Abyss (Songs of Megiddo) (10 page)

The pressure builds to intolerable levels more rapidly than you might think. Sometimes it runs out of steam. Often, in fact...but that’s nothing to rely on. Sometimes, coping mech
anisms can defuse you. Sometimes not. Sometimes you don’t have time to pull yourself together. Sometimes you don’t even realise it’s coming. It can come on fast, and the symptoms may hit you before your awareness that something’s wrong does. And as soon as the symptoms hit? Game over.

This is b
ecause the tenuous house-of-cards that is your psychological coherence, simply...collapses: a loud, messy ‘hard reset’ of your system in slow motion.

And h
ere’s the kicker: if you can’t defuse it; if you don’t know how or
don’t have time...then – whether or not you have any awareness of what begins to overtake you – you won’t care. One possibility is that you’ll be a puddle of incoherent mulch – babbling; laughing; crying; screaming; lashing out – which is, of course, one of the more common results of a psychotic break. Alternately, you’ll be able to convince yourself that you’re acting rationally...which means that you’re delusional.

A
ssuming you’re still standing when the dust clears...generally the chaos subsides and normality returns. Now comes the unavoidable, intolerable aftermath...where you piece together the parts that you couldn’t remember and begin to account for the damage done. And...y’know...there’s always damage. Even if it takes awhile to find. Even if it’s just on the inside.

To avoid the collapse...vigilance is key.
Vigilance, and the assumption that – sooner or later – the inevitable will
happen. So you strategise how you’ll react if...and you plan for how you’ll respond if...

And then you wait.

You wait like a soldier at a watch-post in enemy territory and you just never stop
waiting
. Because you have to. Because you can’t not. Because once...a long time ago...someone – or some
thing
– did something to you. It left you...different. Fundamentally. On a good day, you think they broke something inside of you, or took something away from you. Not necessarily something that you
needed
, but...something that contributed to the greater whole; something that made you...you.

On a
bad day? Well...it’s more like they left something behind.

And so you wait.

I’ve found that other people who spend their lives dealing with situations reminiscent of mine, typically try to insulate themselves from exposure to things that might trigger them. Just like I do. They cordon off those places in their mind as best as they can, and avoid letting people too close. To the uninitiated, it can seem like almost anything other than what it is. Self-involvement; emotional coldness; apathy; laziness; closed-mindedness; introversion; extroversion, too. Almost anything other than what it is: Self-preservation.

Some achieve a balance. Some lose themselves completely. Inevitably...eventually...we all toe that line between control and chaos. We do so, either because we convince ourselves that we’re ‘better’: that we’re ‘healed’...or because we find someone – or some
thing
– that seems to be, approximately, worth the risk.

Or, for some of us...we do it because of something inside of us begins to wake up.

For the adventurous among us, there are other...‘options’. Some seek, for example... to ‘cauterise’ the wound through over-exposing themselves to triggers.

To be completely blunt about it...I’ve never had the stomach for that. Or, from another perspective...I’ve never been that
incredibly fucking stupid.

But then...I
would say that.

Everyone’s experience of the aftermath of trauma is different. The unifying commonality is the
scale of the wound: the degree of the damage done; the significance of that damage. Beyond that...various stratifications of shared experience draw us together...but...ultimately, keep us fundamentally apart. A long time ago...perhaps a year after my parents died...I started to have these...‘encounters’, is a word I’ve heard used to describe them. And it seems to fit. They led, initially and since, to a fairly strong suspicion – nascent, originally; understood only on the most basic possible level – about which ‘cohort’ of trauma survivors I, most likely, belonged to.

It came, as a rule,
at night. It still does.

Sometimes...lying in the dark, I’d feel – like a slow, creeping
, fever-like feeling engulfing me – a building awareness that I wasn’t...quite...alone. I’d be there...under the covers. Just me. It’s hard to describe, but...it’d be as if there was some other person in my mind. A complete and coherent parallel structure of consciousness, co-habiting me. In beginning to succumb to sleep, it was almost as if the wall between myself and that Other began to lose its integrity...allowing inter-drift. Overlap.

The progression was always the same. The more awake I became, the less I could feel it; the less I could
recall how it felt to feel it. But...in those moments where I was stuck there – in the space between waking and sleeping – I had this sense...of intent. And...just for a moment...the thought would occur to me that...if I went to sleep, and just...never woke up...if someone else wok
e
up instead, and I just...stopped: then, perhaps, that would be...better. Perhaps that’s what I wanted.

But it wasn’t and isn’t,
and the sense that I’d just thought some other self’s thought; a thought that was thought on my behalf by a self other than me – but from within me – jolted me awake. As quickly as it came, the feelings and thoughts were gone again...but while I felt them, they’d been solid. They’d been definite. And they had solidly...definitely...come from within, rather than without.

In the hazy back-end of mind...I was always aware, at that point, of the single que
stion...this time definitely a question of my own making: what if I just gave in? What would happen, then? But I never let myself dwell on it. How could I?

When I said that – for some of us – something inside begins to ‘wake up’, this was the fee
ling I was referring to. I’ve heard others describe it, too. Hearing it always sends shivers down my spine: a perfect replication of what I feel...even down to the unexplainability of it; the vagueness of the specific feelings being alluded to; the indescribable horror of it, and the accompanying inability to accept, on any genuine level, that something so macabre has actually been invented by one’s own mind. And, of course, there was always the deep, desperate desire to rationalise it away. But I’d never been able to do that. Because I’d never really been able to summon up the courage to try.

Fo
r fairly obvious reasons, I had no desire to explore it further; whether to investigate why it happened, or to try to prevent it from happening. Whatever it was in me that made me feel that way at night...it was a part of me that I didn’t want to have anything to do with. The continuing problem was, that while I knew myself well enough to know where not to dig; to leave the holes alone and the dark places down in them hidden from the light...other people might not have been so...intuitively
cautious. How could I trust another Human Being to know where not to dig? To understand – on an instinctive level – the dangers of doing so?

