Lee Altomaro
WHAT WAS THAT noise? It crept into her sleep and pried her out of dreams. Something about it didn’t sound right. Like forced water crackling through holes laced with static, not the kind of soothing sound heard with the movement of running water. A scratch. As if the hand of a malevolent god had circumscribed the heavens and allowed the first glints of Armageddon to slip into her consciousness. A blight, an imperfection upon her highest level of self-awareness. A waterfall made of scissors and nails and aluminium screening. All the jagged courses of wonder heaving themselves into a pile of nothing more than broken ceramic dreams. How to know, if this was a dream, why did the veil feel so thin, like crepe paper?
She thought about finding her legs and moving position, but there was something taut around her limbs that made moving impossible. It felt like rope. Maybe she had been kidnapped and was down in some dark cellar, tied up and awaiting God knows what.
It happened when everything seemed to be going so well, or at least as well as could be expected. She had a good job, a few good friends, and had become closer to her family in recent months, so it wasn’t as though she had to feel all alone in the world.
Family support notwithstanding, the last three years had been challenging, having lost her lover of sixteen years to a disease so rare it only happened to one of out every half a million people. She and Maggie had done everything together, and were closer to each other than most people were after a lifetime, so when the doctor gave them the prognosis, it was as if the world had collapsed in on them.
It was a lot of work, but somehow she managed to stay above water. Still, she had not really been able to let go—her mind stretched out upon so many long, lonely days since the day of the funeral, as if she was living in a nuclear winter. The trouble started one day when she was preparing breakfast, a premonition. The coffee was a little bitter, she was running a little late, but a pause, to hear something that hid behind the walls, behind the newness of the awakening day. A scratch. The sun was out but the colors of the world were all wrong. The very air inside and out of her seemed to have no life. The sound that should have been there either way was absent, and the footfalls of past platitudes, even they were not within echo.
How many times before had she heard this absence, felt this absence, even when Maggie was alive? How many cruel manifestations of a nothingness attained? A chasm not identified? Was it a missing link? Was she born without the enviable piece of armor that seemed to make most people appear to be fluid and blissfully unaware? Why was it so difficult for her to be at peace? Not to say that there weren’t plenty of times in her body, whole, and limitless, when she could honestly say, that the world was painted as pure as the sun at birth, as bright as the snow on Christmas day, and as soft as a mother’s embrace.
But that noise. The absence of the links that bound the hand, the legs, the head, the arms. As if on the day they handed out instructions, she had instead broached the event horizon. A black hole, spreading out from center, swallowing the illumination of her given birthright. It was as if a force unknown was trying to claw its way inside.
On that morning, on the way to work, to the place where among the bodies, sitting mostly, the tasks were laid out for her. The purpose was defined. That always felt right. Working. She didn’t have to question her purpose. She could feel at peace there. But all that space when she stepped back out into the day. It should have felt light, but it felt heavy. All that possibility, all that not knowing. She could go here or there, under or above. She could go nowhere or everywhere, and who would know the difference?
The roads all led to the same place, the same now and again. Endless and yet short in stature. The texture sometimes changed. The vibrations sometimes changed. The land was always there, belying ancient wisdom. Is that what had happened? Had she stepped outside and never stepped back in? For now everything she was experiencing was just ruminations of the mind. The taut strappings were still holding, not allowing her to see, to move, to breathe.
She could only fathom a feeling inside her, in which she knew there was something there that was alive but buried. The growing sense that something wasn’t quite right. Something she had known, something she used to know. It was there if she could only see it. But how could she see something if her head wouldn’t move, couldn’t move? Tracing her line of vision only allowed for a peek into more black, more nothing. Except for the palpable absence of light, she felt nothing save panic.
There was a vibration. It echoed across a thousand walls, it beckoned her toward highways and fast food joints and empty spaces. It hearkened outward among the lost. It had no direction but it was everywhere. It was always there. It had always been there. Sometimes she forgot about it and didn’t feel it for several days.
But today was not one of those days. Today was going to be a day of reckoning. She could feel it in her bones. She knew that as sure as she knew that something terrible must have happened to her. Smashing, wrenching visions of no rest. Journeys taken deep into the night and lingering past dawn. What was that sound? Had she taken a wrong turn? The spaces were all around, the trees had been covering for her. Was it raining? Had she fallen asleep in some strange place?
