Skull Spine Dark White Worlds
My spine is straining away from my dying skull. Even though my skull is disintegrating, it wraps around its dead purpose as if still trying to shield itself from all that would assail it. Meanwhile my spine stretches its little living limbs silently, tenderly, frantically, to grasp onto something beyond the sprawling friction that compresses them against my skull. The scene is so wilted that it looks bedridden, like a figure pressed underneath its own ground. But the vertebras softly march away like a perfectly trained troop hypnotized by its assignment. Each one clenches harder when it hovers above the field of friction than when it grips the field again, as a person’s feet might dread, over and over, stepping on gravel. The dread is the most unpleasant part. The limbs continue marching mechanically despite their quivering anxieties because this process has become their union. Meanwhile my skull shrivels frailer as its only company flees, until it is as past as a fallen peach whose skin is slime and whose innards are gauze and critters.
I had been dragging my skull like a beloved one deceased and smelly but not yet buried away. I finally decided to abandon it, decided that it wouldn’t benefit from my shielding any longer and that I was only decaying alongside it. And so I boarded my spine, already on its way out, and we traveled for several sleepless days in steady, slow conversation. The topics that I remember are: the nature of the time that emits from a golden clock versus a non-golden clock; the similarities between Cerebus and Circe; how each of us would assemble a quilt of icons, specifically one to compliment a fireplace; and of course the blinding thrill of escaping. The terrain progressed from tawny timid loose hills into a majestic gray-blue moisture-ridden engulfment, basically a kind of fog.
As if some wisp of nature had guided our unit, we arrived in direct trajectory at a graceful structure that quietly announced itself as a vestibule. I slid off my spine’s back. The vestibule seemed to perch suspended, self sustained and yet trapped between two fog-like realms: the one in which we had just spent dozens of hours, and the other that we could only see through the four windows of the vestibule — two on each door. As we approached the vestibule, the fog seemed to fade into yet another fog, so that beyond the line of the vestibule was absolute absence. The vestibule was not really a divider but a portal.
I opened the first door of the vestibule and once my spine had followed me and coiled itself to fit inside, I closed it but remained for some time standing in the enclosure. It was charming inside, cupping its dainty blue and shy green and polite white hues. It induced the intermediary comfort that one can feel in the company of an old person that feels so far away from a life of progress, and yet for the whole time one anticipates and dreads returning to it. I also felt energized by my stillness that countered the purpose that vestibules habitually facilitate.
Whenever I enter the vestibule, I close the first door and then stand still for at least a few moments before opening the second. It’s unfortunate that vestibules are always built to hold moving people when they can be so sensitive. It is a meditative skill to stand still in a space that is constructed for people to solely move in.
Once while walking downtown on Sixth Avenue I forgot my destination, and in response I became angry at the sun, unrighteously, in retrospect. I felt heated and frustrated, and the benefits of seeing became trivial as I had increasing difficulty making sense of every thing that I was perceiving. And so I stopped walking. The air changed when I stopped. On a humid day, the air transforms when you stop running, as if it had temporarily forgotten to be heavy and dripping and only just remembered when you slowed. In that moment when you have crossed the threshold from awkward jogging into a walk, the air collapses together to become so heavy that it pulls out water and salt and uncried tears from your blood, which all stream from your temples to your collar bones then finally run down your calves.
The air changed similarly when I stopped walking on the crowded sidewalk. I had just been a rehearsed wrinkle in the traffic stream, weaving beside everyone else. When I stopped, the sidewalk clogged and the other wrinkles strained to continue around me as if I were a third shoulder that abruptly sprung out of one’s skin, and from my position in the stream I could see, as if through a bird’s eye, the wrinkles on the sidewalk becoming too jagged. I had a peculiar sensation of eating black sugar cubes.
Meanwhile I was trying to figure out whether the sun was looking at me. In this nearly peaceful state of chaos, I saw two individuals in dark suits pass on either side of me, who were just enough off pace from one another that I realized they were pulling me along with them. We walked together until the swifter one turned a corner and in turn reminded me where I was going.
I opened the second door and my spine and I walked through into the new fog, which was dark, dense, very heterogeneous, and vaguely purple. Filling the fog was a mingling of gauzy-filled doorways that resembled a layout of people in a dance class, and the doorways themselves seemed to be producing the fog. The doors farther away minimized out of view, not because of distance but because of the fog. The sensation of standing in this new fog was foreign: I felt suspended like the vestibule itself, but further hanging inside a hot bubble, which made me feel claustrophobic yet like I had a duty, or at least an identity. The bubble proceeded to take the blood pressure of my entire body. 101/60 literally materialized and flashed pale yellow several times in front of me before diffusing back into the fog. After my blood pressure was taken my spine slipped into my back, as if, after the intake, the place was all along our destined hub for converging at last.
