I'm going to just go ahead and leave this here for you guys to read at your leisure; please let me know what you think of it if you do by chance read the whole thing! I know it's a bit long (but hopefully I'll add many more pages to it once I revise the ending!)
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From the shadows around me a smooth note swells, high and piercing, blooming into a velvet expansion too big to be contained, threatening to burst its seams. Then it recedes, a torrent of aggressive noise dying down, in the end no more than a blip on the radar. . . .
“Is it agreeable, Ian?”
“Huh?”
“Agreeable, is it agreeable?”
I had the most distinct feeling that my head was floating away from my body; I could feel it, playfully buoyant, like a balloon on a string bobbing far above my shoulders. My limbs tingled; I felt a tremulous sense of surreal danger. I sank further into the chair. Miraculously, something was still holding me together. I was, just barely, still able to think.
A figure loomed before me in the dim light: tall and lean, but strong-looking, and strange, the silhouette of a being more or less than human. Through blurry vision, I felt I was looking at the shadow of a man. His aura was otherworldly—it seemed to undo my sense of reason.
His drifting voice flowed mildly around my head. “Nice 8-track collection. Mind if I put something on?”
“What?”
“Leftoverture’s a nice choice. Kansas’ wayward sons provide such satisfaction, don’t you think?”
“Huh?”
“I said the wayward son, satisfying.”
“You an alien?” The question echoed from somewhere above where my head ought to have been.
“No,” he said.
“Uhkay, sure, right then, play what you like.”
He held the 8-track up, inspecting it. Then he slid it into the machine with one smooth movement, his hand reaching across to the play button, his arm muscles flexing and taking shadows; it was lulling and dreamlike to watch—his movements were slow and hid a stoic strength, with which he could probably pinch my neck in easily.
Now a different kind of sound filled the air: old and staticky, the strange melody of man-and-electric-guitar, upbeat in an old-fashioned sort of way. The first few notes resonated deeply with me, echoing in full color, jarring and oddly flat at first, but then full and ripe in all respects—color, sound, feel, it was all overwhelming my sensory input. I took it in silently, slouching into deeper concentration, wilting in its presence.
I teetered on the verge of spilling through the gaps of my old patio chair. The brittle weathered plastic felt strange against my body. All the while it had been growing white-hot, pulsing with energy, like hot iron spitting sparks straight from the forge. The chair’s arms wrapped themselves slowly around my own, sealing me in. I wondered whether chairs often do this, then shrugged in a relaxed way, overwhelmed once more by a sense of languid ease.
The figure bent down so that his face and mine were level with each other. His eyes were swimming—the centers, though they were still, were brimming with movement and energy. Even gazing into them, I felt an overwhelming stupor reach inside me, grabbing hold of my already unraveling mind…
Breaking eye contact, I strived to put on an appearance of composure.
“This is my basement, yunno.” I could hear myself say it. “And I don’t—know—what—you’re doing here, pal,” my slurred speech had never been more intimidating, “but I’ve got you right where I want you. Just you try and mess around with me.”
He blinked, considering my words, and then reached casually into the folds of his tunic, pulling out a fruit with the demeanor of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. He began to peel the rind off slowly, and I watched as patches floated gently to the floor—they seemed to mock gravity as they drifted lazily. The fruit itself, which I could make out through the grip of his long spindly fingers, glowed a brilliant shade of vermillion, convincing me that somewhere out there more figures like him, clad in overalls and straw hats, were making a small fortune harvesting balls of radioactive marmalade.
He spoke to me again.
“I’m not some benevolent spirit, you know.” He fiddled with his otherworldly fruit. “People always mistake me for the good guys.”
“A benehhvolint spirit wouldn’t play Kaaansas on an eeeight-track player inmy basement,” I said, struggling to let the sounds escape from between my thick loose tongue and cavernous palate. I hadn’t anticipated the difficulty of forming words, but it was overtaking me.
“They consider themselves Bruce Springsteen fans,” he said, a little amused.
I wanted to respond, “I always knew there was a deeper reason I couldn’t take them seriously,” but all I could muster was an, “Erhhhbluuuhhh.”
The figure took one confident bite of his freshly peeled fruit, leaving only a crescent of the foreign flesh left. I felt a little mingled spittle and alien OJ hit my cheek. He did not seem to notice my internal battle against the silence, or if he did, took no interest. Maybe he was not at all benevolent.
A moment of awareness had seized me, out of nowhere (swooping down to me from the heavens maybe), and within that moment the conditions of my current situation stood bare, in all their peculiarity; a sense of urgency had filled me (perhaps it was the impending sense of doom I felt being held in a patio chair’s death-grip) and I blurted out,
“Who the hell are you, man?”
