The Galliard

Never time passed with so little definition. Neither the present nor his memory had its usual edges. His days were as weeks, and his months were sometimes less. In that initial moment in which he was again self-aware, he knew nothing — which is to say, he was uncertain of everything. His mind, or his world (at first he wasn't sure), was all murk and distortion of sight and sound, thought and feeling: as though all were as speech underwater.

As Richard came a little more to himself, he found his body moving with intent in a room of masked dancers, one arm extended toward his partner. The dancers kept, what seemed to him, an unnatural distance from each other. The dance was a galliard, and the song melancholy, with repeated rounds like a chant — a melodious rhythm to which rose and fell the shoulders of the whole party in perfect time. The masks they wore, they wore uniformly: not a face could be seen without. Consistent too was the slight, unnerved feeling Richard had whenever he allowed his attention to remain too long on any mouth or eye in the crowd. Not that anything appeared to be wrong with them — on the contrary, they all looked superficially like happy mouths and merry eyes — but Richard had the peculiar sensation that they were somehow far away, and the longer he tried to focus on any one, the greater the feeling of distance. It was all a trick of lighting, he supposed, or of whatever drug he now began to think he had been given.

But how had he come to this now? He had a thought of taking his leave of the dance to collect himself, but there came to him a strong thought, almost solid, like a sound: “Once one has begun to dance, one ought never to stop before the music ends.” So he continued, but doubted the voice. The voice spoke within him, but didn't sound quite like his own voice, as if his conscience recalled not his own values, but those of another.

Disturbed, Richard began to introspect, fearing what he would find within the one dull brown memory of the indefinite, recent past. It was no black spot in his mind, no unconsciousness. It was, rather, a vague, blurry mixture of all the things he had apparently experienced, having taken on the accumulated color of all he had seen and thought and felt into one great intermingled stain. But no sooner had he concentrated his will upon the task than the dull brown thing began to divide itself, as white will divide when applied to a prism and reveal the many colors that coalesce to make it. Images and emotions, all in very strong color pulled away from each other and lined themselves up in a sequence — but whether the correct one, he could never afterwards discern.

The content of the images themselves were mostly rather plain, but his reactions to them were inordinately potent. None of this felt right. The queer idea occurred to him that the things in his mind were not rightfully his own. He did not like this at all. Neither his conscience nor his intuition could be quieted, though his memory and the associated emotions were struggling to muffle their cries. In another man they might have succeeded, but Richard was not unaccustomed to fighting himself and winning. He had been conscientious as a boy and had learned to listen to the voice that told him what was wrong to do or good to do, and thus he knew what it was to discern the tiny whisper of character despite the raucous tantrums of self-preservation, desire, or rage. He had long been consistent in telling the truth, even when it spoiled his plans or negatively affected his reputation. Of course, it is such little deeds of goodness which can alone reliably make one capable of great deeds of goodness. Richard's grandmother had once told him, “A real hero — not a warmonger, mind you — is made when a little boy is honest and peels the potatoes and stands up to a bully for another and sits with the neighbor when her cat dies.” Richard had taken these words to heart and was now was steeled against the battle for his will.

Upon a slight pause in the music, a second before the crescendo of the galliard, Richard perceived a quiet, muffled sob. And suddenly he whirled with a flash of memory and a bite of realization in his clearing mind. He saw at once that he was in the midst of a great, dangerous cult. He saw that some unnamed man had resisted, had taken to the brainwashing imperfectly, and was cursed therefore to endure his half-twisted mind alone in the prison for which the basement below this ballroom served. The only door was in sight and reach, but Richard knew at once that he could not now free the man from the prison, but neither could he put the man from his mind. He could not dance now; he could not laugh now — not while he was here and the outcast man there, apart. So he stopped: a pillar of will in a shifting tide. He stood with the weight of a great burden, but began a stride to the door. With each step his conscience assented its approval and his will grew more resolute. The weight grew lighter until at last the burden became his wings. With each false, grinning dancer he passed, his love for this humanity — his brothers and sisters — grew bolder until it could no longer be contained by decorum and broke its fences into a run. Removing his tie and disregarding all the stares and gasps of disbelief, he pulled open that horrible door before he could be stopped, and bounded down the stairs.

