Breakdown
Chapter 11: A Place Where No One Knows Your Face
It was a stretch of the Cave of the Winds known as the Grand Concert Hall, so named for the way that sounds reverberated. It was deep in the winter of ‘84, and way after closing hours. The flashlights had been turned off to preserve what little power they had left. Mother and her friends back in Denver thought we were with Father, and Father and his cronies back in Colorado Springs thought we were with Mother. After our fight, George had stopped talking to me. There had been a cry in the darkness. A bat, surely just a bat. And yet George still refused to answer me.
It was a dank place, and in the darkness it felt utterly devoid of the warmth of human kindness. Death waited in this place, echoing your darkest memories back to you. I decided to risk turning my flashlight on and taking a peek.
“Look away, Nate,” Mother’s voice warned me just in time. “Just look away.”
Drip. Drip.
If this was a cave, why were the walls behind me moving? Moving like they were breathing? The air was foul with a fetid stench, like that one time George and I had fed that cow with a pound of hamburger meat. From above came the oppressive feeling of being watched by the eyes of the gods. Watching...and judging.
Slowly, light crept into the cave, revealing a path: it was composed of broken shards of mirrored glass, forming a trail of bad luck to an unseen destination. The growing light revealed tendrils of flesh hanging down from the unseen ceiling, forming curtains that I would have to part if I wished to leave this place. The wetness of this place started to eat away at my shoes.
I had a choice at this point, to accept this world that I found myself in, or to reject it. Rejection was surprisingly easy—it is a tendency of human psychology to reject a stimulus as unreal for being too horrible to contemplate. This trait was undoubtedly useful in our primitive past. Unfortunately, it’s also where Holocaust deniers come from. I decided I didn’t want to be eight years old anymore, I didn’t want to be in a talking abattoir, and I certainly didn’t want to be anywhere near Denver. So, because I made that decision, I made it happen.
This was a dream, after all.
I walked through the curtain as if it was just an ordinary curtain, and passed through into the room beyond.
“Useless. Utterly useless,” a young male voice said in a monotone. I silently made my way towards its source, making a guess that this was the individual I was supposed to contact.
I was in a dark hallway that writhed around me as it measured out the slow beating of a heart. The wetness staining the floor was somewhere between brown and crimson in color, and quite thick.
“I know a dark secluded place,” I quietly sang to myself, having found a tango to match the unnerving rhythm of my surroundings. “A place where no one knows your face. A glass of wine, a fast embrace. It’s called Hernando’s Hideaway! Olé!” What? You have to yell that last part—it’s part of the law of musicals.
“You are such a flip flop!” the voice of Gilda chided me from above.
“Aw, you say that like it’s a bad thing!” I answered the disembodied voice with a grin. But she had a point that needed to be addressed, and I decided that this needed to be settled first. “Considered opinions are one thing,” I addressed her, “but if you honestly have a reason to change those opinions then do it, and face the consequences.”
“Why doesn’t anybody listen to what—” the voice of my mother complained. It was obviously Gilda trying to distract me.
“Don’t change the subject!” I demanded of Gilda, and the whole host of voices that her mind commanded. “You had a choice to make, and you failed to make it. The situation you face now is a direct result of that. You cannot expect the world to change back to the way it was. It will move forward, despite our devout wishes to the contrary, and we must adapt.”
Putting my hands behind my back, I began to walk around the edges of the enormous heart. “The way I see it,” I continued, “you could cut your losses, walk away and make better friends—prove that ‘victory is the best revenge.’ Or, you could actually address the criticism that you were given, that friendship is not a zero-sum game.”
A low growl reverberated through the chamber. “Useless,” an older voice said. It couldn’t tell you for sure who or what it belonged to.
I turned around to retrace my steps, saying, “Value is in the eye of the beholder. Childhood is the period when self-worth is provided from without, but to truly become an adult, you must decide for yourself what it is to have self-worth. I believe that no one is worthless, that no souls are disposable.” This was my thesis statement, one of the lessons I tried to imprint into all of my teenage clients.
I heard a footstep in the mush behind me. I stopped walking, but refused to turn around. “The world is a messy place,” I remarked. “But you are allowed to decide what sticks, and what slides off.” After all, despite where I have been, the tuxedo I was wearing in this dream was still immaculate.
“Can we ever escape what we have done?”
I turned, slowly, to face a teenage boy, maybe 15 years of age. He was cradling one arm, which looked scraped and bruised.
I smiled warmly at him, answering his question by saying, “Ask the war veteran if he would rather not have the scars.”
“Ask that same veteran why he is on the streets, starving, when the world does not reward him for trying to save it,” he challenged me.
I frowned in disappointment. “That is entitlement,” I told him coldly. “What we do for veterans is a privilege, not a requirement. After you fight the war, you go back to work. The only ones who ‘deserve’ rest are the dead.”
