Careworn (short story)

By Luke Labern

Blood red. My thoughts are blood red. Though all I can see are shadows, my body is screaming out blood red. What is white is grey; all else is black, spotted, mottled black. My heart is restless: but why? There is nothing here. I can feel it pounding; my ribs have become an existential xylophone. Just off centre to the left, that is where my thoughts are. A disembodied consciousness perhaps, but that’s where my thoughts are. Don’t let them travel to my left arm. Don’t let them follow that fabled path. Death is absence, but it walks predictably: a stumble, fumble and a heavy pounding as a palpitation hits its head on the pavement of my mortality. Then a nothing spreading through the arteries; air’s oxygen choked, scared right out of my body.

The nothing will rush through my body’s architectonic perfection. I will die. Nature will reclaim its children in slow stages: only I will ever know fear.

My thoughts cannot go there: I cannot die tonight.

How can such a setting give rise to such stimulation? I am quite alone; the edges of the room are plain, almost soft. Nothing sharp can harm me. The silence of the room is the only danger: the lack of anything is the reason my thoughts refract and return distorted.

It does not take much to set me off; the slightest suggestion or coloured thought is soon amplified in this room of nothing horrors. Nothing is here; nothing is all I have to be afraid of.

The lights went out two hours ago. At first I felt comfortable. I even thought I was going to fall asleep quickly. I thought I could get away with it, away from it, tonight; I thought I would sleep and dull my consciousness before it had a chance to nail my eyelids open. Doom had been cast on me; turning too many times, being unhappy with the position of my pillows and my neck, I tempted fate. Now I am suffering the consequence.

There is a little saviour beside me. It is wrapped up in plastic. Mass-produced, pumped out by matter not yet consciousness, thick metal arms pound against a belt of rubber. In their little hands, their cups, lies powder that can quell this. Condensed and engraved with jargon, a little of the powder sits in the draw besides me. Its plastic house shows signs of me. Careworn, it has lost some of its offspring. They have left the nest; I have eaten them.

But I do not want to take another tonight; I am not hungry.

Being force-fed is one of its profound assaults. It will drive me to the drawer, grab my wrist and manipulate my fingers. It will grab my face, bruising me somewhere inside, and it will open my mouth. A masculine mouth does not exist: the inside of lips are always delicate and wet. Any thing that enters them had better be invited, or else it is distress itself. Such is its aim: playing me, treating me like a shadow-stained puppet, it grabs the powdered pill with my meat arm and places it in my mouth.

It smiles in the dark, saying: ‘I will decide when I leave.’

I am free of it, for it leaves my consciousness alone shortly after. But I have been manipulated and used, and I will be left deflated and exhausted. Its invisible fingerprints remain on my wrist long after it has gone. I am left with blurry, bleary mind when I awaken, waiting fearfully for its return. For it will return when I eat. It always does.

Some nights I am hungry: I have great faith in the morrow and the world, though I live on the outside. Sometimes I like to look in, in the morning. But here, now, I have no ambition.

I am not hungry and I do not want to eat.

It is here, and it is time. Like clockwork, I have allowed my consciousness to ferment and it has arrived. A psychological cesspool has once again given rise to new spawn, vile spawn, strong spawn.

I cannot see it, but only because it is everything and everywhere I see. There is nothing that can hide it from me, or me from it, for it lives in my consciousness.

Not knowing whether to close my eyes and seek sleep as a last resort, or to bolt and breathe, I pause. Focusing on sensations of every kind, this hyper-sensitivity becomes torturous. Every reminder of existence becomes a fear of death. The constant beat amplifies, intensifies. I wonder if it is happening, or if it will happen. That thought, a form of capitulation, invites it in. Lying quite still, listening for what cannot be heard: then I feel it. The motion inside me breaks free of its tracks. Ignoring rhythm, it adopts a scatter-shot approach to contraction.

It starts to hurt now.

Pounding, knocking on a door I cannot open, and do not wish to close, that little fist of muscle has gone beyond consciousness. This is the anarchism of the heart. It is in control now. I have lost the ability to control the most innate and private thing I own.

I am along for the ride.

I am not quite sure what I can control, and what I must endure. I can move my arms and legs, but they carry with them a new, alien weight. They are weighed down, turned almost to stone. A surge of energy passes along my spine: it is almost pleasurable, or would be if it were not out of context. These are the same feelings I have felt before, but, like cramp, they are occurring without my volition. This is a violation of normal experience and thus frightening.

Whether it is something beginning inside and being applied to everything exterior, or something at the edge of my consciousness rushing in to fill the interiors of my consciousness, I cannot tell. It is as though my stomach contains an infinite drop, and I am being pulled inside it. Clawing at the edges of normal experience, it pulls me down. This is made worse by my recollection of normality, for I am desperate for the simplest of comforts: the ability to breathe, to feel calm, to feel bored by inaction, even. As I am pulled down, ever down, and as I feel my limbs stretch and my tissues beginning to tear before giving way, where my vital liquids will reform in a spontaneous fountain, I focus on one thing. I obsess about how this felt. I obsess about when this happened before.

