An Episode of Remnants.

Episode Content Warnings

Please bear in mind that this work has content some listeners may find distressing, including themes of war, violence, and grief. This episode contains:

Existential dread

Moments of suicidal ideation

Mentions of murders

A scene with sexual tension

Heavy discussion of addiction

Heavy discussion of death

Heavy discussion of coercive control and manipulation

Complex discussions on the nature of death and grief

Transcript

SIR
Oh, dear Apprentice.

It does trouble me, I won’t pretend. It makes me feel, which I should not. It makes me fear that you have changed me. Ridiculous to fear this; all remnants change me. One way or another they sit upon my shelves or become the dust upon my wings.

It was you, I think, we described me as a mass of moths. I have seen enough remnants, and through them enough moths, that I must say this description intrigues me.

Was it their ephemeral nature? I have seen enough lepidopterologists to know that many moths live only for days. It is a life marked by death, fleeting, as all lives seem to me.

Is it perhaps, though, instead that they circle light? It is not that a moth finds the light appealing. They orient themselves by the moon, they say. Lights and flames makes it impossible for the moth to know which way is up.

Fitting, either way, that you should call me a moth. Fitting that I should be one. Fitting that you should be the one to say it.

That was not the you that you are now. That was many versions of you passed.

You don’t know yourself. Not as I do. I have traced your quivering edges so many times I know every mote of you. So I know you have been changing.

But I denied it. The outline was the same, I knew. The shape is the same. Torn out pages, forever. You, my dear Apprentice.

I do not see remnants as you do, but I am learning. That suggestion, that symbology, that representation of a thing which mean the most.

Fitting as it is, then, that you should call me a moth, it is more fitting that torn out pages are how you see yourself.

All these disparate pieces of you.

In theory I should be able to read a remnant again and again. In theory, yes, this is how it ought to be. But in time it was as though that binding which held you once together came apart from what you were.

It was an accident, you understand? An accident. I cannot let you see it. I cannot. It was hard enough to have you come apart in my hands once.

Please understand me when I tell you that I never meant for this to happen.

Everything here crumbles to dust in the end, one way or another. Some things remain intact until they vanish, leaving behind nothing but an empty space where they used to sit, which will slowly be claimed by the dust. Other things, they linger here, they lose their edges. It’s hard to tell what they used to be, but if you get close enough you can still understand the core connected parts of them, buried under the dust of what the rest of them used to be, mixed up with the dust of everything else.

Still other things, they appear solid at a glance, but when you touch them, you realise they had become dust in the shape of what they were, and dust is all they are now.

The dust moves. It shifts and changes. It rearranges things, claims remnants, consumes others. The volume of it never changes, though more remnants arrive.

What there is of the dust leaves without fanfare. Always I’m feeling it, tiny losses, minute disintegrations, parts of me going and going, still more arriving. I feel it all, and it is part of what I am, but not all, just as I am not all of it.

This is why it is fitting, you understand, that you compare me to a moth. Ephemeral thing, dusty wings vibrating in the dark, reaching for a light it cannot have, which will eventually consume it. Every day I am less and more than I was. Less and more than I will be. Shifting, changing tides of dust. It is beyond me and engulfs me.

We are one, and distinct from one another. It flows through me and am powerless to stop it.

I am this place, Apprentice. First and Last.

Usually I feel it like raindrops on tree leaves, dripping down into roots. I am aware and aware. Always processing, processing, processing.

But you. You caught my attention. A grain of sand in the mouth of an oyster. And I have made this, this smoothed out thing, to keep your edges from irritating the rest of me, but that pearl is a hundred, two hundred, a thousand times larger than the grain of sand ever was and I am stuck with it, now, stuck with behemoth mass inside of myself, a thing I designed to protect me, but which consumes more space every day, every day.

You are a pain.

A pain.

I should want rid of you but I have made you precious, now. By mistake. I have turned you from a speck of irritation into something beautiful.

How wretched. How damned. How vile.

I should want you gone. Most parts of me do. But this part is the loudest. And I cannot bear it. I cannot bear the thought of it.

APPRENTICE
(vaguely, sleepily)
I walk… the path… I know the way.

SIR
Even when you rest you’re trying to leave me.

APPRENTICE
I know the way.

MOVEMENT

SIR
No! Lie down. Lie down.

APPRENTICE SIGHS

SIR
I have you, I have you.

