Rivers of the Mind Season 2 Episode 6--And then, light

The door. The stairway and the house peeled back and I saw the door, alone in the center of a thousand pointed star, printed like never ending graph paper that flowed out of itself, and only outward, so wide that I could not see the ends of its of its points. I could only know that they were there, that they flowed towards an unseen and distant, four dimensional pyramid of indeterminate size; the deep inevitably of these unseen formations was instinctive, unquestionable. From here, everything looked as though I sat in the base of an valley—though tempted to look up, to look away from myself, this body I knew to be mine, this self I knew to be imperfect, I focused my attention away from the unknowable shape and curvature of that which was—and instead, I focused everything, all my senses, on the door—the door. The Old Door. The Weathered Door. The Door with Keyholes Rusted and Hinges Peeling From Their Arches. The Door That Smells of Sanitized air and Wet earth, the Door That Masks Unspeakable and Unknowable Fears. I touched the handle. The nerves in some distant, massive form lined up with my own—all across the endless, spherical body, the thousand pointed star that stretched so far around the horizon that it swallowed the horizon whole—I saw that I existed only as one tiny cell of something massive—I was one of 9,999,999 points in a network that existed here at this door across all times, all universes, all existences—I could see myself there at the door, my hand around it, turning it slowly with my wrist. And then--

Light.

          I shut my eyes in pain, and when I opened them again, my vision had split into scattered, staggered frames that vaguely reflected some distant, fishbowled universe, like I was seeing through the eyes of two people at once. I blinked, and the world staggered back into focus with a  flickering afterglare. My bloodshot eyes, which wrenched themselves open, and I felt my own body fall back into itself, yet at the same time, I also felt myself breaking away from a much larger whole. As I fell backwards out of my eye, I could see the hospital lights like bright, rectangular suns reflecting my pupils, which seemed like an immense black lake. And all at once I remembered what I needed to...wait...No. Nevermind. I forgot...uhm... whatever it was I was trying to remember. And by the time that I remembered I'd forgotten, I'd forgotten to remember. The cycle stretched on in perpetuity until forgetting had become an excuse to remember, and remembering an excuse to forget. There, in the tenuousness of memory, I felt myself reborn as someone who had somehow always known exactly what and who he was, if only because I'd forgotten everything I didn't know.

          I peeled back from my eyes towards far corner of the hospital room as a reborn, amnesiac spirit. The eyes of what felt like eight and then four and then two people overlapped into a singularity; down below, I saw a body, shaggy-haired, dark, and lean, a body that stared at me with mortified devastation through tortured, pinprick eyes. It saw me--I was a thought that he'd lost—another memory torn from him by a vicious, sadistic captor. I kept drifting back towards the ceiling. Was I real? I reached back to see if I could feel the jagged cement texture on the wall behind me and...I could. Could I feel my face? I could. Could I feel my shoulders? Yes. Could I feel my heart, my stomach, my legs—? Yes. Everything.

          I didn't remember how I got here, though. I didn't really remember anything—I only remembered, vaguely, that falling backwards out of my own eye as multiple people at once was not a normal thing to do. Perhaps after all that I'd been through I'd thrown a part of myself away, perhaps I wanted something, anything, to be preserved outside of my brain so that one, tiny piece could be left pure and unbroken, a part of me that I could retrieve if I ever remembered where I'd left it. I had no memories of how I arrived in this hospital room, no memories of what had brought me here, even though I felt certain that I could remember, if I'd wanted to. Whoever I was in this form, I felt like more than a memory—I felt like a mirror image of that much larger self lying there on that bed, even if I was quite different. The pupils in my physical body's eyes suddenly dilated, and slammed shut, in defeat. I felt that defeat in my core, I could feel them as my feelings, but still somehow I recognized its feelings as entirely separate from me.

