The Man that Mary Built

[Ari Rahikkala]

There was a loud sound, like a firecracker going off right by one´s ear, a scream of pain and disbelief, and a slight thud accompanied with a clang. There were sounds of doors being opened, then of something heavy being dragged over a floor and over snow. Then it was silent for a while, until there again were sounds of more doors opening and closing, faucets running, rags and mops moving across walls and floors, and a faint sound of a complex tune being whistled.


Time passed, then the doorbell rang, at the agreed-upon time.

"Good evening. Mrs Wilson?" The woman at the door was in her mid-fifties, although it was hard to tell because she looked more like forty, and only the depth of the wrinkles around her eyes showed her real age. Wilson, who was the same age but had been putting on some weight, felt a slight tinge of envy.
"Mrs Perrers, right? Please, come on inside, I´ve a warm house, coffee and a little something to eat."
"Thank you. Brr! It´s horribly cold out here... you really do live out of the way, you know," Andrejane tried to joke.
"Well, it´s so nice to have a little space for yourself..."

Andrejane took off her shoes and overcoat which had already gotten wet from the gale and snow in the short trip from her car. It was beyond her why on Micras anyone would want to live on a godforsaken place like this, right next to the Elwynnese border and the sea in Goldshire. Maybe she thought it was better to have snowstorms and enormous fir forests than, say, any neighbours within five kilometres.

"You´ve got a beautiful house here. And that garden, you´re taking good care of it, Mrs Wil-"
"Oh, just Mary, please. Mary Sue, actually, but I like Mary. And it´s not really me that´s making the money to buy all of this, it´s my husband Josh. He´s not here right now, he´s off on a business trip to Much Rejoicing. Coffee?"
"Yes, please. And you may call me Andrejane, or just Jane if you like."
"Andrejane? So, um, now that we´re on a first-name basis... what´s the wind that blows a SHINE agent to my little abode?"
"This is about... your son, Cole Wilson. Or, rather, his once wife, Mercury Wilson-Rheingold. I´m not at liberty to disclose much about her present mission and performance in SHINE, but... she´s having a very unique kind of problems at her job and I believe Cole is connected to them. She is... not quite emotionally stable, and--"
"Miss Perrers, if I may ask, how on Micras am I supposed to know what´s going on in Mercury´s heart? She is a very fine woman, and I´m very sorry for what happened to the marriage of her and my son, but it wasn´t me who was married to her."
"Please allow me continue. I´ve asked her parents, I have asked your son - both of them refused to tell me anything about the strange marriage. Even she just claimd what we have is that they were married - for a week. What kind of a marriage lasts a week? If there´s anything I can do to help her, I want to do it. Mercury Wilson-Rheingold is one of our best agents - SHINE can´t afford to lose people like her in any case, especially not to a fling-"
"It was NOT a fling! Look, there´s a reason why nobody´s willing to tell you the story. It´s common decency. You won´t like what you hear. But if you´re so stubborn and nobody else is going to do it, then I will. I´ve got plenty of time...
"It began when Cole met her... well, I should say it began a lot earlier... but you wouldn´t understand."
"I am-"
"It began when Cole met her. They were both were living in Shirekeep, Mercury where her parents raised her, Cole in an apartment - he was studying chemistry at the JM3 at that time - but they were also far away from home, in Straylight, In fact, vacationing on Sanctuary Dome... They met on a hibeach, you know, those things they´ve got over there..."
"Yes, I´ve heard of them. I don´t see the appeal, really, but I´ve heard of them alright."
"So, yes, that´s where it happened. Cole was a bit drunk, he told me, but managed to get her number anyway, they just talked a little, and it wasn´t long until they were seeing each other in Shirekeep. They´d go back to Sanctuary Dome a lot of times - Mercury had her job in that security company and Cole, well, he somehow managed to get Josh to send him wads of money for his so-called studies, so it seemed sometimes as if they were going somewhere every weekend.
"Once Cole took her to Discontinuity. Ever been there?"
"No, not really. I´ve been close, but not close enough to actually see the place."
"Would you believe it´s romantic?"
"Romantic? It´s a huge city on the sea... yes, if you... spin it right, I guess it could be..."
"So, Cole took her there once. Most of the time, when you come in in the middle of summer, the first thing you and so on. Then you notice the mist: It always seems as if it had been there for a while but you just hadn´t realised it. It´s really deceptive, too: It looks like someone had painted a smudge on the horizon and all that smudge is doing is rising up and getting even smudgier, until suddenly you´re feeling the mist around you, and it´s only been a minute...

Andrejane sipped her coffee. She expected it to taste bitter, but the taste was actually quite soft and rich.

