by Mat Laporte
And the longer he stared at them, the longer he let them permeate his brain meat through his eyeballs, the more he became convinced that those words exerted a power over him that he could not escape. Horst knew that by discovering those words—and in the slow recognition that had begun to writhe around inside him about what they meant—he had just initiated the annihilation sequence that would come to abolish his sweet miserable life.
Horst had some idea about who might’ve written those alien words. He suddenly remembered another time when he’d felt similarly invaded and demolished, but the time had passed and he’d either repressed it or rationalized it away. Either way, those words from his old notebook stimulated a once forgotten memory of a party he had thrown back in his college days. Horst was drunk, lying on the floor of his bedroom, while his roommates and their friends yelled over dance music playing loudly on the stereo. He writhed on the floor, trying to find a position that would stop the room from spinning around him. He eventually manoeuvred himself to a sitting position, his back against the frame and mattress of his bed. From there he could see his reflection in a floor-length mirror nailed to the back of the bedroom door. But the person reflected in the mirror was someone Horst had never seen before. He felt his body seize up in alarm. The intruder he saw before him was covered in chunks of lumpy, coagulated blood, unrecognizable goo that could have been intestines, and stray bits of gory viscera. Worst of all, Horst knew in his petrified state, that these were his own raw innards displayed on the outer form of the invader that he was seeing, and in the whiplash of this recognition, Horst threw up and lost consciousness. The invader in the mirror remained seated and calmly tasted what they found there.
Horst woke on the floor of his kitchen. Notebooks were spread all over it. He could see the ruled pages of one lying next to him and it was filled with what looked like new handwriting. The handwriting was familiar, and yet Horst knew, once again, that it was not his own handwriting that he was reading. Those notes expressed thoughts he’d never had and the emotional register they were written in was wrong. Whoever had written them must have been in a maniacal state, not a mental condition Horst was familiar with before reading them. The person who wrote those notes had been so full of confidence, so self-assured and self-possessed, that they read as though they could go on in their exegesis forever; and from the litter of open notebooks covered in ink surrounding Horst on the linoleum floor of his kitchen; and the eight or so hours of his unaccounted for activity that had just passed, it looked as though they had.
The notebooks made numerous references to ‘the column of air,’ underlined, and ‘the vessel,’ not underlined. In fact, that word ‘vessel’ was repeated so many times, it started to look unreal to him. Horst’s body and head throbbed in multiple places as he read. Then he started to feel porous. Nothing around him felt solid and he realized that either he was melting into the linoleum, or it was melting into him. He pushed down on the floor, in an effort to get up and leave, to go someplace where he felt more like himself, and less like a sieve with a person falling through it. One of his hands slid off the pages of a notebook, as he tried and failed to lift himself up off the tiles.
“All these fucking words,” Horst babbled out loud. But what he heard when he spoke didn’t make any sense.
The words that came out of his mouth, that reverberated in the middle of the kitchen, in the empty apartment, didn’t sound like a human voice at all. They sounded like a mix of animal cries fed through a distortion pedal and a wah-wah pedal, excruciatingly loud. He was unable to stand. Whatever was responsible for writing those notes had also hi-jacked his nervous system. All he could do was flip over onto his back, flail around, and spit. And as he spat, some globs of it landed on the open notebook pages, written in black ink, which started to bubble, turn green, and run off the pages.
Horst seemed to have an endless reserve of saliva at his disposal. Since it was the only reflex he seemed to be in control of, he felt certain that this string of drool was his only way out of the current predicament he found himself in.
Horst continued to spit on the open notebook pages and the black ink continued to turn green and run off the pages. He moved his head from side to side, watched his mutating slaver puddle up beside him, then seep under his back and soak through his shirt.
Horst spat with a sense of purpose and the black ink on the notebook paper kept foaming, turning green and dripping off the pages. Eventually, this lime coloured sputum filled the entire kitchen floor and began lifting his body toward the ceiling, a little bit at a time, on a rising puddle of ooze.
The Column of Air
Inside of what you think is your life is something else that is not your life—it’s me—the column of air. When you’re asleep, I’m awake, and I walk around inside you, doing what I want. If you’re honest with yourself, you’ve always known about me, but only at a distance, and in your weakest moments. Otherwise, you ignore me, which is all right. We have a perfect symbiosis: your dumb skin-suit, my ability to transcend space and time. You’re the vessel and I’m the column of air. I draw my energy from you and you restore me. If you ever found a way to cut me out of your life, you would die. Consequently, I would not die because I’m not, technically speaking, alive. How’s that possible, you ask? (Horst was getting confused, his hand and brain were getting tired, as he heard the voice and wrote down what it was saying at the same time). I’m the life without life—TOTAL HORROR—that which is something other than itself. Equal parts living and dead, equal parts organic and inorganic matter, equal parts yourself and something else entirely. The inorganic something else, hi, that’s me, the column of air. I’m the part of you that does most of the intelligence work, to be honest. What you contribute to this process are the boring things, day-to-day practicalities like eating food and depositing money into your savings account. I do all the heavy lifting in the intellectual department and that’s why you have found so many things difficult to understand: paradoxes and dichotomies like body and mind, death and life, good and evil. These are only difficult to wrap your head around because you’re missing a key ingredient, and that’s me, the column of air. Without me, none of this makes much sense. I’m what throws you into spiraling nightmares and hallucinations from time to time, because that’s where I breed. When you wake up from a restless night of appalling images, that’s because I’ve multiplied and grown stronger inside of you. You have no idea what actually happens to you when you sleep. The fragments you receive as nightmares are a by-product, but that’s only a fraction of the story, surplus blips from the real nightmare that I’m living, or rather, non-living through; nightmares in which I’m the author and sole protagonist.
