The Doctor pronounced the two words so they rhymed. It wasn’t funny and he didn’t laugh until very late that night, in the safety of the dim light and running water of the bathroom. Chanting the rhyme like a mantra calmed him at first, but could not soothe the burning ruction in the core of his being.
The words were probably Greek. He hadn’t bothered to look it up and wasn’t able to with his hands shaking as they were. The lump that had grown in his skull, complicated by the funny way the Doctor said the words, along with the lump growing in his gut, made everything more difficult. The lump in his head, they said, was less troubling than the one in his gut. The troubling one was on his pancreas, another word the doctor said wrong, putting a subtle accent on the second syllable in addition to the one on the first. Pan-Cree-us. Like the name of that supercontinent, the one that grew like a lump on Earth’s skin, then spread all over and was now killing her. All of the Earth, all in a lump, Pangaea.
The lump in his head had been there for years, maybe for ever. The doctor said not to worry about it. That might be a years-down-the-road problem, and, honestly, that’s not something worth wasting thought about.
He imagined it like the bullet that was fired on the day he was born, high in the atmosphere, whizzing around the world until it finally stops somewhere. Maybe it’s a tree, maybe it’s a head, but it will eventually stop. He preferred not to believe the story when he was a kid. He thought if he hoped in the correct alignment, the bullet would get faster until it broke orbit, if he were… something. Good? Fast? Skillful?
The origin of the bullet was lost in the mists of family history. He recalled his brother telling him the family decided to fire it when they got a look at him, but the story hadn’t seemed to exist as early as that must have been. His brother said it was their father who’d first told the story about the bullet, so his brother felt obligated to try it on him in turn, to ease the fear by giving it a new home.
Their father passed the buck to the Greek man who’d lived in a van a mile or so down the road. Nikomachus (the Greek’s name, no sense dancing around now that things are ending) had introduced the family to the game of chess, or at least to taking chess seriously, and had talked about philosophy with the children’s father at some length. The family culture of playing chess and arguing over poorly-grasped philosophical concepts could be traced directly back to Niko. The rest of the family’s hobby of making him question the very nature of perceived reality and its relation to pure truth was merely a delightful byproduct of the culture.
Now he was bent double in the bathroom. He was laughing, first at the doctor and then at himself for absently repeating the words that were complicating his treatment.
The words fell out of his mouth and tumbled down drains, through streams and rivers and out into the warm sea. He watched his invisible breaths, now individually numbered and dwindling and flittering and squeezing between cracks and out vents. He watched his future ebb in the throes of this peculiar and beautiful hilarity because he was powerless to stop it. His guts ate themselves and his brain ate itself and his time ate itself and all he could do was chant his paroxysmal glee into the world.
The words were wrong, so maybe the doctor was wrong, so maybe his time that was always going to end was now going to instead go on forever. Maybe the metaphorical bullet now making its way through his body would, like he hoped the real bullet might, pick up speed and turn upwards and become a vessel bringing him to the stars.
Dee’a-beat-us Me-leet-us, had said the doctor and now said he, grappling with the moment when the infinite would inevitably pass into the now.