13th
The Motions, an Echelon of Beauty Part 8
I woke for a second time and noticed that the sun had shifted its position. It hovered directly over my eyes but, as though it were partially eclipsed, staring into its absolute retinal stimulation was only as painful as a tender stroke after intimacy and like that stroke I knew the light was doing irreparable damage while causing no pain at all. I sat up quickly, licking my dry lips, and was painfully blinded by the blue ring temporarily etched into my sight, as though the sun was trying to remind me that some things are only felt after they are gone. As the blue ring faded and the sunlight once again began to irritate my eyes, I held an outstretched hand up in that universally imitatable physical make-shift shade, palm upward but not exactly perpendicular to the sky but rather at a forty-five degree angle, elbow bent as every time before, creating more of a salute than a protective position and perceived a blond-haired boy jogging towards me in what seemed to be the only sweat suit in this reality. As I watched the blue eyes bounce within the frame that carried them forward, I remarked to myself how similar the facial features appeared to be across every being in this particular universe. And I forgot to breath suddenly when his blue eyes locked on to mine. His body froze and I felt a rush of what could have been joy or panic, as the distinction between the two is often impossible as they are felt identically. My eyes asked his what was going on and they answered back in incomprehensible screams. Before I could speak, his eyes returned to the common glaze, the ground hardened beneath me, and the green tint returned. I wasn’t sure when it had left, but I didn’t notice that it had been absent until it was once again apparent. The smoking female alien-ghost that had lit her third cigarette and left the support of the bank’s wall passed before me, playing with a lighter, towards the inert jogger. For a second, I thought that she might be approaching him. He slowed, seeming to approach her cautiously but not reflecting a visual response yet other than that deceleration and I rapidly identified the striking similarities between every feature of their blank, lonely faces. How I distinguished the sexes became somewhat of a marvel as they suddenly looked precisely identical and not one more male or female than the other but rather something in between. And as the twins passed through each other, my mind skipped a beat. There was no shimmer, no light, no sound. It was as though they didn’t exist to each other. The boy reached my feet and I kicked through his waste. I started laughing with a growing ferocity. My consciousness was shutting down. I had trained it through years of trial and error to function in a reality that was no longer applicable. And as it realized its futility, all logical functions were abandoned, replaced with a heightening collection of basal survival instincts and fight or flight preparedness. It had become obsolete. My conscious had become obsolete.
On a whim, I decided to take a walk. I leapt in an attempt to float and was disappointed by the fact that I had failed to gain the power of levitation. Turning the corner, I noticed a naked, blond-haired infant walking unsteadily through some trees beside the road. As the child’s head emerged from the thickest trunk, it lost its balance and teetered to one side. This caused its head to vanish into a large branch and for a moment I was looking at a tree that had breathing, thumping human protruding from its base. Somehow the boy, evident through his nakedness, was able to shift his weight forward enough to steady its momentum. When he reached the raised sidewalk, the boy attempted to lift his tiny foot and finally lost his balance completely. His tender head passed through the final branch and thumped on the sidewalk. My ears prepared for the inevitable wailing but the boy remained silent. I walked to him, wondering if he had been hurt seriously, if pain, exlusively caused by the interaction of one object with another, one or both pain-perception capable, could even exist in a world where interactions seemed to be forbidden in the laws of physics. The boy was conscious, as conscious as any person could be in this universe, and stared straight into the sky. His eyes shared the same shade of blue as the sky, and by the pale white of his skin and unmistakable blond-hair I somehow knew that this boy would grow up to look exactly like the three I had seen before. It struck me that without social interaction and the passing of alleles and mutations, that every human being would look eerily similar. That without social interaction where we are often taught and teach how to assimilate, how to become like each other, like some schema of the average or maybe the perfect, somehow maybe a blend of the two, that interaction that helps us imitate and helps us to fit is the one thing that prevents us all from being clones. But how this or any other child could ever have possibly been conceived without social interaction evaded me and I decided to see if perhaps there did exist some parental being which might be trying to regain an interaction, maybe the only interaction. I walking quickly into the trees that the boy had passed through previously. Through the brush, I could see buildings that I had never seen before. I quickened my pace, habitually flinching every time I was about to slam my face into the trunk of a tree, only to pass through it seamlessly. I was approaching the last of the trees separating, at least visually, me from the small collection of houses when the green tint flickered and my shoulder collided with a skinny oak tree. The sudden painful but miraculous and fucking beautiful collision spun my entire body around. I fell onto a root, my back quivering with pain, and I saw a raven pass just above the trees around me. I watched it soar and before it had a chance to leave my field of vision, it vanished, along with the trees, grass, and everything that was or had ever been alive. The green tint returned to a world that had become a gigantic cluster of rock. I breathed a sigh of relief because I was finally blind, just like everyone else.
I woke up in the weeds beside the bench I had missed during my escape from the bus. Memories of my dream faded as quickly as my surroundings became discernable. But even as my mind metamorphosized into its new set of principles and conceptions, this new meaning of “open your eyes” remained.
An elderly man sat on the bench, completely still, his face covered by deep wrinkle-scars that were so tough they might remain like stone castings after his body faded into earth. An uncombed beard extended to the collar of his black t-shirt and his outnumbered brown hairs practically glistened from the oil. I sat beside the bench, propped up by my palms, and looked at this man who sat forward, his hands lightly tugging at his upper knees, staring deeply into the oily, cracked pavement, not noticing any passing vehicles, and wondered if the world truly was as ironic as it seemed. I wondered if this man was blind.
I joined him on the bench, the two of us taking up less than half the wooden sitting space. I felt a tight, unidentifiable stab of anxiety when he still offered my presence no response. After five minutes of no interaction, my curiosity accelerating towards its peak and staring into the pavement, I asked him,
“I was wondering if you could help me with something. I’ve been sitting for a decent wondering what it is that makes this world go around.”
When I received no response, I turned to face the old man. He had ceased his gaze into the earth and was focused directly on the center of my brain. His vision burrowed through the precise center of my retina and I panicked to burn every horrible thing I had ever done out of my mind because for the first time it had simply become a bare cluster of rocks and everything I had ever done lay scattered across its open, fully visible surface. But the panic faded as I followed those canyonous wrinkles to their origin, his eyes, yellowed from severe alcoholism, and began to think it wasn’t me that he was looking at in that way that demanded a justification for simple existence but my rather he was staring into the faces of my demons.
In a cough, his behavioral characteristics went from statue to human being and he responded,
“You do… two-ply“ in the calmest, most powerful deep voice I had ever heard. I could sense the aged wisdom in the timbre of his voice and wanted to know everything about this man, yet feared that he would in turn know everything about me. My mouth clenched. I had a feeling the old man may have buried a god in his lifetime too, but was too unsure of what that meant to ask. I wanted to dump everything I had buried in my lifetime into this man. I wanted to go back to the cemetery and dig up everything that signified the man I had buried earlier that day and to bury it into this one. I wondered if I could crush him with my sense of loss. I wondered whether his alcohol gave his bones that extra bit of strength required to carry the world.
The old man looked back at the pavement and I watched his wrinkles sink as the iron melted from his skin. A bus arrived. I got on and disappeared.
