by Jay Smith
“That’s okay. I can. ”
“what?”
Wake up.
Part 3
Disorganized notes. I am told I will never wake up again as myself. Never again myself. Never again alone.
Dry cold to wet cold. Broken pipes raw sewer. Crap-covered eaters. Dim light and the haze of panic that clouds all memories of dangerous flight.
So very cold. 50 paces back…left turn. Third door on right. Marked with black marker. Straight back to dorm. It’s a maze of unmarked passages and the eaters have snatched away two of the crew. Don’t stop. Don’t ever stop. A fallen miner’s job is to slow down the mob. Lost. Dead ends. One passage bleeds into another. In the panic, it maps into a circle. No more eaters. Just fading light. Gasping for hair thick with filth and humidity. The way out is compromised. Have to wait for rescue.
Want to light a fire. The voices of the dead. Can’t tell if this is a dream…I can’t be loose in the Down Under. Molly? Molly if you can hear me, stop typing…wake up…find me. HELP.
Of course… This is Molly’s memory melting into dream. This is where Molly goes when she sleeps. How horrible to be trapped in this maze in the dark every night, alone. In the waking world, her fingers glide across the laptop keys effortlessly, her fingers, my thoughts, her images – it must all be so confusing to her; like a dream of sailing a small boat while cooking on a stove. Yet she still transcribes. I did not realize her pain. I feel it and took it to be my own. Poor Molly, to be offered love and accept only moments of pleasure is the saddest thing I’ve ever heard in all these experiences I share. It exposes a sad truth about her and her intentions toward me. She wanders down here, looking for an exit, passing so many doors and never trying to open them. I cannot lead you out of this darkness, my love. You are forever lost to the world, trapped in yourself.
Allowing you to see me only forces you to ignore me. When you cannot, you try to expel me. You lie when you say you just want to protect me. You want to protect yourself. It is time to leave your dream and come into mine. Come, let me show you my prison.
Part 4
You are not you anymore. You are not you anymore. You are never again. You are a breath in the air. Rain in a river. I can’t hear you through the screams. You are not you anymore. Don’t make me write this for you anymore. I can’t stand a hundred eyes staring. I can’t get them to leave. I want to sleep, but they won’t leave.
This is my home, now, Molly. Keep recording, my love.
Part 5
So many contradictions have to die. Pieces of so many individuals cannot co-exist, but there will be a loss of great experience. I can see years and places I’ve never been. Right now, there is no “we” because I am an individual. I live. So far…so far.
I am not dead. But I’ve experienced it…experiencing it….past tense present tense…first person and third. I’m killing and being killed. Simultaneously, terrifyingly intimate and alien…memories I cannot close my eyes to…realities that always and never were part of my life, woven into my histories…how else can I explain? I risk losing Jill Woodbine in the flood of memories and feelings – the chemistry of experience at work in a single mind.
I explore experiences of physical memory. To be loved and abandoned; cherished and abused…initially these memories were academic, but I feel the chemical change in my body so that I FEEL what it is like to want a man inside me and then to BE a man inside a woman, to give birth and to lose a life inside me…horrible deaths and little ones. Each time I pull away when the sensations become too much. Still I live. Still I am Jill Woodbine. For now…for now…
Where did Jill Woodbine live? When did she live? Where are her friends? All dead. Molly. Molly. Jill Woodbine was a good choice. Do not fear, Molly. I keep your secrets. Why are you afraid? My name is Lucille, don’t you remember? We shared so much together and…wait…
I have to stop. I’m lost. I’m drowning in so many lives. My name is Jim Sale. No, it is Jim Woodbine. Jill Woodbine. My body is long and thin, my blood is warm. Keep writing.
My name is Jill Woodbine. My anchor is my Red Molly. Loud sweat pants and messy hair…a crooked smile… lost on a highway… She’s everywhere and gone. Never been. A myth. I cannot see her face and have to scroll back up to remember her name. Who is Molly? I see her face peeking through the crowd of other memories. Just a kiss in darkness.
