Waking
The thing to finally establish the shape and quality of silence was the sound of motion which first sprang forth: the gnashing of gears, the strain of stone and steel, groaning and tired. The same was true for the darkness which was created in an instant by the light, a slightly sickening pink for the benefit of the many plants rather than the single person who lived beneath it, and sparked to life by the aging holiday bulb timer ticking imperceptibly there below. The even pink of the light became the uneven pink of the walls where it was impossible to tell whose carelessness should be blamed for the splotched arctic camouflage of the room, between the discount handyman and his years of touch-ups with whatever color was close enough and cheap enough and the discount tenants with their years of smoke and grime, the walls themselves being eternally covered by a fresh coat and promptly soiled again from scratch, both suspected parties with functioning senses to notice the decay but not the good sense to care. All this and the first wisp of smoke from one additional cigarette (previously unfinished and now re-lit from the night before) spilled at once into the mind of the latest of these tenants, alone upon a mattress on the floor and now leaning, crawling, slowly up and against the wall behind, shielding a vague pain in their abdomen. Somehow, the healthy reds and greens of the plants betrayed none of the pallid degeneracy of their keeper, and the additional visual interest they offered in this first artificial light of day would provide welcome contrast for any casual observer of the otherwise spartan conditions in the room.
For a cigarette which was, at it's peak, already quite flimsy and desiccated, its revived corpse burned unsurprisingly quickly down to a stub too hot to inhale or handle, and so fell idly by the side of the mattress, emblazoning the bare wooden floor with another black pock. A worn, multi-color quilt (a gift, once) fell fully off the bed's occupant and halfway off the bed, miraculously far enough from the smoldering remnant of the cigarette to avoid tragedy, and the occupant rose. Mechanically, but still with great care, they moved, still naked, around the perimeter of the room, immediately identifying the areas damp with condensation from the gurgling device in the corner which dutifully maintained a level of humidity suitable for the foliage through which this sole mammal now moved, peering as if unsure whether danger or treasure lay behind each leaf, stalk, and vine. The smatterings of droplets gathering on the walls, patches of fog upon the windows, tucked into the corners where mold already creeps in the cracks, were all to be wiped with the dirty towel hung (ostensibly to dry between uses) over the cable which fed one of the handful of powerful lamps. With each of these accumulations wiped in turn, with the towel carefully replaced, the tenant concluded (unbeknownst to them) another day's rendition of the same start to every day of every cold season in the last four years. With this out of the way, finally the day's first thoughts: another cigarette? not now, but if not a cigarette, then something else, right? then what, food? and if not food, then a drink; if a drink, then (of course) a cigarette, and so on. Fifteen or so years of this, and how many more? Surely the thing that made Christ's journey into the desert, that fabled battle with his demons, with hunger and thirst, the thing that most made it worthy of record was not that he survived all those forty days and forty nights but that it only took him that long to be through with it.
In the next room, the blush of plants' preferred tint gave way to the cold, white glow of the only wall mounted lamp in the entire rented flat, casting light upon tiles. The mottled stains on the toilet bowl broke the sea of white where some parts had been sloppily missed in the last cleaning, where others were simply out of reach of the current brush based on its size, shape, or some additional, yet unknown quality, and where others still had been cleaned (perhaps too well, once) with a chemical mixture too strong, or a tool too abrasive, subtly dulling the once glassy surface with an unfamiliar texture, and creating a space from which no amount of scrubbing or further chemicals (from at least the set of those believed to be safe according to this current tenant) could remove the tawny stain this unintentional refinishing had invited and subsequently immortalized here within the bowl. Though there were many of the same model and same vintage within this block of flats, and many of them were presently in similar condition, it was this bowl in particular which most resembled in its pattern of tarnish the painted snow, mud, and dead grass of the winter works from a particular second-generation regionalist painter, the second in a short line of long-dead artists who may have himself appreciated the cold, even light of this washroom scene if his paintings were any indication. Enraptured by the aesthetic qualities of this visible decay, one could miss the enduring beauty of the porcelain's outer, still glossy surface, fogging with steam from the running shower, just now turned off. Moving, as one might, from the shower to the sink, the contrast of its relative cleanliness becomes immediately apparent, especially now as it is quickly, though effectively, wiped clear of any debris by a towel which just moments before had dried a freshly, though incompletely, shaven face. If an unadorned white sink bowl could look at all proud, this one certainly looked so, if only in comparison to the sad beauty of its neighbor. Then, as suddenly as these appeared in the light, both were gone, first for just a moment before returning, then again for many more moments. The power had gone out.
