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Those that truly loathed the Core, hatred filling every inch of their body, its destruction becoming their sole purpose of existence, obsessed about having everything removed from their skin, every single trace of the Core removed, like it was nothing but a pus-filled abscess. Sono hated the Core too, immensely, but to make it into an evil as large as that would be to flatter it, with a strong chance of losing himself in the process. He had plenty of friends that had disappeared that way, mentally as well as physically.

For better or worse, Sono thought that it would be to kill off a part of himself. Had the trials suffered in prison not shaped him? Nine years was a long time, and however atrocious it had been, the glimpses of magic, though few, still lifted him today. They gave him hope, and meaning.

The elderly often held sessions of what could be considered school inside the prison, sitting before a large gathering of kids, telling stories, teaching them the alphabet or how to count. But since the quotas set by the Core weren’t always easy to fulfill, school did not always assemble, or attendance was poor, if there was an available and willing elder at all.

After a few years in prison, he was sent to a stone quarry, where school came in the form of unstructured talks, about everything and nothing, sometimes as a group, and sometimes one on one while the others slept around them.

Listening to Aunt Yanda telling stories in prison was one of those magic moments he could invoke at will to bolster himself. It wasn’t so much the details anymore, they were all but dissolved, but the sensations he summoned. Back then, the pains, hungers and evils had disappeared as wonder filled him, but little of that survived today. It was more like a memory of a dream in a nightmare.

But, each time the smell from the enormous pit on the north side of the city made it to the south side, where most of the Outsiders lived, it was difficult not to clench a fist in rage, regardless of the place one’s mind was in. Not only did the pit smell, it glowed too, and would one not know what made it glow, the greenish tint of the surrounding pollution would be somewhat becoming. It was constantly refilled with prisoners of all ages, the majority of them dead from the Core’s indifference, which exasperated the underlying heart and lung problems every Outsider suffered from.

The Outsiders who died outside of prison were taken to a rudimentary burial ground near the pit, each one buried underneath a pile of debris. There were countless of these mounds scattered around the area adjacent to the pit. A very long time ago, before Sono’s grandpa was even born, they had attempted to bury everyone that ended up in the pit, taking them to a place nearby to be properly buried, but very soon discovered that the pit never shrunk, on the contrary, so they eventually gave it up altogether. That was how the burial grounds were born.

A few, as Sono had witnessed, took the matter into their own hands in prison, and ended it independently. The tools utilized to accomplish it were either poorly suited for the job, or blatantly over the top, harrowing either way for everyone involved. Sometimes they threw themselves under or into powerful machines, which crushed them to a pulp in an instant, or they committed suicide by guard, attacking one of them which often ensued with a barrage of bullets fired at them. Some found sharp enough objects to slit open their wrists with. Once, a man had tried to hang himself by tying his pant legs to a fence, and then sticking his chin over the crotch of his pants. When the guards spotted him, they shot him in his stomach several times, and he remained hanging there, coloring his underwear and legs a deep red.

The dead bodies, or whatever remained of them, could lay there for days before the guards took action; ordering whoever happened to be close by to clean it up by pointing with their weapons. Corpses were put in a large metallic cart, but where only rolled away when it was full, which usually didn’t take long.

The wall around the Core was the tallest and sturdiest structure around, with an unpleasant surprise behind it. Many years ago, a small group of Outsiders had gotten past it, supposedly by digging for years, only to discover there was another one just like it. It had looked like a dry dam inside, with dusty, almost imperceptible roads between them, miniscule in comparison to the towering walls.

The Core was shaped like a circle, and the prison was somewhere inside that circle, although no one knew that for a fact, it was just surmised. Everyone arrived at the prison sedated, and left the same way, or worse. Never better.

The Core had several modified wind turbines on top of its high walls, acting as fans, to divert the foul smell from the glowing pit. And they weren’t spread out like sentries with identical intervals; they were strategically placed, as if someone had actually spent time to calculate how to direct the smell straight to the heart of the Outsides. A foul smell always hung in the streets, saturated every garment and sometimes became powerful enough to sting the eyes. Since the wind wasn’t what it used to be, or so people said at least, and the three nuclear plants evidently produced all the power the Core could need and more, such ludicrous excesses were possible. The nuclear plants, along with a few buildings flanking them, were situated far from the city, by the shore, all protected by vast fields of razor wire and countless watchtowers.

