FLYING IN THE DARK
[letter twenty-seven]
*
November 29
Haley,
I leave this letter in your bag, mixed with all the others. How long will it take you to notice? Two, three days at most, I suspect. You’ve been rereading our correspondence an unreasonable amount these days. Ignoring the winter weather creeping up on you.
I’d hoped to sustain a normal letter exchange with you. I hadn’t counted on you arriving at the prison regardless. The posters across Laverre were an oversight on my part. It can’t be helped. Neither can we.
I write this last letter to you solely because I have but one request. Yes, after all this. After all of everything. I must abandon my dignity and take the risk. Anything is of value to me at this point. Anything to differentiate me from the illusions I forged and festered until they colored my entire world. Then a part of yours.
My request? Never call me human again. Mark is dead.
I’m sorry to tattle on myself like this, but it’s the truth, exactly what you have been itching for. Mark arguably wasn’t human, either. I know for sure that I’m not. Whatever I am, I need to find out. I am going to find out. That is why I escaped. An easy feat, that. The details are irrelevant. Only the why matters, and now you know. Why.
That courtesy should still be part of my repertoire is shameful. For you it must be torture in disguise. Rest assured that I deliberated for many hours in my mind whether to write and say goodbye to you. I turned the idea over like eggs on a spatula, into a sizzling frying pan. Like the ones at Brun Way’s cafeteria. I did not like those eggs. Consuming them, I mean. I never grew accustomed to such foods. But I liked the sound, its familiarity. The sound of things changing. Forever. Until it is just gone. Something in me is just gone. Has been gone a long, long time.
Like I said, I must find it, what’s gone. I must find me alone. When I find me I will be alone, with only my mistakes trailing behind me, literal skeletons.
Do not write to me again. Do not try to follow me, find me, convince me, change me. Yes, leave Laverre, do that, please! You’re concerning yourself over nobody. I know, that’s what you do, concern yourself over others. Over me. Over Kenneth. Over your pokémon, like that goddamn xatu. Won’t you take care of yourself for once, please?
Especially don’t concern yourself over someone you barely know. Case in point: Is it Markus or Mark? Do you remember his real name, not what you call him on a whim? What you read goes in your brain and out again an hour later. It happens for every human. Biases seep into your collective image of another person. Then social interactions become controlled by expectations of who you and the other person should be. If a human changes… actualizes themself into someone praise-worthy... it is done quietly, over years and years and years. Because humans don’t evolve the way pokémon do, quick and striking. How are humans the superior beings?
I’m not subject to such nonsense. Because I’m not human, and I’m not sure I ever was. Not in the sense you think I am or want me to be, anyway. But how I dreamed… To be what you needed, so that you would be what I needed, it was a dream. Unfortunately, I’ve awakened. It no longer feels as if I’m walking in my sleep.
Don’t argue me on this point, Haley. I know you want to. Your voice rings in my ears now, replacing the curves and ink of handwriting. I hear your argument, the futility of it. Don’t you see? The multiplicity of my illusions, terrible, cascading and taunting and sitting right outside my cell door?
Well, not anymore, re: the cell door part. Now they can touch my skin. The dark fails to serve as a cloak. The moon rises right where I left her the previous night, staring. Unperturbed. Her concern is for the sun, to count the minutes until it is time to trade places in the sky and watch over us puzzle pieces. They have what we wanted. The perfect mutual relationship. The ability to read each other’s thoughts and provide what the other needs, nonverbally.
If I were a flying-type, I think I’d go on up to the moon. Or the sun, if fire energy lay within me as well. A talonflame, like Joey’s… It’s not impossible.
Alas, I’d humbly sacrifice anything to switch places with the moon or the sun. Preferably the moon. I could stare down and bask in silence, my home. Without words we would all understand that this is a time for humans to sleep and a time for wild pokémon to hunt. Complement and carry the other forever as a comrade.
It’s not impossible. Well, some of it is. I cannot replace the moon. But a talonflame, hmm... I must die again anyway. Not permanently, just enough to live a different life...
Do you see yet, Haley? Do you? At the very least, Ribbons has.
I’ve spun and spewed so many lies. Truly, though, I am grateful for all you’ve done for me… for Mark… for both of us. Out of all the prisoners Joey could’ve identified to inspire you to action, it had to be the one trapped by choice. Mark himself is at no fault for this choice, that is, how I stole his personality, identity, appearing, speaking style. Warped it all to my liking and for convenience’s sake. Easy, when your only conversations are with strangers who have, at most, read about you in bullet list form.
You know what? There’s little to lose, so I can be more specific now. Thank you for the opportunity to use my voice. My voice, that forgotten thing which wilted from disuse over the years. How could I
not take someone else’s when the chance emerged?
