[i][color=7ea7d8]No one wants to know If their straight and narrow swayed; If they have ever been unmade; That we are not of stone, That what we carve is sure to fade... Bathroom stall poetry. No author. I asked my phone about it, just out of curiosity, but she didn't know. Cute, I guess, but maybe not the best inspiration for an entertainer. Forever is kind of my patron saint, you know? Fame is definitely an orthodox religion, we pray for intercession, we try not to look God in the eye. Except in mirrors, where we're hypnotized, but you can't help that. God needs his stage makeup like everybody else. Cameras aren't big on reverence. It was opening night at the [i]Corpus Coliseum[/i].[/color][/i] The screams rolled through the open space, slamming and slicing into each other, a frenzy of sound and passion ready to exalt or to annihilate. Martin waited in the wings, looking out over the crowd. [color=7ea7d8][i]All those faces, so hungry to be happy.[/i][/color] His expression would have been strange to anyone looking, it wasn't excitement, it wasn't anxiety, or boredom, or contempt, or pride. Martin's face was a mask of pain, and beneath the mask was just more of the same. But no one was looking; that was the point. In moments like that one, buried in the blue breath of a fog machine and gazing out into a sea of expectant eyes, Martin was invisible, intangible, an absence stretched between the past and the future. Between backstage and center, there was nothing, as far as anyone knew; Martin himself was not self-aware. He couldn't have said what it was that ached so fiercely during that time. Self-awareness was a tenet of his faith, one among many narcissistic oblations, and as a purveyor of mystery - [i]magic[/i] being the popular misnomer - he had few mysteries himself, but those moments were exceptional, unknowable. Maybe the shape of that pain eluded him because it was too fast, transfixing him in a single soul-shivering motion that didn't slow as it passed through his conscious experience. The prestidigitation of a superior magician. [color=BC8F8F]"You're overcomplicating things, kid."[/color] [i]Flash[/i] The light shattered his trance, brought him into being, and then he was dashing through the blue fog, mounting the central altar he'd had set up upon the stage, and the roar of the crowd and his heartbeat became one great paean as he leapt up into clear view, arms spread and white teeth gleaming. The announcer was introducing him - his better half, anyway. [color=7ea7d8][i]The Magnificent Me. The Me that I could be, if only I didn't have to be me. Lowercase, unremarkable, recursively self-absorbed...[/i][/color] An unproductive line of thinking, but his opening routine was too well-rehearsed, too familiar to distract him from thinking about it. The he he had to be. [color=BC8F8F]"You're just thinking, thinking, thinking...like all the world's red and raw could fit inside your bursting brain."[/color] [i]Flash[/i] Colors burst across the stage, a line of performance fireworks designed to mislead and dazzle as he moved from point to point. He drew three rabbits from three hats simultaneously - each a different color - and set them loose on the stage. Actually he drew only one of the rabbits, the white, and a pair of mirrored arrays replicated and shaded her to match her cousins' brown and grey coats. The timing was delicate, like a phone call to someone you were leaving behind. [color=BC8F8F]"But pain doesn't fit. Couldn't. Pain isn't a thought, it's a [i]feeling[/i]. You can't order it the same way."[/color] [i]Flash[/i] She was in the audience, Anna's friend. Not having the best night herself, judging by the distance between her and her paramour, her crossed arms. She smiled up at him, unknowing that his eyes had found her through his fantastic mask, but there was sadness caught in the curve of her lips. Not just her date. Had something happened? Martin missed his catch, improvised a recovery. The audience murmured. [color=7ea7d8][i]Oh, fuck this.[/i][/color] [color=BC8F8F]"You're addicted to it. To order."[/color] [i]Flash[/i] Back in the apartment, years ago. Anna called him a child playing dress-up. She'd been passed over at work, come home to find him working on his latest trick. She'd broken part of it and stormed out. Martin stayed up all night, but she never came home. [color=BC8F8F]"So you try anyway. Adding pressure to pressure."[/color] [i]Flash[/i] Half a hundred phones on camera, you better believe not everyone turned their flash off. It drove him crazy, threw off his timing - that was his favorite excuse. The truth was the timing didn't much matter, not as he moved into the second act. His tricks were too mechanical, too complicated, you couldn't follow it all, couldn't [i]appreciate[/i] it, and in this half of the show the Magnificent Marovio evanesced into little more than light and shadow. The suggestion of a magician, like the suggestion of a family, like the suggestion of a morning mist - never materializing. Beneath consideration. Unimportant. [color=BC8F8F]"You have to let the bad blood out, kid. You have to make a [b]mess[/b]."[/color] [i]Flash[/i] Jake and Ally, thick as thieves, like when they were kids - the same guilty eyes unwilling to meet. Everything seemed the same, except that time had stolen away their innocence and their childhood invulnerability, and so mischief had become trouble, and so mistakes became damage. It was Christmas, and they didn't want to talk about the personal things. So nobody talked at all, and love lay crucified by the silence, unavoidable and inexpressible, a ruined gift beneath the tree. [color=BC8F8F]"Stop trying to think of everything, kid. Give your brain a rest."[/color] [i]Flash[/i] It loomed over the stage, the incarnation of nightmare. It was all smile, all Smile, and when it moved Martin saw how it broke the rules around it, how it stretched in ways a body couldn't, shouldn't, [i]must not[/i]. Blue fog rose over the stage, threaded by something darker, and driven by primal instinct Martin kicked off the end-stretch lightshow early. He disappeared into silhouette, small beside the monster, and now the crowd's murmur was interested. Anna's friend had spilled her drink across her date's lap, who was cursing, which she would neither hear nor remember. She was on her feet as Martin lost his, and Smile leaned down to offer him something. Something dripping. Something [i]beating[/i]. [color=BC8F8F]"Why don't you just...have a heart?"[/color] [i]Flash[/i] [color=7ea7d8]"Fuck!"[/color] Martin snapped awake, gasping, eyes wild. Images crashed into him, a waterfall from nowhere, as he tried to place himself in space and time. [i][color=7ea7d8]Am I...[/color][/i] The room was white. Halogen light beat down on him, beat him down. There wasn't much to see, just an empty cell, panels set into the walls and ceilings behind which all the interesting terrible glittering instruments of science coiled like sleeping serpents, a drain in the floor, a cot, a bathroom. The room was divided in half by a polycarbonate shield, beyond which were one-way windows for observation, one end of the airlock into the cell. There was no one there now, nor had there been since Martin's arrival. Nothing to break up the monotony - except the hazard strobe, which was flashing now. [color=7ea7d8][i]What...happened?[/i][/color] Scenes from the nightmare offered him answers, a few, those that he could bear. Smile. The heart. An exploding web of viscera and burrowing claws. The unit of...paramilitary, special forces? Armored people with guns. Martin remembered feeling electricity arc through his body, choking on gas, trying to say...something, anything. [i][color=7ea7d8]Stop. Wait. Help me. I'm not sick.[/color][/i] Was he? Martin looked down at shaking hands, and something seemed to - [color=7ea7d8][i]there. Shit. What the fuck? Shit![/i][/color] His hand was melting, running together, the flesh sliding back from a newborn spike of alien bone... The airlock door hissed. Martin's head snapped up and he half-crawled, half-lunged across the laboratory cell to impact the shield, pressing his face and hands - [i]human[/i] hands - up against the transparent polymer. [color=7ea7d8]"Hey. Hey! I'm in here! What the fuck is happening to me?!"[/color]