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“Why did you stop playing it?”
“I can’t speak and perform at the same time.”
“No, of course not.” He laughed. “That’s logical. Can you keep playing it for me?”
I should have just agreed and that would have been that. Instead, I asked, “Why do you want to hear this song?”
“It’s dark. It’s so so dark.”
“Are you afraid of the dark?”
He laughed again, resuming his pacing. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Then what makes this darkness so frightening?”
He stopped, turning towards me. “The place I’m in is not merely the absence of light.”
“Then what is your darkness?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?” My lips turned downwards. “If nothing is wrong, why are you afraid?”
“Not nothing, but the state of nothing.”
“I don’t follow.”
“In the place I am in, I walk but my footsteps do not echo. I am not alone yet I see and hear no one. Even the weight of my clothes is more imagination than reality, even as my mind rationalizes how illogical such a circumstance is.”
“If where you are has nothing, how are we able to speak?” My words were spoken slowly, in the same speed the Emerald Lady often spoke to me.
“I made a deal with a God.”
A face made of shadows and eternal night entered my mind’s eye. “The self-proclaimed god of nightmares?”
“You’ve met him?”
I looked away. “Once or twice.”
“How was it?” There was genuine curiosity in his voice.
“It was awful.”
“Yes,” he said. “Even if He is a God, encountering Him is truly awful, isn’t it?”
I glanced at the cross tattoo on my wrist, resisting the urge to rub it. “I serve a different God.”
“What sort of god is yours?”
With a confidence I did not feel, I turned my lips upward. “Don’t tell me you’re here just to discuss theology with me.”
“No. Given my current circumstances, that would be inaccurate.”
“Then what is it you really want?”
“In general, or—what do you mean?”
Maybe I was projecting or maybe I was grasping at straws in an effort to hold onto my dislike of him, but I asked, “Right now. In that place of nothingness you say you are in, what is it you want?”
