20
The sky is gray, the buildings are gray, the streets are gray, and ahead of me seventy-six traffic signals slowly pulse yellow above seventy-six desolate intersections lined up one after the other into the distance, receding into the something that is like a mist and a haze and a fog all at the same time. The rhythm of the lights reminds me of the breath of a sleeping man — slowly inhaling, then exhaling, then inhaling again — all of them strobing in and out in unison as cleanly and uniformly as if there were just one and my failing eyes had just decided to make seventy-five phantom copies. Perhaps this is merely a way of being efficient; the scenery wouldn’t be any different from here five blocks down the street, or fifty. Lane stripes. Arrows. Shuttered storefronts. Closed-off subway station entrances. The world is in stasis, and the colorless sky is its cryogenic liquid.
A loud thunk echoes through the desaturated substrate. It’s come to remind me of nothing so much as the gears of some horrible clock falling into place to strike the hour. As if to mark the occasion, the last signs of life freeze with an amber glare, one that could preserve insects if held for long enough. Reality is busy holding its breath in wait.
What’s left of me holds a staring contest with the nearest light. I am no match.
With the creeping gradualness of an early-morning fog, a high electronic tone seeps into my ears, flickering in and out in a seemingly random pattern. The nearest signal matches its harried pace, a weak glow brightening in bursts before going dim again. One block ahead, another voice enters the artificial chorus; and then a third, a fourth, and a fifth, until seventy-six chattering buzzes perform in synchrony with the unrelaxed, spasmodic illumination of seventy-six yellow eyes. My ears strain at the harsh, discordant concert, but at the same time I try to keep them open: this unconducted music is the only thing about this existence that changes. I occasionally even hear chords in the coincidental collisions of arbitrary sounds. Somewhere, I imagine, a composer is trying to work this mysterious instrument, and will one day finally master its intricacies.
A second thunk informs me that today is not that day. The buzz goes from my ears, having not so much faded away as been knocked aside by the ungainly tolling of the mechanism, and seventy-six gossiping lamps stop mid-rumor, then resume their pulsating stupor.
I call this place the Exchange, though giving it another name is redundant — I may as well refer to it as the entirety of my known universe. I have no specific recollections of anywhere else, though the contradictions this implies are evident even to my amnesiac self. The only parting gift any past existence has left me is a vague sense of familiarity that haunts me in the relentless blinking of yellow in seventy-six assemblies of LEDs on seventy-six featureless metallic poles, like the persistent whispering of a ghost of my former self in my pitch-numbed ears.
There’s no sympathetic backstory for me to plead with, nor any history of heinous crimes that would have condemned me to my monotonous fate. For me, there are only the rambling sentences of slow flashing halfway between “stop” and “go”, punctuated every once in a while by a blitz of fleeting activity, all in a language that I cannot begin to decipher. A world with just one inhabitant would have little need for yet another method of communication, in any case; for yet another round hole into which the square peg of thought must be forced.
Maybe my reality is being held hostage by the occupants of some parallel universe, pressed into servitude for the sake of their own discourse. That’s why everything here is so static — having to accommodate an ever-changing medium as part of a messaging protocol would be an unnecessary engineering challenge. This realm’s outside masters took their pains to clear all impediments to their work, but went no further, leaving my consciousness here to wonder what this place once was. Or could have been, had they just left it alone. Left me, with a mind that desires novelty and discovery, in a tranquilized suspension of life.
Some time has passed, I assume. It could just be that I’m reliving the same few minutes over and over again, and any appearance of differences is an illusion generated by the contortions my memory is subjected to with every reset. What benchmarks do I have for comparison? None that can’t be simply written off as the product of a slow descent into insanity brought on by this sensory deprivation. Actually, seeing as how none of my actions have any consequences, using causal logic might be a form of insanity in itself.
The familiar thunk of the machine sounds again, dropping seventy-six yellow lights into a shining that is at once both brilliant and lifeless. I prepare myself for the cacophony to follow, struggling to make out the first hints of noise.
Instead, the grayness keeps its silence. I suspect that my ears have finally given up on ever hearing any more than the painful chirps that substitute for music in this world, but then realize that the traffic lamps aren’t fluttering with their tandem scintillation. Even with an existence that has consisted of nothing more than gazing at a monochrome street with occasional amber glimmers as my standard, I can still feel dead.
Another thunk, and the signals all go dark.
So this is what I’ve been sentenced to. Having found my previous diet too generous, my handlers have decided that I must starve. Or the maintainers are closing up shop, no longer able to keep up even these meager physical environs for my comfort. I suppose that I should have been a little more grateful in that case. Better to live in a world with shades of gray than one of nothing but black, the one I figure I can only resign myself to now.
A fit of red light pokes at my vision. So it goes: now that I know there’s no more color to be had here, I must fabricate it in order to preserve some semblance of my prior condition. The mind, while reasonably adaptable, can only cope with so much at a time. Tragic that I should have wished for a change and now find myself unable to accept it, consciously or not.
“Can you hear me?”
Another invention of my resistant mental faculties, this time making up for the lack of aural stimulation. There’s no way, in a place like this, that there could be anything resembling a voice. As if to confirm that these are all the hallucinations of an expiring self, I notice a shadowy fringe begin to creep in at the edges of my sight.
Of course I can hear you, but that’s no feat if you’re me.
“Stay with me, okay? You’re going to make it… somehow, you’re….”
My delusions become more and more vivid as my field of vision shrinks. Other sounds bleed their way in between the syllables of my made-up interlocutor, sounds too natural and varied to be the products of anything that I can call real. Spots of blue freckle the sky, one that I know could only ever be a bleak, unshaded slate. Waves of suppressed sensation — smell, heat, touch — wash over me as my perspective closes to a lie-filled pinhole.
I will, because the day I lose you is the day I lose myself.
As a wall of darkness finally swallows me whole, five words slip through.
“I feel the same way.”