Chapter 4: CHAPTER IV: SECOND INTERLUDE

Violet was aware of a completely alien sensation: she had two bodies. One was close by, surrounding her eyes, and one was at a distance and seemed (felt?) much larger. The full sense of the distant body faded yet did not quite vanish. It remained, like the memory of yesterday's headache, incorporeal but present.

She opened her eyes, and found herself floating, as she had suspected, in the Cognitive Void. As before, she was near the idea/sphere she had been talking to when the shadow of Guilt came near.

“What's happened?” Violet asked the idea. It hadn't seen her because its eyes were tightly shut. It was cowering. “Where's that Guilt thing?”

“Eh!” The idea's eyes slapped open like waxed windows. “Guilt?” It looked quickly all around, its mouth gaping in amazement. “Wait, now,” it said. “Now, it was just here, just now. You screamed, and for a second I thought you’d vanished, but I closed my eyes because it was going to fall on us. You’re still here, but where is it?”

“Maybe…maybe it lost track of me when I screamed? Because, you know, this is a dream, and I woke up then.” So, when I woke up, I disappeared from here…? Weird.

Hearing muted voices nearby, she looked around and noticed several of the surrounding shapes glancing at her and talking among themselves in low tones. The lavender emptiness below her made her legs ache for ground.

“If you did go away, or wake up, or whatever you call it,” said the idea pointedly, “Guilt did, too. At least, it isn't here.” It paused. “It could come back.”

She frowned, remembering how her jeans had stiffened in the keening cold-storm of Guilt's presence, and how the deep fright she had felt had punched effortlessly through to her heart. Violet couldn’t bear to consider again facing the fear. “Well, where can I go to get away from it?”

“Nowhere,” said the idea, slowly, half-closing its huge eyes. “Unless…”

“Well?” The thing's sense of melodrama annoyed her.

“Unless you've stopped believing that this is all nothing but a dream.”

She could not think what to say. Then she had an idea. “This can't be a dream, and not be a dream,” she said triumphantly. A small grape-colored orb popped into existence a few meters away. It had three slit-pupil eyes and was encircled by a narrow band of pale gray.

“What an interesting little idea,” commented the larger sphere.

Refusing to be distracted, she added, “And it certainly isn't real, so it must be a dream!”

“I'm as real as you,” squeaked the little idea.

Violet narrowed her eyes at it. “It's a continuing dream,” she said firmly to the large idea. “With a more vivid sense than any I can remember. Like no dream I ever had.”

The large idea regarded her. It squinted and pursed its lips. “I don't know,” it said at last, in a drawl. “I guess that's close enough. If you think of this as anything other than a random dream, it might help, some.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

Her companion sighed. “No, of course not,” it said with exaggerated patience.

The little idea set up a ragged, frantic chant: “She don’ know what she talkin' about abou'! She don’ know what she talkin’ abou’!”

“Hey, shut up,” said the larger idea. The smaller ones quieted down, grumbling among themselves.

“This is nuts,” she said, quietly, to herself. “Didn't you say something about a place called, what, the Introspection Station?”

“Yes.” The idea backhanded its small compatriot, sending it caroming off another nearby sphere into the distance. “Yes, you might find some help there. Although,” it added, thoughtfully, “I’m not sure if they’re working very efficiently over there.”

“Anything, anything,” she said. “If I have to be around that, that, that thing, again, I've got to have help. How can I get there?”

“It's a long way, and a lonely journey. I can accompany you to the edge of the Association of Ideas, however.” It floated around behind her, elongating slightly in its direction of travel, and gently bumped into her, pushing her off on a new course.

“Hey! I didn’t know you could move around in here!” she exclaimed.

“We don't usually, because there's nowhere to go,” was the reply from behind her back. “And the effort is draining. We draw energy from the starlettes you saw condensing while Guilt was growing nearer. The starlettes exist only in a fairly small volume of the Cognitive Void, and so, we are limited in our movements.”

