XXXVII
For Bean, there was an instant, when he was consumed by the swirling vortex, where his consciousness had been refined to one singular point. It hummed like a perfect fifth before it too was swallowed up by the grand nothingness.
And like dank sweat, he was secreted into another world.
He awoke, almost instantaneously, in a crumpled mess on a pile of shrubs. It was a starless night, and there was a rasping wind. It wasn’t strong, but it brought with it the kind of coldness that crept into one’s bones and froze them from the inside out.
His first thought was screaming. It was a prolonged and desperate cry. He held the sound with such ferocity that his mind began to feel at ease. And the longer he sustained the cry, the calmer he felt, hidden behind it. And when his mind had exhausted itself, his body became overwhelmed with a sense of warming pleasure, as if he had just run a thousand miles and knew, in that instant, that he needn’t step an inch more.
Thus, his second thought was relief.
He had never experienced anything like that before. Moving through doorways, even irrational ones at that, had become drab and common. He had died so many times that he no longer celebrated the feeling when his soul took off or came into land. Though he could feel it, it had become something that was calculable and expected, and therefore entirely uninteresting. Having rationalized death, he no longer had a need to experience it.
This, though, was unlike any death before. And what was stranger, as he searched frantically, was that there was no door from which he might have come. There was no logical passage; no in and no out. And therefore, as he quickly deducted, wherever he was, there was no easy escape.
The last thing he remembered was looking upwards, and watching his superior cut him free like a dangling thread. He would have done the same, were he in the other shoes. And he might have been quicker at it too. There was a job to be done after all, and with it, there was no ground for needless possibility.
But as he thought of being cut away, disposed of, and forgotten, he became, for the first time, overwhelmed by feelings inside of him. Although it was one sensation, it felt as if it were many - sensations that were as real as the muddy ground beneath his feet, yet invisible and indescribable.
All of a sudden, the thought of moving became heavier than the action itself. And so he threw himself back into the muddy ground, like a rickety vessel, swaying hopelessly back and forth, and never drifting farther than its poorly tied mooring. He hung onto the reeds so tightly that his knuckles turned white and his nails dug into the skin on his palms.
The next thought that he had was of himself; as of being aware of himself. In his mind, he stared up at his superior and at his bloodied leg, and it became patently clear that he had failed. And as quickly as the tides of emotion seemed to come and go, his isle of placid contentment was quickly washed away by a flood of self-abasing feelings. The first was guilt, and that was followed quickly by shame. And then, when he remembered the instant that The Accountant knife cut through the cable, the very last of his rationale was eroded, as the emotions that swallowed him up were sadness and then panic - as he was shaken vulnerably at the thought of being alone.
His heart started to race, and his breath became fractional. He clung, as hard as he could, to the swaying shrubs and reeds, and he swayed with them, back and forth, waiting for this swell of misery to subside.
“God help me,” he said to himself. “I can feel.”
He tried to move, but legs gave way. They folded beneath him and he collapsed into the mud again. All he could think was that, very soon, Heaven would cease to exist, and that it was all his fault. He had no desire to go on. He wanted to just lie in the dirt and wait for God to lash him.
He stayed there, feeling wave after wave of torridness and disbelief ripple at his image of himself, before the sound of someone walking nearby, jolted him awake. Immediately, he was charged with fear. His body filled with adrenaline, and though his mind felt light and racing, his legs and his arms felt heavy and stupid. So he hanged onto the reeds and swung back and forth, where, not a stone’s throw from a path, there came a sound much like a rusted door being wrenched open, and then slammed shut.
It was horrible and frightening.
Bean stayed as still as he could, imaging the sound coming from some giant mechanical beast with icebergs for teeth, and black holes for eyes. His mind conjured a Frankenstein of possibility for what monster was responsible for such aural reckoning. And as his fear swelled, so too did the depth and shape of his imaginings.
“Please God, take me home,” he whispered.
The sound grew louder and more deafening every second. It was sharp and stabbing. It came in short bursts of high pitched screeching. Each time, Bean shut his eyes and hoped like hell that if he could not see it then it could not see him. But only worse was when he shut his eyes for couldn’t help but imagine the beast from which he absconded, so clearly in the Light of his mind.
It was when the sound stopped that he held his breath and opened his eyes.
“What is that?” he said to himself. “I know that.”
He could hear the voice of a young girl singing.
“The lord’s prayer,” he said.
Feeling his fear slowly peel away like dead skin, he crept closer, but not so much as that he should accidentally be given away. Crouching low, and swaying with bushes and reeds, he eyed the shadow in the distance. All he could make out was a pair of crooked legs, which looked bent and deformed, and trapped inside metal braces. As much as he strained, he couldn’t make out anything else. That was until it spoke.
“You’re not real!”
As impossible as it seemed, and as irrational as it was, he knew the voice. He had heard it speaking into the same fretful undertone, hiding behind a veil of false bravado. On the path, not a stone’s throw from where Bean crouched, a young crippled girl stared fearfully over the moor, sure in her head that she was being spied and soon to be set upon, by a pack of bloodthirsty oafs.
“It’s her,” said Bean, almost disbelieving. “The discrepancy.”