Stone Wall, Part One

Where the south and east walls of Louest meet is a small bedroom, pressed right up against the cold stone.  The bedroom is small, in the back corner of an inn, at the end of a long stretch of houses built right up against the city wall.  The room was large enough, but only barely, to hold a mattress and all the possessions in the world belonging to X, the only child of the innkeepers.  Only he knew that if he crawled and wiggled his way between the wall and his mattress, right in the very corner, there was a nook--a small depression where the boulders making up the wall curved in.  And in that depression was a loose rock.  By working at it, he had found that it could be removed and behind it was a tunnel.  It was an apparently long-lost door to an apparently long-lost city secret.  Now it was his secret.

X was a happy, quiet boy, 10 years old, straw hair sticking up wherever it would.  His parents were always busy with the inn and that gave X lots of time to himself, which he usually spent reading in his room, far from the noise and bustle of one of the busier inns in that section of Louest.

If there was something unusual about X, it was his ability to get lost in a book for endless hours without any sense of the outside world.  His parents would on occasion come in to rouse him and get him going early in the morning, only to find him reading, sleeplessly, for the twelfth straight hour.  They would mildly chide him, but otherwise let him do as he wanted.

Upon awakening, X got up and exited through the small, unnoticeable door beneath the stairwell outside his bedroom, where no one would even suspect there to be a bedroom.  Due to the shape of the city wall, it looked like there was hardly room for a supply closet under the stairs.  X liked it that way--he felt safe, cozy, and tucked away.

Somewhere Only We Know, Part II

Jim stole a glance at his building as he walked off into the night. Flames licked the tan brick walls, smoke billowed from windows, people screamed, the alarm screamed, sirens screamed, people stood and gawked, tenants ran out of his building.  But he just turned his back to it all, to his life, to his past, and walked in some direction down the dirty, brown street.

His loafer-clad feet stepped to the rhythm of some vague, deep-seated nostalgia his brain had conjured from its deepest catacombs.  Old skeletons, with vacant skulls, leered at him in his mind's eye as he walked down nameless streets.  Each skull reprimanded him for its own purposes, but he couldn't look them in the eyes.  He looked ahead instead, down the hall of some musty memory, looking for a door out.  The only light in those mental recesses were flickering torches on walls, burning cobwebs that turned and swung in some rancid, stale breeze from the depths ahead.

Jim, lost in his thoughts, was only vaguely aware of the changing neighborhoods around him.  Some were dirtier and browner than his own, some were nicer, a lighter shade of dull, some lavish.  He passed occasional parks, plenty of store-fronts, crossed an almost endless bridge, and continued until the city ended, the road started to wind, the trees got thicker at road-side, the night deepened, stars became visible, the moon rose, and he found himself, many hours later, far from his burning building and its hideous browns.

In his mind, the catacombs reached their darkest extent, when he found a heavy, stone door.  He pushed, he strained, he manipulated, levered, shoved, coerced it, and it grudgingly opened, inch by inch, and he ran into the blackness behind, which revealed open air, freedom, and escape.

Outside his mind, the eastern sky started to lighten, kind of a sickly, smoggish smear of pale blues, reds, oranges, yellows, greens, but color nonetheless.  As the sun exploded into the sky, it revealed a startling green wood around him and noticed consciously for the first time its fertile smell.  He sagged down in the shade of an elm, not far from the road, and lay down and let sleep take him into a dreamless state of peace.

Crossing Over, Part I

It started as a nagging feeling, deep in the recesses of Mandy's mind, then it felt like her soul were slipping out the bottoms of her feet.  It was a sick feeling she had always associated with missing an important deadline while doing something non-essential.  But she couldn't put her finger on why.  

Gradually but persistently over the course of about an hour, but it felt like days, weeks, months, endless time, she felt like her very life had been sucked out of her body, like the world around her had emptied.  It was almost tangible, like the feeling of leaving a sauna with its thick, pervasive, almost suffocating atmosphere, to a cold, atmosphereless room filled with emptiness.  She felt unbelievably, incredibly alone.  Not just alone, but more alone than anything she had experienced.  She didn't feel lonely exactly but alone--like she was the only person in the world or in the universe.

When the void was complete, she stood there, in the middle of a parking lot on her way to her grey Accord, and just looked off toward the mountains in the distance and stared.  Empty, soulless staring.  She felt a bitter absence, a sense of loss, a deep depression, a sick uneasiness, a disgusting emptiness, a fragile meaningless, all at once.  It astonished her so much that she just froze, didn't move.  She wanted to vomit, to collapse, to die, to suffer, to hide, to disappear.  Hope had fled.  Meaning had evaporated.  She was a body without soul, without life, spirit, meaning, purpose, just an empty void.  And yet, she had her perceptions, she could see the mountains rising above the nearby trees, she could smell the early stages of autumn, she could hear wind pushing through the leaves in the linden next to her, she could feel the sun on her face, coolness of the air on her skin, feel the wind gently blowing her hair, she could think (her thoughts were only of death and despair, but she could think).

Eventually she sat down, then lay down, right there on the asphalt of the parking lot, its gravel poking into her arm and the side of her forehead, her eyes staring blankly at nothing.  She was enveloped in a sense of remorse and despair and sadness--deep, deep sorrow--that she had no capacity to contain.

