Infinite Expansion nosleep

Somebody said we are either alone in the universe or we are not, and that both possibilities are equally terrifying. The same holds true in the confines of the mind. What happens up there, in that custard of squishy meat and electricity, deep inside what you perceive and imagine and think upon, might be some lonesome being’s account of what is happening inside and out of himself. Or it might be a less solipsistic experience. I remember having a solitary stream of consciousness once. There was a guiding voice which helped me make sense of the day, and I called it my thoughts. We had a good relationship, too, for more than thirty years. My process was a simple one, and it allowed me to navigate my surroundings, more or less. I held a job and understood the unwritten social contract. I didn’t hurt people. When that all started to break down is unclear, for reasons I should assume are obvious. Illusory phenomena aren’t in the business of making themselves easy to detect, nor are different personalities inhabiting a single suit of meat and bone. I suppose, if I had to try to put a tic on my timeline and say “this is where everything got fucked up,” it would be somewhere around my thirty-third year, when I first had the definitive thought that there might be more to me than me. There’s something close to megalomania in that last sentence, I realize after looking over it, but let’s press on a bit before writing anything off. Nobody has the same preferences from day to day; nobody wants to eat the same thing on their pizza every month of their life, or watch the same movie. Little variations are a part of life, and characteristic of every fully functional human I’ve ever met. For that reason I don’t think I’ll ever be able to pinpoint the start of whatever this is, be it mania or phenomena. My preferences began to diverge from themselves, first on a less than suspicious basis, such that you would have thought me whimsical or adventurous. Time passed, and these divergences intensified and grew more common. At some point my thought process began to seem alien, and my decision-making schemes increasingly foreign. Examples? If I could give examples it would suggest the dilapidation of my sense of self was something I could put under a time-lapse camera lens. This will be easier on all of us if you just take my word for the fact that I was once a good man, devoted to causing no harm and passing under the radar of fame or infamy, obeying my elected officials and embracing the cowardice of a suburban white man’s comfort. Now there’s a little girl locked up in my basement. There is no quicker way to get someone’s attention. I bet you’re listening now, right? Hell, you’re probably sharpening a pitchfork, applying pine resin to a torch, and hoping I’ll drop an address somewhere in this confessional. If I had kept going on about my suspicions of mental disability and cognitive incongruity, you’d be asleep. I wouldn’t have even reached the part about the giant spider in the bedroom, the people in the hallways, or the door. No. You want to hear about the little girl. The one taped to a chair in the basement. Everybody shits their pants when it’s a child’s life on the line. A grown man’s sanity is his own business, and I’m sure even the staunchest of liberals would throw the first stone at me if he saw the state of little Samantha. Let’s see if I can put that in words. First thing you notice when you open the door to the one room of my basement, and let that rectangle of light fall on the wooden chair upon which is strapped our pre-pubescent victim, is her forehead. Little kids have the biggest foreheads for some reason. It’s a quirk of human development. Samantha’s is caked with dried blood. At least that’s what I assume it is. I can’t be sure. Below this crown of brown coagulative is a pair of the roundest blue eyes you ever saw. Once again, they’re just too big for her frame, but in a way that looks endearing instead of freakish. These eyes are bloodshot with incessant tears. She’s a small girl, maybe average for her size but I couldn’t say; I don’t have a lot of experience with these things. Her skin is a little olive, her hair dark brown. There are tiny hairs on her forearms. The duct tape is going to rip those to hell if she ever gets out of that chair. Maybe there’s a little boy somewhere who is in love with her. If I hadn’t put you off me in the first few sentences I’m sure I have now. The vitriol isn’t exactly intentional, it’s just that the whole situation pisses me off beyond measure when I step back and look at it. I had nothing to do with Samantha ending up in my basement. She is, at the end of the day, an intruder in my house. I believe that I want her here less than she