A slow, steady machine wheeze. Cloaked, clothed, a breath. As I woke up I tore the mask off my face. The ribbed tube fell to the ground, blowing machine breath. My heart racing, my hand fumbled around trying to power off the CPAP. My fingers found the switch.
Silence.
My heart racing, softly in a loud silence, hushed, careful in its tantrum, my head aching, I’d awoken from a nightmare. My jaw hurt from the mask. My throat was dry with heartburn. I’d forgotten to take my medication. I struggled to catch my breath.
Outside, a sound of plastic, of ice, of metal, scratched away, echoing on before dying. A shovel maybe.
My head fell back on my pillow. My leg ached. I tried to fall asleep. I was thirsty and my stomach ached. I stood up. A chill ran in my room. I grabbed onto my walker.
Fragile, choked footsteps as I moved. Only my loud metallic shuffle. Along the hall, checkered waxy wallpaper, dim lamplight, a single bulbous, flowery pendant light, hanging by three dark and thin chains, vaguely reminiscent of cauliflower or fungi, dead insect masses grey through the lamp’s warm glass. My brother’s room, the door open, his bed empty. He was sleeping at his girlfriend’s. On the mattress, his bedsheets covered his pillows, forming an odd shape like a shell or a man in fetal position. In the bathroom, my heart eased, my thoughts cleared. A sleepy fatigue overcame me. I walked out of the bathroom, down the hallway, went into my bed, and stared at the darkness in front of me, and kept staring.
A nervous shudder ran down my spine. In the day, life was hazy, repeated mind-numbingly, a waiting room to death. In the night I scared of everything, an unlit paranoia took hold of me, the rush I could not feel by sun haunted me by moon.
That night, as I tried to sleep, a thought stared back at me from the darkness. A certainty. At first, ridiculous. Then a spark of possibility, mocking me from wherever my subconscious could uncover it. Then a necessity. A fear of death. I would get up, walk to my brother’s room, find the bedsheets turned over, and what had been hiding under, waiting for me to leave, now scuttled nearby.
Now in the unknown behind me.
A shiver ran down my body, anger rose inside of me, I would give in to it again, I could do nothing. I had to wake early tomorrow, there waited for me a life I had to attend to, I could not afford insomnia. I pulled the sheets off.
I held on to my walker again and limped to my brother’s room before turning on its lights, lights that would hinder my sleep. The shape was still there, laying on the bed. Nothing was behind me.
But the shape still seemed uncanny, the things it hid taunted me with fear.
I sighed and stepped forward. There was no curiosity in my movements, no bravery or apprehension, I leaned on my walker, lifting the bedsheet. Pillows.
I went back to my room and crawled into bed.
On the edge of sleep, a thought prevented my drifting into it. My hand wandered out of my bed, into the darkness, grabbed for the tube, then the mask. I pulled it back onto my face.
The slow, steady machine wheeze began.
If I slept without it, I would wake up fatigued and sick.
A slow, steady machine wheeze. I woke up again, around three in the morning, this time entirely unable to fall asleep. I couldn’t, not with the mask on. I took it off. Now I would sleep badly, waking up more tired than I’d been in the night. I placed it back onto my head. The machine pushed its breath down mine. I removed the mask again and threw it on the ground before turning the machine off.
I breathed freely. And in the darkness I heard a slow – steady – machine – wheeze.
The sound was far away, lost when I focused on my own thoughts. I must have had misheard it. But on the edge of sleep it came to me, wheezing mechanically, slowly, steadily, far, far away.
Far away down the hall.
I jumped out of my bed muffling a scream and ran to the hall. No sound. A nightmare. Lightning shot up my right leg.
Not again.
No strength of will left to go back for my walker, I decided to limp down the rest of the hall, down to the room my mother and father shared. I needed to look. Nothing again. A now fading nightmare.
And in the silence, in the suffocating darkness, as I stared at my sleeping parents, the sound came to me once more.
A mechanical wheezing. Far, far away. Down the hall, which ended at their room, though not tonight, extending past their room, past the house and the window, though identical to the section that preceded it.
