Chapter 5 - Let Me Know You
I came back two days later, at about 11pm. Lila was down in the room instead of the library, a fact that surprised me at first sight. I made a form outside of her visible range, and waited soundlessly as she traced her finger into the grooves of the wooden compass I created to locate her, while she floated in the room. Would she ask about it?
“Hey,” I said, loudly enough to make her drop out of hover for a moment. Her mind caught her in a hover again after she fell two feet.
“Whoa! That was a shock,” she said. “You should have a bell on you or something.”
“Are my silent arrivals unsettling?” I asked. What could she feel unsettled about unless she kept something from me? “For Rebecca, I rang the doorbell of the library house when I came around. Until it didn’t feel necessary. Part of my mind made this thing for her that notified her when I arrived in that space, whether as a visible-physical form or invisible.”
“Invisible?” She asked, as if I was hiding things from her. I was, but she was not supposed to know about it. “Why arrive while invisible?”
“Well, that way you learn something you could not otherwise,” I said. “For example, I saw you trace the compass I carved into the lower room. Were you going to ask me what the carvings symbolize?”
“Not really,” Lila said. “It’s just cool designs. If I had to guess, it’s something like directions based upon something in the world you occupy. We have them too, but they’re more fine tuned. I see you have four letters here for the four directions, and then you mash and repeat the letters for fine tuning, but doesn’t saying NNNNEE get a bit strange after a few repeats? Otherwise, it's not very accurate.”
“The North, East, South, and West directions are a pretty old concept,” I explained. “Most people and devices use something more fine-tuned now. Some people still use them when precision isn’t necessary.”
“North, North, North, North, East, East,” Lila said, while setting herself down on the couch.
“It would just be North-Northeast,” I said. “There isn’t a need to keep adding the letters, since you adjust by landmarks you see. As there aren’t landmarks around in untethered space, I can’t really illustrate the point.”
“Why not make something beyond the room?” Lila asked.
“I tried,” I said. “My creationism doesn’t extend very far beyond the confines of this room and the library above, it seems. The darkness beyond is just that. You can stitch it into worlds from stories that already exist, but that’s not really like creationism.”
“Then what about your story?” Lila asked. I feared that the most. Another person let in on my tormented mind, witness to my repressed past encounters, would only make me miss Rebecca. She was a woman. Lila was just a girl. Was she just a girl?
“Can I ask something?” I asked. Lila grimaced at the change of topic. She floated again in the room, this time sitting cross-legged with hands on her knees.
“Go ahead.”
“In terms of your people, your kind,” I started. “Are you considered a child, a young adult, or a full adult?”
“And what’s your reason for asking?”
“It’s just…” I said, then hesitated. “I revealed my story and my mind to Rebecca. She was a woman. I’m a bit hesitant talking about some things with anyone so young.”
“Is that your decision, or is that crap imposed on you by the people you need to live among?” Lila asked, as if she understood completely why I hesitated.
“It’s imposed,” I replied. “In my world anyone from birth to a certain age is considered a child, and kept away from the strangeness of adulthood until reaching that age themselves. The level varies between different countries, territories of developing humans with different cultures.”
“So what’s really your issue with ‘revealing’ your story to me?”
“How I’ll be seen through their eyes,” I said. “If and when I share this with them. It's not concrete yet. I may even be dead by the time this reaches the eyes of the world, but I’m worried nonetheless.”
“I think I read somewhere before that only the guilty worry,” Lila said. “It’s an old saying. I think it went something like: ‘the guilty worry that they will be punished, where the truly lost welcome judgment. Only the innocent worry for the guilty ones they accept among them.’ Or something like that.”
“It makes sense, at least,” I said. “So, just for my sake. In terms of your people, your kind, are you a child or an adult?” Lila sighed.
“It’s a stupid concept,” she said. “What if I say that I’m a child? Will you really not let me know how you came to be here?” I felt worried for a moment. It was just a story, a blanketed chokehold over my life that did not detail every thought I ever had, the fears I held under the pillow like a gun to defend myself.
“I need to sleep,” I said.
“Don’t go,” Lila said. “I’m sorry if I’m pushing, but it’s important, isn’t it, to you?” I looked out the window, into the darkness of untethered space. I could almost imagine Kara out there, just beyond the schism of nothingness, or everythingness. The untethered space was not the Infinity Void. It was not filled with stories, bundled into worlds. This was the raw nothingness where everything existed before it was part of the story. It was the memory bank of items generated in said stories.
