Basal Ganglia (9 page)

The escalating incongruity represents an imbalance to the fort’s welfare, which represents an imbalance to their welfare. Events are unfolding completely out of sync. Rollo must work toward the restoration of balance in whatever capacity that entails.

He scours the Prefrontal Chamber’s wreckage, weeding out anything that remains intact. Surviving plates are stacked and placed carefully in cupboards. Cutlery is introduced back to its drawers. Furniture is shaken of debris and dragged to its resting position. Anything broken is pushed into a pile without consideration. Rollo does not want to understand the specifics of the damage. Specifics will only allow for the formation of attachment with the broken objects, which Rollo has no time for. This pile will be disposed of via the waste management system and forgotten. They still possess enough ephemera to ensure the continuity of their day-to-day life. Restoring order to the chamber is a step toward restoring order to their dynamic. He undertakes the restoration with care, understanding that haste cannot possibly honor the fort and what it requires. Haste is not something the fort understands.

The wounds on his body have coagulated. They will busy themselves with their own patterns and heal what was broken. Rollo no longer needs to consider them. The life of a wound is a short-lived conversation with the body. Hemostasis. Inflammation. Collagen proliferation. Contraction. New skin.

Seated in the restored order of the Frontal Chamber, Rollo allows for peace to assure him. His tired eyes are content with what they see and decide to close. They burn gently behind his eyelids, bathing in fluid until the burn soothes. With the barest commitment, he could fall asleep, but now is not the time. It is enough to enjoy the peace of relaxation before he is forced into another action.

Ingrid is out there somewhere, occupying a position in the fort. Rollo directs his focus toward the chatter of her mind, trying to find sense in her chaotic mental verbiage. If she would relinquish some of her telepathic chaos and give it to reason, Rollo would have something to work with. Instead he understands only the intonation of certain sounds. Panic. Fear. Anger. Nothing else is afforded a voice.

Regardless of the outcome, Rollo must find her. He does not imagine it will take a great deal of effort. The fort is known to him in detail. His concern is focused more on how to approach Ingrid rather than whether or not he will find her. He assumes the latter and is terrified of the former.

12.

Rollo and Ingrid once apart. The movement of one occurs without the knowledge of the other. We are pre-fort. Pre-them. They have not yet come together as a new whole. The childhood Rollo is a construction of influences and experience, all coming together as an individual. Ingrid is the same. Two separate beings aware only of their own parts.

…

When she was young enough to remember everything, before what was learned became subsumed by what is, Ingrid was given a gift by her grandmother. A towel embroidered with red stars. The towel was hers. At night it was tucked into her body, keeping them both safe in one unconscious gesture. When awake, her fingers explored the raised thread of the stars. Tracing their outline, reading their detail. Her mind consuming the embroidered stars until the stitching resided not just on the towel itself, but also within her nature.

Her grandmother would embroider, knit, cross-stitch and thread Ingrid’s formation. A childhood defined by her grandmother’s hands. As Ingrid’s dexterity developed, her grandmother transitioned from making to teaching. Ingrid sewed her first stitch on a plain white handkerchief under her grandmother’s guidance. Caring eyes savored the birth of Ingrid’s aptitude. Allowing for mistakes in order to understand correction. A line of red stitches. Almost too straight for someone without experience. Taken and framed as a keepsake. It hung on her grandmother’s living room wall. It greeted Ingrid whenever she visited, always stoking aptitude’s fire. Reminding her everything possesses a beginning.

The outward simplicity of the handkerchief belied its complexity. A straight line of stitches was the foundation upon which the development of Ingrid’s ability sat. From here, her capability blossomed, allowing greater execution. Her stitching was now dictated by what she could imagine rather than the limitations of ability. Patterns were stitched. Shapes were knitted. Her family soon wore sweaters and scarves forged by Ingrid’s hands.

Ingrid was in a possession of an ability she was already beginning to forget the origins of. We often forget how we learned what we know. The act of doing has little time to remember why it can do. Textile skill worked to define who Ingrid was. Learning the skill served no purpose outside of attaining the skill. Learning can and should be continual, but progress rarely reaches toward its beginning.

Her father was a plumber. From an indistinct time before Ingrid was born to the moment she left for the fort, plumbing remained his profession. This instilled a fascination of pipe systems within Ingrid. The mystery of a world existing below them, ceaseless in activity, designed to work beyond the scope of casual sight. Her father’s life was dedicated to pipes that disobeyed their design. So much of his world unfolded within this invisible world. His job was forcing pipes to re-obey their design. To carry water deeper into a system Ingrid longed to understand.

Ingrid was washing her face in the bathroom. She removed the plug and watched the unmoving soapy water, which refused to disappear into the plughole. This contradicted one of her basic understandings. The hole at the bottom of the sink existed to remove used water. She kept vigil over the strange spectacle, beginning to notice the water level was, almost beyond perception, decreasing. It seemed the sink was sick and Ingrid wanted to know how to make it better. The hole that took the water no longer appeared endless. She became aware of something bigger controlling the hole. A system. The water emerging from the tap obeyed a process that allowed its passage into the sink. When the plug was removed, it depended on another process to carry it away. When one process within the machine ceased, the whole machine ceased. The fragility of these integrated processes overwhelmed Ingrid.

She watched her father dismantle the pipe that refused her unwanted water. He fed strange instruments into the plughole and performed mysterious hand movements. The instruments would emerge covered in black slime and hair. Before this moment, Ingrid erased everything that traveled down the hole from her mind, as if the act removed it from existence. This was no longer the case. Everything the hole took went on to continue its own type of existence in this pipe world.