wants to be here, contrary to what her incessant crying and muffled screams might suggest. The whole situation is like the blurry memory of a degenerate. The basement itself is unrecognizable to me; I enter it from a point of ingress in my home that I cannot detect. It does not appear - I do not move through some liminal hallway or stairwell to reach this underground chamber. I reach this basement housing the girl through the same modes of travel that you and I both use in dreams of the impending apocalypse or global catastrophe. I receive a sense of the threatening, the gargantuan wave or the titanic wall of fire, and then I am witnessing the results of the world’s collapse in a microcosm, a dead child or a burned-out hospital. I am in my kitchen, I am in my bedroom, and then I am in my basement and I am looking Samantha in the eye. Samantha’s eyes. Now is as good a time as any to address them. Words will fail to woo you to my side in this case because you cannot see Samantha’s eyes, at least not in any way that I can describe. In the same way that you know you can watch an insincere man laugh in your face in front of your peers and disguise it as good humor, or the lascivious woman smirk at you with feigned passion while thinking of another lover, I can see behind the veil of suffering and a child’s innocent misunderstanding. Beyond those tears of torture, Samantha is something infinitely more sinister than she seems. She does not shed tears as a show of sorrow for her own plight, but rather to remind me that she is in control. When somebody finds her, they will see a child, and afterwards see me as a monster. They will not see the corrosion behind her eyes, the unhealthy fury or know the intent that lies within this girl-thing’s heart. Sometimes I’m tempted to slap her across the mask she wears and see if I can’t get it to fall off, but honestly I’m too scared to do so. I raise my hand and my temples begin to throb, my peripheries to dim, as if I’m threatening the exposed nerves of my own brain. The child sobs and flinches, though something within is laughing. My waking life is labyrinthine - a constant churning of both my stomach and the gaseous walls around me work to keep me in. I walk down the hallways of my home and squint at the pictures on the walls, only to find that they are nothing but squares of shadow. Perhaps the man made of gloom coming down the hall from the other direction can see them. He stops, looks, and then passes through me and goes on his way. My home is a crowded place lately. My blurry guests multiply as if in reflection of my own fragmenting personality. Maybe one of them put the girl in the basement. I take three lefts, then a left, and I am back where I was a moment before. The hallway is a rectangle without egress. I am in the kitchen. A man stands beside the refrigerator eating all the raw meat he can find from within. Though the food stuff is nearly as formless as he, I hear the squelch of wet organic matter between his teeth, the patter of blood droplets on the linoleum. These sounds reach me as if from down a well, or the other end of a poorly connected phone call, but I hear them. Another man sits at the kitchen table holding an open bottle. He drinks it down and sets it on the table top amidst a dozen others like it. The bottles overlap, many cohabiting so much of the same space that they are impossible to count. Already he has another in his hand, and lifts it up to his featureless mannequin face. I wake up in my living room, sitting upright on my couch. The late afternoon sun comes through the window. My television is on. This is not a washed out photo-negative; the light warms my skin and I can see color outside the window. What woke me? A knock on the door. It comes again. When I stand it takes me a moment to find my equilibrium. I wonder how long I have been asleep, how long it would have continued had it been uninterrupted. The doorbell rings. I move through my house the way the waking do, one room at a time. The pictures on the walls have faces of relatives and friends. The refrigerator is closed. Sound is crisp, almost painful. Who is at my door? The brass of the handle is cold in my palm, enough to drive me to memories of ice and frost. Is it winter? I open the door and the world outside is dry. The sky clean. My front step is occupied by a well-nourished man named Jerry. He lives next door with his wife and children. The way his eyelids flicker and his jaw shuffles backwards just a millimeter, bringing his mandible back against his throat - I must look unsociable. “Hello Jerry,” “Are you okay?” He asks, extending a hand, palm up, to proffer assistance. I fight the urge to zone out tracing the lines in his palm, the hills of meat between the creases