Immobility

Brian Evenson IMMOBILITY

For Peter Wessel Zapffe and Thomas Ligotti; and for Greb, always

And for Kristen Tracy

In the true movement of community what is at stake is never humanity, but always the end of humanity.

—Jean-Luc Nancy

It is the desire and goal of the Church to gather and preserve copies of the world’s genealogical information recorded through the ages into one central storage area where they will be safe from the ravages of nature and the destructions of man…. The magnificent machinery is in motion, and in an efficient, businesslike manner, page by page and book by book these records are being stored as priceless treasures, securely protected in the tops of the mountains.

—Brother Sidney B. Sperry

Infinite emptiness will be all around you, all the resurrected dead of all the ages wouldn’t fill it, and there you’ll be like a little bit of grit in the middle of the steppe.

—Samuel Beckett, Endgame

PART ONE

A SENSATION OF COMING BACK alive again, only not quite that, half life maybe. Still utter darkness, though perhaps a faint hint of light on the horizon. Scraps and bits of sound caught somewhere between brain and ears and slowly unthawing to become words, trickling slowly in, but in such a way that it is hard to be sure if they are words from now or words remembered from an earlier time, things imagined or things actually heard. The word food, or perhaps brood. Dying out or crying out, something of the sort, hard to say which exactly, if either. Claps? No, not that exactly, but Claps still sparked something, was close to something else. Clasp? Lapse?

The darkness bedappled now, but still nothing visible, figures not yet sufficiently separated from the ground to become distinct. A dripple, a strange sensation, intimations of shape and form and movement. Almost like being alive again.

And then, suddenly, sentences. Murky but comprehensible and properly sequenced—probably real for once rather than imagined. This:

* * *

“WELL, WE’LL HAVE TO USE HIM, then.”

A male voice, hoarse and loud.

“Do you think that’s a good idea?”

Another man, this one perhaps younger. The voice, at the very least smoother, more quiescent.

“Do we have any other choice?”

“How do we manage the situation?”

“I’ll come up with something.”

“What?” The voices getting softer now, slipping down in pitch, starting to fade.

“I don’t know.” A long silence. “I’ll figure something out. We’ll just do the best we can.”

“So, you want me to wake him?”

A hesitation so long that the conversation seemed over. And then finally:

“Yes, wake him.”

* * *

SLOW SHIFT TO WHITE NOISE. Probably a remembered conversation rather than something he was actually hearing, but from when? And who was speaking? Were they even talking about him? If they were talking about him and he was asleep, how could he have heard them? And if they weren’t, why did he continue to have the impression that they were?

Strange the things that seep their way down to you while you are dead, part of him thought. Or is it just my imagination? another part wondered. A story he was telling himself, a dream he was dreaming.

And who exactly do I mean by he? he wondered. Don’t I mean I? Who do I mean?

And then came a light so bright that, despite just having begun to find himself, he was lost again.

1

WHEN THEY FIRST WOKE HIM, he had the impression of the world becoming real again and he himself along with it. He did not remember having been stored. He could remember nothing about what his life had been before the Kollaps, and the days directly before they had stored him were foggy at best, little more than a few frozen images. He remembered tatters of the Kollaps itself, had a fleeting glimpse of himself panting and in flight, riots, gunfire, rubble. He remembered a bright blast, remembered awakening to find himself burned and naked as a newborn—or perhaps even more naked, since all the hair had been singed from his body or had simply fallen out. He remembered feeling amazed to be alive, but, well, he was alive, it was hard to question that, wasn’t it?

And then what? People: he had found them, or they had found him, hard to say which. A few men banded together, acting “rationally” instead of “like animals,” as one of them must have put it, attempting to found a new society, attempting to start over.

Not having learned better, he thought grimly, the first time.

Was it all coming back to him? He wasn’t sure. And how much of what was coming back was real?

What was his name again?

* * *

AT FIRST HE COULDN’T FEEL his body at all. He heard noise around him, the low rumble of ordinary mortals muttering to one another, the scuff of feet against a floor around what must be his receptacle. He tried to move his mouth and found he couldn’t, that he couldn’t even feel it, that he wasn’t even completely certain that he had a mouth. It made him nervous. He tried to lick his lips, but either nothing happened or something happened that he couldn’t feel.

His eyelids were closed, but there was the slightest gap between them. He could just see out, could see light, a slight blurriness of semi-differentiated figures, nothing more. He tried to will his eyes open further, failed. Nor could he move the eyes themselves: they stayed staring, fixed, his mind very clumsily processing the thin slit of reality available to them.

He tried to swallow, but couldn’t move his throat. Am I breathing? he wondered,