You wake up on a perfectly clear glass bed. It’s perhaps a familiar place; albeit full of mirrors, hundreds — a confused mental nod speaks about the dissociation, but withdraws your face and your scent before hugging you. Now torn by your image, you consider how alert you should be as you scan the room: constant reflection shoots your sight to the ceiling, or, well, back inside your glass brain and neck. Sight takes a frantic hold of you — nothing but rapid saccade. Your skin spoke of merging with glass, and that, well, hits you hard; a bizarre figure-thought that splits into two, fixes itself behind your eyes, and jump starts a suction spiral into your inner ears, the grand jury of all proprioceptive errors, a withdrawal from horror into free-fall. Your glass neck annoyingly tugs on your awareness: it feels like a thousand little air bubbles are trapped beneath the surface, some terrible nausea.
You look again at your reflection and yes, there’s that grin of yours suppressing all of your confusion like a sponge. It’s so bright and colorful. You listen to the mixing and pouring of orange, yellow, red, green… blue. This ocular hubbub pulls you into following the dusty trail of the spectral crowd. It takes a while, but you find their gathering place in a particularly large mirror that reflects the odd theater you are, for lack of a better word, trapped in — moments only to be blinded by the bright flare of colors swirling around the geometric, mathematical bore. It looks like the source of light is behind you. A metallic taste, feels like thyme against your teeth… you turn your head around multiple ways, chasing a pale blue trail. You found him! Behind your back, under you — it’s a holographic, bipedal hue stuffing you with color! You notice that he’s shaking with suppressed laughter. It feels like he adores you.
“All that’s behind us is energy” he said, “and all that is in front of us is time” he whizzed, “but this moment expands itself into forever haha, until I know how I can give you a massage”, and it tried its best to give you a back rub. What he said felt like a fundamental and concrete belief towards figuring out how it could release your day from your glass muscles.
You focus on what he’s doing: his hand drowns and wriggles in your back, but resurfaces easily breathing the bright air. Each dive broke into a laser show of feelings; wave after wave of proper conversation, as if maple syrup was the cure for headaches. It was amazing, after the fact and chimes you no longer felt nauseous, honestly; the twitches you felt anticipating each and every touch, dish-washing all the focal errors that map and scan your memories, as if as a child your brass parents with their brass feelings were opening the door to your room once in a lifetime, recurring. Huh. The conjured up image of your parents is quickly ravaged by a mongoloid abyss.
You’re starting to recognize the situation. All the tiny bubbles in your neck took the appearance of tiny humans, gathering around the bonfire dimly burning in the back of your head, carrying little drums, strings, strangely shaped tubes and sticky drinks, preparing for the promise of a moon tan by the holographic man: Mohammad Abdu’s virtual jailer.
The holographic man was there for all the ends you seek, always unwilling what you will— a process of stasis transformed into constant motion that leads you to nowhere, some unraveling that extrapolates your ego into a fantastic dream.
Under the sway of release, all that music made a particularly external, mechanized sound more obvious. Twisting open your ears like a plastic coke bottle, the fuzz sieved through your surroundings and took with it the moon kin and their bulk. That strange sound was coming from ways above you — a giant printing press was absorbing the ground with its tedious hum, spewing mirrors onto the floor that strangely enough never crash but simply fall through. Something etched on the machine in large font caught your attention:
“My world begins at the limit of your eyesight.” You started thinking could that be the bizarre internal dogma of the medium reflecting the infinity above? The mongoloid wouldn’t allow it, but maybe you could imagine it was a huge glass pyramid perching on a green meadow, where only hard-working cows and sheep kept track of your prison time with their daily meals. Besides, anyway, you just woke up.
Nothing makes sense to you.
How would such a prison function if it weren’t for the very nature of who you are?
Just half a kilometer away there was a slouching figure facing westward.
The 6-feet tall lizard — standing on his feet over a calm azure pond — let out an audible, slow sigh. The Sun’s light was conscious of your prison, so it carefully glazed over and bled into the water, the pond waiting with transparent surgical gauze of green and other green, beginning a medicated meeting between the two. The lizard had removed its clothes some long while ago and, he was just staring and brooding. He buried his face in his hands. The bones of his thighs sank in the ground, but the muscles lazily stuck around.
“Better to be a skeptic than a hypocrite,” he said.
The sky was almost orange; a hazy dusk tinge overlapping with itself then fully spreading like a sail, welcoming the breeze to set sail the waking world towards a yellow saucerful of dreams.
But for the restless, hopeless, those who couldn’t follow:
The lizard thought he’d wash himself from head to toes if God would devour him.
He missed you so much, and he had decided that he would break you out tonight, even though it would break his knightly oath towards Mohammad Abdu. No longer could he wait for you to finish your prison sentence.
All you did was object over the fact that Abdu can’t possibly melt your brass parents into jewelry for him to wear.
And so furious a song was his sentence; verses over notes that propel into impregnating your mind with the abyss. You — rendered withdrawn and docile — turned his attention towards building your prison while the lizards danced under the trance of his music.
That was years ago.
The lizard opened his eyes. The moon was slightly buoyant inside a shelf in the sky. Traces of dark grey clouds, starless black salivating over the earth. The wind died days ago: Abdu was carrying the corpse in full stride over to your lizard friend.
God of the Labyrinth, the Star Seed born in the burial mounds of past universes.
All-Father Abdu: consumer of alien flesh, admirer of mirrors; a black gelatinous hum that sings to entropy, a harbinger of energy and possible worlds; curator of realities.
There’s so much one could forget about this world; lifetimes, a collectiveness of memories, shared works and conversations, pain, misery, and utter joy. Forgetfulness preserves dignity.
Your prison disappears alongside you.
------
ART & TEXT: AZIZ