Morgellonic Zones

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MORGELLONIC ZONES
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A shaft like a mundane hallway but rising up through the ceiling and there is a large room with carpet on every surface and it is far too large but no great ruin, such an ordinary room like a cheap house unfurnished it makes you dizzy as if you suddenly shrank down and were not only lost in this place but lost all scale of yourself and become microorganic.

The difficulty of scaling up and down the vertical hallway is also a source of dread. If anything should come from below that had been silently following. Or if anything should come from the dark corners of this far too vast room. For it is so large that it draws dark at each vertex, receding diamonds of black at the four corners of the floor and the four corners of the ceiling. There is an initial urge to explore, even if it seems empty. To see if there is something on the floor you missed, or even to fulfill the curiosity of the corners. But the naked openness of the room, while deceptively traversable to the eye, is not easy on the legs. It takes longer than you think to approach the corner, and the darkness grows slowly and awfully around you. You feel the stamina draining from your legs, and know to run on this carpet would be like running on sand. The corner is now much larger than it was from the center of the room. It rises above you like the mouth to a dusky canyon. You lose the reference point of the walls around it which were already at a disturbing scale and now in their absence are wronger still.

You step back toward the shaft. To assure yourself of the rope. You stare at the corner to make sure nothing comes from it. And another step. And another. There is a great feeling of pressure. Of being watched. Static electricity rises like a wind, and your feet sink into the carpet.

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Beware of opening yourself up in this place. By opening yourself up I mean dying. Being injured. If you become open it will use you. It will try to repair you as best it can. Or use you to repair something else.

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What looks like human hair sticking out of the wall like a woman’s hair. Long and I think it was brown but it was hard to tell in the lighting it could have had grayer parts but I’m not sure. The longer I looked at it the more it seems like it could be other things like an animal. But that was a problem of looking at it too long.

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I climbed up the narrow shaft and emerged from the corner, into a living room. For the first time in weeks, months, I don’t know how long—I saw the outside. It was early morning and those were windows to the outside.

I sat on the couch, exhausted from climbing up. Many times I had thought I would slide back down without the strength to make another attempt. As my breathing slowed, I found myself fidgeting with my tie which I still wore after all this time and that is how I discovered my own disquiet.

When you stare at anything, you take in a composite, an impression, your brain fills in the gaps using what you’ve seen before. But the longer I stared at the windows, the flatter they seemed. Like a painting of windows. And the more my eyes became adjusted to the light after being in the dark for so long, the less bright they seemed. The dull luster of early morning became something entirely unlike even the edge of sunlight.

And was there not something malnourished about the television set in the corner? And in what language were these books stacked so neatly on the coffee table, as if removed from the shelf in a complete unit? I walked up to the window and it was a piece of glass with smears of color. These impressionistic blobs seemed to share the architectural anemia of this place, more meager than even the dullest of those colors in actual life. I felt colorblind, or that the palette was something for insects, extending into ultraviolet and infrared or even terahertzian frequencies.

The door, of course, was part of the same material as the wall, in a perversion of the typical “landlord paintover”. The dark brown pleather recliner now seemed like a bulbous mushroom in this room of mush, an extension of the couch I had just been sitting on. And that couch was contaminated in return, uncertain in what it contained and where it ended.

The television—in this place there is a danger when it makes things which depict other things, and in attempting to depict the world inside a screen it had been forced to use crude physical objects, or more than objects, fetal or homunculus-like, crammed in at small scale like rotting cloth puppets but a little too large, I think, and too lifelike, and I hoped they were not breathing and I hoped they were not moving and I hoped they did not look at me and I hoped I would not become like them, forced into a frame.

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CANCER PARK

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When Cancer was younger, she did not realize what was wrong with the Theater. This is because a child’s brain is already tripping. Already sunk deep down, circuits still coming online, the neurology of time and space.

The seating has an ordinary slope, at first. As you approach the screen, the steps become steeper, then drop sharply into the dark gap directly below the screen. Maybe four to eight feet wide, but it is difficult to tell. The only way of descending now is by using the seats as handholds.

Some feel that in addition to the observable spatial characteristics, there is a sensation, though this is difficult to find an objective or unified description of. Some find it difficult to notice when the slope is becoming a drop. Others find that when they are seated in the cramped, goatlike seats at the limit of human physiology, there is a change in time and awareness, deeply unpleasant but at the same time difficult to notice or react to, like a fly drowning in a pitcher plant. Loss Prevention finds this sensation, imagined or otherwise, instructive.

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Trash accumulates in the park with no staff to clean or sun to weather. But there is a cavernous wind. Cups roll and cans clatter, setting your heart jumping after you’ve been walking two hours in silence. Eerie rustling of plastic bag caught in something.

So this clean concrete feels wrong. Dangerous. She tries to remember if she was here before.