          Meagan, who I knew somehow, heaved to the left as though her jaw had been hit by something massive, and then suddenly gasped for air, staring transfixed at the wall. She was interrupted by the entrance of a tall, African American woman, with a pair of hornrimmed glasses and a serious expression. This woman shut the door behind herself and muttered something to Meagan that I couldn't quite hear. I settled on the ground, and grew to my normal size. I had to warn them. I had to tell them about Ryan. I tried to follow them, to get their attention. I steered around the hospital bed and reached out for Meagan's shoulder, but it passed through her. The door passed over me indifferently, almost mockingly, and slammed shut. I was now alone—there was nothing in the hospital room but myself and my physical body—my heart rate hovered around 140, my breathing quickened, but my eyes remained shut.

          It was then that I slowly came to the realization that I couldn't see myself, not even if I looked for myself. I knew I was there—my sense of touch told me so—I knew that I—I had a body with hands and arms and legs and a face. But I couldn't see myself. I backed away from the door, with resignation, and heard a faint sound of trembling. My physical body convulsed in the hospital bed, as from out of its eyes rose another copy of myself, sound asleep. The mirror image hovered above the hospital room floor for just a moment with white flowers blossoming upwards from the pits in its eyes and then disappearing like mushroom clouds. In the darkness, they seemed to glow. “Get down. Duck.”, a voice chided me from behind. I fell to my knees, and shrunk. Opal-colored tendrils, perceptible only by flakes of white and green and blue suspended in dense aether, swirled around the holographic version of myself as its body hovered about, stalking over the hospital room like a helicopter might stalk the hills of some nameless tropical landscape in a newsreel. They danced over the room and poured out into the darkness like flashlights, lapping out at the surroundings like a thousand tongues of fire.

          Eventually, my double or whatever was controlling it decided that I was nowhere to be found, and hovered, still sleeping, into the hallway. I took a puff of a cigarette and then—hmm. What was I saying? “Haven't won yet, John.”, a voice spoke inside of my head. A familiar voice. Ryan. I remembered him from...uhm. From his house? Oh...yeah. It seemed like it must have been five minutes ago, I guess. Suddenly I remembered everything. Everything... “Here, John, have the illusion of a beer.”, he said. I didn't know what he meant. I'd been holding a beer this whole time. I took another puff of my cigarette and sipped the beer. It was suprisingly good. I returned to my regular size and took another drink.

          My brain felt super foggy. If I remembered right, I'd been listening to a voice remind me about what had just happened. But I don't remember when or where exactly. “Well, okay, so for the ninth, but for you basically the first time.”, Ryan, the unseeable and timeless entity groaned, “...thats because I'm drawing on sheets of graph paper, but because I am not bound by time, I am conscious of all of the sheets of graph paper that I could be drawing on at once. Now the shape you saw is a hexateron...it's like a...okay. Honestly, I give up. You're the one who looked up, it's really a bitch to try to explain, but—ok moving on.” I think that answered my question, but I forgot what I'd asked. Ryan manifested itself in the corner of the room, as a thousand pointed star that seemed indeterminately far away, folding in on itself in a swirling pinwheel of graph paper and pulsing graphite around a baffling and hypnotic shapeshifting pyramid.

          “Right now, John, you're effectively a ghost, ok? A detached spirit. People can only see you if I make you visible, but that takes a lot of energy.  Ghosts are—well, I'll put it this way so I don't hurt your feelings. They...feel just like the people they think they remember being. But they're not. They're the little splinters of what happens when a soul explodes. They keep burning as long as there's, well, I mean, like fire needs heat and oxygen and fuel, ghosts will just keep burning and burning until they run out of...whatever they're feeding off of—sometimes that only takes years, sometimes centuries—depends on how much they have to burn. Guilt. Insecurities. Anger. Love. Curiousity. Longing. Those are the things a ghost can feed off of. But every emotion eventually runs out, though right? That's why he had you trapped in there, repeating your memories—its to feed and to make ghosts that he can use as part of his plan. Your double that you saw, he might be a puppet. But he's got an endless supply of food, and you're running on uncertainty, and existential dread, which only lasts a day or two, tops. I can try to feed you some memories to try to keep you going, but I can't do too much.”

