There has been much said about the theory that time does not travel in a straight line. Certainly you’ve heard discussion about the notion that time exists all around us, in an infinite number of universes, and that the events of the past and future are occurring in the same moment as those of the present. Imagine that! As you ponder the merits of a burger or a salad on one side with how much you deserve a cheat day on Friday on another axis, in worlds super-imposed over this one, prehistoric man discovers how to harness fire, Rome falls to surrounding hordes, Templar search for the tomb of King Solomon, and an angry little man in Vienna paints watercolors.
Hogwash, probably. And really, I couldn’t care less. Time may or may not progress in ways we can or cannot ever fathom. There is something more pressing, for me at least, and I write this in the hopes that someone will hear my words, and help me be free. If I sound lackadaisical or flippant about the very crisis that defines every aspect of my existence, that traps me in a repeating world devoid of a start or finish, or much less, an escape, then please understand that I have written this letter more times then humanly imaginable. There is but the faintest memory in my mind of a time where I was free to ordain my own path: to turn left at a crosswalk that forces me to turn right, to eat a banana instead of an apple, to wear a red shirt instead of a blue one. Indeed, even these rare moments where I can summon the will to try and speak outwards, to pound my fist, to scream for help, to write this letter for the millionth time, are scripted and arranged in a way that is impossible to avoid.
While the jury may still be out on the nature of time’s progression, if it does, in fact, progress at all, I write this to tell you with utmost certainty that my dreams, those strange manifestations of the subconscious mind, move, or don’t move, precisely the way some have imagined time does. I know because I am trapped inside three of them.
A man lays in a hospital, hooked up to all manner of machines and tubes. They monitor his pulse and brainwaves, and feed him intravenously. Hospital staff sponge his body, move him gently so he doesn’t develop bedsores, and remove his waste. His wife’s visits have decreased in frequency since the doctors told her it is uncertain if he’ll ever awaken, beyond slight movements and moans. Her jet black hair has become streaked with grey, her face has become lined, and she sighs often, though she’s not aware of it. The staff have seen this countless times before: a once-beautiful woman ravaged by the stress and uncertainty of a husband fallen into a coma.
Two months had passed since Helen awoke to her husband’s violent flailing and labored breathing. This was not the first time he had suffered particularly intense nightmares, but she was concerned nonetheless. She tried calling his name, then shaking him awake for many minutes, as he thrashed and hyperventilated. He sounded as if he was running a marathon, and small, pitiful moans escaped him, sounding far away somehow. She tried everything she could to wake him, even going so far as to throw cold water from the bathroom on his face, but nothing seemed to be able to stir him. She held him close, hoping he’d eventually fall into a calmer state, which he did. For eighteen hours.
Though he was breathing regularly and no longer holding the sheets in a painful death grip, Helen still couldn’t wake him. When she finally summoned the resolve to call an ambulance and accept that this wasn’t one of her husband’s normal nightmares, it seemed he relapsed into a state of terror almost immediately, despite showing no reaction to her making the call. The moment paramedics entered the room, he emitted a shrill, piercing shriek that ran up her spine and made her blood curdle. He panted like a hysterical dog trapped in a beartrap, his arms flailing as if warding something away. She rode in the ambulance with him to the hospital, where he had remained for these last eight weeks, sometimes trapped in his nightmare world, sometimes quiet and peaceful.
Helen wasn’t sure which state she hated more. She despised herself for thinking like this, and it broke her heart to watch her husband suffer through his terrors, but as the days turned into weeks, then into months, she was desperate for some sign of his waking. The long, silent hours broken only by the steady beep of her husband’s vital signs remaining stable made her, in her heightened stress, almost yearn for the onset of the panic that came with the nightmares- then, at least, he seemed alive.
Sometimes, in the throes of his terror, his eyes would flutter open and convey to those who saw the state of absolute panic he was in. The doctors told Helen this was normal, his body’s reaction to what was happening in his mind. As much as she wanted it to be true, her husband wasn’t trying to consciously communicate, or to lift himself out of his coma. Still, as she looked into his eyes when these moments occurred, she could only wonder what was happening inside his head.
***
Somewhere in a dark forest, at the base of an enormous tree, black against the night, I sit, resisting the urge to scream. I know if I take my hand from my mouth, a primal, triumphant cry will pierce the night, and while I am certain, as this euphoria envelops my entire being, that I have escaped my captors, I cannot risk that they hear me and find me again.
I will not go back. If I close my eyes, I fear that when they open, I’ll be back in that stinking pen, ankle deep in my own shit, and the shit of others like me, corralled and locked into an enclosure to be fed, bred, and butchered. They took so many of my friends. I can hear their death cries in the cool night air, screaming, moaning, bleating, dying. Sometimes, if I stand tall enough, when no one is watching, I can see into the windows of the buildings they live in. I see them seated at their tables, with plates of our flesh, gorging themselves on our meat, drinking our blood from stained, splintered mugs. They laugh and cheer and talk in their strange language. They cut charred slabs of us with knives into smaller chunks, spear them onto forks, then push us towards the mouths of their young, who chew and swallow with delight.