He let the question echo, eyeing me from where he stood. Those large and lively eyes! Within seconds (or hours, or days), my awareness had faded again, and I was returned to a state of confusion. My head, which at first was too light, was becoming uncomfortably heavy and it lolled to one side. Then the heaviness receded a little, and with some effort I pulled myself back up again. His silence had reminded me that the music was still playing in the background. Staticky, coming in like an alien transmission:
…Once I rose above the noise and confusion
Just to get a glimpse beyond this illusion
I was soaring ever higher…
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a small spider weaving lacework into the corner of an old wood table, where the leg met with the under panel. I’d used it to hold my painting supplies at one time, before leaving it to the neglect of my basement. Long ago, I had realized how much of an artist I was not; though it disappointed me a little, I wasn’t heartbroken (more confirmation that I was no artist). The used canvases from those days were probably still around somewhere, beneath their crusting ridges and stagnant stains.
The spider spun slowly; leg after leg after leg, she made her way inward to that singular point—that critical place where everything was connected. She dropped down, her abdomen dipping to attach the new strand at each radial. I imagined spraying her web with water, watching droplets glisten as they fell along the taut lines at angle. And I thought about each crystalline ball falling to that central point, each string reaching inward, and suddenly I was overwhelmed by the immensity of the pattern—the immensity of the web, and the spider, and the table, and the basement, and—
“It’s too much, it’s just too much!” I cried.
“Too much of what?”
“Too much of everything! Everything.” I felt I might cross that threshold into something too overwhelming to bear.
There was a long pause. He stepped back a little, giving me some space. Then his voice filled the dark silence; his speech lulled me again, one seamless smooth note.
“Yes, there is a vastness to it. I was once overwhelmed by it too. It takes much more to bring me out of being so underwhelmed these days. I miss it, I really do. But more and more, I have grown fond of the quiet unrest that fills silences and dark corners and lonely hours.”
“What’s so important about that stuff?”
“That horror greets us only in the dead of night.”
“Are you horror? Should I be afraid of you?” I asked, half attentive, and still half horrified by the web’s lure and bigness.
“You asked me who I am. I’m not a who, Ian. I’m a what. A modifier of consciousness, to be precise. And I am not horror.”
I was dreaming of web-weaving, still struck by the awe of immenseness life around me was taking on. I tried letting his words sink in.
“Modifier of…can I call you Moc, then?” I asked.
“Sure, if that’s what you like.”
Some time had passed before I felt the need to ask another question.
“Moc,” I said, “does horror ever visit you like it does me, or us, people I mean?”
“All the time.”
“You screw around with people’s minds,” I said.
“I enlighten them.”
“Why me?”
“I like your music collection. It’s rare to find people with good taste these days. May I ask why you stopped painting, Ian?” His voice was even and calm.
“Useless. I mean, I am useless at it.”
Moc bent down and picked up one of the patches of rind from the ground, thumbing it in his palm as if to smooth it out. It seemed such an ominous gesture to me at the time, but I had no idea what was to come; maybe that’s what frightened me most.
I looked up and saw that he was still thumbing his palm, but the rind had all but disappeared.
“We’re going to search now. Close your eyes, Ian.”
“They are closed, aren’t they?” They felt shut. A thin light layer was pressing against them from the outside—I could only assume it was my eyelids.
“No.”
“Oh.” The thick feeling of a skin over my eyes doubled, and I was sure they were shut this time.
“Where are you taking me, Moc?” I had asked. There was a childish curiosity in my voice. With this, he moved in closer, resting his hand on the top of my head. I struggled under the weight of something greater; my mind was whirring, whizzing, completely boggled… Then infinite black.
--
I was slumped in a chair that held me as tight as my mother did when I was young; my head was still spinning.
My real eyes had been opened. Moc could attest.
He was looking into them again, the way a doctor might in an examination. I was sure that mine were swimming too, just as his were. Then he said to me in that smooth and serious voice, “Ian, I want to ask you something.”
“What is it?” I prepared myself for something profound and difficult—I had a feeling I could tackle it.
“You got The Doors?”
“Are you joking?”
“No.”
“How about you go dig through my tapes again while I try to readjust to the room being sideways,” I said. It was true. While I had reached a plane of understanding that was beyond mere transcendence, I was still spilling out of myself and my thoughts were bleeding into a greater consciousness that left me nauseated. I wondered if the chair could still contain me in this state.
