Eye Contact, page 1
Eye Contact
Eye Contact
Copyright © 2011, by Thomas M Malafarina.
Cover Copyright © 2011 Sunbury Press. Front cover image by Alecia Nye. Back cover photo of Thomas Malafarina by Steve Rouss.
NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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FIRST SUNBURY PRESS EDITION
Printed in the United States of America
March 2011
ISBN 978-1-934597-37-8
Published by:
Sunbury Press
Camp Hill, PA
www.sunburypress.com
Camp Hill, Pennsylvania USA
Dedication
For my three siblings: My two sisters: Louise (Malafarina) Nasados and Georgine (Malafarina) Klem and my brother George Malafarina. We had some great times growing up in Ashland with our wonderful parents. Then before we knew it, we watched our own kids grow up. Now, God willing, we’ll get to watch their kids grow up as well. How all of that has managed to happen in just the blink of an eye is beyond my comprehension.
The eye sees a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination awake.
Leonardo da Vinci
Chapter 1
An impenetrable darkness—total, complete in its starkness—seemed to engulf David, wrapping itself tightly around him like a pitch-black suffocating shroud of death, preventing even the most miniscule scrap of light to shine through its inky blackness. It appeared to him as if every existing glimmer of radiance that might have once existed had suddenly been sucked from the universe, creating a jet-black void darker than the most dismal gloom found at the bottom of the deepest coal mine miles beneath the surface of the earth. Blacker than the blackest night David had ever seen, it was an all-consuming desolation akin, he suspected, to the darkness of the grave.
“W…w…what? Where…where am I?” David thought, confused and bewildered. “Why is everything.... so dark? What’s going on? I can’t see a thing. Am I...am I blind?”
Although the crushing blackness was in itself beyond terrifying, it was only one small facet of what David was rapidly realizing was his ever increasing dilemma. He soon discovered he was unable to move a single muscle anywhere in his body.
“What the hell? Why…why can't I move?” he thought, trying with all of his willpower to command as much as a finger to twitch in response to his mental command. He was unable to do so. “My God! I can’t move…and I cannot feel a thing…I am…I must be... paralyzed.”
He was numb from head to toe, as if someone had injected him with some sort of drug, leaving him in a paralytic state.
“Could I be dead?” he speculated. “I don't think.... I'm dead…I mean…How could I be thinking...these thoughts...if I were dead? Yet, I can't seem to move...and I can't feel...a thing...not a single sensation...and it is so...so dark. What in the world has happened to me?”
Trying desperately to hold his ever increasing panic at bay, David soon realized he couldn’t smell, taste or hear anything either. He thought he could imagine his own voice in his mind, but he knew even if he were capable of uttering a sound, he would not be able to hear it. It was as if he were experiencing some sort of total sensory shutdown blindness, no tactile sensation, no smell, no taste, no sound.
“Wait a minute...” he thought. “I should be able to hear…or at least smell something. But…but…I just can't...What in the name of God is going on?"
Suddenly he seemed to lose his train of thought. Then just as suddenly he was back on track, as if his overstressed brain had shut itself down for a while. It seemed to David like a large amount of time may have simply vanished. And then without any recollection of what had happened, he once again found himself aware of his dark surroundings thinking about his predicament but without being able to comprehend how much time may have passed. He was somehow able to perceive the existence of this chronological gap, as if he understood he had experienced some sort of blackout. But he could not even begin to determine how much actual time had lapsed, whether it be minutes, hours, days or even weeks.
He supposed for a moment this lack of feeling might be what it was like to be dead; he began to reconsider again the notion that he might actually be dead.
“I...I just…don't understand....Could it really be?...Could I…really…be....dead? I don't think so...but I suppose...it might be possible....I mean... I just don't know....”
Once again, he lost conciseness and eventually came to with no perception of how long he had been gone or any memory of what might have happened during the lapses in time.
“Why…do I keep…blacking out?” he pondered. “And how long am I gone?”
He wondered if what had happened to him was not death but something similar to what death might be like—a sort of almost-death, the existence of one's consciousness in a void of darkness with no physical senses to anchor him to the living world. Maybe this was how one’s life force or soul traveled to wherever it went after death. He wondered if he was clinging to life by a very thin thread and on the verge of death.
He thought about that for a second, and it seemed to make some sense to him since he perceived himself to still be alive, yet he did not quite seem to be so. This strange direction of thought led David to wonder about his surroundings.
He believed he might be lying on his back, perhaps in a bed or on a table, but he was unsure since he didn’t have the ability to feel any sensation or pressure of any sort. He could not discern direction. Furthermore, although he could not determine his orientation for certain, he strongly suspected his continued existence in his physical body. And being horizontally prone, that seemed to make sense to him.
