Light, Dark: Part 2

Dark.

There really was no way for Mark to know how long he had been there. The florescent lights never turned off, but stayed constantly glowing without so much as a flicker. Faces and voices drifted through his head. He tried to keep himself sane by remembering the faces of everyone he had ever met. He worked backwards in his mind, recalling what he had done that Monday when he should have taken the stairs, and tried to think of all the faces he had seen. When he got to someone especially memorable, he would try and remember every conversation he ever had with them. When he exhausted his memory of them, he moved backwards again.

After what seemed like years, but couldn’t have been since the phone never rang, he stopped trying to occupy his mind and started trying to keep it unoccupied. Remembering his whole life, it seemed, took less than a year. He tried not to think about anything. He couldn’t sleep, no matter how hard he tried, so he just kept his eyes shut and tried to think of darkness.

Even waking dreams didn’t come to him Hallucinations would have been welcome, but they didn’t come either. It was somewhere around this point, when he couldn’t imagine being there any longer, that he stopped believing in God. It made him feel nothing.

Finally, one day, the phone rang. He scrambled to pick it up.

“Hello?” Mark heard his own voice speak for the first time in almost a year. But there was no one on the other end, just a click and a dial tone, then the phone went dead.

He returned to sitting.

The next year, he summoned all of his anger, all the rage he could find in his hollow head, and when the phone rang, he folded his arms over his chest and looked the other way. The phone rang and rang for what must have been days and he still thought of hate and anger at this project and refused to answer.

When, at last, it stopped, he begged for it to return. Then he fell to tears.

His first actual conversation with the voice, at the end of his third year in the elevator, was anticlimactic.

“Why am I here?” he asked.

“Ah, Mr. Cliffton, we can’t answer that question.”

“I’d forgotten why I’m here. You didn’t give me a reason?”

“No, we didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because we’re not allowed. That’s three. I’ll speak to you in one year, Mr. Cliffton. Please answer when I call.”

Mark hung up the phone without sadness or hope or any other detectible emotion. And then, he sat.

Mark didn’t keep track, but thirty-five phone calls took place before the room went black. At first, it was just a relief. It was so dark that nothing could be seen, not the outline of his hand in front of his face. It was exciting to him for what must have been days. Then, one day, he couldn’t remember if the lights ever had been on in the first place, or how long they might have been on.

A phone call didn’t come for what felt like a really long time after that. It had been long intervals each time before, but he had waited for what seemed like ten years without the phone ringing. Maybe the phone was broken like the lights. Maybe he had imagined that there was a phone in the first place.

But then he groped around in the dark, found the phone, and started hitting the receiver violently against the floor. The sound was strangely satisfying. In between hits, he heard something he had not heard in years: a voice.

“Hello?” the voice said. It was not the voice from earlier, but a more tired, and more distant voice. “Is someone there?”

“Yes, is this Churchill? Why haven’t you called?”

“My god,” the voice exclaimed. “You’re there, huh? And they didn’t tell you?”

“What?”

“They probably hoped to solve the problem before telling you. Funny. Now they’re all doing other jobs or they’re dead, depending.”

“What?”

“Funding was cut,” the voice said. “Man, I would hate to be you right now.”

“What are you talking about? Who is this?”

“I’m no scientist, I can tell you that. We’re salvaging what we can from these old facilities. They’ve been empty since I was a kid, but I read about the research they used to do. Are you in one of those cross dimensional pods?”

“Yes! That’s what it’s called! Can you get me out?”

“Are you kidding? They were so expensive to operate, the equipment for them was sold a long time ago. Just these phones and a couple monitors left. I’m taking them out before the demolition people come in.”

“What’s going to happen to me?”

“Well, if we had a scientist here, maybe he could tell you. What a trip. An actual subject on the phone. You have no idea what you’ve done for us here. I used to read about you as a kid. I guess I just assumed you were dead. Too bad we can’t do anything for you.”

“That’s not fair,” Mark began to cry. He didn’t know where all that feeling came from. “It’s not fair! Let me out!”

“I’m sorry, man, really. I’m behind schedule already. You take care. Hang in there.”

“Tell someone about me!” Mark yelled, but there was nothing there. Nothing. He banged the phone and yelled into it for as long as it occupied him. But there was nothing.

Mark held his hands. He counted his fingers. He would hold out one hand and then touch it with the other, feeling every groove and every finger. Sometimes, he did nothing. He did nothing in a way that you and I can’t imagine. He did nothing in ways that he couldn’t even wrap his mind around.

Once, there was another shaking. Violent and quick, the whole world shook and ached with moans. His room dropped, he felt, then stopped again and stayed still again.