of his knuckles. “I’m alright. How’s the family?” “I ask because I thought I heard screaming. You have someone else in there?” I glance over my shoulder into the interior of the house. Is there someone else in here? Jerry’s brow is furrowed. Is it accusation or concern he wears between his eyes? “Fell asleep in front of the T.V., Jerry. Sorry about that. I’ll turn it off.” He swallows it and nods. Yet he doesn’t leave. “You know,” he looks down at the threshold between him and me, “If you need anything, company or a cooked meal, Susan and I are right next door. You’re always welcome.” “I appreciate it, Jerry. Real soon.” “Alright,” he nods and turns. I shut the door. Jerry, Jerry, Jerry. Nothing bad about Jerry. Nothing bad has ever happened to Jerry. We have the same house, essentially - a modest two-story in an unfurling development. Jerry’s is lively with wife and children. Mine lies indolently in the sunlight hours, crawling with bacteria and phantoms when the lights go out. It’s no wonder he’s concerned. Now about that screaming. It’s quite probable I called out in my sleep, or the television was on as I said. If, however, it was neither of these things, the third and final possibility will bear some quickening of breath. The door to my basement, painted the same innocuous white as the walls and placed near the garage exit so as to be inconspicuous as possible, is ajar. In another time I had forbidden the use of this door. The floor below is unfinished, little more than a concrete box of spiders and plumbing. No place for children. Now there is no one to forbid but myself, and I had no reason to descend until now. The basement’s ceiling is padded with insulation, hanging in white plastic like rolls of adipose from an obese woman’s arm. Somewhere a pipe drips rhythmically. I walk around the stairwell. The floor saps body heat through my bare heels. A little cry swims through the empty spaces between me and the gloom. I stop to listen. She’s not supposed to be here. She stays in the negative space. She doesn’t exist here in the daylight world. Then she cries again. Samantha. A closet in the basement’s southwest corner keeps the boiler out of sight. It’s here that I find her. The round red shoes she’s wearing used to shine, but that luster is gone. I ask myself how I know this, and the answer is somewhere in the reason why I know her middle name is Jane, her favorite color is orange and she hates the flavor strawberry. When she lifts her eyes to look at me, the fear behind them is dulled by resignation, as if I’ve entered this room a dozen times before. To do what? I kneel in front of her and peel the tape off her face. Her cheeks are sallow where they should be rosy and round. I wince when a strand of her hair catches on the glue. I free her mouth, and work to loosen the tape where it has caught around her ear. I notice, a moment too late, her pupils constrict and throat tighten, then she has my thumb between her teeth. She whips her head around like a dog tearing meat from roadkill, and it is my turn to scream. I get my finger back, but the little monster keeps a few ounces of my flesh. She spits a misty spray of blood in my face and inflates her little lungs, readying a cry that I wouldn’t be able to explain away to Jerry and Susan. I slap the tape back over her mouth before she can exhale, and the scream catches in her throat. Samantha flails her head around so violently I think her neck might snap. She rocks on the chair legs, back and forth and around at extreme angles for which I cannot answer. Her cry has become a deep-throated gurgling, a beast’s laughter. I back towards the door, but run up against a wall, or perhaps a haze that I somehow interpret as a wall. The door is gone, as are the definable physical aspects of the little room. I have slipped back into the other place. Maybe Samantha dragged me there, maybe by the thumb. She is at rest now, calm in her chair, her hair covering her face and her head slumped between her shoulders. She flickers before my eyes, her whole figure blinking like a candle. Is she dying, or is her presence here, among the splinters of my own, delicate as a whisper? Samantha. Samantha. Where do you still exist? My living room is cavernous, now. The walls and ceiling have broken down, or moved outward to let in more void. To walk across the carpet is to traverse the deck of a ship in the night, whereupon the transom light is somehow a glow given off by your own presence. All around the void is black velvet. A man sits on the couch, sleeping. He twitches with nightmare. A man opens the front door. There is nothing beyond. He has a conversation I hear as crackling static before shutting the door again. A few moments later he opens it once more. As memories