Do you feel this, the touch of me upon your soul? Do you shudder the way I shudder when you walk through these halls, your fingers lazily tracing the edges of the moving, whirring mechanisms of me?

How do I look, to you? You say you see endless skies, and stars, and dust and veils. You say you think I am beautiful.

This is more than I can bear.

APPRENTICE
I walk… the path.

SIR
No, no you don’t. Not you. I won’t allow it. Not yet. Please. Please not yet. Please. I’m not ready. You want to see yourself? You want to see what you are? I will show you a piece, that is what I will do. I will show you a little piece of what you were. Would you like that? Hmm?

THE APPRENTICE DOES NOT RESPOND. HE IS STILL UNCONSCIOUS.

SIR
Yes. You know, it’s interesting. I make myself more corporeal for you, and I see you as more corporeal in turn. Here is what you imagine as your hand. You do not have hands, of course. Your hands are gone, gone. But your little mind, it must invent an imagine that it understands. What a fascinating machine it is.

And in trying to make more sense to you I find you make more sense to me. What have you opened up, within me?

I fear you are making me different.

DUST SHIFTS

SIR
Though not entirely.

This moment will do. Here, hold it in your hand. I will help you, see? There you are. Now. The paper is worn, soft. You can feel where the pen has pressed into it, left a mark, your words are more than inked in place, they’re etched, like heiroglyphs in stone.

THE APPRENTICE GASPS

WHOOSH

APPRENTICE
I’m breathing fast, the air is hot in my chest, in my throat in my mouth. My limbs are aching, but I’m distant from it, distanced by something louder and more immediate: fear. Compounded now because I have made a mistake, a terrible mistake, one which might cost me my life, and I know it.

Every hot breath tastes like it might be the last one. My heart throbs in my chest faster, faster as though trying to cram a lifetime of throbs into this compressed moment which feels so very, very like it might be my last.

I should not have gone to the dinner. I know someone is looking for me. I have known it for some time, have been convinced that it is Charlotte, who was so convinced we were halves of a whole. There were voids in her that could never be filled. I am not her completing piece. I’m nothing; nobody; no-one.

I close my eyes and I’m thinking of one night I stumbled home with some beautiful man from a bar whose name I can’t recall. We stumbled through his house, taking off our clothes. He called be Peter, and there was a transcendent moment, as I thrust into him and he screamed and I saw stars, drunk on him, and champagne, and just the barest drop of morphine. In that moment I really felt like no-one. No-one. And it was bliss. Bliss.

Unmoored. Unburdened. Free.

And then he called my false name, one of so many false names, all layers, all abstractions. Veils upon veils which hide what I really am. A bleeding wound where a man ought to be.

The window in this room does not lead to the fire escape, as I had thought. It is a drop, three stories down. The gossamer curtains catch in the warm evening breeze. Falling feels very much like flying, I’d venture, until you hit the ground. There’s peace in that. Some appeal. To know what birds know, just for an instant. To soar freely through the air and then have it all just be over.

All gone.

I think of Harry, I wonder what he thought of as he sailed down towards the ground. I wonder if he felt it when he reached the end. I wonder if someone pushed him, or if he really did jump like people said.

Could I do that? Choose a moment of flight? A last bid for agency, in this last moment I have.

But here I am, frozen, my back against the wall, staring at the open window I have backed away from instead of flinging myself through.

The door burst open. There he is, my pursuer. I’ve met him before. Taken him apart with my hands. He has scars on his chest; a bullet wound; several surgeries to repair it. He shivered when I lay my palm against the whorled and puckered skin, whispering in rapid, beautiful Italian.

He is beautiful in this moment too, breathing hard in the doorway. His shirt is cheap, unbuttoned at the throat. His dark curls have come free of the wax he’d used to flatten them. I wonder how much of his lung is left, on the side where he was shot. Does it hurt him, to breathe so fast? So hard?

‘Theodore du Perier,’ he says. His voice is low, echoic, inarguable. ‘Edward Pocket. Edwin Peterson.’

I smile at him.

‘You met with me. You said you were Lucio.’

‘You believed me,’ I say.

‘I know.’

‘What do you want from me, Elio?’ I ask.

‘You are like water slipping through my fingers,’ he tells me.

‘There’s no where else for me to run,’ I say.

Elio looks at the window.

‘I’m dead either way,’ I say.

‘You think I want to kill you?’ says Elio, tilting his head to the side.

I frown. ‘You don’t?’

‘Why would I want to kill you?!’

