Bill slumped against the heavy metal door, and let it swing out into the chill of the darkening evening. He dragged his feet over the metal door frame, onto the grey cement walkway outside. Behind him, in the gloom, the lobby clerk answered the phone with a high pitched mechanical chime. Bill let the door slam behind him, blocking out her professional, dispassionate voice. The woman was more a machine than a person. She had stared at him with the blank, blind eyes of someone who has acted this scene out too many times. "I'm sorry, I can't help you. Mr. Thompson is busy today. Come back tomorrow."
Every day, she said it. Probably not always to him; no, it was too practiced, too easy to roll off her tongue. She likely said it over and over daily, like a mantra. I'm sorry, I can't help you. He wondered vaguely if that phrase ever bled over into other aspects of her life, if she ever caught herself saying to her family or her friends or bums on the street begging for a buck - I'm sorry, I can't help you.
Well, he for one was tired of hearing it, day after goddamned day. Tired of pushing through the foreboding company door with that slight straining feeling in his chest, the tight anticipation that maybe, oh just maybe today would be the day..and then the crushing, the final, the impersonal, I'm sorry. I can't help you.
The last patch of sun slid behind the glass skyscrapers with a resigned sort of finality. Bill thrust his pale hands deep into his pockets and moved down the streets, shoulders hunched slightly against the cold of the deepening evening. He snorted slightly when a stray waft of city stench floated up from a nearby sewer, and once reached up to rake long, callused fingers through his short, dark hair. Well, his usually short dark hair. Lately, he'd been going for the rugged look. It was definitely not the look of the season, but a man on a tight budget didn't really have too many options. He scrubbed absently at the rough stubble sprouting to match the hair, accenting an already noticeably pale face. Hey, shaggy might come back someday. It was good to be prepared.
His lips quirked slightly at the thought, but dropped immediately as he rounded a corner and ran head on into a gust of cold wind. His free hand flew to the broad strap over his shoulder, hooking his fingers into the fraying leather. The wind subsided, and he lifted his head but left his hand on the strap for another second or so, just for the sake of comfort. It was good to know that she was still there, pressed securely against his back. He maybe had nothing else, but while he had his guitar - well, that was something. Not much, but something.
He had bought her about two years ago, when his old guitar, his first true love he jokingly called her, had quietly gone to pieces after too many years as his focus. It was rough on an instrument, he knew, to be the focal point of a man's life. It was hard on them, to be the focus of all his joys and fears and angers and hurts. So Janine, his first, a lovely old girl he'd gotten from his dad when he lived, had been put in a box and sent to the recycling plant, with all honors. He'd moped all that day, then the next taken what meager funds he'd been saving for almost a year, and found Elanor. He'd picked her up in the shop, and she'd felt as new as the day but as comfortingly familiar as his own name. And the first time he'd stroked through a few , he'd bought her on the spot, never mind she was about fifty bucks over what he'd planned to spend. The new sneakers could wait. And she'd been worth it, every time he brought her out of the case.
He'd let her down tonight, though. It was a cycle he was starting to hate. They'd go somewhere, play a gig, maybe get a buck or two. For a week, maybe more, he'd live from job to job, running bar to townhouse to party to bar. But then the compliments, the few lousy scrounged bucks would get to him, and he'd dream of maybe getting somewhere a little better, maybe living a life less day to day and more month to month. He wasn't asking to be a superstar. He wasn't asking for glory and wealth beyond the wildest imagination. He wanted a little , maybe. A little more comfort. Just a little more.
So he'd go to one of the buildings, like the one he'd just left. They were all the same, really. Tall, imposing skyscrapers, glass windows as featureless and reflective as the lobby clerk's eyes. And every time, every damn time, he'd hear that sing song phrase, the automated message in a human being's mouth - I'm sorry, I can't help you.
And he'd be back where he was now, dragging worn out sneakers over gum and graphiti-encrusted cement, headed for his low-rent apartment, low- income lifestyle - low fuckin' life. The thought sent a momentary surge of anger through him; he kicked at a soda can someone had left half crumpled on the sidewalk and watched it skitter noisily into an alley. But just as quickly, the anger burned out, leaving him colder than before.
