She was lost.
There was nothing save the half-sensation that she had been there before.
Shot through with the pervasive sense of self-doubt chattering away like a thousand petulant stepmothers.
She had gone too deep again. Maybe too deep this time to ever come back.
She was searching, chasing a phantom, triangulating a garbled transmission from somewhere in the uncharted recesses of her mind.
She didn't stop. She pushed harder. She could feel it there, pulsing erratically, a fibulating psychic heartbeat, emanating waves of pure thought stuff.
It was too deep. No right minded person who valued their sanity would keep going. But she was so close... just a little more...
Cognitive whiplash hit like a repressed memory and she tried to roll with it. Cogent breakdown was normal but this was the worst she had experienced. Thoughts began to collapse in on themselves, their new psychic density creating mental gravity wells that drew other ideas in on them.
Her sense of self was the first thing to go. Nothing save the most basic concepts of what she was, Human, Woman, remained clear. Everything else mixed with a lifetime's worth of random thoughts and gave birth to a jarring juxtaposition of contradictory identities.
She was the bearded lady, the anthropomorphic cat girl, the good time nanny from Sheffield, the tall blond helicopter, the soft palindrome engine.
Signal.
Bug.
Star.
Bullet.
Ink.
Echo.
All of it was something and nothing and everything. Up was loud and down was blue.
She reached further still, even as the last remnants of self-awareness fell away and she was left mentally naked. The whole of her being became that single, desperate pursuit. And then... pain.
The man who had taught Dimes how to travel inside herself had been quite adamant about teaching her the fail-safe. She'd tried to tell him it was unnecessary, that she was prepared to take the risk, but he would not hear of it. So she'd learned it, an automatic mental trigger that would disrupt the trance state and haul her back to reality. It was a wholly independent mental construct without need for conscious intervention. It had to be, since its whole purpose was to draw a person out at the point of total cognitive collapse. Dimes had spent the first few months after leaving her mentor's tutelage deliberately trying to disable, or at least override, that mental programming. She thought she had succeeded but the bloody hunks of torn skin under her fingernails told a different story. The nails of her right hand had managed to tear through her jeans and rake four deep furrows into the flesh of her thigh. It hurt like hell and for a moment it was the only things she knew. Then her senses began to slowly reawaken, followed shortly by her first conscious thought: “bandage”.
The wound on her leg turned out to be worse looking than it really was. Fortunately she kept her nails relatively short and they had only managed to tear through a few layers of skin after penetrating the fabric of her jeans.
Still, she thought, better to be safe, as she applied an ample layer of antibiotic ointment and placed a large adhesive bandage over her injury.
In truth her failure, her tenth successive, hurt more than her wound. She had really believed that this time would be the one. The feeling of something lurking in the shadows of her mind had been an ever present distraction since childhood. It sat like a splinter of glass in her brain, nagging her with its inexplicable presence, daring her to determine its nature and origin. Her father would have called her a fool and remonstrated her for her inability to accept what she could not change. She could almost hear him: “You waste your time and endanger yourself, for what? What does it matter? What will knowing this thing change?” Her father's voice was the voice of her conscience, the voice of reason and rationale, always there to set her straight. Of course she would have argued with him about that, as she always had, and she would have lost, as she always had. But what was she supposed to do? Sit and wait for the inevitable?
After dressing her wound Dimes went into the kitchen and threw her torn, bloodied jeans in the garbage. She debated putting on clean pants but decided the risk of her bandage bleeding through was still too possible. Besides, it wasn't like she was expecting company or anything. Her short, black hair was a mess, her pale blue tank top was in desperate need of washing, she honestly couldn't be sure how long she'd been wearing that particular pair of underwear, and she could still feel a few tiny fragment of blood and skin that she hadn't been able to scrub from beneath her nails. No, today was definitely not the day for entertaining guests.
In Dimes' living room, hanging on the eastern wall, was a single, small photograph in a plain wooden frame. The photo was of her father. So far as she knew it was the only photo of him in existence. It was also the only thing that adorned any wall in her home. Dimes had taken the photo herself on the day she'd left for college. Her father's hair was short, as he'd kept it later in life when it had started thinning, and he wore a thoughtful, almost blank, expression. Anyone else looking at the photo might think he was looking at something beyond the photographer, his eyes distant and contemplative, seemingly unaware that he was being photographed. Normally her father would have refused any attempt to take his picture but on that day he'd allowed it, staring off into the distance and pretending that he hadn't noticed Dimes with her camera.
Dimes walked into the living room and stood in front of her father's picture. She thought that she ought to feel awkward or uncomfortable standing there in her underwear, even though it was only a picture, but she didn't. She knew, had he been standing there in the flesh, that he hardly would have noticed the state of her dress, let alone cared one way or the other about it. Dimes looked into the distant eyes of the only person she had ever truly respected and wished he really were standing there at that moment.
