by Freddie Baseman
MAURICE WILSON (1898–1934) was a World War I veteran with zero mountaineering experience who attempted to illegally crash a plane into the slopes of Mount Everest and summit it alone. He did so in an attempt to prove the superiority of his syncretic religious beliefs, which he supposedly inherited from a mysterious man in Mayfair, London, who cured Wilson’s years-long illness.
“But…you wouldn’t say almost, right? When I get halfway up the rock wall, I wouldn’t say I almost reached the top. Maybe halfway—but it’s tiring. It gets harder the further you get.” Y/n tilted her head to the side. “And…they found your body below the North Col? So that means you wouldn’t have even gotten to Camp IV?”
“You told your mom you thought it was impressive.” Maurice curled his white, God-servicing hands around the flesh of an overripe mystery fruit. It was mutant, its raspberry drupelets nestled between peach fuzz and ribbons of banana peel, and Y/n could have sworn she saw its swollen tongue loll out of its…head? “You told [Guy You Totally Don’t Have A Crush On] it was kind of hot.”
Y/n frowned.
Maurice noticed and frowned too. “Aw, shit. I’m supposed to be English, aren’t I?”
Y/n pursed her lips and nodded.
“Well why am I stuck sounding like a jock with a bad knee and a weird penis?”
“But…that jock could be English,” Y/n said wisely.
“But…he’s not though?” Maurice responded, confused. Then he brought the fruit to his mouth and took a large bite. A strange cacophony erupted from the contact between his teeth and the fruit: cymbals; hissing; soft, hiccuping pants. Time-juice squirted, shimmery and black like blood—blood as it should have been, if only God had been on paranormal Wattpad. The time-juice spattered across Y/n’s flushed, gibbous cheeks, but she didn’t even blink. “Oh that’s good,” Maurice said after swallowing, then smiled. “Oh that’s very good.” He paused. “But I’m from Yorkshire, though? Isn’t that, like, a specific thing?”
Y/n tried to snap her fingers, but they were greased with sweat, and she didn’t know how to snap anyway, so she just sort of rubbed her thumb against her index and middle fingers with an ever-increasing annoyance. “Well, yeah. But I don’t know what that thing is, so your options are vaguely-British-slash-Australian-because-I-can’t-really-tell-the-difference or—how did you put it—oh, yes, ‘jock-with-a-weird-penis.’ An American one.”
“If I must…I’ll take the former. You really went for ‘Hugh Jackman and the corpse of the Queen had a child and that child was almost successfully possessed by Bilbo Baggins trying to do a Matthew McConaughey impression,’ but hey…I’ll make do. It’s gotta do it for somebody, right?”
“All of that's way after your time, babe. But, I mean…if you insist,” Y/n beamed, then continued, “And by the way—I do think it’s cool. I guess.”
“‘Impressive.’”
“Yes. Impressive.”
Maurice raised a scruffy brow. “‘Hot.’”
“That too.” Y/n wanted to roll her head around, because there was a bad crick in her neck, but she knew it was just her emotion roiling upward, like the wandering toxicity of the medieval womb. She could expulse or chain it; she couldn’t work it out just yet. Or ever. “It’s just that it’s also sad. And pathetic.”
Maurice leaped from his plain wooden chair. When he next sat down a minute later, it would be on an ottoman. Then a sugar-dusted gumdrop. But, for now—where were we—ah, yes, there he was, standing, huffing mad.
“Oh, to not know you!” Maurice exclaimed, dropping the mutant fruit onto the tufted floor like a grenade. And then: “But at least I can say I believed in something, and I lived by that belief.”
“It killed you,” Y/n said, unimpressed.
Maurice swept a hand to heaven and smiled. His eyes glittered like disco.
She could so easily picture him, lying on the ground, below two tiny disco balls. He would have raised his gun, fired at the fixture, severed the cords. And the disco balls would have fallen, down, down, plop!, one into each of his empty sockets. “Kill? Yes, darling, but what did you expect? I’m an Adonis, but even he was just a man. I could have died in Flanders, in London or America; and, no matter what—even if I lived to 100—I would’ve been dead by your birth.”
“You would have been 108.”
“In what world? I had a fucked arm and a mystery sickness. Maybe you should hit the brakes—even if I didn’t meet that man in Mayfair, nothing could’ve helped me there.”
“Jeanne Calmen lived until 122.”
“Good for her.”
“That’s it?”
“What? Sounds like a goddamn curse.”
“Maybe,” Y/n conceded. “Most of the things I’m living for are impossible after, like, 30. Then again, they’re also impossible without disposable income so…maybe I should just buy a plane and crash it into Everest.”
“But you can do anything.”
“I’ve heard that one before. My second grade teacher. Pretty sure if she could do anything, though, she would’ve been doing something other than teaching second grade.”
Maurice sat back down on the ottoman. “Oh, that’s not what I mean. I mean you’re a star! You’re old-Hollywood young! You’re not real, and Freddie hates herself, so you’ll be pretty forever.”
