Authors: Matthew Revert
Rollo will find them both. How can there be any other outcome? For Ingrid to avoid him successfully, she would have to move in endless circles from one chamber to the next. A perpetual movement, unsustainable over any timeframe. This movement would necessitate Rollo adhering to a pattern understood by Ingrid, which seems impossible in the face of his newfound unpredictability. Each attempt to formulate a plan is hindered by the imagined visage of Rollo obstructing mental progress. Ingrid’s precious son has understood nothing but the fear preoccupying its mother. Only one outcome must be considered… the safety of the baby. An action cannot exist that Ingrid will not consider in order to achieve this outcome. Whether considering the action will result in performing the action is another matter beyond Ingrid’s ability to comprehend.
Ingrid’s head tilts backward, just enough to survey the ceiling of the Sulcus Tunnel. Beyond the ceiling, through layers of compressed soil, exists something that is not the fort. Whatever life before the fort consisted of continues to interact with an aboveground world detached from everything she knows. If it meant the safety of her child, would Ingrid join her unknown past aboveground? The thought congeals within Ingrid. Slowing. Fighting movement. Melting into pure fear. Her memory is unable to locate further instances of this thought. In the emergence of this moment, Ingrid cannot understand how leaving the fort has never been afforded focus. While her intellect is capable of acknowledging life removed from the fort, instinct has forbidden this acknowledgment from merging with intention. Even now, as paranoia and fear for her child’s safety scream like frightened animals, she is unable to invoke the required intention. Whatever course of action Ingrid chooses must limit itself to the confines of her world. What exists aboveground ceased being her world long before the memory of this time disappeared. Her eyes abort their study of the ceiling.
Limits have been set. The course of action will occur in the fort. Evasion is a plan that lacks longevity. Rather than evade Rollo, Ingrid must confront him. Stop him. Rollo’s mobility cannot continue.
It would be possible, if Ingrid exercised commitment, to end Rollo’s life. It is a thought that sits more comfortably than she is comfortable with, but she allows the thought to explore itself. Life, in all its iterations, will move toward its end. The end it moves toward could, without a great deal of complication, be introduced in a deliberate fashion. Ingrid could use the life within her to take the life within Rollo. The pure mechanics of the task are not beyond anyone. Prolonged periods of safety lose connection with life’s fragility. The continuation of life transcends expectation and exists beyond comprehension. If we have enjoyed a prolonged period of safety, how can we conceptualize the end of that period? It is only in moments defined by illness or danger that life reveals its tenuous hold on continuation.
As Ingrid envisions the act of killing Rollo, the thought transforms into something horrific. The sensation of a knitting needle as it penetrates Rollo’s skin, even in mere thought, triggers pain within Ingrid, as if she were committing the imagined act against the self. Her body experiences pain as the needle’s penetration shifts. Ingrid endeavors to move away from these thoughts, but slips backward, becoming smothered by them. Her imagined acts of violence, in every sense but their physicality, become real until her whole body writhes in pain. The theoretical act is subsumed by its emotional weight until one more potential course of action is erased from her list. Only when every part of Ingrid believes she will not kill Rollo does the stabbing pain cease.
Without solution, Ingrid feels helpless. She is unable to remove herself and the baby from the fort. She is unable to remove Rollo from the fort. The outcome she seeks is bound to the environment she seeks it in. The three of them will remain here because there is nowhere else. Rollo will remain alive because murder cannot exist within her. All that remains is to incapacitate Rollo. This in itself is not the conclusion to Ingrid’s worry; rather it is a means of buying time.
The Central Sulcus Emergency Tunnel is equipped with a security system that can be activated to incapacitate any intruders. Once activated, the Sulcus Tunnel initiates lockdown and disperses infectious spores throughout all other chambers in the fort. On a theoretical level, the system is an ingenious safety net, allowing for their continuation. In the realm of practicality, the system has never been employed. The method by which one activates the security system lacks clarity in Ingrid’s mind. It was, like most things in the fort, designed and implemented by Rollo. It strikes Ingrid as a strange act of cruelty to seek Rollo’s incapacitation via his own invention, but somehow, also fitting.