Arthur Kibuya had been a brilliant man, though Dimes had not realized it while he was alive, and like many brilliant men he had not wasted time trying to be understood. As a child she had loved him. As a teen she had hated him. But it wasn't until adulthood that she had understood him, and with that understanding came respect. It was her father who had given her the name “Dimes”, a name that had, most of her life, been something of a conundrum. When she was ten years old she had asked her father what her name meant. His actual answer, being almost entirely devoid of pertinent information, she promptly forgot, but the gist of it had been: "what difference does it make what your name means?" At the time, and for years after, she had determined the reason for this non-answer to be that there wasn't an answer. Her name didn't actually mean anything. It would take another decade for her to realize how wrong that assumption was. Her father was an eccentric man, often give to behaviors that seemed random and purposeless, but he rarely, if ever, did anything without a reason. The name he had given to his only child was no exception nor was he simply being obtuse by not telling her why he had named her so.
Now here she was, what seemed like a thousand years later, ironically longing for his guidance. Her father had never been one for telling his daughter what she ought to do, yet somehow all his cryptic phrases and answerless answers had done more to help Dimes find her way than any advice she could have received. She tried to imagine what he might actually say to her now but it was impossible. The voice in her head was as close as she could come and it was a pale shadow by comparison.
Madness was closing in on her, she felt it as surely as she felt her own beating heart, and that cruel wire twisting through her mind was the source. Every day it crept closer, tiny claws gently picking away at her sanity bit by bit, and she was still no nearer to any sort of answer. She'd spent five years trying to fix herself, five years of everything from psychotherapy to psychic surgery, and she had nothing to show for it but an extensive knowledge of what didn't work. She had not exhausted all her options but those that remained were less than appealing.
Dimes' specialty was names, an obsession born of her own unusual moniker. Etymology, onomastics, toponymy, if it had to do with names she had studied it. She was not identified as an expert in any particular field, but only because her area of expertise was not recognized as a “field of study”. Of particular fascination for her was the power of names. Dimes' theories regarding the psychological impact of names, on either side of the social interaction equation, were often met with skepticism, if not outright disdain. On the less “realistic” end of her spectrum of study, what some might term “paranormal” or even “occult”, she tended to remain quiet. It was hard enough for her to be taken seriously given the unorthodox views she did express. On those subjects she could hardly even be considered a novice, having pulled back quickly when she had realized what she was getting into. Over time she'd continued, very carefully, to probe the depths of that world, if only out of curiosity. Except now she found herself looking to that world as perhaps her last chance for salvation. Were there answers there and was she willing to go looking for them? Insanity was a terrifying fate but her limited studies had lead her to believe it might be far from the worst.
No, she thought, I don't care how dangerous it is. I won't spend the rest of my life as a screaming lunatic, shitting herself and beating her head against the wall of some padded cell. Anything but that.
Dimes went into her bedroom and pulled the sheet off her bed. It was plain and white, which was exactly what she needed. She took the sheet into the living room and laid it out on the floor in front of her father's picture. To say that her father would have disapproved of what she was about to do was a dramatic understatement. Dimes had made many questionable choices in her life, some her father had lived to state his opinion on and some he had not, but this was something he might have actually tried to intervene against. She could have gone into a different room, it would have been easier, but she refused to do so. Following this new path would require courage and if she couldn't summon the courage to do it in her father's sight then she wouldn't have the courage to see things through to the end.
Dimes knelt on the clean, white sheet and carefully tore the bandage from her leg. The blood had stopped flowing and she could see the reddish pink of her exposed, raw flesh. Gritting her teeth she dug her thumb into the deepest of the gashes. Fresh blood welled up and ran down the side of her thigh. Dimes placed her bloodied thumb to the sheet and slowly wrote her name in tall, capital letters. Beneath her name she drew a series of symbols and then drew a large circle around all of it. Finally she closed her eyes and plunged all her fingers into her leg, fully reopening the wound, and tearing the flesh even deeper than before, as focused all her mental energy on a single question. The pain in her leg grew to a burning crescendo and she fought back the urge to withdraw. Pain was part of it, pain would draw attention to her, pain was her gift and her offering.
Dimes' hand twitched, bringing a fresh gout of pain and blood, and stilled. It spasmed again, though her muscles remained lax, and she winced as the fingers clawed deeper still. Suddenly her hand leapt up from her leg, dragging her limp arm behind it, and rose up over her head like an overeager student begging to be called on. It was as if her hand were a glove that someone else had slipped on, she could feel it move, but the will was not her's. Her index finger flicked forward, pointing towards the wall in front of her, flinging a line of bloody droplets across the glass of her father's picture. Dimes leaned forward as her arm swept down and slammed her finger painfully against the sheet. She kept her eyes closed, focusing all her concentration on her question, as her finger twitched and jumped across the blank sheet, sometimes returning to jam itself back into her leg, her wound serving as bloody inkwell to her finger's quill, before continuing on with its frantic scribbles.
When it was over Dimes slumped and nearly fell over. It was only her desire to see the results of her ordeal that kept her from succumbing to the urge to pass out. Across the formerly pristine face of her bed sheet, which she was now obviously going to have to replace, were scrawled a nearly indecipherable mass of symbols. They competed with one another for space, occasionally overlapping and intermingling. Most them she did not recognize, or at least could not immediately identify, though a few seemed somewhat familiar. But in the center of the mass, untouched by any other symbols, was something she did recognize, though what it might mean was beyond her. It was a single word, neatly written in wide, block letters: “GANG”.
No comments:
Post a Comment