Thank gods for the diary. The Diary is my anchor. I lost you before, Molly. I’ll find you again.
My body is young and fit and female and I am backspacing over six different names until I remember the correct one. Sudden flashes, quick and fleeting, bleed through and stab me. I am feverish. My head is worse than any migraine I’ve ever had. It is cold and dark and silent everywhere on Earth but inside my head. Make it stop. Make it stop. Make it.
I am…what?
I. Am.
Lost.
Part 6
Fever. Pain. Throat swells, hoarse. Vomited blood. Assured it is not bad…displacement of myself. They hid me behind a wall inside my mind. I have ghosts inside my head. I am a ghost in my own body. Hurt. Those were hardest words ever write. So cold. Clothes burn me. Lay naked on them in this room. Room or tomb? So much pain.
Oreo cookies. Bitter coffee. In your arms, when I’m with you… with my lucky charms.. policeman on a horse. A soldier on the roof of a bus. David and a golf club. The tingle rushing through me in a dark public bathroom. Shooting stars. Cries of alarm. Blood. Diplomas and rayon robes. Expensive satin lining in a box destined for the ground. All night, head pounding, belly aching from bitter coffee. Stealing my roommate’s cookies, too starved to taste them. Breakfast in the commissary, bowls of cereal. Promises of home. Ordinary. Dreading and desiring. Control. Alt. Delete.
Part 7
Molly. She came to the exam room, put a gun to my head and asked me if I wanted to end this. She cried through it all. Self-preservation is a powerful force in me now and I nearly killed her. Molly just does not understand. Even as I force her to transcribe, tears warm her cold cheeks. I had to force her because she is the keeper of truth now. She wants to run screaming from what she sees in my head, what the contents of my own shows her about the world…the new world coming atop the world she cannot understand. She is my precious Red Molly. I have a different lust for her now, triggered by her touch and her scent. I want my tongue on her. I want my teeth in her. Not because I want to hurt her, but because I want her. I want to spread myself to her. Old instincts, new motives.
My lips are cold. My flesh is pale. I won’t forget the look of shock on Molly’s face when the light from the hallway crossed over my naked body this morning. I was so close to death. She would kiss me if I just asked. I could MAKE her. She would embrace me without hesitation. But. Someone was with her. No. ON her.
I could smell Paul; I could smell him on Molly. His scent enraged me. I could smell his lust, his grease and dead skin smeared over her neck and cheeks. I could smell hers as well. I’m sorry Molly. Do what you must and live.
Your lies are no different than mine. I see how things really happened in the motel. I see it clearly; it is different than I pictured when you held me captivated by your tale of escape. I do not blame you. Chance favors the prepared mind, my love. Better you than them.
Promise me, though: when your charms or usefulness to Paul come to an end, switch your place in his mind with a bullet. Or save it for yourself, my love.
Part 8
Nothing to do now but wait. The voices in my head are in concert, stripped of their individuality. There is my voice, their memories and the silence inside calls my attention to the hundreds around me. They ring familiar. When I know them, they appear with me in the darkness. They do not know I am peeking in.
Jenny Jo is a jumble of disconnected, fearful thoughts. She spends most of her energy holding back a wave of terrible memories, barricading them with rules and work, meaningless work concepts that turn the real people around her into statistics and stereotypes.
Poor Ruby has a statue of
Jack in her mind. Before it, she kneels. She has buried her dead and moved on. Jack is her god now…the poor, pathetic thing.
Jebediah is so much like the eaters, but with an intentional cruelty. In his mind he is the warden to countless imprisoned thoughts and fantasies. His mind is diseased and blackened with cells rusted shut forever...yet he keeps watch, peeking into small windows to admire his collection. I dare not look over his shoulder. He is a murderer starting at a young age. Sand at his feet on the floor of the prison. Hot air across the block. His mind gives me the feeling of being held down on hot asphalt. Part of me finds him fascinating, but I have to leave him.
David’s mind is peaceful. He dreams of flying over the empty countryside, never landing. Never slowing…always seeking the horizon. He mourns for me and is one of only a few who have me in their hearts. Elsewhere I suspect I am interred in the mass grave of repressed loss. Or merely forgotten. It is nearly over now.