‘You’ve been hunting me, for months, threatening me, sending, fuck, like, an obscene amount of oranges to basically every apartment I own, which. Fucking terrifying, by the way! Why?!’

Elio shakes head. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘You’re Charlotte’s guard dog. She sent you after me, she wants you to bring me back, dead or alive, I presume, from the increasingly unhinged nature of her pursuit!’

‘Charlotte Chatterly is dead,’ says Elio.

The words land like sandbags on the ground between us.

‘Dead,’ I repeat.

‘Murdered. They say it was her housemaid, Gabrielle. But they’re wrong.’

‘And you know who really did it, do you?’ I say. ‘Because it was you?’

Elio shakes his head. ‘I’m not a killer! Never again.’

I stand up from the wall. My heart is thundering like a steam train but I’ve almost caught my breath. ‘Who killed her, then?’

‘A man named Stephen Grenville.’

I frown. Stephen Grenville? His name was in Harry’s pocket book. He’d underlined it. Pearl Grenville’s fake brother, wretched little thing entirely ruined by Pearl. Of course she could not see she was the making of him. That her revulsion of him had made him into exactly what she loathed, and worse. You cannot torture a child into growing into a respectable person. My aunt tortured me, too, and look at the mess that made.

‘He’s coming for me, too,’ I say, quietly, calmly.

‘I wanted to warn you,’ says Elio.

I frown. I look up at him. He’s all ragged at the edges, still breathing too hard.

‘Why?’ I ask.

Elio shakes his head minutely, as if this question is absurd. ‘Because it’s the right thing to do?’

For a moment we just stand there, breathing out of time and looking at one another.

‘Elio,’ I say, softly. ‘Take off your jacket.’

He rolls his eyes. ‘I’m not armed.’

I shrug. ‘Humour me.’

Elio narrows his eyes, but takes the jacket it off.

‘Drop it,’ I say, letting my voice drop down a little lower.

Elio hesitates, but does as I say.

‘Now, turn around.’

He makes a slow, full rotation. ‘There, you see? No gun.’

‘No gun,’ I agree. ‘Now. Unfasten your belt.’

Elio frowns again, just a little, but unfastens the buckle.

‘Now pull it from the loops.’

Elio obeys.

‘And throw it across the room.’

‘What are—’

‘Just do it,’ I say.

He does.

I cross the space between us in less time than he takes to lower his hand back to his side. He’s unequipped, caught off guard, pliant as I press him against the wall. He is inches taller than I am, the flesh under his soft, sweat damp skin is firm. He doesn’t need a gun. He could tear me in half, probably. He could beat me to a pulp.

‘I thought you were going to kill me,’ I say, winding my hands into his hair.

‘What is wrong with you,’ Elio half-whispers, half-moans, like a sultry little prayer.

‘So many things,’ I whisper back, before I start to take off his clothes, and take him apart again.

WHOOSH

SIR
So many things indeed, dear Apprentice.

I like those memories best. The ones where you are caught between death and life. So many of them in your short existence. Fascinating to me that you are so set on making each interaction into a transaction, terrified to let anyone do anything for you without some kind of trade.

And control. Yes. Control. You seek it out. But the more you grasp, the less you seem to have.

How did he taste, dear Apprentice? Was his sweat like salt on your tongue? Did you let him touch you, as you let Lucio? Or is it something reserved for other people you think are like you?

You treat your very self as your greatest weakness. There is nothing you wanted to be freer from than that. The burden of understanding. The weight of yourself. But you don’t thank me now its gone. You shout and cry and blame me for it. And yes, it was my mistake, an accident, I did not mean for it to happen, but perhaps it would not have happened at all if you had not longed for it so desperately.

If I could make a guess at to why it is that you fascinate me, it would be this.

And in your mind it granted you power. You thought of yourself as something less than other people at your core, but that felt like power to you, didn’t it? You put yourself on the outside of humanity and used that vantage point to judge them. You decided who you thought was good, bad, worthy. You manipulated, cheated and lied. You did not care. You felt like an imposter and you were one. You chose to be. Perhaps it began as something that happened by providence but eventually it became you, didn’t it? All you were was the mask.

At least for a while. For all that longing for something close to oblivion, it was moments like this you seemed to cherish most. It is these memories most tarnished by later remembering. Elio’s hands on your chest, the way he traced the scars on the back of your legs and did not ask where the came from. He just said that he was sorry. And you turned your face into the pillow and you hoped he did not know how you wept, but he did, and he did not mind. He just let his fingers dance across those scars, decades old, and let you weep.

