ROWAN-2
“One hundred eighty degrees.” That was the flat voice of Dr. Bowusuvi. My back was to him, so turning as he instructed, I faced him.
“Raise your arm,” he commanded, his eyes, little more than black beads, dissecting me with unrelenting exactitude. I did as he bid, and with one of his metal instruments, a long one with a triangular head, he prodded the underside of my arm.
“Pump your arms thirty seconds, please,” he said now, his final word, “please,” ostensibly a de-intensifier of his command, instead, with ironic power, intensifying the degree from what I thought of as Level One, Standard, all the way to Level Three, Foreboding, bypassing Level Two, Urgent, altogether.
“That was fifteen seconds,” he stated when I stopped moving, with an expressionlessness that somehow suggested dissatisfaction, “Another twenty seconds, please.”
I complied, and as I caught my breath, he placed the instrument I thought of as a metal cookie under my sternum, and examined it as it lay cold against my skin.
“The filthy walnuthead!” Now I sat on the brown couch in the main room, as the Fatheads came up the hall from the gray room, one of them voicing the epithet that one or the other of them always felt the need to repeat after they had scuffled with Romulus.
“What a little devil!” another of them agreed, nursing a hand with self-righteous disgust, “What’s the old bastard want with that thing, anyway?”
The third one, the one who sat with me after they cleaned Romulus’ cage while the other two collected laundry and trash from the baskets in my room, said to me, “What do you think, Kiddo?” I just stared at him.
“Ahhh!” That was me, now in the gray room, racing for the door, as with unfailing accuracy, Romulus threw a little wooden black tile at me from within his cage, the very same black tile, in fact, that moments before I had thrown at him, missing, as I sped around his cage like a satellite. The tile greased my arm as I dove for the door, and I fell, laughing in disappointment and delight, at this, another loss in the game of hit and run we played when we tired of the sedentary battle of wits for which the tiles were designed.
“Did you have any dreams last night?” Now I was with Dr. Mulgar.
My chest tightened, but I knew he’d know if I lied, so I shook my head.
“Speak, Romulus.” This was a frequent prompt of his. He had a distaste for nonverbal communication.
I spoke: “No.”
“None that you can remember.” It could have been a question or a statement.
“Yes…no.” By that, with my precision of expression hindered by a lack of vocabulary and a deteriorating presence of mind, I meant yes, the statement is accurate, no, I can’t remember any dreams.
“Have you had any notable daydreams, or unexplained thoughts?”
I shook my head, and then hastened to add, “No.” I wasn’t sure what he meant by “unexplained thoughts,” but I was pretty sure I hadn’t had any, and if I had, I knew I wouldn’t be able to explain them to him with the alacrity and concreteness he would demand.
He was disappointed, I could tell; but with an admirable display of good cheer, he said, “That’s okay, don’t worry about it, Romulus,” and patted me on the head. After little more than a perfunctory pause, he went on, “Okay Romulus, ask yourself what’s going to happen tomorrow. Just relax, blank your mind, empty your mind of everything except that one question, ‘What is going to happen tomorrow?’ Relax, Romulus, relax.”
My chest constricted further…
I woke; I was alone, sitting at the head of my bed. The wall-lantern still burned, casting shadowy light. For a slow blink of my eyes, like that of a tortoise, I was disoriented, but then I remembered that I had been about to begin my bedtime ritual. I had felt drowsy; I must have drifted off to sleep as I sat there preparing myself. Sometimes when night arrived, I wasn’t tired at all, but sometimes I got very drowsy over the course of the day, and there was no predicting whether I would or wouldn’t; I did pretty much the same things one day as the next. There was also no predicting whether or not I would dream and if I did dream, what I would dream about.
Some glorious nights, I went on a brief dreamland adventure or romp, but for the most part my dreams, like tonight, were snippets of things that I had experienced at some point during my life, usually within the past couple of days. Romulus’ dreams were almost always adventures, in vivid settings—the forests where he’d grown up, of course, but also mountains and plains and swamps, places he’d never been. He had related to me the events of many of his dreams, and for him, exciting, funny things always happened. He would, for example, climb a tree that extended up to the clouds, and then, noticing that it wasn’t just one tree that was so tall, but a whole forest of them, would leap from the tip of one tree to the tip of the next, far far above the earth. Sometimes he even flew in his dreams, or “went flying,” as he worded it after investigating Leniman syntax.
