Terra Incognita, page 22
“Eso— What?”
Esomnesia. The state of being within one’s memories. A metaphysical state outside of reality.
“Why am I dead?”
You died last night. We were able to harvest your memory matter and stimulate it for Esomnesia. We need your memories for our research with mod memory creation. We are going to process the memory of your death to remove it. This is for the preparation of your memory matter for transfer. We are going to transfer them to a mod brain.
“So, first I’m going to experience my own death, and then I’m going to turn into a mod?”
Basically, yes.
“I can’t. I can’t do this. This is sick and twisted and just plain wrong.”
There is nothing to worry about. You might feel a slight discomfort, but it will be over quickly.
“…”
Can we proceed?
“Yeah, I guess. What exactly do I have to lose, right?”
Good. Let’s start with the events of last night. What were you doing last night?
“I was out with my friends. It was my one friend’s birthday, so we all went out for drinks at Tiger Tiger. It was fun, but I didn’t feel well, so I left early.”
When you left, where did you go?
“I parked far away, so I walked up the street. All the lights and loud music, slowly faded away behind me. The further I went, the darker it got. There were a few people around, who were partied out of their minds, so I was pretty much alone.”
Why didn’t you walk with someone?
“I don’t know. Everyone was still having a great time, so I didn’t want to spoil it. I was fine, though. I knew the way back.”
What happened next?
“I turned into a small street close to the place I parked. I can’t remember the name of the street, but it was one of those tiny ones. And then… what…”
What is happening?
“I thought I saw a shadow in the corner of my eye. Is ther—”
“Is there anyone there?”
“There’s no reply. Let me just get out of here. Something feels extremely off. There are no lights here. My heart is beating hard. What is happening? I don’t like this.”
Where are you?
“Still in the tiny street. I need to get out of here. It’s extremely dark… What is this feeling? What is going to happen? Shit! I can’t move. I don’t want to do this!”
Push through. You can do this.
“Oh no… Oh… The shadow. It’s there again. Someone is definitely there. What should I do?”
Can you see what he looks like?
“No… Oh crap! Oh crap! He’s wearing a hoodie, but his face is completely black. His eyes. His eyes are purple. What… I’ve never seen purple eyes before.”
Purple?
“Maybe I should turn around and run. Okay. Shit, why is this street so long?”
Where is the person with the purple eyes?
“I don’t know! Why can’t I run?”
“krxxxxzz!”
“Shit! He’s got me! Ouch! His fingers are digging into my arm! It hur— Fuck!”
“Heeelp! Help m—”
“I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe! No, no, no… I don’t want to die! Help! I can’t get his hands off my neck! Aaaahh! It hurts, help!”
Can you get a clearer view of his face?
“Help me! I can’t feel my arms… Ouch! I am against the wall. Why do I see blood? Where is it co— Oh no… Shit! My arms… My arms are gone!”
Focus, Mia, focus.
“My arms… Help! My arms… Where are my arms?”
Where is the mod with the purple eyes?
“I can feel myself going… I don’t know… Nghh… I don— I don’t want to die. Wait, I see his eyes. Big purple orbs… He’s coming closer.”
What is he doing?
“His face is right in front of mine. I can see his face now. He… He doesn’t have a skin. All I can see vaguely are wires and bolts. What is this?”
“Please… Why?”
“Cogito ergo sum…”
Cogito ergo sum… It’s definitely him.
“I don’t…”
“I don’t understand.”
“…”
“He’s gone. Everything is gone. There is nothing. Even the pain is gone. Am I dead?”
Yes, you are.
“…”
Very good. You’ve made tremendous progress.
“My head hurts a lot. What happened?”
What do you remember?
“We were talking about a memory. I’m not sure which one it was. For some reason I see Jenny’s face, with someone I don’t recognise.”
Good. Very good indeed. It seems to have been a productive session. I am going to prescribe you some medication for the headache. Please come back to me as soon as possible if the headaches get worse.