The Core also had hundreds of drones at their disposal, for a variety of tasks. The majority of them scattered the pollution above the Core, or tried anyway, a handful of them assisted the wind turbines on the walls, and fluctuating numbers of them acted as sentries, hovering above the walls and the Outsides, masked by the pollution. Unfortunately the Core was so vast that any opening in the sky seldom became noticeable outside the walls. Often even the walls were veiled by pollution.

The further one got from the Core, the thicker the pollution grew, until a certain point where it all looked alike; a floating gruel made from ground up gravel that everyone was forced to ingest. The ground was contaminated too, every single patch of it, but since all enterprises involving the soil had long been abandoned, it didn’t matter much.

Rumors had long circulated that the people inside the Core who didn’t quite align with the rest were either thrown inside a tiny, brightly lit deprivation cell, without food or water to slowly wither away, often within days, or they were given a piece of rope and a stool and then taken to a neighboring cell, where the ceiling was higher and fitted with a sturdy hook. What happened to them after that, nobody knew. They certainly never ended up in the pit. If the rumor was true, for them to leave the pit like that, with putrefying humans out in the open, was surely for effect; a display of their supremacy, and the insignificance of the Outsiders.

The rumors had originated inside the prison, where contact between the prisoners from the Outsides and the prison guards from the Core were inevitable. The only contact with the Core was through their many law enforcement agencies. The patrolling police, usually around three or four cars, one of them always near the shops and the market, rarely went out of their armored vehicles, and when they did, things went fast, and without words. The police cars were where one first experienced the Core’s penchant for sedatives. No one ever remembered the ride.

Sedatives were used frequently on the prisoners, most often in liquid or solid form, and they were either gulped down docilely or one got hunted down and shot with a dart. Fresh bruises weren’t uncommon upon awakening, regardless of the option one chose.

It was in prison that the dealings most resembling an actual interaction with the Core took place.

In an empty, fully mirrored room, where even the floor and ceiling were mirrored, one’s sentence was blurted out in a voice completely devoid of cadence through the speakers up in each of the four corners. Depending on how one responded to the sedative, it could be an unpleasant trip. Trying not to vomit had been of far greater concern for the eleven-year-old Sono than the outside world when he came to on the floor. Not until the guard grabbed him did he realize where he was, surrounded by mirrors, and immediately afterwards that he had a strange wound on his arm. The voice, that of a haunted computer, which others claimed repeated one’s sentence over and over at least ten times, echoing throughout the room, had been merely a blurred noise in the background for Sono. The guard had then hauled him out of the room, and on through a network of sterile dark bluish corridors, without a single door visible along the way, until, like a portal, at the end of a long straight hallway an unassuming door of polished steel stood facing them. Beyond it, the expanse of the prison opened up.

His reaction to the sedatives, namely nausea, disappeared after he’d been sedated a couple of times.

The guards were outfitted from top to bottom in shiny black armor, with either handguns fastened to their sides or rifles over their stomach, without anything that could even suggest a glimpse of something familiar to an Outsider, like skin, lips, ears, nails, or hair of any kind. Their gloves were heavily reinforced, especially around their knuckles, making their hands appear gargantuan, and their boots were simply extensions of their armor, like some kind of bulletproof rain boots. But what set them apart from the raid squad, whose armor had not a single distinguishing mark, besides the GUARD written in white across their chest, were the bright yellow X’s on the bottom third of their sleek, oval-shaped masks, approximately where their mouth would’ve been. The police shared this with them, both the POLICE across their chest and the bright yellow X as the only vestige of their mouths.

Though most procedures in the prison were mechanized, the trickier things had to be carried out by a living being and not a computer code, though the two were often hard to tell apart.

The bright yellow X embossed onto the bottom third of their masks worked in two ways; as a deterrent in case the extinguishing exterior and the expressionless mask failed, and as a symbol of their inability to speak, since Sono hadn’t heard a sound from any of the guards, not even a grunt or sigh, even though five minutes didn’t go by without passing one, sometimes even appearing in his dreams; he envisioned the mask prevented them from speaking aloud somehow, though they still managed to communicate with each other.

But communication could happen in something as simple as a tiny turn of a boot.

Though he had not personally experienced any kindness or memorable gestures from the prison guards, would one take away their armor, they were not very different. Or so he believed, and hoped. And there were a lot of guards around. Therefore, the rumors regarding the cruel treatment of the Core’s own inhabitants weren’t easily dismissible.

