The Man in the Doorway

The erstwhile god exhaled a plume of cheap smoke into the stale air of my tattered apartment.

“Why did you do it?” She asked, leaning back on my one chair with one foot up on my ash-stained desk. It rested amongst crooked cigarette butts, scattered like so many withered husks of scorpions that had died in writhing agony.

I did not respond other than to take a long drag of my cigarette.

The light had long since abandoned us. Electricity was one of the products of my civilization which had vanished along with it. I could identify the gods’ presence in the ruins of my apartment by the tiny ember glare of her cigarette and the faintest glimmer of a setting sun.

Sincere curiosity was all I could perceive from her tone, though her shadowed features conveyed a distinct aura of malevolence. But perhaps I was reading too much into it.

More likely I am projecting, I admitted to myself whilst breathing out my own ponderous plume of smoke. Inexorable guilt and crippling shame are still symptoms of what might have once been called ‘the human condition’, even though illness, disease, or natural death were no longer. The scientific habits of my mind which sought to observe and question everything clearly hadn’t retired, even though I long since had despite the wealth and fame that came with my illustrious medical career and fraudulent success.

Did I ever pause to consider the theistic significance of my crowning achievement? My crowning mistake?

My left hand instinctively crept towards the cold weight sitting in my lap, but I forced it back down to my side.

“When one has everything to gain, and the only sacrifice was something you’d never have anyway; what would you have done?” I asked, voice gravelly.

The tiny carnelian dot rose to the gods face, flared, and was then subsumed by a bloom of smoke. Through the curling grey-red tendrils I could spy the sardonic twist of the gods’ lips.

Internally, I chastised myself. Stupid question. What would she know of consequence? Of longing, powerlessness, love, disaster, regret? She honoured the inane question as a god should have, despite ostensibly being retired, with silence.

To be fair, it was my fault that this god had lost her job.

My back against a wall, I sat mindlessly observing the miserable expanse of the world through my cracked glass door. I was the sole occupant of the sleepy remnants of this long-abandoned complex. Nature had done the lions share in reclaiming it, and time had done the rest. Humans, society, had no use for buildings anymore, after all. No use for anything.

In giving humanity the answer to the risk of life, I stole from them the appreciation of it. The beauty. The frailty. Passion. Meaning. No wonder this ‘perfect’ world fell apart.

The god removed her foot from my desk and leaned forward, eyes narrowing.

“I know.” I paused. “I know. The cost was something I thought I would never have to pay. Wouldn’t your people have called this a ‘Tragedy’?”

The god snorted derisively.

“The ancient Greeks didn’t have shit figured out any better than anyone else. They called me Atropos, Clotho, Lachesis, Rhea, and many other titles besides, not realizing we were all one and the same,” she announced, punctuating her words contemptuously.

I nodded slowly. She ground her now spent cigarette onto a page on my desk. It was an unsent letter. To Him.

No matter. It was never destined to be sent. If it were, I would lose the last thing that mattered.

“Though I suppose in your particular case,” she said through a facsimile of a grin, tearing my attention from the letter on my desk, “You might call me Nemesis.”

I rifled through my memories regarding Greek lore and mythology. ‘Nemesis’; the goddess of retribution and divine vengeance. Appropriate, I thought.

“So, you’re really here to ensure I never escape my suffering… my penance. Great.” I flicked my own cigarette dismissively at the world through my glass door, then gestured loftily at myself, my threadbare clothing, my unkempt appearance. “As you can see, I needn’t any encouragement.”

“Oh, child. No god could punish you worse than you do yourself. I’m just here to understand why you did what you did.”

I ran my tongue across my teeth and clenched my jaw. My teeth unstained by tobacco or alcohol, despite my fierce consumption of both. Just another side effect of my foolhardy deal with a different god lifetimes ago. Humans would no longer experience death, sickness, disease, illness, or anything that might cause the body harm or discomfort.

Horrible news for someone wishing to smoke and drink away their misery.

“Why what? Why did I cure every plague and ailment of humanity? Why did I remove what I thought was the biggest obstacle to a humanitarian utopia? Why did I save all people from the loss of loved ones, from suffering?” I spat my disdain on the floor beside me, but not before proffering another cigarette to the god at my desk. “Why did I sacrifice something that I thought I’d never have to achieve it? When all I would gain was fame, prosperity, and practicable immortality?”

The god leaned back and raised an eyebrow, prompting me to continue. I sighed again and pinched the bridge of my nose, before making my admission through clamped eyes.

“Why… why did I trick the world into thinking that the key to keeping the gift of everlasting life, which I had bestowed upon them, hinged on the banishment of… Him.”

An oppressive silence filled the room. We both knew who ‘he’ was, though I danced around it with all the grace of a drunkard. I waited for the inevitable. The real question she was asking.

