Black is Black

Prompt: Start the story with the absence of a sensory detail (eg. silence when there should be noise).

It's dark. Not time to get up yet. More merciful sleep. Awake again and still no sign of light. No stars through the window. No window. Feel like I have slept for hours. Time for work, but the world’s black. Feel for an eye shade, keenly aware that I don’t own one. My hand explores my face. Cogito ergo sum. I extend my fingers to the duvet but find instead the struts of a wooden chair in which I’m sitting upright. 

It’s quiet except for a slight sighing of the wind. My hair ruffles and settles. No traffic, no train, no fog horn from the inevitably foggy harbor. I’ve only known this much quiet once before in the far northern country in winter. But that’s not where I should be now. I should be in my house preparing to leave for the day. However, reality belies normalcy. I am not in the far north, or from the feel of it, in my bedroom. I am seated somewhere on a chair and it is dark, either that or I have gone blind. It is unsettling. The brain scrambles to make sense and comes to an impasse. 

Logic suggests, and I seize on it, that I’m in a room without windows. I am not tied or bound. But is there, between me and the inevitable egress, a heavy table or chair to bruise me or a brick fireplace ledge protruding to trip and crack my brains? If I leave this seat I may not find my way back. Right now I am safe, but am I? And even so, I can’t stay here forever. My bladder and stomach won't have it.

Time for tentative steps with arms extended in front of my face. I reach out with my right foot as far as my body will allow and then extend my toes until I risk a calf cramp. Nothing, even when extended from side to side. I tap around with the other but it also waves unseen in the air. Apparently, there is no floor within reach. My distended leg trembles. I am perched on this wooden chair in the blackest of blacks and have no idea if I am inches or miles from solid ground or if there is solid ground.

Ridiculous notions suggest themselves. Am I on the big wheel at an amusement park, or floating in outer space? The chair rocks slightly with the breeze and I grab for the arms, but there are none. This can’t be the Ferris wheel then with belts and bars. The mind seizes on the most implausible notion, outer space, but it's not freezing. And how in all that is good and sane in the world, could I end up out there? Closest I’ve come to a spaceship was at the NASA Space Centre. I bite down on bile. Where the fuck am I? If this was fiction I pray for deus ex machina but can‘t even conjure up an implausible scenario and extraction from it. Despite having slept I am overwhelmingly tired. I must not fall off my chair. 

I have slept again. I awake with a jolt and go to grab the chair, but even it is no longer there. My hands clutch at nothing. I reach out blindly, grabbing and tumbling. I extend my arms flapping and pull up my legs. The somersaulting slows. I pull up my arms over my face waiting to collide with something. Mercifully the chair clatters against my legs. I grab the struts like a long lost friend and try to slow my breathing. Once seated again, I listen and realize I am not alone. I hold my breath and other breathing continues. Someone or something is here. My wish not to be alone dissipates. I expect something to touch me.

Is my companion in the same predicament or is it/he/she/they a guard? Can they see me? Is it wise or unwise to draw attention to myself? I must do something to trigger an end to this Purgatory, whether it be through wrath or rescue. I find myself blurting out “Where am I? Can you help me?” The breathing halts with an intake but then resumes. So is my new buddy incapable of responding or is my jailer screwing with me? I know whatever it is can hear me speak. I become reckless, fueled by a growing anger and call out in the direction of the breathing “Listen, I don’t know what’s happening, whether this is a joke or a kidnapping or some kind of accident but I am scared. Please help me.” The breathing temporarily halts. No response.

I have slept again. Wake with a jolt and the tumbling somersaulting thing. This time I clutch the chair, so I at least have that. Once stabilized and my own breath controlled I listen. I no longer have a companion. Whoever or whatever it was has abandoned me. But then again, it did not abuse.

After a while I pick out the thrumming of an engine, the first sound of normal life since I came to, when was it? Today or yesterday? I can’t tell. Is it a vehicle idling or equipment running? I strain to hear. The noise is constant so I assume it’s equipment like air conditioning, but it could be any machine. How would I know? The noise becomes immediately louder as if a door has opened. I flinch. 

Voices. Quiet then clamoring, talking, coming closer to me. Around me now. Brusque in a language I don’t understand. Not French, not Spanish, not anything I’ve heard. Then a series of metallic clicks right next to my ear. What the fuck was that? I tense up, preparing to resist the unseen visitors/jailers. A headache starts. I feel it at the back of my eyes. Perhaps if they did shoot me that might not be that bad considering; the first time in my life I haven’t balked at my own departure. I feel the big black whale of death swimming nearer to me, its unwavering eye upon me. 