“Thanks, doctor, I will.”
I just have one more question.
“Yes?”
Do the words ‘cogito ergo sum’ mean anything to you?
“No, I’ve never heard them. What does it even mean?”
I think, therefore I am.
“Ah… Cool…”
I am going to count to ten. With every step, you will gradually drift back into reality… one…
[CONNECTION ESTABLISHED]
[COMPILING DATA...]
… two… three… four… five…
[INITIATING TRANSFER...]
… six… seven… eight…
[STABALISING SENSORS...]
… nine… ten.
[TRANSFER COMPLETE]
[DISCONNECTED FROM CMMC TERMINAL]
[END ESOMNESIA]
Phillip Steyn is fascinated by the people around him. At present he is majoring in English literature and linguistics, and tries to find enjoyment in the little things of life. In his spare time he likes to doodle, browse bookstores and stroke his awesome beard.
THE LACUNA
Brendan Ward
It takes a few seconds to spot the plume of smoke rising over the hill, making the air acrid and thick enough to chew. Perhaps the dump—archetype of hell—has had equipment failure again. June is the bitterest month. Winter snaps like a twig beneath my bootsoles on the way off campus. My head aches with dehydration, longing for water, which just now pours from a burst pipe down African Street. My head aches from thinking, drilling first-years on Hamlet, on “Words. Words. Words”. More than that, my head aches from wrestling with the Soweto poets, with imagining matchbox houses and Bantu Education.
“They sought a new place from which to write. Like other poets about Black Consciousness, LKJ, Langston Hughes, they looked for a new centre, away from the domain of the English canon. Why is this important, do you think?” The seminar is silent a moment, the professor waiting for a response.
“It is a dry white season, brother.”
“It is rooted in the same gall as the Bantu Education Act. ‘How is one to speak?’—that is the question. How is one to speak? What words can frame these new, vital thoughts? Especially when English and Afrikaans both bear the weight of the prejudices that press on these poets and thinkers.
“It was also the time of banning, and this too must be seen alongside the Bantu Education Act as another travesty in the war of language against language, of words against words. Don Mattera, himself banned, says that the poet must die.”
I walk the streets leaning into the wind, struggling to put one foot in front of the other. It is cold, my cheeks sting, and for a moment I consider wrapping my scarf around my face and head like a Halloween mummy, but a foolish smile stretches as the only barrier against the cold. I hunker down and keep walking. The wind tosses leaves, dry and brittle and fading, and plastic bags and empty crisp packets that scratch like alien creatures among a shattered bottle in the gutter.
Someone has sprayed a symbol onto the walls of the substation—an unintelligible alphabet, a hieroglyph. Already in my head I hear my parents’ tuts of disapproval, as if this spray-paint, this other kind of art, were the very sign of some deeper decay. This is the thing I struggle to shake—the weight of unknown concepts that sit in my head, scuttling like roaches as I try to look at them. Is this why these lines cannot coalesce into words?
I walk on.
This is a strange town, but only strange in its frankness. Sitting on one hill is the sprawling Settler Monument, like some deranged, rectangular ark moored up there after the flood, while across others clings the location, the township, the apartheid scarf of the town. Not hidden, not knocked down and renamed for triumph, but there, a brazen landmark as notable as the old cathedral that stretches for the darkening sky. Do I even know what to call it? Joza? Have I not lived here for years? I cannot name it, quite, with the correct word, even after all this time.
