You rouse yourself. You limber up, as best you are able, bouncing and jiggling yourself in place, still supine, still sore. You walk yourself using shoulders and back so that you move in a little pinwheel, reorienting yourself within the nook. It is tiring and hideous but not unmanageable. You wheel yourself to your left, to your right then back again, as fast as you can manage, enjoying the sense of motion.
You manoeuvre yourself so that your shoulder and head are abutting one of the boxes to your right and slowly, in occasional pangs of enormous and burning pain, farting and groaning all the while, make use of your back-motion and neck leverage until you are sitting upright, one hand tucked awkwardly underneath yourself. You spin and buckle internally at the change in orientation and altitude. The room seems even taller now that you are sitting upright within it and looking out across the short width of it. Your body is awkwardly cramped into the southeast—could it be southeast?—corner of the room, most of your legs still at an angle to yourself which juts them out underneath the curtain.
The box immediately behind you is shallow in height and offset slightly from the box more deeply placed above it. You lean and shunt your way slowly further upwards until your buttocks catch and you are able to improvise a chair.
The boxes within the nook are of a multitude of shapes and sizes, you realise, not uniformly large and person or mammal-sized as you were assumed while on your back, but containing a smaller assortment too: head-sized; nose-sized.
The collection is ever more closely and haphazardly stacked the higher you look. You ponder your circumstances. Then:
Heave, judder, you rock yourself until something tinkles, something clatters. There is a gap behind the wall of boxes you lean against and something, or some set of somethings, have been dislodged and have fallen.
Heave, judder, you writhe as best you can until with a whack another of the boxes above clatters against your shoulder, then lap. It is cardboard rather than wood, and it has come open.
You let your head fall in a downwardly facing flop, chin to chest. The box is something which has been delivered—whether to here or somewhere else and then brought here, you cannot say—its exterior heavily labelled.
Springs are the contents, springs of various lengths and tightness of coil. There appears to be no interior packaging or container for the springs and so you believe they have been placed in this box at a point sometime after its original contents have been removed. Perhaps those original contents were also springs, but you do not believe that this set now visible, arrayed as they are, represents the true original state of the innards of the package, the state within which it had been delivered, somewhere, sometime in the past.
You rock and wobble yourself again into another rain of boxes. Nothing lands directly upon you, but close enough that in the minimal light you can see screws and nails and washers and nuts, each category of things in its own box, each just as clearly, to you, replaced within or added to the box at some point after its initial opening.
Clearly something has been under construction here, or would soon be so. Or perhaps nothing would be constructed at all and the person or people here who had stored these items were merely hoarders, or may had had some plan in the past, now discarded, or put on hold or otherwise not enacted.
You wonder what you might become yourself given sufficient time, enboxed here upon your back, in darkness except for a crack—still visible—at the other short-end of the room. Some floor-oriented shape; some human matting. Perhaps, bamboolike, you will find yourself slowly shooting towards it; your legs extending outwards with rhubarb-forcing cracks, or with new shoots forming, budding out of the heel and soles of your husk …
You can recall only two members of that dialogue, bulb-lit or otherwise. It was the only one you had with that group of people, you are sure of it—some of these sureties are intuitions as much as memory—as though you are sometimes able to see a counter or tag associated with a given event in your internal catalogue which shows at a glance its number or relevance, regardless of the content recalled. Memory metadata. It is not an outcome of repetition; this was a single occurrence more clearly intuited than those with many. The thin lady and the one with a hat: the combination of impressions associated with them are significant enough to unconsciously mesh with your own sawtoothed internals …
Accidentally or otherwise, your memories are primarily nonsense. Nonsense or embarrassments or otherwise essentially degrading. Perhaps you have spent so much time in worthless activity that these are the only things to have seeped through, your memory rendered ineffectual through sheer saturation of moments you would not wish ever to recall, now so fundamental to general information storage or the fitting together of detail with detail that without them you would have no past at all …
The only memories you are able to invoke—which are invoked regardless of your intent—are broad and flat and saggy. Your behaviour and your circumstances are recalled, but never the mood. Detached from any actual experience of the time, they are at most re-imagined with the temperament that you bring to them now …
Over all else, the inundation continues; the layering of noise is as though you are in a much larger room with a hundred loud conversations taking place simultaneously and you have lost the facility to selectively bring into focus just that which is directed toward you. Some long-instilled behaviour insists that you attempt to decode it, you can feel the associated mental weariness spinning up, but you stop yourself from nodding or shaking your head in faux comprehension …
You need to shift your weight, it is too painful to continue to lie on those parts of yourself that you have so abused to get here. You attempt a roll: your shoulders and the muscles of your upper back are fatigued, so instead you slide your elbow, your right-hand elbow—perhaps you are right-handed?—upwards a little, in the direction of your head, until your head and torso begin naturally to tilt to the left. The pain is significantly greater in this interim position; your upper arm trembles with spasms that appear to require no deliberate effort on your part. You bear the pain and increase the angle and stress untill the tremor becomes a shimmy, the shimmy a full palsy. You pull leftwards with your head, fail and rock back. You pull leftwards with your head, fail and rock back. You pull leftwards with your head until your upper torso twists enough, your arms splayed, to bring your forehead into contact with the wood of the floor, fighting the pounding blood of the onset of unconsciousness and keeping yourself awake …
Whatever those dolls may be, however discovered and wherever encountered, you think of them as game pieces. You are as certain of this as of any fact relating to them, a pointless certainty, one of your own instincts rather than of any properties of the dolls themselves …
That day is a clutter, long in the recollection, with a twisting in its growth over time. You could not possibly have lived it for as long as you recall, could not have taken so many and so contrary a set of actions …
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 …