                   “But—what's the point? Why am I even here?”

          “Hey! That's the spirit. Keep that existential dread going, buddy. Alright, now, can you follow some very simple instructions?”
                   “I—I—I don't know if--”
          “I am asking nicely. If I weren't Good Ryan, I wouldn't even bother. But I need you. And you need me. No pressure, man, but, I mean....seriously. Please.”
                   “Okay.”
          “Ok. So, what you gotta do...hmmm. Where did I start last time? Fuck, nevermind, they actually launched the damn thing last time. I started—Okay. So come out into the open.” “Okay” “Sip some of that beer...Aww, who am I kidding, you should probably just chug it, man...Alright? Feel drunk? Or kind of drunk, like, in theory? Whatever, just pretend your drunk. Now run into that wall. Yeah. Don't look at me like that. You're a ghost. Run bitch. Run. Okay! Welcome to the supply closet! And...yeah. Wait....let me remember....I think down was the cooling system, up was the laundry room, the corner...yeah. Okay. Move to the right...no...yes. Right corner. Right corner. Right...there. Good job. Okay. Now just like...walk into that. No, don't run. I'm sorry. You didn't really have to run that time. You could have just walked. I kind of wanted to lighten the mood, since, I mean, like I always say, you should space out your existential dread with some gentle slapstick comedy every once in a while, just to stay healthy. Okay. Alright...yeah. This is the boring part. Just...keep walking through these cables for a while. They'll all live without internet for a few minutes. Good work. Thanks. I know, it sucks, but so far this route has been pretty good at not getting you killed. Hey, slap the ceiling real quick.” “Why?” “Just do it, it's important.” “Um...okay.” “Someone was sitting on the toilet reading the newspaper up there, I think he just about shit himself. Okay. Now—go down. Down! Welcome to the token crippling design flaw in the thirteenth most secret military installation of the 21^st century! Hooray! Time to blow shit up! Just kidding, none of those levers do anything, this is just a regular old mining tunnel. Just...yeah. Walk that way. Okay. There we go! Turn to your left. Go down that long, wet hallway there. Keep going. That is a river! They use it to power the base. Isn't it pretty? Think of how immense it is. How endless it is compared to your mortal self. All the answers you wish you had. All the explanations. Give it a minute.” “You know, that was suprisingly filling.” “Good. Now lets keep moving. There is a door on your right. Remember where that room is, but don't touch the door. Okay. Now walk backwards four steps. Big steps. No. Too many. That is a hidden observation room. Just sashay yourself right in there and...alright! We did it! And you only managed to get yourself killed a couple hundred times or whatever. Nice. Look through that window over there. What do you see?”

          “I see myself. Myself and...a couple of...of...”

                   “That's right John...Ghosts. Real ghosts. Don't think too much about their scars, John. You don't want to know where they came from. Can you tell I was in a mid-2000s emo band or what? Anyway. Watch them. Carefully. Eh, who am I kidding, you can still read their minds, you'll figure this shit out.”

          Shrinking myself down to an almost microscopic size, I landed on the edge of a narrow, heavily polarized observation window and moved towards its brittle glass with uncertainty. The other me was slumped against the wall, muttering something under his breath. A woman sat next to my duplicate, with matted brown hair, a wide, crooked nose, and dilated blue eyes. Her neck was covered in bruises. A few months ago, in 1966, she'd been traveling with a few college friends in a van across the country. They stopped at a bar. While they were hanging out, some cool long haired guy had come to sit next to her, and she'd gone on a walk with him. As soon as they were alone, a hand slipped over her mouth, and pressed a rag against her nose. Quickly, she fell into a haze, and awakened later in a military holding cell. Her real name was Mary Ann, but she went by Sapphire, her birthstone. Her dad used to beat her; she'd run away from home at 17. Her friends probably thought she was dead. But she was—she'd killed herself in 1967.

