The air clings to his arms as he falls, vapor trailing from his fingers. Will is tumbling through an endless series of clouds, falling as if he’s in the last moments of a dream. Yet, unlike a dream, he’s completely aware. Terribly so, in fact. Still, he keeps falling, with no end in sight. He wonders why he can’t wake up. How close must he come with death before he does?
Head over heels, hands flailing about, his body spirals around for what feels like the hundredth time when he eyes a swath of orange fur sitting above him, suspended in the air, as if on an hidden ledge. Either it’s on an invisible cloud which is descending at the same rate as Will, or it is somehow outside of Will’s falling zone, a passive observer. Its several tails wave to and fro behind it.
“Hello, Will.”
“Hello. Did you just speak to me?”
“Do you see anybody else?”
“No. But foxes don’t talk. You are a fox, right?”
The fox jumps down from its invisible ledge, and saunters up to Will’s face. In a continuous, fluid sequence, the fox slinks into the shape of a silverback gorilla, then a microphone with a long trailing cord. It finally settles on the shape of a porcelain garden gnome. “Sometimes I’m a fox, sometimes a gnome. I like to ride the wave of potential, and see where it takes me. You see, the first rule of this place, Will, is that nothing is what you think it is. And just when you think you’ve figured it out, that’s when it will change into something else. This is the land of contradiction, Will. Welcome.”
“So you’re not a fox? Then you’re also not a gnome either, I take it?”
“No, certainly not.” The flecked paint starts to crack. Like a hatchling emerging from its egg, the fox emerges from out of the gnomes rigid body, bounding back up to the invisible ledge or cloud it had originally leaped from. “Not many here have names. It would just confuse things, to be perfectly honest. But you can call me Fox. Yes, I think that’ll do just fine.”
“Okay, Fox. So, why exactly am I falling? Or, better question: why aren’t you?”
“Oh, that’s what you’re doing? Well, I’m not quite sure why you’re falling. That thing all you humans have, that force of reason, is fairly weak here. It doesn’t exist in as great an abundance as the world’s you’re used to. In fact, tell anyone around here you believe in reason, and they’ll look at you as if you just said you believe in the Easter Bunny.” Fox quickly shifts into the form of a giant rabbit, complete with a gray tuxedo vest and whicker basket, and then back to his fox shape again.
“Okay, so I’m falling. How do I stop?”
“You want to stop?”
“Of course I do.”
“Well, see, that’s your problem right there. In order to stop, you can’t wish to stop. You can’t desire it. You have to either accept it, or wish for the complete opposite to happen. This is the land of contradiction, after all.”
“What? That makes no sense.”
“Sense? What is all this ‘sense’ business about, hm? Is it not the same thing as reason?”
“Well, I suppose so.”
“And I’m fairly certain that I just said that...”
“Yes, I know, that reason doesn’t hold water here, that it’s like the Easter Bunny. Okay, I get it.”
“But do you really get it, Will? Really?”
“I don’t know, I guess so.”
“You guess? What is reason, then?”
“What’s reason? Well, it’s how the world works, right? You know, common sense?”
“Reason is a system of truths, but truths based on what? It’s a framework of knowledge, but what is it built upon? The answer to both of these questions is, itself. Reason is self-referential, a cancer growing unchecked, only serving its own purposes.”
“Never really looked at it that way.”
“Well, here, in the land of contradiction, you have no choice but to do so. For reason is an abstraction here, never allowed to plant its seed.”
“So, this is all well and good, but what does this have to do with me falling? Or am I not really falling? What if I just try and right myself up and...” Will kicks out at the air, the mist trailing around his bare legs and blowing up his baggy shirt.
“You won’t be able to stand up until you either accept you’re falling, or wish for it.”
“Okay, fine. I accept I’m falling.”
“If that were the case, you’d have stopped by now. Accept that this is forever, that this isn’t merely a moment that will change, that there’s any alternative to this. Don’t accept by reacting to it, by relying on that rational framework you’ve built up inside you your entire life.”
“I... I can’t accept that this is forever. I don’t want to fall forever.”