Head bowed against the fitful winds, he started walking again. His body felt sluggish and slow, like he was walking through water or mud, like his feet had suddenly decided to get about five pounds heavier, each. Elanor pressed heavily into his back, as if she had suddenly betrayed him and become something much heavier, and more sinister.
He closed his eyes against the grit that sliced through the air and against his skin, riding the wind. One hand compulsively went to the guitar strap, the other he threw into the air before his face in a weak attempt to shield it from the onslaught.
"Why do you people bother?"
He froze, face still partially obscured behind his arm. The voice had been as cold and dead as fallen leaves beneath a pile of dirty snow. It grated harshly into his ears, made him want to cry or yell or sink in a pile of jellied bones to the ground. For a breath of an instant Bill debated turning sharply on his heel and running away, running like a madman and never look back.
He decided to lower his arm instead.
Walking next to him, as calmly and naturally as if she was his old friend and had been with him since he left the building, maybe even before, was a woman. She was about his height, about his build - in fact, she looked a lot like a female version of him. A him that had been locked away in a cell somewhere for years, forgotten and half crazy. Her features were just a little sharper than his, as if hunger had eaten away at her. Her dark hair, the exact same color as his own, hung around her skinny neck in a limp, wild sort of way. Her skin was clammy, slightly paler than his. But her eyes were the strangest, and most frightening, feature of them all. They were like an exact inverse of his own - two round milky white irises stared out of otherwise entirely brown eyes. She had black pupils like his own, but they were so fiercely dilated that they were mere pinpricks of black inside the white. He stared into those pupils, and felt himself gasping like a drowning man. She looked away, and he was suddenly surprised to realize that he had stopped moving, had actually fallen to one knee and had dug his fingers into his throat as if he were trying to tear away something wrapped around it. But there was nothing there but the loose, overstretched collar of his t-shirt. He stood up again slowly, one hand going back to the guitar strap, the other clenched at his side.
She started walking again, as if he had merely paused to tie his shoe or some other mundane, normal task. For reasons he couldn't afterwards fathom to himself, Bill hurried to catch up. But he watched her profile warily, flinching every time he thought she would turn her head. Her features, so familiar but so alien, remained calm, unperturbed.
"Well?" she said at last, and he shuddered involuntarily.
"?" he replied at last.
"I said, why do you people bother?"
"About what?"
She lifted a long pale hand, so eerily like a dead replica of his own, that he almost missed her words. "This. Any of this. You all try and struggle and dream and fall down again and again, and still you keep getting up to try again. It makes no sense. Even when you do get what you want, it always turns out that you really wanted something else." She gave a brief, husky laugh that reminded Bill of his grandfather's last wheezing breaths when the lung cancer had finally killed him. "Or even better, some of you get exactly what you want and as a result, cause unmeasured misery or pain to thousands of others. And you know it, too. So why, then, do you keep getting back up again?"
"Who are you?" Bill asked, realizing he could work up the nerve to talk almost normally as long as she kept those freaky eyes turned off of him. "What.." He trailed off, as a powerful wave of stench rolled over him. "What the hell is that?" he choked, fighting the urge to vomit as the smell of feces, urine, sweat, garbage, and blood roiled in the air around him. The woman titled her head calmly towards the scene that had suddenly materialized before them.
"Look," she said.
They were standing in a part of town Bill had never seen - actually, he wasn't sure they were still in his city. This place was so run down, so god-awfully filthy and decayed that he didn't think anyone who lived within miles could miss it. A row of ramshackle huts leaned against brick walls or each other, muddy walls covered in paraphernalia of all kinds. Muddy straw mats with holes, bits of tin or rubber, and the occasional grubby garment were tacked onto the sides of the slum buildings (if he dared to call them even that) as if the huts were magnets for junk. And the stench permeated everything, as ugly and as solid as the rest of it.
In front of one of the dark doorways, a girl, maybe fourteen at best, huddled miserably on the splintering wooden stoop, hugging a bundle of rags and rocking slowly. She was so thin that her knees looked like wooden balls carved in the middle of two twigs. Her feet were bare and heavily callused; her ragged scrap of a dress barely covered the ridiculously spindly arms, the narrow chest. Her hair, as thin and lifeless as the woman beside him, hung around her starved face in listless strings. "Hush, hush," she crooned tiredly to the bundle, and Bill realized with a jolt that the rags were barely covering a newborn baby as scrawny and neglected as the girl.