But no longer, not with this guilt ripping at me. You know me—no, Mark—who now?—so well that I couldn’t stand the thought of you arriving at the correctional center, watching me, sensing something wrong. There was no need to additionally measure my physical movements until that meeting arrangement, and, trying, memories of me and him flooded back. I was unprepared. Too much, too much!
Even if
you hadn’t noticed something amiss, Ribbons would have. He’s right: I mean danger to him. To anyone. Me, a dark-type cowering from a psychic, flipping the advantage around to avoid being exposed… In that respect my disappearing act was, in fact, a performance designed for a target audience. As you feared.
You asked once about who flies your letters to you. A bird belonging to the warden, perhaps? An inmate’s flying-type, designated to serving Brun Way until his incarceration ends? No. It’s been me, disguised as different species. This way, you’d not feel compelled to grow attached to any one bird.
Before departing, I’d create an illusion of my Mark form and send him into bed for a nap. Careful not to overlap with parts of his schedule which required him to change locations. And when no one was looking, off I’d go, slipping through the bars to freedom. To a brief moment with you, over and over. When you mentioned meeting in person, I thought, We already have, what could you mean? Like a fool.
By the way, Haley, following the rules was rough. Your lucky coin, your letters, none of it should’ve been in danger of inspection by the guards. All of it should’ve been all mine to sneak in and hoard. A treasure chest of goods in plain sight, and no one would suspect a thing. But I could not predict when Ribbons would arrive, where I’d be… I have limits to my illusions, you know. Luckily, the guards’ baseline is the belief that all inmates are ungrateful. Markus Samaras, he receives a lot of mail, but he never sends anything back! Typical inmate behavior, that.
So on that level I was safe. Sure, it would’ve been safe to have Brun Way send my letters to you their way, but I wanted so little in life that when I wanted to mingle with you and your team and Kenneth, if just for a moment, I made it happen. Those moments accumulated and suddenly I was asking for the world when I deserved none of it.
You might not believe me. But you missed my slip up a few letters back! How I mentioned your hair’s blondness. How else could I have known? And ask Ribbons, ask him! Ribbons, noble Ribbons, has continually sacrificed himself to fly your letters to me. The sickness he suffered as a natu was not due to a lack of physical prowess, Haley, but of extensive anxiety. Knowing he was headed to a place with a dark-type in the vicinity, unable to retreat to the safety of his trainer, his team, his pokéball if attacked… But he was unable to refuse you such an important favor.
Oh, I can’t blame him for loving you so much.
More confessions. The real Markus Samaras, born on July 10 during a year where the drug use statistics skyrocketed, probably. Quadruplets: Delphox, Greninja, Chesnaught, and him, all faking aliveness in their respective ways. They wore death on their bodies at all hours of the day. Still, because Mark spoke highly of the others, I wish I could have met them. I wondered if he’d talk highly of me if I were gone, too. I dreamed often about going anywhere else.
Honestly, Mark came from an okay home. Sad, but not unbearable. He was left to fend for himself, in locating, identifying, describing his emotions. They were tumultuous. His parents could glance at him as a tornado ripped through his insides, his brain circuits. And they did not notice. Perhaps this knack led him down the acting route? There remain big gaps like this that I will never be able to fill for you, let me say now. It’s abhorrent as it is, the way I twisted the truths I did know into something unrecognizable to me but recognizable for you.
Cue again winded descriptions of Mark at high school, then breeder school, then training and the move tutor, buying my egg and trying to “start over”… Or not. What you’re dying to know, assuming you’ve processed who I really am by this point, is how the switch happened. So I shall jump to that and
Wait. No, allow me this last indulgence, will you? Allow me to tell you about my time together with Mark, from my point of view. My early days with him were unremarkable, thus eschewed from my memory once we established a routine and revealed deeper aspects of ourselves. Cue a skip to your commonly asked questions, then.
I didn’t exaggerate his worries about my muteness. Under the influence, he thought demons possessed my vocal cords. He loathed psychic-types, yes, but for my sake was willing to collaborate with psychic-types to communicate with the demons and exorcise them.
There was no need. Mark made silence comfortable. He fostered an environment for silence to be used the way it should be. Silence allows you to give others the precious gift of time, and attention. Mark spun tales all the time. I listened. He wasn’t deliberately trying to entertain me. Just enjoyed the sound of his own voice, and the sight of eyes on him rather than past him. The latter reminded him bitterly of his parents.
Why not use my voice once,
once, to convince him I was okay? Not sick? Mark himself was sick, as you know. His starters became sick. Died by his hands, in a way. His parents were sick, deprived of the ability to provide emotional support for their only son. Died of old age, unaware of the damage they’d wrought. To reveal I was a normal zorua, free of the concerns that plagued all areas of his life, was to wholly desert him and shatter the worldview he’d built for decades. I was afraid that I’d be the one to send him over the edge, closer to drugs, those inanimate destructive things, into full death.