“And therein lies the great cosmic joke, Will. You are falling forever, just as you are standing around forever, talking forever, waiting forever. Each moment stretches out into eternity, because eternity, reduced down, is made of the same binary force as a moment is: it all reduces down to the great spiraling dance of Helios and Hyperion. Time is an illusion, merely the interlacing of moments. And now, you must understand this: that want, and desire, all stem from an inability to accept the infinite nature of every single moment.”
“Okay, Buddha, I get it. There’s no past, no future...”
“Exactly. Their existence only comes from their relation to the present moment.”
“Right. And so, there’s just... this. There’s just me falling. But not even me, it just is to fall... falling....” Will closes his eyes, squinting hard, trying to push his thoughts away.
“Don’t fight it. Accept it.” Will stops trying to force the thoughts, and rather focuses on the blood pumping in temples, the heat in his face. He focuses on the sensation, so intently that all the thoughts just dissipate from inside of him. When they try to resurface, as a nagging whine or a capricious doubting voice, the sensation quiets them, buries them in the nature of falling, falling. It just is, until...
Will falls in a heap on the ground. The mist has given way to an icy ground, packed firm and smooth. Old snow, a finely ground crystalline dust, blows through the air. Will and Fox are on a thin strip of ice, a road which undulates its way over softly rolling hills until it cannot be seen any longer. “That hurt,” Will says, softly writhing on the ground. He looks up at the fox, who sits by the side of his head, watching wordlessly, his tails swishing through the air.
“Don’t even say it. That the pain is all in my head. I think I’ve had enough talk about enlightenment for one day.” Will stands up, shaking out the snow from inside his baggy shirt, then shaking his mop of hair back and forth so the powder flutters out. “Where are we?”
“Again, better we didn’t say where we are. It would just complicate things. Just know that this is a land of contradiction. You’re on a journey, are you not?”
“Well, I was. I was on a bike trip.”
“All by yourself?”
“Yeah. I know, everyone said I was crazy. But it’s not like I didn’t try asking a bunch of people to come with. They all just said no, so. Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, like you’re studying me, or are going to eat me. You’re not going to try and eat me, are you?” Fox laughs, but it’s a long one, with emphasis on each exhale of breath, and long spaces of air between. It’s unnatural. “Why would I try and eat you? What do you take me for, hm? No, no, young William. I want to help you. You’re on a journey, and I want you to get to its end. Isn’t that what you want? To get to the end?”
“Well, yes...”
“Then let’s go. We have to get out of this frozen tundra before we can get back to that road to California you were so happily on. How long have you been away from your trip?”
“How long? I don’t know... since yesterday?”
“Yesterday, hm? Today, tomorrow, and especially yesterday have no meanings, not here, and certainly not in the Fade,” Fox starts trotting along the ice path, keeping low to the groun
d all the way to the summit of the hilltop. He peeks his little fox head up over the ridge, carefully, until he’s certain of something. Then, with a flourish, he turns around, a wind rising up from behind him, tearing through the landscape with a pained howl. “Come, young William, purveyor of yesterdays and intrepid bicycle rider. To get back to where you came from, we must wander away from this cold, cold place.”
“Wait, wait,” Will scrambles up the ice, trying to catch up with Fox. “But where are we going? There’s got to be a way that you can explain all this to me within the stupid rules of this place.... oh my god...” Will stops as he surmounts the top of the hill, his train of thought gone, his stubbly jaw slack and hanging.
Snow patters across the icy path like little feet, the narrow, mirror-like ribbon of the road leading to a series of five tall buildings. They road cuts through them like a schism in the earth; in fact, two buildings stand at the bottom of a sharply inclined ridge, which falls from the edge of the road, as if the earth just dropped away from the weight.
It’s the buildings themselves which has caused Will’s breath to give way. Their interiors are burnt out, each floor a cavernous and charred skeleton. Even from this distance, the shadows within each room seem to promulgate a pulsing darkness, evil black beacons. Will can feel eyes on him from those towers, though he can’t see them. And then there are the edges of the buildings, sharp, protruding blades, like broken teeth, or lances spearing towards the sky.