The tenant, having carefully followed the walls and furniture with their hand until locating the battery powered torch kept upon the small, round side table by the mattress, only then discovering that its batteries had long since been harvested and repurposed for use in some other device and so instead making their way by hand and wall and furniture through the rest of the flat, having clumsily found their way into clothing unseen but almost certainly suitable for the day as they owned only a few items to choose from, was at last free of the darkness, and looked up from the balcony. The even, continuous grey of the clouds was just translating the first light of the day through its many layers before graciously offering it to the scene below. Up to the grey, then gazing out, over the fence at the steam rising from the surrounding buildings as precious heat escaped, and finally down at the stairs in an effort not to slip while descending from this, the third floor of an unnumbered building. The stairs, constructed of weatherproofed wood and then, for some bewildering reason, covered in a layer of thin, somewhat industrial carpet, as one would find in a business concerned with traction and potential staining rather than any sense of style or comfort, were an incredible hazard in the cold season. This carpet, which in its intended setting would have offered much desired traction, superior to that of the tile or coated concrete flooring it was intended to cover, collected dirt, moisture, and an incredible ecosystem of slime worthy of a biological survey all its own when placed outdoors in this climate. Still more treacherous than this accumulation on its own, on a morning cold as this one, it tended to freeze into a perfectly solid pad of ice covering almost the entirety of each and every step, save only the border at the edge where each rectangle was too small to reach the true boundary of the step, creating a staircase that seemed an even greater danger than the only other obvious way down: simply pitching oneself over the railing from this, the third floor, or even one of the remaining three above it, directly off the side and down onto the waiting pavement. By this time, however, the tenant had safely descended and, were one to look out from that railing, could be seen making their way slowly down the walk below.
Without another cigarette, and certainly without any food, instead came another real thought: what is that down the way? An unsettling pink mass upon the road had slowed the only audible footsteps to a hesitant patter instead of their usual clip. What could only be known as a rabbit by one distinctive foot which remained intact now came clearly into view. At this funerary pace, eyes roaming across the road to capture the full extent of the late rabbit's last appearance, the tenant's body continued forward as their head slowly turned with the passing scene, never looking quite in the same place but still never really looking away from the rabbit, seeing it here, and here, and there as well, eventually recognizing that they were looking almost completely behind them as they walked beside the road. With the rabbit trailing behind, they turned ahead, gazing down instead at the endless, identically greying aspen leaves which filled the gaps between the scrub grass along the road's crumbling edge. Mud coated the soles and sides of the tenant's boots, and oil from the trucks that used this road coated the mud in the bottom of the holes where boots (perhaps these same boots) had sunk into the surface on wetter days than this one. Occasionally a piece of refuse added some variation to this mixture: ah! the outer wrapper from a sweetbread, or oh? a foil packet, but from what? It seemed impossible to say, with its printed label having suffered in the elements, reduced to an illegible smear. Finally, weighing in at an unmistakable Net Wt. 350g, the reigning champion as the final piece of debris littering this 4km stretch of nearly uninterrupted chain link fence was the pale orange (formerly red) box from an unheard of brand of children's breakfast cereal. Recognition of this, along with the change in pavement, signaled their arrival in an area that could more properly be called a town, and brought their head sharply upward. Their eyes, moving as eyes do with the head, fell immediately upon a new advertisement which had been plastered across the broad side of the fish-packing facility: Enjoy UNAR! The letters, probably taller than anyone reading them if one could guess from down here, took up surprisingly little space out of that dedicated to the advertisement as a whole, and the rest was filled with a realistic image of an UNAR cigarette packet, the typical tear-away corner removed with one reaching out, inviting the viewer to pull it free from the pack. Another thought, this time with feeling: did they stop making Will?