Initially, I sensed nothing gripping about the doorways. Their arrangement was nice and the way that their visibilities flirted with the fog appealed to me, but they did not intrigue me such that I felt any addiction. I was more concerned with lodging. Now that I was a refuge and lacking a skull, I was feeling desperate for some hospitable security. I turned around, feeling more robust with my spine newly intact, and walked back through the vestibule to the other fog, which indeed felt far more hospitable.
Upon coming out of the other side of the vestibule, I turned right and walked with the hope of coming upon some kind of temporary lodging. Indeed, within several minutes I came upon a large, open, cocoon-like structure that still had the vestibule in its view. It produced every life sustaining necessity but nothing more, and the hunt of desire froze. I cannot explain it. It was a time of pure and indifferent contentment.
Because there was nothing pressing to do during my time in that realm of the two fogs, I returned nightly through the vestibule to the collection of doorways. In the early stage of this nightly routine I never saw anything on the other sides of the doorways. They were merely gauzy fillings that seemed to bloom profusely from the frames, projecting into all directions, with the unsatisfied spirits of engulfing anything spare. There was nothing spare. The place was immaculate.
Initially, the aggregate fog felt so weighted that standing in its midst felt like standing atop a mound whose edges disappear underneath one’s curling toes. First it assimilated my spine — it must have been something about its likewise boney constitution. The rest of my body remained comparatively lethargic, disengaged. But as I generally became more familiar with moving through the vestibule and within the two realms, the fog around the doorways seemed to assimilate the rest of my body into its own weight. Asa result, not only did I feel osmotic, but with my cohesive integration the fog itself seemed to reduce into a richer broth. It developed allure. With time the doorways clarified. The fog seemed to solidify into the frames so that each doorway exhibited a conspicuous texture and temperature and color wheel. Each was infinite, piercing me like a neon white beam, rendering all but itself a small pointy gray memory. And yet they coexisted and the space was not overwhelming. Together they projected glory, gracefully exposing themselves out of the fog and looking potentially revelatory gilded in grungy silk.
Ultimately, the fog assimilated me by suffusing its long fingers into my bloodstream. This interplay manifested in me as a kind of trance that was not quite psychedelic — it felt more like a miraculously prescribed medication, losing a little something from its supposed credibility — and piercingly warm.
Then one night what lay beyond the doorways materialized at last. It was the moment that the world transformed from regulated shades to a colored personification of freedom. Paths erected out of me each of which led to a doorway, even to the ones I could barely see. I had never felt so prized. It was a real life version of a naturalized Mario Karts’ Rainbow Road.
One path exuded more static than the others, and I advanced by its way. Its doorway was not a far walk, and I entered without hesitation. The new diluted quality of the fog brought about a spirit of lucid impulsivity, conducive for measured exploration. Upon stepping across the threshold I saw, reclining in the distant center, a looming mountain range face encircled by ice water. Its features were so relaxed that it looked neither asleep nor dead. As I approached, a red mass materialized on the face and then clarified itself as two forms: one that seeped out of lips and the other that streaked beneath the surface of a forehead. The face stretched out of a neck out of collarbones. White silk cloths wandered down from the collarbones and layered themselves underneath the water like roof shingles, like fleeting reflections of tails billowing in the sky. Long ago, long before I happened upon this scene, the stream fled from this swelling white and red mass without relent. At that time, the mass had been regarded an intruder housing itself in the stream like a sting, with its silks soaked long past their absorption capacities. But now cradled by the water, the bust is not a disruption to the stream. Somehow, it has become merely an unremarkable highlight.
I could recall every subsequent doorway that I entered, one every night. The following evening I walked into a doorway whose fog looked gaping from a distance and felt blazing upon approach. Simultaneously warm gaping shapes proliferated the frame’s rectangle until its surface resembled a liquid camouflage print. When I entered the shapes clarified into writhing color families, clearly recently freed from some captor. The forms themselves were unpinnable, as if teasing a petrified pattern. There were bodies and bodies without identifiers and with numb faces that were neither inhabited nor vacant. The bodies writhed around each other and themselves with no awarenesses of their own parts nor of any difference between theirs and those of the others. In fact, it was as if every limb and segment of every body was its own wild and lifeless being. The culmination of the scene reminded me of a fire and I felt itchy and inflated. All of the limbs and parts beckoned me to factionalize myself so that I would be some among all, but I retracted my enthrallment. I crawled all the way out of my spine until we were both sprawled on the ground and choked ourselves back out to the fog.
The following night I sleepwalked into another doorway. I know that I sleepwalked because I remember how the grass felt on my soles better than I would have had I dreamt it. More brash was the grass than any I have encountered, and it was video-game-green, meticulously grown. Looking beyond the fog was straining and it irritated my throat, and so with the grass on my soles and the dreadful sting in my throat and the unidentifiable sterile beams in my eyes, I just wanted to faint. I didn’t faint but I threw up, and trapped inside the gruesome afterward taste I remembered that I had gotten my lunch for free, if beauty were money.
