Asylum (51 page)

            “Not
addition,” Chloe argued vaguely.  “There was this thing.  This other thing.  It
was love.  It was more than a human.  It was more even than the dark.  Back
where there were bodies, where there was snow that fell out of the clouds and
leaves that changed color.  They fell too.  Everything fell there.  Everything
changed there.  Changed?  No.  It went round and round in a circle…a cycle. 
All these molecules…things that went around so quickly, like the second hand of
the clock.  Bodies…tiny cells thrust forth from the ripest fruits of strange
combinations of random molecules.  Springing out, open-mouth…wailing. 
Suckle…grow…learn…grow…reach…grow…walk…grow… love.  Love from the moment eyes
touch human form.  Learn…grow…love the body that divided, that shed the naked
creature into being…and from that love, greater love.  Love for all that
resembles it’s own form.  Unless it’s thwarted.  Unless it’s stopped.  A
sapling plucked, a limb, twisting round any obstruction to reach any ray of
light it can.  Oh, but if it grows!  If it grows in the full light, in the full
breeze and rain, it sees beyond the molecules, it sees beyond the world of
forms.  It sees and it continues to grow.  And that continued growth…it’s the
learning of greater love.  Isn’t it?  It grows towards love.  Passing through
the cycle of seasons.  Rains fall, leaves fall, snows fall, and it reaches up
and up and up, becomes higher…higher…  Oh my God…there is something more, isn’t
there?

            “NOTHING
MORE!” the dark Thing screamed.  “Nothing and no one and no great thing!  You
reach, you strive and the higher you grow…the farther down the fall.  Come down
or you fall and break!  You break to nothing, to nonexistence! 

            “And
then love for that outside it’s form.  Love for more than can be explained,
that can be defined by those stupid molecules.  Something outside of science
and what it can discover.  Love for all that created all,  Love for oneself,
love for the greater that eclipses self.  Oh, I’m so close…I’m so close. 
There’s some center, and that concept of self is a spoke supporting that wheel,
that cycle that keeps on turning.  Leaves fall, snow falls, buds swell, flowers
burst, and I’m somewhere.  I’m somewhere in it, in all of it, aren’t I though? 
I love you for this.”

            Her
form would have wept, would have knelt, on knees that the Dark wildly and
feebly tried to shred.

           
“YOU
IMAGINE LOVE!” It screamed.  “You want so badly to believe that you are part of
it, as an individual!  That your concept of self can remain intact, through all
of eternity. I give you that!  Child, there is no God!  Look to yourself!  Look
to your hands, to your thoughts, to your own imagination!  You are God!  You
are all there is, all there ever was, all there ever will be!”

            “
No,”
she laughed, swelling.  The empty space no longer terrifying, there was not
enough space, no mammoth enough a volume for HER to be contained by it.

            “And
what do you know of love?” it whispered in death throes.  “What do you imagine
it truly is?  You think you know love?  When did your worthless body experience
it?  You imagine the insights of glorified nothing.  You have no experience to
ground it.”

            And
then came shrinking.  The air whizzing out of the hole in an inflated theory.

            ‘What
love, what love, what love?’ it cried as it hissed away from her.

            “No,”
she said calmly, no longer addressing the dark thing, but the thoughts that
kept her tied to that dark place.  “Oh no, come now.  Was there not always
love?  Seth was such a dogged example of love for no sensible human reason.”