At first, when he told me about his dreams, I told him about mine, too, but he wasn’t impressed by my experiences. “The two worlds are the same for you,” he told me, not with disapprobation, but with a sort of grave, puzzled concern that seemed a lot like disappointment. So I stopped telling him about mine, except on the rare night that I did happen to go on a little adventure. Adventures delighted him. I wished I had more to tell him about; I liked it when he was delighted.
“Mind?” I asked, “Are dreams real?”
Mind said—unhelpfully—“Why would you consider them not to be real, Rowan?”
“I mean, are they really happening?
“Why would you consider them not to be happening, Rowan?”
“Well, when I wake up, whatever has happened to me during my dream hasn’t happened to me here—in real, you know.”
“Are you certain of that, Rowan?”
“Yeah, like there was one time I got a scratch, a pretty bad one, and I didn’t have it when I woke up. It was gone.”
“Could the wound not have healed?”
“No, it was pretty bad, and then I woke up and it was gone. Like one second later. Another time I think I died, my head got chopped off, I think, or it was about to be chopped off when I woke up; but when I woke up I was alive.”
“Could it be that in the reality you call dream, your perception of time is different from what it is in the reality you call waking?”
I had no answer for that, so I said, “Also, the me in my dreams knows all about the me here, in real, but I—the me here, in real—I don’t know all about the me in my dreams.”
“Are you sure that is so, Rowan?” he asked in his sure, amenable voice that made it seem as if everything and nothing was true.
I thought about it. It was hard to say: my memory of what I—the dream I—knew or had experienced was always fuzzy within minutes, or even seconds, of waking up.
Suddenly I thought of something: “Mind, are you showing me stuff when I dream? Stuff that I didn’t ask for?” As I asked, I doubted that he was: the flavor of the images he showed me was different from that of dream images, although sometimes it seemed as if there was overlap between the two.
“Does it seem so to you, Rowan?”
“No, I guess not.”
I felt a powerful drowsiness dropping upon me again. “Well, good night, Mind.”
“Good night, Rowan.”
I was alone. My feet dangled between my bed and a little black cabinet beside the bed. Silence reigned in what could only be called a miasma. Today was one of the rare days when the Fatheads had not paid their respects, so the near-permanent redolence of Romulus’ cage had permeated the house, and having, now, an element of fetid staleness to it as well, hung in the air like an invisible and yet somehow soupy fog.
Studying was complete for the day, supper had been eaten, and the dishes washed; I had washed myself, as well. Nothing remained to do except go to bed, which is why I was sitting where I was: to do my pre-sleeptime ritual, after which I could go to bed. Romulus had somehow fallen asleep in the heart of the awfulness, which had surprised me; but upon retreating to the other end of the house, to my room, shutting the door to lessen the stink, and taking my usual pre-sleeptime seat on my bed, I, too, had fallen asleep.
With an unknowing love of irony, I smiled to myself, caught in what Vonnae would call “the throes of appreciation,” and now at last began my pre-sleeptime ritual. I looked around, at the colors of the room. The bed was white, the little cabinet and the two rectangular mechanisms upon it black. Another little stand, or cabinet, on the other side of the bed was black, the wall-lantern above it was white. The walls were white, the ceiling black, the floor black and white, tile. The door was white, as was the door to the closet, the doorknobs of both black. The wastebasket was white, a chest of drawers white as well, the curtains over the room’s one window, which was on the wall behind me, were black. The black-and-whiteness of the room was pleasing to me—pleasing in a different way than, say, a solid bright color, or a profusion or complex intermixture of different colors, not as dazzling, not as eye-caressing, I suppose, but somehow magnetic in its duality. Romulus’ room, of course, was unbroken gray: cage, walls, ceilings, floor, all; my wash-room was a dazzle of white; the main room and the kitchen were colorful, with blue ceilings and green carpets and a bark-brown couch in the main room and a bark brown round table surrounded by orange chairs in the kitchen; but none of these rooms were quite as pleasing to me in a physically-resonant way as was my black and white bedroom.
