Artifact

by Shane Lindemoen

  “Lance,” she wiped at her face several times, as if she could somehow clean the moment away. “What on Earth is going on?”

  “I’ll explain later – right now we have to get to the maintenance locker and grab the extendable ladder.”

  “Why?”

  Sid said, “There are a couple people out there on top of a storage container, about a block west of here.”

  2.

  The ladder wouldn’t reach. I had to work fast because the end of this dream was probably getting ready to cycle again. I had no idea how much time I had left.

  The plan was to extend the ladder all the way to the top of the truck, forming a rudimentary bridge to the office. It extended several meters shy of where we needed it.

  When Sid and I slid the ladder out of the window, we clubbed a few zombies as the bottom half fell to the ground.

  “They’ll have to jump to the ladder,” Sid said. “We’re going to have to try and hold it steady. They’ll only have a few seconds before being pulled to the street.”

  The zombies ignored the ladder for the most part, except to move around it, and continued piling themselves around the shipment container.

  “It’s about six meters from the top of the container to the ladder,” Alice said. “The woman might make the jump, but not the little girl.”

  “An Olympic athlete couldn’t make that jump,” I countered.

  Sid shrugged, barely keeping the rising panic out of his voice. “I could climb down, and she could throw the girl to me–”

  “That’s not going to work,” I said.

  Suddenly, the man that was hanging over the sunroof began to stir.

  “Oh no…” Alice said.

  He sluggishly pushed himself upright, and I could see a deep wound on his right side. The blood seeped in rhythm with his pulse – it was bright red and full of oxygen.

  “He’s still alive,” Sid said.

  “How do you know?”

  “He’s wincing.” Sid’s relief was palpable, if only momentary.

  I saw it too. The man carefully inspected his side and clenched his jaw against the pain.

  Twisting his head, his gaze settled on the woman and the child hopelessly looking up at our window. He looked around the trailer and saw that the zombies were nearly high enough to climb up.

  He said something to the woman in the leather jacket, and she turned her head. There was no way of knowing what was being said over the rising din. She just stared at him. After a few moments, she pointed to where we were holding the ladder.

  He nodded and looked down into the cabin for a few moments, probably trying to clear his head and catch his breath.

  He disappeared into the cab for what felt like an eternity. When he reappeared, he had two bundles of what looked like bungee cord. He painstakingly crawled onto the trailer and moved to where the woman and the little girl were kneeling.

  They spoke briefly, and the woman started to cry. The little girl’s face was blank and stoic, seemingly detached from the world that was falling apart around her.

  He stood and waved at us.

  “Catch!” He yelled.

  He waited for me to extend my arms, and then pitched a bundle of bungee high over my head, where it slapped against the building and then slid down into my open arms.

  “What does he have in mind?” Alice asked.

  He held up both of his fists about a foot apart, and yelled, “Anchor each strut to some sort of mooring inside!”

  He doubled over and clutched his side from the effort of having to yell. I could see that he was coughing blood. He stopped moving, taking massive breaths as blood spread around his head.

  I turned to inspect the things inside my office.

  “The desk,” Sid said. “Tie it off to the legs.”

  I quickly rigged the ladder to the bungee, and then knotted the cord to the desk.

  “I think he wants us to make it longer so that the ladder can reach the trailer,” I said. “We tie off each strut so that it doesn’t wobble too much as they climb over?”

  “Yeah but,” Alice said. “What does he have as an anchor?”

  “Forget that,” Sid said. “How is he going to tie off his end?”

  We looked down, and the man was back to his knees. The woman was still crying. He knelt in front of the little girl and smiled. He gently caressed her cheek and then embraced her for a few moments.

  “He’s not going to tie off anything.” I said calmly.

  “What…?”

  The man turned toward us and stood at the edge of the trailer. He swayed for a moment, and then glanced up. For a long time, he just stood there looking at me.

  “No!” I shouted.

  He nodded once, took two very deep breaths and then leapt from the trailer.

  As soon as he hit the ground, he got to his feet and started shoving, throwing, punching, whipping and elbowing the zombies around the trailer. The zombies that he couldn’t reach started pulling themselves away to follow him.

  “What the hell is he doing?!” Sid screamed.

  The man was slowly clearing a path to the ladder. The woman leaned over the lip of the trailer and dropped to the ground. She turned, and started coaching the girl down.

  By then, the man cleared a pretty substantial area between the trailer and the building.

  When the little girl was finally down, the woman shoved her up the ladder, following closely.

  “Hold it steady!” Sid yelled.

  When the woman reached the halfway mark, she turned to see if the man was following, but he disappeared beneath the waves of that horrible sea. He was gone. I could see a pile of zombies pulling apart something that resembled a blue and black plaid jacket, but nothing more.

  She lay on the ladder halfway between the boiling ocean of living corpses and the safety of the window – literally suspended between life and death. She lay there for some time holding the girl, and wept.

