Chapter 5 – The Line Forest
Drip
Drip
Drip
I had that dream again.
I began to awaken. I had a terrible headache, but I didn't know why. Maybe it was because my bed was harder than usual. Wait…that makes no sense. A faint, pale green light filled the sky and leaked in through my eyelids as I awoke to see an endless, cloudless, starless sky above my head. "I don't remember having a sun roof," I thought to myself. I realized that for some reason I was lying on the ground outside. I felt a cold, hard surface beneath me. I looked down to see a deep, depressing gray ground. I couldn't quite tell what material it was made out of. Was it some type of soil? It wasn't anything man made. It was completely hard and completely flat. I punched it. My fist connected with the ground and stayed there, making no sound upon impact. It didn't even hurt; I didn't feel anything. The air was a silent as the ground was featureless. I sat all the way up and looked around, trying to interpret my surroundings.
Evenly spaced in alternating rows all the way out to the horizon was a series of systematically placed, geometrically precise, solid rectangles, longer than they are wide. They were about the width and height of a small tree, but instead of a living organism, they were long, flat, unvariegated and unvarying in form, cold and eerie as a cast iron fence but completely devoid of design or function. They stretched as far as my eyes could see in every direction and beyond my peripheral vision, and yet they were all an identical, finite size. Their exactitude and uniformity was beyond mathematical imagination.
"Holy shit," I said, my voice echoing out into the endless void that I seemed to have found myself in. "What the fuck."
Scanning the horizon again, I came to the conclusions that there was nothing there except me and these incomprehensible shapes. "Oh man," I said to myself. "I'm finally alone." You weren't there. I stood there and gazed out. No sounds. No movement. No life. "Thank god." For a brief second I was at peace.
Pop. Like the sudden and unwanted presence of a jack-in-the-box after a pleasant melody, you materialized instantly and wholly right in front of me.
"Fuck," you said, looking at the world around you. "This is some wack ass shit." You walked up to one of the protruding lines, stared at it for a bit, made an angry expression, and punched it. A dead silence. You stood there with your arm extended outwards, fist touching the line for a good minute and a half. Then you lowered it, walked towards me and punched me in the head.
"What was that for, man?!" I screamed.
"I didn't get the satisfaction I expected from punching that line," you explained. "Hey," you said, "You didn't even blink when I did that. Your head's not even bruised. Did that even hurt?"
"Come to think of it…no" I said.
"Hey man," you said, "you're still not blinking. In fact, I don't think I saw you blink in the last like 10 minutes. It's fucking freaking me out. Why you not blinking?"
"Uh…I just don't really feel like it," I said.
"Does that explain why you're not fuckin' breathing either?"
"Yeah."
You looked around, presumably attempting to comprehend your surroundings, no doubt contemplating the purpose to which we were brought to this strange landscape. Your eyebrows furrowed and you felt around on the ground for a moment or two before moving towards one of the lines and looking closely at the base where it connects to the ground. "Where's the outlet," you said. "Come on, let's go look for an outlet."
"What you even want one for, you don't have any plugs with you," I said.
"I wanna play Xbox."
"You still don't have nothing to plug into anything," I said.
"Whatever, I'll find one." Without consulting me any further you strolled away into what I can only describe as the forest of lines, passing through the spaces between them rapidly despite there not being a straight line for you to walk in between them. I followed. It seemed like we had walked for a very long time, yet it seemed like we had gone nowhere. The lines had a hypnotizing appearance as we walked and all of them, from the very closest one to the one on the far reaches of the horizon, seemed to stay the same distance away from us. Nothing changed. I stopped and you got farther away from me. The distance between us increased. I ran to catch up to you, but still the lines were all in place. The light in the sky hadn't changed either.
"Hey, are we moving?" I asked you.
"What are you fucking stupid? You're moving your feet, of course you're moving," you said.
We wandered like that for what seemed to be hours, but since nothing changed, I couldn't tell how much time had passed at all. I relied only on the vague feeling inside me, which I began to doubt more and more. We moved forward, we moved to the left, and we moved to the right. Still the scene was identical.
In the distance I heard a faint sound, the first one besides your voice I had heard since my own voice. When I could not even hear my own footsteps below me, something was making a rumbling noise beyond my field of vision. I couldn't tell what it was.
"Do you hear something?" I asked you, hoping to confirm that what I was experiencing was not solely my mind's invention. You looked down at me with a look of such unimaginable scorn that I recoiled under your gaze.
"Yeah, I hear something, and it's a foot shorter than me and it needs to shut the fuck up," you said.
"…What?"
"YOU. YOU. …IT'S YOU."
"Hey, I may be shorter, but at least I'm in proportion, unlike you with your lady hips and really elongated waist. It looks like you were made out of rubber in a factory and they hung you in the air when you weren't completely dry yet and then you started dripping slowly down."
"Wow…I would be offended if I thought that meant anything."
And once again I lost a battle of wits. To an idiot.
Again I heard the rumbling. Even you admitted it. "Hey, what's that noise? You hear that?"
"You mean that noise that I heard a while ago that you denied the existence of?"
"No I mean the noise that I heard that you failed to hear."
"I heard it first. It's a bus."
"Shut up. It's my noise. I heard it first."
"You can't possess sound waves—they move."
"Don't assume that everyone else has your difficulties. Stop using the psychological strategy of similarizing everyone to your level in order to feel normal."
"Similarizing? I don't think that's a word."
"Yes it is."
"No…it's not."
"Yo, you think there are fucking dictionaries here? There isn't anything here. But if you insist…"
You pulled a sharpie out of your pocket and wrote something on your hand.
"Here. First dictionary." You lifted your middle finger to me to demonstrate that you had written "similarizing" on your skin along with a pronunciation guide.