“My parents kept me from children who were rough.” My school tried to, small, elite. The city did so too, placing my small house hiding safe in the suburbs. Not fully safe, no, but where it looked safe, with green things growing and dustbin men to make trash vanish once a week and comforting security firm signs watching from walls and gates. Johannesburg nearby is not so simple, the invisible barriers more permeable, in flux. This block will be familiarly generic, that block, a wild unknown, graffiti-branded as not safe by the silently conditioned code. Here in this town there are even envoys from across the barrier, divisions clear in streets and zones made moot by the flow of people. Yet there are still places I wish I could want to enter, eyes I want to meet without the surge of confusion, of a kind of shame that won’t make itself clear. I still have not taken that Xhosa course, and I still twist with nerves at the thought of going into the places from which the world has kept me away. That I have kept from me. I am a tortoise struggling against its shell.
Maybe we haven’t got past our fear of sailing into the unknown and into the clutches of the Cyclops or, worse, off the edge of the world. Is this the thought of a colonist, still so after generations?
It is now dark. I try to imagine Soweto in 1976, even in 2014; how do I speak to you? The image comes out in black and white. I consider walking directly home. Instead I pace down a deserted High Street, silent apart from the donkey eating something at the top of the street. I know this street well, now, after days heading to the butcher, the clothing stores, the pharmacy, and nights to the pubs half-hidden down side streets, blaring their location in the air. Tonight is not one of those nights and the air is still apart from the breeze. It is like a close-up of a map, frozen on paper. Why am I out walking? A car passes by, cutting the silence. I see no one, not even the car guards who wait outside the steakhouse franchise in the hopes of a tip. I turn a corner. The streetlights are out and the dark air lies heavy in the street as it climbs a hill. I feel a little disoriented for a moment.
Then I smell it: a reeking, wild and sickly sweet, like the den of some creature. As if this is not a street, but the entrance into the burrow, the den, of something. It overpowers even the smoggy air that billows from the burning trash at the dump, from fires to heat and cook in the township, from the exhausts of cars ferrying children from sport at school. I tense, muscles ready, while my mind runs over a mantra of logical explanations. Maybe it is a chemical spill, or part of the preparations for the National Arts Festival—a rehearsal of a street piece of some kind. Maybe I am imagining the whole thing, a trick of the mind and sinuses in the sensory deprivation of darkness. My nostrils flare despite my decision that this is simply nothing to fear—maybe a lost mongoose in a drain, or feral cats. Or something.
I hear a voice that does not flow over the air. It is as if I am repeating the words myself, an echo of something heard only in my mind. It is crisp and cold, a winter voice, a dark voice, like ice on a deep lake.
At last.
I don’t know if I say this aloud: “Who’s there?”
The street feels trapped, silent, undisturbed. Although perhaps I did not speak; no one has ever spoken here. Weight, a presence of something large, pressing the space, cuts me off in the gloom.
A shiver runs down my spine. The air stirs, a slow, calculating movement, a muffled footfall. The voice begins again.
Of course you do not know me. I wait in the belly of a beast, in the pit to death, in the singing caves that tempt young maidens to follow the swallows. I have waited for you in the shebeen, the shack, the centre of the city. I have waited for you in the rubbish tip, on the streets of Johannesburg, and on dark roads you drive too fast, here in Grahamstown, past the cathedral at night where you’ve been told to never go alone.
The dark street is a gullet. I turn, wildly, searching for the voice in the shadows. A million images crawl across my mind of monsters from movies, from countless videogames, from hours reading condensed, children’s book of Greek myths. Where is my magic sword, my supernatural guide, my gift from the gods?
I can live only where you are in the dark. Of course you do not know me, yet somewhere in your youth I stood in the dark of the passage outside your bedroom, daring you even to go to the toilet. I lurked at the window, and in your closet, invisible and tangible and compounded of all your wildest imaginings and recurring nightmares of being eaten alive by the man with the hairy arms and fiery hair.
Words that aren’t mine funnel into my brain, and my lips crack in the dry cold as I mimic them, compelled to try cut the silence. My breath is ragged. Cold air burns my lungs. I whip around again. My feet shift, sore, as if they were turning to stone, melding with the pavement.