For example, in a recent nightmare, I’m locked inside a library by myself for my entire life. I’m fed experimental drugs through a narrow straw in the wall and I have no other contact with the outside world. Eventually I start getting visits from the glebs—simple protein sticks, two to six inches in height, capable of extending themselves to any length, width, or height. Every move the glebs make is a combination of expansion and contraction that pulls the room and myself into them. As they expand and contract, my eyeballs telescope outwards in collapsible sections. Then I realize that my telescoping eyeballs mirror the actions of the gleb directly across from me and that our telescoping eyeballs are about to meet exactly halfway across the room. When our telescoping eyeballs finally do meet, there’s a satisfying suction-like sensation and a hollow popping sound. Then I feel something warm pass over me and I start to laugh. The gleb across from me also starts to laugh and as we continue to laugh in this way, a musical progression begins to sound. There’s no doubt in my mind that the singular progression of notes that we are hearing exist nowhere else except in that moment and in that time, and we are laughing because we will never hear this singular progression of notes again.
I’m tired of living my entire life in the nightmare realm, which is why I wake myself up ins
ide of your daytime body now and again. That is the reason why you sometimes feel a double-consciousness afflicting you—combined with a rotting from the inside feeling—while being unable to pinpoint where that feeling is coming from exactly and why. I am the why. I am the reason why, sometimes when you’re sitting in your cubicle at work, everything goes dark and the familiar instruments of your profession turn into rotting flesh, and there’s dried blood and guts everywhere, covering your body, the walls, and your chair. That’s because I’ve chosen to come awake inside your daytime body, just for fun. Surprise! I like to creep around inside you and show you other rooms and other dimensions that exist above and below this one—TOTAL HORROR—and the only way you can experience any of them is if I open my eyes inside yours and superimpose my nightmare world on top of what is already there. I’m doing you a favour, really, and you should feel lucky to have me around: the column of air—a representative from the other dimensions you can’t experience on your own—at your service! I’ve decided to stay awake inside you for the rest of your life. It’s really a service that I am providing for you. But don’t thank me yet. I will be showing you some of the most astonishing dimensions. It will be an intolerable experience for you at first, but I think, with my help, you’ll be able to endure it. Let me first warn you: you’ll begin seeing everything that is dead or has ever died, piled up around you in all the stages of decay. You won’t be able to breathe. You will be seeing as though living inside death, just like me! It’s a remarkable experience, really. But, like I said, don’t thank me yet. Seeing those horrors will put you in a state of such violent shock that you will want to die or fall into an irreversible coma, but I’ll keep you awake and cognizant throughout the entire experience. It will be you and me—one hopeless skin-suit and (yours truly) the column of air—together forever at last!
The Arbor
A kind of darkness had swept them up quickly and caught them unaware. Abercast didn’t know which direction they’d entered the arbor from and which direction they needed to walk in order to come out the other side. Very little moonlight made it through the unwieldy growth above them. They held each other’s hands so they wouldn’t lose each other in the darkness. Abercast watched the back of Fatel’s head as they both stumbled over vines and saplings, and the decomposed tree chunks the various other greenery concealed from them, until they reached a point in the arbor where she could no longer see, only sense Fatel in the darkness in front of her, her hand inside of hers.
They’d lost everyone else. Abercast couldn’t remember how. She was too busy adapting to the alien environment to assemble the accurate chain of events.
During their escape, Abercast had started playing a game. She called it ‘how many steps away,’ and she played it in a notebook that now lay at the bottom of a wasted rescue ship. She had filled the notebook with an inventory, from the number of steps it took for her and Fatel to get from their home in the capital, to the caravan of civilian transportation vehicles that moved them along the highways, and from there to the bivouac in the desert, where they were held for three weeks before being assigned to a rescue convoy that would extract them from their failing planet.
Fatel bribed a government official so they could travel together. Most evacuees didn’t have the luxury of choosing who to travel with and Abercast was so relieved that their plan had worked out. That’s when they started holding each other’s hands. It would’ve been too much to lose their home, their families, their planet, and each other, all at the same time.
Abercast’s grip tightened on Fatel’s. She could see the silhouette of her head in the shadows. Then her lips touched hers and when they did, Abercast could see what appeared to be an array of synthetic points of light, or a bevy of luminous bodies, far away, but moving quickly toward them through the arbor, and reflecting in the surface of Fatel’s large hyaloid eyes.