She navigates toward the top of the tunnel, holding her baby closer than ever, with absence of mind, trying to force it into her belly. Into the space that exists within a woman where a baby is supposed to grow. A life projected upon an inanimate object, which cannot help but oblige the unconscious desires of the living object imbuing it with more than it can ever be.
Seven velvet ropes hang from the tunnel’s ceiling. Three red. Two yellow. Two white. Each rope hangs at a different length from the others. They control mechanisms deep within the hidden layers of the fort. There is an order to these ropes that, when abided by, should result in the system’s deployment. The order required by the ropes is something she knows, but it exists in decrepit fragments of memory. The fragments have scattered like dandelion florets in the wind. Each floret possesses data different from the others. Individually useless. Of value only in dialogue with its sibling florets.
Sifting through memory, searching for fragments relating to the totality of Ingrid’s life. Fragments are placed side-by-side. Continuity between fragments is sought. One hand remains pressed against the baby; the other combs Ingrid’s beard with spanned fingers. Each rigid follicle presses against the palm of her hand, investigating the skin. Hand leaves beard and reaches toward the first rope. Red. Second longest. Potentially incorrect. The hand closes around the rope and pulls down. The rope plays at resisting, but gives without a great deal of exertion. Dust from the tunnel’s ceiling is dislodged and floats downward in slow pendulous arcs, seeking Ingrid’s nostrils. A series of clockwork sounds click and rattle within the walls. A sound that may be a ball bearing travels on a track around the tunnel’s circumference. It drops into something wet. A series of long, thick woolen blankets fall around Ingrid, covering the tunnel’s surface.
Ingrid reaches toward another rope. White. The shortest. It has less give than the first and threatens Ingrid’s footing as she pulls. When the rope obeys, Ingrid hears something that could be a sheet of steel falling above her. The fall shakes the tunnel, dislodging more dust. Rather than fight it, she allows it to enter her as it deems appropriate, choosing instead to consider the remaining ropes. The dust infiltrates Ingrid, marking its entry with unreachable irritation.
Although the memory has been forbidden access, something communicating at an unknown level is aware of the pattern. Before Ingrid moved to the fort, before she and Rollo became one, her life was consistent with that of most people her age. After school, she would spend her evenings on the phone with those she was just at school with. Gossip too precarious to utter in the presence of the group was saved for one-on-one telephone encounters. Each friend was privy to a different fragment of gossip. Each fragment, when stitched together, told the schoolyard’s overarching narrative.
The phone number of each friend never existed inside Ingrid’s consciousness. The numbers lived in her fingertips, where they followed a pattern equal to the correct sequence of numbers. It was only by refusing to engage her conscious that she was able to dial the correct sequence of numbers correctly. When attention was cast upon the number, it would form a jumble from which the pattern could not be discerned.
The pattern of the ropes exists as the phone numbers of her childhood. Only by forgetting she needs to know the pattern will she be able to execute the pattern. Ingrid senses this, but cannot give form to it. She steps away from herself, allowing an automated process to engage. Beyond her outstretched arm, there is nothing except absent movement. She feels rope in her hand but refuses to understand the rope. As one rope gives, her hand moves to another. Each new rope triggers sounds around the tunnel that betray its inner life. When the final rope is pulled, sliding metal can be heard around her. This is followed by a hiss with the aural properties of escaping steam.
Throughout the tunnel, spores fill the air.
…
Rollo stimulates his salivary glands, attempting to fill his drying mouth with something to spit over the mirrors in the Occipital Chamber. Were the mirrors merely dirty, they could be fixed. Something easily rectified to restore reflective clarity. They display little more than abstract textures. Any one of the mirrors may, somewhere within their indefinite array of merging shapes, reflect Ingrid and his hypothetical baby. He studies them with increasing focus, as if focus in and of itself can create detail.