grow soft with rot they are alienated from one another. A line is fragmented, and between those fragments an infinite expansion takes place. Eventually the person within those fragments who may once have been you is foreign, a stranger first to you, then to the others. These shadows of men who perform their little duties to the end of time may all once have been me, and perhaps they still are. Maybe, to them, I am a wisp of shadow and fog unendingly shuffling through this gloom. I am in my bedroom. A network of spider webs crisscrosses over the bed in the middle of the room. A great mass sits in the web’s center. It is long and curled, sectional, and from its thorax come eight rigid legs. It hangs motionless over the bed, fangs moist with venom. Around it a hundred tiny acolytes await motion from their mother, weaving their own designs into the framework of the monster’s web. The face of the giant arachnid is that of a human. It is distorted, of course, by the syringe-like teeth that jut from its mouth, and the extra eyes protruding around its cheekbones like tumors, but it is a human woman. Sometimes I recognize her as the lady who once made me give up booze and red meat, who convinced me to live with her in a little suburb, who took my seed and grew two little girls such that I would be forever bound to her, to them, to this place and this life. Caitlin. My wife. One of her legs shudders, and slowly she adjusts her position in the web. I am in the kitchen, watching one of my fragments prepare meals. He spreads foodstuff on pieces of bread, wraps sandwiches and puts them in brown bags. I watch him do this for a long time. Perhaps his thoughts are replaying on an endless loop, like his actions. I vaguely remember the spite that would have been at the forefront of those thoughts. Hatred for Caitlin, Samantha, and the third one - the interlopers, invaders of my solitude. At the time I had believed my thoughts to be a sanctuary for these feelings, a place where I could let them run their course in privacy. I had thought myself alone in my head. If this, the grey house, the other place, the photo negative of my waking life, is in some way my mind, then I was wrong and my thoughts were never truly my own. They were on display for the whole cast of my past self, what I was and perhaps what I will be. Not only that, but for the invaders that now haunt this crypt with me - the great spider in the bedroom, the flickering demon tied to a chair in the basement. Sunlight, albeit waning as it disappears behind the western horizon, brings my pupils into focus. I’m looking out my front window, parting the blinds with a finger to peer out on the neighborhood. There’s a police car in front of Jerry’s house. There’s no one in the cruiser, no flashing lights or sound of the engine. The officer must be inside, talking to Jerry or Susan. Had there been a scream again? I think of reasons my neighbors might have to contact the police, and perhaps it’s my self-obsession that leads me to think it can only be something to do with me. I go to the kitchen, thinking to get a beer from the refrigerator. I open the door and the appliance is empty. I open the pantry. No food. I find a box of salt pushed to the back of the shelf, and a can of baking soda behind that - the sort of things you abandon in a kitchen when you take your leave of it forever. I walk through the hallway, towards the stairs. I pass squares of discolored paint where pictures once hung on the walls. The stairs moan under my weight, though I feel light, wasted even. My atrophied legs shake as they bear me upwards. Downstairs there is a knock on the door. It is not the neighborly sort. It is followed by the doorbell, twice, in quick succession. I ignore it, and continue to ascend. As I move upwards the color sloughs off the walls and the sunlight turns to a haze, too heavy for the atmosphere, and falls to be replaced with shadow. The pain leaves my legs, my decrepit lungs cease to matter, and I move like a specter through the artificial twilight. The banging on the door comes from another, distant time, muffled, and unobtrusive. The walls fall away, absorbed by the void. My fragments move through something less than blackness, an anti-color maybe like what the blind see in their dreams. They are losing form, too, becoming less my compatriots in the drifting memory and more shapeless non-stuff. Will I soon be alone, out here, in this vastness? My thoughts, next, begin to lose coherence. Through this expansion, this entropy of my consciousness, I am undergoing heat-death, the way they say the universe might someday. I welcome it. I will my last scraps of self to disperse, to fly away from each other and hold no communion through which I might retain