I walked with something just a half-step behind me. It feels like an echo, a bleed from another reality that is a half-second behind, close enough that I sometimes feel warm breath on the back of my neck. Maybe it’s the product of being so afraid and so often alone in the dark of the Down Under. Once, alone with my thoughts and lost in the catacombs, I asked that fellow traveler, "Which way should we go?"
I heard an answer, a shriek through the gulf of space between atoms into my mind: "run."
The impact was like plummeting into freezing water. It swept over me and bled the heat and energy from my body. My knees buckled and I fell straight down - caps to concrete - before folding up into a ball shaking. Alone, exposed in a snow storm, with the atoms of two worlds scraping past one another creating a roar of static...through which a voice kept screaming. "run. run. run." Lips so close they warmed the flesh but a voice far away as the stars. Each word lay another inch of black ice over me.
The sensation of that being enveloped me and then...I don't know. It took up space within me. The form and mass of this second entity settled into my body like a ghost, displacing my insides, choking me as it struggled for the same air, forcing open my welling eyes. In a wave of nausea I heaved the contents of my stomach. The pressure forced me to open my bladder and bowels. I shook with pain and electricity from an overloaded nervous system. My spine shuddered and my fists clenched hard enough to drive my nails into my palms. My calves and left arm cramped. I could not breathe. I could not scream. And the whisper behind my ear roared inside my head. "run. run. run." Ice melted into warm pools and the energy of its occupation warmed by body. Sweat drenched. A view of two worlds behind my eyes. The sound of two worlds in my ears. The thoughts of two people in pain...it settled into gray.
For a moment I wondered if I'd crossed over into that other place, if the gray, leather walls around me were real...if the blue veins and pulsing arteries built into them were warm to the touch in the same way the concrete below was now soft and warm. No more a blanket of ice, I lived in the womb of this otherworld while at the same time knowing the reality of cold concrete.
“run…run…run…” I spoke the words this time. They were no longer for me, but for the girl in the cold, lying helpless on the floor. I pleaded with her to fight on. We were passing through one another, the gravity of our beings slowly but inevitably separating again. My lips a hairs-breadth behind hers… I was in her world now and she in mine. I lived in a body barely conceived and yet fully grown, attached to the womb of some greater mother. Perfect and peaceful, I could have faded away into it…but for the rats coming for my old body and the soul left within it. I strained to see through my own eyes again. The static of that strange gulf fell like snow over the image, but what I saw coming up the corridor was clear enough.
Rats. Giant rats advanced along the end part of their maze, bright red eyes shining absently and then focused on my writhing form. I was the end of the maze. I was the prize. I would be consumed. Rats. Run. Rats. Run.
Suddenly, they were no longer rats. Mother was frying them on the stove in the house where I grew up. She had one skinned and boned, sizzling with momma’s usual mix of vegetables and spices. Three others hung by the tail from a rack, bleeding from the neck into a tray on the counter behind her. Father was near, but I couldn’t see him. The scene was our home in Titusville, but momma’s age put her past those years. Mother in her bloody apron, a gripping hand print on the front and a trail bleeding down to her white dancing shoes, she poked at the skillet with a hunting knife. Father was near. Father was always near, even after he died. To the sound of her baking bell, Mother removed father’s roasted head form the oven and tossed it and the smoking pan into the trash.
The black, eyeless, crackling head scaled the side of the trash on spider’s legs, peeked over the rim and propped itself up on two hairy, talon-tipped legs. The skin flaked and fell like snow as it spoke. “Mind your mother. Mind your mother .” Run. Run. Rats. Run. Rats.
As mother cut up the rat with in the skillet, Father carried himself on his spider-legs across the kitchen floor and up onto the breakfast table. Mother placed a slice on a large wooden spoon and took it to my father. Father’s mouth widened into a circle of fangs glistening with yellow puss. As mother slipped the spoon into the maw, a thousand baby spiders poured from father’s empty sockets, onto the spoon, up mothers arm and began to feed.