She wouldn't notice until she stirred again, a couple days later, that there were no sounds of life, no birds, no children, no crickets, no cars, no people, that the leaves on the trees were curling, the weeds shriveling, the grass greying.  

Life as Mandy had known it was over.

The Reconstruction, Part I

The scans and comparisons and analyses took years.  Seventeen, to be exact.  The first was almost on a whim--a desperate project for an undergraduate psychology class.  It was a 200 level course and Max needed to come up with a test and a paper.  He was clueless.  He ended up deciding to use what he had ready access to--a radiology lab at the hospital where he spent 20 hours a week earning $10 an hour so he could pay some of his college expenses.  He got permission from his lab supervisor, got appropriate consents, and hooked a friend up to the MRI and conducted a brain scan while he watched a cartoon.  He finished his paper, got a C-, but never stopped his experiments.

Now, seventeen years later, he was putting the finishing touches on the software that could translate brain scans into visual images.  Feed the computer some brain scans, and it produced a still image or video of his thoughts. Some thoughts were visual, some were not.  Cleaning out non-visual noise was the hard part.  But he did it.  Among the many things he discovered in the process was that people think visually usually when their eyes are closed.  Not always true, and it varied from person to person, but sleepers were the best.  Hook up his brain-scanner to a sleeping person, and voila! a video feed from the dark recesses of his brain.

His brain-scanner, which he called Hal, had become safer and smaller to use.  What he had now was something that looked like simple headphones, but which could extract soundless images from a person's head.  Thankfully, Max had no diabolical plans.  Or so he wrote in his journal.  We can be the judges of that.

Barber - Adagio for Strings

Placid sea, swelling foamy crests.  I, on my raft, face the frothy spume lifting me and sliding past me as I head out, some distance from land.  I lie back and let the great liquid mass beneath me lift me gently, then let me down, then lift we again.  Quietly, peacefully, the surge of the deep lifts and lowers my body rhythmically, gently, but powerfully.  My arm covers my closed eyes to lessen the glare of sun through eyelids.  Up, down, up, down.  My skin tingles in warmth, a slight spray occasionally creating a chill as it evaporates from my legs, arms, and head.  Salty air bites at my nostrils.

My smallness comforts me as I submit to the great powers that push under me.  I'm too small to resist, too weak to quell the infinite powers that hold me in their mercy.  Since there's nothing to do in the face of such greatness, there's nothing to do but slide and float along.  I submit freely to its movements, trusting that a lack of trust is no help.

There's nothing in the great swells to comfort me but my own sense of place in the whole.  I am no accident, no floating stick, no aimless sea-bird.  I have the illusion of control, but the reality of choice.  I can fight the waves or move with them, be exhausted or be free.  They can take my life or give me sway.  They can be my gravest enemy or the mode of passage across the ocean.  When they waves claim me, they will take me as I decide to be taken, on my terms, in my manner.

My enemy is not the waves or the power driving them, but the pull of fear that makes me lose sight of the journey and despair to be rescued.  The seas are my death, but also my life.

La valeur d'intensité lumineuse de gris, Part I

At the corner of a wedge-shaped building where two roads connect in the 18th arrondissement of Paris sits a public trash can.  It's a hideous green, bolted to the ground, and a popular subject of photo albums American tourists compile after their brief whirlwind tours of Europe ("Europe in 7 days!").

In this particular one, near the Guy Moquet metro stop, lies a small, nondescript paper bag.  That bag envelopes an object that most people would not believe belongs in a trash can.  Well, that's true; but it's equally true that no person seeing the object is likely to know what it is.  By appearances, it's the approximate size and shape of a Guy Moquet 0,54 Euro stamp.  Small, squarish, thin.  But if a curious person were to handle it, she would discover that it's hard and, if curious enough, that it's in fact virtually unbreakable.


Let's not muse so much on what such a curious person would do, but instead introduce such a curious person to the scene and see exactly what she would do.  Let's call her a good French name--perhaps Anne or Brigitte--no, let's call her Sylvie.  Sylvie is, say, 10 years old, precocious, somewhat small for her age (but not overly), with short, brown, straight hair, wearing jeans and a black pea coat, etc, etc.  She walks past the trash can chewing on the last bits of a pain au chocolat, and tosses a little pastry paper toward the mouth of the can, which serendipitously flutters and lands on the sidewalk.  She picks it up, drops it more carefully in the trash, when she sees the bag just described, reaches in, and removes it.  Let's paint a curious expression on her face as she opens it and pulls out our small object.


And thus is set the scene of our tale.  Because she is reluctant to throw out such a dense (for dense it is), clean, evidently purposeful object, she stashes it in her pocket, when she starts noticing a change in the world around her.  Being a human and therefore subject to logical fallacies, including but not limited to post hoc ergo propter hoc, she hastily (and accurately) concludes that the small object caused the change in the world around her.

This is the story detailing some of those changes.

Stream of Stress

It's interesting that in the stream of my stress water can begin to pool because of an obstruction and I'm left dallying in the pool, languishing in the moment, unproductive, guilt-ridden, only to discover, after much ado, that what's obstructing the pool is the smallest stone, easily removed by any motion other than the dallying I was engaged in.  And yet I so often float from pool to pool and let those stones ruin everything for a while.

I prefer my stress to be free-flowing, productive, moving, changing, not pooling.