            “Was
HE?” the Dark thing laughed, puffing itself larger.  “Was he?  I watched!  I
needled and pushed and he danced to my tune!  Was he all you knew of love?  He
kissed the other one you ‘loved’ the Sam one.  He threw those energies he had
for you to those annihilating winds, the one humans break against again and
again, the ones that issue forth from those single human souls.  The only
breeze that stirs these darker regions, the alter of self-importance, or
single-minded bodily desires.  Eat, sleep, breed, consume, want.  The outline
of what make us human!  His love, hahaha, it is as any programmed response of
the body.  His love is his need to make more life.  To make his body feel good,
to be, to-”

            “No,”
Chloe said calmly.  “You weren’t there with his family, were you?  It was
Christmas.  The smells, pine and gingerbread, all  the small things, the child
excited from the very idea of Santa, his father…the way he looked at his mother
when she didn’t realize it, when she was taking pictures of their children…and
so many other things.  The outdoors, the white against the green needles, those
wet black rocks.  He saw it, didn’t he?  The ‘more‘, the great big something…he
saw it.  That’s why nothing bothered him.  He was my chance to grow wasn’t he?”

            And
suddenly, quite suddenly, she was sure she had arms, hands, wrists…and he was
holding them.  His fingers, oh, but she knew his very fingerprints by the
burning grip that circled the phantasm form of her once forearms.

            “Get
away from me!” she commanded the thing.  She tried in vain, to scratch the
thing away from her legs, she couldn’t move her arms.

            “But
there was Sam!  What of love?  What of all you say he knew?  Damn you girl,
think, think with your human brain!  You still have one!  You walked down the
hallway.  You opened the door.  He was kissing Sam!  You think you’re so far
above me!  Tell me it didn’t hurt!  Tell me everything didn’t come crashing
down!  Think girl, think!  You know that love is a passion, quelled before the
alter of self.”

            And
then pain…and doubt…and uncertainty.  It hurt, things started to fall apart,
things started to ache.  There was still a human body, a human ego, the whole
blackened stretching human existence, throbbing, swelling at the stab from the
dark Thing’s well-aimed words.

            “Let
go, let go, please let go!” she begged. 

            Where
there was, only moments before, the feeling of growth, there was now the
feeling of weight, of being dragged down into a mire.  Where the dark thing
touched her, rot spread.  Her ideas were gossamer, the thinnest of shining
butterfly wings trying to lift her.  The rot touched her where the words did
and microbes of doubt ate at all the thin shining fabric.  She wilted.  Yet
that room was still there.  The one where Seth gripped white wrists that may
have been hers, and stared into the portals that illuminated the dark around
her.  There was no more chance of her rising, but maybe she could crawl.  Maybe
she could crawl her way back to that place, where there was a body and things
that could hurt.

            “Oh,
I was close,” she thought.

            `”Stay
here!” the dark voice commanded her.

            With
bleary earth-filled eyes, she squinted into the dark where her legs should be,
and saw something that curled and twisted along her two dimly blue-jeaned legs. 
It was a person.  A woman, with a long black dress that  curled and leaked and
faded into uncertain shadows, a woman made of dark shapes sharp enough to grow
nails and long pointy teeth.  Human, and not human.  She remembered what terror
felt like.

           
“
Get it off
me!” she cried.  “Help, George!  They found me, they’ve got me, George come
back!”

            And
it was stronger then her.  George wasn’t coming back.  George was gone.  The
shape of Kirkbride Hall couldn’t hold even his clinging form.  He grew out of it. 
Was he nothing now?  Would she follow him into nothing?  How did the black
thing get so strong…so quickly?  One minute she dismissed it, not even
listening to its words, and then it grew.  It loomed over her, it threatened. 
A woman with a  black thundercloud dress that filled the whole horizon, and the
rain was coming to dissolve her.

            Some
notion of balance…didn’t she just say such a thing?”

            “You
should do something,” she whispered for balance sake.  “I was just saying
something…I felt that I was getting closer to you.  That you would put a finger
on the scale.  You should do something.”  Though there was no hurry in her
now.  She stopped trying to fight, to break free.  She floated.

            “You
can go if you want,” the woman offered.  Her pointed teeth shrinking back into
her gums.  Her smile became friendly, and full of comfort.  A grey blue dawn
broke over a slanted distant horizon.  It illuminated no landscape, no single
familiar earthly marks.  Just mists, oatmeal-colored mists, tinged in blue and
purple and mauve, highlights of the unfamiliar sunrise.  The imposter sun bled
across the endless folds of the woman’s black dress, turning it cold blue where
it touched.