Night I. Human Life
I walked up to the window. This could not be real. The space the hall must have occupied was empty through the rimed glass. The house held its normal shape. I backed away from the window and looked again at the hallway. I kept watching it. And nothing about it changed. Taking a few steps forward, I placed my hand on the walls. I could touch them. I backed away.
“Wake up dad.” A single overwhelming though interrupted by the wall that had appeared before me. The entrance of the hallway closed off; my way back was blocked.
My throat began burning. While my thoughts ran, molted, fused into each other, I fell in a corner of the wall, clutching my skull. I could not bring myself to look further down. I stared at the wallpaper. I would not look behind me.
A slow, steady machine wheeze.
I turned around.
“Please.”
I wanted only liberation. I could never bring myself to fight. I could never bring myself to hide and wait.
I faced the sound and walked forward. Step after step, the same hallway, the same dim flickering lamplight, the same dead insect masses grey through the lamp’s warm glass. But then came a buzzing. The dead bugs began squirming and writhing and something black and alive fell on my shoulder, I ran.
Until I came upon a single room.
A visceral pain pierced, skewered my internal organs. My stomach twisted upside down. Something corrosive rose up my throat. An acidic dry breath fled from my mouth. My thoughts screamed, boiled. A humid cold crawled up my skin.
Before me, in the middle of the room, was a sort of cube, ribbed, distended, corpulent tubes and varicose tendrils crawling out of it, pulsating, wounding their way around the room, burrowing into the walls and floor, sending a shudder through the barely kept together mass of flesh and weathered metal, stitched into an impossible whole. Screws and bolts, twisted and bent, protruded at unnatural angles. Mechanical whirs, a wet squelching, a whispered, continual drip, and that same slow, steady machine wheeze.
I stepped back. My right leg seared with tensile pain. I fell.
I kept staring at the thing in front of me. There were plates of deformed, misshapen bone sawed and fixed to it, near which what seemed like the remains of severed appendages protruded slightly, wrapped in bandages soaked, dripping with dark blood. Exposed wires ran from it to the wall.
I stayed there as time passed on and it seemed to breathe on and nothing else happened.
A slow, steady machine wheeze.
I waited.
A slow, steady machine wheeze. Straining for breath, uncanny, mechanically, industrially alive.
On its side, a table, with a wooden bowl on it.
I stood up and slowly, weighing my steps, sweating nervously, my heart beating so loudly it shook my head with its pulses, bracing myself for a startle, I walked to the table.
In the wooden bowl was a lightly charred piece of white fish on brown rice, with thin roasted slices of lemon.
“What?”
Distorted, mechanical, deformed, inhuman, synthetic, sawed, an old man’s voice: “ Vood, vheaze”
Food, please.
I turned to the thing. It had a hole on its top, with rows of seemingly glued on dentures of mismatched teeth. A sick nausea overcame me.
“Vood. Vheaze.” Strained.
Tears welled up in my eyes, something in me flipped, I ran away, and at the end of the hallway, unblocked, my parent’s room. I ran past the bathroom, past my brother’s, to my room, jumped into my bed and pulled the covers over me.
Hearing only my own heavy breath, feeling only its moisture well under the covers, I did not sleep or think or move until the sun rose.
Night II. Hanged Men Don’t Swing
The corridor had vanished when I woke. I went through the day in a haze. At work my supervisor scolded me at our weekly meeting. My friends told me I looked distracted, almost lost.
When I returned home I peered again and again into my parent’s room. There the hall ceased; the house’s limits were correct, according to reality.
Exhausted, I laid down hoping to rest my eyes.
A slow, steady machine wheeze. Cloaked, clothed: a breath. As I woke up I reached for the mask. There was nothing on my face. My hand fumbled around trying to power off the CPAP. It was not on.
Please, please not again.
I would stay in my room. I would not leave it until the sun rose. I looked out the window. My eyes began burning. Tears again.
No-
The trees were dull, grey, alien, branches malformed, waving against a backdrop of purple and blues but grey still and only grey. Their leaves like steel wool, tangled, rigid.
Far, crushed by the foggy, distant horizon, an unimaginably immense black figure moved with impossibly heavy slowness, beyond the trees and houses. Humanoid, its skull leaned far back, as if the back half of its head looked up, and from its nose to its neck were rows and rows of white shapeless teeth lined over each other.
I could not avert my eyes.
