Ineffable

XXVII

  It had only occurred to The Young Cripple, after a great deal of time mind you, that she had yet to take a single breath. Stranger than having legs that worked as well as her arms was the act of not breathing. When she was alive, she might have gone a whole day, or even a week or a year for that matter, breathing, but not being aware of it. Very rarely would she stop and notice her own breath, unless it was short, or she was fighting for it.

  Now, though, a slight panic washed over her, as if she had just realized, after a century of sitting in her favourite armchair that she was currently fifty feet upwards, dancing on the wing of a jumbo jet.

  “I can’t breathe,” she said.

  She started to clutch at her chest as if it were caving in.

  “You don’t breathe,” said T, correcting the girl. “One implies ability, and the other a trait. Try to relax. Breathing, when you were alive, was merely an expansion of your vessel. Your lungs were pistons, and your thoughts, for the greater part, like thick plumes of smoke. You are consciousness, much more than a few corporal parlour tricks. Try to be kindness. Be whole. Be…”

  “Light,” said The Young Cripple, like a reflex.

  “No,” said T. “Anything but.”

  “Then what?”

  “It’s hard to say. It’s not something you think about doing, it’s just something you do. So there’s no real word to describe it. It’s just, thinking whole I guess.”

  “When I’m supposed of think of things I can’t, especially if I have to write something for somebody else. And most of the time, when I think things, it’s always about something bad that’s about to happen, either to me or to someone I know. Most of the time, I just end up feeling sad or afraid.”

  “I haven’t been doing this long enough, I don’t think, to be able to tell you right. I know someone who has, though. Her name is Seventy Nine. She has a popcorn stand, by the door. It’d do you good to hear a bit of her wisdom. The kind of real travellers, and real spacemen; not like me. I don’t know enough, not yet anyhow.”

  “At least you’re ok with that,” said The Young Cripple. “That’s something.”

  The pair continued on their journey, along The Bridge, with The Young Cripple staring straight ahead, for the most part, and then wandering, like a cork in the open sea, when distracted by her fears and her indecision.

  It was still awkward, not breathing, just as it was, feeling no kind of air against her face or skin, even though she could hear was sounded like gusts and gales, and even though her body simmered and shivered as if both hot and cold winds were wreaking havoc around her. There was no air touching her skin, which had her panicking, thinking that she had no skin. So learned was she, though, in quieted panic that she addressed each concern with a light brushing of her fingers, simply to cancel out her distress, in how a bus driver might wipe away a drop of rain, or in how a child might brush off, their parents’ distressing concern.

  A girl who has lived and died only once, though, is arted in little more than naïve assumption. So, although she thought her physical actions were unsuspicious, it was the light tremors of emotion, like ripples in a very small pond, which gave her away.

  It was now too that she started to become more abundantly aware of her surroundings, and how terribly frightening it all seemed. It was as if some drug had suddenly taken effect, and being so ill-prepared, the young girl entered a state of dire panic.

  The radio tuned into her frequency and then started to play a horrible piece of classical music; if music is what it could be called. It sounded as if the strings of a piano, as veins in its composer’s arms, were being ripped and torn apart by a flight of wailing banshees.

  “It’s ok,” said T. “It’s just a bridge.”

  Like a trick of the eye, there were now apparently several grounds, and they were layered one on top of the other, like a cake. It was difficult to tell which one she should put her foot on. She staggered around like a drunk, taking prolonged steps as her feet passed through each perceived layer of reality.

  She felt as though she were wearing an old man’s prescription lenses.

  And it wasn't just the ground either, the horizon bent and warped. One second it was in front of her, where one would imagine it being, and the next it was beside her head, and it was as small and annoying as a gnat, buzzing away at her right ear. Then, as quick as she swept it away, it returned to her front, but this time, there were fifty horizons, some of them bigger and smaller than the others; and to her distorted surprise, there was even a horizon where she and the boy had already reached their destination.

  “What’s happening?”

  “How do you feel?” asked T.

  “Horrible,” said The Young Cripple. “Like my head is on a Ferris wheel and my body on a slingshot. I want it to be over.”

  “Try not to fight it,” said T, completely relaxed, as if he were explaining the ache of stinking gas to an infant as not nearly being as serious as their stomach exploding. “It’s completely normal. You have nothing to worry about. You are seeing, hearing, feeling, and being; on a higher dimension. It will take a second or two to adjust, but if you look ahead, there is a version of you which already has.”

  The Young Cripple turned in the direction that the boy’s voice pointed, and yes, maybe a minute or so down the line, there was a version of herself that was skipping as she had been, only hours before.