In a few moments, satisfied that they had accelerated to the proper velocity and vector, the idea left off pushing and came around alongside, pacing her.

Looking back, she saw the Association of Ideas flecked out across the pastel spaces. “There must be millions, they seem to fill infinity.”

“Not even close! There are other Voids, vaster than this.”

“Other Voids…You mean, in other people? What would you know of other people? You’re something of the mind, not a person.”

“What you read and see and hear and taste and touch tends to pop up in the Cognitive Void,” was the dry reply. “You don’t think we’re spontaneously generated, do you?”

“I never thought about it.”

“Hmph. Anyway, we do know of other people.” It paused, then said, “Simply because most of us don't percolate into your ego-dominated space…”

“Now wait a minute! I am not egotistical!”

“In the Freudian sense,” it said, impatiently. “Don't you remember anything from college? You filled up the Void with dull little gray balls, for years. Stultifying.”

“I only had one Psych course.”

“That was enough. You became convinced that you had an id and an ego and a superego, so of course they came into existence here.” It scoffed. “What an unbelievable moron that id was!”

“This makes no sense to me at all,” she said, shaking her head.

“Minds are rather like galaxies,” continued the idea, dreamily ignoring her. Its words took on conviction, uttered in the depthless orchid space. “There is one supreme Void, linking all, in all. At intervals, random minds exist, surrounded by emotions and thoughts and a blanket of external sensations.”

“You mean there's someone else in here?” she queried, alarmed. Then she recalled the strange feeling she had had earlier, of another, far off, body.

“I don't know. They usually can't be sensed. Sometimes, though, we get a quick flick from someplace else, like a reflection. Telepathy, I believe.”

“This is making my head hurt,” Violet said, putting her fists to her forehead. “I'm not even enjoying flying. Why can't I just wake up?”

“You are awake. You wouldn't be here if you weren't, because you’d be dreaming, and you aren’t in the Wood of Dreams. Q.E.D.”

“What?”

“Oh, come on. You don't remember Latin?”

“I've spent years burying it. I hated my Latin classes.”

“You were a bit young for it,” the idea agreed. “Well, they don’t call them ‘parochial’ schools for nothing, do they. Anyway, Q.E.D. stands for ‘quod erat demonstrandum,’ ‘What was to be proved.’ Q.E.D.”

Violet groaned, wrapping her arms around herself, feeling tired and apprehensive, like the hours-long final stage of an LSD trip, coasting into apathy and exhaustion.

“I'm certain you'll find assistance at the Introspection Station,” the idea said, in a kinder tone. “There, you may learn your own personal truth.”

“I already know what that is,” she said, voice muffled, her head bowed with chin touching chest. “It's that I haven't got a life anymore. Calder's gone, I'm alone and afraid, I'm going insane. This dream is a part of it.”

“I'm not going to argue the point with you,” said the idea. “In any case, I haven't got time, because we're almost at the boundary of my space. You must go on alone.”

Violet looked up, out into the blank color of infinity. “Why not be alone in here, in a dream, if I am alone when I am awake? It's all the same. I can't do anything about it.”

“If you don't,” began the idea, then paused.

“If I don’t,” she said, “some other part of me than me will take control. A split personality.”

“No!” was the vehement reply. “You don't understand!”

“No. I don't,” she agreed, feeling fatalistic. “But I don't care anymore.”

The idea was dropping behind. “You can't go on from on here believing that!” it insisted. “You've got to wake up!”

“I wish I could.”

“Metaphorically! I’m speaking metaphorically! Oh, you stupid conscious mind.”

She did not turn around as the orb fell further astern. “How far is the Introspection Station?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” it called. Its voice grew fainter. “You’ll know when you get to it!”

“If I get to it,” she muttered, knowing the idea could not hear her. Turning at last, she called, “Goodbye!” The silly thing had after all been helpful in its way.

“Goodbye! Good luck…”

The idea dwindled to a black dot on the lavender field of space. A prickly desolation filled her stomach as it disappeared in the distance.

