Basal Ganglia

by Revert, Matthew

  …

  Rollo avoids the Frontal Chamber. He always has. Something unremembered dissuades his entry. Only the rusted habit remains. The habit is controlled by an assumption the Frontal Chamber is lost to negative energy that will envelop Rollo should he linger within its walls. Ingrid planted a seed that bloomed into this habit, but now it is Ingrid leading him away from that habit and into the Frontal Chamber’s walls. Her screams paint arrows that end there. In this moment the habit preventing his entry crumbles and blows away into nothing. The habit means nothing. A habit is tapestry of illusion only afforded importance by our adherence to upholding it.

  He runs toward the chamber, toward Ingrid’s screaming and tears the entryway apart, throwing the blankets aside where they float down the Medulla Shaft. Rollo stands in the chamber’s center and spends a moment studying the demon he turned it into. Beyond Ingrid’s encircling screams there is no perniciousness. It is a chamber like the others. Existent, in part, via his hand. It lacks signs of Rollo’s day-to-day existence, but feels completely unexceptional. Any reason for Ingrid keeping him out of this space is lost on Rollo. Unless this was a space Ingrid wanted to keep for herself… but why? More importantly, why does it matter? Rollo longs to stop asking questions. He has never asked a question that met the answer it was looking for. Questions will be asked when they are given a path leading to truth. Until then, questions are meaningless.

  There is undulation in the walls, like an overweight breeze. It comes and goes, but Rollo sees it. He approaches the movement and places his hand where it occurs. Something solid that does not make a habit of being there. Ingrid’s psychic screams have stopped. Even within the machinery’s song, all sounds quiet. Ingrid is here. Behind the walls. Trying to get out. Seeking Rollo as he seeks her. He pulls at the blankets, committed to releasing her. To releasing himself. The blankets are not as important as what they hide.

  Baby Elephants

  A seed planted in the elephant house is given space to become all it wants to be. The elephant house gathers fertility, which it ploughs into the soil, in preparation for the seed’s inauguration. The seed is granted passage into this soil where it will remain for up to 700 days. Gestating in the nutrient-rich world prepared for it. A world concerned only with the seed and its needs.

  The elephant house permits its seed the time to develop before it feels capable of participating in a world removed from its safety. A gumbo of life allows the seed to understand what it means to think before it is forced to think.

  There are five guards who collectively answer to the name Corpus Luteum who devote themselves to the well-being of the seed while it gestates in the elephant house. These Corpus guards take turns. One grows weary and flirts with death before another takes over, destined for the same lifespan. Every action in honor of the blossoming seed. The seed is unaware of the effort given to its protection.

  The elephant house will dismantle itself when the seed has become what it needs to be. The resultant growth will eventually help build a new elephant house in honor of the home it once knew. The home that once cared for it so deeply. The house ensures its legacy by caring for those it holds. Being cared for teaches what it means to care. Any seed blossoming from the elephant house is a seed destined to continue a legacy stretching back further than it comprehends.

  16.

  At first Rollo sees nothing beyond shifting darkness. His eyes strain to adjust, desperate for more visual data. An orb of black glass communicates with outside light, churning it in circles. It glints like a flare fired by someone lost and desperate. Rollo tries to understand how this orb can be Ingrid, determined to make it so.

  “Ingrid,” he whispers. “I am here.”

  His words evaporate. The darkness shifts toward solid form Rollo reaches out to touch. Skin touches something that might be skin. Tougher than skin as he understands it, but in possession of qualities married to nothing else. Rollo’s fingers explore the tactile phenomena before something nudges them away. He withdraws his hand as though bitten and winces at the emergence of a strange sound, akin to a damaged brass instrument played without skill. The volume is minimal compared to the machinery, but it is new. Whatever this is, it is not Ingrid. A trunk emerges from the darkness, sniffing the air, deciphering the space around it. Rollo is not afraid, and reaches out his hand once more to meet the emergent trunk, which bends toward his palm, covering it in cold wet life.

  “I am Rollo,” he says.

  The trunk tightens around Rollo’s hand and tugs, moving his body aside. A baby African elephant shuffles past and stops in the chamber’s center. Its ears flap, whisking breeze toward Rollo, cooling the sweat on his brow. The two stare at one another, working to understand this strange moment, remaining locked in this consideration for some time. The elephant’s marble eye, enclosed in desert floor cracks of skin, holds answers within. Rollo searches for the questions capable of unlocking these answers. He finds nothing.

  The baby elephant’s height is smaller than Rollo’s, but its overall bulk more imposing. Loose folds of grey skin shift and change with each slight movement, never truly settling into one resting position. Rollo feels compelled to reach his hand toward the elephant once more, but is incapable of doing so. The physicality of the animal deters movement. Instead he remains still, giving the elephant permission to dictate whatever might unfold.