          A dark skinned boy named Carlos, face half purple, with veins bulging out of his neck, and eyes bloodied and black, sat on the other side of my body and tried to support my head. He wondered what they gave me—and feared that they'd give it to him next. Only a few days after he arrived, he'd overdosed on a chemical intoxicating agent, so even if he couldn't remember that, he was justified in his fear. He got picked up by a stranger while he was hitchhiking to a farm his uncle had told him about, a place he heard he could find work to send money back home. The family needed to buy some good farm equipment after all, and even if Eisenhower had closed down the official guest worker program, there were still plenty of farmers in need to help around Southern Texas. The stranger, who seemed nice at first, offered him a puff of a cigarette; he accepted, and fell unconscious within seconds. He woke up in a cell, a rearranging maze that they had constructed for test subjects to try and navigate while on various substances. He was thirsty, not having taken a drink in days. “You can't have water until you get out of the maze.”, a voice on an intercom told him in poor Spanish. The next day, he had to solve it again, this time on a large dose of LSD. The process repeated until they tried the experimental agent that killed him before he could find his way out. But he didn't remember that. He only knew that this was a dangerous place. A very dangerous place. Both of the ghosts felt so—Ryan had manipulated their memories so that they could all remember, distinctly, that the year was 1969, and that they had all been moved into the same cell as part of a new  experiment.

          None of them had met John yet. He'd been deposited there right after the guards took another one of the prisoners out of the room for questioning, a “young hippy girl from Austin” named Meagang. As John slowly came back to his senses, he hallucinated that the strangers were all demons, gnawing at him. He did not recognize himself, not his body, not his arms or legs. Everything felt unreal. He remembered living an entire life, one which had seemed totally realistic, but as he slowly emerged from unconsciousness, he recalled two doctors tying up his arms, and shooting them full of some kind of experimental drug. All of it had been some kind of strange, intensely vivid hallucinatory dream. None of it was real—but, I mean, of course it wasn't. The year 2017? How ridiculous. We'd all be lucky if we were all still alive in 1970, let alone 2017, and if America hadn't gone to war with the Soviet Union by then, John hoped things would be...you know. More advanced. Space ships or something. And fracking? Come on, that was obviously made up.

          Now John had had some bum trips, but that last one really took the cake. An entire lifetime lived as another person? And a geologist of all things? Who in the hell spent their whole life wanting to be a geologist? Ryan convinced this ghost as he scrambled for answers that he'd been trying to dodge the draft by heading down to Mexico—so that's what he remembered. On the way down, he stopped for a rest somewhere at a truck stop when a big bag had slid over his head, and everything went dark. He woke up here maybe six months ago. And what a shit place it was. As the acid wore off, he came to terms with the unreality of everything he'd just experienced. But breathed a sigh of relief at least all this was real. Like, it was definitely real, right? But who knows. Since he arrived in this base, the doctors had been shooting him up with every drug they could think of—truth serums, panic inducers, sleep agents—he remembered days spent in front of screens watching the same film, patriotic messages blaring in his ears, unable to sleep but not fully awake. He remembered being asked about his life for hours as interrogators made note of which drugs got the most out of him. He remembered being tested and testing on his personality, his intelligence, his stamina—hours upon hours of seemingly aimless sadism. All of it he remembered clearly.

          But something had changed. Whenever he looked at someone, his brain seemed to coil itself around them, and squeeze out every single detail of their lives. He knew what people would say before they said it, so that their voices almost felt like they came through a psychedelic tape echo. He felt like he was still tripping, maybe not as hard as he had been, but still tripping. Perhaps, he speculated at Ryan's direction, the Government had made a mind-reading drug, . Perhaps that was what it all was for—to make him into a weapon. For example, just by looking at him, he knew that Carlos came from Mexico, and he'd wanted to find a way to make money to send home to his family in Chiapas. He could hear the stories that Carlos' grandmother would tell him, he could see Carlos' childhood memories of playing outside with his sisters. And then when he looked to Sapphire, he knew that she was really named Mary Ann; he knew that her dad used to hit her, something she'd never told a soul. Mary Ann loved art, and music, and walking through the desert—she'd driven in a van through the Arizona desert with a few other hippies to get here.

