I carefully made my way back to the entresol and continued following the only possible path toward where I hoped to find the faceless man that had my voice, my hair and my birthmark. As I walked, I occasionally stopped to study some obscure pile of stuff. I found parchments written with French, German, Dutch, Latin and Italian. I sifted through some very old notebooks, which contained some sort of mathematics. One in particular was entitled Symphonie Fantastique d’Hector Berlioz. The paper had aged, but didn’t look terribly old. If it was some sort of music notation, it wasn’t like anything I had seen before. Scribbled in the margins were obscure musical symbols, but for the most part, where I was expecting to find flats, sharps and bar lines, there were just complicated scratches of nonsense scattered around some French.
This was one example in a pile of scrolls, notebooks, and single leafs of paper. There were similar notebooks and leather–bound tomes scattered around with names like Alexander Porfiryevich Brodin, Georg Philipp Telemann, Guiseppe Verdi and George Frideric Handel.
I kept finding more piles of notebooks and manuscripts containing names and titles of historical significance. And things. Old pianos, piles of jewels and golden idols, stacks of blue jeans and leather riding–saddles of various shapes and sizes – one that could have only been used for an elephant or something of equal size.
This place was a museum, but unlike any I had ever seen before. I could touch these things, if I wanted. I found a pile of medieval and feudal weapons from various cultures. I picked up a very old Samurai sword, whose sheath was inscribed with thin, beautiful Japanese calligraphy over chipped black paint, which read–
島津藩
I didn’t know how to read Japanese, so its meaning was lost to me. I carried it with me for some time, using it as a cane, occasionally poking at something I found interesting. I walked in silence, in quiet awe of the place, tracing the granite staircases as they spiraled upward along the inside of what must have been the cave wall. The wall moved away from me at a curve, until mist and smoke from the braziers overhead obscured the slue of the cave itself.
The staircase opened to another mezzanine–like hall, and on the far side, seated with his back to me at a cherry colored desk of finished walnut was the faceless man. I adjusted the sling around my shoulder and bit down on the pain, cautiously moving forward, not wanting to provoke any sort of hostility or fright. I tried to make myself obvious by sliding my shoes on the granite, until finally clearing my throat.
He turned his head, fixing his featureless face onto mine for a moment, and then turned back toward what he was working on. “How long do you think it would take you to look through all of that?” He asked, nodding toward the miles of monuments, buildings, vehicles, antiques, tapestries, clothing and weapons.
“I don’t know.”
“I’ve tried,” he said simply. “Although, I don’t know how long I’ve been here. At first I thought I was supposed to find something out there. Some sort of,” he searched for the right word. “Catalyst. If there is an answer, it should be here, shouldn’t it?”
I didn’t say anything. I just stood there.
“You’re the first person I’ve seen since the experiment,” he continued. “And you look like me. Well, you look like what I used to look like.” He took a deep breath and shook his head, studying the map of lines on the back of his hands. “When I saw you lying there, I thought I was finally going to get some answers.”
“I may have some answers. But I’m sort of in the same boat as you.” I looked again across the busy expanse of the cave. “I think the only advantage I would have is that I haven’t been restricted to one place.”
He stopped working and sat back. I could see that he was thinking seriously about something. He turned to me again, and after an indescribable amount of time passed, pushed a chair toward me with his foot. “Have a seat if you want.”
I moved to the chair and glanced at what was spread out in front of him. It was a jigsaw puzzle – there was a small pile of pieces on the desk. He saw me looking and shrugged. “I got bored. I tried reading some of the books around here –” he waved at the piles of junk. “But most of them are only half complete.” He leaned to the side of the desk and passed me a book. I weighed it in my hand. It was old and nearly falling apart. The colors on the cover washed to a dim yellow, and the red title was now faded to a dark orange. I flipped to the copyright page and read, Dracula, by Bram Stoker, Westminster, Archibald Constable and Company, 1897, First Edition.
I flipped through the pages until the print stopped. I thumbed back until I got to the last page with writing on it – page 181.
Frankly, we did our best to prevent such a testamentary disposition, and pointed out certain contingencies that might leave her daughter either penniless or not so free–
The rest of the book was blank. “Are all of the books like this?”
“The books that I’ve seen. But it’s not just the books, it’s the instruments, the movies, the notebooks, the poems, the sheet music… nothing here is complete.”
I looked at the jigsaw puzzle. He was using the same strategy my grandmother taught us – it was easier starting with the corner pieces, before trying to move inward. This other, faceless me found all of the border pieces, and was starting to move toward the center.
“What about that?” I asked, nodding at the puzzle.
He grabbed the box, which was blank but for a simple black inscription–
Eurographics 1000 piece mystery jigsaw! Put all the pieces together and discover the image inside!
“If everything is incomplete here,” I asked. “Why bother with this?”
