The City of Death

When the light went out, Giligan didn’t flinch. It was hard to discern his expression in the darkness but Jenni knew what to watch out for. Even when the outline of his figure didn’t break, Jenni heard his silent scream. The loss of the light made no difference to him.

She crossed the room to sat by his side.   

“Are you scared?” she spoke up. They both knew she wasn’t talking about the devouring shadow circling them. Materialistic, worldly things hardly mattered to Giligan, the same way a dead man would regard his past life.

In fact, Jenni was the one currently terrified out of her mind . She looked up to the moon in the night sky to avert her eyes from the void. Tentatively, she admitted. “I am scared.”

With the help of the moonlight, she catched Giligan’s corner of mouth quirking upward. She might be wrong. Except, she was pretty sure that in that split second, Giligan had smiled.

Is the world ending? She thought to herself. The moon offered no answer.

“What’s there to be scared of?” Giligan asked. Jenni almost mistook it for a rhetorical question. Giligan was hard to read under the daylight, his stoic face gave nothing away. Now, Jenni might as well talking to an unbending rock. The man was impossible.

She shifted uneasily. Absent-mindedly, she thought that even dead men should fear something in their graves. The problem was, they were, well, dead. They could scream all they want but who wanted to hear them? Dead men tell no tales, as the old saying goes. Jenni had always thought the phrase was born out of aversion from the death, from the fear of the livings.

Giligan wasn’t dead, but he sure as heck talked like one. When Jenni looked into his eyes, there was nothing she could see that reflected a breathing life. No tales to speak of.

But, occasionaly, there were moments. And the stoic, unreadable Giligan had pushed her away exactly before the light went off, as if he was scared of her. Something had spooked him enough for him to stop pretending to be dead. It was the reason why she was out here in the first place, following a dead man’s trails.

Giligan get off the bench park. His daunting figure looked at home with the darkness, giving off the impression he could disappear any moment.

“Come with me?” he offered his hand. Jenni didn’t take it but she did stand up and walk by his side.

“The city looks different without the light guiding its path,” she commented. Different was a huge understatement. If she had to be honest, the city looked dead. The irony was probably laughing at her right now. The girl who always laughed at death now walking in the city of one.

Jenni couldn’t see it but she could feel Giligan’s gaze pinned at her. She wished the darkness hide her squirms.

“I am sorry.”

She blinked. Giligan’s eyes were now pointed up ahead. With half of his face hidden within the shadow, Jenni couldn’t read his expression at all. And yet, Giligan had never looked more alive.

Maybe, she really had transported into the City of Death without realizing it. She didn’t realize she’d muttered the words out loud until she heard Giligan’s snort beside her.

“You always say the strangest things.”

“You do too,” she snorted back. “What’s with the sudden apology?”

Giligan shrugged. “For pushing you before.”

Oh, right, it was the reason why she was out here, wasn’t it? She was walking in the City of Death because Giligan had shown her a brief sign of mortality. Like they said, curiosity killed the cat. That kind of phrase usually didn’t fit her. Jenni never considered herself to be the kind of girl who seek trouble.

It was always the troubles who find her. Such was the way of living. It worked like a wheel of fortune. Nobody was happy forever. No one was sad forever. Jenni had accepted that long ago. She just couldn’t accept Giligan, who run outside the wheel of fortune and watch everyone else scrambling around in it with cold detachment.

“It’s fine. I am sorry for laughing.”

“You weren’t laughing,” he said, his tone emotionless. Just a few seconds ago, he sounded like a normal living, breathing human.

“I was,” she admitted. “On the inside.” When Giligan didn’t say anything, she curiously asked, “Isn’t that why you push me away?”

Giligan’s eyes were glowing in the darkness as he watched her like a hawk. “No, I push you away because-“

He paused. Jenni had to push. She didn’t know what it was about this City of Death that made Giligan acted more human, but she wouldn’t miss this chance. “Because?”

Giligan stopped walking. Jenni stepped in front of him. The moonlight didn’t assist much in her endeavor but at least she could still see the outline of his face.

“Because you made me want to stop pretending.”

Oh. Jenni didn’t actually understand but she thought she might get it.

The thing was, it was so easy to lost yourself in the land of living. Everything about Giligan was contained in one ugly warped mirror that she didn’t want to look at. Just like how Jenni saw everything she used to be in the boy with the emotional capacity of a rock, maybe Giligan was seeing everything he could be in a girl who laughed at the death.

Jenni opened her mouth. To encourage him, maybe, or to mock him. She couldn’t decide. Now that she saw more than the dead man Giligan ever was, it wasn’t so easy to ignore the humanity in his eyes, even without light guiding her. Giligan wasn’t a dead man, after all.

She tried again to say something, anything, but the light came back. The city’s pulse was quickening once more. In the absence of darkness, Giligan returned to the broken shell of a human he was before.

“Jenni,” he said. Tried as she might be, Jenni couldn’t see signs of life.

“Giligan,” she smiled. “Let’s return inside. I am sure our friends are looking for us.”

They must be panicking right now. Not that Giligan would care.

From now on, she’d try not to read too much into it. What did they sabout it again? Ah, yes. If you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you.