  Sid was begging her to climb, and Alice was untying the bungee from the desk, probably planning to lower it so that they could help pull themselves up.

  If these dreams were a part of me – If I were creating them as I went, what sort of monster did that make me? I had to keep asking myself the question – the same question that I thought was the right one: Why? Why is this happening?

  I would never know.

  Or I wouldn’t know soon enough.

  Dreams are meant to be awakened from, not drowned in. I wasn’t going to wake up, was I? Sooner or later, I was going to die there.

  I watched the woman weep with the child in her arms, until the world went away again. And again. And again. And again until the end of time.

  3.

  –My wrists were bleeding.

  “Here, you deal with him,” A woman said over my shoulder. “This is getting us nowhere.”

  I quickly realized that I was sitting in a wheelchair. My ankles were shackled to the caster housing, and my arms were handcuffed behind the backrest. I looked around and saw a white wall with paintings hung in beautifully ornate and impressively detailed golden frames. They stretched in either direction for eternity. Miles and miles of paintings were arranged throughout an immaculate white room. The walls were so blatantly clean that I couldn’t tell where the ceiling began or where the floor ended.

  I tested the handcuffs and my wrists stung.

  Things were so bright, I experienced whiteout. My rods and cones compensated with a peripheral impression of gray.

  Someone faced me toward a painting. “What do you see?”

  I shook my head and sighed. “Take these handcuffs off of me. Let me up.”

  “We’ll let you go,” someone else said. “If you tell us what you see.”

  I studied it for a moment. “A little girl.”

  “More. Tell
us more – tell us everything you see in the picture.”

  I violently pulled my wrists apart and kicked my feet but nothing happened. I thrashed so hard that I was sure the wheelchair would tip, and when I realized that I wasn’t going anywhere, I sat for a long time simply focusing on my breathing.

  “When you’re finished,” someone said. “Tell us about the painting.”

  I sighed and looked up. “She’s wearing a blue dress and a red bow in her hair. She’s standing in a garden holding a green watering spout.” I said, “It looks like it may be spring time…”

  The person rolled me to another painting.

  “And this?”

  “What is happening?”

  “You were about to tell us what you see.”

  “No,” I said. “Why am I here? What is this? Usually these dreams follow some sort of logic.”

  “You’re here to tell us the truth,” said a little girl. “We want to know what you see.”

  “Where are Alice and Sid? Where is the woman and the little girl?”

  “You’ll know everything, when you tell us what we want to know.”

  “Why?”

  “So that we can help you see the truth,” someone else said, a man.

  “What truth?”

  “Why you think you’re dreaming. Why you think that you can’t wake up.”

  “How is this going to help?”

  “Tell us,” they said in unison.

  A man said, “Tell us what you see.”

  I studied the painting in front of me again. “It’s the Mona Lisa.”

  We rolled down the line and they parked me in front of another painting. “And this–”

  “Please,” I said. “Just tell me what’s happening.”

  “What do you see?”

  “How do I get out of here? How do I wake up?”

  “You start by telling us what we want to know.”

  “And then I can go?”

  “That’s up to you.”

  I sighed and glared at the painting. It was a portrait of Jesus breaking bread and drinking wine with his apostles. “Da Vinci’s, The Last Supper.”

  They rolled me to another, and–

  –What I saw shocked me. It looked exactly, exactly like what I had been experiencing since the accident. An unexpressed scream stitched itself into my throat, and I fought the tears back from threatening my vision. I sat for quite a long time, taking in every detail of the painting. Nobody behind me seemed to mind. Until that moment, I lacked the words to describe exactly what I had been going through. This, however, changed things…

  The painting presented a world that was melting into a desolate and arid landscape. There was a pocket–watch that lost so much viscosity it ran like warm paint over the side of a desk. There was another watch hanging over the limb of a dead bush, as if it were dead itself.

  No, dead wasn’t exactly the right word.

  In order for something to be dead it must have first possessed life. A watch was built lifeless. Lifelessness was the defining characteristic of a clock – a watchmaker gives it the illusion of life solely through the expression of his will and patience, and everything thereafter is an aspect of reality, which creates itself anew with each passing second. “I think I know what’s going on here.”

  “So tell us,” a woman said. “Tell us what you see.”

  “A nightmare.” I said, “An epiphany.”

  “Go on.”

  There was a closed pocket–watch in the lower left corner covered with ants, and another open–faced watch draped over a lifeless figure which could have been a flesh colored duck, or a badly disfigured person.

  “This is Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory.”

  “The persistence,” the man echoed sagely, as if he were a teacher whose student finally said the answer he was waiting for. “Of memory…”

  “The persistence of memory,” the little girl said softly.

  “I’m getting close, aren’t I?” I asked, “To figuring this all out?”

  “Just two more.”