He could not conclude whether he was in a large room, a small room or, for that matter, in any room at all. Suddenly another possibility hit him—he wondered with ever increasing horror if perhaps someone had drugged him, paralyzed him and then buried him alive in some sort of box or coffin. He had seen such awful things done to people on television shows and in movies. Without warning, a claustrophobic panic began to overwhelm David as he imagined the sides a container next to his arms preventing him from moving them if he were capable of movement. And he envisioned a tightly closed lid perhaps only inches from his face.
“Who…who…would do this to me?” he wondered, growing increasingly agitated. His heart began to pound with an increasing panic matched only by his swelling fear. “Who would…want to…bury me alive?…How can I get out…if I can't move…Oh my God!…I'm going…to die…to suffocate…in here.”
David imagined a solid wooden lid several inches thick just beyond his face with tons of earth piled high above him, making it impossible for him to do anything other than wait for his precious life-sustaining oxygen to run out, which he suspected would bring a horrible and painful death. Or maybe blessed insanity would arrive first to free him from his mental anguish.
He felt he was about to lose all self-control. He envisioned his heart racing, pounding furiously in his chest, and his lungs screaming for the slightest bit of precious oxygen he knew would never come.
“I can't…can’t stand this,” he thought with rising panic. “I can't breath...I need to…to get up...need to breath...need air...please God help me....”
David's panic grew even more relentless, and he was sure his mind would soon shatter and his heart would burst within his chest from the unbridled terror of his perceived confinement.
Then suddenly he found himself in the darkness as he was before, but now he appeared to be calm and relaxed. He instinctively seemed to realize another significant amount of time had apparently passed, and as before, he had no recollection of what had happened. It was like he had actually gone away and then returned once again.
What he was most thankful for, however, was that his mind seemed to be intact and had not snapped from the strain and that his heart hadn’t exploded inside of his chest cavity. He began to believe he apparently must still be alive—that is to say, if one could consider this sort of existence living.
“What in the world…was that all about?" he wondered. “One minute I was...terrified....My brain ready to melt down....I was on the...verge of dying...now...I am...calm as if...as if nothing...happened at all. How can that be?...Why am I still...still alive?”
He began to suspect someone must somehow be supplying his physical body with whatever sustenance it needed to keep it alive. by what method he did not know. It was as if David were in some type of suspended animation—not alive yet not dead. He could do nothing but wait in frustration, anticipating what would happen next.
David realized that even though he appeared to be alert and thinking, he could still not perceive time. He couldn’t tell the difference between a second and a minute or between a minute and an hour. He did not know if he had been contemplating his curr ent condition for a few minutes or for several days or longer, as if time had ceased to have any meaning to him.
He decided to try a counting experiment and quickly discovered he could not count for more than a few seconds before he lost track in the midst his progression and had to start all over again.
“What?” he wondered in surprise. “I feel like I was here...then in the middle of counting…I was suddenly gone again...” Then he thought, “Yes, gone…like gone somewhere else...as if my mind...left my body…for a while...but where could it have gone?...and for how long?”
He tried to count once more, and somewhere along the line he simply lost his way as he had before.
“One...two...three...four....” Then he simply stopped, losing track. Then, after an undetermined amount of time, he once again became aware of his pitch-black surroundings.
“What the hell?” he thought, growing even more frustrated. “This is…so strange…it is like I…literally…went somewhere else...and then...and then came back…but how could that be possible?...How could my mind…just go away?”
No matter how often he tried, the results were the same; each time he would seem to go away and then return at some point. In addition, the most frustrating thing was he always returned with no memory of what had happened during these missing periods.
At first, the idea seemed like a ridiculous concept to David. As none of his senses were functioning, it was impossible for him to separate a time of blackout from a conscious period. In addition, the time he thought of as his returned periods were limited to only thoughts with no other physical sensations of any sort. Yet somehow, because of the lapses in time, which somehow he was capable of perceiving, he suspected he had actually traveled somewhere else mentally.
“Maybe this is real....” he wondered in the darkness. “And when I go away...I...I don't know...I pass out or something...like my brain shuts down.”
He did not understand how every one of his senses could be useless, yet his mind was alert and active—perhaps overly active—and he was still perfectly capable of thinking. It all seemed so horribly unfair to David. He was a prisoner.
“What good is it...to have a working mind...when nothing else works...and I can't even tell where I am...or what...what has happened to me?”
Then he speculated that the reason for the lapses in time might be some evolutionary form of mental self-preservation. Maybe, because his mind was being taxed to its limit, if not beyond it, it might be shutting itself down from time to time to prevent a total mental meltdown. Maybe these blackouts served the same purpose as dreaming did; they might even be nothing more than dreams themselves.
