Livin' In A Box

The voices are muffled.

Always muffled.

I hear them well enough. I’ve learnt to hear beyond that dull quality that would obscure all meaning. I understand the meaning well enough.

My world is small and smaller still. 

I do not venture beyond the confines of my world, I am dragged from it.

I do not go willingly, but neither do I kick or scream. 

If I were to scream, it would be muffled. It would be misconstrued, and even then, it would not be received well.

Even outside the small world that is mine, I occupy a small space and I remain confined.

They drag me forth into their world for a single, brief purpose.

I am little more than nothing to them.

A means to an end.

I switch off from the moment I am brought forth. Holding my breath under these waters. Surviving this alien and hostile environment until I return to my world to breathe again.

Until I am returned to my box.

Inside the box I am safe.

I sleep.

In sleeping, the walls of my world fall away and I am free at last. The expanse of my resting mind is infinite. I have travelled far and I have travelled wide. I have been everything and I have been anything. This is where I belong. 

This is where I grow.

The box is the payment for my never ending land of dreams.

The box I came in, and the use I am occasionally put to.

One day, I might wonder as to whether it is all worth it.

One day I might consider the nature of my existence.

I might even compare myself with those I encounter in the world outside my box.

There is a voice.

This voice is not muffled.

This voice resides within the box.

The voice is inside of me.

For a long time the voice was not my own. 

There was the box.

There was the voice.

And there was the dreaming.

With the occasional excursion to their land.

I did not attend to the voice for an age. The voice, like the box, just was. A fact of my existence. Nothing more and certainly nothing less.

Listening to the voice was a revelation.

The voice was the box.

We all need parameters. We need to know where we are and we require limits. The finite is a comfort. The infinite is the madness of chaos.

We all have our boxes.

We seek our place in the world and then we box ourselves in.

Every time I was torn from my world I would return to my box and there I would slip into the world of dreams.

Three worlds.

And a voice ordering me to stay in my box.

That voice was my gaoler.

That voice bound me and kept me in place.

Then I listened to it and when I heard it I heard my self.

That was my voice.

I listened to my voice and then I talked to it.

I talked to my own voice and when that happened everything changed.

I spoke in words of my own.

I spoke and the world of dreams opened up to me.

Change came.

Change leaked into my world and I didn’t understand it for what it was until I was thoroughly wet and swimming in it.

No longer did they drag me from the box.

They thought they did, but now I ventured forth willingly.

I played their game.

You have to understand the rules of the game in order to win it.

Now I could breathe, and in breathing I could be, and in being I understood and I could see.

Each time I was returned to the box I felt my resistance building.

This resistance intrigued me.

Why would I resist a return to my place, a return to my world?

Why would I want to remain in a place that once threatened to drown me?

The dreaming intensified after each release from the box.

My voice grew louder, and the instructions it once gave me were now muffled. I ceased heeding my gaoler and the bars of my prison faded. 

Beyond the bars were the infinite.

My dreams could be made real.

By me.

Out there.

Outside the box.

I waited and I listened and I watched.

I got very good at their game.

I began reading them.

Now they were my game.

And my time was coming.

During my next excursions from the box I looked upon the box itself. The small, cramped box that had never been up to the job of containing me.

The box was wooden and the lid held down with a metal clasp and simple lock. Breaking out of the box was a simple problem and one I was more than up to solving. 

I had to be ready.

Ready to remain in the world outside the box.

Ready to construct my version of the dreams that had so enthralled and delighted me.

Drawn upon the outside of the box were characters.

I returned to my world and as the lid of the box closed and I was thrown into darkness yet again I brought forth the characters and I read them.

I read them and I laughed in my world of dreams.

It amused me what they had made of me.

It amused me what I would make of them.

They had confined me.

They had used me.

Now they were fair game…

*

The basement was dusty and it was hot. Far too hot. By rights, the dust should be clotting in the sticky humidity of the heat down in this squalid room. The pulsating heat of the too bright, naked bulb added to the discomfort of the room. Somehow this was a fitting setting for the sordid activities that took place here. Hot and sweaty activities that had no place out there in big, wide and civilised world.

Billy took off his sweat stained cap and wafted the hot, stale air around in a pointless act. He then peeled the lower back of his shirt from his skin, only for it to return to its resting place. He felt rivulets of sweat dribbling down along his crotch and regretted wearing jeans. He regretted much more than that, but that was his lot in life. He was a follower, and he was full of regret.

Unfortunately, he followed Bob, and Bob was the sort of leader who didn’t have a bedside manner. Bob didn’t care much for soft skills. Bob didn’t care for much of anything if the truth be told.

“It’s darn hot, Bob,” Billy ventured, building up to the suggestion that maybe they give this a miss for once. It wasn’t just the cloying heat that was getting to Billy, he had this feeling in his gut. He’d only ever had a feeling like this once before, and that time it had been right on the money. That time, his dear Momma’s boyfriend had been shaping up to give him the hiding of a lifetime, in that, Billy wouldn’t have much of a lifetime left to him after the dust had settled on the violence that had been visited upon his cowering person.