          As I watched my double interact with these people, the distinction between us gradually became less and less clear to me—our minds, both powerfully telepathic, pooled into one. He or I knew that Ryan was a heroin addict from San Antonio, who'd been lured here by his drug dealer and forced into a slow, painful withdrawal; we knew Ryan played guitar, and that his favorite band was the Monkees, as he was eternally ashamed to admit. I'd never met these people. But he and I knew them inside and out instantly. I—he? I looked at the faces of my fellow ghosts with terror, breathing heavily. Carlos' veins submerged beneath his skin and his eyes reverted to a thoughtful brown, framed by patchy brown facial hair. Mary Ann pulled her hand away from his shoulder, slowly and gently. The bruises around her neck disappeared, and her skin cleared up—two enormous blue eyes now glistened with sorrow and life. My heart started to calm down as I looked at her—I could sense an invisible and shimmering light quivering behind her pupils. I knew that I had met her, I felt, for some reason. And likewise she felt like she had met me.

          “Are you alright?

          I blinked rapidly to try to clear the haze out of my eyes, searching for words that did not exist. Ryan sat back, deciding not to insert himself into the situation. Let them form a bond, he decided. I dissociated from my double, shifting my attention to Ryan. My other ghost was blocked off from seeing the scheming side of his brain, which watched like an indifferent cameraman already tired from filming the fiftieth take of a scene. But this was the first time his ghost had looked at Mary Ann that way, and perhaps that was what had been missing from the other tries. “I just...It was fucking terrifying. I don't even know how to describe it man--”, started the other me, “I just...lived an entire life...as like...a different person.” Sapphire's eyes grew wide, and she shared a worried look with the others in the room. Ryan played along haphazardly, able to make them hallucinate genuine emotion. A silence fell upon the room. But Ryan felt like they were getting somewhere, so he decided to jump in with some developing action. “I think I heard the guards say he got shot up with Salvinorin A.”, he said, hoping that no one noticed his anachronistic reference to a chemical not identified until 1982. They all did. “You know, from Salvia?”, he said, inserting memories in everyone's minds of salvia.

          All of us had heard of salvia, of course, but none of us had ever tried it. I... **rewind sounds** “I think I heard the guards say he got shot up with PCP. Wait, nevermind, fuck that, that's stupid.” **rewind sounds** “He got...you know what, fuck you assholes. I am a GOD and you will BOW BEFORE ME” **three gunshots, rewind sounds** “I think I heard the guards say he got shot up with some kind of new chemical or something.” There, decided Ryan, that should be good enough. Mary Ann bit her lip. “What do you think it was?” Carlos looked back at Ryan, not quite understanding what either of them were saying. “Who knows, man. And they just took Meagan, too. They're probably gonna give it to her next”

          Meagan. I remembered her from the dream—I'd met her towards the end, when, in the dream, I ended up taking LSD in a field, and I started to read minds. But I'd never met her in real life. Perhaps I'd heard her name while I was under or something, Ryan hastily suggested to me. Mary Ann remembered, with Ryan's assistance, that Meagan had been one of the first people to have been brought to stay with her in this room, and she'd been so incredibly nice. The two of them sat in the dark room at night talking for hours about President Johnson, about the war, about their whole lives—this conversation had actually been with Ryan, and he'd actually been more interrogating her than really making pleasant conversation with her. Carlos thought he remembered seeing Meagan too. She'd tried to speak Spanish to him, even if she did it poorly—he thought she was cute, and he wanted to try to teach her more, if he ever got the chance, so that maybe he'd have someone to talk to. That, again, was Ryan, who had actually been trying threaten him as he regreted having been around for one trillion years and never learning Spanish.