ego. Then there’s the door. It interrupts my dispersion. Candice’s door. Candice the third one. I can tell by the little unicorn stickers around what would have been her head level, the smear of something sticky on the handle. Do I have a hand with which to open it? It opens for me, and the room beyond has been spared the dissolution of the infinite through which I drift; it is still a room that once belonged to a little girl, a family’s baby, a sister and a daughter. The bed is made and covered by a quilted comforter designed with stars and hearts. A doll rests its head on the pillow. Life support equipment is cluttered around the bed. Big, blocky instruments: respirator, vital sign monitor, ventilator, dialysis machine…the feeding tube hangs like a dead snake, a bit of tape still sticking to its end. Caitlin and I had to become so familiar with these things. They greeted us every time we walked into our daughter’s room, huddled around her like vultures around a dying animal. Their beeps and breathing, heard through the walls, kept us awake at night. They commanded our attention until we had none to give our oldest daughter, Samantha, and our neglect made her a demon. My will wasted and I drifted away. Caitlin tried so hard to draw me back in, to keep me rooted in the house, in misery with her. Her vehemence left me feeling tangled and caught, sucked dry. My support may have nourished her, but when I had none left to give our hatred became mutual. I see another one of my shadow-kin, this one at the foot of the bed, balling handfuls of the sheets in his fists. I remember that day. Caitlin had been at the store, I had fallen asleep on the couch. I woke to the sound of panic from the machines. The slow, rhythmic beeping and hissing and become a loud twittering. An alarm screeched. As I rushed upwards, towards the malfunctioning equipment and the little comatose girl who was helplessly at its power, I remember passing Samantha on the stairs. I have a memory of her face like a snapshot. She was calm, but expectant, reading and analyzing the panic that I felt at the time, immune to it herself. When I got into Candice’s room, which had taken me an eternity in a matter of seconds, any brief opportunity I might have had to help had passed. The machines had been sabotaged beyond my abilities of repair. Power cords had been cut, wires and tubes mangled. Many lay on their sides. The beeping was a cry of warning, a draining of reserve energy meant to buy time in the event of a power outage or similar accident. There was no way to undo the extent of the vandalism, and Candice’s body had no reserve energy. She went cold in minutes while I knelt at the foot of her bed and prayed to the monolithic respirators and filters. Caitlin had the sense to keep Samantha away from me. I have not seen the child sense, except as she appeared taped to the chair in the basement, and now they tell me that this was but an apparition. She was never there. They are trying so hard to break me of these delusional memories. They are my caretakers, charged with providing a vortex towards which all the dispersed bits of my life might gravitate and reassemble. Doctors, psychiatrists, wardens. I am their charge now, with many thanks to my neighbors, who did a careful job of monitoring my piecemeal drift into void and formlessness. I am told Caitlin has been made aware of my condition, that she is worried. The doctors ask me if I’m happy that she still cares. I don’t know. They ask me if I want to know about Samantha and her progress in a children’s asylum. I don’t know. Do I have any interest in the reassembly of my psyche, the cleansing of my spirit? I don’t know. Feelings are hard to measure in the void. I watch one of my fragmentary fog men stand behind the shoulder of a doctor. The doctor marks a paper on a clipboard. The fragment ignores this, watching me on my hospital bed with an eyeless face. He is the bit of me that nurtures something akin to hope, albeit deep and secretive. He is dispersing, blowing away on the breeze of the hospital’s air conditioning. The doctor’s voice is far away. The feeling of the mattress beneath my back is gone. Somewhere, far beyond the limits of the ever-expanding universe, I like to think there is a nothing-space, a lightless, formless expanse of void. We move into it, filling this space as best we can, and as we fill the infinite, in our heedless attempts to occupy all that there is, we drift farther and farther away from one another and everything that once made us human. Eventually all the light will diminish, become a speck in the distance, at the mercy of the blackness that surrounds it. Then it will wink out.

Submitted September 05, 2015 at 12:45AM by Ambugaton729 http://ift.tt/1NSCaRa nosleep