Basal Ganglia

by Revert, Matthew

  “We will get through this,” she whispers to her baby. “Do not pay any attention to him. You do not need to be what he is. You are alive in your own special way. A way you will reveal to me when you are ready. I will look after you. I will look after you.”

  Ingrid stares at the walls, understanding that within them exists unexplored space. A hidden world within their hidden world. A world divorced from Rollo. Divorced from them. A place Ingrid can start anew with her baby. This unexplored space offers an opportunity to feel safety.

  It is unknown how long Rollo will remain unconscious, so Ingrid feels compelled to act. Within the self-imposed limitations, she has a course of action that promises a way forward. She pushes the baby once more into the smooth of her stomach and edges toward Rollo. The tip of her tongue coats her lips with wetness before slipping back into the safety of the mouth. Ingrid shivers under the weight of this unfolding moment. Her lips find Rollo’s forehead. Their proximities, for one moment, merge into a single occupation of luxuriant space. Rollo’s skin feels warm, and transfers a film of sweat to Ingrid’s lips, which her tongue cannot help but taste. It is the sweat of fever dreams and reconstituting mental architecture. Sweat manufactured within the deepest heart of his heart. Sweat Ingrid feels like a thief for tasting.

  She moves her lips to Rollo’s ear canal and directs a whisper that tickles his cilia.

  “I do not think I can kill the part of me that loves you, but I promise I will never stop trying. Please do not look for us. Let the baby and I be what we need to be.”

  Ingrid’s mouth closes before she has a chance to whisper ‘goodbye.’ It is not a word she feels she can live up to. ‘Goodbye’ is the most dishonest word language has conjured. It is a muscle we flex to intimidate and impress. A word without flesh. Goodbye is simply a word preceding hello. To truly leave another, one must never seek contact again. Only death is goodbye.

  Ingrid leaves Rollo alone in the Parietal Chamber, refusing to look back, as though such an action will trigger a series of events antithetical to everything she needs to feel. She scales the Medulla Shaft until she stands at its base, the vibration of waste management below. The baby is tucked into the waist of her skirt, enabling both hands to perform the next task.

  She searches for edges on the blankets comprising the walls. When an edge is found, it is carefully peeled back, until the next layer reveals itself. The process continues, Ingrid’s hands uncovering layer after layer, each movement careful in the hope it can be reversed, masking Ingrid’s entry into the walls.

  Persistence finds the point where blankets end and hollow space begins. Grey light exists within this hollow space and Ingrid crawls toward it, trying not to wonder where the light is coming from. It is because things are, and that is enough for Ingrid.

  The blankets are easier to peel away than set back in place. Forcing them back into position requires Ingrid’s hands to exhibit great care and patience. Layer by layer her entry point disappears until there is no entry point. Signs of the wall’s disruption, however minute, will be visible to Rollo. Ingrid does not imagine any effort to hide from Rollo could truly prevent him from finding her should it be what he desires, but why would anyone desire something that avoids them with such commitment?

  …

  Two gears become transmission when working together. Each gear wearing cogs around the circumference that mesh together when engaged in their purpose. Each cog forms a relationship during each rotation. The repetition of these brief relationships is the totality of that function. The cogs enable the gears to continue their rotation, feeding their transmission into another mechanism. While the machine is alive, the sequence of mechanisms within the machine understand only their own totality, unaware they are enabling another function separate to them. This fandango of function is unaware of the dance it performs. These functions are organs in the machine’s body, keeping it alive. A gear that does not rotate is a gear occupying useless space. A gear wants nothing but to rotate.

  …

  Ingrid beholds the towering skeletons of dead machinery climbing the space within the fort’s walls. Browning steel interlocked in stasis. Fossils of function. Archaeological remnants of former lives. The scope of the mechanical construction fixes Ingrid in place, commanding her attention away from the baby and into the world of its overwhelming detail. Everything is connected to what precedes it, advancing beyond Ingrid’s line of sight, suggesting an endless parade of forgotten process.

