An Episode of Remnants.

Content Warnings

• Discussion of death and grief
• Descriptions of a sexual encounter
• Descriptions of drug abuse
• Depiction of a character with severe CPTSD
• Explicit discussion of suicidality, including expressions of desire to die
• References to child abuse

Transcript

SIR
Ah. I am alone.
Not truly alone, of course. It is impossible to be alone here. This place thinks and feels as much as I do. It listens. Don’t you? Sometimes, you speak.
The Apprentice is not far. If the need arose I could get to him in moments. This is always true. The veil is thin and always moving. Our separation is an illusion, but isn’t a door an illusion, too? A wall that moves, that breaches itself. Illusion. Like a loose floorboard, hiding secret things. A plank of wood that tells a story.
It is cold, here. Strange that I know this. Strange that I feel it. It is not a thing I have noticed I could do, before.
I like it best when this place is this way. Quiet and still. A room behind a closed door. An empty space beneath a plank of wood. Sanctuary may be an illusion but it is a good one, heightened somehow by the knowledge I am not truly alone. This place isn’t watching, here. It is there, it is always there. But here it does not reach to move or turn or guide. Here it simply is.
If the Apprentice were here I am sure he would ask about it. He has made some remarks about places that I do not look, places where things are hidden, kept from him. Certainly I am compelled at times to prevent him from looking. Overwhelmed by a need to make him stop. What is that feeling in me? Big, with spiked edges that would claw at the inside of my throat, if I had one. So jagged and sharp it feels wrong to name it, as if to name it would be to give it power.
And yet, I know. I know what it is.
I am afraid.
Maybe that is what I am, and that is why for so long I could not know.
I am afraid. Afraid of losing him, I think. But he is dead, as everything here. I would spend the rest of whatever this not-time is piecing him back together every time he came apart if I had to. If I let myself feel this, I would find every speck of dust that belonged to him and build them back into his shape.
It is not so straightforward, I think. So many of his pieces belong to other people, too, and here there is no constant. The shards of glass embedded in his skin, gleaming mirrors which I catch myself in whenever he moves. What is it I see? More dust of course. Tied to him.
He asked if I thought we’d made each other, and I do think that. But I think everything makes everything else. A great, shifting continuum. A cloth we are all torn from, fibres reaching for what used to be there, frayed and catching on the breeze, cobwebs of our souls.
If he were here I know he would ask if the stillness now makes this the truest form of this place. But it is always its truest form. Shifting, moving, changing. Constant and finite. Everything and nothing. Shelved and discarded and reshelved, born and died and born again. First and last.
Ah.
Ah.
I see, I know. I understand.

[WHOOSH]

[FOOTSTEPS]

APPRENTICE
Walking again. That’s good. If I’m walking that means I’m going somewhere, and if I’m going somewhere there must be a reason why.
Yeah. Good. Good.
Though.
We were in the dust, before. Now Sir’s somewhere else, again. That’s fine. But we’re inside again. If he’s right and it’s all always the same place, what then? Why does it change so much? What’s the point in it all?
Maybe I should have thought about that more. Maybe that’s why I was—
Huh.
I have a shovel.
I couldn’t dig in here. The floors are made of wood. You can’t dig wood.
But it… it’s not wood, is it?
It’s all the same stuff, Sir said. All of it is dust. Him, me, the remnants, all of it. The disintegrated pieces of everything else. So maybe if I…

[THE SHOVEL SOUNDS LIKE IT’S DIGGING IN SAND. THE APPRENTICE LAUGHS]

Remarkable.

[HE DIGS SOME MORE, THEN IT STRIKES SOMETHING HARD.]

Huh.

[HE GETS DOWN, SCRAMBLES AT THE DUST]

A stone face. Elio. What are you doing in the ground?

[A THIN WIND BLOWS]

Amelie’s daughter, my granddaughter, Raida. You knew her. She found you and you brought her to the Matzners. The family that lost me. You died before she did. That’s right, of course, you would have been old by then. An old, old man.
The Matzner boy they named for me, the little one. He mentioned Gerald. Did you know him too? Another lost soul returned home. Only, I was the one that brought Gerald to them. Too late, of course. Simeon had already gone by then.

[GASP]

The love was still there, I know. I know.

Hmm.

Why are you in the—

[TUMBLING THUD]

The wall, it— an arm. Your arm, Elio? Yours? But, I— Do you have something for me?

[HE GETS UP, WALKS TOWARDS IT]

Your hand is reaching out, but there’s nothing in it. Why is your arm in the wall and your head is—

[CRUMBLING]

On your shoulders…? So what’s in the—

The hole’s gone. So’s the spade.

Why are you holding out your hand? There’s nothing in it! There’s nothing… in it.

[A RELIEVED, LAUGHING SIGH]

You’re warm, Elio. Your hand is warm. Like it— just like it was before. Like you’re really here. Like you’re not made of stone. Like. Ah. Ah.