“Because I counted the pieces.”
“And?”
“One thousand. All accounted for.”
I pulled the chair closer to the desk, ignoring the grating bite of pain that gnawed the back of my elbow. The bloody paste finally dried, and my cuts seemed to be holding fast.
“Out of every piece of junk that I’ve seen in here,” he continued. “This was the only thing I found that seemed to be complete.”
I laid the samurai sword across my lap and pulled off its sheath, revealing a blade that ended about twelve inches before it should have.
“What makes you think all of the pieces are for this puzzle, and not just several puzzles dumped into one box?”
He shrugged. “There’s only one way to find out.”
He passed me a handful of pieces and then turned back toward the puzzle.
There was suddenly a moan that sounded like a gate the size of the Eiffel Tower opening. Dirt began to fall from the cave ceiling. I looked up and saw the giant braziers starting to sway slowly – the chains groaned as their rusted encasements broke apart. They were so large, and their movements were so forceful, that one could barely recognize that they started moving at all. The only reason I could tell that the braziers were swaying, was because each one seemed to be moving in its own direction, which gave the expansive ceiling a strange oscillating appearance.
“What’s happening up there?”
“Before I woke up in the shaft,” I said, turning aback toward the pile of pieces in front of me. “The sky started to break apart and fall to the Earth.”
He turned his head toward me and sat without saying anything.
“You’ve been here for a long time,” I continued. “I’ll let you decide. We can either try to find a way out of here and make our way back toward the labs, or we can try to put this puzzle together. But I have to tell you that from what I saw happening with the sky, this place will be coming down sooner or later.”
He sat back and looked as though he was thinking things over, but it was hard to tell. “The labs?”
I nodded and tried stretching the pain out of my neck. “I got this idea that wherever I found myself, I was going to try my best to make it back to the labs – to the artifact.”
“The artifact…”
“Yeah.”
His head faced the puzzle for a long time. He touched his face at the spaces where everything should have been, but wasn’t.
“I think this is significant,” he said finally. “The puzzle, I mean. You and this puzzle are the only complete things I’ve seen here.” He dropped his hand into his lap, “I feel as though I should put this together. I can’t really explain why.”
“Okay,” I said. “We can get to work on this, and I suppose I can answer what questions you have in the meantime.”
“Like why I don’t have a face and you do?”
“I’m not sure I have an answer for that…”
His brow collected over eyes that weren’t there.
I pulled a pile of pieces toward me and started picking through the black ones, looking for two tabs and two C cuts.
4.
“I’m not sure how long I have left here,” I said. “The time I have in each place is always different.”
I realized that it was warm, and did my best to unbutton my shirt as well as I could. As we spoke and worked on the puzzle, I continued studying my surroundings, at least what I could see of them. The interior of the cave was split into discrete paths, if not actual roads, by a maze of antiques that rose at varying heights, nothing obstructing anything entirely from sight because of how things were organized. I saw several buildings – a very impressive skyscraper that looked very much like the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. I certainly recognized the profile of Mount Rushmore, and not far from that the effigy of Crazy Horse, who looked as though he were pointing directly at where we were sitting – each monument looked surprisingly small in scale within the context of the cave. The braziers continued to groan as they swayed back and forth – hopefully slowing down and not gaining momentum. Whatever was happening on the surface must have been spectacular.
I was certainly impressed with what I saw.
“Well, I’m convinced.” He said.
“I didn’t think you would need much convincing.”
“I don’t know,” He said. “Maybe the sequence of milieu isn’t random. You said it was the accident, then the hospital first, the lake second, our home third, and finally the labs. Rinse and then repeat, right? But the times were different. And you said that the moments seemed to cut together like single frames of film, until it seemed that each dream, beginning at different times and in different places, started converging onto the same moment, at the same place–”
“The labs, yeah…”
“I haven’t experienced anything like that,” He said quietly. “But time here seems to pass very slowly for me. Almost like this place is a microcosm of very fast reality that feels relative to something much larger, and much slower.”
I sighed, not yet entirely comfortable with his face, or lack of one to be more precise. The more I focused on the puzzle and the beauty of what lay within the cave, the less I seemed to notice or care that I was talking to another version of myself that didn’t have a face. I never realized how important the expressions of emotions were until they weren’t there anymore – his words seemed more hollow and cold without facial expressions to interpret their meaning and intention. I supposed it was different than talking to someone over a flex–phone or listening to an audio recording, because my imagination couldn’t fill the gaps left when there wasn’t a face to match the sound with. Talking with this other Me, the fact that he had no features, and that I could see it, prevented me from imagining them.
