Born today: Christopher. His voice is broken. Within the current of his nerve-screaming withdrawals, he hears a low, cackling analog tenor start counting backward. The sickening panorama of felt symbols and patterns grabs at Christopher’s comprehension, forcing its failure into attention somewhere unclear. His body fires every nerve by contraction against the perceived rape of what he does not know.
He believes there to be an angel machine; it counts further: “Twenty-nine, twenty-three, nineteen—”
He had always been counting down to this point, counting down from the bottomless, endless madness. Where to? Christopher is certain that the end is near.
“Christopher?” the angel says.
The veil is broken. An angel looks down from its porcelain-cracked white smile mask, its soft reflection catching the blue glow from ceiling sparks. Christopher wonders about all the broken times. The angel’s eyes roll towards Christopher's with the sound of dry gears; his name is Antony.
In a slow, humming cackle of the angel machine, Antony struggles out, “Ten-hundred years at once.”
Christopher wonders if he can exist any further through every pull of sense, the skin pace with fire from memory's fuel. He feels a jolt of a needle into his arm’s left vein, and he has a moment where the thoughts and touch no longer scream.
Christopher says to the machination that is Antony, “Will you know what the end is like? It must be near.”
Antony hangs without movement of the shafts and gears, from the wires and pumps of the wall crucifix; not even the break of eye contact in his irresponsiveness. Christopher is left with the boundlessness inside him, a feeling he has died before, feeling the loss of the old world.
Christopher says, “I’m all alone then...”
He stands from the stone-raised slope he lay on, takes out the tubes and needles, and begins to walk over to the corner of his blindfold. He sees the blackout of his escape as a sign of his release. Where the unreality of dreams comes true, he sees the jugged stone maiden of wires, needles, and a mask connected to the large gas tank beside it: the blindfold. The lullaby follows from the seeming terror of this confinement. It is through drowning the mind that he can quiet the noisy symbolic screams of spirit.
He mumbles quietly to himself, “I couldn’t care, as long as I am not here.”
As he approaches his freedom, the angel’s eyes flick with clicks of machine, watching with an eagle's sight.
Antony drones in beeping murmurs that rumble out the speak of glitch, “As your gaurdiannINv —ing —ing... angel —I advise you ...—”
Antony’s system screeches in a scattering bob of high-pitched siren sounds, “DoN’t DON’T don’T don’T — CHRISTOPHERR! ER —ER!”
Christopher says back, “You are repeating yourself. I believe I have heard you say this before.”
Escape; it helps him keep in touch with the old world. Christopher steps into neglect; it’s a release worth the parched throats of a child’s needs unmet.
Antony says again, though more clearly this time, “Christopher! You must go back! You do not know just how deep you are already in!”
Christopher walks away, abandoning the warning of his guardian angel. He chooses to go deeper into the machine, hoping to escape its tormenter, truth; he believes this with all his mind and heart.
Awoken, another age: a woman’s hands comb through the thin hair of his scalp with love and terror. “Christopher!”
The woman cries loudly. The smell of something nauseating fills the air beneath the swirls of vision and vertigo. A putrid light-brown bile covers his neck and face like dirt over a dead dog.
She cries again, “You need to stop, Christopher! Come back!”
The lungs must travel up, if there was ever any care. He thinks just that, how he doesn’t care. To him, it doesn’t matter, as long as he is not here. To not be someone was what he came here for, deeper into the mystery of lostness, believing in a truth never told, where dreams come true.
The lungs cannot travel any further up the current. The grave keeps him still, no longer moving. The elder spirit grows heavy with tiredness here and there, he thinks. The moment of spirit’s memory gets buried once more in another geyser of brown vomiting.
She cries once more, “PLEASE MOVE!”
Christopher’s blue lips barely mouth the words to her, “Go away, Antony.”
One more moment of rest, he thinks, just one more... Just a little bit more, then maybe I can. He doesn’t need any of these memories, those he found to be cursed with light and sounds; it is all too hostile. He always tries to snooze the alarm of the Angel in his ear. He wants to slip away, down the swirling promise of wonderland, a white rabbit of a white mask company, unlike the passion and intensity of Antony; he only wants to be carried away by the illusory. Where to? He would not want to know.
The lungs can no longer climb, and it finally all goes beyond distance, with blurry dark and blackened dusk dreams. A woman is left with an unblinking man, his eyes resembling an angel's, though more like the tragedy of one fallen from grace. She stares at the death, where love got lost inside itself. She can only think that it isn’t happening to her, that it’s not possible to be left without what she thought to be her spiritual half.