[WHOOSH]

You smile at me across the table. You’re looking for me, but you don’t know it. You think I am someone else, my own lover, my Lucio. There is a thrill in pretending to be him. In the last few years I have taken maybe a hundred people to bed but none of them see me as Lucio does. As I slip into my performance of him, I wonder what I will see when I look in the mirror, if it will reveal to me what he sees under his fingers when I let him undo me.
You do not notice my accent is not right; you are from a very different part of Italy than wherever it was that Lucio grew up and so that is enough to disguise me. The scars on my hands, too, distract you. Interesting that Charlotte would not have told you about them. She had traced their edges with her tongue, imagined how they’d come to be pressed into my palms. I did not have enough strength in me to tell her that her fantasies were all wrong. There were no ropes slid down in a great escape. My escape was small and quiet, a simple turn away and a tug, in a packed crowd of bodies, and I was gone.
You think they are scars of war. You think the same of the marks across the backs of my thighs, raised in places, others flat and silvery under your fingers. When you unbutton your shirt, your own scars shine. You tell me softly what they’re from, a beat where you expect me to answer in kind about my own, but I don’t. Your pretty bronze skin deepens at your cheeks, your chest scarlet in the frame of your open shirt as I turn us over against your pillows. Muttered words, confusion, and then at once, I sink myself onto you and you almost choke. It hurts me, the quickness of it, but it is worth it for your face, the arch of your back, hands scrambling for purchase in the sheets which are sticking to the backs of your thighs. You brought me here to ask me questions, but instead I eke little sounds out of you. You are a line of fire that feels like it reaches along the whole length of my spine. It is an effort to stay present, to hold still, to keep steady and my mouth shut, so I do not say a word, because I have forgotten all languages and if any noise comes out of me I’m certain I will give myself away.
I run my hands through my hair, make a show of it. I am at my most, at my best, when I am this. I roll my weight forward on my knees, feel the burn in my thighs as I raise myself up a little to make you squirm. This is all you will remember of tonight, Elio, when I am done with you. I think it over and over, a prayer, a mantra, a promise and a threat: this is all you will remember, you will forget how much I made you speak before, and more words will drip so easily from your lips when you’ve slept a little and wake still flushed with me beside you. I drink each morsel and do not let it show on my face that I am desperate. I am easy and languid and pretty on your pillows and you do not know that I am making you tell me exactly what I need to know. Charlotte is looking for me and she is getting very close. In her mind I have stolen from her. She will hunt me until I am leashed at her feet again.
When I’ve got from you all I think is possible, I leave. It is the early hours of the morning and the cool air turns the sweat on my skin icy. I bite my lip until it bleeds so I do not show the discomfort until I have turned a corner, incase you are looking from your window and see me walking away. But in the dark of an alleyway, I let it come, shaking fear that buckles my knees and has me panting. I’m sick in the old gutter, wine and scraps of pasta, half-digested, in the silt and other muck.
At home I wash meticulously, scrub so hard my skin turns pink. She is so close to finding me. I take out my morphine tin, shoved under my mattress, but the dreams it brings me aren’t soft and pretty like they’re supposed to be. It’s like being caught in a fever. I am half in my bed, half in another, years ago now, strapped down, tube forced into my nose, another snaking out between my legs, and Charlotte is whispering, whispering to me.
When I come back to myself it is midday in Italy but for a moment it is dawn in a little house in Wales and my aunt is coming to hide me. I scramble up my bed, my body much larger than I expect it to be. I am sore, but not because of Gloria. I’m sore because of you. The burn in my thighs is from where I’d made you fuck me, not from the sharp bite of an old belt. I have to leave. I have to shed my skin again, become someone and something else, far, far away from here.
It is not until I have arrived in India that I realise I have not spoken to Lucio about it. Of course, it’s probably for the best. I am far enough away that I can sink into being Basil and every day he feels more and more real until I spot Harry across the room at a party on New Year’s Eve and the threads are all unravelling because he knows about my oldest name, he knows about ‘Edwin Peterson.’ He knows. He knows. He knows. I am to flee, I mean to flee, I want to flee, but as I’m going, there— there he is. Harry. Dead. Eyes unseeing, staring at me. Dead.
I know at once it must mean. Charlotte has found me.
I run again, hide out in my place in Valencia, carry oranges from the market, make a bastard version of the tea Harry always used to make for all his lovers. I try to lose myself in the local people. Most cities, I am someone, embedded in the local society. I am expected to be Lord du Perier or Basil or one of a dozen other aliases, but not here. My staff know me as Mr P and I pay them in cash and I rarely leave the house, except at night.