We were making good progress. Although we had a substantial portion of the outside put together, the image was still meaningless and isolated. The only part that was missing was the center. The other me sat back and admired our work. The image took shape near the outside of the puzzle, and there were what looked like two flesh colored limbs on either side. The one on the left arced upward toward the center from what may have been a knee, or the top of someone’s head. On the right, there was a similar shape protruding out of a red sweep, which could have been clay. There was a crack in the image, in the section of the limb on the right, just before the faded margin of strawberry red. It was as if the image was a photograph of something painted onto stone or marble.
“It looks like a pennant, or a chemical trail.” He said, “Or a cloud.”
“I was thinking it looked like two arms.” I pointed at what may have been the start of an ulna – and the shape seemed to be on both objects, right above where thumbs ought to be.
“So this place isn’t real.” He said, “I get that. But I don’t get why I don’t have a face.”
“Well, you said it yourself – everything in here is incomplete.” I shrugged. “So are you.”
“What are you missing?”
“My memory…”
He shook his head, “I’m just as lost as you are in that department. I don’t remember anything before the accident – and what I do remember is incoherent. So am I more incomplete than you? Why? Why have you been flitting through universes, and I’ve been stuck in here?”
“I wish I knew…”
“If we are the same person, assuming that what is happening has a point, then why the differences? If everything in here is incomplete, again I have to ask which parts you are missing.”
“First off, I’m not entirely sure we are the same person,” I said.
“Fair enough. But whose dream is this then – mine or yours?”
“What if it’s both of ours?”
The other me shook his head and rubbed the back of his neck.
“I’ve seen a separate vision of myself before–”
“While you were bleeding to death by the bed, I know you told me–”
“Yes. But that projection of me either couldn’t or wouldn’t acknowledge that I was there. You have. We’re talking. We’re putting together a puzzle with each other, for god’s sake.”
“What gave you the idea to head to the labs?”
“The week we spent in Arizona, remember?”
He thought about it and nodded.
“The only constants – the only real consistency within each dream is that there was an accident, we were there, Alice was there, and it involved some sort of artifact from Mars. I just thought that if I could do anything, I might as well try to put all the dreams into one place, and see what happens. I chose the lab for two reasons. One, because it was a place where I remember being able to figure things out and find answers. Two, because the artifact is there…”
“You’re using the people and places that you recognize as landmarks, and mapping your way back to the lab.”
“Exactly.”
“So it’s symbolic,” he said simply. “And so is the fact that I’m missing a face. It’s a metaphor or an allegory for something.”
“I don’t know. But it would make sense, wouldn’t it?”
He nodded.
“Whose dream we are in is irrelevant,” I continued. “What’s important is that we have realized that none of this makes sense on real terms.” I waved around, taking in the endlessness of the cave. “Where on Earth could this have existed? How much sense does it make that you don’t have a face?”
He leaned forward, and hesitated.
“Go ahead.”
“Well,” he said. “If this is all a dreamlike hallucination or a coma, why must there be an artifact at all?”
I shrugged. “I think that what we do in this place is crucial to whether or not we wake up. I believe that every weirdass thing I’ve survived so far is strictly symbolic of our fight to stay alive somewhere in the real world.”
We sat in silence for some time, letting the possibility sink in deep and take root.
“You don’t think we woke up after the accident,” he said finally.
“Nope.”
“And you think that opening the artifact
in this place will cause us to wake up in the real world.”
I nodded. We finished an additional ring toward the center of the puzzle and started picking through the dwindling pile of pieces again.
“There is one thing…” I said slowly.
He tilted his head toward me.
“The whole reason I’m here, in this dream.”
“You were dropped down that shaft.”
“Yeah. And the people who dropped me said that this wasn’t as much of a dream as I would think. They also said not to let the zombies touch me.”
“Well,” he said. “That sort of changes things. How much can you trust advice from something that may or may not be a hallucination?”
“Well,” I shrugged. “If each projection is a separate part of who we are, then why would we lie to ourselves?”
“Good point.”
“If I disappear in the next few minutes, remember,” I said. “If those zombie things get in here, don’t let them touch you. You run, understand?”
He nodded.
“I think that if one of those things bites us, we’re dead. As in, real dead. As in, we’re never waking up. Understand?”
He nodded again.
We worked without talking for some time, and I became increasingly anxious that I hadn’t shifted realities yet. This was the longest I remained in one place for so long.
We filled in enough of the puzzle that we could clearly see I was right – there were two arms reaching toward each other. The part of the puzzle we completed ended at the wrists on either side.
“I know what this is,” he said softly.
So did I. There was enough of the puzzle filled in at that point that it didn’t matter if we finished it or not. It was pretty clear what the image was.
The other me rose from his chair and put his hands on his hips, mirroring exactly the posture I take when I’m thinking very seriously about something–
– Suddenly, there tolled somewhere the loudest and largest bell that I ever heard, and we both had to cover our ears. There was a loud clanging followed by the sound of massive plates of metal grinding together.
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