"That´s the right moment to turn it all around. When you see that you both have seen the mist and that it seems it will be forever before you´re there. That´s the moment when he kissed her. It was a long, wonderful kiss, lasting far after they were already in the mist, and when it ended, they turned around to see the city.
"Discontinuity is not just some pile of floating metal. It´s a miracle of engineering, it´s a piece of art, and it´s enormous. It´s not just steel and concrete, it´s glass and gemstone, it´s chrome and marble. When you see the city glistening in the noonday sun, reflecting rays of light and rainbows into the mist around it, when you look up and it seems the high-rises just go on forever... you could just as well have come to Heaven. When he does it all just right...
"..."
"Mary? Mrs Wilson?"
"Oh, I´m sorry. I guess I drifted off... Josh, my husband, took me there once, to Discontinuity, and that´s what he did. I don´t even know if Cole kissed Mercury the way Josh kissed me, but I hope for her sake he did. You don´t get experiences like that every day."
"I --"
"She would - oh sorry, please, go on."
"Er... forget it, actually. I didn´t really have anything to say to that. How does the story continue?"
"Well, it goes on like love usually does. Cole moved to a bigger apartment and took Mercury with her, they started planning their wedding. I don´t really know much about their life together, other than that they were madly in love, Mercury was but I´m not sure about this one. He once claimed that they had never made love, because he claimed to be chaste and not be going to do it before marriage. Now Mercury wasn´t his first girl, he´s brought home more than a few, and, well... I sometimes don´t make my presence known when I come home - my car´s pretty silent and all, and from what I´ve heard, either a couple of those girls liked agreeing with him really loudly, or he was lying to her."
"What kind of... why would he do something like that?"
"He´s not like... the rest of us. He´s not motivated by the same things. He´s not interested in money, love, power, nothing. I wish I could tell you about it, but I can´t..."
"This could be very important to Imperial security. As I said, I´m not here as a SHINE agent, only Mercury´s supervisor at her workplace, but that might have to change if there´s cause for an official in-"
"WHAT? You´re not going to sic your hounds at me!"
"Please... Mary. I´m not here to persecute law-abiding citizens of the Republic. The Kaiser, however, has not seen it fit to provide his subjects the right to stay silent, and an official SHINE investigation would not be a good thing for your legal status. I´m asking, for your sake, please cooperate and I´ll go back where I went and not bother you with questions about past relationships anymore."
"... no. I can´t tell you the whole story, just like you can´t tell you the whole story about Mercury. I´m bound by oath on it. I can tell you this: Cole is not... human. Not the way we are, thinking and feeling people. He´s a monster that... looks human and thinks like a human in almost every respect, except that instead of wanting the kinds of things that people want, he wants to betray."
"What kind of motivation is that?"
"It is... a sad mistake. Of nature. One that has only been made once before..."
"What?"
"No, that´s an old story. Well, tt´s become old quite recently, but it´s... not st, and maybe he also wants base pleasures, but little else in this world - and betrayal always comes first to him. He wants to break promises the way a stone wants to fall, it´s his nature and his only nature."
"How could such a creature ever..."
"Sometimes nature does things like that. Just like you and I are interested in gossiping about other people´s lives, just like we´ve got husbands because we want to feel love and to be loved, and maybe bear children... it´s the same way that he´s a betrayer. He has made a dozen girls fall in love with him by my count, only to betray all of them, and the worse he broke their hearts the happier it made him. Mercury, he said, was his greatest work. That girl was so madly in love with him, I´ve never seen anyone...
"So... they were going to get married. They´d do it on Sanctuary Dome, according to Cole´s suggestion that Mercury agreed with right off, in the Oldfield Shrine of Songs of the Old.
"The wedding went a lot like it traditionally should, until...
"The priest said they could kiss each other, at which point Cole tore off her wedding dress, threw on the altar -"
"What the -"
"It´s not a beautiful story. He... had her way with her... he wasn´t gentle."
"What... but... wasn´t the church full of people? Didn´t anyone stop him?"
"Her father was the first to rush to stop Cole, but... this is Straylight. You know them, if they´ve got something they own, they´ve got a weapon to protect it, and sometimes they take out those weapons in situations... they´ve actually got a rule for it, I think it goes something like "use weapons to enforce sanity and to avoid letting anyone get hurt in heated situations". Not that they care too much for rules, but they seem to like that one. That priest, can you believe it, wore a gun under his cloak. He took it out and he shouted loud that he´s not going to let anyone stop two consenting adults from having sex in his church, then he ordered everyone from I was seeing, but I guess I was feeling somehow morbidly... curious. I realised that in a way... it made sense. Mercury wasn´t making a move to try and stop him, she only seemed... awfully confused, as if she´d just woken up on the altar and had no idea how she´d gotten there or that there were other people around, only that Cole was there... she... she seemed to like it."
"But... she was being raped!"