"It's her son, from a year ago when a stranger walked into the house and raped her on the floor while her sister was out looking for work." the woman whispered, and despite the stench Bill sucked in a gasp of air. He felt again that ache in his chest, that overwhelming urge to collapse on the ground in despair.
Ah.
"Yes," she nodded once, not taking her eyes from the girl on the step, whose arms were slowly loosening their hold on the rag bundle. "You do know me. You've known me many times before." The girl's head rolled back, her eyes stared blankly at the sky, even emptier, more uncaring, than the lobby clerk. She didn't move when the baby rolled from her lap and fell to the ground by her feet, didn't flinch when it's wail of pain faded to a murmur and then died. "Let's go," Despair said, turning away. "She's mine, now."
"The baby?" he gulped, feeling deep in his heart that they were both out of his reach but unwilling still to let it lie.
"The baby is another's concern," she answered, almost sharply, as if the question called up some old, bitter resentment. "After a certain point, they always are."
Bill coughed violently as a foul cloud of oily black smoke suddenly rolled around, wiping away the ragged street with its lone occupants and replacing it with a factory. Metallic bits of machinery rammed, hammered, screeched, thundered, and screamed around him. He clapped his hands over his ears, and tried to block the cacophony, the sheer lack of all harmony from driving his brain into the ground. He pressed his back against the weight of Elanor's case, trying to recall the sweeter, softer sounds of her sound blended with his own voice. It was no good, it was too little against the bashing and grinding of this musician's hell.
He felt more than saw her eyes trained on someone next to him, and he nearly jumped out of his skin when he realized he was standing right next to a huge man, muscles so thick he could probably have ripped Bill in half with two fingers. The giant was pushing a hefty bar of metal attached to a thousand other levers and gears that whirred and clicked in time to his movements, churning out some form of molten metal into a heated pipe that carried it away somewhere he couldn't see, nor cared to. The man was staring straight ahead, at his hands on the bar, moving it back and forth, endlessly.
"His wife died yesterday," Despair's dead voice overrode the noise of the factory with ease; in a way, her voice almost seemed a part of it. "He has been working here, in this job, for ten years now. She was the only person who wasn't afraid of him afraid of his size. The only one who didn't think him a freak or assume he was dumb because he was strong. She's gone, his only friend and love. And day after day, he sits here and does the same thing, over and over again, because no one else will hire him for anything but the same kind of grunt job, muscle work. Over and over again. Until he dies." Her voice took on an almost sing-song quality, as if she were chanting something - like the clerk's mantra. And Bill felt a helpless sort of pang as he looked at the man but thought, I'm sorry. There's nothing I can do for you. I can't bring her back, I can't make other people see you in a different light. I'm sorry, I can't help you.
Fuck, he thought, swiping an arm across his suddenly wet eyes. Why show me this crap? There's nothing I can do! The world shifted again, without either of them moving, and this time they stood in an office building, as sterile and typical as every other office building he'd ever seen on TV or when he followed his dad to work - cubicles, computers, tired people with coffee cups and manila folders shuffling past each other in narrow corridors. Here, Despair seemed almost to grow taller as she fed on the workers' mutual sense of frustration, of the loss of their dreams, and a smirk twitched and died again on the face modeled after Bill's own. The office changed to a flat, wide plain where the sun beat mercilessly down, hard and heavy as a molten club. A small cluster of hovels housing dark skinned men and women as wasted as the girl hunched together in the wasted desert land. The adults lay on the hot floors, moaning and coughing up blood and phlegm, while the naked children sat nearby and waited for something they didn't quite understand but felt coming just the same.
They began coming in flashes now, too fast, too exquisitely painful for him to handle. Dying men, screaming women, quiet children who watched with empty eyes - they sat on floors, huddled in dark rooms, smiled to TV cameras while their immaculate fingernails dug deeply into their concealed palms. He could no longer see their situations or their settings, all he could see was face after face after face of pain and longing and fear and in every single one of them the stark, bleak picture of Despair in all her squalid glory.