He was already out of sight by the time I’d said it, and I began to hear shuffling coming from the corner. He didn’t strike me as behaving particularly like a spirit of something or other.
“Once, I created a man’s dream from scratch,” he said, still thumbing through my music collection. “It was an amazing experience for both of us.”
“What did you make him dream of?” I asked, trying to imagine how one might physically create a dream for someone else. What came to me was an absurd image of Moc standing behind a man with a beer hat, feeding a mercurial liquid through tubes which went in through his temples instead of his mouth.
“I didn’t make him dream of anything. I created a dreamscape for him, a place where he wanted to be. In the end, that was enough. He sat there, very content.”
“What did it look like?”
“Dreamscapes are made of fine material; it’s very difficult to describe how the ether of one man’s dreams translates for another. It was a desert. The sand was warm and fine, and the sky a deep, most intense purple. Where he sat, I’d laid a bed of peonies. They were very soft.”
“And he just sat there?”
“Wouldn’t you?” Moc had already given up his search, and had once again returned to the chair. He looked eagerly at me, waiting for an answer.
“Can’t say.” I thought carefully about it, and was not sure whether my answer would be truer to my real self, or to this wiser self.
“Well, let’s try something different then. It’s not going to feel comfortable at first, and you’re going to wonder where you are very literally within the experience. But don’t worry, it will be you; you will be watching yourself from a safe distance.”
“Are you saying this will be an out of body experience?”
“There is no body to begin with. Here we go.”
“Wait! Will I lose anything, will I go somewhere else?”
“You’ll lose precisely one patio chair after everything’s all through. Here we go.”
They were incoherent and insubstantial but insubstantial was good—it meant that he would not have to deal with the full emotions his dreams would otherwise bring. Instead, it was a fleeting image of this person, or a soft, indistinct murmur from that person which, he convinced himself, must be of a comforting nature. Most of the time, he merely experienced colors and a sweet numbing tingle, as if a small tribute was being siphoned from the part of his brain where his most warming memories were kept. Slowly though, these experiences began to lose their freshness, that feeling of being something young and endless. Against all he hoped and wished for, the sounds became more indistinguishable, softer still, and less comforting; gradually he faded away from that place of warmth. The images were now blurs and vague outlines. Desperate to remain and yet unable to resist the changes, his body compensated by filling with an immense sense of paralyzed despair.
The eroding landscape of these dreams soon gave way to a more tangible but airy reality. Soft earth pressed itself firmly against the soles of his feet. The colors ever so gradually materialized into various forms of scenery, the blurs crispening into solid objects. The soft lavenders became a majestic mountain range, taking root in the distance. The warm blues meandered through a thicket of newly appeared flora. Red sky hung high above, intense and harsh, as an unusual but ever-present dawn seemed to employ itself over the landscape, giving the impression that it had never been anything other than red since the earth was young.
He could feel the yellow. Slowly the yellow had gone from being an all-encompassing and permeating feeling of warmth to a soft glow radiating energy on his skin. It was still warm, and it was still, in essence, unchanged, but now it was outside of him, in this alien place which seemed to persuade him that it was not so alien.
The place was not his, it was not familiar, it did not impress or move him. He was unable to find solace in the warm rays of distant yellow. Instead, a feeling of distinct estrangement grew inside of him like a tumor, pressing against his insides, making itself a regular presence.
After the transformation, everything ceased to feel real. Nothing moved, nothing changed. There was no sound of flowing streams, no birds rustling the leaves of trees, no faint buzzing that could indicate a breath of life. It stayed this way for what seemed an eternity.
Without thinking, without so much as contemplating his next move, he took a single step forward. The earth shifted ever so slightly backwards. He took another, and still it moved. Soon he was in full stride, and quickly he discovered that the scenery changed, got closer, disappeared beyond his line of vision. Things began to show the irregularity of nature--places of burnt earth where tiny buds were taking their first breaths, places where rocks stacked up against the soft rage of creek water, places where fallen leaves were tramped down into a gentle nest, places which suggested a subtle pulse of life.
After some time of this, he came to a place that was entirely foreign. There lay before him a stunning field of wild yellow grasses, so perfectly golden yellow that his knees went weak, and he cried for the beauty.
He knew his home.
“What was that all about?” I asked.
“Perspective,” he replied.
“I knew my home. I don’t think I expected that. Did you?”
“To be perfectly honest? I was hoping you would.”
“By the way, Moc?”
“Yes?”
“I painted that picture before—the one with the man and the peonies and the desert purple sky.”
“I know.”
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