Newt Run

You See the Town

  A shattering that gives way to a blind field. There's no thought, nothing even close to it. This, now, this is, it's uniform, an immersion, a toneless intimation of the fact that now is, and is, and that is all.

  But.

  What? How can there be anything else? Although there is – small, microscopic maybe, but there, eddying in the endless current, not a thought (because there's nothing to think with and nothing to think), but there is... something. A sensation? Or at least an impression, possibly an imperfection – the sense that what seems to be whole is in fact a broken beat, and that you are beating with it.

  "And that you are" – call this a thought, and after that it happens quickly, patterns emerging in the field, variations in light, shapes as well as colours. You understand that there are things. It's a big leap, and one that doesn't come easily. In fact it's violent, maybe the only true violence, a final, perfect rending: once a thing's been torn it's torn, there's no repairing it, no return; there are things, each separate from the next, and you are separate too, distinct within a million other distinctions. That immersion in a unified whole? That's gone, and gone so far that even trying to describe it was a waste of ink, or at least of digital memory. And another thing: it's never coming back. Try naming it and fail, try pointing to it and miss. At most there's only the sense that it might have been, like mist from a fading dream, a thing best described by its absence: the hollow in a glass, or the space between spokes on a wheel.

  There's no sense worrying that it's gone. Things go, that's all, and anyway, this new world is more interesting, if less embracing; ten thousand different things, a million, infinite – look at one and you can't fail to see another, either within it or differentiated or implied by it, each of them unique, their own length and width and depth, their own reach and span of time, their own space and their own name.

  You know their names. There's no telling how you know them, but it's obvious that you do. Maybe the name of a thing is intrinsic to it, although that's debatable and sounds more like fantasy than the other possibility, which is that you gave these things their names without knowing that you did it, or at least without admitting it to yourself. Regardless, you're finally starting to get a handle on this world, this place where you find yourself. For example, over there? That pitted, stubbled field? That's a town, and the wide, grey line cutting through it is a river. There are houses, and trees, and beyond those, hills. Cars, people, garbage, windows, terraces, fences, pipes – one by one they receive their label, and perception for you is suddenly one long, instantaneous act of categorization and sub-division. You couldn't separate yourself from these words any more than a soul can leave its body. You and the names are stuck together, and armed with them, you see the town.

  It isn't small. In all honesty it's probably pushing the limits of what can properly be called a town, but as you're new at this game you get a pass. So let's call it a town, but if it is, it isn't a quiet one. It moves, teems actually, its narrow, winding streets clogged with traffic, pedestrians and vendors shouting into the crowd. It sits crammed between the surrounding hills and on either side of a river that cuts it in two. Most of the buildings are uniform, three storey townhouses with brick walls and tiled roofs, each of them connected to the street by a complex series of pipes. Originally these pipes were intended to provide the town's homes and businesses with cheap, renewable heat, shunting pressurized water vapor from a geothermal station next to the hills, but the system has never worked properly, the brainchild of an idealistic (and long dead) politician, and in recent years it's fallen into disrepair. As a result the town is wreathed in steam. From above it even appears to be smoldering, a pit of hot coals doused with water, or a meal of concrete and pavement left out to cool.

  Following the course of the river from its mouth at the sea, away from the docks and shipping lanes and past the mid-town apartment complexes and office towers, you come at last to the under-privileged north. Here the homes are older, centered on a rambling collection of tenements. Most of the pipes are badly maintained rip-jobs, rigged to siphon heat from wealthier neighbourhoods. You watch as a steady trickle of men arrive at the foot of the northern hills, lining up for the cable car and another day of work in the mines. If you look carefully you can see the anxiety on many of their faces, a visual record of the odd rumours circulating in local bars about men who've gone missing, good men, men with families (although that isn't always the case – some of them were single, and only a few of them were good), each of them silently taken by the earth, lost in the depths of the mines, and even if the bosses deny all this, going over the improvements that have been made in safety procedures, calmly reiterating that there's nothing to worry about, the truth is they're worried themselves and are just better at hiding it.

  You are aware of every face in every crowd, reading their emotions as easily as if they were written in a book. For instance, you know that this man is smiling because he quit his job, or that this woman is upset because she doesn't know how to explain to her mother in the capital that she can't make it back to her own father's funeral.

  You smell the bread baking, and the soft, organic scent of the shampoo a teenage girl is using to wash her hair, the thin reek of blood stains on pavement. You hear words spouting from a thousand throats, the metallic clatter of a truck rumbling across 3rd Bridge, the splash of water rinsing the street in front of a butcher shop.

  You see the town, but it isn't right, and you know that; nothing else moves as you do, nothing else exists in this way, formless, spread across every square foot of the place at once or exactly here, at the intersection of Norfolk and Nascent, moving from one face to another, each of them containing its own story and each its own prison.

  You are not like them, not trapped in a cage of flesh, and the truth of this is terrifying – you move, but have no body, see but have no eyes, and worse, no eyelids to shut any of it out: sights, sounds, smells and sensations flood in, unceasing, remorseless, a kind of torture, steadily flaying you, laying you bare. You want to cry out, yell, shout in the face of a thousand strangers, but you don't have a throat and the sound dies before it's born, echoing hollowly in a void, the ghost of a scream and nothing more.

  5 Years Later