One of the black mechanisms upon the black cabinet beside the bed was a big box capitalized with an important-looking array of levers and buttons, and adorned with, or strangled by, a plethora of wires issuing from it on all sides that gave the impression, somehow, of the wild hair of a robotic madman. The other, smaller, black box was what I thought of as the talking machine. It had eyes: It had buttons, too, a much smaller enumeration of them than did the big box, but its prime characteristic was its eyes, which, as I perceived, forever stared at me with a Dr. Bowusuvi-esque dispassionate penetration, this, as it seemed, perfect emotionless scientific fidelity contributing to my feeling that it just sat there insistently all day, waiting for me to make it talk. To let it talk: whenever I went into my room during the day, it seemed to me to be waiting for the night, waiting for the eerie light of the wall-lantern to enable it to come to life.
Anyway, after looking around at the room’s black-and-whiteness, I pushed a button on the talking machine, the third button from what I considered its left side. Its eyes began to spin, and did so for an immeasurable length of time, infinite and brief. When its eyes had stopped spinning, I pressed the second button from what I considered its left side, whereupon its eyes started spinning again, but much slower than before, and in the opposite direction. Then, the talking machine began to talk.
In an expressionless voice that was just enough slithery or demon-like in timbre, and just enough deep and resonant, to seem knowledgeable of the deepest darkest most remote and unknowable corners of existence, the machine said, “Our death is written in the very moment of our birth; and since our death is the doorway to nameless voiceless nothingness, so too is our life. We are nothing more than specks of dust falling upon the ocean. We are meaningless. We do not, we will not, accomplish anything in our lives because even as we act in the present, which is immediately the past, we have died in the future, which is one with the past and therefore the present. We have ended; and then the world has ended, the sun has died, the universe has contracted to the size of a fist, and we have never even existed. Even as we strive, thus, even as we triumph, we have failed. Love is less than nothing. We never truly know our fellow humans because before we know one another, even as we reach out to one another across the chasm of ignorance that divides us all, we have died. We never know triumph or joy or even sadness and defeat because they, too, are fading, have faded, into infinite time even as we experience them. This is the One Truth: All is loss, and loss is all we ever know.”
As the machine talked, I opened the drawer of the cabinet, withdrawing a syringe and a small vial. The vial, though I had emptied it the night before, was, as always, filled to the brim with a roiling purple-black substance that burned my eyes to behold. I had always assumed that Dr. Bowusuvi, Dr. Mulgar or one of the Fatheads refilled it when they visited, but today none of them could have, since none of them had been here.
Puzzled, I twisted the cap of the vial until it came off, noting the hollow scraping sound that it made as it came loose, and noting, too, as I often did, that even though the stuff was tumbling and rolling about like smoke or steam inside the vial when the cap was on, it didn’t rise up out of it when I removed the cap.
I placed both the cap and the vial upon the cabinet and picked up the syringe, letting the calm solidity of its heft extend to the muscles of my hand and fingers. Thus steady, I inserted the point of the syringe into the vial, and as I had been instructed, held the vial about half-way along the shaft with one hand, pulling on its small handle with the other. I watched the purple-black substance go into and slowly fill the syringe as a liquid, as it issued from the vial as smoke, noting with wonder and puzzlement (as I often did) that even though the vial was larger than the syringe, and had seemed full, all of its contents fit into the syringe.
I then fished a bottle of disinfectant, a small square of Special Cloth, and a bandage from the drawer of the cabinet, and after moistening the cloth with the disinfectant, and then dabbing the most prominent vein in my forearm with that moist cloth, I pushed, with utmost care, the point of the needle of the syringe into the vein, and pressing the top of the syringe, emptied its contents into my bloodstream.
The syringe empty, I covered the vein with a bandage, and sat there unmoving for a count of sixty, before putting away the materials of my ritual. I then finished my pre-sleeptime routine by untangling the bigger machine’s wires, taping the little circular pads that were at the ends of its wires to various parts of my body, pushing the specific button on the big black box that Dr. Bowusuvi had instructed me to push, dousing the wall-lantern, and lying down on my back to go to sleep as the talking machine repeated its endless mantra, “All is loss, and loss is all….” I sank, then, into slumber, the same way I had every night in my memory.