Rollo shares a dialogue with the fort. The ways in which Ingrid betrays her location are all communicated by the fort. It would be so easy to find her. Almost a game, like hide-and-seek with a child, but Rollo has had predatory intent projected upon him. Ingrid’s every action has sought to reinforce this projection, and he has allowed himself to become it. He needs to withdraw from Ingrid’s manipulation. Shift the dynamic.
Rollo’s face meets the cool glass of a surveillance mirror. Its uselessness mocks him, introducing Rollo to his own vast ignorance. This carefully constructed, self-congratulatory system possesses no concrete purpose beyond his aggrandizement. Whoever Rollo was before he became all he remembers, at some level, must have assumed this surveillance system would never meet its function. A useless accoutrement, worn by the fort as a fashion statement. What other functional dimensions of the fort in actuality lack function? Existing only to bolster the ego of whoever that version of Rollo was. To what fraudulence has he dedicated his life to maintaining without question? His dialogue with the fort has never ventured into this territory. The fort only understands the construction bestowed upon it.
He is sickened and enraged, longing to reach into his past and inflict pain upon this forgotten earlier self. Wanting to drag this self into the present, forcing him to see how useless his invention is. To parade him before it, stripping him of his ill-gained confidence. Replacing the self-importance with the doubt of intelligence.
He raises his face from the mirror and brings it down again with force, feeling shudders of impact travel through the blood. The movement is repeated. Harder. The impact more severe. Repeated. Harder. Harder. Harder. He continues to perform this simple movement until the impact cracks the mirror. He lifts his face to examine what has been achieved. Layers of smudged blood obscure reflection further. Rollo’s face burns with pain his hands lack the courage to touch. The warm wet of newly struck blood travels the curve of his neck. Into the collar of his clothing.
Slumped against the wall, Rollo removes his shirt, peeling its dampness away and discarding it on the ground. Attention is paid to the jut of his breasts. The sensitivity of his nipples, which seem engorged, almost painful to touch. He cups each breast, feeling their weight, wondering what they are for. If they serve an unexplored purpose. Pressure is applied to each and builds within. The action is accompanied by discomfort, but it does not feel wrong. Two jets of colostrum emerge from the tips of Rollo’s nipples, painting the ground around him.
…
We refuse to acknowledge the bulk of who we are. Conflict abounds between emergence and suppression in all things. Raw feeling and thought are born and sculpted into a fathomed unit before our conscious understanding is permitted to interact with it. The process separating who we are from who we
really
are enables us to form relationships with ourselves and, eventually, with each other. Relationships based upon the interaction of lies. This dynamic is known. Anyone who understands the extent of what they suppress from others understands the extent of what is suppressed from them. A relationship, in order to operate with continuity, must nurture the continuity of suppression. The relationship with others, and with the self.
The equilibrium of continuity can fall victim to life’s traumas, permitting remnants of raw feeling to infiltrate the manicured environment of our conscious garden. Wild flowers break through the soil, severing root systems, dominating what we have carefully planted. Burdening the landscape, tempting it toward discord. The chaotic whorl of unconscious truth flows through the tempered conscious. Once known, it is integral. Something we must assimilate into the evolution of who we are.
…
Rollo has become aware an integral component of everything he knows is amiss. It communicates with him using language similar to Ingrid’s psychic wordlessness. It expresses via feeling and casts shadows he cannot escape. Something is reaching into the past and withdrawing alien fragments that want to make sense.
The fort keeps truths Rollo did not know to look for. Truths beyond the process of its upkeep. The walls vibrate with his past. With Ingrid’s past. With their past. Everything that was forgotten lives inside the fort, following them, longing to rejoin them. Memory and truth seek each other out, imploring Rollo to facilitate this reunion.
The point at which experience gives way to memory is gradated, bleeding together the many thens and nows. Memory begins constructing its own truth before the experience responsible for the memory’s creation ends. Defining lines are an illusion. Something has happened to Rollo and Ingrid that contradicts their past, so incongruous that memory has completely abandoned them. They have responded with escape, unable to confront whatever called them forth.