Cartesian Certainty
It's 6:15 in the evening and she is sinking into madness once more. The day dies outside her window in gradients of colour painted against an industrial skyline, and with it goes her tenuous hold on reality. In the daytime, it can be so hard to see more than what is straight in front of her eyes, but under the dark cloak of night reality sprawls thick around her in a dizzying tangle of possibilities. Her window overlooks a river and the moonlight winks off the surface of passing waves. Her window overlooks a busy street and the stream of headlamps make twinkling stars in the night. Her window overlooks a sea of lonely souls as they drift by, each of them brains in a jar, uncertain of the existence of anything but their own awareness. (her window overlooks a quiet garden which reflects only her own thoughts back to her). In another universe she makes wise use of her gift for perspective: no doubt she is so adept at it that she can transfer her own mind into the physical body of another. In this universe though, she is wasted potential until the magic hour of dusk creeps across the skyline and shadows become chains and paralyze the senses (there is something familiar in their slow slouch away from her body: something she is so intimately aware of in the way that they stretch taller and less familiar as the sun sinks low. She is never sure whether her shadow is her own or whether it belongs to someone else).
6:23 pm, and madness marches in with the dusk. Her breath is catching in her lungs and she strains against it even as her mind buckles under the kaleidoscope of reality: her knuckles are white as her hand grips the armrest of her chair (her knuckles are white as her hand grips his hand. As her hand grips the banister of a meticulously polished railing. As her hand grips the branch at the edge of the world). Her computer is a distant memory in her lap. Outside the window, the last shadow yawns into a black chasm that becomes night, and she is lost, as always, in its grip.
A moment passes. She breathes into her uncertainty; checks her pulse; sighs; drinks a sip of wine and grimaces at the sour note. "Should have gotten sake," she mutters, glancing at the Argentinian Malbec in disdain. It is somehow 6:49 pm, and she curses at the theft of time. She shifts in her chair; holds her laptop like a beloved weapon. The lines of her body are sharp and prepared under the soft weight of it even as her fingers flex swiftly across the keys.
A sudden clatter from the back porch startles her – "Goddamn it Forehead, you stupid animal! That better not be my marigold!" she shoves the laptop to the side and surges toward the backdoor to fling it open—a ragged-looking mutt cringes next to the shattered remnants of her newest addition to the impressive menagerie of potted plants. She opens her mouth to scold the wretched creature.
6:53pm. She staggers backward when the image is overlaid by jagged pink hair and watery green eyes brimming with tears: there is a familiar angry snarl on a petulant mouth. "Sa—" the word begins to tear itself from her mouth.
6:54pm. She is left with the bitter-tasting broken edge of it, lips breathing a memory she never earned, and she dimly recognizes the soft wet snout of Forehead as he snuffles against her bare feet in apology.
7:10. She goes inside. She wishes she could shut the feeling of loss outside with the neighbour's dog.
"Look, all I'm saying is that I'm not sure you're making a good choice in studying something as impractical as philosophy. You're such a pretty girl, sweetheart—what about fashion or cosmetology? I mean…" the voice goes on. She pulls the phone away from her ear as she grits her teeth and closes her eyes against the assault of good intentions. The tinny speaker advises the grass below on setting realistic goals, and suddenly she is no longer listening at all: a smell is wafting across the park and it is all she can do not to cry at the loneliness it conjures within her (A plate of barbecue held out toward her. There is friendship in those hands, and comfort in the lines of those wide thumbs). "Are you still there? Are you even listening?" the phone distracts her with its petulant cries, "God knows you're distracted these days. Sometimes I really worry. You ungrateful girl, making your mother worry." She mechanically raises the phone to her ear again—"Call me when you are actually willing to listen"—and the line goes dead before she can compose any reply. It's just another nail in the coffin of her relationship with her mother: they have always butted heads over her need to question everything (her mother has always supported her in her need to find answers to everything). Her hand clenches around the phone as reality splits again for a moment: she knows she should worry that these episodes have started creeping into her daily life but she cannot find it in herself to care. A brain in a jar can only be certain of its own awareness, she savagely reminds herself (what if? What if it could be aware of more?).
"It's 3:40," he grates out, irritation evident in every angle of his body.
"Yes, thanks for that, asshole. I can tell time too." She has no patience for his precious little ego today. His expression remains unchanged and unimpressed (he wasn't nearly so composed in the Forest of Death). She blinks against the foreign thought and sighs, giving up. "I got into an argument with my mom, ok? She never gets it."
"Aa."
"Yeah." They settle into their reluctant routine, computers out and thick tomes occupying the space in between. There is an army of highlighters and pens littering the no-man's land at the centre of the table before she cautiously breaks the silence again: "What if…what if Descartes had it right, but not quite right at the same time?"
He frowns at her, "Try laying off the weed, stupid. Maybe you'll make more sense then."
"Still carrying your older brother around like an albatross?" she sneers, "Try being original, and then maybe you'll grow your own personality."
"Bitch."
"Little shit bastard."
"So," he intones, waiting.
"I mean, I know that we're studying the nature of certainty and doubt, and that there is a point to which such things are helpful and then there is a point to which they reduce you to incredible existential paralysis, and of course, it's good to question things because we are so easily deceived by what we want to believe and what we most easily perceive and Descartes was right in all his circle-jerk psychotic babble to question the senses, that little shit—"
"Hn,"he interrupts her diatribe,
"-right. Though he totally was a self-absorbed ass and we both know it, but that's beside the point—I'm still talking! Put that phone down you insensitive bitchface—what I mean is, how do we know that we can trust what we know of ourselves? What if everything we know is a lie? What if it was just one original lie and that was all it took for us to build all these truths off of it. I guess what I mean is, how does anyone live with that weight of uncertainty on their backs?" her cheeks are flushed from sharing thoughts which had only existed as whispers in the dusk of her mind. A long pause, and then-
"Your mother is right: you should have studied fashion," he dismisses her (the sound of birds fill the air alongside the crackle of lightning. A man will always kill a friend). It's 4:48 pm.
It's pouring rain when she sees him, and she is so shocked at the sight that she doesn't even remember to check her reflection in the window next to him. They lock eyes and somehow, even in the pouring rain, she knows his shadow stretches toward hers like he owns it.
Her world shatters.
It's 6:03 pm.
(Kai.)