Dark Sequence

This is a place of wondrous illusion, a vacuum unconscious of its own non-being.

That is ridiculous. This existential dread thing is overdone, but there it is. A cliché that writes millions of benzodiazepine prescriptions every year. Bad benzos, but Peter could keep it at bay. It’s just that those thoughts kept popping up like bubbles in a pool of boiling black oil. And he liked the stuff so much. Who wouldn’t? But he was a doctor. Could he keep the thoughts down, the feeling going without the drug? Perhaps, but not just now.

Coming out of his reverie, he found himself staring at a blank patch of air some distance from where he sat in the dark, windowless room. The moon exerts a gravitational force on tides. His eyelid twitched—a signal. A split second later his head cocked as if anticipating some sound. The splashing sound of water he remembered, but not at the moment he sensed it. The glow of the desk lamp seemed to brighten at the edges of his stare. He did not remember the others leaving. An independent will shook him abruptly from the shell of this arid daydream. The room grew darker. His peripheral vision wavered, ripples radiating at the edges of twin eddies, and two small dull objects dropped dead center into the blacknesses that were his pupils.

It was always like that at the onset of his migraine. He looked down at the papers on his desk. Figures whirred and fuzzed, making him realize that it was very late, and he had been there a very long time—more paperwork than time with patients. He still held the nub of a pencil in his hand and stared at the blurring hieroglyphics as the lamplight waned, steadily dimming. Gaslight, he mused. His eyes burned.

It certainly was late, possibly past midnight, although the windowless room offered no evidence and he had misplaced his watch. For a moment, he was paralyzed physically and mentally, concentration sapped. A vague amusement slowly welled up inside him as he considered how the iris of an eye adjusts to varying degrees of light to make what is dark, lighter, and vice-versa; and how could one be sure that this was true and not just that the intensity of the light had changed. More gaslight, more thoughts. Well, what to do now? The lamp dimmed a few degrees more, then maintained a subtly flickering illumination.

Peter stood up too quickly. Sensation drained through a hole in the back of his head. He almost fainted, but then the lamplight flared a little, catching his attention, and he steadied himself. Although he did not pass out, part of him was weak, distant, unconnected, floating above. He lumbered away from his desk, his jaw slack. The pencil fell to the floor unnoticed and burrowed silently into the carpet as his foot slid over and broke the point off of the soft lead. A halo of numbness enveloped the top half of his skull. A dull roar arose between his ears as he bumped his way around to the front of the desk.

Can there be such a strong gravitational pull that all the water on the earth is pulled out—or in? The faint glow from the lamp made a jumble of large shadows on the grey walls of the little room. Peter knew that his narrowed vision was not a result of the lamp’s failings, and there was the odd sensation of losing his kinesthesia. What if he had been drugged beyond his customary self-dosing? Not likely. Had his head frozen? How? And the migraine pain was gone. He managed to position himself before a closed door.

A sense of activity beyond drew him. What door was this, why didn’t he recognize it? Like the operator of some cumbersome machine, he willed his big hand toward the doorknob. One by one his lethargic fingers made contact. It seemed incomprehensible that this clumsy paw was attached to him, a surgeon—really? The doorknob was much too small. He moved in slow motion, twisting, then pushing sharply, nearly falling through the doorway into the light. Almost immediately his physical coordination started to revive in a gradual, steady surge, but his mental machinery remained stuck in a state of hazy limbo as if his head were shot full of novocaine. Presences pressed upon him. Squinting into the harshness of the light, Peter shuffled into a vast open ward of some kind, but not one that he knew.

Splash. Quiet, please. Someone must have spoken. He kept on, mutely observing as his vision slowly adjusted to the light. His faculties were coming to life, but still he felt some constraint, a censoring of emotion, insight, reasoning. Somewhere a door remained closed.

The ward was vast indeed: a large open space peopled by white figures, faces flitting, but not still long enough for him to focus though in his peripheral vision they flickered in sharper detail. Some appeared to be patients or possibly models, lying or sitting. Others hovered about, as if in authority. Every now and then a “patient” would rise, and one of the “hoverers” would lie down in their place. Wouldn’t it pull on everything including the earth itself? It was all very confusing. But there was no doubt. They were all watching him, not directly of course, eyes averted.

