Two years had passed before Bunnu, who was still awaiting trial in the detention facility in the Morellan town of Asoka Plains, began to suspect that he was slowly starting to shrink in size.
Now, in his cell, he laid back on his mattress, watching an ant crawl from his fingertip, up the wrist, to disappear into the forest of hair that adorned his forearm. Bringing his arm up to eye level, he scanned through carefully in search of the elusive mite, as he craned his neck upward from the rock hard surface of his pillow. Unable to find it, he wondered where it could have gone and, more importantly, how it had ended up here in the first place.
He relaxed his neck again with a sigh as his head fell back against the pillow. The detention center was said to be impenetrable to the outside world. Airtight: or so the claim went. Normally, he wouldn’t mind that a mere ant had managed to break through the defenses of this facility, but he had been under the impression that this place was the perfect controlled environment. But how could he go on thinking this were true? Certainly, it used to disturb him that this facility was meant to be isolated from the influences of the outside world. In fact, it had been a source of great despair for him in those first few months. To be so removed from the mechanisms of civilization that one could only assume oneself to be a kind of rusted old gear, no longer necessary to the workings of humankind and, thus, made to waste away in dormancy amongst other such gears in a forgotten pile of scraps: how could one possibly feel a sense of purpose in these circumstances?
But this initial cynicism eventually wore away, as he realized it would be of no benefit to view the matter from this perspective. And thus, he soon came to embrace the insulated quality of this facility from the outside. There was something pristine and unreachable about it. Something that allowed him to feel a sense of peace, as it was closed off from the existence that he had known.
And thus, there was a freshness to this atmosphere, despite the darkness that seemed to pervade in his cell, the shadows that dominated his surroundings; a familiarity encapsulated him in the tight quarters of a receptacle that had been designed for those relegated to obsolescence, affording him a comfort in the absence of light that could scarcely impel him to crave anything more. The light, in fact, shimmered in dully from the hallway through a thick frosted glass window on the cell door—that was so densely layered with sand-blasted frost that, in its opaqueness, it ceased to even be a window anymore—causing the inbound rays to separate through a tiny translucent perforation in the exterior of this glass into colored bands of the light spectrum that spread across the wall opposite. Bands of light and dark oriented themselves like patchwork as they had upon Bunnu’s face on that day in the washroom of the inn. What connected those patches of light and dark? Where did one end and the next begin? Bunnu had asked himself these sorts of questions, in the past, to be left with no answers, but only with more questions. Yet, now relishing the darkness that persisted amidst the rainbow of colors that adorned the wall of his cell, Bunnu could imagine that the patches of light and dark weren’t at all, in fact, connected, but were entities that flourished independent of one another.
Light and Dark: each was unaware that the other existed.
Bunnu was, hence, prone to dwell in the bands of dark as the colors that emblazoned his surroundings seemed luminous in their curiosity, probing depths of him that he sought to keep private. To reveal them would be to grant access to that core of him which had until now remained secure in its state of sanctity. The darkness was not so imposing as the light, since Bunnu had seemed to garner from the former—albeit not from the latter—a tacit understanding that the depths of him were not to be approached, nor tainted by aspects of the outside. And in rejecting these entreaties by light and dark, it was Bunnu himself who came to be obsessed with the prospect of probing the inner reaches of his own core—a realm which, in and of itself, could only be advanced upon through internal dives of immeasurable distance, but which was not so distant in the way one would perceive in the tangible world, for the process of diving down into oneself was tantamount to an intentional reduction of one’s Self along infinitesimal increments that occurred over what seemed like vast expanses of time until one became tiny enough to probe the very interstices of consciousness. In this way, his core remained a realm upon which neither darkness nor light could prevail, but one for which he held an undiminished and inexplicable fascination.
Bunnu, thus, dived down into himself frequently, settling to the depths in search not truly of an answer, but of something that made the very concept of an answer seem a trivial concept. In fact, he had no concrete reason to search, except that he knew something was in there, deep in the recesses that sought to be probed and dissected and reduced to smaller and smaller pieces: sliced and bisected and further stripped of its superfluities and, thus, shredded down to its rudimentary components, which would thereupon be eviscerated until one was as close to the boundaries that separated Reason from its absence as one could possibly be. Bunnu had, by way of this introspective process, dived and searched and chopped and dismembered, but always seemed to return to the surface, his quarry lost and settling, in its reduced state, further down into the Trenches, while he was left struggling to keep his head above water and gasping for air. The process had, until now, proven a failure, but to expect success may have been unreasonable. Yet, he understood that it was necessary that he keep trying. To him, this precious solitude with which he had been endowed could only have been a result of destiny as it was apparent that he was meant to be given this opportunity at self-realization.