It is never the same. There are layers to this hell, rings; some are subtle and uncomfortable, some, like this, the very core of all that is wrong. Once the initial thought has signalled to it that I am ready, or weak, then comes the surge. Once the surge occurs, it is a matter of one’s reaction. Sometimes, with enough experience, it is enough to tell yourself that you are not weak. At others, like now, the heart responds before consciousness can interject, and the body responds to a danger that is not there. It alone is the danger.

What was comfortable becomes a horror: all around me is quicksand, and there is nothing I can do to escape. There is no escape, for this is an infection of experience. The last remnants of logic hold fast to two artificial truths: there is no need to turn the light on; you are not hungry, do not eat.

The near past becomes the infinitely distant. All that comforts is the thought of oblivion. But of what kind? The nothing above which I am lying widens. Its edges will not support me much longer; only what is visceral and violent will remain. All that is ephemeral will become irrelevant, like the dying man’s plans for tomorrow.

I still have not moved.

It is almost as tiring to realise the fact that I am tired of fighting this impossibly strong, impossibly vivid, impossibly absurd battle as it is to endure it. I would relish a physical struggle, some form of antagonism, embodied. This is more insidious. Embedded. Nothing is as destructive as the battle which rages silently and, no matter the outcome, leads to a loss of respect for oneself. A lack of identification with oneself. A mistrust of the past and its relevance because it cannot help one in their time of need. A disdain for the future, because it is merely possible that such a battle will have to be fought again.

Quite apart from all other battles being fought, and all other lives being led, such a battle leads to an overwhelming solipsism. Nothing matters but the consciousness one is enduring. And that, because no thought, or sentiment, or ounce of bravery can escape unharmed from it, like the last light snatched away by a black hole that can never be satiated.

It requires nothing to stimulate such a battle, and no history, and no future present, can remove the possibility of its occurrence. All that is needed is a consciousness open to the truth, and a body to be overwhelmed by its findings, both logical and emotional. This goes beyond, and makes a mockery, of both.

The nothing is fully embedded now.

Sobriety, for whatever it worth, haunts me a final time. The last societal skin hangs on its forceps; pausing before moving on to the procedure, I am taunted with its presence. I am reminded that, though a form of protection, it is artificial. What is real lies beneath.

It rips the last remaining skin off.

Thus I am exposed; laid bare, though not anaesthetised. I am to witness the procedure, and to marvel at my paralysis. I know nothing of running a body, or a person, or a life; what made me think otherwise?

The procedure invariably results in an extraction. That is, after all, its specialty: it is negative, and removes all that it sees unfit. It rejects the word ‘destroyer’.

The time between its last operation and now, and all it contained, is violently removed. Every edifice I had attempted to construct; every chain of reasoning, every attempt to trace my history and its course, is shown to be absurd. I am shown its own reasoning: all that I believed I was working with, all the work I thought I had completed, was only ever a masquerade.

It divides by zero.

Nothing is the only answer it accepts; all I had been attempting, in what I considered my moments of peace, and calm, and solace, were really little figurines. Absurd human machinations. Once again I am shown this, the perversity of profundity.

I am shown, with all of the grace of an amateur beheading, that my suffering has been, is, and will always be meaningless.

It is almost over. It cares only about its entrance and function: its exit means nothing to it, but everything to me. Abruptly, it vanishes.

I notice that although my body is strained, and feels crushed, that its rhythms have slowed. My breath, which before was shallow and unceasing, desperately seeking air though with a temporarily collapsed lung, has become slower. It is uncertain, and weak, and I am sick of having to breathe again. It is keeping me alive.

I have entered the critical zone. No criminal can be quite as brutal: if I do not regulate my breathing, and expend what little energy I have left to stay calm, it will return and repeat its actions without hesitation. Experiencing it after a break is overwhelming, but in succession, one’s barrel is scraped clean and is scarred, the same violent grooves engraved by its insistent probing.

What was blood red is now collapsed and colourless. I have no other thoughts except that I do not want to think; I do not want to experience that again. I do not want to be.

I realise that I did not eat; I resisted. I did not become a numb idol; I experienced it all. But that only matters in a different time and place. It only mattered to a different person: one to whom such games were relevant. I no longer care about such things; how could I?

I am left alone now, left to consider ‘reality’: left to consider what I was before and what I thought I was going to be. Most of all, I am left to construct and create new machinations, new figurines. This is the cruellest time, precisely because it is possible to forget, if only for a moment, what is really the case.

Though it is quite possible that there will even come a time when I will forget its existence for a consistent stretch of time, and become quite occupied by my machinations and figurines, I will never forget one thing, which it whispered into me when it left:

I will be back again.