"No!"
The word burst out as if someone had ripped it from him. He screwed his eyes shut to block them out, block them all out, and this time he did drop to the ground. He wrapped his arms around and rocked, half sobbing, half screaming. "I'm sorry!" he yelled, to them and to her. "I'm sorry! But I can't! I really can't do a fucking thing! I CAN'T HELP YOU!"
And then there was nothing but silence and the dry husky chuckle of Despair.
I can't help you. I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry but I can't I'm sorry I can't I can't I can't -
"But maybe..."
He swallowed, eyes still as tightly shut as before. Somewhere near him - his senses were so disoriented now he didn't know where - Despair heaved herself to her feet and scowled deeply across her copied face.
"Oh no you don't." Her voice deepened, became harsher. It physically hurt to hear it. "No. This one's mine! You can try to take the others if you want, but this one is Marked! I Marked him."
"Are you always so certain?" the voice was so softly spoken that he had to strain to hear her, but the sheer harmony in it, the music he heard in the tone made him want to weep again, but different. It made him remember suddenly the instrument he carried still on his back. He had forgotten her, forgotten Elanor in the onslaught of despair, forgotten the release that she had always brought before.
But I can't.
"Are you always so certain?" the voice murmured again, and he dared to open his eyes.
Despair stood before him, feet planted in the dead rocky ground, arms crossed, a dangerous look on her skeletal features. Her inversed eyes bored into him, and he wrenched his entire head to avoid falling into that void again.
Behind her, digging her toes into the soft earth like a child at the beach, sat another woman. She, too, had an eerie familiarity, as if she was also a female version of Bill himself - what he would have looked like as a girl who was, well, pretty. Her hair was short and curled in soft dark wisps over her forehead and around her wide eyes. She was sitting with her knees drawn up to her chest, and pale arms wrapped protectively around them. But there was nothing frightened or defensive about the posture. It merely looked comfortable. Her head was bowed slightly, everything about her was soft, unassuming, easily missed if you weren't looking but hard to turn from once you actually saw her.
She glanced up and met his stare, and her lips lifted a little. Her brown eyes were as normal as his, except a thin veil of white covered them, giving her gaze a strange, all encompassing quality. She was blind. She saw everything all at once.
"I Marked him," Despair croaked, and Bill knew the woman's gaze flicked from him to her and back again - though how he could tell when she had no pupils or irises, he couldn't say.
"I know."
"He saw everything," Despair threw down like a gauntlet, challenging.
The woman on the ground shifted a little tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "I know." A shred of a melody floated into Bill's head. For a moment he forgot what was happening before him and tried to follow the song to its end, but Despair snarled again and he felt it flutter from his mind.
"You know the rules. I Marked him first! You can't touch what another has Marked!"
"I know."
"Then why are you here? He's not going to change, he can't throw off a Mark he doesn't even know is there!" Her voice rose until it became the keening of a banshee, the cry of a woman whose lover has died in her lap. "It's impossible!"
Bill shuddered and hunkered down on the ground, aware that something bigger than he was taking place here, all around him, but not completely sure what it was or what it meant. He knew it was he they spoke of, but whatever they meant by Marked, he couldn't say.
Another face flashed again in his eyes, a little boy with flies crawling around the corners of his eyes. The heavy ache in his chest, the dull burn of despair, flared inside painfully. Almost desperately, he turned to look at the other woman again. Despair growled, low in her boney throat, and the ache inside pushed hard against his ribs as if threatening to burst out of him.
The other woman caught his eyes again, and winked.
Bill stared, unsure if he had actually seen what he thought he had just seen. But this time, when the ache pushed against his insides again -

- something pushed back.
"You can't touch him if he's already Marked!" Despair bellowed, this time sounding as guttural and fierce as a wounded bull.
The other woman climbed slowly to her feet, her eyes fixed firmly on Bill, the question unspoken. Yes, he thought. Yes, you can.
She smiled.
"The rules!" Despair raged, and launched herself at the intruder.
"The rules, yes. You broke them, friend."
Despair stopped.
The other woman seemed to grow taller still - or maybe she was merely becoming more solid. "You said it yourself. He can't be touched if he's already been Marked."