“There’s something in those buildings,” Will says.
Fox appears from behind him, coolly nodding his head. “We shouldn’t draw any unwanted attention to ourselves. Just follow me, okay? There’s going to be plenty of chances for your eye to wander, but you mustn’t be distracted. Just keep your focus on me, or else you’ll be pulled into the world of contradiction, and you don’t really want that.”
The wind creeps up the path and up to Will’s ear. He hears something in it, something which makes him flinch. “Did you hear that?” He says.
“Hear what, pray tell?”
“It was, it was an old woman. And she was screaming, it was like she was screaming through a pillow, but I heard her. She wanted her... her cigarettes, and her house, and her...”
“You want to know what’s out there, Will? What’s watching us from those buildings out there? They’re forces of desire, William. Insatiable forces of want, lost souls who suffer because of want. Whispers. Their worlds are dead, their concepts and stories never having been fulfilled. Their wanting makes them suffer, as the one truth of this place is that desire will always be jilted.”
“God, she was so angry, and so sad. Fox, I don’t think I want to go through that place.”
“It’s the only way we can get you back on your journey, Will. Just stay focused on me. They’re merely voices, after all. They can’t hurt you.”
“Just voices, right.” Will says, following Fox’s paw prints in the snow. “They were just voices in the desert too, until the shadows came out.”
“Trust, Will. I got you out of that fall, didn’t I? I’ll get you through this.” The wind sets Will’s arm hairs on end, pointed up towards the dying blue sky from the summits of goose pimples. His knees and elbows are scraped from the fall, but the blood only forms in little pinpricks, it being so cold. Though the chill is biting, Will is practically oblivious to it. His attention is entirely on the voices he hears drifting up from the ruins below.
“Why did he ever leave me? I just wanted to be loved. That’s all I wanted. That’s all I ever asked.”
“I just sit, all god damn day. Why’d they have to take ‘em, huh? What good did it do to take my legs? Hell, I’d rather em rot out from under me than them cuttin’ em off.” The voices come from all directions, some from high up in the towers, some from the lower floors of the buildings sunken below the road, their rooms crushed little caves from all the weight they’re supporting. Will’s head darts back and forth. He’s gulping the cold air, his cheeks hot despite the wind, his body feeling buoyant and weightless.
“Don’t look, Will. Just keep your head facing forward. Eyes on me.” Fox’s tail swishes back and forth behind him, the carrot before a horse. Darkness is starting to set in, especially as they get closer to the five buildings. The towers block out most of the sky, killing the light before it even hits the ground. There’s a sound like ruffling feathers from the nearest tower, high up in one of the burnt out rooms.
“What was that?”
“Don’t worry, just keep focused on me.”
“I wanted to be great, the greatest. I wanted my name to be like honey on the lips of those who said it.”
“I wanted to rule them, don’t you see? I’d rise up, they’d give me what belonged to me, and then I’d rule them.”
Out of the corner of his eye, from one of the lower rooms, Will sees a mess of torn fabric and rope dash quickly out of the shadows, then back in, like a tentacled sea beast briefly emerging from the depths of dark water. Will finds himself whispering things, assurances, the kind that he used to tell himself as a kid when he’d have to go out to the chicken coop all by himself under cover of pitch.
But there was always a light on behind, a light in the window, my father watching me from over the sink, Will thinks to himself. The cigarette smoke would snake around his head, collecting on the ceiling, and Will, just a child, barely old enough to reach the rusted chain hanging from the only lightbulb in the coop, would feel okay. He’d feel secure, that nothing could hurt him, not with his father watching...
“Whoa, whoa, whoa there. Watch what you’re doing!” The voice is greasy and, oddly enough, sounds familiar to Will. “You see what he’s doin’ back there? You best mind, Fox. He almost drifted off again.”