  “If that’s me, and she, or I…feel ok, then why don’t I feel ok now?”

  “You are a three-dimensional being, and, as you can see now on The Bridge, a dissection of your complete self. That being, the ‘you’ that occupies and has occupied the complete realm of time and space. What you’re asking, to be able to feel as the version of you a minute from now, and every other version of you - in past, present, and dotted along the future fabric of time - this is a trait of a higher being, not you, not even I. What you are talking about is omniscience.”

  “Like the boy?”

  “Like the boy,” said T.

  Distracted, the girl tripped. The many grounds were popping out of one another like shadows on a cube; while others were perpendicular, shooting off in all directions so that below her - and around and above her too - everything looked like the ground. One second she felt like she was flying, and the next, as if she were falling.

  And as for the horizon, it was in all places at the one time.

  All of this was dizzying. The Young Cripple closed her eyes, but even her thoughts shaped themselves differently. Her own voice was foreign. It spoke in inconceivable sentences and ideas, where it seemed that every vowel had been replaced with a prime number, and every preposition, with a sensation akin to being poked, or prodded.

  When she turned behind her, expecting to find relief, she saw at first that everything in front of her had already turned around too, even her feet, even though she had only moved her head. When she blinked, everything returned to how it was.

  Stranger, though, was seeing this great, almost infinite line of herself, stretching on for as far as she could see. It was as if she were seeing every second, or every infinitesimal fraction of a second, as it was occurring, or as it had occurred. She could see time unravelled in its complete form, dissected like the boy said as if it were an open box.

  “Relax. Look ahead, at the version of you a minute from now. See how calm she is?”

  It was true. She did look content, and settled too.

  “You see every version of you, between now and then. There is no grand event or perilous challenge. The only thing that has changed is her perception, and how she feels. Knowing that,” said T, “how do you feel?”

  The girl expected to give a poor review of how she felt. The truth was, though, as she saw the other version of her skipping and smiling again, the tide of panic that had been eroding her courage grain by grain, finally started to recede. And in a minute or two, her senses began to settle. They felt different, like worn leather, but there was less friction on what she would assume as b
eing common, or sane. Feeling as if she had awoken at the end of a ferocious fever, The Young Cripple wiped her brow, turning behind and staring jadedly at the many versions of herself.

  “I’m ok,” she said.

  “Of course you are,” said T.

  It was now that she could properly see her surroundings. What had at first seemed like a long and empty path, surrounded by a lush valley of green reeds, was in reality, far more complex.

  The Young Cripple looked below her feet. The ground, which she could now make out, was clear like glass, and as solid as steel, yet when she touched it - like she would a lamp post or a cooking pot - she squirmed and pulled her hand back in fright as if the pot were actually a slimy mollusc. Although it looked and felt quite solid to walk upon, there was an invisible membrane that covered the whole path, and probably out in the reeds too. It was warm and soft to touch, yet to stand and walk upon, it was firm and even brittle in parts, and it felt no different to cement, or at times, like finely laid bread crumbs.

  What really caught the young girl’s curiosity, were the clouds that were forming to her left, way in the distance. They weren’t like normal clouds, or any cloud she had ever seen before, and yet, they were where clouds were expected to be.

  They were small, but The Young Cripple could still make out their incredible shapes. What she couldn’t figure out, though, was what the devil they were made of. Each cloud was transparent, or so it seemed and filled with as many coloured dots and bright flashes as there were, grains of sand, on every beach in the entire world.

  There were about twenty clouds that she could see, in some kind of detail. And behind them, there were so many that it looked like the sky was made of bubble wrap. They went on forever it seemed, each cloud fractionally smaller than the one before it. And so on, and so on, for as far as her squinting eyes could see.

  “Pretty clouds,” said The Young Cripple.

  “Pretty thoughts,” replied T. “Each shape is a thought.”

  The Young Cripple stared with all her might at the cloud or thought that she could see the clearest. She had never imagined a thought as being something that you could see outside of your own mind, and that, like a purse or a person; it could be described by its appearance, and not by its contents.

  “Who’s thinking them? If they are thoughts, there has to be a head and a brain - someone has to think them up.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe the boy you said.”

  “Maybe. Do you see the one over there, second to the left?”

  Though T was just a voice, he knew the position of all things.

  “I see it,” said The Young Cripple. “The one that looks like a tube. Is that it? What is it?”

  “I lived there. It is where I’m from. Well, the last time I died anyway.”

  The Young Cripple cringed as if the boy had sung off key.