  Ingrid moves through the space, taking in new components of the machine. Its stillness disquiets her. In this stillness there is anger. The desire to scream with life. To feel the dirt and pain of work. The drive to exist as anything but unused and forgotten. Whether this is a feeling fed by the machine or projected by Ingrid, it is one she feels an affinity with.

  Ingrid is aware everything before her is something, in part, built by her. Together with Rollo, each component in this machine was set in place with a purpose. A forgotten plan. Her brain fires memory requests, each one returned unfilled. Beyond all else, Ingrid is drawn toward waking the machinery. Whatever mechanism is set in place to power this steel sculpture is as lost to her memory as its existence.

  She approaches a gear that matches her height and places her foot on one of its cogs. Above the gear is another, which is attached to another and another. She starts to ascend the steel, feeling the harshness of its surface against her skin. The machine is scaled without understood purpose. Finding the next foothold is process enough to fuel her momentum.

  The machine draws her in, introducing a world within the world she thought she knew. There is majesty in its construction contradicting the callow assemblage of the pillow world. As though the world of blankets and pillows are a façade concealing the importance of whatever this inner world means.

  In the continued exploration of this steel environment, Ingrid’s attention leaves the baby. It sits unconsidered against her stomach, absorbed into her anatomy. Like an organ one only comprehends when it falters and upsets the body’s operation. The area within her thought process dedicated to the baby has fallen asleep. The area concerned with Rollo’s pursuit has done the same. There is only the operation of the machine.

  Devices with the appearance of levers are pulled, but refuse to understand what Ingrid hopes of them. A crank is turned, but meets resistance before it can complete a single rotation. It seems somewhere within the belly of this rusted structure must exist something willing to experience life. All things reach toward their purpose and a machine should be no different.

  She scales higher, disorienting her sense of space. Losing any connection to where she resides in relation to everything else. Unaware her baby has slipped slightly in her waistband. Unaware that she sought refuge in the walls for a reason. She climbs toward a clearing in the mechanical jumble where the uniformity of dim light finds the independence of greater illumination. The clearing possesses a steel grate base in which Ingrid can stand. The exertion of ascent had gone unnoticed until now, so much so that Ingrid resents stopping. Admiring that part of her is capable of directing attention away from discomfort. Away from anything not pertaining to an immediate goal.

  Had she not spotted the mushroom-shaped red button protruding from the wall, her thought process would have moved from the leg pain to the well-being of her baby. Instead, her attention is refocused on the goal. The button sits alone in the steel environment, conspicuous and calling for intervention. She studies her palm before pressing it against the button.

  The introduction of force does little to tempt the button into relinquishing its stasis, so Ingrid applies more. The barest hint of movement. Enough to continue. She places her second hand atop her first and applies greater force with both. Another flirtation with movement. She anchors her front foot in the interest of increased force.

  The button gives in, slamming downward, casting off dust.

  At first, nothing. Ingrid turns in a slow circle, hoping to see new life. From above, what so
unds like a sheet of steel tumbles down an unseen shaft, rattling like a dying vehicle. It collides with the ground. The sound of reverberating impact destabilizes Ingrid’s footing. She lurches backward, searching for balance. Unaware the baby has slipped from her waistband and now sits by her feet.

  Yawning sounds beneath her as the machinery wakes into its first new day in memory. The dislodgement of sediment. The reversal of stasis. An industrial cacophony booms, encouraging Ingrid’s fingers to protect her ears. The components around her all find their individual voice. Gears rotate. Pistons pump. Drums spin. It is only now, having achieved her goal, that Ingrid affords attention to her baby. She pats her stomach and feels internal free fall when the vacant waistband is revealed. She fights against the growing cloud of panic in the interest of a measured approach to the dilemma, but finds the cloud dominating and smothering. Her screams are absorbed into the surrounding soundscape. Useless. Her eyes dart with erratic jerks, too frenzied to capture detail. She feels something beneath the shuffle of her feet and jerks her vision downward. The baby lies unconcerned. She maneuvers into position to collect it, but does so with haste, and kicks it aside. The baby falls. Ingrid dives too late to prevent, but just in time to watch as it becomes savaged by two meshing gears. Its stuffing erupts. The material consumed. It is destroyed without effort. All Ingrid can manage is an empty stare, which she directs through her environment and into something else.