            Friendly
smile still attached, the woman patted neat hair, twisted severely into a
perfect bun.  She seemed to be the only fixed part of the strange world.

            “You
can go, if you want.  Really, maybe you should.  Here I’ve been wasting my time
trying to talk sense into you.  Sure, if you believed half the garbage you’ve
been throwing at me, you can see for yourself you’re better off out there,
outside your body.  Who needs these molecules, right?  Love beyond forms and
all that…go on now. I’ll stay right here.  Send me a postcard from the studio
of the celestial design committee,” she smirked, not bothering to look at
Chloe.

            “I
couldn’t leave if I wanted to,” Chloe admitted, defeat evident in her voice.

            “Sure
you can, it’s up.  Up and out and keep going, just go right through the room. 
Here now,” the lady bent down and laced her fingers, half in jest, half
seriously offering Chloe a leg up. 

            Chloe
squinted towards where a sky should be.  She didn’t see any room at all, only a
pinprick of  white light.  A star in the eerie blue-white morning.  The dark
lady followed Chloe’s gaze upwards.

            “And
what are we doing now?” the voice hissed at her.

            “Oh
I don’t know.  I guess I thought this was your place now, your star.  Isn’t it
though?”  Chloe asked without any concern.

            The
star shone brighter, larger in the shifting cloudscapes.  Larger, and falling…a
falling star, a meteor?  Maybe it was left over from her dream after all.

            “Stop
doing that,” the dark lady ordered.

            “It’s
not me, at least I don’t think it is.  Well…it isn’t a star at all, is it? 
What is it then?  It’s very bright, isn’t it?” Chloe cocked her head.

            “Stop
it!”  the woman was a Thing again.  “Make it stop.  You’re doing it, I know you
are.  It’s nothing more than wishful thinking, it’s not real.  Some medieval
belief of the modern peasant class.”

            “You
don’t seem all that sure.  It’s so bright.  It’s too bright!  You know what it
is?  What is it, what kind of medieval belief?  It’s not God is it? 
No…something though.  What are you doing?”

            The
eerie medium she hung suspended in was glowing, reflecting back that blinding
whiteness.  The Thing lost it’s shape, it was a shadow once again, wrapping
snakelike, round and round her legs, pulling her down, away from it.  For a
mesmerizing second, she wanted to go with the dark Thing, to hide.  The Other
was too bright, it was coming too close. It would burn her, blind her, make of
her a shadow.  The blackness sucked at her ankles.  ‘Down, deeper’ it beckoned.

            Chloe
wavered between her fear of the unknown light and her horror of being lost in
the dark.  One horrible, one unbearable, but between them…

            Chloe
wrestled against invisible straights, kicking and slapping at the dark thing
down by her legs.

            “Get
off me, get away from me.  I’m not going anywhere,” she thought, but her
thoughts were too small to be heard in the presence of all that light.

            The
dark melted, slipped away from her, bunched up and then flapped and blew away,
a broken black umbrella on the wind, disappearing.  Too much light…and yet,
squinting through it, she saw, or thought she saw something…a shape she
remembered.

            And
then, as quickly as it came, the light receded, and in its retreating wake
there was frozen earth and wet black rocks, the flat sheet of the lake at
night, a midnight sky, black fading into royal blues around the edges.  The
last remnants of it’s light gathered at the top of the nighttime dome and burst
apart, running down the edges of the world in drips and streaks, each drop of
liquid light stopping at a different point, freezing, becoming a tiny point of
illumination in the black sky, a star.

            Chloe
sat on her snow covered rock, alone on the shore of Lake Superior at night. 
The water lapped gently, rare feathery clumps of snow fell lightly here and
there.