What else was true? Hmm… We did perform a lot of shows. In Lumiose, to earn money. The streets there were overcrowded always. So much so that one week I didn’t spot someone lurking nearby to steal our tip bucket, also overcrowded as a strategic way to get people to watch us. Unable to score, Mark suffered from withdrawal symptoms. Worse than he ever had before. He hallucinated voices, sights, smells, even tastes… Unable to undo the illusions bombarding him, I could only empathize in horror and suffer, too. And not once did he ask me to create new illusions for his sake, break the existing ones. Was it polite consideration for my sake or a way of avoiding my assumed nature, my deviousness? The evidence supported either conclusion: his treating me like a fragile object and the frequent training sessions he held in the hopes of me evolving.
That is not to say that I was not true to my devious zorua nature, ever. My favorite stage performance involved a daring illusion I concocted alone. Obviously, Mark was unaware beforehand. How would he react? I had to know. I had to break the predictability of his life once. To catch a glimpse of himself should he tried to fix his life. He’d forgive me by the end of it, he who accepted the majority of my shortcomings simply because I was not a stranger to him.
Mark claimed to the crowd before us—bustling, chafing each other’s shoulders, taunting anyone who could hear with the belief that we’d flop—that I’d breathe fire hotter and brighter than any real fire-type. Part of the trick was the assumption that our audience possessed little to no experience with fire-types. In overcrowded Lumiose, after all, residents cannot own fire-types. Trainers must contain theirs, even the dual types, in a pokéball. Wild ones that stray within the city limits are chased away.
I’d been practicing my flamethrower, right, so I was ready. I inhaled greatly. Felt the smoke fill up my lungs and surely cut five years off my lifespan. And when I exhaled, the flames blanketed the stage. Faltering, a few sparks licked and melted the wood beneath our feet a tad. Not that anyone could see. The audience was blinded, shielding their eyes. Which stirred the slumbering adrenaline in them. I had until the brightness dissipated to prepare to strike.
I couldn’t cry out. So I faked several alarming facial expressions to convey to those who opened their eyes that, ah, I couldn’t control the fire after all. I jerked the flames this way and that, a feat I had fled from Mark in the night to perfect. I could control the shape of the flames as well now. I made them flicker and hiss and bounce up and down. Threatening to scatter anywhere, on anyone.
The charade had to end, of course. All charades do. I summoned my rain dance technique, which we’d also practiced for emergencies. The fire, doused, made swirling smoke patterns. Like translucent fireworks. Then people knew this was indeed the performance, everything up till the blackened sky lit up again with its various shades of blue.
Mark was stressed. He held a forced smile while half the crowd stomped away in dismay, the other half congratulating us with cash. Afterward he coddled me, dubbed me a genius, the best and most ruthless partner he’d been dreaming of...
And now Mark is dead. Dead dead dead.
Balancing the facts and fictions of his life, my life, heavied my mind greatly. Some missteps were purposeful, to see if you’d catch on. I brought myself up in conversation so many times. Grieving for myself. But from the point of view of Mark, how he’d grieve for me, if he would. Emotionally distant sums him up well. And for a friendship which relies on a pure emotional connection, I had to improvise and improvise and improvise…
Cognitive overload. I’d felt it a long while, my body wanting to evolve. The daringness of the performance I described above was the first sign to tell me I was nearing the inevitable. Mark hoped for it, longed for it, but missed it. I only let myself change when I received your first letter. Before then I’d just grit my teeth past the physical pain.
Logic. I was never in danger of losing you, of you leaving. No matter how this played out. I am like you. My parent, Mark, told me that flaws were abundant in everyone but they could improve. And he wouldn’t go as long as I was actively working on the ones that affected my performances. But he has gone.
When your letter arrived, I’d hoped that it was him. My trainer, my friend, my Mark, had he come to say hello to me again? From the dead! How? Would he outline this trick of his for me, please?
But the real trick lies with me. He died when I was breathing through a body just like his own. Down to the tiniest group of molecules in his body. I thought that I must help him live on literally. No one else would remember him. His parents, his starters? Impossible. Other friends, other family? None.
Therefore, I was Mark, I had to be be Mark. Enmity, he was the dead one, I thought. By convincing you that he’d be gone for good, I’d hoped to convince myself.
To no avail now. You see, we did not have enough resources to expand our names outside of Lumiose. No known connections to drugs except in Laverre, and not enough time to get there before withdrawal would set in. Our performances grew stale in Lumiose’s eyes. Famous, international actors started traveling through and were the priority of people’s time and attention. Mark would promise dealers he’d pay them back eventually, but for now, desperation had a hold on him, wouldn’t they spare him a night of the desire to die? Those who said no, he stole from.