Having been forced to take up a new brand of cigarettes after the discontinuation of their beloved Siyusz, the tenant had resorted to one of the other brands offered by the same manufacturer operating on one of the larger nearby islands, switching begrudgingly to their Will line. The stub consumed on this very morning had, in fact, been the last of a pack of Will cigarettes which had lasted almost one full week, as they had to for a growing number of reasons, not the least of which being that this brand, specifically the version which came in the deep blue packaging (indicating a full strength but with no filter, in contrast to the similarly deep red package) had been increasingly hard to find in the past few months. It had occurred to them, upon failing to find them at the market closest to their unnumbered building, to check near this walk's other terminus, where another market waited. It had not occurred to them until this moment, now seeing that parent company's name in the still human-sized fine print of the ad, that this shortage may not be a temporary anomaly, that it might be the result of dwindling stock as the manufacturer cleared out space for some new product. Suddenly the ad was gone replaced with the image of a small office space where a young man in a blue chalk-stripe suit had just revealed his new strategy to a table of his senior colleagues: I've analyzed the data, I've tabulated the metrics, and though our remaining untapped markets are slim and public opinion remains to our detriment, I believe that our forced renegotiation of suppliers (which, as I'm sure you all know, has resulted in our raw product coming increasingly from the lower region where soil quality varies more greatly, but the trade policies and shipping lane safety are increasingly in our favor to continue operations) could be re-framed as an opportunity to re-brand, and perhaps just a few new customers could be acquired through a carefully timed surge of advertising on our neighboring isles. No smoker quits just because the label has changed, but maybe just one or two more are made, right? This boardroom appeared to blur, quickly and wetly smeared with light just as a mirror being cleaned, revealing a pedestrian traffic signal with its decisive red hand displaying a single finger as if impatiently requesting the pedestrian hold their question for just a moment while the much more important person on the other end of the phone line finished their thought. The tenant, embracing the politeness so often displayed by pedestrians toward their multi-ton friends here upon the way, obliged the hand, and only when it had been replaced with their own warm, glowing silhouette, somehow frozen and carefully cut out to trace the gentle swing of their arms, continued onto the market and inquired about any remaining packs of Will, the dark blue ones, if you have them... Holding a crinkling, golden packet as they emerged, the tenant did their best to enjoy that first drag of UNAR.
Down that street only a few blocks farther, in one of the innumerable metal structures that filled the plots just in from the harbour, the tenant was soon wrapped in their dust-free, protective white oversuit (donned earlier in a cramped room known simply as "the dirtlock") overseeing a rapidly growing stack of thin, plastic cartons piling up from the chute at the end of a large device which took in rough plastic granules and spat out the quickly molded objects. After some number of containers had arrived, as judged by the length of the stack, the tenant swiftly lifted them up so that one corner nestled between a set of thin, parallel metal rods above the chute and drew their service weapon: a trigger-operated handheld air nozzle, roughly in the shape of a small handgun, which they ran up and down the length of the stack exactly twice, walking along it a small gap which moved through the stack giving the cartons an appearance of a deck of cards in the hands of a skilled dealer. Having shuffled and flourished this plastic deck to their satisfaction, the tenant swept them up again and dropped them neatly into an awaiting sleeve, guiding them in with one hand as the other held open the bag, then tying off the end as the hands met at the edges of a unit completed. This all occurred in a matter of only a few seconds, in which the tenant estimated that 80% of another stack was now present at the end of the chute, meaning a few idle seconds more until this process began again. Now in the fall of their seventh year of employment here, the tenant had been taught only this task.