Water ran down the walls. He could feel it. He would press his hand against the walls and feel the small trickles of water fall down. Eventually, the water brought minerals and those minerals started building up on the walls, little by little. He would sit, patiently, and feel the walls turn into stone, little by little by little. Lost, lost, lost were the old walls. No longer an elevator receptical, he could tell, now something else. It occupied his every thought for longer than he had previously been there, until he didn’t remember what the metal walls had been like in the first place.

“How long?” he used to say to himself. He wasn’t sure exactly what he meant by it anymore. How long was he there? How long was he going to be there? How long did he have to live? He just kept saying it. “How long?”

And in the dark, some many years after his last memory, he heard a voice say, “Why?” It was a woman’s voice, soft and gentle.

He didn’t think anything of it, assuming that it was simply himself.

“Why?” it repeated.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “I can’t remember.”

“A punishment, I think, wasn’t it?”

Now that he thought of it, he thought that he had been talking to her for years. Or maybe not. It was unremarkable.

“I did something wrong,” she said. “And they put me here. I wonder if they’d be upset if I got out.”

“Who?” Mark asked.

“I don’t remember. Whoever put me here. But I’ve been here so long, maybe they’re not around anymore. How long have you been here?”

“Many thousands of years, if that makes any sense to you.”

“But them, they’re not here, right? They’re gone now, aren’t they?”

“Does it matter?” he said.

“You’ve been here thousands of years?” she said.

“Forever, I suppose. Forever.”

“Forever,” it sounded soft and mournful in her voice. He liked it. And in liking it, it occurred to him: someone was there. He had been hearing her voice, he realized, for centuries without paying attention. Now, he could ignore her no longer.

“Who are you?” he asked.

She was silent, then started to answer with a syllable. “Um...” but stopped. “Do you think,” she said at last. “That I am individual and separate?”

“That’s what I’m wondering,” he said.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“There’s a hint of it somewhere. Shadows of some world where I was. Ghosts of ghosts. I was an individual.”

“That is so,” she stopped to search for the words. “Rich and exciting.” To her, the very notion of individuality and singularity, mixed with words like “shadow” and “ghost” painted a textured and layered experience firmly into her being. She was tingling and alive with the energy of it.

“Your voice,” Mark said, “is coming from a different place than mine.”

“Let’s meet!” she said excitedly. It was strange how quickly conversation came back to them. How clear and coherent their thoughts were and how solid their intentions.

The voices moved closer.

“Here I am!”

“I’m right here.”

“Come closer.”

“I’m coming.”

It was playful and they moved across the space of the room they were in, and how exciting the concept of space had become, how endless their small room felt in search of each other.

“Where’d you go?”

“I’m right here! You missed me!”

They tried again and again, their voices crossing over each other and into the other side.

“We can’t do it,” he said at last. “We’re not in the same place.”

“Or,” she said, “you’re just in my head.”

“Let’s not think like that,” he said. “Let’s talk. Let’s remember.”

Mark was easily lost in her words. He listened to her say anything, and she delighted in the talking. She wasn’t sure exactly what she was saying, but followed the rhythm of her own words and found energy in the way he reacted.

“Purple,” she said. “I like how that sound feels, ‘purple.’ It’s dark and deep and soft to the touch, I curl up in it and feel warm and welcomed.”

“That is so beautiful,” he said. “I think that’s what purple was. I think you’re right.”

And she would move on to another word, expound on its sound, expound on its character.

After talking a long time, the woman’s voice said, “I have to go to sleep. Don’t you want to sleep?”

Something came back to him. “I can’t,” he said. “I haven’t slept for as long as I can remember.”

“I can’t stay awake any longer,” she said. “Will you be here when I wake up?”

“Will you wake up?” he asked.

“I always do,” she said.

“I’m always here,” he said.

In the dark, he could hear her breathing. He would count her breaths until he couldn’t find a higher number, then he’d start over. Every night he imagined what she must be feeling during all that time. She anchored him, gave him a place to put his thoughts. He wondered if she slept when it was night and only then.

Often, they wouldn’t understand the memories that would come flowing back to the other one. He told her about the kolache he had brought with him the day that he came to wherever they were. She laughed. “What’s a kolache?” and he would describe and she would puzzle. “Is it like a pastie?” she asked. And then he was lost.

Ice was something that she remembered, being surrounded by it, lost in it. That’s where she was the day she came to their home, surrounded by white and ice. Someone was lost, she couldn’t remember who, then she was lost, calling names. Something sudden happened, she dropped, she lost her breath, she woke up here, a thousand years ago talking to herself, then talking to him.

“Do you ever wonder if I invented you?” she would ask. It makes sense, really. I needed company, so I made you.”

“No, that’s not right,” he would say. “You don’t know what kolaches are.” And of course, they both knew he was right then. The kolache was key.

There was a violent shaking again. Loud noises, many times louder than their voices rang through their room. At the end of it, a small sliver of light shone through into the room and had them both speechless.

