A Cloud in Heaven

Part 3

        The next three days bled together as a seamless series of gray melancholy and fervent terror. Episodic assaults on the final shreds of sanity mingled against a dwindling supply of antidepressants and anxiety medication. The small breaks in between each episode felt like a luxury only a few could afford, an escape of immense cost and effort that never lasted long enough. He hardly ate and drank. His skin felt taught against his softened muscles, squeezing his bones tightly in a macabre embrace. He was killing himself not in a swift act of mercy to end the traumatic fear but instead slowly through neglect. He could not touch his cell phone to reach out to his mother, his uncle, or any family member who passed through the digital gates of simulated paradise. To re-charge his phone would seal his fate. This way he would have to save himself but he knew he had neither the strength nor the capacity to save anything. He plunged into each pill bottle, making sure to scrape what medication he could from each one. The mixtures made him sick. A cure turned to poison. He vomited regularly. He perspired until small seas formed on the tiles of the bathroom. He did not even bother numbing his pain through television for any joy that he found in the act was now meaningless, now even more meaningless than before. It was just a widow into a world that was not his.

        The world he saw was dead for generations, stolen by the rampant greed of a world that fueled men to seek solutions to unburden a failing society. A world were corporations kept the governments as prostitutes to be paid for services behind closed doors and left the people of the world with a hidden, unknown shame. The brothels of bureaucracy were bought and sold to the highest bidder, to those with enough wealth to make a difference but desired to change nothing. Those that held hope for their redemption suffered immeasurably under the new business model. It was suffering the everyman did not understand. They were fooled to believe change was for the best. Politicians only cared for themselves but corporations relied on the people. They thought they would serve them but truly it was the other way around. A new order disguised as a cheap fad. A short fix to the burgeoning problem of food and housing shortages. The votes were cast. The hands were shook. The money was spent and the bloodied ink dried. They did not understand as automation filled every crack of humanity. They did not realize when millions died to serve a cause they believed in. It was truly business as usual. He was too young to understand the world that was lost. Too young to grasp the concept of the cost of progress, an enshrouding mist of diagnoses and remedy ensured he would be none the wiser. He lost everything before he realized he had any of it.