"Maybe she was drugged, nobody would have noticed with her being so giddy about the wedding anyway. Maybe she´d been fantasizing or dreaming about it... maybe she thought that that moment, too, was a sweet dream. Maybe she was too afraid to do anything. Anyway, it seemed to the priest that she was consenting, and he was the only one in the church who had a gun out in the open at the moment.
"So... what happened then?"
"It was... over soon. When Cole was... done, he and the priest figured together that they were possibly in mortal danger, so the priest took him through a backdoor to a ship that was just leaving for mainland. Mercury was still lying there on the altar wearing only tatters of her wedding dress, staring straight ahead when the patrons were let in again. We snuck out of... did I mention Cole is not, er, well-liked in the family? It was only Josh, I, mother, and a couple of our brothers and sisters in there, anyway, we left without making a sound and -"
"You just... just left?"
"What could we have done? No-one of us was going to try to defend Cole or, for that matter, say they´re sorry."
"But you could have-"
"Cole is not... one of us. Life´s nothing but a game of betrayals to him."
"Then why did you let him do that to her in the first place? Or to any of those other girls?"
"We couldn´t just have locked him up. Not someone like Cole - he´d just have patiently waited for the right moment to run away. Couldn´t have put him in prison, either, he never actually committed any crimes after all. Hearts aren´t considered properrs. No, much better to just play family, trying to keep him out of the places where he could cause the most damage. Not that we succeeded very well at that... even those girls would never listen to us, he was too good at what he did."
"Is he still out there doing the same thing?"
"No, not anymore. Not as far as we know anyway. Not that we had anything to do with it. He simply said that he wasn´t doing it anymore because he realised that the farther he bends women, the greater the enjoyment of the betrayal - but he hadn´t just bent Mercury, he´d broken her, and that - he said - was much less rewarding."
"How could he..."
"Well... this is third-hand information, since we never talked with Mercury´s family again since the wedding, but: Mercury, poor girl, hadn´t even quite realised Cole had left her. When her parents had brought her to their hotel room, she´d insisted on getting to the wedding reception - and when she was told that it had been called off, she wanted to go to their honeymoon suite instead.
"All the other girls had spent days crying or apathetic after Cole. She was at the heights of happiness. Mercury felt she had everything she could ever want in her life, only she was terribly confused, almost to dissociation.
"Cole started the divorce proceedings right away - the marriage had, after all, been consummated, by some definition anyway, and he wanted to end it. Mercury got the paperwork in the mail. They say she stared it for a while, then disregarded it and didn´t even acknowledge it existed at all. Then she spent a week barely ever sleeping or eating, only watching the TV-Shop channel."
"Didn´t you say Cole liked to cause pain with his betrayals? Why did he stop there, really?"
"Well... the story I told you isn´t the one I told Cole. He depended on me to learn what happened after the wedding. I told him she´d committed suicide, hoping he´d figure he can´t get any further than that. He said he´s going to try something diffehan just causing a suicide if he wanted."
"Won´t he find out?"
"One day he probably will."
"What´ll happen then?"
"What do you mean?"
"You said he´s a... monster. Aren´t you in danger, too? What if he finds out you´ve lied to him?"
"I´ve lied to him about a lot of things and he´s found out about most of them. He always tells me. I´m used to it, it´s the way this whole family works."
"And what do you mean with that?"
"Oh, alright... Josh."
"Josh?"
"Yes."
"What about him? Is he... is he the other one?"
"He is."
"And... you´re married to him?"
"I am."
"Hasn´t he...?"
"No, he never has. He´s a monster just like Cole, but he´s not the same. Some days it´s difficult to remember he´s not human. He really is a sweet man, only... sometimes..."
"Sometimes what?"
"Please, it´s my marriage, not yours. While I understand your plight, I don´t think SHINE really is in the business of mending broken relationships."
"But... why are you still married to him? Is it... damage control? Are you really trying to be a hero by only causing pain to yourself?"
"I believe I can change him."
"You believe... but that´s just the old delusion, you know. Of course you believe that! Please, for your own sake... I know what it´s like. I work with a man whose wife has tried to change him for thirty years. I´ve talked with her, she´s still got that mad glint in her eyes, she´s still thinking she can get him to come home early, and to truly care, and to spend more time with his children, even though they´ve only got one that´s even living at home anymore. Please don´t be like her..."
"It´s my marriage. You can´t understand it. I can change him... I could have changed him if I´d just been able to figure out how."
"Mary..."
"Now, was there anything else? I´ve told you what I know of the story. I only have bits and pieces of what happened to Mercury lateryour time, Mrs Wilson, and the coffee. It was a pleasure."



"So you won?"
"The old man bled a lot, I cleaned up the mess so you wouldn´t have to."
"He wasn´t that old."
"Did you know I´d do it tonight?"
"You can fool most of the people most of the time, but even you can´t fool your mother all of the time."
"Then you also know the game will go on."
"I know what you are."

Cole smiled and walked away.

[Ari Rahikkala]

Meta: The story's © me, cc-by, a result of a couple of days without an internet connection, and possibly a sign of things to come. I must study this "being productive" thing more - it feels so nice .

[hypatias mom]

Can't wait to see the next installment. Interesting beginning.