"Yes, ouch." A nervous zombie replied hoarsely.
"I look terrible," I said. Ellie took my hand to make me feel at ease.
I should be angry. I was on TV for the first time and it looked terrible. But I am not angry because I can't stop thinking about my latest problem and what should I do with him.
"My name is Gabriel," he said, seeming to be reading my thoughts.
"No," I said. "No, no, no."
"You don't look that bad, honest," Allie said, misunderstanding my panic.
No name, I think. no name.
After all, if hallucinations are like puppies, naming them means trouble. A name means it will always exist.
I am sitting cross-legged on the **, with two 800 mg tablets of white painkillers on my body, sitting cross-legged on the **. Allie gave me pills and a glass of water on the bedside table, then disappeared to work in the office downstairs. Although she has handed over our files to Garrison, she wants to tidy up all our files if the investigation gets worse. Obviously, she has been talking to her lawyer brother.
Of course, no amount of paperwork can make up for the fact that I killed my stepfather. Gabriel was sitting in my office chair, his huge wings stretched out onto the table. He knocked my pencil cup to the floor without even apologizing. I can't blame him loudly, because I should have fallen asleep.
I pointed to the long pile of feathers under his feet. "Where you go, will you bleed like that? It's destroying my OCD." When Ellie was driving, I couldn't get this picture out of my mind—he flew out of the window, little The black wings hovered towards the sky at a speed of fifty-five miles an hour.
"You are the only one who sees them." He didn't whisper like I did.
"How did you do it?" I asked. "How can you be both real and not real? I mean, none of you are real, but—"My voice changed.
He did not answer, but looked at me with those big green eyes blinking. I gestured frantically. "It's like the car you are sitting in the seat, but your wings go through the door and come out from the back door as if the car isn't there. But when you sit there, it’s enough to sit in the seat. Now you I'm using my desk for this again."
He shrugged. "I have no idea."
"What do you know?" He said nothing again. "If you don't talk to me, how do I know who you are?"
He tilted his head. "Why do you have to understand me?"
"Because something is wrong with me." I took a deep breath. "I want to know if I have a serious illness. Help me."
He straightened up in the chair, losing the casual look for a moment. Immediately, I realized that the hallucinations of asking myself can help me distinguish myself as being on the gods or the absurd nature of the onset of gods. His tie changed from black to green.
I was dazzled and closed my eyes. "I'm under too much pressure. Maybe you are a mental device that keeps my brain from being completely torn in half?"
"If you take painkillers, your judgment will be impaired."
"Ah, so you are like a sound voice?" I bounced the two painkillers. "Does this mean that I am not suffering from a mental illness? If I am mad, my judgment is irrelevant."
"You must make important decisions as soon as possible. If you take these, you may make the wrong decision."
"Well, you seem to be very judgmental. This is progress," I said. "Jīng God's mistake** doesn't care about judgment at all, right? Other than that, have you ever tried to sleep with a neck injury? Doctor York told me that Eve's knife had scratched my spine. Think about it. "
He looked at me quietly, as if I was a puppy tumbling on my big ears.
"Have you ever thought that if I don't take birth control pills and sleep for a while, my decision-making ability will become insignificant?" I added.
He picked up something from my table and handed it to him. This is a snowball that Ellie sent me from London last winter when she was on vacation with her brother. Gabriel kept turning it over, turning it over, as if he had never seen it before.
"You can't see this city," he said.
"You should look at the snow instead of the city."
"But it's not snow," he said.
"This is not a city either." I put down the pills again. If I hold them for too long, they will melt in my hands, leaving the disgusting smell in my mouth as they descend.
He threw the globe on the floor, the globe rolled over the carpet, and stopped when it touched a leg of the table. Neatness is meaningless to this guy.
What am I going to do with him? He acted as if he would follow me forever. Just imagine what I look like in the grocery store, pretending not to notice a man with black wings, like that damn snow globe, stroking and discarding produce.