And so it goes. The visitors/jailers come and go as if they are inspecting me or keeping tabs. They circle me but do not touch. I was wrong about the stomach and bladder. I seem to have no bodily needs now except for sleep, oh and anger. It comes and goes but when it does come it’s all consuming. I once reached out and tried to grab whoever/whatever could be near me but my hand fell on nothing.

Daily I try to recount the facts about my life so that I maintain a connection between now and then. The list has simple things like my birthday, where I lived and worked, friends, family etc. At first I used it as a discipline, like that party game when a list of objects goes round the room and you add something to it until someone can’t remember all of them and you lose and that's the game ended. But lately the list has grown shorter. I’m having trouble with my telephone number and can only remember the last four digits with certainty. 

Just when I’d seemed to resolve myself to this new life, if you could call it that, the unrelenting sameness of the days took a small change. I’d stopped lashing out, ceased trying to throw myself into oblivion, put an end to all the crying and shouting and was sitting meekly as usual when the machine noise became louder and the observers/jailers entered. This time one of them poked me. It was so unexpected that I did all the things I’d stopped doing all at once: lashed out, screamed and rolled off my chair. But this time something stopped my tumble and I felt myself placed firmly back on the chair until I stabilized. I waited, but nothing different happened again that day.

The next time they came they poked again. As I’d rehearsed in my mind I resisted the urge to respond and anchored myself quietly in place. Deep breath. Another poke, then a rub on my left shoulder. Not hard or gentle, but quick retraction, as you might with an animal that is thought to bite. Then, and this was the thing that started to awaken hope: words, actual words that I could understand, interspersed with the other language. Not sentences, but fragments; just conjunctions and adjectives really. No nouns to latch on to.

The next day, for the first time, they did not come. Nor the next. This, so cruel after hope had been awakened in me, I sobbed and rocked in the chair. I wailed for all the time I had been there hoping to kill myself off with despair. How much can the brain stand before it breaks? Does it take pity and shut itself off if you dive out of the burning building or will it force you to count the floors? Once mine let me fall asleep while driving so I knew it could be a traitor.

Awakening once again, but now there is light and there is sound. Both fuzzy but both there. 

“Round, round… He’s coming round.” A man’s voice, coming closer. “Hold on buddy, don’t try to move. There’s a towel over your eyes, and I’m going to slowly remove it. You might want to keep your eyes closed for a little while - There….” A hand is touching my head. I feel the colder air seeping in as the fabric is lifted. I hear a chair or stool being rolled towards me. “You’re safe but you will be disoriented for quite some time. In fact, if I’m honest you may never get over this… Okay, I’m just going to wet the towel and wipe your eyes with it and you can open them when you feel ready.”

It hurts, but I see the man small and swarthy seated on the stool. He has very hairy arms. I don’t know what to say or trust myself to say it so lay watching him. I am lying on a bed not sitting in the chair. I feel around to find the cotton bedclothes. Some sound comes out of my mouth but merely a slurred “Wha…”

“Yes,” he says, smiling “What the fuck, eh? Okay, listen up. You may feel like you’ve been gone for months, years. You may also believe all sorts of other things. Some start to see nothing but dogs or eyeglasses. Your vitals however remained relatively stable until the last few hours so we discontinued.”

He walked to the sink and ran the tap. “Here, try to sit up and have some water.” He placed his hand behind my head and pulled gently up. A paper cup to my mouth, the water cool. Weakness, cramps, pins and needles, all at once. “The sides are up so you won’t fall out. Ready for it? You’re enjoying the result of a combination of medically administered drugs and voluntary sensory deprivation. You should start to remember a little within the next few minutes and then most over a few hours.”

Sensory deprivation? Isn’t that illegal? Wasn’t it banned in the fifties? I go to say “Wait a minute,” but it comes out as a coughing grunt. 

“Yeah, I know,” he says. “It’s not kosher, but you signed up for it. Private clinic; private experiment; no questions asked. You should sleep okay overnight and then I drive you blindfolded wherever you want in the morning. You only have to be in the dark for a short while this time, but be ready for it.” He gets up and takes a while on the computer. “You sign the non disclosure form and the money goes into your account and you get your wallet and phone back. Oh, and your clothes.” He smiles again. “I hope it was worth it…”

For a second or two I am plunged back in the dark on the stool and tumbling; tumbling, tumbling. My stomach gives a lurch. I reach out my arms to steady myself but I’m okay and back in the room.

“Oh yeah,” he says “Better get used to that.”