Not surprisingly they had taken pretty much everything. They’d left a glass of water, a copy of a trashy romance book some illiterate fuck from another session had left behind. They hadn’t even spared him a toothbrush.
But strangely they’d left the toke - practically a ball in his stiff pockets, but with a little straightening you could kind of sense the original craft, the elegant form. It would smoke, that was the important thing. Of course, you needed a light for that though.
Bastards.
The place to start, they say, is the bottom left corner of the first wall you actually spend any time looking at –and you will!
When Greg’s eyes finally focused on the wall directly in front of his crude, metal-framed bed he was reminded of that, remembered the tip -
Start left bottom, and…
He sat up so he could see it better.
Start left bottom and move left to right, taking in all the details…
Here you might find all of the lead - or blood - scrawls, the scratches, all the signs that somebody else had had something to say, something to think about in there. All the signs of former life and how close, just how close they might have come to getting the hell out.
Which was, after all, what they wanted from you.
There wasn’t much there to talk about right away, not much to see - at least not from the vantage of dark corner he now sat crumpled up in, affecting the manner of somebody who honestly couldn’t give a shit. He sat up a bit, moved into the light to better look left then right, then slowly back right to left, only just a touch higher. Back and forth, back and forth until he got to the top - and then, well…
…you just move right along to the next wall.
In that big blank space there was seven crushed bugs that he could clearly and accurately account for, and maybe ten more stains that might once have been bugs but could have been the mined effluvial carcasses of nasal hunts. And maybe some were smears off a finger that delved into deeper and even less wholesome holes
Filthy fuckers!
He wrinkled his nose. He was himself scum of course. He was under no illusions. But you know, a person can only sink so low… Shit. Why would you even wanna?
Left and right left and right.
There were scratches sure enough, and marks, words you could read, but not anything much you could make any sense of. ‘Trees and birds’ it seemed to say in a faint grey network of scratches, but Greg knew he was probably only seeing what he wanted to see there. Images of things he had never seen, but always wanted to.
The abandoned book truly was an illiterate piece of crap. Greg was no snob. He wasn’t some smart ass scholar and he knew his station, but he did like to tickle his gray matter, tease out a few worthwhile nuggets of sense from a space long used to house the in-pouring swim of whatsoeverthefuck beverage was taking his fancy any given time. He kind of liked the swim, the blur of a booze-addled life – but he also liked to read books. Books with names you used to hear people mention once in a while, back when. Books with names on the spine that counted for something that wasn’t nothing in the idlewild of the rottenness.
(Gimme an hour of befuddlement - an hour to screw up my eyes and make my brain question it’s own form and virtue, and I’ll give you a reason to live.)
It’s why they had rounded him up. They could tell he liked to think on some level. Actually think.
Wasn’t much else to it, Greg thought. Not much more than that. At least on wall one.
The next wall was harder, it being yet darker. The single high, tiny window cast barely any light on it, but Greg’s eyes adjusted. There were the remains of at least nineteen bugs on this one, their slight forms sometimes spread over an inch or more across the faded white paintwork. More shit and boogers too, like before. But here there was a line of three hundred and fiftytwo short strokes etched in what looked like pencil. The only story that told was that someone else had been in there, once - for some time - and that someone had owned a pencil, and maybe they couldn’t actually write. Which might account for why they had left that occupant a pencil in the first place. A different challenge. New thinking.
Lucky bastard!
Getting up off of aching knees Greg turned his mind once more to the fuck awful piece of shit book. He considered trying to eat it.
And then it struck him that if he restructured the vacuous tome it might actually be reworked as something, if not great, at least worthy of the effort of reading. He devised a new way to read each page, letting his eyes pick the order of the paragraphs –
last page last chapter, first page last chapter, second to last page – and so on.
It was, for a while, mildly diverting. But really - why gold plate a turd?
Nope. He decided to eat the damn thing. Or smoke it – if he ever managed to get a hold of a damn lighter!
The third wall was the darkest of all, and had the rare honour of being the only one that had a door in it. It was also the wall that the head of the bed ran up against.
Alright, He thought. Let’s go again shall we? Left, right, left and right…
More bugs, more…
Hell and nine quarters make the suit. The suit is foul. Long live the suit and may he rot.