Will snaps his head up, finding himself on his knees, his elbows clutched tightly in his mitts, his teeth chattering. He doesn’t remember falling, and can’t see Fox anywhere around him. His mind got lost in memory, of being a child and looking up at the light in the window and feeling safe. But the memory is gone. He can no longer conjure up the image of the window, of the crooked houseplants and cigarette smoke framing his father’s face. He can’t even remember what his old man looked like. All his thoughts go black, until there’s only what he sees, which is that he’s fallen in a circle at the center of all the towers, their sharp edges barely discernible in the dark. Around him snaps the tatters of capes and cloaks, ropes billowing with the fabric, the bodies they belong to indiscernible.
“I want power,”
“I want fame, riches,”
“I want blood,”
“I want war, famine, death. I want them all to hurt so bad.”
“Enough, you bunch of buffoons!” The familiar voice says. The various capes and cloaks and ropes all retreat, away from Will and back into the dark. For a moment, Will can only hear himself breath, his throat like sandpaper, as if he had been screaming for the past few hours. There’s a murderous thump from deep within the dark, like a baseball bat thwacking against a pound of hamburger meat, and then Fox flies through the air, landing just behind Will in a pile of bloodied fur.
“Fox!” Will screams, but before he can go to him, he sees a large shape making its way towards him from out of the dark. The shadows melt away as the figure steps forward, revealing a large man, rotund of gut and completely naked from head to toe. He’s like a walrus with arms and legs, the top of his head a polished dome. Covering the man’s body are symbols, carved deeply into the flesh, varying colors of red, pink and purple. Some are as familiar as car emblems, others as esoteric as the whispers shared between star dust. Branded on the upper left corner of the man’s chest, in thin cursive writing and surrounded by a squarish border, is a name, three syllables long, though the man’s face seems barely capable of holding one, two, on a good day.
“Don’t you worry ‘bout Fox none. Just had to set him straight, ya see. Put him in his place. Didn’t I tell ya I’d be seeing ya back with me sooner than later?”
??
?Bart?” Will says.
“Yep, it’s ol’ Bartholomew, alright. In the flesh, as they say. Don’t get up, please.” Bart grins, gesturing at Will’s struggle to stand. The cold, exacerbated by the deep shadows from the broken buildings, has worked its way into Will’s bones, the bike shorts and thin cotton shirt doing very little to keep him warm.
“He’s not... yours, Bart...” Fox is nearly hocking the words out. He joins Will in the struggle to get their feet underneath them. “...stay away from him.”
“Oh no, he’s mine alright. He’s been mine since the beginning. Just ask him,” Bart bends over. Though he’s still a good three meters away from Will, leaning down as he does brings him about nose to nose with the shivering young man in the bicycle shorts. “This is what you say, Fox.” Bart continues. His breath smells like gasoline and caramelized chemicals. “You payin’ attention? Hey, all you whispers, you hold this Fox up so that he can look at me when I’m talkin’ to him.”
From the darkness, which encircles Fox, Will and Bart like the edge of a spotlight, springs a wave of tattered cloth, ropes and chains. They wrap around Fox’s limbs, and lift him up in the air, pulling tautly.
“So Fox, this is what you can ask this here fella. Ask him, say, ‘Hey, William. Whose you’s belonged to since the beginnin’?’ You catch my drift? And then Willy, then you say... C’mon Will, you say...”
“What the hell are you talking about? I don’t belong to you, I don’t belong to anyone.” He looks to Fox, then back at Bart. “Let him go.”
“Let him go? Who? Him?! That there fella a’int your friend, if that’s what you think. What line of BS did he use on you, Willy? He was going to get you back on your way? He wanted you for himself, he did. You really thought he was your friend, huh? Can you get a load of this, guys? Will thought that the ol’ fox was his friend.”
A roar of laughter erupts from the shadows, the kind found echoing about the hallways of mental asylums. It swirls around through the darkness like a whirpool, escalating in power. Only when Bart smirks, his bloodshot eyes scanning all around the periphery of his head, does it stop, just as quickly as it began.