“I need to sleep on it,” I said. “Will you please let me sleep on it? That means I’ll think it over before bed and make a decision in the morning. Is that ok?”
“Of course,” she said. “As long as you don’t run away from me like you ran away from Rebecca.” I froze. My lower jaw trembled with surprise. No. It was anger. I was angry at Lila because she belittled me. I wanted to shout, tell her that I did not run away from her. She left by her own volition, but it was my fault.
“Good night, Lila,” I said, through my teeth. I left before she had a chance to respond. Something about her made me feel uneasy. Was sharing my story with her, explaining Finnelgamin and Rebecca, a good idea? I would know in the morning. If I made no decision, I would never come back to the file on my mobile device again.
break
I arrived at the room without form at the same time I was there last night. I slept, but did not consider what Lila said at all. There was no point to go over my whole story. I had access to less than half anyway. All it would be was just a retelling of my life how I perceived it from the start. Who could even find that entertaining? So I arrived, and scanned for the one person who would be angry at me for not being there in the morning, if she tracked time in my world at all. My day was spent in utter boredom due to lack of work, but I did not want to have this conversation with her earlier.
“Lila?” I called out, manifesting just a mouth and vocal chords to make sound. I faded them out before she came thundering down the spiral. Her eyes shifted over the enclosure and proceeded slowly. I hovered in the air, to see if there was anything she could do to see me, to find me out. There were countless ideas from books in the library full of stories I linked with in the Infinity Void. There had to be something that would allow her to find me. I was unreachable with matter. It was as if I was in a pocket dimension of the one she existed in. Creationism allowed such impossible things.
“I know you’re in here, Jack,” she said. “And when I find you, I will subject you to much punishment for standing me up like that. I thought you said you would sleep on the idea, but here you are, coming here right before bed to taunt me.” I floated closer to her face, looking right into her eyes from just a few inches away. The floating was freeing, much to the heaviness of my body in the real world. I have wanted to escape that for the longest time, but with weight came bone density, furthering the weight drama even if I were to lose the unwanted fats.
She put her hand through my stomach with a swipe, but I felt nothing. She had no sway over my pocket dimension. Her eyes searched in the room, trying to figure out what was the most likely spot where I would be. There was no simple way to do it. She would have to use something from a story, and I bet it was going to be Remy’s world of darkness. If anything had the power to reveal the hidden things, it was the verete crystal meant for having the darkness step aside.
Just as I predicted, she manifested a monocle of green material with a gold rim around it. Most often they were worn as a fashion accessory, but later in the story, when the darkness fell upon the cities under blackout, the mineral which filtered carbonic air into breathable air and carbon residue, was used for war against the Garavand. Or so I thought, since I had not read more of the Garavand books. If I wanted to, I could even spend days simply reading the books in the library of the future story in the Garavand world and Tiarto’s adventures.
“I know you’re testing me,” she said, scanning the small room with the monocle. Could she see me? I remained still to give her a chance, but she seemed unaware of my presence there. “I know you already gave me a way to find you, so I will do so.” She threw the green monocle away and drew something I did not expect from another story. There was now a blue torodemyt in the room, the kind of much interest in Tiarto’s world. Without revealing anything about it, I could easily say that Miro played a vital role in that story.
“I know about this little guy,” Lila said, putting her hand through the blue rock as if it was a paper lantern, and yanked out the bright glowing cyan light that was the myt heart. In response, the blue creature lost all color, drawing a dark black rather than a dull gray. I wanted to stop her, but it was too late. She killed such a powerful creature just for one property. “This is sure to find you.”
With the glowing heart in her hand, she crushed it into powder to smear open a lens between dimensions. It was about the grossest way she could have gotten there, not to mention the most brutal, but the myt did not really die in the end. It was never alive at all, as it was just a part of a story that was not a part of this one. The untethered space gave without restraint, since even if it was entirely dark, it was brimming with all the parts of a good story. She panned the lens over me and pointed triumphantly.
“That was a barbaric way of getting the job done,” I said, creating a form for myself. “There were like four other options you could have used instead of that one.” Lila hugged me when I touched down on the wooden floor.
“Yes, but if I didn’t use that, you wouldn’t get to learn about the other person who’s been hanging around here,” she said. I froze in cold sweat. Rebecca? Finnelgamin? Kara? Denizen? Or was it Fyntn? I turned to the smear of cyan blue-white light hovering in the air of the small room under the library. From my angle, it was just a line, but Lila pulled me along as the smear opened up a view into other dimensions.