And now the chase begins, I suppose. You always run. You have always run to hide. Your species tells itself it is an apex predator, that you ran down your prey until it collapsed from exhaustion. That this guaranteed your rise to dominance over all life. You mythologised your predatory prowess. But what if you did not master fleetness of foot for feeding? You mastered it for your own survival—to flee that which would eat you. Come now, find your feet and move. You dare not disgrace yourself by freezing, like some herd beast now.
I shiver, twisting my neck, and craning to follow where the voice in my head sounds like it is coming from. All directions look the same in the shadows. I am lost in the place that should be my home.
Run! Flee!
I am running, but without knowing where I run. The dark street is a labyrinth of houses, alleyways, twisting shadows, looming shapes in the darkness that mock the mind as it grapples to separate bushes and bears, trees and demons. My footsteps are mirrored in the sounds of something in pursuit.
You know, rats can be conditioned to understand direction, and to understand colour. But, disoriented, they cannot connect location and colour to navigate by landmarks. But you humans, ah-h-h, you humans have your massive minds to help you sort through the noise of the world, while still archiving information to use in times like this. Dodge left!
Instinct kicks in. I step left without thinking, following instruction, avoiding a lamppost that looms out of the darkness like the tail of some burrowing monster. My reactions are slow, however, slower than ever before, never an athlete. I am still lost.
But without language, can this be done? Oh no. Deprived of language you revert to the rat brain, the child brain, the lost mind grappling with the unknown for a foothold in quicksand, for a system to guide you in the absolute chaos. Without language, landmarks become mere shapes, directions disconnect and your mental map breaks down. Your home becomes an alien land, a dark place, an unknown. Do you know why this is?
The Observatory? I’m confused. Buildings loom in darkness. A statue, a figure half seen. I should know it. Terror, I’ve never felt, grips me now. It is closing on me.
You are barely creatures, despite all your claims to the contrary. All your questions, your questing for that which is elsewhere, for the equation that captures the details of the microscopic universe, cannot raise you from the mire, the foetid swamps in which your species began as little more than bacteria billions of years ago.
Why are buildings so big?
You have stretched your limbs to toddle forward into the dark world, and put names to things to tame them, to separate good from bad, friendly from dangerous. Dog—wolf, cat—lion. Friend—foe. And then you build entire maps of these things to crush each other and struggle blindly for excuses. I know the words that tumble so readily from your mind’s tongue, which you push so kindly into my domain. Or else you write poetry to dress the world in mystic hues. For what? Why simply, because without words you lose yourselves in the dark. In the dark I wait for you.
Where are my words?
Your words are drowning in mine. Your words aren’t even your own. Where did you find them all, child?
My words—
Their words! They are all so old, so much older than you I have gnawed them for centuries and tasted the changes, and spat them out for you to use. And oh so, so many of my words can lock you out. There are so many languages you cannot speak, languages that deny your access. Of eleven in your supposed home, how many do you speak?
Get out, get out, get
A paltry two!
out!
With so few words you wish to resist me? I speak all words in all tongues. Ek praat alle woorde in alle tale. nDithetha wonke amagama ngazo zonke iilwimi. Je parle tous les mots dans toutes les langues. Jag kan alla ord i alla mål. Pom put di thuk phasa krapb. Sé decir cualquier palabra en todos los idiomas.
All at once. All voices.
Where are you now, lost human? Where? Drowning in language. Adrift in the ocean of forgotten words, foreign sounds. An alien in the very system you love so, need so. Slave to yourself. And there are words I taste that you have mouthed, dark words, mistakes.
Overwhelmed.
I see. Wings. Darkness. Fast. Close.
Ah, now you begin to see me in your wordless terror. It is pitiful to see you clawing for words, burrowing into the corners of your mind to look for a way to see me properly. Can you capture me in words as you drown in the flood of my countless voices? I speak with myriad mouths inside your mind. Look at you, running in circles. You have passed this house before. You twist back in on yourself in terror. Look where you are.