Someone, unknown, caught on and reported him. The cops stalked after him. Also disguised and at night, to blend in with our natural habitat. Mark was sleeping blissfully between two empty garbage bins in the alleyway separating the local press and a battle restaurant. I sensed an off presence and woke him up, signaled for him to run. In his drugged state, running was a colossal struggle. The police would’ve caught up to him in no time, and that’d be it for him, for us! He always told me the city would separate us if given the chance…
He did not look back to see where I was. So I did not get his permission or see the disapproval creep on his face, whichever would’ve happened. I stayed behind, transformed into him, summoning the zoroark energy I felt lurking in me to ensure the police would be fooled. Yes, they arrested me instead, unaware of the truth. I thought only about how a human’s skin is cold, and the handcuffs on my wrists, Mark’s wrists, was even colder, and how I’d saved him from that.
Mark adopted a pseudonym, for a while. He wrote to me. Much like you. Too afraid to approach anywhere near Lumiose, then Laverre once I transferred there. And I? I was incapable of leaving the prison freely like I can now, thanks to my unevolved form. So I waited for Mark to bail me out, because he promised he would. He’d devised a plan to save money, he wrote. The right way this time, a surefire way. I had hope until my competency hearing came and weight (I was struggling to act human and aroused suspicion), then my trial came and went, then sentencing, then several quiet months...
I assume that he overdosed in hiding, no one to search for him or identify him. I’d have heard about it if anyone stumbled into his corpse and reported it. My illusion would’ve been shattered by his fingerprints, by science.
So no, to be clear, I don’t know his fate for sure. But if he’s not dead, why hasn’t he come for me or written to me? Why has he abandoned me to live out the full extent of my sacrifice? I could leave and search for him, yes, I’m aware. My assumption is safer. Keeps my heart intact, cracked as it’s gotten.
My life was predictable until you wrote to me. No hello from Mark, but hello from a stranger instead? When my schedule, my decisions, my clothes, everything was decided for me, and I could say what I’d be doing years from today’s date and time? I could’ve ignored you. Indeed I’d forgotten how to read and write by that point. They were skills I developed solely to communicate with Mark until...
So I tried to learn how again, and it was taking too long, too long, because my body ached and all my energy was sunk into maintaining Mark’s appearance. The more I tried, the more I was suddenly desperate to have you as a companion, however distant, so I evolved in the night. My capacities expanded, I wrote to you successfully and apologized for my apparent rudeness. You know the rest.
Now officially, our letters end here. It’s nothing personal. My life supposedly ended when Mark disappeared/died. Yet my heart keeps beating, and my mind sharpens with each word of yours I read. The whole of me wants more life. Which I will find, as I said, alone. I do not deserve your supposedly unconditional company, least of all yours. Too kind, too genuine, too trusting.
I thank you for leading me as far as you have. For inspiring me to seek sights and sounds, tastes and smells that otherwise would pass me by. That was a goal you succeeded in tenfold. And thank you for being my first experience back into the life of Enmity, albeit through Mark’s name and signature. It only happened because I initially failed at scaring you off. Were you sure? Were you sure? You were sure about a criminal, about Mark. Not me, right? So we should have a chance, you think? Yet I am a criminal in my own right. Not a drug addict, but filled with pathological deceptions and tales long enough to write a dedicated law book about.
I’d say sorry for leaving you alone, but you’re not. You have your flying-types. As for Kenneth, I’m curious to know if he suspected, well, this. How could he have? He was full of surprises, though. Perhaps he would not have wanted to accept the truth, even if he’d put the pieces together. A pokémon, capable of so much language and intelligence he could thoroughly fool numerous humans? Prison workers who reduce a human’s status to that of a monster is not the best example, actually. Still, it would mean that Donmel is capable of the same, and that he’s failed to help his pokémon reach that potential in favor of neglect.
We talked about this plenty, Haley. You will be amazed as you learn how complex your pokémon truly are, now that the language barrier is diminishing. Ribbons will confirm my story. That my letters, for the first time, consist of no illusions or tricks.
In the end I have confessed to you after my request. Why? Out of guilt, no other reason. Use my story as you will. Sell it to the prison, or some tabloid looking for a great headline. You could earn money for handing over my letters and taking part in such an unbelievable experience. Who knows, Mark may come out of hiding then, like I’ve dreamed. Either way, I give you permission to take advantage of me in this way. The downsides and their accompanying burdens are mine to bear.
Thank you again, Haley. I’ll miss you, but this—is—the—space—between—us. No, not wide enough. Let me try again. Drive the point home, wherever that is.
This
is
the
space
between
us.
Goodbye,
En