  I relaxed a bit, sensing a change in them. I was beginning to trust that they were trying to help – whoever they were.

  We stopped at a glass case containing a violin. It was very old, and very beautifully crafted. Careful grooves trailed the length of the neck into the scroll, where the finish aged to a deep black. Its beauty rested in its simplicity, but the care with which the carpenter molded the body around the top–block was unlike anything I had seen before. The ribs were chipped around the corner–blocks, and I tried to imagine how old it was – what appeared to be brittle was somehow reinforced by the solid–wood test of time, and although it projected a sense of strength, it still looked as if it would shatter at the merest touch. “I don’t know the builder, but that is a very beautiful looking violin.”

  “And if you had to guess the builder?” The voice asked.

  “Stradivarius,” I intoned. “I would have to say.”

  We moved away from the case, and came upon another painting. Again my heart dropped.

  I knew what it was supposed to be.

  “This isn’t right,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “This isn’t the painting.” I said, “It’s been changed.”

  “In what way?”

  The original painting depicted a man – although it only vaguely resembled a man – with a lion’s mane of gray hair splashing a black backdrop tinged with red, which in reality was just a wall inside Goya’s house. He was supposed to be crouching in rictus – eyes opened wide and manic, maddeningly rending the remaining stump of an arm with his blunt teeth. He was supposed to be essentially eating the headless carcass of his own child. “This is supposed to be Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son,” I said. “But this…”

  I had to look away. Instead of Cronos and his darkened maw, it was Alice. And she was eating what looked like an image of me.

  “Please,” I said finally. “Just let me go. I’m tired. I’m just so tired of all this.”

  A warm and comforting hand gently squeezed my shoulder. “Do you know what this place is?”

  I thought about it. “It feels like a maze. Like an epistemological snare.”

  “No, this place–”

  The person turned me in a circle so that I could take in the vast, white emptiness of the room, which was filled with thousands of pieces of art.

  “No.” I said, “Where am I?”

  “It’s a mausoleum,” the woman said. “A tomb. A place where memories are allowed to persist.”

  “It’s a prison,” the little girl said solemnly.

  “A prison for what?”

  “Genius.” The man said, “Miraculous self–reflections and truth.”

  “I – I don’t understand.”

  “What good is that violin?” The woman asked. “What’s the point of keeping it locked away like that?”

  “To preserve it, I guess.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it holds historical significance.”

  “How? There’s nobody here to use it. There isn’t even anyone here to see it.” She said, “The violin, Lance, has lost every speck of utility. It has even forgotten how to sing. Without the delicate touch of an artist, what does that violin even mean? It is utterly worthless without the appraisal and admiration of such a mind that has the capacity to appreciate and understand what it is. It is a collection of dumb matter afloat in the ungraspable construct of time, without purpose or meaning.”

  “The answer is nothing, Lance.” The man said, “It is good for nothing.”

  I craned my neck around to look at the violin. I studied it for a few moments, admiring again the detail of its workmanship. I wondered who built it – who gave it the illusion of life. I wondered about what it must have
survived to get there, how many generations it had been passed to, how many wars it had seen, how many hands that have held it, and in how many museums it had lived.

  I wondered about the tree that had been cut to harvest the wood. How old was that tree? Where did it grow?

  “You’re wrong,” I said finally.

  “How so?”

  “There is someone here to admire and love it,” I sighed, and turned my head back toward the front.

  “Who? Who is here that could do that?”

  “Me.” I summoned a bit of strength and said, “I’m here.”

  The wheelchair suddenly jerked forward and someone started rolling me toward the abhorrent version of Goya’s painting.

  “I hope we see you again, Lance.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Letting you go.”

  “That’s it, I can go?”

  “Of course. We don’t lie, Lance.”

  Alice’s deformed head grew larger as they pushed me toward the painting. I noticed that there was a slot in the floor below the golden frame, and it grew as well, until it was slightly wider than an open coffin. I realized then that it was simply a hole cut into the floor, and as we drew closer, I failed to see how deep it was.

  “Lance,” the woman said. “These pieces of art will remain imprisoned forever. For being a masterpiece, there’s a price to pay. A consequence. You have to realize that these things remain significant only as long as there are people around to appreciate them. They will remain entirely meaningless until someone comes along and gives them meaning again. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, but I don’t know what this has to do with me.”

  “Then you don’t understand.”

  The person wheeled me to the edge of the hole, and my heart dropped into my stomach. I realized that it was as close to bottomless as I had ever seen.

  “Don’t do this,” I said breathlessly. “Please.”

  “A word of advice,” the man said. “Those things that you think are zombies? You’re only half right.”

  The woman was behind me, too. “This isn’t as much of a dream as you would think.”

  “Don’t let those zombies bite you.” The man continued, “And Lance, if you want this to end, you have to open the artifact. You know that, right?”