Therefore, I Think I Am

Battling with the Night of Mirrors

VIII. "Most people are other people."

- Oscar Wilde

I feel my body begin to slow its steps, coming across something important enough to deserve its pause. Focusing back on the present, my eyes are met with a familiar sight: ruins. I wonder for a moment if we've done nothing but made a giant circle back to Port Burdock. Yet those ruins are a façade constructed to keep safe the precious community nested inside. These ruins are a classic case of disorder, an accidental chaos where buildings are almost strewn about the landscape. Where Burdock's walls were unbroken, a solid barrier, this town's are crumbling.

Moving inside the concrete decay, the differences continue. Where Port Burdock had the vague spark of life, here there is nothing. No whispers of conversation, no fires of tiny industry. If not for the barely recognized husks of buildings, I would believe myself amidst a forest of rocks, a modern Stonehenge weathered by time. The silence is disconcerting by itself, and, perhaps for reassurance, my body looks to find Sancho standing behind as always. The sheriff seems unaffected by the tenor of this town, swaying as always in his personal breeze. It may be that his sunglasses are somehow blocking out the oddness of this place; I do not think my body has spoken to him since we left Port Burdock, though, considering my detachment, I cannot be completely sure.

My body moves down a thoroughfare, pausing occasionally to look into the rubble of small houses that border the path. Each seems empty, bar a few piles of junk scattered haphazardly about the floors. Unfortunately, my body is prevented from doing too much exploring, encountering more strange barriers to progress. Some rooms have fallen furniture across the doorways, and while I intellectually know that my body should be able to move the pieces to explore further, my hands cannot, or will not.

There is a consistent gloom at work here. I imagine that, were the sun out and shining, the aura generated by these remains would still block out its warmth and light. Even the air here is heavy, bent over by some ineffable force that both depresses and sets the teeth on edge. It is not so much that the surroundings are terrifying or even scary, but there is a surreal nature to all of it. Even with Sancho close by, the complete lack of vitality makes me feel like I am the last man alive, like I am the last straw unsnapped in a hurricane. My body pauses a moment after searching a fifth skeletal house, seeming to wait for some otherworldly force to sweep me up and away from this husk of a town. Then the moment is gone, and my body continues to search broken hovels. I do not know for what it searches, but given that I have no power to command it to do otherwise, I rest on the laurels that I have never possessed.

But then I see something out of the corner of my mind's eye. The space beyond one of the proprietor-less houses seems to give off... something. If I called the atmosphere here ineffable before, no word exists to describe the attraction I suddenly feel, overcome by a magnetism that beckons me onward. My body pauses again, as if my mind has discovered something that my body has always sought to keep hidden. Reticent and seeking to keep this new matter veiled from me, it slowly begins to back away. I feel the sudden urge to surge against my restrictions again, fighting for even momentary control of my facilities, so badly do I desire to seek the source of this new feeling.

My backpedaling body passes Sancho, his stooped form coming into view. He seems unaware of this strange internal conflict. His sunglasses are off, the misshapen eyes beneath wide and staring straight ahead as his fingers scrub the dirty lenses ineffectually. I feel sudden kinship with those eyes, knowing the pain that his smaller, frozen eye must experience. To be stuck staring blindly straight ahead, knowing that your counterpart is free to allow its gaze to wander is truly a unique version of hell. Though, it seems this particular form of torture is becoming less unique. I have learned to live with my own forced imprisonment but I am oddly infuriated by his ocular incarceration, and feel myself fueled further to resist the blind movements of my being. Slowly my body ceases to move backwards, freezing into a statue in the middle of a dead city, an old man in his separate world as my only company.