Oubliette
(Architecture) a dungeon in the shape of a long vertical chamber, in which the only entrance is through the top.
[from French, from oublier to forget]
Part 1: superposition
{All humans will, eventually, die.}
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue
or even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall…
—from Forgetfulness by Billy Collins (William James Collins)
But what is light really? Is it a wave or a shower of photons? There seems no likelihood for forming a consistent description of the phenomena of light by a choice of only one of the two languages. It seems as though we must use sometimes the one theory and sometimes the other, while at times we may use either. We are faced with a new kind of difficulty. We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do.
—from The Evolution of Physics by Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld
oOo
June 7, 2004. Day seven of confinement. The thing about getting rid of useless pride is that it is a scaffolding built of years. It takes more than the work of a moment; though you are begging in the windowless cell. What was I thinking, putting myself in here? You don't remember. It's beginning to disturb you, how much you don't remember; although when you close your eyes and follow the trail—one event follows upon the other just as you had expected it to; and you can even recall the way you stood up in shock the first time Kira killed, when all you saw was a reporter's face through the screen of your TV, and the way your hands had sweated, your heart palpitated as though in sympathy; (terror) you think, classifying the signs; and how that evening when you went to the store, when the motorcycles, converging around frightened prey— (Criminal. Name: Shibuimaru Takuo.) The accident; the truck slamming into him; the sick fragile way it jerked and spun, the skid of wheels. It was the end of your boredom, because though you were nothing but a spectator to the great battle, you already felt how Kira and L would pull you along in their wake just as any battle between titans would (because you would stand within the event horizon, if only to get closer).
Perhaps that is where you are now. In the quiet dark within the black hole, where your self, gaunt and unfamiliar to you, has already irrevocably been altered. (Suspect. Name: Yagami Light.)
The facts don't lie in saying you have the potential to be Kira, that the suspect profile and all the circumstantial evidence is against you. And yet the idea that you could have become so disassociated from your sense of self as to distrust your own memories is jarring. Had you convinced yourself in a fit of temporary madness? Was the shock of Misa's arrest so great? Or was it L, with his soft insinuations, level-headed, building a structure atop which you can stand, precarious, Kira; like an imaginary god? Ever since you'd met him, when he sat beside you in the Todai entrance ceremony and said "I'm L" with his black-hole eyes watching you… it is true that you had felt the dilation of time; it is true that in that moment you were aware of yourself as a suspect, as though you were guilty. L has always been able to make you feel as though you were guilty, though you have nothing to be guilty for.
The problem is that it had fed your pride. That the greatest detective believed you were capable of being his opposite had a heady power you couldn't deny, though it disgusted you to your core. You hated his very being, and craved it; as though in his own darkness he had seen your own worst pathetic thoughts and unearthed them, digging through the midnight graveyard of your most unsettled dreams. Everyone thinks, now and again: the world is rotten. Everyone thinks, now and again: why is the world succumbing only to entropy; why does the bad always outweigh the good, why do the murderers live and the victims die. Perhaps that was why you had stepped so close. Perhaps that is what pulled you into a self-doubt of such grandiose proportions. When he had said "you are Kira" your morality and your memory and your sense of self had said "I am not", but your pride had said "I could be if I wanted to. There is no way I would do any less."
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