His grandpa wouldn’t fare well in prison. It was basically a labor camp, toiling day in and day out, and even the sections with the lightest loads were tough on the elderly.

Oftentimes, one didn’t even know what it was that one had been assigned to do. Assembling the same tiny pieces with a magnifying glass and tweezers, or welding unassuming metal scraps together for weeks on end. And, out of nowhere, one could suddenly wake up at any one of a number of quarries, cement factories, coal mines or hangars filled with mountains of junk to sort through, usually rusty metal, tires, old appliances and electronic devices.

Not even three-quarters of the Outsiders Sono had been at the stone quarry with lived long enough to see the prison again.

Maybe they were all in fact facilitating the acceleration of their own annihilation. It was much more probable than their salvation. But maybe it was dumb to look for salvation in one’s imprisoners.

To the Core, the Outsiders were probably just disposable parts of an immense machine that they controlled. Though some of the Outsiders in prison had adopted even bleaker sentiments, Sono had been surprised to find Outsiders on the other side of the wall harboring sentiments that overran them both.

Despite the bland pot of timidly boiling water before him, suspended from a rudimentary sawhorse-like frame constructed out of rebars, whose steady humming pleasantly engaged his ears, Sono turned to the side, to stare at the equally bland drum by the wall. It was actually an old oil barrel plastered with faded charcoal handprints; his grandpa’s handprints. It was by far the most melodious piece of metal he had ever encountered, even at rare times when he himself, tone-deaf as he was, pounded and slapped the top of it.

Two

“I saw her again Grandpa! I saw her!” Sono leapt toward him as fast as he could across the concrete pieces.

“Did you hear me? I saw her again! In a dream, last night! Wait, I’ll tell you!”

Chin down, eyelids forced apart wide, he tried to run even faster across the jagged land.

“Careful so you don’t fall!”

Pouting slightly in concentration, Sono shook his head almost imperceptibly.

Sono eventually jumped down from the last concrete piece onto solid ground.

“Heyaaa!”

His grandpa offered him a few absentminded nods. “Who did you see?”

“The girl! The one that hopped around here before. Don’t you remember? I told you about her; Turn.”

Edgar gave a single nod, with his eyes closed.

“This is important. Listen to me, please.”

“I’m listening, Sono.”

“She was in my dream last night. Do you know what was sticking out of her mouth? A horse’s tail. Fucking weird, right?”

“Hmm…how do you know it was a horse?”

Sono didn’t, and though he tried to convert his exhilaration into something more sleuth-like given the development, it failed miserably. “What else could it have been?”

“That’s for you to think about, not me.”

“You’re the shaman.”

“I am, but I don’t meddle with dreams offhand like this. It would be highly irresponsible. If I were to tell you something, it would hinder your own quest. It’s something
you
must initiate. And then I can only guide you.”

Sono crumpled his face in disillusionment. “Now it’s a fucking quest?”

“Do you think she could’ve had a horse inside her?”

“What? No. How?”

“It was a dream. Unthink accordingly. Just because you don’t see them around here, doesn’t mean they can’t be somewhere else, like inside someone.”

“She ate it?”

Sono looked over at his grandpa, hoping that he’d shed some much needed light on his enigmatic dream, even if only a sliver of it; he’d be perfectly happy with that, but his presence had in an instance turned alarmingly static. His eyes were riveted on something in the distance, but no matter how hard Sono tried to spot it, even walking up right next to him to see it from his point of view, he couldn’t spot it.

“Grandpa?”

Edgar hushed him, both vocally and with a raised index finger at chest level.

“What is it?” Sono asked nonetheless and backed up slightly. By the looks of it, he seemed to have given up all nonessential functions to boost his sight, widening his eyes and hoisting his eyebrows, all the while his posture began to sag dramatically. He slumped down bit by bit until his ass hit the ground, like his wax crutches finally gave in to the heat his feverish passion exuded as a result of the emerging spectacle. A spectacle only he saw. And apparently it was stunning.

Once his form had set, neither slumping down nor springing back up, Sono walked right up to him, leaned over, and peered into his unblinking eyes, nose to nose. He even waved a hand in front of his face, but Edgar was lost, temporarily or not only time would tell.