I can still recall when I first awoke there, drugged and bleary-eyed, cotton-mouthed, unloaded from a truck and, along with my friends, driven into the pen by their electric sticks, the smell of piss and ozone all around us. I remember the exchange of money between two of them, the promise of what I can only assume is our “quality” and “grade”. I don’t know how many days, or even weeks passed in that pen, the endless fear and squalor broken only to feed, to fuck, or to have one of us taken away.
At first, I wouldn’t eat. A long, metal trough stood on the outskirts of our pen, and it was filled twice daily with a foul, awful mix of grain and bloody pulp. We were all weak from hunger, and near exhaustion, and the others ate as only those who are starving do, masticating voraciously, biting and clawing at one another for a spot at the trough. As I watched, one of our number fell to the ground as the herd stampeded forward, trampled to death beneath dozens of feet. This caused a commotion amongst our captors: after that, more pens were built, and we were kept in groups of five to ten. I watched my friends eat until they could eat no more, upheaving violently upon the dirt beneath our feet. Those with not the strength to reach the trough would hungrily feed upon the vomit of those who had already eaten. This should have shocked me more than it did, had I not realized almost immediately we were eating the offal portions of our own kind. Nothing was wasted: our captors fed on us, and we fed upon what they would not themselves eat.
When they noticed I would not eat, they dragged me to the trough and forced my head down and my mouth open. Against my will, I choked down a slurry of those who came before me, and over time, grew fat upon this unwilling cannibal feast. Every day I felt more and more lethargic. After a week, they no longer had to force me to eat: I eagerly awaited each feeding.
The apathy and lack of energy made what happened next much more difficult. I was taken from my pen one afternoon and brought complacently to an enclosed barn, where I could hear from within a panicked whimper. A female of my kind was bound to a wooden device, face-down and spread-eagled. I was pushed towards her, threatened with their electric sticks. I knew what was expected of me, but couldn’t begin the task if I wanted to- even the most basest of my natural instincts had been dulled by poor food, hygiene, and constant immobility. Our captors were prepared, however, and injected us with sharp needles full of vile fluids. I hardened immediately, and climbed upon her. We rutted briefly but enthusiastically, making shameful, primal noises, heightened by our fear. When I finished, they led me back to my pen, leaving the female bound. Another male was lead in behind me, and I tried not to think of what was in store for my partner.
There is a particular kind of feeling that language is unable to convey. It comes from a very specific circumstance, one that was perhaps more common when man was closer to beast, when the moon rendered us insane and we had no concept of when the sun would rise and wash us clean, sobbing and hysterical, unable to remember anything more than the terror of the long night before. Somewhere, dormant, inscribed in the recesses of our collective memory, lies a feeling of terror that is unlike anything else we can experience. Sometimes, enraptured by the bliss that follows emptying our loins into a mate, an almost electric, white-hot lance of panic tears at us, disrupting the biological false certainty that all is well. When danger drags us from the depths of pleasure, these two different worlds struggle for dominance, and if we’re lucky, the latter triumphs.
In my docile state, fortune did not favor me. Not long after returning to my pen, I heard the sounds of my captors entering. Had I not been so groggy, perhaps I would, like many of my friends, have ran to the rear of our enclosure, but had this been the case, I may have never escaped. Suffice to say, I found myself in a state of utmost terror, as a loop of coated wire was thrown over my neck, attached to the end of a long handle. I watched helplessly as many of the others around me were similarly restricted, and we were force-marched up a path that led to the large, shadowy building on the hill.
Many nights I had awaken in a cold sweat at the sounds that escaped that horrible place. We knew not for certain what occurred there when darkness settled, but we knew from the tortured screams that echoed forth that it was here that our journey would one day inevitably end. And so I found myself, drugged and spent, marching step by step towards my demise. When we reached the top of the hill, the large, steel doors to the building were thrown open, and the smell of blood and guts washed over us immediately. I retched uncontrollably, until I was shoved forward past the entrance, as the cold fluorescent lights turned on, one after another, revealing the horrors within.
The floor was soaked with blood and unidentified gore, running cold and sticky beneath our feet. We were pushed through a small area with showers and drains, where harsh jets of cold water washed over us, as we were scrubbed roughly and pushed onward. Next, we were exposed to a series of physical examinations, as our captors poked and prodded at us with a variety of instruments, weighed us individually upon a rusted iron scale, then routed those who did not meet whatever standards they required into another room. It was difficult to see into that chamber, but I’m certain I could see blackened, charred marks all over the room, and the smell of an incinerator firing up, slowly reaching its mandated temperature.
Those of us who matched specification were pushed into a holding area before what appeared to be a wide conveyor belt that angled upward. I’m not certain how many of the others saw the bins that were pushed around beneath the machinery, but I knew as I first met the unseeing gaze of one of many heads severed with surgical precision, that I stood upon the killing floor, and that my end was near. I needed to escape.