Two red dots, bathed in their own glow, locked onto me.
I began running, past my brother’s closed door, past the bathroom, past my parent’s room, into the extension of the hallway I knew I would find.
Into the room where the thing stood last night. Though it was not there.
A sickly, emaciated young boy with thin, sallow features stood in its place. Naked, covered in filth, reeking, he held a revolver to his face.
“Lost Grace waves idly on a whimpering swing,” he said as if to himself.
What?
“Chains creak in tempo, seen carved and spread in blank of yore.”
What’s going on?
“Lost Grace raises iron and leans cold echoes, singing in a choir of dark sheen, against its temple.”
I didn’t understand.
“Hey buddy,” I said, my voice trembling.
“One single chamber filled, brimming with promise, bursting with potential for new light.”
His hands were shaking violently; his eyes, wild and manic.
“It bleeds for shapes, past the divine fractals it’s spoken before, things simply novel.
Hypocrite, it has been smeared and scribbled over, beauty again begets tedium.”
He was reciting a sort of poem. I slowly extended my arms towards him. “Calm down little guy, put –” A deafening gunshot filled the room.
Night III. Man Overcame
My nightmares, so visceral they had left reality hazy, stuttered, rotted my day, more than any ever had. I lapsed in and out of consciousness, the people I conversed with seemed intangible, illusory, untalented and clumsy actors.
Once during lunch, once more as I left work, and more frequently still as the day went on, thoughts of sleep would spawn a sense of scopaesthesia, insect-like and crawling on my skin, into my heart, loudening, hastening its beats, filling, drowning my ears with it; brief attacks of panic at the thought of my bedroom.
As the sun melted away I turned my room’s lights as bright as they would let me. I drank coffee and watched movies. In the morning my eyes were bloodshot.
And again the following night.
Nearing delirium I had convinced myself I could go on sleepless. The third night I succumbed to fatigue. I woke up frenzied near midnight, to a metallic, hoarse wheeze that clinked at the end of its outbreaths, the same slow, steady machine wheeze.
Tears began streaming down my temples, onto my pillowcase. “Not again, not again,” I repeated. As I wiped them off, I felt the glossy, weightless plastic against my face. My hand pushed the CPAP’s off switch. The breath ceased.
I sat, idle, thoughtless, a squirming darkness perfectly still before me, and heard not a single sound.
Then came a distant motorized whirr, far outside the window. It ended and again a deep silence seeped in the darkness.
I laid my head back on my pillow.
I could not fall asleep.
I stood up, passing by my walker, and made my way to my door, propelled forward by first a fearful fascination. I turned the handle, opened it, moved into the hallway. I walked past my brother’s room, past the bathroom, into my parent’s room, then in an almost trance-like state. The hallway went further than it should have, as it had the previous nights. I followed along the checkered, waxy wallpaper.
But the hallway went on.
And on.
And on.
My leg began aching worse and worse.
Unending dim lamplight. The same bulbous, flowery pendant light, flickering as if in its last moments, interrupted by the flicker of the next light, and the next. Each sporting the same grey, shadowy pattern of dead moths and spiders resting within.
Until I blinked and I was not anymore where I had been.
Or perhaps it had been a gradual change. Gone unnoticed.
Mendelssohn. One of his songs without words. The venetian gondola. I was in a space that extended without visible end in every direction. Although it was without walls, it had a ceiling, which along with the flooring was a blurry untextured grey. In the middle of the space, or what seemed like the middle, were walls, the same grey, walling off a large venue I couldn’t see the inside of. The piece having only just begun, only the lower voices were playing, the music seeping out, muffled, from within the large central room. Old, golden stanchions lined off its few entrances, connected by thick velvet ropes.
Then the melody began. When I heard the first note, like distant, obstructed party chatter, a man was born two months prematurely. He scraped his forehead as a child while learning how to bike, a scar he wore during his wedding, which his parents did not attend. Two more notes, he remarried twice, had three sons, died in snowy tram station. The melody went on, his youngest an athlete; a girl with pretty eyes cheering him on at a college game, another note, they divorced, their daughter a social worker, another note, the daughter’s children cried around a hospital bed, the song went on; sons and daughters with grandsons and granddaughters, three nurses, two bankers, a president, a singer, one last note rang from the room.