  15.

  Rollo’s brain is not quite ready to relinquish its unconsciousness. The spores have nestled deep, installing mental cotton, insulating this from that. Painting detail with torpid blur. The booming rhythmic clatter of awakened machinery troubles the air, filling the fort with new sound. The interjection of any new element to a known environment forces a reassessment of that environment. Until this moment, the aural qualities of the fort wore the illusion of silence. There was no shortage of sound in their world, but it was an unchanging symphony that, over time, had drifted away from attention.

  The sound of machinery screaming within the walls is too new. A new symphony drowning out the old. Following the requirements of an unknown conductor. Too loud to understand. Too loud to ignore. The louder a sound is, the more difficult it can be to hear. Sleep has knocked that from this, failing to prevent the entrance of sound. Rollo is forced toward the waking world. Pulled from the spores’ fog. An unnatural extraction severing sleep’s roots in violent jerks.

  Rollo’s eyes blink open, but see nothing except for spikes of grating sound. Lightning bolts of waveform dancing about the retina in deafening strobes. His mouth opens and sucks at oxygen. Greedy gasps. Aerating his body. He does not comprehend where he is. For one moment, there is no fort. There has never been a fort. There is no him. No Ingrid. Waking up naked into a new expanse that calls toward translation.

  A glimmer of something familiar. The hem of a blue blanket in the Parietal Chamber. One his hands have mended before. Possibly more than once. Rollo reaches a hand toward it, attempting to draw further cognizance into his body. The taste of sleep coats his dried white tongue and a ball of pressure presses against the front of his skull. The poison of intoxicated slumber has accompanied Rollo into the waking world of new sound and familiar objects. The cut on his head has coagulated into slugs of blood. Brown, oxidized wound leakage coats hemispheres of his body, reminding him of recent events, pulling him further into now.

  He sits up and fights the urge to fall back down. The insistent sound from within the walls is the only thing he is unable to place. The boggling extent of its reach. The way it occupies every direction so fully. The determination with which it goes about whatever it is doing. He spends time searching out a pattern as a means of assimilating it into reality. In the hope he can push it aside and focus on Ingrid.

  He reaches the quick conclusion the activity within the walls is something Ingrid is responsible for. Perhaps as a means of escape, she has entered this discarded space and discovered whatever is responsible for the sound. Through the din, Rollo is unable to discern Ingrid’s psychic chatter, the absence of which unnerves him. It is the only time in memory he has lost connection with her. It has become more important than ever to find her. To engage in a dialogue. Something between the two of them that bears the elusive mark of truth. Truth, whatever that word means, must find a way to prevail. Together they must experiment with something new or, perhaps more accurately, something very old.

  …

  The fort means nothing if its foundation is divorced from truth. Whatever led these two people into the depths of the earth must have possessed a significant meaning. There must have been a time where the two of them were bound by genuine regard for the other. Rollo is determined to reconnect with this past and embody it in the present. He has to believe that within Ingrid is the same determination. Believing anything else suggests the end of everything his life has been in accordance with. The concept of one must be reintroduced to the other.

  Rollo is prepared to undo his life’s work if it means finding something which represents unity between he and Ingrid. He will, if the situation requires it, tear away every blanket, stripping the fort bare of its illusion, exposing whatever resides at its core. In whatever nook Ingrid hides, he will find and reach out to her. Their dynamic will be dismantled into raw product, and then rebuilt according to a forgotten blueprint. Distance eradicated. Mutuality in all things them. Rollo will tear the fort apart if it means bringing him and Ingrid together.