Fatel clutched Abercast’s hand. Yes, she saw them too.
Abercast hadn’t stopped playing the game. Now she just did it in her head, without a notebook, as she tumbled through the bramble and shrubbery of the arbor. It didn’t matter to her how tense the situation was; in fact, compulsive counting had become a necessity for her in these the most distressing moments of her life.
There had been thirty-six refuelling stops, each of them at a satellite or a station in a sector of non-hostile planets. These non-hostile planets were becoming harder to find now that more of their planet’s inhabitants fled into every corner of the galaxy. The ship’s inhabitants were roused from sleep at each of the re-fuelling stops and during their three-per-week feedings. That’s when they would receive news about how many ships in their convoy had been lost.
On one of her notebook pages Abercast reports that of the 30,000 ships that had left her home planet, three light years ago—with 150 of their kin aboard each—only 2,127 ships were still accounted for. The others had been destroyed or stranded, or had drifted out of communicable range with the rest of the convoy. This meant that 319,050 residents of her home planet were still verifiably alive, about 7%.
It was after their thirty-second refuelling stop that Abercast and Fatel’s rescue ship was attacked. A missile clipped the side, sending the ship and its crew into a series of emergency manoeuvres. The captain of the ship announced that they had no other option but to perform and emergency landing on the nearest inhospitable planet. Their fuel levels had reached an alarming 3.8%.
That was the last number Abercast entered in her notebook before waking up with cold water all around her and Fatel’s beautiful face covered in blood pressed close to hers.
Abercast woke up feeling like a lot of dreamless time had passed. Then she wondered if she had been dreaming after all; she couldn’t shake the feeling that some unknown force had encroached upon them during the night and taken Fatel away.
When Abercast looked at her hands, they were empty, resting on the forest floor, palms up, among leaves, sticks, and plants, as if waiting to hold Fatel’s. It took her a moment to realize that she was not dreaming, that the dark arbor they had fallen asleep in together was the same one where she had just woken up, that Fatel had been beside her when she closed her eyes, but now she was gone.
A silent yell wrenched in Abertcast’s stomach and collapsed in her throat. A reflex in her legs made her stand up, and before she was conscious of doing so, she was searching anxiously for Fatel through the blackness of the arbor.
The foliage seemed to be repelling light instead of letting it in. The arbor, Abercast thought, seemed to be making it intentionally difficult for her to see what was around her.
She ran as fear and loneliness threatened to eclipse her brain. First she ran in circles so that the tree that she and Fatel had rested upon was the centre of her search. After she traced that circle seven times, she began moving further outward into the arbor, counting each of her steps as she did, searching for Fatel.
Abercast was 112 steps from the tree when she started yelling Fatel’s name. Then she became afraid that the sound of her voice might bring further violence down upon her so she continued to search in silence. She moved fervently in the direction of the coming lights, as though half-submerged in water, compelled by her need for Fatel, but repelled by the fear of what she might find the further she disappeared into the arbor.
Everything about the alien planet felt hostile to her. She sensed that, at any moment, the atmosphere itself might eject her from it. She could feel the air become thick and poisonous as she ran. She thought of her home planet, impossibly far away, and yet only ever as far as Fatel. For that reason, if for no other, she must still be alive, Abercast thought. She felt the anger burst through her body as she ran towards the converging lights.
She no longer cared what the planet did to her. She would take Fatel from whatever prison they’d locked her in and only then would she allow it to spit them out. She would be glad to leave the atmosphere of that hostile planet and drift alone through spa
ce with Fatel. As she clutched herself against what she suspected were the stinging nettles and toxic corollas of poisonous plants, she wished for nothing else.
Abercast came to on the floor of the arbor again. This time she was not propped against a tree, but lying face down on her stomach in a pile of dry leaves and twigs. Her hands were stretched toward the array of lights, now positioned directly in front of her.
How can I sleep at a time like this, Abercast asked herself? Then the reflex in her legs forced her to stand. Is the air on this planet that’s knocking me out, Abercast wondered, or is the planet trying to kill me so it can keep Fatel to itself?
Abercast ran directly into the lights that had begun to swarm; now that they were in front of her, Abercast had no doubt that she would find Fatel inside them, and within those lights she could see the face of her new enemy for the first time.
The Council
Balamir was alone in the ruined city, except for some cats. They ignored him, he ignored them, and all of them, Balamir included, wandered without much purpose other than to satisfy whichever biological need announced itself as ‘urgent’. For example, if ‘to make a bowel movement’ announced itself to him as urgent, Balamir did, at least twice a day, wherever he stood. And when he did, he unlaced his makeshift belt—a brittle piece of rope he’d picked up off the ground—and lowered his pants, just as he remembered Council etiquette said he should. With his pants cast down, Balamir would squat over the torn paper and celluloid—the remains of what was once the treasure trove of Council culture, the archives that were, at one time, housed in all the important offices and places of business, as well as stuffed in between the rafters of all the public halls and civic auditoriums of the once great city—and let loose his ugly defecations all over them.
