent his head forward as goosebumps erupted over every inch of his skin. His car wasn't too far away, he would be alright, but all the same when he felt his phone start buzzing in his pocket he ignored it. His fingers were too numb, he told himself. He would call back later, he thought, except really he wouldn't. Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow, maybe when he was freer, less bound up by the suffocating love of something he could not see, something that would not answer him, but something that also would not allow itself to be hated.
For his steadfast love endures forever.
And yet it would all be so much easier if it didn't.
When he reached his car he slid gratefully inside, cranked up the heat and tried desperately not to think of the man in the alley as he did it. There was a new voicemail on his phone, from Nate of course. No one else ever called, just work and sometimes his father. He put the phone to his ear and listened.
"Jordan, man, where are you?" slurred a thick, teary, drunken voice. "I called you earlier, why don't you ever call me back? I need you, man, I…I fucking need my brother and you never pick up the damn phone! You and Gabe both, you're worthless! What's the point of having fucking brothers if they won't even answer you?" It all dissolved into sobs for a moment before he pulled himself together and concluded his message. "Just…call me when you get this, man. Please, please call. I'm fucking drowning, man. I can't do this. I miss them so much…"
Jordan hung up the phone and deleted the message before it even had time to finish playing. It was all the same, always. The same lazy, drunk tongue, the same angry accusations, the same resigned begging at the end. Ever since Nate's wife had abruptly left one evening last month, packed up her clothes and their two young daughters in the back of her Altima and taken off while Nate was out "working late" with his "friend" Melanie from HR, this had been happening at least every second or third night. The first few times Jordan had been responsive, had tried to say the right things, had tried to think of some way to console someone so inconsolable, but he couldn't anymore. It was too exhausting, especially knowing as well as he did how deeply that loss would cut, how utterly impossible to alleviate that sort of pain was. There was nothing any living human could say to someone whose own actions had resulted in that sort of loneliness, and God, as always, stayed stubbornly and mysteriously silent on the matter.
For I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.
It was the truth, the only halfway comforting words that he knew of, but they didn't come from him. He had nothing more to offer, not this late at night and not on this particular night. Not when he had felt himself so unceremoniously ripped away from Spider Fingers by that inestimable force that he couldn't comprehend no matter how hard he tried, not when his whole body vibrated and trembled under the weight of that vast starry sky that went on forever and ever and made him feel as insignificant as a single grain of sand on a cold, lonely shore. No, Nate would have to bear that cross himself. Jordan knew that. Nobody had ever managed to help him with his own despite their many attempts. In the end it was just him, knees buckling and shoulders aching, dragging that heavy, worn beam through snow and rock and sand, over hill after hill, just waiting for the day when he would reach that final peak and set it down, spread his arms, feel the nails pierce his skin and the blood flow out, where he could throw back his head and look to the sky and know that it was finally over, he would finally see Zion…
That was what he lived for.
It will be ok, he typed into the text bubble at the bottom of the long list of incoherent messages he had received from Nate over the past weeks. Go to Dad's. I will be there in the morning. I love you.
Then he turned off his phone, turned the key in the ignition, and backed out onto the long ribbon of barren highway that he knew would take him home.