The rabbit runs deeper into newer worlds, each fleeting itself the same, and the rhyme of responsibilities cannot confine him long enough. Is he drunk, high, insane maybe? It is all just the medium of movement for Columbus's spirit.
The angel sees his fallen angel, far inside and dreaming away. The maiden holds only so long, until Christopher finds his way out of this, escaping even his own escape. He is sure a cursed reunion awaits after however many of these, a responsibility to see truth return as a binding spell, where the machine runs in higher gear, screaming with confusion about where it has been. This may be where God is both sleeping and awake. Christopher may have a responsibility to see it. The old world came before knowledge, and the new world begins after it.
Antony sees symbolism and knows it well; Christopher believes he speaks the same intuition as the machine that is God in his mind. The angel seeks to guard Christopher from himself, maybe, though his cracked mask might bear the weight of being fully awoken, perhaps even felt in his inseparable wiring into the machine. Antony lies all alone, and yet Christopher only sees his own. Antony might even be awake through all of it, and therefore would not be fleeing, whereas Christopher runs at every glimpse of whatever lies outside of himself. He cannot stand the truth, so he makes a world apart from it inside himself, and the ones inside his dream never wake as he does. To Christopher, Antony is the awareness, and maybe that is why the angel is always fighting for one more moment with him.
Christopher does not know if there is another way. He sometimes gets this feeling: the very delusion he believes he doesn't have, yet keeps trying to feel, is somehow hiding his oath to what he has forgotten. Where Christopher lives in illusion, his guardian has no understanding, yet tries to pull him out of his ways.
Antony ratchets in his analog tenor once more, “Christopher, the fallen one, return.”
The maiden spills open with the wounds of blindness; Christopher is covered in pockmarks, his face red with chemical hives. Antony thinks of how many times it has repeated; it tires him. Christopher falls into the bottom of the stone. The lenses of Antony’s eyes watch him drag himself again.
Christopher sneaks out a snarling temper through his gas-burned throat, “I —hate...”
Antony’s lenses follow Christopher’s dragging crawls with clicks of eye movement, the pupil tracing within a dusty porcelain eye. The hate of this nerve wreckage seeps out of Christopher through shakes against the demands of reality.
Antony releases another ratchet, not of voice but of smile; it twists in desperate anticipation in Christopher’s eyes, as if he believes Antony craves what is his own... his spirit. Antony begins crawling away, crawling over the resistance of objects that are his own pain and suffering, yet still pushing against the thick sludge of inscape anyway. He can feel the waking nightmare repeating itself, and the mind of Christopher is engulfed in a storm of twisting stomach knots and a burning skull. Who can you trust? The repeating question echoes as reality becomes a horror show of funhouse mirrors; even the walls mock his despair. The rapid gunfire of a heart speeding accompanies a high-pitched ringing in the ears. The only break in his heart that may come is in that soon-to-be brake-slamming car crash, of its Presto blood rhythm eccentricity.
The angel speaks in tongues by seeming exhilaration from broken tenor, made of white jutted analog noise. A harshness not of order and more of a kidnapping; Christopher thinks this as the memories swirl him like a spring anaconda ready to pull him apart. The twisting of a kinetic smile pulls from the now-soft yellow-hued reflection in the white mask. The cracked mask keeps its fixed stare on the wounded; Christopher feels both like a child and prey. He begins twitching into a seizing spill of urine and drool, foaming out of the mouth of the hereafter, awakening the same to it as always.
Christopher’s last word chokes him even harder into wakefulness. He screams once more through broken vocal cords, “I CANNOT TRUST!”
Christopher’s identity dissolves into the static of truth, into the same acceleration mystery he will later go on to forget, though not before a heavy burden of this synesthetic pain he cannot truly know beyond the suffering. He feels great hatred toward his existence beyond the dream, loathing its never-ending, strangling presence. The ringing and fever static are in every sense of the body, filling him without choice, both hot and cold. His comprehension is held down and violated into a blunted curb stomp against sanity’s cries, spilling out the last of his comforts. Sharp precision introduces itself and finds his electric, spasmed heart. It stabs tighter, further up, with piercing accuracy at the neck, below the back of his ears, and into his brain. The repetition of being trapped is familiar, though he still feels unwelcome in this new yet same hell, as if he has died before. An unrelenting force won’t stop drowning Christopher’s mind in this solitude of waking.
Christopher stops; repeat.