VI
– Intake

~ Dio ~

23/11/2023

Wright ushered Dio and Yvonne into the Bureau. The building
– an imposing granite dome ringed with incandescent foliage – made Dio nervous.

Like most
of Palatine, it reminded him – more than any other thing – of a photo negative of something familiar. The memory of those hulking grotesqueries: those distant, sprawling testaments to the perverse architectural ingenuity, and unhinged, obverted fetishism of their creators...were, yes, definitively locked away in the repository of things mad and monstrous, situated in the very deepest corner of Dio’s shadowy back-mind. But most of what he saw struck him as the direct and uncomplicated execration of the known and familiar. It was as if the colours of Palatine Hill were inverted; as if he and Yvonne – ushered downward by their ‘Virgil-apparent’, Wright – had stumbled into a parallel world: the opposite – diametrically – of their own. A place where the very spectrum of visible colour had been tipped on its head, and committed to the dark night of day.

Once inside, though, the Bureau was very much what one might have expected of a buil
ding bearing its name. Very much...or less than. It reminded Dio more of a free clinic, than anything else; starched and cut-rate; tacky and generic. There was an eerie sensation of familiarity, also: A kind of pantomime-normalcy that prodded and poked at Dio’s sanity with the experimental curiosity of a malign psychiatrist.

There was a reception desk with a friendly
– if tense and overworked – receptionist. There was a waiting area complete with faded linoleum floors and plastic, plasto-fabric-padded chairs. There was a small television set, suspended in one extreme corner of the room, playing out some desperate, post-midday-programming telesales riff featuring, apparently...literally the only set of knives you’d ever need. Guaranteed, of course. Except where specified in the fine print.

Dio caught Yvonne’s eyes, expecting to see a reflection of his own disbelief at the absurdity of it all. What he saw was a heightened state of awareness: the sharp, slightly mad eyes of the mouse that had seen this break in the maze before. The
mouse that knew – sooner rather than later – there’d be two buzzers. If they got the
right
buzzer, then that was fine. That wasn’t the one she was worried about. She was worried about the other buzzer. The buzzer that carried the current; the buzzer that delivered the shock. The traumatised acuity in her expression was suggestive of too much experience with that second kind of buzzer.

Concerned though he was, Dio couldn’t help but find Yvonne’s vulnerability endearing. It was, after all, an extremely rare thing for her to display. Covertly reaching for her hand as Wright leaned casually over the reception desk and conversed inaudibly with the rece
ptionist – elbow down and a flirtatious smirk on his face – Dio squeezed reassuringly. Yvonne shot him a look, like: ‘thanks...but really Dio...what’re you gonna do?’

And it would’ve been a fair question. A question he would’ve had no helpful answers to.

Still. As disturbing as every contour of the situation seemed to be rapidly becoming, Dio had faith in The Organisation. Faith that they’d be taken care of. And, up until that point, he’d never had a reason to question that faith.

“Okay.” Wright rubbed his hands together, turning back to the two of them. “You can go through, now.”

“Through to where?” Yvonne asked. Wright smiled an understanding little smile.

“It’s
intelligent to question, Yvonne. And it’s reasonable to expect answers. But I’m not the one to give them to you. Would it reassure you to know that I went through what you’re about to go through? All generalists like myself do. As do all the ‘intakes’ of Palatine. As do many of the recruits.” He chuckled, reaching over to squeeze her shoulder. “We may be a faceless, global, clandestine, ideologically motivated, morally complicated super-conglomerate...but...gosh,” He laughed. “We still have to kowtow to the bureaucrats. That’s all this is. You understand?

“That’s
all
this is?” Yvonne repeated back with abridged emphasis, raising an eyebrow. “Screening, induction, and paperwork?”

“That sort of thing, yes,” Wright offered vaguely.
Dio could tell, from her unchanged eyes, that she was far from reassured. Turning, Wright led them down a corridor off to the left of the reception desk. Three doors down on the right side, Wright reached up, and rapped briefly on the cold, white-glazed metal.

“Come, please.” The muffled voice sounded out from within. A woman’s voice, Dio co
ncluded after a moment’s consideration. Wright turned the knob and pushed open the door, ushering Dio and Yvonne inside.

“This is where I leave you,” Wright smiled. Yvonne turned back, eyes full of confusion.

“What? Why?”

“No fear, Yvonne
...no fear, my girl.” He instructed reassuringly, before leaning a little closer, and with a deadpan stage whisper: “They can smell that, you see...” He paused, their faces inches apart: nerves and trepidation versus cold, amused unreadability. Wright pulled back, laughing heartily, before walking out and closing the door behind him.

“Was that a
joke?” Dio muttered, looking around at the empty, square, white room in which they now found themselves.

“If it was, it wasn’t fucking
funny,” Yvonne replied, hugging herself around the midsection and walking cautiously forward, into the centre of the room. “That bitch, Smoke...” She muttered.

“What about her?”

“Just...what she said. I’m really on edge, here.” She paused; eyes narrowing: “You heard that voice, didn’t you? Saying to ‘come in’?”

“Yeah.” Dio confirmed.

“So why are we alone in here?”

“We’re
not
.” Dio observed, pointing into the top left hand corner of the wall they were facing. A small tube capped with rounded glass hung from a few inches of exposed aluminium. Yvonne regarded the camera with suspicion.

“I’ve seen a room like this before
...” Yvonne murmured.

“So have I
...” Dio’s voice wavered; threatening to break. He thought back to that room; the white room in Tel Aviv. The one where he was tortured.