And Lucio, the way he touched you. Soft and reverent. Though you never could recall those moments again after what happened, not without his gentle expression being mixed with the last one you ever saw on his face. He was going to kill you. Not intentionally, but he would have killed you. As much as you enjoyed flirting with death, when it was looking at you through the eyes of your lover you didn’t want it, so you made it come for him instead.

That is how I know you understand accidents.

You did not mean to hurt Lucio. You carried it with you for the rest of your life. The look on his face, the blood on your hands, on your naked body.

When you returned to your apartment you howled like an animal, took a corkscrew to the meat of your own leg, wanting to feel a more straightforward kind of pain.

And then nothing at all. Any escape, anything to take you one step out of reality, you hungered for it; sex; booze; gambling. But none you craved more than morphine.

Ever since Charlotte your body remembered that oblivion. Craved it. Were you an addict? Is that fair to say? You never used it regularly for long. But even when you were clean, you thought of it often. Dreamed of it. Sought it out in your darkest moments when even the thought that you were nothing could not soothe you, so you had to smooth out all thought entirely and leave behind a straightforward kind of bliss.

You did it after Lucio. After you saw the lights and the tape and knew Harry was dead. And Celine. And so many others. A trail of bodies in your wake.

Perhaps you’re right. Maybe you’d never been born none of that would have happened.

This certainly would not have. This fixation, this obsession. There is no reason good enough for what I have done.

You don’t matter, and you’re right. You’re nobody. You’re just dust. Dust like the rest of them.

And yet I cannot let you go. I cannot process you. I cannot judge.

I know you better than you ever knew yourself. Every iota. Every mote.

To process and judge is my purpose. My function. I process, and I judge, and the judgement is always the same. It is not about worth or deserving. This is the First and Last Place. It belongs to the dead and unborn. They flow through me. Shelve, and discard. Again and again and again.

And then you. And I looked at you and looked, again and again and again. What is it about you? Why did a judgement not come? So again and again, this part of me, fixated, even as the rest continues with my purpose, this part, me, I am caught on you. Engulfing you. And I couldn’t fulfil my purpose, why?

I have theories but I do not know. I cannot know.

When I decided to construct a way to let you speak, after you asked where we were, who I was, what you were doing, after that, you wanted to know about the dust.

It flows through me, I told you. Some stays and some goes, but the amount is always the same. It is always leaving, it is always coming.

And you responded, so how do you choose which parts do what?

I do not choose, I told you. I am not a thing that chooses.

But it comes and it goes, you said, so there is something which decides on the coming and the going.

I do not think that is how it works, I told you. It is not about deciding. It simply is. I process. I judge. Things stay or they don’t. There is no decide.

But you judge, you said.

Not as you would judge. All things are dust, in the end. It’s just a matter of time. Some remnants linger. Others do not. Some must be dismantled. All of it comes and goes. I just do as I must. Know which need to sit, which need help to come apart, which will do so on their own in an instant.

And what am I? You asked. Like you knew, right away, what you were. Am I a shelve or a discard? That’s the question, isn’t it?

And that question. It crawled into me. Larvae under skin.

The phrasing of it. The ways you did not comprehend what you were saying, so vast you didn’t even comprehend that you didn’t comprehend!

But you were right.

That is the question.

So why do I have no answer?

Constant, eternal, processing all the time forever. Remnants I hold a moment longer. Ones I return to. Ones I know I will miss when they are gone. Others who haunt me despite their absence. Maybe its that some particulate of the dust of them remains here. I do not know.

But even those, I processed and let them be, or turned them to dust, or held them a moment. It happened. The process, it happened.

But not with you.

So you were right. Do you have any idea how much worse it made things that you were right?

Shelve or discard. That is the question. And suddenly, I was asking it. Suddenly, it was a choice.

I am a thing that processes. I am a thing that judges.

And you asked me to decide.

Shelve or discard. That is the question.

But looking at you now, the insignificance of you, I realise. I decided the moment I indulged the question at all. Shelve. Always shelve. Let me keep you. I have never wanted a thing before. I don’t know how it will be if I cannot have it. It frightens me to think of what would happen if you were gone.

So you cannot be.

There.

There you go.

That is my answer. Shelve. Now. Always. Please. Please.

I will be a thing that chooses. And I will always choose you.

END

---

Found an issue with the transcript? You can report it here!