That made sense. Y/n wondered how beautiful people conceptualized their ideal selves. Did they just look the same, or were they still lusting after the beyond? And the most dazzling girls—ethereal, galactic—what did they do? Did they escape into unsightliness, just to try it on? Just to see if they could imagine it?
A beat of silence. “Huh,” Y/n said. She frowned. “But the things I do won’t be real either.”
“But…if you’re right, is that a bad thing? When you succeed, it will still feel good, it will feel real, but when you fail, when you hurt people…that pain won’t.”
Maurice watched Y/n cross her legs and tilt her head in thought. In time, and in no time at all, she spoke. “Do you wish you weren’t real? Because then you might have made it in the end?”
Unlike the slim-ankled girl across from him, Maurice didn’t need to think before answering. “No. It wasn’t a power fantasy—not just a power fantasy, anyway. I wanted to successfully change the world. I didn’t want the world to successfully change me.”
Y/n felt herself grow defensive. She wasn’t sure about what. “It’s not…it’s not like that,” she said lamely, and her cheeks reddened. “And you didn’t do that! You survived the war only to go kill yourself doing nothing. You proved nothing.”
“Maybe not.” Maurice shrugged. “But it’s what I chose to do.”
Y/n went on, hiccuping between words. “Nowadays summiting Everest isn’t even that impressive. You can basically pay to do it. But I bet if you were born fifty years later you’d just find some other stupid shit to die trying.”
“Well of course!” Maurice said. “There is always something new to be done.”
“But some things don’t need to be done. You know those people who get Guiness records for things like ‘Left-handed Person Who Sucked the Most STD-riddled Dick During Collar Bone Removal Surgery?’”
“I mean—minus the STD part—good for them. Why the fuck not?”
“So you’d do it? You’d win the record with God and the…fucking Mayfair Man on your side?” Y/n laughed.
“Ah, but now we’re getting into whether I still believe,” Maurice shook his head ruefully. Heavily. “It’s a good question. If you loved something, and it killed you, would you still love it like you did before?”
“Would you?” Y/n’s voice was quiet, barely there. The atmosphere had shifted. Aquatic. Submerged.
Maurice dragged a hand over his painted face. The strokes shivered and shifted. “That’s not fair. My body’s the body of a dead man, but I’m just a name Freddie gave to the voice in her head. It’s not right to pretend I can still speak for myself.”
“I guess it’s different when you’ve really been there. If you’re real, you’re a person, your own person—but you only get to be one. I’m a different person every day; when Freddie needs to escape, she closes her eyes and builds me a new world with fifty new things to love and be and a hundred new emotions to feel that are even better. I don’t have to be attached to myself like that.”
“Do you want to be?” Maurice asked.
Y/n worried her lip. “See that’s the thing—not really. If I can be a…I don’t know, a bombshell blond supermodel one day, and a twink prince from Fantasy-Kingdom-or-whatever-the-fuck the next, that’s a win. I want to care about whether I’m real or not, but…I just don’t.”
“It’s like those stories about immortal men, where at the end they choose mortality, because what gives life meaning is how soon it’s over after it begins. It’s such horseshit. What kind of unimaginative idiot only wants one short life? Aren’t there a thousand more things you want to learn and see and just inhale? No, yes, I want constant, constant, constant reinvention.”
“Until nobody knows who you are,” Maurice said. “I know. But that’s not imagination; it’s fear.”
Y/n shrugged but looked away. Maurice stood again, and this time approached her. Tentatively, then not. He kneeled down, and curled his hands into her thighs, frostbitten fingers and sharp nails burning the shiny-smooth flesh.
“You’re afraid, you’re terrified, because you—the real, actual you—is deficient. You lack in all the ways a person can lack. Do you even know, if you changed your name because you didn’t like the old one, or because really, really, you just didn’t like yourself? What a terrible shame it must have been, I can only imagine—I am only imagined—when the court order didn’t give you a new nose and smile and personality too.
“You’re not just uncomfortable in your body; you hate it, you’re embarrassed by it. You say your name like an apology. You liked how you had to wear masks during COVID, because a part of you had always felt like your face was an outward manifestation of the chronic illness of You, and you didn’t want people to know just how sick you’d gotten.
“You still remember, when you were little, you broke your…toy, or favorite piece of jewelry, or something—you don’t remember that part, but that part isn’t important anymore, anyway. What you know is you broke it and went crying to your mom, and she tried to fix it but she knew it was broken, and she told you the pieces were jagged and dangerous, and needed to be thrown away. But you didn’t throw them away, you brought them to your dad next, dropped them in his hands and asked him if he could put the Whatever-it-Was back together again. And he tried, because of course he did, because he loved you; he still loves you—you know that, right?—but he loved you then too, and so he tried to fix the thing that was broken, that was making you sad.
“You know what happened? He cut his hand on one of those little pieces, and you watched blood well, a little pearl, for a moment, before it began to leak out from the tiny chasm in his skin in a thin, red stream. He yelped, or cursed—and it’s not the sound that fixed you in place, but the hand, bleeding because of the broken piece of that thing that mattered so little you don’t even remember what it was. The hand, that is, and the way your mom came into the room and she knew, and you knew she knew, that you had not listened to her.”