“Don’t tell me you let yourself get outfoxed by a fox, William? Oh William, dear, sweet little William. When you asked me for direction, for water, for company, did I not provide, all the way out there in the middle of God’s country? This Fox is a thief and a liar. He wanted to use ya to get out of here, ya see? He’s a lost soul, same as all of the others. Wants something that he just can’t have, so he’s stuck here. But you, you’re special. You can shape worlds, William, did you know that? Wow, learn somethin’ new everyday, don’t we? Even in a place where days don’t have much meanin’, accountin’ there ain’t no such thing as time. Oh hey, there you go. Still got a little wobble in your step, but you’re standin’ pretty tall now.”
Will staggers on his feet, looking about him, trying to figure out a way to escape. “What do you mean I can shape worlds?”
“Power of perception, understand? It’s all relative, as some German once said.”
“Subjectivity?”
“That’s right. And relativity. All that gobbledegook. ”
“That’s what you mean by the power to shape worlds? That I have an opinion? What’s so special about that?”
“Sh, William!” Bart puts a grubby finger the size of a muskrat up to his lips, shushing William with spittle specked with chew and tar. “Not so loud! They hear you, they’ll get awfully resentful. You must’ve take what you’ve got for granted. These whispers, they’d kill for the chance to shape worlds accordin’ to their whims and fancies. They can’t do that, Will.”
Will realizes that there’s no way out, not without having to run through the creatures in the capes that hang around the circle. He turns and looks at Bart. “I think this is all just one big misunderstanding. Fox probably didn’t have the noblest of intentions, but there’s no need to hurt anyone, right? Even if the guy is a complete liar,” Will nods back at Fox, “let him just live with it. I’m alright, you’re alright, no harm done. I can just be on my way, and things will go back to as they were.”
Bart stands straight back up, lets a big breath pass through his naked body. Some of the symbols seem to glow, while others grow darker, and colder in hue.
“There’s no goin’ or comin’, Will. Route 60 is the longest road you’ll go down because it’s just an infinite loop, don’t actually lead nowheres. It just goes round back in on itself. See you, you’s like a world spinning out somewheres in space, where the ebb and flow of the tides makes no difference on the universe none whatsoever,” Bart smiles, and in the spongey, yellow teeth, Will sees the last throes of a dying sun, cirrus star dust swirling like gyres around the compressed orange sphere, flying off into the quiet of space.
“You see it, don’t ya? You see the beginnin’, the end. You see life just existin’ to see itself, to be awed for a moment, just an eensy beensy moment, before it poofs out. In that moment, and the moments in that moment, it just keeps shinin’, ya see. But then it dies, right quick. Forgotten forever, consumed by the dark.”
“Please,” Will says, covering his eyes with the crook of his arm, slinking back towards Fox, the small creature’s fur like morning clouds hanging over the shore. “Please, don’t show me anymore.”
“It’s awfully beautiful, ain’t it? But once you see it like this, well, it kinda spoils the rest, don’t it?”
“What are you? How can you show me these things?”
“I’m the keeper of dreams, William. I can show you whatever I’d like. I’m the master, the main man. This is the Land of Nod, and I’m it’s keeper.”
“Will... don’t listen to him...he lies...” Fox spits the words out before screaming, the frayed edges of the capes pulling harder on his limbs.
“Can you quiet that sonabitch already?” Bart says. “Christ, I got to do everythin’ myself around here?”
More capes spring from the darkness, which wrap themselves around Fox’s body entirely. The pieces of tattered cloth which had his limbs stretched out slacken, and let the newly mummified body fall back to the earth.
“And now, Willy boy. You’s next.”
Will rushes forward, his fist drawn back. He punches Bart as hard as he can, square in the stomach. But his hand only meets a modicum of resistence, and slides right in through the skin, as if its made of butter. The hole in Bart’s stomach quickly closes around Will’s hand with a sickening suction, holding him there. Will’s eyes are wild and wide as they look up into Bart’s grinning, gibbous face, the tippy top concealed by blackness.
“Jesus...” Will says, Bart’s mildewy teeth a marquee above him, stretched from one pockmarked cheek to the other. In them he sees the image of a man, naked, looking much like himself, only completely shorn of all his hair. He lays naked at the center of a circle, with various lines and symbols drawn on the floorboards. The man takes a huge intake of breath, and Will knows that the man is waking for the first time, becoming alive; but as the man exhales, he sees panic and terror enter into his eyes, before escaping, along with any indication of life at all. In one breath, the man has lived and died. In one moment...