“Oh, he’s running!” Lila said, throwing my body so that the smear made a small body visible. It was nothing human-like. Instead, it felt more like some sort of bundle of brown fur, a dog perhaps. “He’s going up to the library! After him!” A dimensional dog? Or was it some creature I had not yet encountered in all of Infinity Void, a new story that could only get to me thanks to Lila and her killing of a torodemyt with such brilliant gore.
“What can I do about it?” I asked. “Isn’t it in a different dimension?”
“Ya-huh! And you were just now in what, mister?”
“Ok, ok, I get it,” I said. “Let me see what I can do here.” I reconstituted the smear of dimensional paint into a sort of dimensional mirror, or magnifying glass. It was pretty cool, but given my love for Miro from Tiarto’s story, I would never think to use the heart of a myt in this way. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to use something really cool. The lupe was about twenty four inches in diameter, making it just over sixty centimeters. It had to be big enough to find the fur ball.
“Let’s go, Lila,” I said. She looked stunned with my creation of the dimensional spyglass and frozen in a happy grimace. We ascended the stairs slowly, scanning the surroundings at each step through the handheld portal in a cradle of woven silvery metal. “What do you suppose it is?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I’ve felt it around for a while now. It just never seemed like the right time to bring it up, since it wasn’t really hurting anyone or acting strange. Maybe it’s some sort of creature that’s just looking for a place to call home.”
“Yeah, that’s a positive way of looking at it,” I said, checking the time. It was already midnight in fifteen minutes. “Ah, shit. It’s almost midnight. I was going to wake up early tomorrow to do laundry and shopping while there isn’t much traffic. This is going to have to wait. I’m sorry Lila.”
“Ok, fine,” she said, taking the dimensional lupe. “At least give me an answer, won’t you?”
“Answer?”
“Didn’t you ‘sleep on it’?” She asked. “I thought you came back because you had an answer for me.”
“Right, that,” I said. I was too excited at finding some new creature to remember that I came by to disappoint her. There was no point to an autobiographical part of this story. It’s been a long winding road of a broken mind, but the before was not important, at least to me. “I think it’s a ‘no’, Lila.”
“Oh,” she said, letting the spyglass hand droop to the floor. “Can I ask why?”
“There is no point to me telling everyone my life before all the insanity of Finnelgamin and Rebecca,” I said.
“Then why not just tell me about Finnelgamin and Rebecca?” She asked. She had me there. I wanted the memory to be buried so deep that it could not hurt me anymore. Beliefs were strong to those who believed in things with all their will. Rebecca leaving hurt me, because I believed that she was not able to do so. “In fact, no.” Her hand tightened on the cyan blue handle of the dimensional mirror.
“I think you should tell me all about your life,” she said. “I think it fits as the front piece of what led you to create Finnelgamin, and then Rebecca. Above all, if you pose this as the third part of the story, following Rebecca leaving you in the dark, then I think by this point the people who are your readers would like to know a bit more about you, your life, how similar it was to theirs. I think you NEED to say ‘yes’, Jack.” I felt trapped, but the countless ways I’ve run from problems in the past told me this would not go away until it was faced head on. I’m so stupid.
“Yes, I will tell you about my life before it all started,” I said.
“No, I want everything,” Lila said. “All of your memories, the bad and the good, and the moments that led to you as you are. Can you give me that?”
“Do they have to be in on everything?” I asked, pointing to you from the page or screen. Yeah, you. Why not? I’d address you directly, rather than drop you a temporary mention. Your eyes, your imagination, they aren’t mine. I’m sorry for that most of all. I wish more people saw the things I’ve seen. It would make me feel less alone, but then again, everyone sees different stories in the void, though some tend to overlap in some areas. The will of cliché.
“I suppose they should,” Lila said. “If you happen to have any fans, this might lose them. Wouldn’t you like that?” I smiled. It was a good opportunity to set the world right indeed. They would find out the truth. I just wonder what you will think about it.
“Alright,” I said. “It’s past midnight. I have to catch some sleep before going in for laundry tomor-, later today. Thanks, Lila.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” she said. “Thank me at the end, in ten years, when I leave here with much more knowledge than I expected to gain in a time-out.” There was that phasing again. It bothered me. She behaved like a grown adult, but spoke in a very childish manner. Not to mention that she did some young things like toying with living beings. I sighed.
“Later, Lila,” I said. She hugged me, and I disappeared from her grasp.
Comments
Post a Comment