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 …