  He listens beyond the mechanical thump and scrape, directing his focus toward that which has always been there. That which he has ignored. The subsumed presence of Ingrid searching for prominence. Something demarcating Ingrid swells Rollo’s senses. He arcs attention in the direction, but finds, like the mechanical awakening, it has no sole locus; rather it coats each direction. It is a glimmer. Potentially false. Invented by Rollo’s hope. It is sadness and horror. Incalculable loss. He allows his mind to fill with compassion and care, hoping it is something Ingrid will feel. Something she will respond to. Now is the time for their mental conversation to find a mutual language.

  Starting in the Parietal Chamber, Rollo disrupts the careful placement of blankets, cleaving through each layer and letting them fall without consideration. The time dedicated to maintaining them, the lifetime of care and workmanship, is reversed. In this care and workmanship lives everything abandoned. The sense of self. The passage of time. The significance of history. His connection to Ingrid. These are things he wishes to hold once more, and he will seek them out by undoing that which orchestrated their disappearance.

  Rollo’s frantic hands reach the hollow space between the chambers, spilling antiquated air. The hive of mechanical apparatus perform their dance, inviting Rollo to understand their purpose. To join them in their ambiguous celebration. He wants to immerse himself in whatever they mean, but cannot give himself to the urge. There can only be Ingrid.

  More blankets are peeled away like stubborn husks protecting fruit, altering the environment until the Parietal Chamber has lost an entire wall. Blankets give way to webs of scaffolding. The true nature of everything that has surrounded Rollo for so long is being revealed. Something that might be surprise introduces itself. Surprise is a capacity Rollo no longer understands. A capacity Rollo replaced with infinite predictability, as though emotional spikes were a detriment to the fort process. These dormant spikes are pushing to the surface, longing to re-join Rollo’s emotional discourse. Surprise will be understood. There will not be an emotional limb that does not feel the rush of fresh blood.

  Every scrap of useless material is removed from the Parietal Chamber, until the chamber itself knows no separation from the hollowed walls that surround it. His new walls are machinery. Forgotten memories marching toward recall. Ingrid is a part of this machinery. A part of every process that radiates function. He thinks about her name. He knows her name. Her name is one that has been held hostage on the rigid tip of Rollo’s tongue. A name exists to be uttered. To be heard. Al
l names must be heard. Ingrid’s name exists in the same breath as Rollo’s.

  “Ingrid,” he whispers into the body of the expansive machinery.

  “Ingrid,” he repeats with greater volume.

  “Ingrid.”

  “Ingrid.”

  “Ingrid.”

  “Ingrid.”

  “Ingrid.”

  “Ingrid.”

  “Ingrid. You need to come out now. You need to be here with me. With have so much to talk about. We have lost so much time.”

  Rollo’s voice finds no reply.

  Rollo closes his eyes, seeing the fort in detail his capacity for vision cannot possess. The sound of the machinery makes sense now. He can feel the rhythm, adjusting the beat of his heart to match. Feeling a new synchronicity with a truer fort. Everything has a pattern. One needs only pay attention and it will make itself known. Now he can work with the sound in a place that does not understand the distraction. He is prepared to strip each chamber bare, but feels this will take more time than he wishes to spend. Ingrid will make herself known. Rollo’s only job is to allow Ingrid to do so. His eyes shut tighter, dissolving the fort’s layout. The psychic waves of Ingrid’s thoughts are given permission to transmit. A tumble of whispers. Comets of pure dread. This blank thought canvas fills with Ingrid. Everything within her at this moment is painted upon this canvas in brilliant fluorescence. She is screaming with an intensity the voice cannot contain. The scream extends beyond sound, inventing its own means of conveying the enormity that lives inside. The power weakens Rollo’s body as more of his mind is poured into the process of hearing it. His knees meet the ground and his slumped body is close to following suit. Everything in this moment is for Ingrid. She needs help. Something has abandoned her and she is imploding with the pain of that abandonment. Beyond this impossible pain is love. Love denied direction. Denied a home. Rollo wants to build this home and invite Ingrid’s love inside. Nurturing it. Allowing expression in order that it may grow.