I winced, in fear of the fisherman's net, that it would again bear down on my back—but he did not move. The bread ceased to drop from between his weathered fingers. The air ceased to move. The sunlight ceased to burn. I stood up. My name...I remembered it...my name...was John. A mouth and eyes tore openings from the sunken, skinned over pits in my skull—memories flooded back into my brain, and I looked up at the sky. The inside of my own head became suddenly awash with colors and realizations. Voices. My own voices. How long had I labored here-- Months. Years. Even longer—I remember my memories used as playthings, each on taken and handed back to me used, so that it no longer smelled, felt, or sounded clean and familiar, like if a friend borrows a jacket and forgets to wash it. He took them from me—the fisherman—I could remember it all. Yes--I could remember everything now. Every single piece...
He torpidly hunched over the water, his body locked in place like the jaw of a rabid dog around the neck of its prey. My body filled with adrenaline as I clutched the oar in my hands, raising it up over my head. He'd taken everything from me--everything that I had. I swung the oar as hard as I could, and knocked his frozen body out of the boat and onto the water. He bounced and slid absently down the frictionless river. As he slid away, his face turned towards me-- gaping black pits took the place of where his eyes should have been, and with a ring of hooked teeth appeared around his mouth. I shuddered in seeing his true form before I managed to avert my attention to more pressing matters. Here I was, alone in an empty, frozen, and lifeless world—all around me, night, beautiful and perfect night, had fallen on the river banks, and I was a stranger in own mind. More than anything I wanted to get out of here. Out of this boat. Out of this river. Out of my brain. My powers came back in full force—I pulled against the spaces between my neurons, hearing them bend and screech like breaking steel. Suddenly, I became conscious of the rest of my brain—I percieved myself as an infinitisimal part of it, and knew that, somehow, he had been expelled from where I was—but there were others like him, others hidden elsewhere inside my head. Others just like me remained trapped in a different parts of space and time--somewhere else in my brain the fisherman stayed alive, conserving his energy around whichever parts of this invasion he deemed most critical to his ultimate objective. Around those pieces of brain, there was a stubborn wall, wrapped tight like a python suffocating my will to resist. It was hopeless to fight against it, being but one, lonely fragment of a personality—and I knew if I rattled on the bars of my cages anymore, I might draw his attention back to my apparently discarded reality.
Watching the emptiness above my head, I gently stepped my foot out onto the water. I remembered the countless times that I had been thrown into the river's surface, hundreds of them materialized all together in a poison that now pressed against my ears, and my veins, drowning out my own heartbeat, as I fell down into my imagination--falling again, and again, and again. But I did not fall this time. I only stood, my feet resting on the water gently. I focused on my feet—left. Right. Left. Right. I carefully crept along the frozen water, which was eerily flat, and completely endless. I could hear my footsteps clap back to me against a wall which felt incredibly close, yet which never made itself appear to me, hidden beneath the horizon. Left. Right. Left. Right. I continued on.
Real Life felt like an impossibly far away place, a stupid dream. I knew that I was the person who I thought I was, but I didn't believe it. It was like...like when I was in kindergarten, and a new teacher named Ms. Grey (she got hired after the last teacher brought some grownup drinks to the school), read me a book about dinosaurs. She told me that right where we were in California, there were dinosaurs that were taller than the ceiling. I tried to picture it, but I really never could, even when I grew up, and I learned more about dinosaurs—I learned to harvest their bones to power cities, in fact. I'd always try to picture it, and I'd always know that they were real once upon a time, but in my mind, I could never make them real. Just like that, I could never make that person I remembered, all that time ago, real to me again. I felt old, older than I could have possibly been, as distant from who I knew that I was as I was from the dinosaurs. Old enough that any happiness I remembered became irrelevant, that any sadness I had ever felt had been outweighed by the repetition of this psychic prison, that any debts I owed no longer mattered. There was only this intrustion into my mind, this war that had last for what felt like an impossibly long time....Left. Right. Left...
Walking gave me a certain kind of comfort now--after all, it's half of what I...think I remember, and the only thing I can know for sure that I really remember. I'd been forced to relive so many of my memories again and again that I didn't know for sure which ones were real. Months passed spent reliving the day I first thought about running away at work, for example—years passed doing nothing but falling down into the mouth of a white flower, its petals wrapping itself around me like a silk blanket until I—land. My foot touched...the land...I jolted up, almost falling over. I'd reached the end of the river. It seemed that it had happened in a blink of an eye, in retrospect, even if I knew that it shouldn't have. I looked back, and the boat seemed to be only a few feet away. But I knew it wasn't somehow, intuitively. Perhaps I was walking into another trap. But if I was...I suppose I had no choice.
Dense fog hung between the buildings in a decidedly non-descript town, its streets lined with quaint two story buildings and enveloped on all sides by forest. Frigid, dense air filled my lungs as I stepped up to have a closer look--Cars had stopped in the middle of traffic, their headlights peering out through the fog. People had frozen in the midst of crossing roads. An old woman in a shop held her hand up to turn off an open sign—a younger boy to the back of him had been caught in the middle of a bad sneeze. All of it felt real. The boat, and the memory of what exactly the boat looked like, both vanished; the river now seemed so tiny it was barely even a stream. My footsteps tossed dry echoes against the walls in the city that quickly became lost in the impenetrable, unreal silence. Was this another trap? I didn't remember seeing a place like this before—and perhaps that was the best sign of one of his traps. What was more, I could read all of these people's minds—or, well, I could read whatever vowel or consonant or color they were thinking of. They were all real people. All of them. I weaved through the crowd, and inspected their faces with pity and concern. None of their....um....sounds really gave me any idea where I was, or where I ought to go. Nothing about this place gave me any sense of an answer. Perhaps my tormentor had died, and my rescue had been overlooked. Or perhaps I was so distant from the real world that a second out there would feel like a million years in here—by the time my rescue had been finished, maybe there wouldn't be anything left of me.