"Do you know what the problem of jīng god's wrong ** is? I can't tell anyone that I'm crazy. Maybe I can solve this problem, if I can talk to others-but no. It's not an option, is it? Do you know what I have left? You. I can only talk to you. I even want to talk to you. This illusion is proof that I am crazy."
"She saw what she couldn't see. She would understand."
"Rachel? She is locked up."
"It's not Rachel," he said, blinking his big cat eyes.
The only person I know who "sees the invisible" is Gloria. I don't even know how to start this conversation.
"Back to our little game" What the fuck are you?" I said. "How would I feel if I touched you?"
He got up from his chair and quickly walked across the room, which I missed in the blink of an eye. I panted hard, wearing a red tie face to face. It has changed again.
"What are you doing?" I choked.
He touched my cheek, my breath lodged in my throat. His hand hovered for a while, and then it passed directly through me. I felt a strange sensation, a warm itching from head to toe, as if every hair and every nerve was standing at its end. He put his hand in his pocket and made my heart beat strangely. But he did not leave. He waited.
"Why are you standing here?" I asked over and over again, trying to breathe my heart in a more comfortable rhythm.
"You want to touch me," he said in a de facto tone. "Touch me."
Before I realized what I was doing, my hand was already on his face. I turned around abruptly, panicking. He grabbed my hand. His touch is as real as anything I have touched, and as real as the chest he puts on his chest. He put my fingertips under the soft satin on the lapel of his suit jacket. But his chest was silent. There is no heartbeat.
"So—" I stammered. "Am I imagining how your hand feels or do you really have a hand?"
My pulse became an angry, terrible thing in my ears. The swelling of my heart makes it difficult to breathe air in my throat.
"I am more real than your current life." His tie turned dark blue, the face of midnight. The look in his eyes made me shudder. They are not green. They matched this tie, and the more I stared at the dark pools, the more I felt that I had fallen forward into the water. Not ordinary water, night water, deep ghosts, and the reflection of the starry sky from above, a perfect replica of the sky.
I bit my lip to concentrate. "I'm completely finished"
He passed by me and walked to the window on the other side of my bed. His hand fumbled his pocket. His wings stretched, then folded on his back until they disappeared completely. He will become a man with long black hair staring out of my window. A strange man is in my bedroom.
"When you are upset, your heart beats faster," he said. He turned to me and, like him, his tie became the red sèyīn shadow I had seen before.
"Please don't do that with a tie anymore. It makes me sick."
"When you are unhappy, it will make me feel jealous," he said quietly. His solemn mouth convinced me.
"This makes me feel that I am talking to a guy with wings. No one can see. A person I have trusted for seven years may be plotting to kill me, and I almost got beheaded. Most importantly, I may have to go to jail and become someone’s bitch."
"Explain trust," he said. Gabriel looked out the window again. It was the orange that was closest to the earth in the afterglow of the setting sun. The long yīn shadow stretches across the world, as if to make the most of themselves before their moments disappear. In this light, he is very beautiful. Throughout the scene, his back is facing me, and the edges of his body are softened by the light of the past, like a dream.
"I am not the one who demands trust," I replied. "I'm not good at this. The little trust I have can easily be broken." I sighed. "It shouldn't be like this."
"If it is not tangible, how can it be broken?"
I fell into tears in tears. "Because it is so fucking fragile."
"Fragile," he said, as if he liked the sound of the word against his teeth.
I put one pillow under my head and the other pillow pressed against my chest. I curled up into a ball, letting exhaustion settle in my bones. "You may not be able to touch or see trust, but when it disappears, you can definitely feel it."
"For all your questions, you never asked why I am here," he said.
I nuzzled the pillow. "Because I know why you are here."
I think of Rachel sitting in her dark living room with bloody fingerprints on her face, and blood stains on the carpet around her. (To be continued) (End of this chapter)