He rushed through twisting tunnel after twisting tunnel of decayed metal, through rooms of stone containing jagged, chaotic constructs forming spaces within spaces, breaking through the ceilings and walls. He climbed stairs, barely clinging to their supports to narrow walkways and parapets and roof terraces. He walked through rooms open to the sky, their roofs ruptured, but always there was the scabrous parasite of decayed metal plates partially enveloping the rupture. He entered vast spaces with huge pillars and great domes fractured and split, dazzling light falling onto great flagstone floors. There were rooms littered with debris, bits of wall, broken hulks of metal, their function he could not guess. He entered curved and jagged volumes of space clinging to the edge of another broken stone room, the edges of the spaces, silent tensions pushing against one another.
He entered plazas and courtyards, their space suggested only by a broken statue or lone fragment of metal standing naked in the wan light. Spaces flowed into the next, room after room, one construct to the next, each suggesting or possessing a fragment of the next, all woven together. Sometimes smooth and seamless, sometimes jarring and violent. All the while he carried out conversations with himself, trying to remember, trying to make sense of all that was happening to him. He didn’t even know if they were voiced aloud or not. All he could hear was the silent echo of his footsteps, the creak of metal or the whistling of the wind through an opening.
The loneliness and desolation of the place and the unnamed fear that lingered over him threatened to undo him altogether. The gap that was forming within him was as cold and empty as the spaces he now occupied. As he struggled with these thoughts and feelings and the dislocating foreignness of his surroundings, his awareness erupted, blinding him with a burst of blue light. Everything around him seemed to become part of his consciousness, the thoughts melding with his senses.
The walls, the surfaces, the space, the emptiness, the light, the colors, it all became vivid beyond all those senses. His self was everywhere. He could feel it flowing inward and out, through everything around him. It all began to enter his consciousness, down to the elemental frameworks. His self was becoming fused with the surrounding environment and it with him. He could not perceive his own movement, or his own body. He knew he was moving; he was not in the same space, the same instance. His movement was continuous, instantaneous. He could not perceive the empty space where his mind spoke to him. It was now everywhere.
And then there was a flicker of an image from within, cutting at him, then receding back. He pushed it away, forcibly. The flood of inputs and stimuli from the changing self surged back to fill the void where it attempted to inject itself. And then there it was again, a fleeting image and, in its wake, a palpable sensory and emotional torrent. Again he thrust it away. He was so close. He could almost perceive the strands of his awareness stretching outward past the confines of his surroundings, beyond what his eyes could see. The perceptions continued to fill him, and they were all there, immediate, and continuous. He felt as if his body could no longer contain this new self, as if it could tear through the confines of his flesh.
And suddenly, piercing through all of this was an image, a memory. It was so strong and achingly familiar. He collapsed to his knees, overwhelmed by the astonishing sharpness of it. It filled his mind, replacing that tantalizing, infinite awareness.
Before him stood a sharp, jutting slab of basalt, a shining, smooth blackness piercing the edge of the space. The ceiling above dropped violently towards him, then receded sharply back up in draping folds of encrusted metal, folds upon folds, pushing outward from the walls into the space. The remnants of the day's light cascaded into the space, delineating and rendering sharply the folds of the roof, revealing the network of cracks and lines in the broken black tile of the floor. He could see all of these forces colliding dynamically through the space, and resonating through him.
And yet, there it was, layered across this perception, in a thickened veil of sensations. It was a face, a gentle smiling face, a face he sensed he had come to know better than his own. A face and a spirit he had left behind. But he couldn’t remember her no matter how much he tried. Staring into those eyes now, he felt a powerful sense of loss and he could feel tears forming and running down his cheeks. Suddenly he was overwhelmed with emptiness and despair at all that he had left behind.
And now he felt blind, drifting in uncertainty. He got to his feet and wiped his dirty and tear-stained face. As he stood there he tried to remember her again, but could not even conjure up the image. Who was she, why did she feel so important to him? Why couldn’t he remember her? Here he stood in this vessel, this construct of space and matter, the forces that had brought him to this point were within him; they were a part of him. The complexity of these forces was beyond his grasp, and yet here he was.
He felt as if he couldn’t take another step forward or back. He was there, and it didn’t matter. His past was lost to him, carried in a distant, unknowable fibrous current of memory. This memory, this woman he wanted so much to remember, was all he had remaining to him. How could he go on? How could he continue? He wanted so much to remember her. He wanted to be with her.
Exhausted and emotionally drained he collapsed against the black stone wall and stared listlessly into space. Then he lay down in the dust and went to sleep.