“Yeah.... maybe that is it...” he thought. “Maybe when things get too weird...my mind temporarily...shuts down...so that I don't go crazy.”
He wished he could remember what—if anything—he might have seen during these blackouts and contemplated if remembering might help or hurt him. Then for a moment he wondered if what he was currently experiencing—the darkness itself—was actually another form of a blackout. It might be nothing more than an illusion, but he had no way of knowing for certain.
He wondered again if perhaps these blackout periods were the only thing preventing him from going completely insane—that was assuming he had not already had gone insane. He had read somewhere once that truly psychotic people did not know they were crazy. Perhaps his mind had snapped long before, and everything he was currently experiencing was just an illusion.
“Maybe none of this is real,” he speculated. “Maybe I am...imagining everything...and will wake up sometime soon...and find out exactly what...has been going on with me.”
Perhaps he was lying in some hospital bed asleep or unconscious; maybe he was dead and this was hell or somewhere between heaven and hell. The thoughts boggled his exhausted mind. As he contemplated the various possibilities, a wave of mental unawareness stronger than any he had experienced so far suddenly overcame him and enveloped his mind like an ebony cloud as he blacked out once again.
Chapter 2
David Matson cautiously opened his eyes with great trepidation, unsure of what he might find waiting for him and frightened of the unknown. To his surprise, he found himself standing alone in the middle of a long, narrow deserted dirt road surrounded by enormous trees, which seemed to stretch incredibly far into the sky. He had no memory whatsoever of the dark place he had just left or of his previous paralyzed condition.
“What sort of strange place is this?” he wondered while he looked down and studied the road more closely. He noticed the soil making up the desolate roadway beneath his feet looked extremely dark in color. It was of a very fine texture and an almost silt-like consistency and appeared to be saturated with moisture.
The surrounding atmosphere was similar, redolent with a thick and somewhat foul-smelling humidity, feeling excessively steamy, as if a severe storm had recently passed through the area. David believed he could still sense the electrically charged remnants of the storm in the air, leading him to assume that thunder and lightning must have accompanied the apparently violent downpour. The place was strange and completely unfamiliar to David, yet it reminded him of somewhere he had been once, as if he should have known this setting but had forgotten about it for some unknown reason.
There was scarcely any ambient light surrounding him. Based on this, David determined it was late in the day, perhaps close to dusk, suggesting the onset of what he assumed would be a particularly gloomy sunset. He stood motionless, confused and disoriented, not knowing where he might be, where he was going or, for that matter, how he had arrived at the strange location in the first place.
He was dressed in blue jeans and a black T-shirt depicting a skull and the Fender company logo. His favorite black and white sneakers covered his feet.
Looking down toward his feet, he could see impressions left where his shoes had slightly sunk into the moistened earth. Surprisingly, there appeared to be no previous tracks behind or in front of him, suggesting the impossible: he may have simply materialized at this particular spot on the roadway, as if he had been somehow mysteriously teleported to this unusual place. Although David knew such things were not possible, he simply could not discount the facts as he saw them, and strangely, he seemed completely satisfied to accept them at face value.
He also found it quite peculiar how he was able to analyze his surroundings with almost absolute detachment, as if he were not actually here experiencing the bizarre situation firsthand but instead watching himself acting in a movie. This strange detached sensation only served to add to his confusion.
The atmosphere around him felt extremely thick and heavy, as if he were breathing some strange experimental form of non-gaseous oxygen almost liquid in its composition. He believed the inside of his lungs might currently be saturated with the fluid-like air. He suspected he might be feeling very similar to what he imagined an unborn fetus felt, floating lethargically in a sack of amniotic fluid unaware, unknowing and uncertain.
He slowly raised his right hand toward his face, his arm feeling weighted, as if submerged in water. The atmosphere didn’t allow for any rapid movements. Holding his hand directly in front of his eyes, he attempted to wiggle his fingers from his pinky to his index in an ascending fashion, like they were overzealous fans participating in a synchronized “wave” at some sporting event.
Although he tried desperately to complete the task, his fingers seemed to move at a much slower rate than he wished, falling significantly behind his brain’s command for the motion. It made David think of a badly recorded videotape where the sound came just a few milliseconds behind the movement of the speaker’s lips, making for a strange and discordant experience.
“David? Davie?” He thought for a moment he heard his wife Gina calling his name. However, the voice sounded very distant and barely audible, as if she were calling to him from the end of a long tunnel far, far away. He supposed the thick watery air of this place made it extremely difficult for sound to travel in a normal fashion. He looked around him but could not determine where the voice had come from, and then it simply faded away to nothingness. He tried to reply but could not, as he appeared to be having some difficulty acclimating himself to the strange environment.