Sweet words, thought Greg. That would have been something I could read!
And surely, faint but absolutely there in earnest – so straight you could barely see it – the wall was, it turned out, covered in tiny neat letters.
“Man oh man!” Greg said aloud. “What good is it - left to right bottom to top? I need to…”
He pulled the bed away from the wall, pulled it round, and climbed up onto it, squinting at the corner, getting as close as he could to the wall between the top left corner and the door. His eyes strained but almost adjusted. He could, near enough maybe, fill in the gaps…
And there was none but could speak, and they only in the voices of the Weeping God. But what mutterings there were were sweet enough, so we listened, we listened gladly. It seemed as though time grants those that listen well a clarity and that fell on us wild children like warm blankets, to that the simple forms and wandering tempos began to reach us and to…
“Damn! Too damn fucking dark to…” Greg. Muttered. “Hang on… I just need to…”
…illustrious whim of the Althlathuns. And that threw upon the…
…but then we were full of sin, and we knew it. We sold what we had into the open plague wound of that rotten fell world, that rotten gaping wound...
…we burned ourselves, burned and did not deserve the forgiveness meted out by the dark brethren, the ever-damned brethren of Althlathu, and all that faced them…
…rest like…
…you cannot, in faith – ha! Faith! There’s a fine one! – go forth and expect the blinded blind to win forth thy mercy, for gone were the people who nested here and loved, who lived and were kind for kindness’ sake. Do you remember that? Do you? For there was a time, there surely and truly was once such a time…
…and now, dusted in the fallen wastrel finger-wrath of weeping godless we, thank you mother for sight. I mean it. Sight and the freedom to think. I think much, what little that may mean to you, dear reader, but the thinking, the thinking and the writing, what might it profit me or thee? What might you glean? As little as I have perhaps from the fall, the precious endless fall of all things?
Ah, now. Hell and nine quarters make the ravaging suit. The suit is foul. Long live the suit and may he rot. May he rot and may we rot our godless rot and be glad of it. The Munger is the ailment is the cinder is the lamb and the slaughterer.
All good, all good, all good…
Greg slumped back onto the bed. There was a warmth in him. He had found the voice that touched him deepest right here on the walls. This was a voice that was bigger than time, and no voice of man, but of all things, barren and bereft of the affliction of affectation or affection. It was cold and true and he trusted it as it asked him to trust. These were the days of the prophets of non-prophecy, where all that was provoked by the child-minding state ate itself in a vast and inglorious banquet. Greg knew that the age of man was expanded into a third set – one for itself, one for all, and one… one that reached higher.
A new one.
This was the voice of the new.
Such books as he had read had made him the fittest, and prepared him for this now. It was his time. He breathed quickly, short and sharp with excitement.
This was real. It was his now.
He must, he knew, be calm though. He’d better calm right down and…
He turned his head to the wall again, propped it on a crooked arm and…
…all good. That’s the word of no-shame, and so it should be. Remember the child in you and listen, for that child is right. You are wrong, you grown. You simply forgot. Well take back the forgetting, and wipe in a new memory of substance that the Munger, not the onced blessed world stripping exiles, need never grow to nor muster arms against them.
Breach the wall of thin and un-mattered matter, but mutter and glimmer and glyph. Signal and sigil. Units of vine and vim and vigour are finessed by the mind that might and must unclog itself but yet be returned unto the vine and vim and vigour…
***
When the bar slid back and the door swung achingly open it was not Greg that lay upon the floor in total stillness. It was not a child of this time, this world. He was not dead but he might as well have been – at least to the blank-eyed thought-barren fools that looked on.
They gave him a kick, then another – harder. Once-Greg kind of grunted, but he didn’t complain. Had he been himself he’d have tried to act louche maybe, come up with a sarcastic remark. But he didn’t, he was still, because he wasn’t there any more, not really. He’d taken the rare step - a step that the wise called ‘the freedom of saints’, a long time ago. But no saints dwelt where Greg drifted free.
Neither fools nor prophets.
Free as only the mind can be free, he drifted in the world-making void of they that are made, and was happy.
END.
>ouch<