This story is dedicated to those who have
spent much of their lives fighting the noonday demon, its dessicating grief.
Their hope for, and dread of, a 'normal' future and a 'normal' life depends
on the continuing ingenuity of the medieval alchemists of pharmacology.
THE BOX
It was the Alien who first showed me The Box. I'd been walking in the forest,
just outside of town, when I first saw her. Initially I thought she was a
mirage: she looked amorphous, translucent. She looked toward me, through me.
When she opened her mouth, what came out was not sound, but colour
. An amazing profusion of purples and greens and a new hue I couldn't even
have imagined, couldn't describe with the constricts of human language. It
was colour squared, taken to another dimension. It was full of meaning
and piercing clarity. The ripples and waves of tumultuous blues and blacks
and iridescent reds swirled and lapped around me, tucking themselves against
and through me like liquid scarves, their message perfect and unambiguous.
None of the awkwardness and imprecision of speech and text.
She told me about her world and what she thought was wrong with ours. She
read my numbing anxiety, the furrowed ridges and black chasms of my depression,
the mute desperation of helplessness and hopelessness that defined me. Her
understanding leapt like yellow fire, gave birth to another new soft colour
that looked like peace, a colour so gentle that it ached. A colour totally
foreign to the palette of man. She was telling me about The Box.
So I went with her and at the edge of the forest I saw The Box. Monolithic,
solid, shiny, nondescript, about fifteen feet square and nine feet high, like
a small, windowless room oddly nestled into a grove of spruce trees, moonlit,
wet with dew. The Alien explained that The Box was uniquely for me, attuned
to my consciousness. As I neared, The Box opened, extruded a tunnel, beckoning,
inviting, suffused in a soothing beam of smoky blue-grey light.
I walked in and The Box closed. There was a platform, just big enough for
one to lie on, and beside it an opening with a transparent chamber that took
me down to a lower, similar, even more secreted room. Safety. Warmth. Rest.
Darkness. Eternity.
I lay on the platform and felt suspended, weightless, just above it, cushioned
by a soft, insistent updraft. Bathed in moving air. My head was encased in
a diaphanous, eggshell-like cocoon. The cocoon was filled with textures, and
set in motion a sensory journey of sights and sounds as breathtaking as the
Alien's spoken colours. Surreal, more here and now and present and rich and
true than my sad reality outside The Box. These sensations, in concert with
the weightlessness, the unconsciousness of the rest of my body, was at once
transporting and disconcerting. I was at once inside and outside The Box,
inside and outside my self. Hyper-real.
I learned that my instinct, my imagination, my thoughts, could move me,
or at least the cocooned reality of me, through space and time and some other
wondrous dimensions I didn't understand. Dimensions in which the visual images
of 'my' world flowed, morphed whimsically into flavours of images,
not visual, but not conceptual either. As if I'd sprouted new senses and the
'flavours' were what these senses translated. And utterly authentic, incontestably
valid, infinitely more than mere representations projected inside the kinetoscope
of the head cocoon.
I learned that The Box and the head cocoon moved through these dimensions
in concert, and that I could, with practice, control them. If I felt threatened
or anxious when I came into The Box, by events or possibilities real or imagined
in my grim external world, once inside I could move The Box a light-year through
space or time in an instant. Or I could make time stop inside The Box so
it would be invisible outside, as everything flowed through it, progressed
through my stopped time. Or I could move ahead in time just an instant and
then coast just ahead of the time of whatever I feared outside.
At first, when I went inside The Box, I simply slept, the sleep of the dead,
sometimes for days at a time. Incredibly at peace, knowing that when I awoke
I could return refreshed to the moment when I'd entered The Box, and re-enter
the world, as if I'd never left it.
Then I began to use The Box to watch people in other countries, worlds,
times. I saw creatures of spectacular, exquisite beauty, and scenes of unimaginable
horror. While I lay inside The Box, I would 'walk' towards those I saw, although
I knew I was prone on the platform in The Box. But they would respond
as if I was really there, so perhaps I was.
At times I travelled to places to see people I knew, and my visit was never
a surprise, never disconcerting or counterfeit. It was as if space and time
had bent, adapted, evolved, reinvented itself to make the strange encounter
natural. Conversations with those I knew, and discourse with creatures whose
very presence staggered my imagination, were always astoundingly lucid, peaceful,
full of recognition and import and understanding. So much that I wondered
if the Alien was distorting reality to make it, finally, bearable for me.
I was especially suspicious of encounters that engaged my cut-off sense
of touch, the only sense the head cocoon could not, I thought, manufacture
stimuli for. Feeling and tasting a fruit with the flesh of a peach and the
flavour of raspberry wine. Or standing in strange black rain touching the
fronds of a purring creature covered in redolent cedar fur. Or making love
non-stop for three days with hour-long ejaculations with an idealized super-natural
amplification of a high-school sweetheart. In all these experiences I suspected,
but couldn't confirm, that the amorphous body of the Alien was perfecting
the reality of the event by supplying the missing, tactile sensory inputs,
lying beside me in The Box.
But finally it didn't matter if it was real or not. My senses, my instincts,
my brain all agreed on the total plausibility of what was happening. If it
was illusory it still had more immediacy than the reality in the increasingly
pale and unsatisfactory world outside The Box.
So now I am free of the torments that plagued and paralysed me most of my
life: the anxiety, dissatisfaction, dread, disappointment, apathy, exhaustion,
terror, disengagement, grief, incompleteness, the absence of meaning and the
lack of peace and the helplessness and emptiness that reduced me to a shadow,
a pebble, a hollow man. Please don't tell your, or my, government, or church,
or boss about The Box. There is something about it that horrifies them. They
don't understand.
There is something you should know.
There is an Alien waiting for you, now, in the forest at the edge of your
town, and s/he has a Box for you, too, with the promise of endless peace,
ecstasy, understanding. Surrender to it and you will finally be free.
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