          Ryan grew tired of our silent fear and decided to pretend to panic in order to move things along, “I don't know man. I don't know. I don't want them to fucking give me any of that shit. Fuck no, man.”

          “It's going to be okay”, insisted Mary Ann, embracing me tightly to try and comfort me. I stared forward toward the observation slit, not wanting to respond to her, wondering if someone was watching this, taking notes on what I did, listening to what we said. Did they expect something to happen between Mary Ann and I? Was this what they wanted? From outside of my other body, I sighed, since I quite frankly didn't want to break it to myself that I'd been forced by a meddling time traveler to become suddenly smitten with a 78 year old dead hippy for his own personal amusement. “Thank you.” I mumbled.

          “We've got to get the fuck out of here.”, Ryan exclaimed, before turning to face us. We all looked back at him, against our will. The other Ryan covered my eyes. When I opened them, all of the ghosts were paralyzed. Ryan collected them one by one, picking each one up, and tucking them under his arms to carry them down the long abandoned hallway like strange syrofoam mannakins. I followed him close behind. “Oh wait. The other way. Dammit.” He turned around, grumbling, “Where is it...Hmmm. I think I said...” Another duplicate of Ryan appeared at the other end of the hallway, in the shape of a non-euclidean white flower crisscrossed with tiny, almost invisible blue lines. “It's a three way intersection, bro. Down the hall, take the stairs to the left, go through the supply closet.”

          “Thanks man, you're the best.”

                   “No, you're the best.”

          “All hail”

                   “All hail. But be careful. Meagan is more dangerous than we had foreseen.”

          “She will crumble before us.”

          The Other Ryan, the fisherman, hurried along, hastily crafting memories for the ghosts of discovering that the door had been, foolishly, left unlocked. Meagan was almost to Dr. Whitebalm's office. He planted a memory in each ghosts head that the four had snuck into the hallway, and ducked into a nearby office to hide. While there, my double and the other ghosts discovered Meagan's case file laying on a desk. “Reprogramming—successful.” Ryan then invented some memories for us about a conversation we'd had, hastily filling them with canned dialogue. After searching for hours through the offices on the top level of the secret facility, they found where they'd taken Meagan. A large chemical laboratory. She sat in conversation on a dimly lit couch, opposite a doctor, who rested in a recliner. Ryan positioned the ghosts in a neat row, and then, after flipping all of them off and screaming some profanities in their ears to get the urge out of his system, he unfroze them. “What is she doing?”, asked Sapphire, wide eyed. The conversation was, strategically, just out of audible range.

          “The file was right. She's a fucking turn coat.”, spat Ryan.

                   “more privately. I've been trying to piece everything together, but somethings just aren't fitting”, the Doctor could be barely overheard saying.

          I moved away from the team of ghosts, carving a path behind the high florescent lamps so that I hovered just slightly above them. The doctor to whom Meagan was speaking was named Dr. Whitebalm. She was a quantum physicist, who could see and manipulate all spectrums of electromagnetic radiation as a result of the accident that had killed the rest of her team and given me my abilities. She wanted to make sure that Meagan's kept her powers secret from the government. Before I could listen to the rest of their conversation, the Good Ryan appeared to me as a star, an indeterminate distance from my face. “Shhhh. This is going to make sense in a moment. I swear.” Against my will, my body expanded, my hands reaching down and grabbing the edges of a flourescent lamp. Controlled by Ryan like a puppet, I rocked back and forth. The fisherman, leading the ghosts, froze time for an instant and caught sight of me, his face spreading with a scowl. The Good Ryan, or...what I had thought was the Good Ryan...frantically tried to explain, “Okay, let's see if it works this time. Three things. Remember what I told you about ghosts. Second thing. Think of the house. Don't stop thinking of the house. Last, make eye contact. Also! Remember what I told you about ghosts. Did I already say that? I did...fuck.”

          “What the fuck are you--”
          “Turn around and make some fucking eye contact.”