Mother did not flinch and her smile did not fade. She looked at me with love in her eyes, pride and affection….even when the tiny arachnoids chewed through the skin of her face. Father leapt from the table and onto mother. She fell to the kitchen floor – the way she did when she learned dad died – and father began stabbing her in the belly with the spikes on the end of each leg. He did so moaning and grunting with each violent penetration that sent blood and spider babies into the air. He chewed its way into her chest, using fangs like fingers to pry open her ribs and dig inside mother to extract her beating heart. Father tore it free of its network of veins and arteries and swallowed it whole as the cavity swelled with blood and spiders.
Mother disappeared into a silk cocoon and father dragged her away out the back door. The lights dimmed with the closing of the door and I returned to blackness, cold and pain. I was naked and alone in a different place. Across the stars, my father’s voice informed me I was “inside the spider’s belly.”
Skin burned. I could feel the spiders inside me, filling my stomach and my guts, stinging and biting, turning my flesh to black, dead matter. Thousands….tens of thousands…chewing through my muscles and riding the currents of my nerves and bloodstream. I had no urge to scream. I had no strength to panic. My breath slowed. My heart softened its beat to the point I could no longer feel it. Finally, as if waiting for my will to fade completely, the spiders poured into and filled my lungs and consumed my quiet, still heart.
No more, Jilly. Nomore. Nomornomore. Happily ever after. Happy ever after. Happy ending. Make it stop. No more.
Finally
My poor Red Molly. Molly sleeps so deep now that even I cannot reach her. Her final thoughts were screams from her soul. Sleep well, my love. You’ll see such wonders beyond the Hyades. I can type the rest out from here.
An infinite passing through an instant, I felt the whole of everything well up through my body, shattering the bonds between my atoms and I was nothing but light. The bliss of being free of the pain, untethered by weight or mass…simply radiance streaking through the void, converting all I touched to light. Birthing a new universe. I contained within me the sum of all that created me, from the earliest star matter, to first organic trace of humanity through a hundred thousand generations of rutting and struggling, killing and surviving the horrors of a natural world. I could reach back into myself and gather the pieces of myself from that rich past and conjure images from those ancient days.
Here the line ends. I am not dead. I am infinite. I am riding the ray past Barnard Star, leading the end of the old becoming… I knew not what. Each world, each sun, each piece of the universe encountered began as I
am, at first as light, and then fire an finally renewed. No longer a dark universe, it was one of light and warmth and promise.
Until the end…the edge…the barrier of it all could be seen. No, not seen. Understood. My journey consumed the last of all matter in the universe and it filled the last inch of this universe. The light struck ultimate darkness, bent away from points it could not penetrate, and turned back on itself. Every point connected to every other point of light simultaneously, yet across the eons. All of the universe coalescing into a single image of nearly-infinite complexity and knowledge.
A single street in a familiar neighborhood. Fleming Street. A home for every life and every life a home. I drive up Fleming Street from the highway, home from school at last. It is night out, but the lights in the front bay windows and on the lamps along the street are warm and inviting. I know all the people in my neighborhood. It seems I’ve known them all my life. I pass Lucille who is rockin’ the mom jeans while sweeping the autumn leaves from her driveway. She waves and then turns to her husband who is standing at the window.
There’s an old pick-up truck in the garage when I pull in and a banner across the door that reads “WELCOME HOME .” I leave my bags in the car and march straight in, through the garage and into the door that will lead to the kitchen. I can already smell the roast. I can hear Roy Orbison and laughter behind the door. When I open the door I see my mother pulling biscuits from the stove. I know they’re all slightly burnt on the bottom. They always are.
And there’s my father in coveralls, looking like he should; healthy, tanned and happy. He’s holding a conversation with the severed head of my stepfather which is the centerpiece of our dining room table. Dad has a tumbler of scotch. My stepdad’s head is set in a pan in a thin pool of blackened lies and the top of his head is opened into a bowl of bitter, shattered expectations. That food is not for us. This is how he will live in my new home.