CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT - Charlie's Departure
Emboldened by the hot coals of his righteous purpose, Charlie stepped forward towards the incision. His stride was unstirred by the rushing torrent of wind that tore past him from every direction, bending the fine hairs of his bare skin. The air fought viciously in defense of her young; she pushed away every atom but those of her son's, whom she now warmly beckoned.
Charlie stepped again, and in spite of the warm, omnipresent buttermilk that coated his mind, he felt his thoughts return to him.
"I- I was," he began, his voice naught more than a whisper, but it still bounced from the chamber's walls. "I was just a boy."
In the deep, concentrated vapours that encircled him, Charlie felt his memories burn away a crust to reveal the wet, white skin beneath. He found his mother; a figure of love, kindness, and protection, and he felt the sting of betrayal when she abandoned him in the night. Packed in a small box tight with blankets, rainwater dripped down from the air-holes that were stabbed through its lid. He felt his eyes wet with despair until the morning came, when two coated samaritans dressed modestly as stylish nuns had retrieved him. They lifted the lid to find a very small child, curled and soaked with rain; "Charlie," is what he'd said his name was, and it seemed to be one of the only words he knew.
He remembered the orphanage, cramped and decrepit as it had been. He remembered the moldy wood of its lumbered walls, he remembered the kind and friendly faces that fed him and tutored him. He remembered the smell of beef roast and tangerines, the parties in the shining ballrooms and the friends he danced with to an orchestra of rainfall on xylophones -
"That - no," Charlie mumbled with a start, "That didn't- happen to me."
The nuns appeared now, in paintings which oil had begun to ooze, hot with the humid summer air. Their dresses, brown and white, gave way to currents of flowing crows' feathers, and he found his lonely eyes gazing at them through sheets of glass.
Charlie turned his eyes to find Bonka, and although the machine watched intently through eyes focused and aflame with pride, his mouth would not reply.
Charlie shouted angrily at him, "I was just a boy!"
Desperation swelled within the child; his very heart clambering wildly for an ounce of affection, for sweet acknowledgement - everyone else has more, I know it. Everyone else is happier. Every answer is written in books everyone else has read, in every film they've watched and every conversation they've had. Pleasure, perfection through satisfaction and fulfillment, of money, of friends and of family, in different amounts but in perfect ratios for everyone- but me. There is respite only in disconnection, reprieve only in music and light and sound and the dopamine of the artificial reality.
Which strings played this curse, what moments carved these runes that enshroud my dreams with despair and voidal darkness? I see no faces, no faces in the smoke of the chemicals, where others see entities of love and tranquility and divine satisfaction - but for me, there are none. There is nothing. I ascend time's desertous, sandy hills, it's heat drying my skin and my bones, towards the barren light above me. Even in a space without time, where rules lie plain in divine geometry, where every dream and memory transcend together into one bright ego, burning hot as the sun's plasma - in the unruled beyond, there are none but me.
"Bonka-" the boy stammered weakly, "Which memories are real?"
Bonka's lips curved in a smile. He replied deeply. "That question doesn't have an answer."
At Bonka's sides, melting into existence through shimmering walls of rippling space, appeared three familiar children: a stout boy and a blonde-bobbed girl woven together, their parts and strands streaking through the other's clothes and skin like rivers of colour through white paint, and another child with wavy brown hair, frightfully pale skin, and a thousand-mile stare.
Charlie asked the first child, "Did your satisfaction persist, Gloop? Did it never feel like the nothing you grew up with?"
The boy did not reply.
"What of you, Viola?" Charlie asked, his head unturning, "Did your connection to another soothe your anxieties? Did your dreams quiet their lamentations?"
The girl did not reply.
His eyes found the last child. "Verona," he spoke quietly, but he knew she would not answer him, "The compounds, the stones - the pleasure you pursued, are the memories they created enough?"
As expected, she did not answer. Charlie turned away from their oppressive, terrified stares, and solemnly surrendered, once again, to the grasping incision.
Reconciliation, at last - Charlie thought, as the white tendrils of light melted his perceptions into blinding, untethered awe; the incision shimmered wider as his arm passed its event horizon, sending fractals of dancing kaleidoscope crawling like web up his arm, scattering beads of coloured neon, ripe and bursting, against the white velvet of his skin. The space beyond death, the space beyond time, the space devoid of feeling as he could have thought to perceive it - unloving, unhating, pure and teeming with the rippling heat of entropy's reversal - his elbow, swallowed now into the the blinding white; his shoulder, his face...
This is part 1 of a two-part chapter. Thanks so much for reading! I hope you're eager to see what lies beyond the incision. Please leave me a review to let me know what you think!