Unsure of what exactly to do next, Sono sat down beside him, staring more or less in the same direction, and trying feebly to produce a whistle.

Quickly bored from the lack of stimulus, Sono grabbed hold of his own legs, and tipped himself over onto his back. Remaining on his back among the dirt and concrete pebbles, he stretched his legs out and stared at the defiled sky. It was a challenge to properly ascertain the distance between him and the mass presently colored a mottled, sickly brown; though he knew it hung low, at times it felt like gazing at the very fabric of the universe, an unfathomable distance away, simply because it was so languid.

He scooped some of the airborne filth up with his cupped hand and piled it on top of his grandpa’s head. The invisible adornment brought him little joy.

After a while, during which he had almost dozed off, he heard his grandpa breathing; pushing out the exhale much more vigorously than he dragged the mix of gases into him, the kind of breath one lets loose after a strenuous yet exhilarating event.

“The tree. I saw the tree again. Huh...”

Sono turned his head sluggishly toward his grandpa, the sharp pieces digging into unaccustomed parts of his head.

“You totally zoned out…”

“I had to.”

Keeping his eyes on his grandpa’s left ear, Sono raised himself laboriously, brushed the debris off from the back of his head, and then pulled his legs in to sit cross-legged next to his grandpa.

“You had to? The despotic tree ordered you?”

“No, but unless I free myself to it completely, it disappears. I wanted to Sono. But I have to be delicate. Concentration can hamper it, or destroy it. But you can’t be indifferent either. It’s a balance, I guess…”

Edgar laughed good-humoredly. Sono searched for the tree a final time, its absence neither elucidating nor debunking his grandpa’s dissolving presence.

“Was it the same tree?”

“Yes, I believe it was. And I could smell its leaves this time…”

“Really? Leaves? Fresh green leaves? What did it smell like?”

Sono watched his grandpa slowly troll the top of his eyelids with his eyes.

“I don’t know how to describe it to you…”

“Come on, please…try.”

Edgar grunted something that seemed to signify acceptance.

As the seconds passed, without any further noises from his grandpa, making space for silence to comfortably entrench itself, Sono’s excitement slowly turned itself inside out.

“Wait…how do you know it was leaves you smelled? You’re just fucking with me as usual.”

“I smell what I think it smells like. I’ve read countless books on the smells of trees.”

“Books? Do you even know how to read? Most people I know learn to read in prison…so, is there something you’re keeping from me, Grandpa? Because you haven’t been to prison, have you?”

Edgar shook his head innocently.

“Nothing worth mentioning about your past?”

“No. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

Sono inhaled deeply, and when reaching the apex of inflation, he locked it in, sending an ominous stare sliding down his nose. “That’s even more alarming…” He smuggled out almost breathlessly from between his lips, before releasing the prisoner, peacefully. “You could’ve smelled your neighbor’s musky fart and you wouldn’t know the difference. Ten miles away from here. Yesterday’s grasshopper feast with an entire bottle of hot sauce. Yumma yumma.”

“It’s more about the sensation.”

Edgar snapped his fingers.

“Snap back at you too…what sensation, like massage? Then describe the delicate hands torturing you.”

“I can’t. Not even to myself, not anymore. Even if you experienced it with me, we’d describe it differently. I could spend the remainder of my life describing it to you, and you still wouldn’t be any wiser. It’s all a matter of perception. Everything moves. Your perception too.”

“I didn’t mean poke around at atomic level, just say if it was nice or not. That’s all. Keep it simple for the city boy…who didn’t grow up in flourishing surroundings like you, smelling trees and shit...”

His grandpa picked up something from the ground. “Take this pebble. Do you think you can comprehend how it feels if I describe it to you?”

“Yes, it’s a pebble. It’s not the first time I’ve seen one, Grandpa. Thanks a lot…”

“Can you really?”

“Yeah, I can. Do you want me to prove it?”

“What is similarity? Looks? You can’t be certain, and neither can I. The next time, the very next moment I feel it or look at it in my hand, the factors which we for lack of a better utilize, will have changed. It’s merely a description of the pebble. Don’t mistake it for the pebble.”

“Uh…I’d say that was wise, but then I’d be a liar. That was amazingly wise!”

Sono waited for Edgar to jump in, with anything, but he seemed to already be airborne.

“Do you even understand what you’re saying yourself?”

“Sometimes,” his grandpa responded musically.