The day’s total reached into the low thousands of containers, but these were nowhere to be found as the tenant walked along one of the harbour’s abandoned ledgeways, tracing a low railing which prevented only the unmotivated from slipping over the edge and into the slapping water below. The day's last light was fading quickly from the clouds spanning out to the horizon. Over that sound of the waves, the brief crescendo of a deep horn, stepping up its daily minor third before reverberating back into the sound of the sea. A few pedestrians dotted the edge of the street above, but no one else joined the tenant on this lower walkway. Along this stretch of harbor, only the damp tunnels under the loading docks and the narrow stairways beside them brought any new scenery to this sunken path, guarded on one side by the concrete wall reaching up to the street and threatened on the other by the eternal clawing of desperate waves reaching for land. The tenant traveled this path strictly for the privacy and constancy offered by these surroundings, and they had done so on more than half of their working days since beginning at the factory nearby. Today, in comparison to many others, the tenant found quite pleasant, with a livable temperature and only moderate winds which offered them the comfort of isolation aurally just as the walkway did spatially. As they fiddled with the matchbook, the tenant shielded a cigarette between body and hands, cornering it between the archway of a dock tunnel on the right and the joined stairway on the left, as if to give it no choice but to take the match. Successful, they remained there for a moment more, allowing the infant ember to get its bearings so that it could hold strong once they continued on. Rather than walking further along the way, the tenant moved out to the railing and leaned, taking in the sky and the artificial moonlight of industrial lamps shining up at it, and the sea undulating outward until they collapsed into a single line, destroyed. In the breaks of the wind, over the sounding waves upon the rocks and finally to the wall, the slight hiss of the cigarette’s paper wrapping burning in the breeze, as the cigarette seemed to smoke itself. Here, a last day's last full thought: isn't that something? what then is left for me?
With a final inhale, it was gone and the tenant released the stub at their fingers to sail on the breeze, down to the water. Turning back, they began the ascent to the road, confidently placing each careful step on the stairs, damp from the sea upon that same breeze. No more than one third of the way up, a dull and familiar pain grew in their abdomen until, after only a few steps more, it became too great and forced them against the wall, gripping the railing with whitening knuckles as they lifted their head to visions of the concrete and streetlamps which now sagged, melting into darkness as the distant horn blew once more.
Anyone who has nodded off at the wheel but felt some need to keep driving would recognize the infinite feeling of waking up—nothing in between, not even the memory of nothing, but the mere absence of any transitional time; though one is surrounded by the evidence that the world (and the car) are still moving at now unimaginable speeds, the evidence is fleeting compared to the nothing into which it breaks. It is a miracle that waking up occurs at all. It is a miracle that it wakes and that, beyond this, it wakes to the car still upon the road, between the lines, which seems at that moment impossible, if one even registers it as a fact at all. Here, reality must eventually set in: that feeling at some time (which cannot resemble any time at all to that which wakes) ceases to break. Whatever thoughts registered in the waking, this no-thought resists apprehension altogether. Here, it seems there is no alternative, no substitute to be found in its place. There is only not in the place of another experience of waking. From this no-state, there is no waiting, there is no advance notice, no attending to what must be done now in preparation for the next thing which must later be done just as one has planned, and there is no knowledge (except from some other experience, outside of that place) of the great machinery which moves the world. How could there be? There is no silence from which it will spring forth, and no darkness out of which it will crawl, burning some infernal fuel to light its own way. Such was the experience of the tenant as they lay upon the steps, shocked and feverish, smeared down their chin and onto their shirt with bile and quickly fading, the result of their gallbladder which had been quietly failing for the preceding months and which had been set to rupture slightly earlier upon their walk. Now, hours later and with a vile heat festering within them, barely able to make sense of their own body in the waking, they stared with narrowing vision as if through the dark tunnel under the dock, out over the lapping waves. Their clothes now soaked while the wet concrete sapped all their radiating warmth, even in their fever. The scene did not come in time to meet them, to find a mind that could recognize the novelty, but out of the warming grey above, the slightest glint of a sunrise had broke the clouds as dawn arrived. A next waking never came. Over the harbour, day breaks with the sound of motion, stone and steel, groaning and tired.