Without any reference point she had no sensation of motion; she couldn’t even gauge her speed. Beyond the color there was nothing. Even the odor of mint had dissipated, leaving the Void smelling vaguely of an unused auditorium.

Time passed. Gradually Violet drifted into a trance-like state, being dimly aware that she had curled up into a fetal position but felt no need to do anything to change her orientation. Formless thoughts and images welled up through her brain. Occasionally a thought would link to others and a coherent sentence or phrase would patter through her consciousness at a somewhat higher level.

Why isn't this space all filled up with Ideas? Why are they only in one area?

…what's personal truth? God?

Can't drift on like this forever…

“What?” she said, startled, her body jerking. She strained her ears, trying to summon up the sound that had roused her. She stared around, biting her lower lip. She heard it again.

A slow peal of faint, whispery laughter. Her hackles rose. Guilt; it was returning!

No. There was no vast shadow, no darkening of the Void. Her heart slugged in her chest. The laughter faded and was not repeated. It had sounded like—the laugh of the thing calling itself an impulse. She remembered its conical teeth and blank eyes, and shuddered.

The adrenaline drained out of her system, leaving her exhausted and depressed. Her body ached. “Can I sleep in here?” she wondered, out loud. “What if I start to fall?” But there was nothing to fall on, nowhere to fall to, she realized, peering into the nothingness around her.

Wait, though. There were, apparently, other portions of her mind. That’s what the idea had said. What would happen if she…fell awake?

She puzzled over this, dully, for a few minutes, before noticing that the surrounding Void had grown slightly darker. Startled, she gazed around, and saw that some areas of the Void were paler in color than others. Local variations in the aether density? Zones of increased likelihood? High-probability areas? She stared at one region of curdled light, dead ahead. Was it pulsating?

Maybe that's the Periphery. Maybe once I’m past that, I wake up! Then she passed into a chilly current. Alarmed, she felt her muscles tighten again. All around was silence; she could hear her own slight movements, like whispers in an acoustically perfect hall. Vague movements tickled at her peripheral vision, but when she turned to look, they were never there. She could not shake the growing certainty that all about her, huge amorphous shapes squirmed. Her stomach felt queasy. “Like butter,” she said aloud, remembering how she'd described nausea at the age of seven. “Butter,” she said again, and bit her lower lip. She wanted a cigarette but was afraid to light a match. “What's wrong with me?” The half-seen shapes came a bit more into focus, crowding closer to the centerline of her vision. They grew, larger and larger, as big as cars, elephants, office buildings, and bigger still with the passing seconds. “I'm shrinking!” she gasped. The ghostly shapes shimmered around her like heat waves from a bonfire. Twisting in an anxious adagio, she tried to determine the extent of her danger. The sounds of her clothing rubbing her body grew into sibilants in the air. She decided that these sounds were being produced by the shapes. They were conversing among themselves—no, to her. Yes! They were speaking to her.

The voices were as gentle as murmurs in a cathedral, a choir of sighs. “We are you, demanding your right to think and feel. You are we, you have the advantage over us. Autumn curtains in the hallway of the years can't dim the sharp twinkles off ice at the end, and beyond that. You cast your eyes like marbles across the skies, ever rolling around the rims of the stars. Give us our freedom!”

One of the shapes laughed wildly at this point, but was hissed at by the others, and the voices continued in all-but-perfect unison. “We have you in mind. You reject us, your unfounded suspicions. Give us the chance! Can you refuse to use the Muse? Or the mirror? You're wasting your time.”

As the last syllable was spoken, the shapes began to break apart, disintegrating as if their words had been their flesh and blood. The coagulations melted away, icy lumps slumping into the pale grape ice cream of the Cognitive Void. She felt that she was again alone.