“Why did you abandon and condemn your son?”

Explanations and excuses tumbled through my mind like leaves in a hurricane.

I sought the centre.

“I was young when I made the Deal. Successful. Ambitious. I never imagined I would be in love. And a child? Inconceivable,” I muttered, deadpan. Expressionless. I glanced down at the dark object in my lap.

The god motioned with her hand. Get to the point.

“What would it matter? I thought. But the Deal wasn’t made to sacrifice my unborn child, who I never thought would exist to begin with. It was to sacrifice the one who would one day call me ‘Father’.”

A moment of silence. Of understanding.

“I see. You must have made your witless Deal with Eris,” Atropos said through a laborious sigh, then after a moment added softly, “That bitch.”

I spat on the floor again in agreement. After a moment of consideration, the god contorted her mouth and spat in the same spot, though awkwardly.

My cheeks creased with the echo of a smile as I lit her cigarette and then my own.

“She has a penchant for cursed bargains, as I’m sure you’ve discerned by now,” Atropos mused. “So long as your son never calls you Father, then he will survive. All you had to do was knowingly damn both of you to an eternity apart, an eternity where you both fade into oblivion and sorrow. Everyone knows your face, after all. Who you are.”

“And if either of us were to be part of this new world, this hell I created, then he would learn the truth eventually… and I’d lose him forever,” I whispered, nodding.

Atropos tapped the ash from her cigarette disdainfully. “Classic fucking Eris,” she grimaced.

My mouth dried. There was one more mistake I made. A sentimental gift given in a moment of weakness that would one day come home to roost.

“It’s worse,” I croaked, right as a door screeched open calamitously down the hall outside my apartment.

Apart from myself, only one other had this address. The sound of that door breaking the quietude of several decades heralded the repercussion of that fatal mistake.

“It’s worse,” I repeated, my left hand twitching. “I gave his mother a locket before I left. In it a picture of him as a newborn, his mother, and… I.”

The god at my desk audibly exhaled a long plume of smoke.

“I see. That would be him then,” she concluded softly, thrusting her chin towards the door to my apartment, before nodding slowly in understanding. “You always knew that he would eventually find you.”

Footsteps echoed down the hall, pausing every 8 steps. The number of steps between each door.

“How long has it been?”

My heartbeat thrummed in my ears. My hands shuddered. The god benevolently tilted forward again and offered me her cigarette. I leaned forward, took a single drag, and slumped back against the wall.

“An eternity,” I whispered, smoke trailing from my mouth.

“Do you want to -”

“More than anything.”

8 more steps. Closer. So much closer.

My left hand, still now, travelled to my lap. The god glanced down, then looked back up at me knowingly.

“He must never call me Father,” I whispered through tears. Atropos, the goddess of fate, of destiny, the cutter of the thread, nodded. Her eyes gleamed.

8 final steps.

A shadow appeared in the doorway. I did not, could not, look.

My left hand took up the gun in my lap and pressed the cold metal barrel against my chin. In that final moment, it held my treacherous mouth shut, stopping me from saying everything I wished I could have.

I fired.

* * *

The Man in the doorway recoiled at the deafening clap of finality. A faceless vagrant toppled to his side, and a gun trailing smoke clattered to the floor.

Across the tomb, a woman sat unnervingly still in the shadows by a desk. Plumes of smoke wreathed her head. Her eyes were not on him, however, nor were they on the nobody who had just killed himself. They were on the item dangling from the Mans’ left hand. A small, heart-shaped locket, which glittered in the final rays of the setting sun.

“Why are you here?” The woman whispered into the echoing silence.

“I don’t know,” the Man responded quietly whilst staring at the corpse, eyebrows drawn together. “All I have is this.”

He held out the locket as he intruded the room, and after a brief pause, stepped over the body. She snatched it from his hand without asking, though the Man shrugged as though it were of no consequence.

“Who are you?” The Man asked.

The mysterious woman opened her mouth to speak, then closed it, apparently changing her mind. She looked from the Man to the body on the floor, and back again. She turned her gaze down to the locket and opened it.

Inside was… nothing.

She turned it in her hands and found the address to the building engraved on the back. She looked up, eyes widening.

“By the time my mother gave this to me the photo inside it had faded completely,” the Man explained in slow tones, “if that was what you were looking for.”

“Did… she say anything?”

“Only that I should look for someone at that – this - address, who might be able to explain everything,” The Man responded distractedly before turning around. His gaze landed on the faceless remains, his eyes devoid of the spark of recognition.

“Who was he then?”

The woman breathed out through her nose as she stood tiredly. She stared down at the ruined face of the one lying cold and crooked on the ground, like the withered husk of a scorpion that had died in writhing agony. Her right hand dragged the ash-stained page off the desk. She crumpled it in her fist before stepping tenderly around the corpse.

“No one.”