“That’s not me, though.” Y/n said, watching as Maurice’s rotted English fingers punctured skin. Pink, unlined cherubic skin, bitten by cold, fake, dead nails. There were cups all over the floor, beneath her low-backed chair, cups the size of tea lights, which caught the blood—no, not blood, the scene is not vampiric in the least—the ichor as it dripped down. Yes, yes, a pale, shimmery silver-gold, which left a residue like pixy dust—flying magic on the rosebud legs of your very own dream girl.
In the cyan starlight, under which they now sat, one kneeling before the other, the ichor did look like wax in their little cups—if she lit their imaginary wicks, would they burn? Y/n murmured again, daringly, “That’s not me,” and she snapped her fingers, successfully this time, setting the tip of her index finger alight. She dipped it into the thin liquid collected in one of the cups, then brought her hot wetted finger to her lips. And she marveled; she cried. It tasted like hot cherry juice. It tasted good. It stained her fake-real, wax-candy, Tumblr-girl soul.
Maurice watched her silently, then pulled one of his hands out of Y/n’s thigh. His fingers had submerged themselves in the quicksand-like flesh to the metacarpals, and as he began to extricate them, they hissed like a piccolo, and the bitter winds that come with high altitudes. Once he freed the hand he brought it to his bruised, fly-bitten lips and sucked his pinky finger dry.
His other hand, his left hand, still inched deeper into Y/n’s skin. “Do you think I regretted it in those final moments?” he asked, bringing his free hand around to hold her waist. “Do you think in the end, I stopped believing?”
Y/n rolled her wrist in small, comforting circles. She watched star-sweat collect on them, as the sky began to melt. Her nails grew quickly, and they sharpened to spears, glittering. “No,” she said, and made an elegant swing at Maurice’s shoulder, piercing the gray skin of his upper back. She could feel the elastic of his trapezius give. “I think you thought you would make it even when it was obvious you wouldn’t. You’d survived so many times before when you shouldn’t have, I think a part of you thought you could survive anything.”
Maurice pressed closer still, leaned his head against the inside of Y/n’s bloody, leaking thigh. Their bodies were a Gordian knot in the water-grass, pink and gray flesh sparkling with melted stars. “Have mercy on me, Freddie. Or at the very least be careful. There’s shame enough to go around.”
Y/n frowned but didn’t object. Instead, she said, “It’s just weird. Your life was a fever dream. You lived the way people imagine themselves living when they need to escape. But that’s just…that’s just stupid. You don’t actually go and do those things, because you’re not—I’m not—that kind of person.”
“You shouldn’t be,” Maurice murmured. “Some fantasies need only to be held. Cradle them and they’ll warm you—but try to consume them, try to embody them, and you will burn.” He let his eyes flutter shut, dark lashes pressing into the gaunt hollows of his cheeks. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t be that kind of girl. It simply means you must kill your darlings. You can kiss them first—but you have to shoot. Don't let yourself be hidden away.”
“Sometimes I don’t think I deserve to escape,” Y/n said, clinging to the veil of fiction. Desperately, embarrassingly, even as it faded away to a filmy sheen. “If the pain I’ve caused is real, why should I be allowed to leave it behind?” She tried to squeeze her hand into a fist inside Maurice’s back, and it hurt. “I shouldn’t, right? But then I remember it all bad, worse than it was—and then I think, well maybe it really was that bad, and I’m just trying to rationalize my fuck-ups, sanitize and excuse them. And that’s lying, and escaping is lying too. And then I can’t breathe, even though I am breathing, when other people aren’t, and that’s so narcissistic, isn’t it, to breathe in and breathe out and use so much hot air just to say, ‘Oh, how hard it is for me to breathe sometimes.’”
Maurice thought about what to say next. Or maybe he already had his words and was simply granting hers some space to stand on their own. “I can’t grant you absolution. That wouldn’t be fair. I mean, I am you—at least a small, loathing piece. But I’d like to think that’s why we were put here.”
“Oh?” The word didn’t leave Y/n’s mouth of her own accord. She had only just placed it on the tip of her tongue, her lips parted ever so slightly, when the wind came and blew it out.
“To make sense of things. To feel all the feelings, good and really, really bad, astronomically big and infinitesimally small. To commiserate and to argue and to learn ourself.”
Y/n shook her head, ignoring all the aching pain, the flowering bruises. “You were wrong before, then. I’m not real, but the things I do are. I can hurt Freddie. I can ruin her.”
Maurice smiled wanly. The star-sweat had begun to smear the paint on his eyes and lips and nose; it looked as though his face itself was being washed away. “Very few things are truly inconsequential,” he said finally, as his lips lost the last bit of their definition. “Did you really think you would have the pleasure of being one of them?”
About the Author
Freddie Baseman is a sophomore studying Writing & Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She likes reading and writing all things fantastical, kitschy, and unsubtly queer. You can find her at the bookstore, buying another book even though she hasn't finished the last one, or losing a game of pinball to her nine-year-old sister (whom she loves very much, despite the pinball thing).