The strange threatening tones of the—unfounded suspicions?—had made their incomprehensible words particularly terrifying. What had they meant? Were they threatening, or warning? There had been an undercurrent of gloating in those dry hisses. It made no sense. How could creatures of her own mind hurt her, especially in a dream? Now the Void became for her an outward manifestation of her angst; outward, yet indisputably inward because of its nature. She was in and out simultaneously. The confusion was, she felt, beyond her ability to cope with, and in her consuming anxiety she arabesqued through the Void in unconscious grace. Deep under the surface dread, she felt a need to pray. If she could open herself again to God, after the years of denial, then perhaps she could find the strength to endure in this insane dream. Yet, even as she had the thought, she had a subliminal image of big blank eyes. It was an urge, an impulse. Naturally. The surrender, to a vast Sufi-thing; it would be so easy. And now why not? And now why not relax, lie back as on a blanket of pine needles, listening without thought to the wind streaming along under the moonlit clouds? What could be more peaceful, more soothing? It was the acceptance of Calder all over again. The very first time she had given in to him, instead of to her religious beliefs, had been on a camping trip in the Poconos. As the campfire tinkled, cloaking itself with soft gray ash, Calder's strong arms held her in the nylon tent, and she let her body be guided. The gratification was there. Pleasure and release reached into her cells as no prayer had ever done. Perhaps God had not heard her—but Calder did. He had been real, solid, hard, and soft. What could this mean, juxtaposed with the half-seen suspicions that had sung to her? Where was the connection? What were these beings, in her mind? Whims, ideas, suspicions. Personified, of her, yet alien to her. Could a mitochondrion be more easily understood because of its undeniable reality? Or did knowledge of the physical self reach deeper, to the level of bi-helical DNA molecules? Or deeper still: into quantum, as it were, consciousness? Images of atoms strung into a red and blue double ladder curled in her mind. The red and blue blended and faded into the Violet Void.

The emotions had to be real, had to supercharge the chemical stew of the body, under the hormone-driven action of the brain. So, brain (mind) first, she told herself…then feelings, because feelings did not rule the body. Or did they? She recalled the salient moments of her life. The embarrassing ones came to mind first, such as the time she had upchucked on her desk at school and got sick again in the doorway as she came back from the girls' room. Being afraid to leave the playground because a friend's brother, who was something of a bully, was loitering with friends at the end of the block. Loosing a tremendous sneeze in church. Moments of pride, as well: looking at herself in a full-length mirror after donning her Girl Scout uniform for the first time. Being accepted for a national Merit Scholarship. She could not separate these events from their attendant emotions. Each important aspect of her past was viewed through a filter of emotion. In which case, she told herself harshly, her emotions kept her from seeing things as they were, because they controlled her perceptions. All she had ever had from her emotions was misery, suffering. Without them, what would she be? Could she be? She ground her fists into her forehead, trying to make some sense out of the ideas and thoughts that were so strange and frightening. Truly beginning to accept the concept of madness, she gave in to despair.

Sometime later, through her tears, she glimpsed a light at an indeterminate distance ahead. It twinkled, colors diffracting through the fluid between her swollen eyelids. Too miserable to consider its source, Violet stared apathetically. Within a few minutes, however, it had grown. Gradually it became a multicolored marble, a patterned football, a basketball blotched with lime and salmon, and larger. How close could she be going? No—how large was it? Her speed, she remembered suddenly, was tremendous, far too high for her to survive any impact, however glancing, with the stupendous sphere. She had ceased to think of her physical relationship to the planetoid in terms of distance from it: now she unconsciously felt herself to be above it, in a condition of altitude, skimming across it at an approach angle.

“Now, this is flying,” she muttered, and spread her arms at the rush of air. The planet smelled fresh, spicy and alive. Her mood brightened as she slalomed down corridors of puffy clouds. Far below her, the land surface was broken into a close but irregular check. Presently she could make out what must be fields of some sort, glowing like Technicolor film tests, and webbed areas like frozen smoke strung with light beads. There was no sun or moon visible in the Cognitive Void above. The world beneath, encrusted on a vast idea, was lit by its own internal energies.