  “Each one of those thoughts that you see is a universe. And that one, the one that looks like a tube; that was mine. If it was a bit closer, I could even point out my star.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “It’s kind of an ordinary thing to exaggerate. But yeah, I am.”

  “So all those shapes, all of them, they’re all universes?”

  “Yeah. Here, on The Bridge, or below or wherever, is where they form. When we go through the door, we are born into a universe, more than likely different from the one we just came from.”

  “How many are there? How many universes?”

  “That I don’t know, trillions maybe, probably more. It doesn’t take long for them to form. And then when they do, they just go off on their own way. Like clouds really.”

  “Where do they go?”

  “Where do your thoughts go, when you stop thinking of them? Those worlds you make up in your head, what happens to them when you think of something else?”

  The Young Cripple looked fraught with guilt.

  “I never thought about it.”

  “It’s not that bad really. The truth is; some of them never stop growing. They go on forever and ever. And others, they just kind of disappear.”

  “There’s so many. Can we see one being made?”

  “We should be,” said T concerned. “We should have seen thousands by now. Like I said, something’s not right.”

  The two kept walking along the path with The Young Cripple focusing on the horizon as much as she could; but the wonder of seeing something as spectacular as a universe, let alone trillions of them, broke her concentration, and time and time again, her eyes drifted, and as they did, so too did her thoughts.

  And with it, her feelings turned upside-down.

  “I don’t want to think,” she said, almost in tears. “If I think something up, and I forget about them, they’re just gonna drift forever and ever, and then get cold and die; all alone.”

  The boy didn’t respond. His senses were on danger, on the edge of the horizon.

  “There, up ahead,” said T. “Can you see it?”

  The Young Cripple squinted as best she could. And yes, she could see it, or what she thought it was, or might be.

  “It’s a hole,” she said, in disbelief.

  “It’s not a hole,” said T, a little concerned. “It’s a door. A hole cannot be shut.”

  As they neared the shape in the distance, The Young Cripple could see what was at first, a blotch of darkness, like a black rectangle painted onto a white canvas. But now, as they got closer, the canvas got bigger, and she could see into the hole.

  “This isn’t right. The door shouldn’t be open.”

  There was a door, except it was torn off its hinges, and hung like an old toenail.

  “Where’s the boy?” said T.

  “What does he look like?” asked The Young Cripple, seeing nothing and no one at all.

  “Well he’s not invisible,” said T, crassly.

  “You don’t have to be mean.”

  “I don’t get it. And where’s Seventy Nine?”

  The two looked around. There was, at the end of The Bridge, a hole in a wall. It was a hole that led to what looked like a town, but an old-fashioned town, with horses waiting outside doorsteps, and barrels of water, lined up along the street, dirtied by filthy, iron working hands. The light that shone was dim, and it cast the most horrific silhouette of a family, hanging by the neck at the town’s entrance.

  “There should be a boy. And Seventy Nine,” said T, the static from his radio how hissing like a cut snake.

  He sounded nervous for the first time; borderline scared. As they neared the door, The Young Cripple peered through. She could hear the sound of tightened rope swinging back and forth. The way that it dragged and pulled had the girl thinking of a tightrope, which always had her imagining tragedy and death.

  There was a loud cracking sound as if the glass they had been walking on shattered. And then a flash of Light. From behind the hole in the wall, a whistle sounded, as if a shift had started, or another had just come to an end.

  And then there was the sound of marching.

  “Hide,” said T. “Quickly, behind the stand.”

  The Young Cripple dived inside the popcorn stand and waited. Though she didn’t breathe on this conscious plain, still, out of some instinct she had learned from a whole life of being frightened, she held her breath.

  “Soldiers march!”

  “Sir yes sir!”

  A hundred million voices all sang.

  “Aleph-Null, or so I’m told,

  (Is) Heaven paved with blood and gold,

  And I will fight till end of time,

  With iron fist and love divine.”

  “Sound off!”

  “One, two.”

  “Sound off¹”

  “Three four. We are Light, we are war!”

  And they chanted those last words as they marched: “We are Light, we are war.” Their feet hammered down on the path in such deafening unison that the Light about The Bridge flickered as if a wire were loose.


  “Stay still,” said T.

  By the time the last soldier had reached the gate, the first had returned, walking backwards along the path with a torch held in one hand, with its other hand scrunched around the scruff of some poor looking creature’s neck.

  As much as T reasoned with the Young Cripple to keep low, and eventually, to shut the hell up, she couldn’t resist; she couldn’t help but look. Worse than seeing evil was hiding from it, and then imagining where it was, and what it was planning to do. The sound of their marching feet, not an inch from where she hid, was like the itch of a scab that she just had to pick at and pull.