“And now, William, you’ll kindly follow me.” Bart’s head revolves around on his neck, until it is completely turned around. Will struggles to free his hand as Bart starts walking backwards, but a shooting pain tears up his arm with each effort. He can feel Bart’s viscera churning and tightening around his fist, contracting like snake muscles around his fingers. Will knows that the vision he saw in Bart’s teeth, of the man on the floor, was his future.
“I can’t. Please, don’t make me see that. Don’t, please,” Will is pleading with Bart, but it might as well be falling on deaf ears. It’s like a lid has been closed over the earth, the snowy ground refracting nothing more than a dull blue sheen. Nevertheless, Will sees the figures shuffling a ways away, orbiting them like comets with tattered capes for tails. They whisper and whish, rustle and swish, their
low voices all gobbled up in one another. They’re like a room full of cockroaches all trying to speak through the same rotary phone, calling across the galaxy to their deadbeat landlord about no pressure in the pipes and a drafty bedroom skylight. They want to be heard, want to get out of this place; Will understands it all and is terrified at how desperate their desire is. They will do anything to get what they want, bike trips be damned.
They come up on one of the towers. It’s the tallest, the most bent and twisted. In the crook between Bart’s shoulder blades, a mouth of razor sharp teeth appears. “Welcome home, William.” The mouth says.
“Let me the fuck go! I’m not going in!” Will kicks at the body, again trying to desperately pull his arm free. He fails to notice Bart’s deli meat arm cock back, fails to appreciate the effortlessness at which it careens through the air. After the fist connects with his jaw, Will stops struggling, suddenly struck with the thought of how numb and heavy his face has suddenly become. Then, he tilts, consciousness floating up and away.
“Well, guess we’ll have to do this the old fashioned way,” Bart says, lifting Will in his arms, walking backwards into the tower. The tower’s lobby is like a cavern dug deep in the earth, hallowed out by time and dripping water. The surfaces glimmer in the dark, as if a moon so full and ripe has burst its thin white skin, the released liquid having long ago frozen on the ground. Bart makes his way for the staircase, a large ballroom type deal, with divergent stairways breaking off from the middle and climbing in opposite directions. He takes the left staircase, his steps slow, steady.
There are picture frames on the walls, of deciduous trees finely inked on tea stained parchment. The branches seem innumerable. The names in the boxes beside each branch are even more so. Tree after tree after tree, the frames climbing high into the dark eaves, so many they could account for all of life, for everything that was and is and will be. And they do. And then the walls give way, cracked wood and steel greeting the night sky with charred teeth. There are stars. They watch, solar breaths fluttering in the cold stratosphere, cloud blankets like thinly threaded whispers. The steps whine under Bart’s weight.
Bart reaches the summit. There is only a flat floor, worn with big caterpillar spaces between each board. The stars shine coldly. The naked man with the carved runes in his body lays the boy down, in the middle of the floor. He shuffles around, finds a sharp stick, and retraces the symbols already etched in the wood.
“And here we are, little William...” Bart says, in his dripping, slow country cadence, “Here we are, right back to where it all began.”
Invisible tendrils of cape fabric snap around the edges of the floorboards.
“Just cool your jets, alright? We’re just about there. Just a few more things to do,” Bart keeps retracing the symbols, making his way around the circle. He cuts his palm on the sharp stick, smearing the blood all over his body. The runes carved in his skin blink to life, shining pink and purple beneath flabby folds and a red viscous film. He slathers his entire body until he resembles a pig who just rolled in mud. Will doesn’t wake when Bart rearranges his limbs to look like Vitruvian Man, or when his face is roughly smeared with blood. He doesn’t wake when the giant man throws his head back and howls at the stars, which tremble in their places, nor when the shadows from around the top of the burnt out tower rush forward, their torn capes and clothes snapping in the cold air. Will doesn’t wake. Instead, he sleeps, and in his sleep are dreams.
Chapter XIII: “Pilot”