I looked around. Aside from the venue there was an infinite nothingness, no movement, no sound, no object or detail. I felt so infinitely alone. The song began again and as it went again and again and again, I forgot fragments of my past and who they had made me into, in the rushing rapids of lives flinging into my mind and out of it in the blink of moments, everything about myself left me.
Again, again, it would all come back to me, as I looked at the venue and a faint sense of being watched brushed past my back, as I turned around to the unending emptiness, as the indescribable sensation that listening to the piano keys pouring out of the room filled me with left no trace after it had left.
I do not know how long I stayed there, listening, looking behind me, a thin glassy fear shattering with every look at the grey, grey emptiness, before I decided to walk into it, away from the lined off venue, away from the music.
The time seemed to stretch for much longer than the hallway. For many, many days, perhaps weeks, not the weeks that come to your mind as you read these words, but real weeks, long weeks, with their second and minutes and boredoms and hungers. There was no music anymore, no venue, only a low grey ceiling, and incomprehensible vastness. Until I walked further along and there was also a young man, laying on his back with closed eyes, his hands behind his head, as if soaking in an invisible sunlight.
I stood there staring at him, though he did not move.
“Hello.”
He opened his eyes and looked at me. He said nothing. The young man stayed there, staring, breathing deeply.
I remained, without moving, examining the man for hours. He was the only thing I felt I had ever seen. His body was fit, extremely healthy, almost chiseled. He was handsome and his skin was incredibly clear. His hair was blonde, of medium length, though long for a man, and flowed down in loose locks. His nose was pointy and freckled, and his eyes were a greyish green. He wore a white tunic and brown, leather sandals. His cheekbones were fairly high. His upper lip was thin. He looked like me. What felt like days passed.
“Hello,” he said. Not expecting an answer, I had not thought of my reply.
“Where are we, and who are you?”
He kept staring at me, blinking occasionally. He answered hours later.
“I don’t know.”
“Why are you taking so long to answer?”
“What’s the hurry?” he said.
I thought and could not find a logical answer. “I don’t know.”
“You’re 24, and yet you only think of death,” he said to me.
I laid down next to him and we stayed there for a long, long time, until there came a slow, steady machine wheeze.
The laze and languor wisped away from me. I started to my feet. There was nothing around me. The man still laying down with his eyes closed.
The breath’s whisper continued. I listened to it and it almost seemed to me as if it was growing louder. Closer. Though however much it did grow larger, it grew so imperceptibly that I could not certain of it.
“Can you hear it?” I asked.
The young man looked at me but did not answer.
I had been imagining it. I listened and listened but I could not catch it anymore. Until I realized it had morphed into the silent drone. Until the silent drone grew louder, back into a discernable breath.
The breath morphed ever so subtly, first turning raspier, then into a growl.
Out of the horizon’s haze of distance, on four legs, ready to leap forward like a rabid wolf, appeared a smile of long, straight, sharp teeth.
My heart threatened to beat its way out of my ribcage.
The thing began towards me. I ran.
My footsteps echoed into the drab infinite. Shards of pain sprouted thorns in my right leg. But the thing’s steps ceased, and a morbid, sickening sound of tearing flesh replaced them. Then my own steps. I turned around in disbelief. My teeth were chittering. The thing had stopped atop the man. Out of the scene screamed the rip of torn tissue.
I felt tears again. Why me?
“Why aren’t you running?” I yelled out.
Gargled, a voice came back to me. “What’s the hurry?”
I collapsed.
I woke up in cold sweats. It was a cold, harsh, sunny morning. I gazed out of the window. The trees were barren and frosted in rime. I didn’t have problems at work again. My friends said I looked better. That day I didn’t feel anything when I thought of sleep. Night approached. I slept well, a numb, dreamless sleep.
Coda.
You might think it cheap. Stories of nightmares. Inconsequential. Intangible. Dreams are necessarily unreal. Worthless in their lack of ‘having happened’. That is entirely wrong. There is no difference, precisely in its consequentiality. Whether dreamt or lived truly, all stories are is time passed, time gone, time irrecuperable. Nine hours lost, though probably more if you slept badly. In this way, perhaps they are even more important, consequential.