Not all the park is saturated in trash. There are many areas which by accident of geometry are cleaner than others, or in the path of air current or water drainage. And the uncaring architecture easily conceals sudden and arbitrary locations and sub-locations, places that are simply not convenient to walk. But something in her muscle memory, the mazewalker’s trance, gives her pause.

Through the archway, a gray courtyard surrounded by high walls. Trash nibbles at the edges like curious rats. At the back is a shop, or at least the front of a shop, glass wall with awning, and most usefully, a door.

She should turn back. But if this is new, if it has been inserted, then for once she will be first, in her life of scavenging through the dregs of those faster and stronger.

As she crosses the courtyard, a sound comes from behind her. She looks back and a cup rolls across the concrete. But she sees no one. She doesn’t know why it was so loud. Heightened nerves, tuned for the slightest disruption.

She enters the shop and there is a rack of sunscreen. She laughs, though there is the impulse to take some anyways, just because it is an object in an empty world. She could paint with it, leave white smears, but that doesn’t seem useful. Could grease the ground, make someone slip if they’re following her, but this is more likely to impede her own exit. And taking time is dangerous. If this place can be inserted. Can it be removed?

Keep moving. Sunglasses. Another laugh. This place is a shrine to something that doesn’t exist. But there’s something about these glasses. Something cool. Even hot. She hooks a pair of bug-eyed sunglasses in the waist of her skirt, they’re so light, it’s fine.

Swimwear. Some of it is so impractical she blushes. She has to imagine these are distortions of fashion, extrusions of this place unfit for actual humans. She grabs a black bikini top and bottom, the closest to replacement underwear she’s found for months. The rest of the swimwear is caught in the wall, stings pulled like bubblegum.

Plastic lighters. Emerald green. Stuck in the glass counter. She feels along the sides of the counter for a door, she saw her mother push on one of these plates once and it sprang open. But not here. She could break the glass, but this seems like a bad idea. It would alert others to her find, though somehow that isn’t what she’s most afraid of.

Booty shorts layered across each other. NO. STOP. STOP. NO. STOP. The words flow off the shorts and into each other. At the edges, the shorts fuse into the floor of the display case. Others say nothing at all, or nothing that she can read. She begins to question whether they said anything at all, if it was just shapes and her mind is as starved for meaning as her stomach is for food.

A sound emanates from the back of the shop, or rather, the opposite wall of where she entered the room which contains certain items. A faint sound of water. The wall recedes here and there, but never deep enough to become a hallway, always taking her further from the sound. It reminds her of thirst. She takes the last gulp from her plastic water bottle, then stows it in her backpack to refill later, if she’s lucky. The empty bottle wakes her up, gets her nerves tingling. She moves with absolute efficiency, quickly checking the last corner of the shop then retracing her steps to the exit. It isn’t a large room, but there’s never a good reason to take a step you haven’t risked already.

The empty courtyard has a few more rolling cups, a twisted straw rocking on its broken back. As she approaches the archway she came by, she doesn’t remember that drop. The courtyard is a little below the archway, but not so much it couldn’t have been an automatic movement, filed away as irrelevant by her brain.

Is there a second archway? This is important. When none of the architecture is designed for your traversal, you can’t trust a single deviation from the path. There is no force in place to inhibit endlessness.

She turns around, scanning the dim walls, but finds no other exit. When she looks back at the archway, it seems higher than it was ten seconds ago. And she knows why the courtyard is darker.

She runs at the archway and leaps up and her fingers slip from the edge. Her heart starts beating quickly, the emptiness of her bottle joining this new wrongness, body waking up to a danger it can’t map, dumping chemicals blindly. The sunglasses clatter at her waist, hinge digging into her clammy flesh. She’s just a little too short to make it.

She runs back into the shop and drags out the lightest display rack she could find, a pale eyecatch near the entrance like the spine of a giant fish. She rolls it up to the wall and climbs on and leaps again. The edge moved while she was gone, her fingertips coming just short again. She props her foot up on the tines of the display rack which seem formed for no product and she knows the uneven surface is how you sprain your ankle and lose, lose forever, but it’s all she has. Her fingers latch on this time, then slip off, sabotaged by the sweat of her panicking body.

How long ago was the last interval? In another few seconds, maybe. Then it’ll be too far. She wipes her damp palms on her skirt and bites back a sob and wiggles out of her backpack and steps on top of those things she needs, those things she can’t afford to leave behind, painstakingly scrounged across this section of eternity, and the plastic bottle crunches under her sneakers and she leaps with all her strength and gets both hands on the edge. Her sneakers scuff at the wall and she strains to lift the weight of her entire body, feels herself slipping down irreversibly and she hooks her chin on the edge with a click and blood fills her mouth, tongue burning deep in the root. She swings her leg up until her inner thigh tendon feels like it’s going to snap, then gets her right sneaker up and rolls up and over.

She pants at the darkness above, the only stars the ones bursting in her eyes. Finally she looks down. A black pit. She spits out blood, and it falls forever.