"It's not a dictionary if you don't include a definition," I stated. You quickly pulled the sharpie out and inscribed something on your other middle finger. "To similarize," I read as you lifted both middle fingers to me simultaneously.
The sound got louder. "Hey, I hear my sound again," you said to deliberately antagonize me.
"Really? If that's your noise, then what's its name?"
"Jeremy," you said with unanticipated immediacy.
"Fuck….prove that."
Just as those words emerged a bus drove up next to us and stopped. The windows were blacked out so that we couldn't see inside. The bus was painted red with strange MTV metal band drawings of googly-eyed cartoon demons having a party in extremely saturated colors. Huge multi-colored flames were painted as the background with images of people receiving torments. I figured it must be some band tour. The door pulled open and a voice said, "Sorry about Jeremy. Here's been really loud lately."
"In your face! Again—defeated," you said. You claimed victory by literally thrusting both middle fingers into my face and then walked straight onto the bus.
"Dude, don't go in there. You don't even know where it's going," I said, concerned.
"Oh, no…no. I know where it's going. Away from you."
"Why do you hate me so much!?" I screamed.
"Geez, that's a really loaded question!" the bus driver yelled. "You don't just say that to people."
"Yeah," you said as you traced your finger down your face in the imaginary path of a tear.
I debated with myself for a little while if I should get on this bus with you or just turn around and walk into the eternal oblivion of lines. The choice was difficult. But eventually I decided to get on the bus because it was air conditioned. You sat down in the priority seating section, despite the fact that the entire bus was empty.
"Those are for the disabled," I said.
"Yeah, you're right," you said and stood up. "Here you go."
"That was in really poor taste," I said.
"Yeah, you're right, this is priority seating, I shouldn't have offered it to anyone else but me," you said as you sat back down, now lifting your legs up so that they took up all the seats with priority seating labels.
I sat on your legs.
"I know you think that's gonna make me move them, but you ain't gonna win this, man," you said, not even budging.
"Everyone remain seated," the driver announced. "This is a one way trip. Destination arrival time is in 2 hours."
"What time is it now?" I asked.
"Twilight," the driver responded. He had an unusually base and gruff voice despite being fairly polite, though laconic and rather bored sounding. Then I noticed that his hat was in a strange shape. It didn't quite fit on his head properly. Upon closer examination I noticed a pair of horns poking out from the sides of the hat. It was then that I noticed that his skin was a particular bright shade of green and that he was driving with his tail, which was long and prehensile and forked at the end. With his hands he occupied himself with a game of Tetris while driving.
"Please stop staring at me," he said awkwardly. "It's really making me uncomfortable."
"How did you know I was staring at you?" I said.
"I'm a demon. I know everything."
"Oh."
Suddenly I heard this muffled sound of screaming behind glass. I could barely make the words out. It sounded something like, "stop…wait….please…I don't wanna be alone….where am I…it's meaningless, all meaningless here…where are you God?!…"
I turned around to look out of the back window and saw a man running as fast as he could, clutching his hands together as if begging.
"Hey I think that guy is trying to get on the bus," I said to the driver.
"I know. Didn't I just tell you I know everything?" he said. He began to slow the bus down.
"THANK YOU SO MUCH! THANK YOU!" the man screamed as he began to slow down and reach for the door to ascend the steps on the bus. The bus, however, continued moving at the exact same pace that the man was running at. His face began to look confused. He ran a little bit faster to catch up to the door. The bus sped up to match his new speed. The man ran even faster, now just as fast as before. The bus sped up even faster. The man finally stopped running and fell on his knees crying into his palms. The bus stopped completely. "THANK GOD!" the man shouted. But as soon as he reached the doors the bus started moving again, repeating the process.
"This is funny," the driver said.
Finally, as the man was screaming continuously into his palms, the doors opened and the driver said, "get on."
The man tentatively approached the bus.
"Ticket please?" the driver asked.
"What?" The man said, dirt all over his clothes and his eyes tearing with desperation. "Can I just buy one now?!"
"No," said the driver. "They're not for sale."
"What do you mean?!" he screamed.
I began to say: "Hey, we got on and we didn't have—" but you put your hand in front of my face. It still smelled like Cheez-Its.
"The trick to life man, is to pretend that you own everything" you said, and popped a soda and started drinking it.
"Where did that come from?" I asked.
"I already had it. Because I own everything."
"Holy fucking shit, you are such an asshole about everything. This reminds me of the time when we were playing Roller Coaster Tycoon and I had spent hours and hours of dedicated gameplay making the perfect amusement park and I had a 100% rating and like thirteen pretzel stands and when I got up to go to the bathroom for two minutes you swooped in and changed everything, like you not only deleted all of the bathrooms and garbage cans so the guests were really unhappy, but you replaced all the amusements with the same one water ride in every space. You even named the park "Axel is Awesome" and renamed like half the guests "Axel 1" and "Axel 2" and you named the rest of them "Roxas" and systematically drowned all of them and took screenshots and changed my background to a picture of all of my guests dying and my park getting a negative rating, like I don't know how the fuck you managed to do all of that in two minutes but when I got back my keyboard was totally coated in Cheez-It dust or some fucking shit and I told you 'you better clean that up' and you said 'okay' and you just opened a bottle of Mountain Dew and poured the whole thing over my keyboard and I could never turn the computer off again."
"It's probably still on now," you replied. "Everybody else must be dead by now, I put something in front of the gate so they can't leave." You laughed.
Just then the man clutched the bus driver's jacket, crying into it loudly. The bus driver sighed, exasperated.
"Alright, you can go on the bus," the driver said. "But you can never get off…until the last stop."
"Where is that?" asked the man.
The bus driver closed the door.
"Hell."