In the light: cloudsign. A feel of increasing lateness that may be just a camouflage of the weather. You can still feel the start of what will eventually be a full headache, the tiny but constant weight of the light resting on the front of your brain, straining the optic nerve, pulling your eyeball tight against the skull. Having to process day and night in alternation is surprisingly tiring …
In the darkness: box edges merge with box edges, merge with empty space. You roll your head and eye, memorising the impression of shape and volume, the fading lines of contrast against the increasing flat noise. Your pocket of visibility beyond the curtain is shrinking now, not obviously so, but you feel the decrease in granularity. The rain is noticeably loud, bleeding into and over the scraping of wood, sound and vision becoming a single lulling white-noise …
It is dark, but not pitch, with no shadow of movement from the curtain-bottom. Since the imagined window gutter is low and near, any interuptions in its illumination will be visible only when something is close-pressed against you. Your body beyond the curtain tingles with exposure, but your head is safe. You wink to your still dark-attuning eye, keeping your head tilted woundwards and away from the line of light. The dark slowly turns gritty, the grain of old film stock. You wink back and check for shadows in the light. None …
The skin of your shoulders is a continuous burn down through your muscle to your bones, which feel small and fragile and popped. The rear of your head is wet underneath your sweating: the sticky and underhair wet of blood or some small wound. You cannot move your fingers. The palms of your hands are cramping. Your lower back and abdomen are a single hard girdle, all the small pieces of yourself through which you have force-marched this distance are fused and immobile. You will not be moving again in the same manner, not for some time at least, but you still have the majority of your ankle and toe and foot strength as a reserve …
Shuffle, heave, scrape, you caterpillar across the floor, sinuously now, call it that, adding a small and inefficient kick to your right as you convulse onwards, trying to avoid collision. The thing-with-drawers is almost certainly not close enough to be an actual impediment but you fear that you might snag against it and cause some movement or shunting, drawing attention to it or to you and forcing another improvised exchange of noises. The least exhausting option is to make allowance, to detour slightly in your continuing high-activity, low-speed shuffle …
Shuffle, heave, scrape, you inch and centimetre through the area between the table and the first table-span distance from it, full of wonder, it being broadly the same as the area you have left behind yet from your new vantage so very differently angled and aspected …
Eventually, finally, you can hear waters. From directly upwards and from one side you can hear what you believe to be the impact of a dense rain. It does not directly touch the shell of the room you are within, feeling more than one space removed from that. You are not on the top or outermost rooms of this structure …
Unexpectedly, your hearing returns as the sounds do, a shuffle bump of the man or thing, and still a lack of water-noise. You note that the drift of time is moved again, is less immediately riverside. The balance of smells suggesting industry are stronger, or at least more unevenly biased. You do not know what to make of that. You wonder if you travel closer to some notional home after all, rather than farther from it. Perhaps you misjudge the intent of this place or its captain or pilot or orchestrator. You do not know why you assume you have come from a town or city …
You allow yourself to relax into your paralysis. You could be comfortable here, for as long as it lasts, some small time no doubt. Release your too-tight grip and surely all those long and life-formed habits will reassert, just as breathing must. Are you truly even paralysed? Were not your arms arrayed in some form when you fell and now distinctly otherwise? Surely your legs and feet could not have been so unnaturally placed? …
You wonder instead if the man on the table, during your period of momentary oblivion, or the bird or cat or gusts of wind above, if one or more have not snuck or crawled or blown themselves down and around you, manipulating and arranging you for reasons of their own, or none, or for play, or for no purpose. Perhaps you were dealt with in some physical manner, brushed-down or poked-at or simply even looked upon and unable to return that look, for a time now repressed …
Current-time, discounting your waste, seems river-like and fetid, some water-rotten collection of outflow. It seems city-bound rather than rural, some industrial subtext sensed but not comprehended. So thinking, you re-categorise yourself as being within a boat or upon a barge, the occasional swelling-upwards and dislocation that you experience is likely a true motion after all and not some vertigo. Since neither your body nor the items in the room give any appearance of sliding, at least not in relation to one another, you make assumptions both that the craft you are within is large and stable and that the water route it traverses is calm …
Action must be taken: get up, get out. You do not move. You consider the strangeness of the other odours you find yourself within, and those which the water content of your waste is activating in your clothing. How long have you been wearing them, and why do you not recall? The stains of food and sweat on your loins and legs, belly and back and other endampened areas have been exposed. The same rotten, vegetative smells seem present in the floor or the floor-covering, if there is one. You cannot in fact discern with any accuracy which smells come from yourself and which from your immediate surroundings. You feel as though you are spreading out into the floor, commingling with the room, and you arch your back a little, feebly and for only a few seconds, to hold it off …
Despite those fears you do not wish, or are not compelled, to move or flee or otherwise hump and flail yourself to scare it off, this bird, this possible rat or man. You are safe in this position, or so you feel, despite its tenuousness, or at least because it is so tenuous and yet so unassailed. You fear that if you were to rock or move yourself out of it, expose or extend some limb beyond whatever cocoon it may be, whether physical or psychic, outside of that which protects you or hides you, assuming something does, that in so doing you would jar it and topple back into action, tilt the world just enough to start it moving again. You are afraid you would become displaced from this calm centre and slide again towards the tumult which certainly awaits around your edges. You try to move anyway; you do not …
So. Now you are awake, or at least conscious, some degree of consciousness at least. You are aware, as you replay it, of a point in that prior situation, call it a threshold, at which or through which the continuity of things appears to have severed off but now been rejoined. Say that a branching of thoughts occurred to you, if they could be called thoughts. Say rather that a set of sensations and images and concepts unrecalled have been experienced by you since then, without your active input, yet now you are once again able to set those thoughts upon a course by yourself. You suspect that you were dreaming, call it a dream, of box-stacking or passageway wandering, something intricate and precise and requiring your full attention and focus, or whatever its dream-proxy may have been …
You wailed and tipped backwards as you ran, falling heavily—throwing yourself, in fact, from upright to supine upon the ground—choking on air and tongue. You lost sight of the man as you continued to slide forward, below the level of the table; you could see only the broad, heavy beams holding the central horizontal plane above you …
Jovially, you told yourself, you wandered, you strolled, toward the side of the table not entirely covered in tools, assuming that they were such and not dolls or decoration, although you did not know their purpose. You tried not to stare too intently for any which might be used as a bludgeon, feeling out their weights and disposition in the hundred scenarios of potential and imminent death-causation which ran through your head …
The second room was identical with the first though enlarged at various edges—scattered about with nooks or alcoves or curtained spaces or doored. They may have been corridors or side-rooms or full annexes; whether empty or full of things you did not know. They were spaced at intervals the mathematics of which, assuming some governing and regular mathematics, was not obvious to you, either at that time or at this …