The specific abilities of her father were akin to magic. Before this moment, she was unaware of her father as anything but her father. Now he was someone who had a function beyond her. He was someone capable of amazing things. When he had completed his magic, water once again travelled down the hole unimpeded. He put his strange instruments away, changed out of his overalls and was, once again, Ingrid’s father. Almost as though he had not been responsible for the orchestration of impossible things.

Ingrid studied water running from taps simply to marvel at its passage. A part of her longed for the sink to become ill once more so she could watch her father perform this role outside her father. She remembered the black hairy slime that had been removed when it was sick and fed hair and mud into its depths, hoping to trigger an upset in the pipe world. When she succeeded, her excitement was outweighed by the anger of her father who, in this strange moment, was both the father she knew and the man capable of the magic she longed to witness. This duality taught Ingrid that people could exist, even in the same moment, as more than one thing.

Following this awakening, Ingrid developed an acute awareness of pipe systems, understanding them by pure will. It became impossible for her to encounter one without seeing the world beyond it. Pipes that led to pipes that led to pipes. She started observing her father more carefully, hoping to learn his magic, following him around, asking questions. Questions he had no great interest in answering at first. As his daughter’s odd interest became unavoidable, he started feeding her the craved information. Sometimes the information would underwhelm, but as she reflected upon what she had been told, the possibilities unfolded before her. On weekends her father would take Ingrid along to jobs, as an observer at first, then as a participant for the less complex duties. As aptitude developed, the responsibility bestowed upon her increased.

…

These were just two of the many facets that formed the pre-Rollo Ingrid. Facets that contributed to the girl Rollo fell in love with. Rollo, of course, possessed many facets of his own, contributing to the boy Ingrid fell in love with. When the two came together, so did their individual facets, merging into the development of a new whole. In the love they shared, their identities meshed together without seams. They were so immersed in the eddies of the other’s ocean, that nothing about their own ocean sought protection. Each was granted total access and explored the other’s depths, forming new opinions. Long-held selves were deconstructed and rebuilt in the other’s image. Rollo translated and deconstructed the deepest locales of Ingrid through the deepest locales of him, unaware his deepest locales were undergoing the same process via Ingrid’s translation. Each pulled the other toward them, shaving off differences, coming together. Stepping away from themselves in a drive toward the emergence of new self derived of the two.

Of the shaved parts… those demarcating a facet incompatible with the whole’s operation, they are obscured but forever extant. They are ghosts of a person past, pushed aside rather than deleted. Ghosts that hold eternities in which to haunt. Already dead, so incapable of dying.

Jellyfish Reproduction

A male jellyfish will spawn each day. Releasing clouds of sperm into the surrounding ocean. Seeking out a host prepared to grant it fertilization. Colliding and becoming something new. Planulae develop and are released by the female, where it floats through the water like dust in forgotten houses. Their float is trapped within the ocean’s dictation, edging downward, finally meeting with objects on the ocean floor. As polyps they fuse with these objects. In this position they can lie dormant for decades. Life exists somewhere within them. Waiting. Unhurried.

Patience consumes the polyp. It obeys a pattern unconcerned with anything else. When deemed appropriate, the polyp will undertake strobilation, reproducing in and of itself. Casting off others just like it, introducing myriad selves to its world. Selves which understand and continue the pattern. These polyps build a rudimentary form of their final selves. The rudimentary selves embrace the constant cloud of plankton. They gorge on the plankton, growing, becoming more. Jellyfish, as we understand them, are formed.

These jellyfish will continue the drift dictated by the ocean, gorging on plankton without end, increasing in size. Obsessed with the continuation of their pattern. Unable to obey anything else.

…

Ghosts float through live wires. Seeking connection with something able to explain why the ghost was born. Rollo and Ingrid took openly from one another. Replacing what had been taken with what they were taking until the only place they could find themselves was in each other.

Eventually one will seek a part of their self not accounted for by the other. This part reaches into their past. Before they became one half of a whole. When all they were was individual.

Discarded pasts lie dormant. They never cease their wait. Understanding, better than the one who created them, that they may be needed. They remain in place for their host who must seek them out. At the end of circuitous routes. The culmination of aimless searching. A deep part of the self never truly forgotten, merely removed from comprehension. When the host discovers this past, its dormancy ceases. A process begins where, once more, the two become one. A fragment of self now exists external to the relationship that has defined them. This wayward fragment once more finds refuge within the host. The two conspire against the relationship in blissful whispers. The past is reintroduced in the guise of a new present. Steady trajectories are altered. Even when lost to what feels like stasis, nothing remains the same.

13.

Ingrid suspects the Central Sulcus Emergency Tunnel is conspiring against her. It wears the disguise of disuse. The dust coating the Sulcus Tunnel smells false. It smells disturbed. Acting to mask what she believes is Rollo’s frequent occupation of the space.

One cannot invent the sadness of neglect. It grows slowly over time, allowing for the possibility of care’s intervention. Hopeful. Naïve. Assured that it will be discovered and removed. Neglect is both a process and an endpoint. One that slowly chokes hope until it dies. Ingrid studies the dust on her fingertips, unable to locate the neglect it should suggest. The tunnel is a lie. It was conceived as a trap by Rollo, who somehow foresaw this moment. A moment that would require Ingrid’s immobilization.

The baby is pressed harder against Ingrid’s chest as she works to calm it with the internal song of her biology. To soothe it with the beat of her heart, trying to mask her panic so the baby cannot feel it. There are few chambers in the fort inaccessible from the Sulcus Tunnel, therefore there are few chambers in the fort that do not lead to Ingrid.