Still with no control over her speed or direction, she could not halt or even slow her graceful descent. Out of the thinning purple sky, she sped over the weird landscape. Farms, like nightlights in a child's bedroom, whizzed by and were lost behind. Zang! a city of angular lights and blob-like moving shapes. Whoooooooommm over a silent forested region, and suddenly stars were below her. The forest fell behind within seconds. For a few moments she was giddy and frightened, until realizing that she was now traversing an ocean or sea, waveless and quiet below her, reflecting the scattered starlettes of the Void.

Likewise, her own reflection was pacing her. Violet looked closely down at the darkened wave-stippled doppelganger.

She saw a woman who appeared older and more tired than Violet remembered, with puffy circles under her eyes. Violet squinted, but this made her image look older. Her hair needed to be combed and brushed. She looked and felt unattractive, tired, sticky, and dumpy. Most of all, I look sad.

As she thought this, her sensation of being suspended above an infinite plane coupled with her sorrow, and she cringed in the face of her insignificance and meaninglessness. This was what was behind it all: this total awareness, ongoing and undiminished, that there was no point to life. There was no God, there was no security, no love. The future became a briar patch, the past the dream of a fool.

The impulse had been right. It was chaos, of course. The concept of “God” became a sand-grain on the beach of the universe. There could be nothing larger, nothing other than this for a person to accept as “God.” Emotionless and endless chaos, a-causal, amoral. Continuum in perpetuum.

The animated cartoon Ideas notwithstanding, this internal eternity's true nature was no nature at all. There was nothing outside, therefore nothing inside: nothing that mattered. This was not a dream, but she was not awake.

In the face of this realization, her own failures—as a wife, a parent, a daughter; her inability to find a job, or to retain custody of Jessie—were understandable if not forgivable. If all was Chaos, she couldn’t be blamed for being unable to impose her will on it. It was so much bigger than she. She could be forgiven for fleeing into the limitless confines of her own mind, though. Indeed, people did it all the time: they had breakdowns from which they never returned. Why not just stay in here, flying through endless space? No more responsibilities, no more striving, failing, having to get up to strive again…

It was so tempting to stop worrying, to stop thinking. How good it could feel to gather in on oneself, curling arms around legs…

As her eyes slowly closed, she caught a last sight of her reflection in the noetic waters below. Not curling; gesticulating, waving arms in rage or pain, face distorted in a soundless howl.

“What in—” Violet grunted, straightening. As she snapped to awareness, however, her course across the ocean altered; she shot up and away from it at a steep angle. She could no longer distinguish her own frantic swimming motions from those of the reflection.

What had happened? She rose rapidly; the reflection shrank to a dot. The enormous ball below her flattened out, taking on first a horizon and then a definite curve. Then she seemed to come to the top of a hyperbola, paused, and began descending. Far ahead across the water she saw a dark line.

Above her, space wrinkled; the dots of light died. The air became cold, the scent of mint sweet blades in her nostrils, melding up through shocked surprise into hissing in her hair. The cold clung to her thick curls, sensitizing her ears to the sizzle. She had felt this before and recognized the purity of the fear. It was the fear of the chaos, a purely existential terror. The last refuge of her mind. Knowing this, she sought to be unafraid, to accept what was coming. Beyond it was freedom, the absolute freedom of non-being. It was all she had ever wanted, she thought, cold tears on her cheeks. The puzzle of her self-actuated reflection was meaningless. All that mattered was that she would soon be taken in and made whole. Then the fear would have to stop, the fear that wriggled and like a cockroach aroused her revulsion.

The stupendous shadow in space was shaped vaguely like a teardrop, with a suggestion of distant glowing nebulae, coldly radiating cosmic unconcern, if not outright antipathy.

“Don't personify it,” whispered a voice—the impulse (where was it? She searched space, saw nothing but darkness) spoke, from the trees ahead? Wait, trees? What was that line across the horizon? Where was the voice coming from? “It's non-real. You cling to the passions and concerns of life, of people. These are not real. Beyond the Guilt, through it, you find true peace.”