Richard sat on the floor next to the man who had only increased his sobbing since Richard's intrusion, and pulled his trembling brother to his chest, awaiting the man's freedom. Richard was already free.

Salis

Salis continued on her southward course, dodging thistle and briar, cobweb and lowing-hanging limb, but eventually found herself precisely where she had intended to be: lost. It was one of those sorts of arguments of which you can never afterwards remember the cause that had sparked her juvenile fury and burned a path through the woods. She had sharply pronounced her intention of running away, and, in step with her under-breath cadence and the slam of the screendoor, marched headlong into those solemn deciduous boughs with every intention of getting lost — of making them sorry.

But now this spiteful victor was losing her resolution. She was lost. They weren't lost. She knew where they were. But she had no bearing on her own relation to them. So it wasn't long — no, far less than long — before Salis gave up her frantic attempts at discovering some landmark or memorable trail and sat herself upon a fallen ash and wept.

After no more than the customary time of sobs and whimpers had past, she looked around to associate herself more closely with her situation: she was truly without even intuition to guide her home.

There is a childish innocence that brings not exactly courage, but suspension of fear. Courage knows what it faces, fears it, and triumphs over the fear. Innocence stands before certain peril and does not know what it faces, so cannot fear when fear would do it good. Innocence is composed of many good things, but it does have its troubles.

Now, there is an animal fear that instinctually reacts to a plain and immediate threat, like a growl or bared teeth, or to the absence of something to which it is used, like a mother or light — when I say fear, I don't mean that. There is a higher fear and it is more able — this is the kind I mean and it cannot be the property of innocence.

Young Salis had been trying to grow out of her innocence for some time (though she did not know it), and so she feared. This fear might have given way to courage, but as she looked around through ebbing crests of tears, the fear she ought to have felt much longer, and rightly so, unnaturally withdrew and vanished. Whatever chance at courage she might have had receded along with the fear, and she stood in an artifical and ignorant innocence quite below her years, with no care for the future.

Knowing neither how to be brave, nor how not to be, Salis swiftly forgot her present jeopardy and occupied herself with admiration for the tiny multitude of variegated forest flowers around her feet. This flower of lavender hue and crimson veins; that flower of brilliant red, seared on the edges by yellow; another in seeming indecision between orange and mauve — not two were alike in kind or color, excepting the pure white prospers, demure among the rest but gifted with the most extravagant and pleasing forms.

One bud alone, no bigger than a thumbnail and cast in sunny gold, drew her fancy from the jolly forum — it being set a little way off from the others like a naughty child or a sacred station. Being that much more beautiful to her — I can't say if it would have been quite so attractive to other little girls — she stepped carelessly forward to more closely appreciate its lines; and, with her third step, Salis' attention caught on a very unexpected sound from underfoot: a hollow wooden clump!

end of the world

I lifted my parcel to the top of my shoulders, grunting as the weight shifted and I nearly toppled over. The person in line behind me coughed as if to warn me against clumsiness; it would throw off the entire assembly’s production for the day.

“Sorry, Smith,” I murmured under my breath, digging my feet into the earth beneath me to steady myself.

“Stop talking. You know it’s not allowed on the line,” he grunted from behind. His breath was hot on my back; he was practically on top of me. I marched in silence, legs burning, arms numb, thinking only of the possibility that I was the slowest one in the line, my weak legs causing the line to lose precious daylight.

We reached the base of the mound. I shrugged my shoulders and used my forearms to nudge the parcel to the ground in front of me, panting to catch my breath. The bigger men filed in behind me, nudging me to get out of their way. One of them grabbed my parcel and pinched it with his teeth, clawing his way backwards up the enormous hill, stacked sky-high with rations, to drop off my hard day's work and tout it as his own.

"Hey! That's mine!" I shouted to him as he scurried away. He didn't answer, knocking over packages and stumbling past the others as he escaped.

I noticed a parcel sitting on the ground at my feet, untouched, and nearly identical to the one I'd lost a few moments ago. I looked to my left, to my right, and stealthily kicked it to the other side of the hill away from the main entrance. When no one noticed the kick, I steadied my nerves and picked it up. I strapped it to my back and crept up the stairs to the entrance of the depository. This poor fool. Now I'll get my rations after all.