In the horror, I remember Lucio. I need to be seen, to be known, to be held. It’s a risk, a selfish one, I know, but I go back to him, my Lucio, my lovely Lucio. He peels off the layers of me and I am more naked before him than anyone else. There is no shame or expectation in the way his hands explore me. I am content to let him take me apart as he always has done. I think it is because he has no past that he remembers. I think it feels like he knows, because of that, that my past is something I would like to forget.
But then he speaks, he pushes, he asks. He asks why just the feeling of those painter’s palms across my body makes me quiver and weep, demands words for this unnamable thing we have between us. I feel small and kicked and hurt, though I can see there’s no ill-intent in Lucio’s eyes, there is something else. Curiosity. He doesn’t want to paint me as I lie before him now, not the way he used to. He wants a portrait of my past and I— I cannot give it to him, do not want it here. Just let me be yours, I’m begging him between every word. Let that be the end of it. Let me be yours, under your hands, and nothing else.
But Lucio is more than I can allow him to be and he pushes and we fight and he scares me and there’s a palette knife in my hand and his stomach and hot, fresh blood is spilling over my wrist and it’s all wrong as he looks into my eyes with shock and resolution, it’s all wrong as we both realise he is going to die, right here, knife in his stomach, in my arms. I’m whispering that I’m sorry, I’m trying to put him back together, but I can’t. He is undone and it is me that did the undoing and it’s all over my hands and my chest and my legs. I’m slick with copper red Lucio’s eyes stare up at me and see nothing, nothing at all.
Perhaps this is the most clearly anyone has ever seen me. I am an empty space.
It is only days after that you find me again. I think you’ve come to kill me but you haven’t. You’ve come to warn me. Warn me that it is not Charlotte who is doing this; she’s dead. Dead. Gone. But all these people, all these people who know me have been dying. So many people. I take you apart again and delight in it, in the wonder in your eyes, and I sink myself so deep into you that I think for a moment I might become you, see myself as you see me, this magical thing, more myth than man. When I’m done with you you ask me to come with you. Tell me you can keep me safe. I don’t believe it.
It will be years until I see you again. Years and so many deaths. I will return to you a desperate thing on my knees begging for forgiveness, for help, for anything, and you will be bewildered. You make me feel like maybe those past selves are really gone and I can be something new. You make me feel like there is worth to me despite the things I’m running from. You want me to go back, to face it, to face him, to look Stephen Grenville in the eye and accept the hate inside of him but I can’t. Because he’s right to hate me, to punish me. He’s right. If I see him I’ll let him slit my throat but I’m afraid, I’m a coward. I don’t want it to be like that. Instead, let me burn. Please. I beg for it. Just make it soft. Fill me up with morphine and set me adrift before you throw me on the pyre. Let my breaths come so slow I do not taste the smoke. Let the pretty softness in my blood get so velvet-dark that the fire eating my flesh feels like a lover’s fingers. Let me die and let it be soft.
I am a weight you drag around, a living contradiction. I can see it in your eyes that you are tired of me, of the stuff I carry with me, of the dozen other selves buried in my bones. You hate it when I preen for you. You want me more real than I am. I cannot stand it. I cannot stand the way you are angry at the same things I hate about myself. It is not fair to want to die and want to live at the same time. It turns me into a thing of sharp edges. You are forever tending slices on your soul just from holding me close, and it disgusts me. I disgust me. I should disgust you too, and I so dream to find it in your face. An edge of pity.
There is only one thing for it. I have to go back. Back to England, to find Stephen Grenville so he can set me on fire. I will ask him to take the ashes to Wales. I was always supposed to be there, to die there. I should never have bother trying to escapet; it’s always been a failure. Let me burn and put me back where I belong. Let Gloria turn my ashes into flour, let her bake me into bread to feed her other children. Let me be nothing, like I’ve always been.
I cannot bear to tell you where I am going, so I leave before you return. It is better this way. I have always been an empty room. This way, you will finally understand.

[WHOOSH]

[SNIFFLING]

APPRENTICE
Elio?
You’re gone.
Of course you’re gone. Empty spaces.

[A DOOR LATCH CLICKS]

SIR
Apprentice?

APPRENTICE
Sir?

SIR
You saw the statue.

APPRENTICE
I saw what I did.

SIR
Is that what you saw?

APPRENTICE
I don’t know.

SIR
Come here, tell me what it looks like, when you look.

[FOOTSTEPS, FIRST ON SOLID GROUND, THEN ON WATER]

APPRENTICE
It’s the room full of mirrors.

SIR
Ah. That makes sense.

APPRENTICE
How so?

SIR
I have been reflecting.

APPRENTICE
On what?

SIR
Myself, I suppose. And you. And this place. It’s all the same really.

APPRENTICE
Sure.

SIR
I’m sorry.

APPRENTICE
About what?

SIR
All the holes inside of you. It is not your fault that they are there.

APPRENTICE
I’m not sure it matters whose fault it is.

SIR
No?

APPRENTICE
No.

[END]