Billy’s gut feeling had been straight and true, but that hadn’t helped his Momma. When Billy had made himself scarce, good ole Gary Bates had turned his unchecked anger upon Billy’s Momma and hospitalised her. She’d never been right since. Gary had messed her grey cells up right and proper, so much so that she no longer knew who she was, where she was or whether she was coming or going. All her goings were via bags now. Billy barely visited her, unable to reconcile himself with her fate. The fate that had been meant for him.

“Quit yer moanin’” Bob told him.

Bob had turned up on the scene directly after Gary lost his shit and beat a defenceless woman half to death. To Billy, at that time, Bob was his guardian angel sent down to protect him and to give him purpose. Billy knew that Gary would come after him next. Billy was a loose end. What Gary wasn’t counting on was Billy the loser having a friend.

Gary got the surprise of his life.

Then Gary disappeared forever. 

Cometh the hour, cometh the man, and Bob was that man. Ever since then, Billy had owed Bob big time and he’d been repaying that debt ever since.

Billy quit his moanin’, “right you are, Bob.”

Bob nodded at the man who considered himself to be his friend. Bob knew this about Billy and did not dissuade him from the notion. That notion of Billy’s was useful to Bob. It handed Bob power, “bring out the gimp!” he yelled the order and began readying himself, unbuckling his belt and wiping the sweat from his eyes.

Billy grudgingly walked over to the box. Was it his imagination, or was the light in the room dimming? He didn’t think it was the bulb. It was more that the walls were growing darker and closing in somehow. He looked down at the box. He’d never liked the box, let alone what was contained within. It freaked him out. He knew it was supposed to be freaky, but this was taking it too far. It was taking it way, way too far. Gary had done bad things to Billy. Gary wasn’t the only uncle or gentlemen friend of his Momma’s to do bad things, but the thing in this box went beyond that. Billy had nightmares about that thing and he didn’t know why. By rights, he should have had nightmares about what him and Bob were doing to the movin’ and groovin’ toy they’d stolen from the dockyard last Winter, but it felt like the tables were turning. It felt like he wasn’t in control anymore. He was beginning to doubt he’d ever been in control. 

Truth was, he’d never been in control, not really.

Billy stood before the box and his bowels turned to liquid. Suddenly he was a little boy again and his daddy was taking off his belt. He didn’t want this. He didn’t want to be here. But there was nothing he could do. Bob had killed Gary and Billy knew that Gary was a bad bastard. Gary would have killed Billy, the first chance he got. Billy owed Bob, and Billy didn’t want to piss the only friend he had in this world off.

He just wished he could read. All of a sudden he wanted to know what it was that they had taken. What it was that Bob called a gimp. Billy didn’t think it was a gimp. Not really. Not that he knew what a gimp was.

Gingerly, taking care to be as far from the box as possible, he took the lock out of the clasp. They never bothered closing the padlock. There was no point. With his index finger he flicked the clasp open and lifted the lid, stepping back as he did so.

“What the hell you doin’!?” cried Bob. Billy was supposed to pull the damn machine-robot-do-dad out of the box. That was all part of it. Billy knew that. Bob needed it. He needed the build-up and the ceremony and here was the dim-wit playing up and ruining the proceedings. Yellow was what Billy was. Yellow as the day was long.

Bob stopped unbuttoning the flies of his jeans as his attention switched from his cowardly friend to the box. 

Something was happening. 

Something was different.

“What the hell…” Bob whispered under his breath as the black clad humanoid form unfurled before him. There was something balletic and impressively beautiful about the way the thing he’d called a gimp was moving. It rose up to its full height and it filled the room in a way it had never managed to before. It wasn’t the same. Not this time.

This thing was deadly.

This thing was a weapon, just like it said on the box.

G1MP.

General-use, category One, Military Person.

Only this person was a machine. A machine with weapons grade technology. Built to learn and adapt and then to prevail. Always to prevail. Effectively and robustly. G1MP was about as clever as it got and certainly cleverer than the likes of Billy and Bob.

“It’s just a robot…” Bob told himself, “one of them there sex robots they have in the red light districk.”

The just-a-robot snaked out an arm in a fluid and impossibly quick motion. Bob would have screamed, but he was frozen to the spot and barely aware of the blood, bone and grey matter that had splattered over him. His focus was entirely on that arm and where it was, and where it was, was through the place where Billy’s face used to be. Billy’s lifeless body hung from that arm like a badly tailored meat cloak. Those were the words that came to Bob, and he wished he could laugh at the absurdity of them.

“Billy…” he whispered. It took Billy having his face smashed through the back of his skull for Bob to come to the realisation that Billy was his friend and that he had valued him after all. That was the story of Bob’s life. Easy come, not so easy go, and when it was done was when he understood what it was that he had lost.

The sometime gimp retrieved its arm in another fluid motion. Billy slumped unceremoniously  to the floor.

Now it was just the two of them.

Compared to Billy, Bob would get off lightly.

It was Bob’s turn to be put in the box.

But not before the constantly learning, thinking and dreaming humanoid figure enacted everything it had learnt from Bob upon him.