“I find peace,” she said softly, wanting to believe, but unable to stop being afraid. The idea, so long ago, had told her that Guilt was attracted by her fear. How then could she not be afraid? “It couldn't find me if I wasn't afraid,” she said, her voice blurred, sleepy. It will tear your mind to bits and dribble them out your mouth in a padded cell. It will make you eat crayons and pick your nose in front of your friends on visiting day.

“What happens to my body afterward?”

“Don’t worry about that,” whispered the impulse. “That doesn't matter. You won’t need your body when you’re at peace.”

“But if it wanders around without ‘me,’ it might get hurt, or…hurt someone else.” She was so tired. An unpleasantly prickly lassitude enveloped her, making her head ache.

“Nothing like that can happen. Nothing…”

Her discomfort was becoming irksome. The thick darkness elicited revulsion from her, and a stubborn resistance seemed more natural a reaction than fear. She saw that the dark line on the horizon was indeed the marge of a forest, as she snapped, “You say all these things, you make me feel like I'm nothing. Why? What are you, doing this to me?”

The fall of night paused. The trees, fluffy fronded growths meters tall, grew up to the edge of a fractal escarpment like the one from which she had propelled herself when escaping from the very creature that now, disembodied, was cajoling her into acceptance of Guilt. The existence of the voice was perfectly natural in the half-light. Everything in the Cognitive Void was realer to her.

“I’m slipping into it,” she muttered.

“What was that? You’re agreeing with me?”

“No! I, yes. That is…” Suddenly it was all too much. She could not cope with this wild realm where ideas and whims had bodies and spoke strange sentences. Enormous apathy overwhelmed her, draining her fear. She was now very close to the trees, yet her rate of speed was the same. If she crashed among them, she would be hurt.

It didn't matter. There was simply no reason to do anything; this was a dream, and nothing could harm her in a dream, so what difference would smashing into phantom trees make? Something, beyond her ken, far off in the spaces of the Void, strained majestically. She felt it draw nearer, felt its desire for her—for her energy. “Dream thing,” she breathed, the words puffing softly in the frigid air, lost in the increasing hiss.

Suddenly she realized that there was no rush of air around her as she (presumably) sped through the Void. The breath-clouds dissipated slowly, rather than being slashed apart by her speed. This lack of a sense of motion overlaid her perceptions: if she could not gain a tactile insight into her long flight, it could be nothing other than dreamlike.

At once she was slicing through icy air, her eyes peeled back by the fierce wind of her velocity. Every missing sensation now slapped into being around her, and with them came a penetrating terror. In seconds she would crash among the tall trees along the edge of the cliff before her, or the mumbling cloud at her back would grasp her in its smoky talons. The danger was too real. From apathetic dullness to panic, her emotional network flared and sparkled its distress.

“Well, honey, it about time you called me up!”

A muscular little cartoon bumblebee with too much mascara suddenly popped into existence beside her.

“Who—?”

The bee-thing laughed. “Self-preservation, at your service! Here’s where you leave the pity party. Okay, now fly this thing! Do it. Dooo eeeet!”

Okay! Right! Control! How do I do that? She strained at the air, trying to force her heavy body into a turn, or any variation of direction. Clawing at the air behind her, she strove to slow herself, with Self-preservation cheering her on. Her efforts brought hot blood to her face, and quivers to her arms and legs; her muscles fought themselves, seeking to haul her bones out of her own way. No response. The seconds had passed like a sermon-laden hour.

“It’s too late,” she groaned.

“Not at all! You did it!”

“I did?” And with that Violet shot into the trees, under their lumpy upper branches, miraculously penetrating many meters into the forest, flashing between moss-grown trunks and stands of curling land coral, through cotton-candy bushes like green smoke, into a scent of wintergreen and mentholated cough drops. She could not see what the exact nature of her surroundings were because they were blurred by the speed of her passage, and by the increasing darkness of the air. Directly ahead of her, an enormous tree-thing loomed, its surface colored like a cat's-eye marble. She could do nothing to avoid it and closed her eyes as she braced for the impact. Seconds later, her awareness exploded into a fountain of stars.