Maybe she had been knocked unconscious, was becoming delirious, could now be uninhibited, free to express anything, everything, inner sensors beginning to lose their hold. After all, the mind was always free to create its own pathways of illusion. She could be anywhere.
Although her mind could wander without censorship, the same couldn’t be said for her body. That corporeal entity was, she realized now without a doubt, gravely incapacitated. Paralyzed, with fear, or due to bodily resistance, she couldn’t determine which. Either one could cause the same seemingly hopeless situation. Either one could incite a person to pull down, deep into the depths of their most elusive trepidations and fears. Yet, situations like these could also allow for the realization of that extraordinary strength that a person could only tap into when the going got rough.
And this going was rough. That much she knew. She had been through how many challenges like this before, too many to count. Days when it was all she could do to try and maintain a grasp on her mind; to try and hold on to even just a small thread of sanity that could connect her to the world, that which was her most basic self. But some days it seemed even that was too much to ask for. Some days the smallest perceived indignity, the smallest disappointment, or the most ludicrous of doubts, could take her mind hostage and deliver her to the proverbial nuthouse.
Nothing had to actually happen, nothing had to actually change. The changes all occurred within her mind, they were not actually taking place in the world. No one else could see them. Most people didn’t even notice them. It all seemed surreal. Yet the searing heat of summer and the unforgiving chill of winter, those things still felt real enough to touch, and because she felt them, she knew that she was alive.
In a room, in a house, an automobile, a workplace, in those and in all places, so arbitrarily put into her space. She walked through them. But it was as if they were placed, as if someone or something else had put those things there. Put them there for her to live in, to work in, to think in, to wonder in, to love in, and to grieve in. Which one of those arbitrary places her body was currently inhabiting she didn’t know.
She was hungry. Springing from the depths of her abdomen. Her body ached, it asked, it pleaded, it insisted. It wouldn’t take no for an answer. It was pure hell, yet the unambiguity of that hunger, that desire, was in a strange way, comforting. It forced her to become single-minded. It forced her to focus on that one single thing. And that one single thing was going to require her to find a way to obtain the strength and nourishment she needed to try and get out of her current situation.
But how could she feed herself without the use of her hands, her limbs, her ability to move? How would she know where to begin, if she didn’t even know where she was starting from? She must think, try to remember. There was a sound, like a scratch, it opened up into a sky full of possibilities; though seemingly sinister, it might help her to get through this thing, if only from the inside out. It seemed like so much time had passed, eons spent wandering through an abyss, a chasm.
And then as if from a thousand abbreviated miles away, another sound now. Heavier than a scratch. A tear. No, not a tear. A rip, like fabric being seared and laboriously pulled away from a long encapsulated tomb, a catacomb, her catacomb, the whereabouts of which were unknown to her or to anyone. What could possibly be the perpetrator of this auditory illusion?
The ripping sound became courser, closer, heavier, and it spoke of great urgency. And with the tearing, the slowly dawning realization that she was beginning to feel the sensation of movement. Her legs, her arms. Whatever it had been, the bindings that had held her captive for so long, were beginning to loosen. She heard the sound of voices, they seemed to be coming from close by, it sounded like someone was saying, “No one could have survived this.”
She let go of a heated breath, it gushed out of her in an exultant gasp, and was immediately replaced by a cold rush of air that gloriously plunged into the space that her breath had occupied just moments before. She inhaled, she reached, and the blackness began to fade into light.
Then she saw it. A shadow-shape painfully silhouetted bright against the night sky. A ghostly presence that had come to liberate her. She knew that shape, had been intimate with that shape. It was beckoning to her. Maggie. She took hold of her hand. Joined together now, they were cast out from the wreckage and absconded swiftly up into the moonless sky, where they were placed, forever. Two bright stars shining down on Mother Earth.
~
Deborah Schmidel is the author of poetry, short stories, and memoir, writing under the pen name of Lee Altomaro, and draws her material from life experiences and is particularly interested in psychological suspense. She attended Cabrillo College, Norwalk Community College, and UCONN, as well as a year at Monterey College of Law. She holds an Associate Degree in Liberal Arts and is currently working toward a bachelor’s degree in English. Deborah has written and choreographed lay services for the Unitarian Society in Stamford, Connecticut including “Notes in a Life” and “Everything Happens for a Reason.” She lives and works in Fairfield County, Connecticut, sometimes known as the sixth borough of New York City.