  The Young Cripple lightly pushed the panels of the popcorn stand just enough so that she could see the entrance to the doorway where, what looked like a colonel, now stood, holding a silver chart in his hands. He didn’t at all look anything like the other soldiers. He wasn’t sexless like the others, and unlike them, he had a particular face, one that was as handsome as it was, wicked looking. He wore a grey uniform with a small sigil on his left breast; though try as the young girl did, she couldn’t make out it out.

  “All accounted for, sir,” said The Colonel.

  “Any sight at all of the discrepancy?”

  “No sir. We looked everywhere, beneath every atom. If there was an extra one, we would have found it by now. Maybe it’s a system error.”

  “There are no errors,” said The Accountant. “Take them to processing.”

  “Yes sir,” replied The Colonel “You heard the man. Get moving.”

  The Colonel extended his whip against the backs of his own men, throwing his full body into every strike. As he did, The Accountant eyed each soul that walked through the doorway, blinded and drunk on fear. He was looking for something or someone, in particular, that wasn’t a part of this group. He stared back out where his soldiers had come from, back to the place where it was that the dead arrived, and he twitched nervously, just once, before scouring his face and marching back through the door, and into town.

  The Colonel walked back and forth, whipping everyone who slowly trudged forwards. He stopped every now and then, distracted by the small, yellow seat that stayed empty by the door. He stared at it for some time, just as a grieving widow might, the vast emptiness on the other side of her bed; but before any feeling could become him, The Colonel snapped to his senses, once again whipping the backs and faces of perilous souls, hobbling towards the open door.

  “Ok, let me make this clear,” he said, as the marching came to a grinding halt. “From now until always, you will do as you’re told. You will be where you are expected to be. And you will never be the contrary. Is that understood?”

  “Yes,” was said by one and all, but it was dull and uninspired.

  “Did I ask you to disappoint me? Well?”

  The eleven hundred souls were dressed in distress.

  “This is a glorious day,” said The Colonel. “A goddamn momentous day. You should be fucking cheered to be in my company right now. You should be downright grateful that you are here, right not. Holy shit,” said The Colonel, sounding almost pleased with himself. “I am pleased to be with myself. You, you should be goddamn fucking ecstatic. Are you ecstatic?”

  “Yes,” said the eleven hundred souls.

  “Sounds like a pack of quivering fairies to me? Are your cocks hard? Are you fucking pleased to be in my company right now?”

  “Yes,” they all shouted as if their words were kicks and punches.

  “You oughta be. You oughta be turned the fuck on right now, just about humping my fucking leg. That’s how pleased you should be to be here in Heaven, under my command, under my watch, under my control. Let me be frank with you. And know that this is only because you’re new here. You’ll never see this gentle side of me again, once you’re spat and shined. Now, rules are everything. And so are lines. You step out of line just once, and you’ll see my worse side. Please, I implore you to step out of line. Do it, just once, so we can get a little more intimate.”

  The Colonel stepped aside and allowed to line to continue moving. “Rinse your mouths before you enter,” he said, as each soul was handed a small soiled cloth, a bar of soap, and a small cup of bleach.

  One and all did as he ordered, washing their mouths with stinging bleach.

  “Welcome to Heaven maggots,” he said. “Watch your step, and don’t rush,”

  When the coast was clear, The Young Cripple and T crawled out from inside the popcorn stand. They stepped up to the door and peered through. On one side, everything was bright and luminescent, and the other, the sky was dark, and the air stank like sweat and fear. But there was nobody around. The whole town looked abandoned.

  “What do we do?” said The Young Cripple terrified.

  “It’s a door,” said T. “We go through it.”

  “But there? It’s so dark. If this is Heaven, then where is the Light?”

  The Young Cripple stared at the yellow, plastic chair which was big enough for a small child. As she reached to touch it, the radio buzzed.

  “No. You mustn’t. In case he returns and sees that somebody had interfered.”

  It was silent, both on The Bridge and through the door. The Young Cripple stared back from whence they came. And the infinite hers, all tipped on their toes, anxious to see what she could see, wishing they were not stuck in the past.

  “You said you would,” said T.

  The Young Cripple nodded.

  “And besides, there’s nowhere else to go. We find my body, then I’ll help you go anywhere you want to go, and do anything you need to do. I promise.”

  Normally she would take a massive breath right about now. But she didn’t breathe on The Bridge, and even if she did, there was no air. Habits though were hard to break. So, she heaved in with her belly and with one hand on the radio, and the other covering her eyes, The Young Cripple dived through the door.