But I couldn't dwell on it, I couldn't get my hopes up. That was just was what he would have wanted. This town was probably just another trap, and I should know by now I'd never escape into any kind of real world. I kept walking, with my head down, but with every muscle in my body ready to jump and run at the slightest sign of danger.
A pair of marshy, heavy footsteps in the distance caught my attention. Though I recognized the mind they belonged to as that of my captor, he did not seem quite like the fisherman I remembered. I froze still; the world felt like it was spinning. As the enemy mind grew nearer, shadows fell over the walls of brick buildings and doors of passing cars. I was torn between running away, and hiding. Deluding myself into believing that I had a chance, I chose to hide—to at least make an attempt at suvival, delusion or no delusion—and so I dove into a nearby alley way, finding shelter behind a dumpster. His footsteps came closer, perilously closer. For an instant, I caught a glimpse into his thoughts and his memories, with no interference or distortion. His name was—Ryan. He crept along, in a dissociated and delirious haze, himself worn thin from millenia of pain. Though he seemed much different from the fisherman, I could tell that the two at least came from the same place, if they were not the same person entirely. I pondered whether I should attack him, or maybe even try to speak to him, but I did not want to do anything foolish. Instead, as he grew further away, I latched onto his mind so that I could track him from a distance, and I tried to understand his thoughts. His mind certainly remembered more than I could even fathom—it had seen more time, it had been caught in more loops, it had lingered for more years in the same place. There was no bottom or top to his memories, but instead they formed a numinous, and infinite space. He walked along stiltedly, with no purpose nor reason entering his mind.
Once I was sure I'd be out of sight, I slid out of the alleyway, and hunched down behind a car that was frozen in the process of parking. Ryan shot a glance over his shoulder with bloodshot and paranoid eyes, his enormous pupils darting back and forth in search of an unseen attacker. Stifled as it was by years and years of abuse, I felt a compassion for him—a feeling I thought I had lost a long time ago. After all, he could have been the only one in the world who had gone through what I had gone through. I thought back to what the fisherman said. A lonely God, he'd said he was. And indeed he seemed a lonely God now that I'd seen this other part of him. He was less grandiose, less purposeful; millions upon billions of years of wandering through time, witnessing the passage of various histories across an almost boundless multiverse, had rendered him too apathetic for sadism. But his apathy had never overcome his fear; he was still afraid and I understood why. You never get over your first few times dying—not really, at least, and he'd died thousands more times than I had As I followed along, I almost felt a trust growing for him—but I did not want to feed into it—I couldn't trust him. But it was worth it, at the very least to follow him and see what he did.
He moved more and more frantically as he went on, winding through alleys and streets, ever more suspicious that he was being followed by another younger and more nefarious version of himself from a different timeline. He let his mind become dominated, almost willfully, it seemed, by the remembered image of a blue-grey house, with two stories and a fresh painted white deck. In this memory, a teenager, who looked just like him, sat hunched over a desk adjacent to the window, his eyes glazing over at a sheet of graph paper. A familiar scene. He could not could how many times he'd relived it. He knew that there'd been at least a million where he'd tried to attack that foolish, stupid teenager snipping seed pods off of a strange, white-flowered, and he'd even managed to kill himself in more than half of those attempts, only to wind up back in the same spot, remembering everything, forced to start from scratch. This infinitisimal moment that we now entered 11 years in the past was only the fraction of a split second that had gone by since he'd taken the seeds. It would take another three days of real time, said the newsreports he'd read about his death, for him to die, and by his count, that meant it would take around 400 septillion years for his consciousness to enter death. But time was only one of seven dimensions he could perceive beyond height, width and depth--he always checked his last words in the paper to see what kind of a reality he was starting out in—since it changed whenever he died. His last words changed, depending on the timeline. In some, he just screamed, and screamed, begging for it to stop. Others had him boasting through maniacal cackles that he was the devil, and we were all his slaves. In some he whispered some dreamy words about angels, universal peace, castles of light--once, they said he didn't even say a thing—he just stared, and stared, and stared at the wall until his heart stopped beating. This walk down the city street appeared linear on the surface, but actually took place across thousands of timelines as he dodged attacks, made preparations, and shifted his focus between possible outcomes.
The house he remembered cowered meekly beneath a half lit streetlamp trapped in the middle of a flicker. The grass died back softly as his feet touched it—leaves clattered to the ground from the bushes. His hand gently grasped the doorknob, preparing to turn it with a morose, dried-out despair. But he paused for some reason. Like he'd forgotten something. He cleared his throat. "Well.", he muttered, "Aren't you going to come in?" He looked over his shoulder. "Come on. You realized I'm doing this on a constant loop and you didn't figure out I already know you're here? Geez. He must have really done a number on this version of you, huh?" I emerged from behind the car. Haphazardly, he waved, "Hey!"
"Hey."
"How's it going?"
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