“That’s comforting. So…is it an illusion or not?”

Edgar, his weary eyes lowered, shrugged his shoulders coolly.

“Great, thanks…”

Though Sono flicked a few pebbles away, the dejection remained.

“And don’t ask me
what do you consider an illusion Sono?
”

“I won’t.”

Fraught with doubt, Sono glanced at his grandpa.

“Did she feel illusory? When she was here,” Edgar asked smoothly. “Her speech, her movements; the way you responded to her presence, inside. Your hunch. Did it feel illusory?”

Rolling a pebble between his index finger and thumb, Sono froze.

“I didn’t ask any of that.”

“But you wanted to.”

“Uh…eventually, yeah…” He threw the pebble away. “Don’t dig into my brain like that, or I’ll do the same to you.”

Edgar slapped the twitching fingers Sono inched toward his head with surprising agility.

“You like her; it’s not difficult to figure out that everything revolves around her.”

“A few things, all right. Far from everything…”

Jumping from one incoherent thought to the other, Turn colored the inside of his mind once again; the trail seeped out and spread throughout his entire body, evoking sensations in colors that were utterly foreign to him.

“Reality is not a fixed phenomenon,” Edgar said and then jiggled his lower jaw from side to side. ”Everyone sees different things here.”

“Why here?” Sono asked, his sour skepticism squishing his face, while his eyes darted across the concrete pieces with haste.

“It’s a sacred place.”

“It is?” Sono anchored his puzzlement to his grandpa’s dusty, tattooed cheek, his innumerable wrinkles expediting its grip. “Why couldn’t you have told me that before? Given me a little heads up?”

“Heads up about what? It’s sacred, not haunted.”

“It doesn’t really…inspire sacredness. Death is just a slip away with all these sharp pieces around. A little cut can mean your leg falls off a week later. It’s more like a leprosy field.”

“Go slower.”

“Na-uh.”

“Leprosy won’t cause your leg to fall off.”

Sono looked over at the broken pieces of concrete a mere pebble’s throw away.

“You’ve just grown accustomed to this desolation, because it looks like a graveyard...”

“Does it have to be beautiful to be sacred?”

“Yeah. At least not painful when you sit down.”

The shadow of a phantasm cut across his mind. Sono leapt hungrily after the crumbling tail of its logic. “So, wait…you agree that this place looks horrible?”

Edgar peered at him thoughtfully. “Hmm…”

“You do. You don’t think it’s beautiful either, you just admitted that, indirectly...”

Edgar bobbed his head from side to side as if tossing the possibility between his uncooperative brain halves.

“Stop doing that.”

Sono had seen a fellow prisoner doing the same motion for hours on end.

Watching his grandpa’s still face in profile, his skin hanging from the protruding bones like a crumpled garment, he flung away another pebble along with his interest in it.

“I could just bulldoze the whole place…flatten it all, like a bug pancake. Feed everyone. With dust!” He sliced through the air horizontally with his right hand.

“There’s no need to turn horrible like that Sono. No…that would be irrevocable. Very, very damaging.” Edgar shook his head in fearful little tremors.

“How would you like to have beachfront property, with two drops of water and dusty beaches?” Sono planted his palm flat onto the coarse ground, and looked at his grandpa, his face clutched by a burdensome wonder.

“No…don’t worry; I was just messing with you. I won’t touch your sacred leprosy fields...”

Together, in silence, they stared across the jagged gray landscape around them.

With no considerable effort, his grandpa’s recent statements sprouted before him vividly, one quicker than the next, each shoot instantly developing into a sturdy branch on his tree of disbelief. In the very space Edgar had seen the invisible tree, his own burst into bloom with a fresh clarity.

Sono gazed at his grandpa with taut eyes and brows guarding them fiercely. “Now I see…what you’re doing…” Sono nodded to himself, and produced a succession of clicks as his tongue repeatedly parted with the roof of his mouth. “I’ve caught the scent of the tree too, and I smell bullshit. Ripe as ever.” His slanted mouth hinted of an expression eager to put its teeth to use. “Since you’re a wise old man, a nail-licking, finger-sucking shaman, and a tree symbolizes knowledge, of course you see a tree. Of course, what else? As for me, I’m superficial, young and dumb, so I see a girl. You’re full of shit Grandpa. Full of it.”

“That depends on how you see it. I don’t have the precise percentage now, but–”