In Colors of Steel
"How this possible life flashes before my eyes in colors of steel, with spanning rods and airy darkness between!"
--- Kafka
This was I suppose how you became who you are, an event that took place before the advent of conscious thought, reinforced over time by your deep dives into this or that universe, the realms of countless other dreamers expressed on pages and screens and through sound waves. You listened and read and watched and then saw your room lift itself off the ground and grow legs and run you down the street, straight through a plate glass mirror beyond which were realms unimagined.
And so you lurk now in the places between, peering in, dipping your toes, wading up to the waist, but always leaving to stand outside watching from Elsewhere. Elsewhere, where the rainbows glow and the nights are as deep as the ocean. Elsewhere, where sheep bounce over the meadows hunting wolves, and candy is poisonous and mushrooms taste like candy. Elsewhere, where a loaded gun is always handy but never necessary.
Your name is Garett. You stand beyond the mirrors in your sleep. Lifting weightless weights, planning, plotting, waiting for the day you might wake and cease to be Garett, to become someone else.
The city is a series of sewers. Sew enough buildings together and what you have is one big burrow, housing all that is human in its spiritless halls, where sewage flows ever downward, but is ever produced anew. You are somewhere in this endless building, still sleeping beyond the mirror.
You have a six-legged cow named Bertha. You keep a box of mints in your pocket, something that you think of as mints because they taste nice, but they also make your brain explode with every bite.
Over the hills, grasses wave as tall as treetops, hiding giants.
I fiddle with dials on your bed, keeping you alive and kicking. You kick aginst the mirrors, but they are made of material harder than stone.
The sensation of floating is real. This is your actual physical state. What is not real is your sense of control over it. The sense of floating where you like rather than in one specific spot.
Beyond the stone mirrors there is only glass, if you could just reach beyond them with the ball of your foot and shatter it, the dreams might flow out into a putrid puddle on the floor and leave you there gasping air. You have arrived in one specific place at last and no longer have the ability to leave and go elsewhere. Perhaps you are awake, and perhaps you are just having a nightmare, one that you cannot immediately exit from.
Outside this room is a onetime subway station, a switchyard enclosed in a series of tunnels, darkness out beyond the platforms twitching with unease. Cold dries out your skin so that it feels too tight. You flex your fingers expecting your knuckles to split open like sausage casings.
You have hair on your head and eyes in your skull, but they're not real. The mouths of the train tunnels are sealed with sheets of metal, turning the station into an underground bunker filled with towers of blinking lights and humming machinery. You put the clothes laid out before you on the body you occupy and climb the stairs. A steel door unlocks for you, and you push it open with fake fingers.
The twilight of clouds has engulfed the ruins. No one else is around, so you begin to narrate to yourself. "You are Garret the 17th. It has been 5 minutes and 27 seconds since your last backup. You live amongst your cluster. Perhaps you had a family once. Impossible to say. Your backup seems to have been corrupted at some point. How long ago is impossible to say."
You rub your fingers together. "When you rub your fingers together, they tell you they are touching one another, but you cannot feel it. Your nose says this place stinks of decay, but you cannot smell." You glance down, and in the floodlights before the doorway, you see a half-dried slug struggling to climb a rusted pipe.
"How grand it would be
to be a strand of cells
stretching in the absent sun."
"Are you a Poet or Philosopher?" you ask yourself. "No. You're a Collector." With a gloved hand, you tighten your cloak around this body and stroll into a tangled horizon.
In the angles of jagged concrete, fungi and creepers play. Beetles buzz to and fro, feeding on heaven knows what in this place. There is a little ecosystem around your feet, too small and poisonous to participate in. The soles of your boots squish and squelch in the softness, tilling what must pass for soil.
At your own scale, tents and shelters have sprung up throughout the ruins, concentrated around the buffer stations and their power grid. Other Collectors wander the ancient city, sifting through the junk or stopping to charge, rest, and socialize. You would nod to them if any came near enough, but you do not seek them out. "You head for the wilderness beyond the grid," you say, "where there are still things to be found, discoveries to make. Nickel and copper to salvage." Your mind still knows to keep an eye out for certain metals, wires, circuits; but not their purpose. You remember not to eat them, yet they somehow look delicious, hovering in your mind's eye, glistening with potential.
In the twilight of midday, you reach a familiar shelter near the edge of the grid. Strings of lightbulbs trace an open front, a lean-to rusted and corroded by acid showers. Inside is a series of mismatched tables and a long counter at the back.
On the wall beyond the counter, a sign says, "Clean up after yourself, and others." Another sign on another wall says, "We are all good people." The refrain echoes through your mind and finds a kinship of ideas within. You look around and see that the other people at the tables are all quite handsome, though in varying states of cleanliness and 'health.'
"They do indeed look like good people to you," you say. You glance at the men and discreetly examine the women, which leads inevitably to examining yourself. Seated on a stool at a table alone, you start by clenching your dick between your thighs, just to check if it exists. It does, but whether it does anything beyond exist is unclear. It tells you it is currently being touched by your own thigh. You reach down and scratch it briefly, through your pants, and this sensation is also relayed, but in a language too clinical for an animal organ.
The word animal hangs in your brain, and you swing from thoughts of sex [and urination] to food, to chewing and swallowing and digesting. Memories of appetite reach you, but not the appetite itself. You stare off into the distance for a moment and then ask aloud, "Does this mean you are content?"
"Still talking to yourself, Garret." It is not a question. An adorable little woman takes the chair across from you and lowers her hood. She has green eyes and hair the color of both the sky and the ground. You look outside and see that it has begun to rain. She smiles at you and you marvel at the whiteness of her teeth, the only things in the world of that shade and hue.
"I know you," you say, switching to first person at last, "very well. But not your name." When you speak it becomes true. You begin to wonder if you could make anything true by the same method.
"Of course you do. And of course you don't. And why should I bother telling you? You won't recall it next time, either." She looks sad and amused. She removes her cloak, and beneath is a surprisingly colorful dress. She sees you exploring its patterns and laughs. "Do you like it? It isn't knew to me, but it is to you."
"It looks great on you."
"Well, I kept it clean at least." She fiddles with her fingers and clicks her teeth rapidly together, fast enough that her chin seems to shake. "Are you going out or heading back?"
"Going out, I guess."
"I see. I've finished for today. Could you spare some time?"
"I can always spare time..."
"...for me."
"...for you, if you like."
She grins and you grin back. Their brilliance aside, her teeth are ever so slightly crooked.
"Want to get out of here?" you ask. "Or do you need to rest?"
"Let's go. I've got plenty of energy."
You look out beyond the overhang again. "What about the rain?"
"I like the rain, remember? Just keep your hood up, in case you forgot that, too."
The two of you wrap yourselves, each in your own cloak, keeping your gloves tucked into your sleeves. The rain outside churns the muck to sludge, destroying the homes of beetles, who will begin to rebuild the moment it stops. With a vague confidence that she will let you, you hold her hand as she tugs you along toward the wilderness. "Where should we go?"
"I'll show you what I found today," she says.
"By the way. How long have I known you?"
She looks down at her feet as you walk. "I don't remember. But a long time. We've known each other a long time."