He could see better now, despite the blaring light. Even as Peter made his way through the ward, it grew brighter. Everything was white. The light squeezed out the memory of any one passing event, not that any one passing event was particularly memorable. It hurt his eyes now, but his alertness had snapped on. Still, there was no emotion, no sense of purpose, no real curiosity. He merely observed. Nothing interested him except to keep moving, and to watch. He was drawn physically by the almost silent, subtle activity; the purposeless, calm movement; synchronized peristalsis; the amazing lack of situation.

He reached the far end of the ward. Where would the water go—up? Even though the whiteness at this point was dazzling, a blank wall that appeared to be totally devoid of light loomed before him. Approaching more closely, he discovered not a solid structure as he had first assumed, but a boundary somewhat like a broad but thin waterfall in which the liquid did not “fall” but hung suspended. Even as the light from the white ward did not pass through this amorphous curtain-like membrane, he could see with blurred vision another area beyond.

His attention was drawn to the left when he noticed that the edge of the water-like barrier hung unsealed next to the wall. Effortlessly moving it aside, he slipped through, leaving the light and hushed sounds of the white ward behind. Turning back to examine the curtain, he brought his face closer to the membrane and felt blinding vibrations. Nothing of the sounds nor of the figures and images he had just left passed through, and nothing of the light actually fell upon his face. Up into outer space?

Thus repelled, Peter turned round again to face the darker ward. What he could see, he could see clearly. But he could not discern its extent, although he guessed it to be smaller and less open than the white ward, more a maze of corridors, rooms perhaps. Again, he did not recognize this place. Things still were not quite right, but his mental processes began to accelerate. Onto the object that is exerting the force? Each thought spins its wheel to optimum speed, then leaps up to the next bigger wheel until its optimum speed is reached, and so on.

#

On either side of Peter, two women sit upright in their beds, reading in an artificial twilight. The one on his right seems cross. A frown dominates her face and her bloodless fingers clench the book. The one on the left seems pleasant, smiling but rather vacant, her eyes unfocused on her book, upside down as it is. The earth’s own gravity and atmospheric drag must be overcome. Down, internally? A big central ocean somewhere? Would it be hot?

“I have questions that need to be answered.” Peter states in a monotone to no one in particular.

“We’re trying to read out here,” the cross woman snaps, and adds, slowly turning to Peter in a voice engraved in granite, “It is time to finish. We are ready now.” Even as she speaks, Peter realizes that life in this place suddenly makes sense.

Piecing together fragmentary memories that evaporate before they could coalesce into coherence, he intuits that what is on the other side of the curtain, and the door, is an illusion, a fiction. But his present situation does not seem quite real either, but more satisfying somehow. A dream perhaps. No. That’s just another cliché. This is real and it is comforting. Yes, it makes sense and this is where he will stay at least until his questions are answered, at least that long—at least.

#

After an entire day of no communication that was totally uncharacteristic, Peter’s significant other, Patrick, came to check. With a sense of foreboding, he thought that he should have had some friends accompany him, but the anxiety had heightened his impatience. I should have been here, he thought. But Peter had insisted that they should establish separate households because of professional decorum. While the big city was a more tolerant environment for same-sex couples, many of the nearby smaller towns in middle Tennessee, like the upscale burg where Peter lived and worked, occasionally had experienced unpleasant incidents.

Patrick had the keys and 26A3, the code. As soon as he entered, he felt a chill. But there were no signs of a break-in or accident, no broken furniture, no signs of self-inflicted harm, no visual cues, no smells, nothing out of the ordinary except an overwhelming sense of stillness, and nothing out of place but a pencil that had fallen to the floor. Then it struck him. He had always been wary of Peter’s solo flights. He ran down the stairs to the basement—the isolation tank. When he threw open the tank lid, his fears were confirmed. Peter lay floating as if in perfect composure, but certainly gone.

Peter had always tried to wrestle down the black, bubbling thoughts. Now, Patrick’s own thoughts surfaced, teeming and buzzing accusingly. Was it Patrick’s fault? Peter’s anxieties? Some puritanical sense of shame? No, yes—no. Peter had just flown a bit too high, out of the earth’s pull, into a timeless sense of unchanging complacency, the physics no doubt inscrutable, but irresistible like the benzo addiction. It was not suicide, at least not in the conventional sense.

Patrick sank into a chair in front of the tank. An eerie sense of calm now overcame him, as if this had always been an unarticulated foreknowledge deep in his gut, now emerging in this devastating and inevitable realization. Perhaps in time, Patrick would settle into the unsettling acceptance that the meaning of a particular life, and whatever would come after, would be known to only one person—maybe. But in any case, that person would not be there to explain. Finally, he pulled out his cell phone and made the call.