They pressed themselves against the light and looked out. It took ages before they could open their eyes all the way. In the light, Mark could see that their room was stone, he couldn’t remember what it had been before, but he knew it had been different.

They could not see each other and for a long time, they both lost faith in each other’s existence. They would talk in short bursts, almost angrily, resenting the absence of the other. Mark drifted off into his own mind and wouldn’t answer her and stopped looking out at the light that he didn’t understand anyway.

But the light gave a length to the day. It would be light, then it would be dark, and as he suspected, the woman’s voice slept when it was dark. Still, he tried not to listen to her.

One morning, the light all red, the woman cried excitedly, “come quick, I have something to tell you, come quick if you are here!” and he hurried to the opening and looked out. All he could see was rock and green and blue. Like every day.

“No, not like every day,” she said. “Because, I happen to know that over that hill, there is a path and if you go down that path, there is a gathering. And people are singing and dancing and children are riding on animals, delighted to be free and alive. They will be there all day and if we gaze at the hill, we can imagine what they are doing.”

The story had a power to it and Mark lost his breath. He stood captivated, looking longingly at the hill, imagining the wonders beyond. And when the sun set, he cried that the gathering was over.

Many days later, he begged for the story again, and she told it. Then, the next day, he told her about the ocean over those hills, soft and blue and full of life. He talked about the people who would sit and gaze at it and take in the beauty of it. She cried for the words that he used and felt herself lost at sea.

They would play this game whenever their hearts would sink. And in quiet moments, they would relive the fantasies that they told each other.

They watched as the landscape changed. Grasses grew, then trees. Large animals with white fur and long necks came once and grazed on the grasses, but could not hear their calls. They were gone with the sun the next morning. Rocks grew out of the grass, mountains jutted up in the distance, the light grew dimmer and dimmer and the air got thicker and thicker.

One day, Mark couldn’t wait for the woman to wake up. He saw on the horizon something they had never seen before. Large machines were tearing out land, replacing it with something else and rolling from one horizon to the other. Eventually, other machines crawled along this space, quickly and quietly. On the first days, only a few, then many.

Something was erected by this roadway. Large and rectangular, the sign was purple. They both recognized the color at once and could not remember seeing something so vivid and wonderful. They talked about the function of the purple sign for months and years. And they watched it fall one day, long after the machines stopped coming and after the road had been covered in grass and trees.

But this purple never left her heart. And she wanted to leave. There had to be a way.

“I don’t like to leave you, Mark, but I must.”

“You can’t.”

“I can. I think I’ve found the way.”

“You can’t. It’s too large, it’s to big out there. You’d be lost.”

“You can’t talk me out of it,” she said, sadly. “I wish you’d just be happy for me.”

“I love you. Did you know that? I love you with everything that I am and everything that I ever was. I love you.”

“Oh, Mark,” she said. Her voice adopted a tone of pity.

“Don’t you love me?”

“It’s not like that, Mark. I think you missed something.”

Heartbroken, he wouldn’t listen to her plan. He was silent and brooded for years and years, patiently trying to heal from the wound that she inflicted. Then one day, she was almost gone.

“It’s simple,” she said. “Put the smallest part of yourself out through the hole. A hair, a nail, whatever will fit. Then, move yourself through it.”

He had no idea what she meant.

“It’s like dying. You die, just the part of you farthest from the hole, and you give birth to that part of you at the tip of that little hair. And you do it again and again. Endless births, endless deaths, your move through the space. I’m almost through. There are only weeks left, Mark, and I’ll be free.”

In a panic, Mark pressed himself against the hole. What she said made such beautiful sense to him. He pressed himself, slipped a hair through, felt a small part of him die and saw the hair grow so slightly longer. One cell, then another, one cell, then another. He knew that in many years, he would be his own reflection, pulling the last of his cells out of the hole and into the open.

“I’m out!” the woman’s voice screamed.

“Wait for me, please wait,” he cried. “You can’t leave me here!”

“I’m out!”

“You have to wait!”

“I’ll be back,” she said. “I’m going to look around, I’m going to find the purple, I’ll come right back.”

Mark let go of her in his mind. He knew she was gone. It was okay. A cell died. A cell was reborn. He moved forward.

More days and nights passed than he knew numbers for and the last of him emerged from the cave. He ran, or floated, or galloped, he wasn’t sure, to the trees off in the distance. He screamed for joy, and would have screamed the woman’s name, had he known it. He circled a tree and fell down, amazed that he could see it from every imaginable side. He felt his soul being pulled toward the tree, toward its beauty and its majesty and he felt like he was in the presence of God.

Whatever was left of him unified with the air, the trees, the colors, the sounds, the light. He became part of it all. He could feel himself growing with the trees, blowing in the air, falling in the rain. It was a type of pain that felt so good, being reunited with everything, he lost himself.

Back to Index