I'd almost reached the depository via my detour when I noticed a dark shadow pour over the hill. I looked up to find the source of the shadow with my eyes but I couldn't see anything - it was as if the sun was being blocked by something huge, something dark and sinister. I heard rumbling, and then I felt the ground below me erupt with the stampeding sound of hundreds of factory workers, screaming and running from the entrance to the depository. Arms outstretched, looks of sheer panic on their faces, they sprinted towards me with no regard to their parcels or mine.

"Smith, run, get out of here! It's going to kill us!" screamed a familiar voice, rushing past me before I could see who it was.

"What's going to kill us?" I yelled, starting to panic.

"It burns! It burns so badly!" Someone was whimpering as they limped from the doors and down the hill. I didn't recognize his face because it was soaked in a brown, slimy liquid. It looked like his mouth was melting. "Acid, it's acid!" he moaned, grasping at his face as he pushed me aside, running into the endless grassy field at the base of the hill. I was still standing near the entrance as more and more people poured out, screaming in terror as I stood, awestruck.

Suddenly I saw it. The brown liquid was bubbling up from the entryway, spewing from the mouth of a red cylinder that was held, floating mid-air by the massive shadow. The stream gurgled and erupted as the acid exploded from the doors, washing away the wirey bodies of my former coworkers, forming volcanic streams of murky runoff down the hill. It washed away the ground beneath our feet, our hill, our depository, our rations, our livelihood. It disintigrated lives.

I stood without moving, clutching the unsteady ground below me as I watched the liquid wash over my feet, up to my abdomen, pulling loose the grains of dirt that were piled so meticulously to build our home. I closed my eyes and tried not to feel the bubbles swell over my head, fizzing and popping as I lost my breath, body swept to the bottom of the hill among countless others, hearing echoes of laughter from the great mass hovering over our colony.

"You stupid bugs, why would you build a house out of dirt?" he cackled as my vision faded for the last time.

The End of the World

The world has come to an end—at least as far as I am concerned. —I say "as far as I am concerned" because the subject to which I refer is "humanity" and I seem to be the only existing specimen. Today, I am Humanity.

I have seen not a dieing human soul in eleven years. Neither have I seen a living one.

I sit now on a stool at the kitchen counter of some random house in a suburb of what was once known as Chicago when there was a need in the world to call places by names. I don't suppose I need to call it "Chicago" for my own benefit. Humanity has moved beyond the need for proper nouns. But I'd like to hear, just once, someone say my name.

God, this place is void! All places are void! I find some comfort in little things, like beds-still-made I can crawl into and pretend was made for me, and, for some strange, great reason, trees give me comfort, are my haven and rest.

But most things now are merely reminders of what I lost, I think I lost—I sometimes wonder if not the world before was the dream and not this—that I have awakened from a prenatal subconscious into a world that is as much about me as is the world inside my mind—that the world I see began when my mind awoke—that the dream I had about "others," filling the world, driving the world, controlling the world, merely means to express a subconscious conviction that I, Humanity, am all there is to the story worth mentioning. I must be the main character. Right?

Certain things remind me more soberly of my loss (if it is a loss), my dream (if it is a dream): odd things like gardens that have forgotten that they need people in order to thrive. I know its silly. Shouldn't I rejoice that they live? But I don't think I would bear it worse if the gardens could not survive. It would mean that we mattered.

I have spoken to no one but the murmurs of the wind through vacant cities. I have seen no one but the phantoms plating billboards on I-69.

I sit—I'm shaking again—in a house in a suburb full of the absence of people. And I wonder to what end I am living. Am I still looking for "others"? Could I handle the existence of another "I," another ego, in this world? A world, once all your own, can it be shared? This would, I expect, sound like nonsense to someone who knows nothing but "others."

But, I look outside at the dark traffic lights and the wild gardens and the still swingsets and I... I so want to be held!

I can't get out of my mind a sentence I suppose I said as a child, or if not, then a sentence from my subconscious dream, or if not, then a sentence that has been imprinted upon the human racial memory clinging yet to secrets in my blood, for I can scarcely imagine what a child's lips would be like had they not once pursed to form these words—and I cannot shake the words. They are my source of greatest sorrow and soberest sanity. They haunt me deeply and touch me deeply. And I can hope—oh! can I hope?—that I may one day know the meaning: "Will you stay with me until I fall asleep?"

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