Bunnu had always assumed that the other inmates were real, tangible beings…but, now, it occurred to him, for the first time, that even this was something that he could not be completely sure of, for he had never seen their faces. Vikram, Yoshio, and Jagdish: as far as he knew, they were simply voices, though it was not completely out of the realm of possibility that they were mere figments of his own imagination. Worse yet, they may even have been fabrications, created by something external to him that sought to deceive him for one purpose or the other.
Opening his eyes now on the mattress, he sat up, momentarily allowing himself to entertain this reasoning. Something from the outside sought to violate him and was using these sounds and voices to appeal to him. The other inmates may not have been real entities, but elaborate illusions meant to deceive Bunnu’s perceptions. Meant to draw him out of his cell for some unseemly purpose.
Hence, the unlocked door…this was all beginning to make sense!
It was thus necessary to be vigilant and critical of even the minutest detail of the surrounding reality as it, too, may well have been some kind of deception. The scraping of their toes and heels against the floors, the padded plastic wrap sound of changing diapers, torsos bumping against walls, the reverberations of their flatulence: All of it could have been a ruse. The smooth, dreamy tones of Vikram’s voice, the gravelly sound of Yoshio’s, the incessant cackling of Jagdish: all of it a ruse! The color spectrum upon the wall: a ruse! The taste of the beans: a ruse! The rock hard surface of the pillow, the smell of the dirty diapers before he deposited them in the chute, the feel of the sores festering upon his soiled, unwashed skin: Ruse! Ruse! Ruse!
It all made sense, now. It seemed conceivable that even the outside corridor, the Yard, and the facility itself didn’t truly exist. Asoka Plains never existed and neither did the country of Morell. And there most certainly was no such thing as a Republic. In fact, political systems didn’t exist either. Neither did the words political or system.
Bunnu’s past, too: this was a deception. He had only now come to be sentient. His first moment of existence was now and he had spent the entirety of it, thus far, in this tiny dark room, reminiscing about fictional events that could only serve to give the present Moment its texture—if for no other reason than for the sake of making it seem comprehensible. This idea that the past only existed to give the present cohesion was not, in fact, a new one…or at least it didn’t seem new. To say the least, the past was good at overstating its own significance and thus the concept of past, in and of itself, could only be best regarded as a convenience sake’s supposition, which abidingly made it subject to one’s immediate doubt. Accordingly, to Bunnu, the only thing conceivably beyond the reproach of doubt was that he existed right now and in this moment, but that too seemed uncertain.
Perhaps, his first moment of sentience had been when the ant appeared. He could very well have still been frozen in that moment and—stationary within this temporal locus—postulating a potential future arc by which time may progress, thus relegating his perceptions to a subset of imaginary time, as they could more likely be described as anticipatory reflexes than perceptions, per se. This is to say that he may actually have been existing in the past and approximating a conceivable future, which brought even the assumption of his immediate perceptions as being in the present into doubt. And thus, he couldn’t—beyond a hint of skepticism—say that he truly existed right now and in this moment, but instead it seemed more rational to assume that he simply existed and nothing more.
The Many Natures of Dust