It had now been 222 years since he had left his life in Bahlia behind and, in that time, Bunnu had had a variety of life experiences, all of which had brought him here. In that time, his experiences had transfigured his constructs of reason: all of them crucial to realizations that had manifested in his lifetime—some as minute turning points, others as full-blown epiphanies. There were times in which what had seemed interminable in its progression and irrefutable in its significance had given way to a kind of lingering abscess upon the conscience which soon hardened to form encrusted debris to be scraped away and later forgotten. The exaggeration of these fleeting blisters upon the perception was likely inescapable even upon one’s sudden realization of their triviality, as they were part and parcel of the Moment and nothing else, in one’s immediate discernment, could possibly be deemed important in comparison. Thus, he was inexorably bound to understand, regardless of the seeming relevance of each instant, that, later on, all that he had viewed as meaningful and noteworthy would largely end up being minimal and fundamentally vacant over the course of time. Nonetheless, he approximated that this illusion of significance that was attached to it could only have been useful to him, insofar as the experiences themselves would be reference points for future events and were, despite their ephemeral nature, carved intricately into the façade of his perceptions. Carved like ancient texts, perhaps. Inscribed: whether it was as an abstract portrayal of his allegiance to the diplomatic agenda of the Greater Kaiiba-8 Football Association prior to his falling out with Takeo, or a still-life of his subsequent turn as a vagrant in Baba City. There they were, his experiences: carved upon ancient corridors of his mind. His entrance into the workforce—a time in which he coexisted uncomfortably with other new hires in the company dorm of the RavanAlloy Mining Company: this was a rendering which could only pale in comparison to the etching of his failed marriage with Pinky Satyajit—the beautiful vaudeville dancer-cum-spy for the Intelligence Ministry of the Republic. One follows these pictorial representations, gazing upon the countless images, leaving nothing omitted as the walls of the corridor upon which these impressions lie could not bear to disregard his stint as a zookeeper in Gautama City in the course that it plotted to the dark recesses of the Moment in consequence. All of these experiences had served to shape his current perceptions.
All of these experiences had served to bring him here to Asoka Plains.
Consequently, h
e couldn’t help but be filled with an intense elation at the prospect that he had been brought to this exact place for this very important purpose. To envisage that this controlled environment that now encapsulated him came about, similarly, as a result of a series of very important causal events, which now came to coincide with his own circumstances, was something that had, until recently, managed to elude him. Yet, it now seemed abundantly clear that Asoka Plains, with its rich and complex history, could only have come to be the sort of place it was now through the exact juxtaposition of events that were now relegated to the status of legend: events which may not directly have had anything to do with Bunnu solely, but which have nonetheless made their impact upon the environment surrounding him. And so, to be in this corner of creation, in this moment, felt greatly auspicious. Meaningful even, for destiny had brought him here by the magnanimity of God’s grace. Thus, this seclusion was essential to the greater scheme of things: both for him and for all that existed out there beyond the walls of the facility.
And with time, the prospect of his imprisonment being an act of divine providence started to make more and more sense to him, until he could finally understand in very plain terms that this experience was truly important. That day on the river bank, he hadn’t been able to conceive of the possibility that he had done something wrong and, therefore, couldn’t see any reason for his incarceration, as he had no sins for which he had to atone. But over time, he came to realize that this wasn’t a sensible way to look at the situation: it wasn’t a matter of right or wrong. In fact, the concepts of right and wrong—though he could only assume these to have been sophistic entities conjured in parallax of his circumstances—didn’t seem to factor in at all and were, thus, irrelevant. What mattered was that he was here. That much was clear to him. Nothing could have been clearer. All events in his past could only have culminated in him ending up here. There was no way around that. In fact, any attempts on his part to reverse the effects of what had been done in the past would only have caused the natural predetermined order of events—human or otherwise—to adapt accordingly so as to counteract such attempts, leading him thusly and without even the slightest variation to the same end result: imprisonment. Such was necessary to maintain the equilibrium of causality. His imprisonment, too, was also necessary to maintain some kind of equilibrium in the outside world and within himself. Hence, everything in the heretofore had been a prelude to this and all that would happen from the here-on-out could be said to have had its origins here. One could only hope for the Cosmos to be so systematic in its devices. And the Asoka Plains Detention Facility, being the controlled environment that it was, exemplified the same sort of cohesive configuration as that of the surrounding Universe, albeit on a micro-scale.
Yet, now, with the appearance of this incessant little ant, which he could feel upon his skin rooting around for something amidst that jungle of hair, Bunnu had to contend with the possibility that a tiny aperture had been found in the system that enclosed him. An isolation that he had assumed to be self-contained and closed off in its defenses had been pierced through, allowing for exposure to outside molecules in the form of an insect. The system had been contaminated and every moment that the ant remained served as a reminder of the noxious air that he was now breathing, air he could no longer trust, as it came from a world that had grown stale and distant from him with the passage of time: a decomposing world of people and things and events that his previous Self had once inhabited and that he had—in this facility— sentenced to a forgettable and petty demise, which is not to say that he, in doing so, had managed to immerse himself completely in solitude. Of course, there were other people, things and events all around him, right here in the facility. Other elements of time having moved on from the exhausted, withered incarnations of its previous Self. But these elements, too, had managed to remain a part of this self-contained system and were, thus, preserved beyond any hint of decay. And therefore, before the incursion of this six-legged harbinger from the outside, he had been able to live amidst these people and these events, amidst the noise of his surroundings and still deem his condition as being one of seclusion.
In fact, there were people all around him in great numbers. Chattering voices that bounced off walls and crept into his cell, making it simply impossible to feel as though he were utterly alone. One couldn’t just hear the chatters, after all. There was also the coughing and the farting and the snoring, which was so loud, at times, that one might have thought the snorer in question to have been sharing the very same bed. And, of course, now and again, he could also hear the crying. Sometimes there was that, too. However, Bunnu did his best to ignore it, because it always seemed to give him a headache.
It was the sound of crying that bothered him most.
The Design of the Facility