The boy pouted. “I hate being here,” he announced, then faded away. As if that alone was a good enough excuse for virtual suicide.
“Well, that’s a little vague, isn’t it?!” I cried out to the ceiling in a mocking tone. “Surely you’ve got a better excuse than that! And it better be good,” I added as I sat down on a somewhat flat stalagmite, “because I’ve heard all the good ones. I’ve counseled patients dying of lymphoma, where every second of life was a living hell, but they kept going. I’ve counseled the survivors of failed suicide attempts, and that’s not something I would especially like to witness again. And I was with a young man on Death Row. And despite what he had done, I still think that what the state did to him was wrong.”
“Have you counseled yourself?” the boy’s voice answered me, vainly trying to change the subject.
“Nobody’s that objective,” I countered. “But yeah, I’ve gone under the proverbial knife. You could say I’m doing my therapy right now.”
“What if you’re supposed to die?” the voice asked.
“I don’t believe in fate,” I said with conviction. “As a matter of fact I don’t believe in most things. But I do believe in the infinite potential of humanity to do whatever the hell we want to do, and in the end to end up doing the right thing, whether we meant to or not.”
“Look around you, and tell me that Earth hasn’t become a world ruled by fate. Absolute good and evil. Magic is real! How do you explain that, Doc?”
“Magic is the will made manifest,” I explained patiently. “What was once merely suspected as coincidence or ‘the will of God’ now stands revealed as the combined might of every mind on Earth, shaping reality in concert. That’s what I believe.” And it is what I believe. We are living in a consensual hallucination, a dream shared by seven billion people...and an ever growing number of ponies.
“Then I have no idea why the hell I’m still in here, because I’ve been trying to leave for a long time. I’ve been cryptic, but really, I think I’m a little trapped in here.”
I smiled in gratitude at the show of cooperation. “Well, where would you like to go?” I asked, holding my hand out in the air like I was about to escort Cale to the dance...or a cab. “I can’t guarantee results, but I can offer my friendship and, considering the name of the reality we are crossing over with, friendship means a lot more than it used to.”
“Well...” The wall before me parted, revealing a small griffon with different markings from Gilda sitting miserably in the mulch. “Why are you here?” he asked with Cale’s voice.
I smiled down at him. “I’m here to help,” I replied. “It’s my job you see. I help everyone I can, but especially the young. Because no one else will.”
“I’d like to get out of this mess alive,” Griffon Cale said, “and in one piece. Only problem is, I have no idea how to do that. At all. I’m afraid of what will happen to me if I merge with Gilda. Only...I felt myself merging without me doing anything. It became so unavoidable that the only way I was able to think of to stop it was by hiding in here, leaving Gilda to face the world without my help. Does that make me a coward?”
“It’s not cowardice if the only person you hurt was yourself.”
“But I did hurt her,” Cale muttered.
“Did you do it because you hated her?” I asked him with a stern voice. “Because you wanted to kill her but lacked the will?”
“...No, I think,” he replied. “But I don’t see—”
“I have a message for you,” I interrupted him. “From Gilda.”
Cale furrowed his feathered brow. “What did she want to tell me?”
“She misses you,” I told him. “It turns out that she could really use a friend right now.”
Cale looked up at me and stared. “And you?” he asked. “Do you need a friend, too?”
I blinked. “I...I need all the friends I can get,” I admitted in a gruff voice.
Cale reached up with one claw, in the same gesture I was using earlier to try to summon him. “Friends, then,” he told me.
...And that is all that I remember. My mind leaps directly from grasping Cale’s claw to navigating Interstate 90. That’s why I wonder if the episode actually happened. It just seems too neat—after failing to save Danielle and Gary, I immediately transition to the successful treatment of a character that I have no way of knowing actually came to Earth. And the part about the pre-apocalyptic weather—there’s no way that that part was real, right?
And besides, the more I think about what happened, the more I am disturbed by the ominous signs I failed to recognize. Cale told me that he was merging without even realizing it. Is that happening to everybody else? And is he right, that the only true way to prevent merging is for one or the other personality to go dormant? Notice that the moment I freed him from his self-imposed prison, he manifested in his mind as a griffon. If that’s not an obvious mental symbol for the rapid and inevitable corrosion of his basic humanity, I don’t know what is. Does that mean I should have put him back in suspended animation, and fed Gilda the false line that I couldn’t find her human? Because that does not sound like an acceptable solution to me.
I’m beginning to feel like Sisyphus here: hated for holding suspicions as to what being inside the head of a pony will do to you, and doomed because the only two alternatives—merging and psychic suicide—are equally loathsome.
Unless I just slide right off the end of the decency scale by deciding that ponies are not “real people”, and that I would be perfectly justified in forcing them into dormancy, to leave the original human minds in charge of alien bodies.
What am I becoming? Is there no light at the end of the tunnel?