"He was mine the instant he stepped out of that door! MINE!"
"But he was mine the instant he first decided to go. And every time he returned after that. Every time he opened the case and played the instrument, every time he sang." She stepped forward, and the music in her voice grew louder, stronger, more joyous with every step. Bill struggled to his own feet, suddenly clumsy fingers struggling to bring the guitar case around, to open the clasps and pull out Elanor. He had a feeling, somewhere in his gut, that it was important.
"You may have chosen him when he closed the door behind him, but I had chosen him long before then, when he opened it."
Bill hugged the guitar to his chest, wrapped his fingers around and caressed the strings. The simple melody he struggled to pick out seemed to disturb Despair more than the words of the woman. She stepped back, dragging her foot with a sick scraping sound that grated in his ears and touching a nerve that sent chills racing down his back. He started to play a little bit smoother, trying to block out the grinding sound of her teeth grating together.
"The rules also mention one other thing," the woman said, her voice falling into a strange rhythm, as if she were almost singing along in harmony with the random chords he pieced together into a melody.
"The choice," Despair spat, and a child's whine was in her frozen voice.
"Yes." The woman turned back to Bill, and he met her gaze without faltering. His hands seemed to know what they were doing, playing something he had never played, but he let them go, let it all go and do what it would. She smiled, and he heard his music soar a little, become just a little sweeter. "Man always has the choice," she half sang to him.
He nodded. And in his heart, he knew the truth of it.
And just like that, he was sitting on the curb in front of the building, Elanor in his lap, and the sun was breaking free of the skyscrapers to his left. She sat next to him, arms folded across her knees, playing with a leaf that had swirled in from somewhere. His hands played on.
"I chose," he told her.
"I know."
They sat in silence a little longer, letting the music speak for them.
"She was right though." He muttered at length, still playing. "I couldn't help them. I couldn't change it."
She tilted her head to the side, and he felt the warm flush of her glance for a moment. "Couldn't you?"
"All I ever could do well was play - and even if I were as good as Orpheus I could never fix all the despair of the world."
"But you can help."
He thought about it for a moment. "Yeah," he said at last. "I guess I could."
She turned her head to look him square in the eyes, and one more time, just for him, Hope smiled.
The morning breeze brushed through his hair, carrying with it the enticing smell of fresh cinnamon buns from the shop down at the corner. Bill grinned, not caring if he looked like a bum on the sidewalk. He couldn't fix the problems of the world with his music. But he could play it. He and Elanor together; maybe they couldn't solve things, but they could help. And that was something.
The door banged open behind him. Startled, his hands faltered, and he looked up.
The lobby clerk was walking out of the building, yawning. She paused when she saw him sitting on the curb, and he noticed with some surprise that her eyes were actually a pretty nice color when they weren't slate- blank.
"Hi," he said conversationally, and picked up the tune again. It had changed, in those few seconds. It wasn't quite as unearthly as it had been before, but somehow it still seemed to be in touch with him, it seemed to speak the words he couldn't find.
"Hi," she said cautiously, as if trying to remember if she'd met him before.
"You were wrong," he said. "You did help me. You just don't know it. But I guess that doesn't matter, in the end." Then, seeing the vaguely frightened look on her face, he laughed. "Sorry, I must sound like a loony. Been up all night."
She seemed to relax a little at the more normal conversation. "Yeah, me too. Working the night shift in this place is killer. The only people who come in are the sad, broken down ones. It's tough turning them away sometimes. Plus, you think lots of weird things alone in the dark." She blushed a bit. "Sorry, guess I sound a bit loony too."
"How about getting a cinnamon bun and sounding loony together?" he asked, nodding toward the shop down the street.
"Actually," she looked down at his hands. "I am kind of hungry. I like that, by the way," she blurted in a rush. "Whatever you're playing. I like how it sounds. It reminds me . You write it?"
"Yes. And no. Long story. Maybe I'll tell you sometime." He got to his feet and brushed off his jeans. "So. Cinnabon?"
"Let's go."
They moved down the street. Around them, the city began to wake after the long night. Despair walked her streets, but somewhere behind her always came her nemesis, her shadow, her end and her beginning. Always after her came Hope.
And it wasn't much.
But it was something.