Brilliant Corners

I almost don't recognise him, lying out on the scanner bed with his legs straight as a palm tree.

The colour from his face has emptied out, leaving gaunt and ashen skin, like dust you would find building up on a windowsill. Before they shaved off his hair, it was a head of tangled weeds that, when its vines were stretched, reached his collarbone tattoo. It is now a blank canvas on which we place electrodes.

I spent hours trying to put a name to the face before they handed me his chart. I scribbled out his name and promised that I would ask the nurse if I could never recall him.

Really, the PET scan is just a precautionary measure. The EEG gave us nothing. The MRI showed us a mashed cauliflower. His chest now rises and falls with the help of a machine. Whoever he is, he looks as dead as I have ever seen him.

My job is to look at images of his brain so I can give them the okay to remove him from life support. Today I will look for blackened hallways and pathways devoured by twilight. My craving for some shut-eye is suppressed by the power that I don't want to have in this. It courses through my veins as I come to the realisation that I will be signing his death certificate.

But he's been dead this whole time; this was long overdue.

The control room springs to life as screens boot up and the radiation sign illuminates. This will not take long.

Pre-set classical songs from one of the nurse’s iPods weave out of the speakers in the other room and silo with the hum of the machine as I stare at the screen from the control room. I wait for a vacant brain, devoid of any activity.

His brain illuminates like a string of Christmas lights.

Hidden within that shell of a human body is him, hiding. There’s only one thing to do now.

I’m going to go in there and get him.

+++

As soon as I have the last one on, I survey myself in the mirror to make sure I’ve put them on right. The mirror extends from the ceiling and falls to the floor, giving me a full-length view of the tentacles on my head. Sticking the electrodes on his head is much easier.

It’s an experimental treatment. It uses electrical signals from my brain and attempts to make an entry point into his by me slowing my breathing, and thus my heart rate. The hope is that I can hit a sweet spot and intercept one of his synaptic transmissions and travel with it. In this case, the only way for him to regain consciousness is if I go in there and rouse him myself.

My feet shuffle on the aseptic tile floor. Here, it’s two brains and a ventilator. Two brains about to merge into one.

Worlds within worlds, within worlds; the distance I must cross to bring back the man in the mirror.

+++

I brace for impact, but instead of meeting it with force, I’m sucked in. I try to swim, but it's viscous, gummy.

Air. I need air.

Light, supercharged, zooms across the tremulant surface, where whatever substance I’m in meets the top.

My hands make up the distance, and I pull myself up and out of it, wheezing as my face meets the frigid blue tile.

The kid is staring at me as if I cursed.

He has huddled himself into a corner, knees up to his chest. In his viridescent irises, I can see myself, shrivelled and shrunken like a drenched cat. His eyes are pushed up by the grin on his face, and his face is lined by two silvery streaks down his cheeks. He can’t be any older than ten, perhaps eleven.

"You still owe me a packet of Haribo’s."

Now I can see it; his sausage fingers handing me a half-eaten packet of gummy bears after numeracy when we were so young, the concept of time was something beyond the confines of two clock hands. I had wiped the tears from my eyes and took them, and he told me not to worry; I'd understand it eventually.

Me and Iggy, Iggy and me.

His words echo off the walls, and I notice how empty it is here. From the floor up to the ceiling pulsing with gold specks, it’s all a shade of baby blue. I approach him as if I’m approaching a slumbering baby, and I wipe my slimy hand against my coat before I realise that it is slimy too.

"We should get out of here." I flick clear goop from my fingers. As he rises without help, he disregards my comment, saying, "Want to see something?"

And with that, I’m following him out of the room, where it turns out there was a door camouflaged the same colour. It leads us down a path where the light at the beginning of the hallway doesn’t follow us all the way down, and by the first couple of paces, we are being consumed by the dark. My voice bounces off the walls as we descend further into the hallway.

"Where are we going?"

"To see my dark corner." He sniffles as if preparing himself.

To know how to get out of one’s mind, you must know what goes on in it first. Only then can both patient and practitioner exit safely — it’s a practice much like suturing an incision. A steady hand, clear mind.

The door bellows a guttural groan as he tentatively steps inside. I make sure to follow in his footsteps as we enter, until he hits the light switch on the other side of the room.

"Cuddles?" he whispers.

"Who is—"

He shushes me, periodically holding still to try and pick up any movement under the bed, in the closet.

Inside is a half-deflated air mattress. There is a starred baby blanket thrown on top. A worn teddy bear. Legos scattered on the far side of the room, prefacing a dancing curtain caressing a star-prickled night sky. The breeze produces goosebumps under my lab coat. The room smells as if red wine was spilt on a rug and was never washed clean.

Muffled scuffling ensues in the distance. Iggy saunters over to the door and fumbles with the handle.

"The door we came in through," Iggy says, "It’s locked."

I probe the door we came through and find it very much impenetrable. He plops himself onto the mattress as it spews his weight outwards. Most of the time it’s locked, he tells me, and when it’s not, there are shadows throwing things in the living room.

"This is it," he gestures with his hands, "well, one of them. We can leave when Cuddles comes through the door; he can show you the others if you’d like."

"Why do you come here?" I ask him. The muffles are now almost intelligible and growing in volume.

"It’s either here or listening to myself think."