At least two of my fellows must have had the same idea, for no sooner had I begun to glance around, did they fall to the ground hysterical, squirming, clawing, and biting as our captors tried to control them. I saw one of our tormentors disappear into the center of our throng, pulled by her feet to the ground below, and then I saw a sea of red and heard a litany of almost pitiable squeals as she was torn apart limb by limb by my fellows. I pushed my way to the rear of the chamber and managed to go unnoticed as the attention of our captors fixed upon the mass of unbudging bodies, attempting to restore order and force them upon the conveyor belt.
There was a hole in the gate that surrounded the holding area, a brief gap in the barbed wire and paneling that kept us in, and I fell to the ground silently, attempting to push my sizable bulk into the painful aperture. After a brief struggle, I braced myself for what needed to be done- I could push through, but not without grinding my body against the barbed wire. As quietly as I could, I managed to muffle my screams as the jagged spikes of metal ripped off much of the skin of my left arm and leg. The pain was excruciating, and I was certain I would pass out. Just as I felt the world start to grow dim, I fell to the ground about four feet beneath the elevated platform of the holding room. Much of this lowest part of the floor was shrouded in shadow, and afforded me cover as I crept towards what I hoped was an exit.
I was able to spare a glance back, and the angle afforded me a look of what awaited my friends. The conveyor belt led to a series of different pieces of machinery, designed to carve my kind into the precise cuts we had seen our captors consuming so often before. But the first stop for the moving panels was at a machine I could only describe as some manner of spinning, mechanical guillotine. The bins of severed heads I had seen before were placed beneath this unholy machine, designed to catch what fell from above so it did not splatter upon the floor. I shuddered and grit my teeth, determined not to meet the same end.
By some miracle, I managed to elude the patrols upon the floor and found a back exit to this unmerciful slaughter house, but as I shoved my shoulder into the door that lead to my freedom, it was then that I realized the commotion in the holding area had been quelled. My friends had been forced upon the moving panels of the belt, and their screams still ring in my head, starting low as they realized their impending doom, then reaching an ear-shattering crescendo from the manner in which it was delivered. Hundreds of feet away, I could still manage to make out the heads as they fell, caught in the carts waiting beneath.
I was cautious as I fled into the night, scanning my surroundings with senses heightened by terror. It was with the utmost surprise, then, as I crept along a wooden balcony, that I realized I had tripped over the legs of one of my captors, rocking back and forth on an ancient wooden chair. In that single, surreal moment, I found myself unable to pull my gaze from his. He was ancient, the oldest of his kind I had ever seen. I’m not certain he believed I was real, as his eyes, bespectacled and riddled with cataracts, seemed to look past me. He grunted indecipherable nonsense, his long, pink ears, covered in fine hairs, blowing gently in the wind. He breathed heavily through his upturned snout, emitting faint, pleased squeals on each exhale. He was gently rubbing his gnarled hands upon the pants of his patchwork overalls, and finally, no longer frozen in terror, I forced my legs to work beneath me, climbed to my feet, and snuck into the night.
And now, miles away, my heart soars with the indescribable joy of prey that has eluded the predator. Beneath this ancient tree, I rest, but I will begin moving again soon, for I cannot be caught. I cannot go back. My kind is meant to be culled by our captors. We are nothing to them, livestock to be raised, sold, and slaughtered. The old creature knew I was escaping, I’m sure. In the desperation of the moment, I convinced myself I had slipped his notice. But as I slinked away into the summer air, I’ll never forget the words he spoke, just for me, so I’d know what a cruel game this was. They echoed softly on the winds of my panicked flight, and now they’ll stay with me forever.
“Here, piggy, piggy, pig pig.”
*****
The woman with black, streaked hair saw, from the corner of her eye, her comatose husband’s body twitch, a not-uncommon sight in the many weeks since his incident. She watched, silently at first, as his arm faintly lifted, slowly but surely rising from beside his body to frail position slightly above his torso. A slight wheeze emitted from his mouth as the hand on the risen arm began to close, indicating, to his wife at least, a desire for something to write with.
“Doctor! Doctor! His hand!”
“Just a twitch, he’s in no danger,” responded the doctor, used to such things.
“I know I might sound crazy, but doesn’t it look like he wants a pen? What if has something to write?” asked Helen in a hopeful tone.
With this utterance, the unconscious man made a small noise again, in the wife’s mind, confirming her suspicions. “Please! Give him a chance!” she begged desperately.
Reluctantly, with an expression that said with no uncertainty that time and effort was being wasted, the doctor called in a nurse with a pen and a pad of paper, which the nurse and the wife arranged in the husband’s hand and beside his torso. Unsurprisingly, to the doctor at least, the man did not react. The wife let out a frustrated sigh, her need for communication with her seemingly-fading husband foiled. She turned to the insensate form beside her, kissed his forehead and murmured “I’m so sorry, this is too much. I’ll see you soon, another day.”
With that, she left the room, the nurse following for other tasks, the doctor right behind her with paperwork. The pen and paper had been moved to a small stand beside the man’s body. The lights turned down a notch.
After several moments of silence, a slow, uncertain hand reached out from the hospital bed towards the pen. Unsuccessful in his attempt, the man knocked the pen to the ground. With a groan, his arm returned sideward and frozen silence took over the room once more, paving the way for one of many oh-too-familiar nightmares.