Work Text:
His scent is his footstep, rushing desperately towards release, towards the promise of a brown leather upholstered chair. I will feign surprise when I see him, as though his essence had not already called out, pungent with terror and brine.
Yes, that is Will Graham, perspiring flesh and half-realized apologies as he stumbles through my door.
His flannel shirt is misbuttoned and there is a smeared fingerprint marring his glasses. A sloppy smudge. He paces the length of my office with several false stops and his anxious words have trouble reaching completion. It takes patient coaxing twice over before he can take a seat, but his foot is rapping tensely on the carpet and his downward gaze blinks quickly, as though he half expects the trembling hands he wrings to be a phantom. I turn him over in my head, the scattered undulation of his voice, the grip of his fingers when he finally hangs his head into his palms to claw at the uncertainty churning within them.
Yes, that is Will Graham, aching to peel back his own flesh and peer beneath, but too terrified to do anything but allow me to hold his mirror.
I will provide his reassuring words, probe carefully at his bruised psyche, and as I bring him to the edge, I will rest my hand tenderly on his shoulder, and wait to see if he leaps, splinters, or crumbles. He is agonizing desperately over my work in a way I cannot but be familiar with, striving for the perfection of knowing, such that I see my own design in him. He cannot tease apart the creation from self, and his being craves unconsciously to see me and know me from himself. Are those my very words and patterns on his lips?
Yes, that is Will Graham, unable to see the work we are so gracefully shaping together. How our hands hover so delicately on the page, to touch the rippling white surface before the water breaks.
Ah, but we are not so seamless, yet. He speaks of my art and his words lick at its form, his gaze struggling to grasp my eyes. And though my face reveals nothing across from him, I feel I have been seen. The hairs on my neck prickle, like one who senses they are watched from afar. He does not realize his predatory touch, does not feel my hand holding his as the pressure builds.
Then he is a wave crashed upon the rocks, scattered rivulets gone to pieces, sobbing their paths down a surface they cannot cling to. His sickness weeps from his words and I cannot but watch in fascination, marvel silently at the degeneration of a man whose mind burns with such intensity that he will rupture with the burst of a star and just as softly fade into an indifferent glimmer in the night.
Yes, that is Will Graham, all glassy eyes and broken pieces, a hovel, a ramshackle creature on dragging feet that poses such an elegant disaster from my chair that it is a symphony to behold.
The code of my profession should oblige me to serve his interests, to gently show him these pieces of himself he sheds in the night and in the eyes of corpses. But my own selfishness binds me to compose him, to arrange him just so. I will prop his crippled pieces in a jagged line up the hill that he stumbles so that he may follow them, until his anguish crescendos and he elicits such pathos, such a sweet note, dangling effortless in the air, that even I shall be moved.
Yes, that is Will Graham.
My patient.
My unbeknownst friend.
My masterpiece.
My madness.