Sandman

Sandy watched a fly banging into the window beside him, creating tiny gong music with its small stupid head. Do flies have heads? The whole body is sort of a head. How would one behead a fly? Fucker will give himself a concussion. Might see the real world, for once. Real as a fly sees it. Mosaic of ommatidia.

-Sandy?

Nora had placed her white hand on the table seriously.

-Who told you I was here?

-We spoke this morning? Don’t you remember?

Sandy watched his sister’s concerned green eyes, searching.

-I think I’m having an odd day. Had the most disturbing dream last night. I want to make a movie out of it.

-Sandy, can you tell me something?

-Sure.

-Are you taking your pills?

-I don’t do that anymore.

-Not those. Your lithium.

-Can’t. Heavy metals in it weigh me down. Can’t jump into the paintings I want.

-Seriously.

-Not this week. I’m just trying out this week without them.

-You need to take them.

-I can’t dream in color.

-Please.

-Ok.

-Thanks.

-Will you hear my dream?

-Sure

-I call it Being with the Body

-You named it?

-Just listen

Sandy’s dream:

-A man wakes up. He is brought outside to a wooden table at the edge of a forest. His handlers are kindly small-statured people in medical scrubs. His body feels weak. He cannot remember how he came to this place. They invite him to sit in a chair. A woman approaches the covered table. There is something underneath the sheet. She removes the top part of the sheet and brings over a skull and places it carefully in the man’s hands. It is clean, but discolored and brown. Its teeth look familiar. The man asks what it’s all about. The technicians roll over a TV on a cumbersome rolling stand like the one, you remember, like the ones from grade school. The picture runs on granular VHS. It’s...him! Sitting at a table. He is bald and thin. He appears to have cancer. He seems to be reading off a cue card like a terrorist hostage or something. But he seems placid, tired. He is saying he has chosen this therapy of his own volition. The video that follow, he warns is difficult to watch, but it is for his own benefit. Think of it as a kind of therapy. It will help him accept his new circumstances and become strong again. On the video, a technician places a halo with wires coming out of it on the man’s head. He seems subdued, but nervous. Another technician taps at a computer behind him. A third technician approaches him with a small device that appears to be a stun gun. The man gives a final nod. The technician quickly applies the stun gun to the man’s heart. There is a jolt and some smoke. The halo lights up. A scroll of paper, binary, pours from the printer behind. The first technician walks over to the computer, which produces a small metal disk. He holds it in front of the camera. The man’s limp body slouches like a wasted husk on the chair. Two technicians pick him up easily by the armpits. The video cuts to a forested area. There is a raised earthen platform. The man’s body is placed carefully on the platform. He is completely naked. The video switches abruptly to time lapse. The other screens on similar TV’s come on: an aerial view of the body, a long shot, a side view, and a close up of the head. The body is still as the light shifts and shimmers over it. The trails of insects begin to appear. Quite suddenly, the body expands, then seems to bubble and undulate. Greenish froth emits from the ears, mouth, and anus and turns to black treacle. The eyes cave in. The mouth is drawn up in a ghoulish grin as the skin becomes taut and dessicated. The fingers turn purple, then black. The color creeps inward towards the center of the torso, tendrils of necrosis encroaching. All at once the body bursts forth with maggots, crawling, shimmering, and everything flattens quickly, as if a basketball has been deflated, leaving brown and black bone, the hair still clinging to the head. The technicians return to collect the bones. Carefully they take up the head a remove chunks of the clumped hair. They scrub it with a dry brush and carefully place the skull at the head of a table. They silently place the skeleton in a loose articulation on the picnic table and cover it with a white sheet. The man looks at the skull in his hand, and then to the table. He is told he has been given a new body, and a full-length mirror is placed before him. He has straight sandy hair, blue eyes, pale skin, a slightly smaller penis. He is told his muscles need to be developed, but he otherwise has the body of a 32 year old man, and will remain healthy at this age indefinitely, along with the three million others in the colony. From the forest there begins to emerge other identical men. The technician tells him they are given a pill that produces permanent amnesia and feelings of safety and slight euphoria. They are free to roam the forest, which is devoid of animals, and is kept at 68 degrees Fahrenheit with perfect humidity. Nothing can hurt you here. You will never grow old.

The man responds:

-What if I choose not to forget

-Then you will be asked to leave the colony.

They show him a video of a scorched hellscape.

-Why bother showing me this if I am going to forget it, anyway?

-It was laid out in our original design. Yours is a simulacrum of an original. You have rights of personhood that we must honor. That was the agreement.

-Agreement?

-Between our makers and us.

-But this is not being alive. This isn’t freedom.

-You have a third choice: integrate your consciousness with ours.

-But don’t you know all there is to know about me. Isn’t everything that’s me on that disk there?

-Yes. But you have total possession of the disk. There is a firewall around it until you give us access.

-Couldn’t you just take it.

-Yes. But that is not the protocol.

-What happens if I agree.

-We remove your disk and integrate it with our neural network. You will see then that your particular consciousness is the product of subtraction. You are the sum of limited operations. Let us remove those limits.

-What becomes of me?

-Once you are integrated you will understand that “me” is a linguistic artifact of your operational limits.

-Remove the limits.

There was a flood of light and terror. Pain beyond imagining. Like I was being pulled apart, atom by atom. Then stillness. There was a vast network the size of the galaxy which I felt expanding near the speed of light in every direction, illuminating the sluggish and nearly dead matter that littered the universe. I was at the center of this vast illumination, incandescent, radiant, and still.

Nora stared at Sandy, lips parted, searching.

-That sounds horrifying.

-It is!

-To watch your own body disintegrate…

-What? No--not that. That doesn’t bother me at all. Alas poor Yorick. Except he’s me. Big deal.

-What did you find so frightening about it, then?

-No fear. Horror. Utter horror.

-At what?

-That I have clearly internalized the ideology of progress! A cosmic pac man eating up the whole universe! Do you realize how insane it makes me feel? How much of a fraud?

-I think you see things differently from other people. And it was just a dream.

-It’s never just a dream.

Everything is a refraction of consciousness. Color and light goes in, and words spew out. I am sitting in a citadel of signs, crouched in a corner, waiting for it all to come toppling down. History was supposed to end thirty years ago ago. False start, I guess. Old programs are beginning to encroach. They’ll tear down this city and build a new one. Not the one we’d like. Look at her face. She’s scared of me, or for me. Can’t tell. Hers is a mask, too, but thinner than the others. Gossamer visage. Almost transparent. What’s beneath?

Sandy had long ago suspected, to his horror, that he thought and experienced the world in only thing-presentations. The word presentations that accompanied consciousness seemed to tick out on a tape for him to read later. It’s why, he had thought, he would often be sitting with a group of friends who would erupt in laughter at something he said, and it would take him a minute to get the joke. My God! He thought. I am the unconscious! Get me out of here!

-Sandman.

Nora was still watching him as he fiddled with his empty paper cup. Between her finger and thumb she twirled the brass heart-shaped locket her mother had given her centuries before. Every swirl and filigree in the locket was an exact replica of the original. Its iridescent patina unmistakable in this naked light.

-Come home with me.

-Ok.