"[…]Say it! Just go ahead and say it!"

"God, you’re unbelievable… […]"

"You’ve never loved me or Iggy, have you? You never have, and you never will, because you can’t manage to hold a job, let alone understand what it means to have a family!"

The slap was lucid amongst muffled daggers and sobbing curses.

"Don’t worry, they never come up," Iggy tells me, pinching what seems to be a nosebleed, eyes fixed on the carpet floor.

The hallway door creaks open. A mini afro wearing green eyes is at the door.

"Cuddles! Perfect timing," Iggy rises from the mattress, disturbing its half-deflated frame, "show our friend the other places."

+++

Cuddles is not a man of many words. As he leads me through the ever-blackening hallway, his fingers grazing the wall, all he says is, "We’ve been expecting you."

His cadence is too much for my stubby legs to manage without breaking into an awkward skip by his side. Cuddles grinds to a halt when he encounters wood.

"Room 101. Welcome."

He swings the door open to reveal a little studio with no dividing walls and grimy kitchen tiles. His bed is where his shower is, which is also where the microwave and TV live.

"Make yourself at home. I can make coffee if you want, although it’s really bad. "

I don’t drink coffee, but I know that he’s right. I let it sit in my hands as I try and put it to good use. Its warmth seeps into my bones and subdues the goosebumps on my arms. Cuddles examines the sofa across from me before sitting down. Still, he meets the cushion with trepidation.

Aside from the lack of natural sunlight and discoloured kitchen counters, there’s nothing inherently unsettling about this place. Except there must be a surreptitious devil lurking in these corners, seeing that it has taken him hostage.

Cuddles is different now. In chemistry, he was free from ink, had dreadlocks styled into elaborate lines, and had a scar on his forearm from being scratched by a stray cat.

Now he is a novel, has coiled locks of hair stretching to the skies, and wears long-sleeved shirts to cover his injection scars. Cuddles looks terrible.

"What’s so bad about this place?" I ask.

"Me, mostly."

I wait for him to elaborate, but he makes his way to the balcony, where the day dies into the night, glaring through his meshed sliding door. Wordless, he rests his arms on the railing, still holding his mug, untouched. The height of the building seems to extend endlessly, making this little studio a floating house, with nothing from up here in sight. At least from here, it seems to be the only building around. In this area, in any crevasse of the mind, anywhere.

"I’ve come here to get you."

He remains silent for a few moments before taking a sip of his coffee.

Before the ebbs of it pass, he says, voice monotone, "What’s the point? Here, there and hell are one and the same anyway."

One June morning, he stopped showing up for practicals. Beauty, Clueless and Know-how theorised that he’d faked his disappearance and joined the Albanian mafia. When he came to clear out his locker space a few days later, I saw him rip up some polaroid pictures through the classroom window.

Cuddles gives a long stare at the sky, the sun melting into the horizon, where it drips into the mountain range ahead. He tells me, "After a few years of sleeping outside, I managed to rent out this place for a few months. The landlord did a bunch of stuff and supplied me too. I hope you didn’t sit on anything sharp."

He pours his coffee off the edge, watching it empty out until the last drop before shaking out any residual liquid.

"You won't die if you jump off the balcony. You won't die if you inject everything from Mr P's stash. Anything I try, I just. Won’t. Die."

Cuddles is clutching the mug much more tightly now, but his face remains insensible.

He wants to be huddled in the nook of his studio flat, drinking bad coffee and putting bad things in his body that don't hurt him. He doesn’t want to come home. Surrounding this dark corner is just more darkness, liquid arsenic dyed a superficial sunset red; dark as far as the eye can see, with a radius so wide all you can hear is your mind within a mind.

"I’ll take you to the door."

I follow without responding.

How am I going to explain to neurology that Iggy didn’t want to come with me? To myself, my own versions of past Iggys’ and future Cuddles’, that they would do the same if their line between consciousness and captivity was indiscernible? When the shell dies, will they feel any pain?

As Cuddles escorts me back to the blue room, I almost want to ask him why the two of them let me see all this, the same person at different points at which they could only wish was at their lowest. Where the others are, and how many. Back where I started, Iggy is in the corner again. He waves before sticking his head back between his legs.

"Well," Cuddles says, "this is me. If you listen long enough, you can hear what I’m thinking."

I quiet my breathing to allow for his thoughts to infiltrate my mind.

There is silence.

"How do I get back?"

"Just wait here."

And with that, Cuddles is gone. Iggy remains in the corner; as if the blue room and pool of sludge and the hallway with no light and all the other dark corners don’t exist.

As whatever Cuddles is doing causes cognitive dissonance between the two of us, I feel myself fading away, back into the light. Much like a wound that won’t stop bleeding, you can’t contain the lions and bears that hide between the cracks of his brain. Attempting to quell the constant flow of memories playing, verbatim, in every pathway, is like suppressing incoming water from a flood from breaking through the windows, the doors.

You can’t help someone who lets the lions run wild.

Hands yielding no fruit, I re-emerge into consciousness to the sound of something probably by Mozart. Knowing his past, his present, his forever, things split into two merge back into one. Looking across to his bed, where the height of his chest is being pushed and compressed, I wish more than anything that he could have had one bright corner; maybe even a brilliant one.