  Time passes beyond determination. Rollo believes he can see the elephant growing. Its skin tightening. Trunk lengthening. He assumes illusion, maintaining his role in whatever dynamic is unfolding. Finally. Movement. The elephant lifts its trunk. Reaching it toward the ceiling and stretching it out. Rollo’s eyes follow the elevation, training his sight on the trunk’s tip, watching it breathe. Growing and shrinking. Preparing to become the point of exit for whatever swells inside.

  A burst of water erupts from the trunk, dousing the ceiling above and raining down in thick droplets, bathing Rollo and the chamber. The water intensifies in pressure, forcing the elephant’s eyes shut.

  Rollo remains still. Arms at his side. Allowing his body to experience the water’s enormity. It pools below, filling up the chamber faster than the chamber can cast it out. Lapping at Rollo’s ankles. Then shins. Then knees. Creeping up his thighs and toward his waist. When the water level meets the droop of Rollo’s breasts the pressure begins to ease. The water eases to a pulse that leaks down the trunk’s length. The elephant’s eyes reopen and the level begins a slow recession. It thrashes its head from side to side, stands still, and then wades through its eruption. It stops to explore the ground, as if seeking something out. Rollo follows the elephant’s path with slow, curious eyes, unaware each time it submerges itself beneath the water, he is holding his breath in sympathy.

  The elephant finds an area of floor that owns its focus. It circles this area, making several attempts to forage out whatever interests it so. It tugs and burrows, uprooting blankets, flicking them aside with trunk strokes. In a sudden rush of activity, the sucking sound of a draining sinkhole summons a cincture of water toward the uncovered space. The level lowers. From waist. To thighs. To shins. To ankles. The elephant shakes itself dry and walks toward a corner of the chamber then slumps to its side. Its eyes shut, inviting immediate sleep.

  Rollo casts his direction from the sleeping elephant to the newly uncovered area. There is a cavity below floor level he was unaware of. He moves toward it, feeling nervous without understanding why. The cavity is covered in sheets of sodden paper. Each sheet wears handwriting.

  The Philosophy of Confession

  Confession reconciles self with self. In the absence of God, to whom can one confess if not the self? Who among us does not desire penance when crushed by the weight of our deficiency? It is in deficiency we reside. It is deficiency in command of every breath. Guiding the passage of every thought. We are who we are, in all our individual beauty, because of deficiencies weakening us. Confession reconciles us with, rather than removing us from, our deficiencies.

 
When dialogue is trapped between self and self, where does our penitent exist but within the self? To avoid destroying this self of ours, in possession of such loathsome deficiency, how do we move forward? Self-expression leads to the garden of reconciliation. Words exist within us ready to find conveyance. Words prepared to hold our deficiencies close. Express everything you hate and feel the power of that hate diminish. Confess everything via the love of words.

  Words are divorced from judgment. Offering a discourse with moments of contemplation, almost bewitching the writer into confessions of the deeper self. In the environment of words there is existent the promise of freedom. A place where permission is granted to move away from our everyday entrapment. To embrace deficiency as something integral to the beauty of whom we are. Although born of thought, once written, that which we use words to express enjoys a life separate from the mind. Liberation. Words are often thoughts we lack the courage to convey. Those who keep a diary keep an exploration of something approaching their own truth.

  17.

  Rollo retrieves a sheet of dampened paper. He studies what is written, understanding the symbols are words. Words are something Rollo has lost connection with, and what he sees resembles abstract shapes. He knows these shapes reach toward a meaning at one point he could understand, and if he could understand them again, answers would be discovered within. He studies the sheet, trying to look into the words rather than through them. Seeking to know what the shapes convey. How each shape forms what he understands to be a letter. How each series of letters combine to become a word. How each word is a package of meaning. How these words, each with their own vast meanings, can be ordered to form strings of new meaning. How these strings of meaning communicate thoughts. Thoughts that can inform existing thoughts. The complexity of the process overwhelms him, threatening to upset any attempt to understand it. After scanning the writing several times, he concludes that two words are familiar. At the top is a word he understands to be his name. It provokes vestiges of unmistakable identity, existing as a package of the self. He allows this word to be recognized. At the bottom of the page is a word he understands to be Ingrid’s name. There is a sense he has written this word many times. It is a word he has fought the most to retain and somehow, he has achieved this. Understanding his name appears at the top, and Ingrid’s at the bottom, he deduces he is looking at a letter written by Ingrid to him. A letter he does not recall having seen before. It appears this cavity in the chamber floor is a repository for unsent letters. A homage to the continuation of their identities.

  At the top-right of each page is something Rollo understands well. A sequence of numbers. In numbers Rollo can comprehend and express the language of the fort, engaging it in dialogue. This sequence of numbers is something he is able to attach meaning to, which may lead to the significance of these letters. Each letter possesses a unique number sequence corresponding to a generic numerical order.

  Rollo empties the cavity of each letter until they are strewn about the chamber floor. Once excavated, he begins to sort them based on their simple number sequence. He becomes lost to this task, seeing nothing beyond the numbers until the letters sit in a neat, sodden stack in wait of further exploration.