        The last pill rung out of the plastic tube, clacking against the smooth concave walls as it landed in his hand with a small thud. The label was torn and faded with the contents of the pale blue pill resting in the grooves of his palm a mystery. He swallowed it like all the rest, indifferent of its effects. He went over to the sofa and slumped into the sagging seat once more and began to stare vacantly at the dark screen before him as he had done day in and day out. This time a feeling itched him that had never before. Beneath the TV he saw the box labeled Mom's Things and it occurred to him that he never once opened it after she ascended. Curiosity overwhelmed him. He faintly remembered the contents of the cardboard time capsule. He felt the medication slowly take hold, hacking away at his interest and killing his curiosity. He needed to know before he slipped once more into the suffocating sea. He flung himself across the room like a desperate animal escaping a hunter's snare by mere inches. With the little strength he had, he flung the television to the carpet, with it landing with a muffled crash as the internal components raddled within the boxy frame. He kneeled before the box and felt a small sliver of terror cut through him, partially dulled by the sea swelling inside him. Slowly he opened the sides of the box to unveil a container nearly empty. The only contents were a small dried leather bound copy of Alice in Wonderland, a raggedy stuffed bear that had lost a majority of its faux fur to time, and a small stack of crumpled photographs. Everything was caked in a thick layer of hardened dust and the smell of neglect. This was all his mother left behind. These were the only memories of her he had left. He picked up the book and examined its yellowed pages, sliding his fingers along its cracking spine. The pages were creased from constant use and were torn slightly along the edges. The smell of old paper permeated the air. It was novel he remembered fondly. It was the only book he ever knew in a world where they had become relics of a more imaginative time. She would often read passages out it to him as a child to comfort him from the insane world beyond their apartment's door. To him a world of talking animals and mad hatters seemed saner than reality. In his world no one awoke from their dreams. They stayed in a wonderland. It was a charade of humanity. He laid the book to the side and lifted the teddy bear from its cardboard crypt. Some of the fur disintegrated in his hand as he lifted it towards him, falling to the carpet in dusty clumps. Its limbs sagged against gravity with stuffing peeking out from between his fingers. The bear had seen better years when it was held close to him at night. It was one of the last remaining pieces of his mother's childhood, passed on to him as a handy down companion. It served her well against the terror of loss and tragedy. He could see the bear's left arm still appeared deformed from his heavy grip. It was a reminder of the night he could not let go of it. The night when he locked himself away in his room and cried deeply into the matted fur. He clutched the arm of his bear as tight as he could as his father laid in the next room, stiff and cold. He remembered trying to sandwich his ears between the pillow and the bear to extinguish the sounds of his mother's wails. She was crying to an empty room, unsuccessfully pleading with the void. He saw the bear now falling to pieces from time and abuse. Time and abuse. He laid the teddy upon the book and lifted the last artifact from the dust filled tomb of his mother. They were crumbled slightly along the edges, bent from reminiscing of better days. The dust clung to their glossy exterior along the grooves of old finger prints and coffee stains. He held windows of events he never bore witness too. A past that was not his to remember. An era of preservation when those who could afford to remembered tried to save the past that was quickly slipping beyond their failing minds. He shuffled through each memory, staring intently upon each face burned into the paper with light and ink. They were people and places he did not recognize. Then he reached the final photo of the stack. It was a young woman and man sitting on a curbing. Trash was around them. Cigarette butts and crumpled cups were strewn all around. She wore her hair wavy and naturally brown. The man had thick black hair that was swept upward with a dark black mustache hiding his upper lip. Her stomach was large and round, bulging through her dress. They smiled. They held each other. They seemed happy. Tears flooded the rims of his eyes and flooded his pupils, drowning his vision. A woman who was saved. A man who was damned. A child, innocent, stuck in purgatory and awaiting the deliverance of a fate he never chose. Warm tears ran down his cheeks, moving along his skin with a slow methodic march to his chin. He held the picture and felt the eyes of his parents upon him. Their happiness a reminder of the hole inside himself. It was his inability to exist within the world he was left to survive alone. The tears crash to the floor and were absorbed instantly by the fabric, disappearing into oblivion. He lowered the photograph. He could not bear the sight of it anymore. He let it go. He let it drift to the floor to lay amongst the remains of his mother. They were her legacy, reminders of what was lost. His head was light. The pill had worked itself through him and crippled his movement. He went to raise himself up but crashed down upon the ground.

        The sea washed over him with the thick sludge grabbing his flesh and pulling him deep into the waves. Dancing in the abyss, he felt his heart slow, his eyes fail, and his breath deepen. His respiration slowed to a crawl. He drifted in the abyss against the murky black with no light to illuminate him. There was no paradise. No refuge arose. No palm trees blowing slightly in a warm breeze. No sand releasing their warmth from a day of basking in the sun's rays. No emerald waves splashing cold sea foam upon his skin. He heard a sound. It was a distant echo as he floated aimlessly in the nothing. The sound was muffled, too far away to comprehend, but it was warm. It cut across the icy black. He felt it touch him like a reassuring hand. The sound grew closer evolving into a voice. It was a soft voice whispering sweetly across the expanse. It spoke in tongues alien to him, gargled transmissions coming across space and time. The sounds danced around him, growing from a whisper to an uproar. They irradiated him and wrapped him in a blanket of fire. Light exploded all around him. The darkness receded. He floated through nothing still. It was just an empty white as blank as bleached paper. The voice disappeared. Now there was only himself, alone once again in the void. He felt something within himself. The feeling was strange. It was numbing at first but then exciting all of his senses at once. A sensory overload pervaded him. He curled into himself. Pain. Comfort. Joy. Sadness. Fear. Acceptance. They mixed within him, his empty vessel now filled to the brim with more than he could bare. The great war inside of him raged. Then as suddenly as it began it ended. The feeling left him with one final thought, the question remained in him. Why?

        Then he woke up.