  He stares at the sleeping baby elephant, feeling an inclination to seek its help, but decides against it. Attempting to understand these letters via their words is a process devoid of hope, so he maintains his interest in the numbers and what they suggest. If the numbers are sequential, then they must demarcate the order in which they were written, which means the lower the number, the earlier the letter. By sliding down the number sequence, Rollo may be given an insight to a time he no longer recalls. A record of everything now forgotten exists, and it exists in these impossible words.

  He makes his way down the pile of communication, taking in pages of Ingrid’s handwriting. Handwriting unique to her, refusing to alter from page-to-page. Neat glyphs that embody Ingrid. She has written volumes. Has conveyed so much thought. All addressed to Rollo, but never intended for him. His journey through her indecipherable thoughts continues, Rollo taking in the patterns and shapes of Ingrid. Appreciating them for what they represent, more than what they are. Then he stops. The significance of what he sees cannot be denied.

  18.

  About two-thirds into the pile of one-way correspondence, the pattern of Ingrid ceases. He compares the point of caseation with a recent page. The handwriting between the two bears no relationship, as though written by different people. He studies the two words he understands. Rollo at top. Ingrid at bottom. They are still there. A letter addressed to him that could not have been written by Ingrid, but could not have been written by anyone else. His attention shifts back to the number sequence on the top-right. He does not want to admit what seems to grow with increasing clarity inside. He places the letter atop the pile and scrambles toward the cavity. Its base presents several dislodged pencils for Rollo to choose from. He selects one, checking to ensure its tip is sharpened.

  Rollo climbs from the cavity. Back toward the letters. Wishing to move beyond them, but understanding he cannot. He feels as though he already knows the answer. Does not want to know the answer. Wishes the answer were something different. He flips a sheet, ignoring the writing on the reverse side, interested only in blank space. The imprint of Ingrid’s writing pushes through, insinuating itself. Rollo runs his fingers over the raised reverse like braille before pressing the tip of the pencil against the paper. He examines the number on the top-right of the letter prior to the shift in handwriting and copies it.

  17221

  17221

  17221

  17221

  17221

  17221

  17221

  17221

  17221

  17221

  Each number repetition possesses the unmistakable idiosyncrasies of Rollo’s handwriting. No one else. He compares it with the original. The same unmistakable idiosyncrasies. The handwriting on the page bears similar idiosyncrasies, suggesting the same hand was responsible. His hand. All the letters prior to this one are the same. All were written by Rollo. Letters addressed to himself. Or letters written when he was still himself. When Ingrid was still herself. Letters addressed to whoever Ingrid actually is.

  Rollo stands up, leaving the letters behind and moves toward the sleeping baby elephant. He leans against it. The elephant shows no sign of disruption. Rollo feels his body raise and lower in tandem with the elephant’s breath. He cups his breasts, studying their reality, massaging them until each nipple releases tiny squirts of colostrum. He feels this fluid drizzle down his body and allows it to soak in.

  Rollo understands he is not Rollo. He is in fact Ingrid and Ingrid is Rollo. He is she. She is he. Nothing is as it should be.

  …

  As teenagers, Rollo and Ingrid met and fell into one another. They each possessed gravity designed for the other’s orbit. Gravity no one else could understand. They turned in slow, deliberate circles, giving up everything they were as individuals to become the totality of them. It was not sacrifice. It was evolution. The weaknesses of one empowered by the strengths of the other. A constant process of giving. Sole citizens in their world.

  In this dynamic, there was no demarcation between the end of one and the start of the other. They formed a continuous circuit, which cycled the energy responsible for powering their machine. All things must be maintained. Maintenance was redirected toward the fort. The machine responsible for Rollo and Ingrid understood what it meant to suffer, but this suffering went unnoticed. Without intervention, all things move toward their end. The unity of Rollo and Ingrid was no different. Their cracks formed and yawned until these little cracks became an expanse of negative space. This negative space grew hungry. Needed feeding, and was fed, by remnants of their individual pasts. These pasts, until now, had been forgotten to the dynamic of who they were together.

  Togetherness slowly pulled away into their pre-together forms. Their identities sought independ
ence once more. Data was sorted and arranged, facilitating Rollo and Ingrid’s separation, but this data was incorrect. Rollo’s data was attributed to Ingrid’s data and vice versa. The extraction of data was so gradual they failed to notice the parts of who they were as individuals being extracted. When the process was over, only the other remained.

  …

  Should you seek the surface, understand you may never again find the point of submersion.

  …

  Ingrid holds a scrap of green material against her stomach. A scrap of her baby she wrestled free from the gears. Her passage from the world inside the walls has lacked pace. There is nothing for her to protect anymore. No reason to avoid Rollo. The fort dictated the baby had no place here. Only the fort process to which they have devoted themselves is allowed to matter.

  She stares up the Medulla Shaft before traveling further. Before finding Rollo, she craves the Frontal Chamber. A familiar place where she can order her thoughts without engaging anything else. A place she can be in the company of her words. She hopes that Rollo does not see her before she is able to perform this solitary reverie.