I fell backward into the emptiness in between all things, backward into the place that is the dream of the desire to keep everything apart. As I fell the force of that desire was wrapping itself around me tightly, a thick muscular coil of serpent whose strong grip I felt deep in my bones, crushing me totally, crushing me so that it could take me and rebuild me. Under its grip I relaxed, my muscles releasing softly, giving myself up to it. Everything around me was hazy and uncertain and yet familiar; I hadn’t been there before but the place had always been with me, hiding in the walls, hiding beneath the ground, hiding under my fingernails, concealed inside of me. The veins of that place criss-crossed through all things, hidden like a mining shaft beneath the surface of the world, beneath the surface of our minds and bodies, behind the curtain that sits next to the world’s stage. Peel back the veneer and it’s right there, as obvious as anything else— more obvious than anything else, more real than the dirt or the soil or the plastic, than the gases diffusing over our heads, than the enormous ball of light hovering in the sky and diligently burning itself alive. All these things, in spite of their solidity and their powerful presence, still bend dutifully to the will of this emptiness; everything on earth and beyond it prostrates itself before the dream that upholds the separateness of all things, the dream of not being touched, of not touching. All hands fold themselves into prayer before it, all hands clasp themselves in reverence to it; there is nothing realer than it. It is the highest thing, higher even than violence; it is the highest violence.
When I became accustomed and the haze dissipated, I could see that inside that place was whiteness, similar to the ubiquitous whiteness in the hospital but not exactly the same. It wasn’t fluorescent and glossy, it was matte and dull like the shell of an egg, a slight hint of yellowgreen lurking underneath that made it nauseating, that made my eyes swim and dance with the threat of sickness. What would be there underneath the shell—if I scraped at the white, if I cracked it open, what could I find within? But I couldn’t reach out and touch the white, because I couldn’t locate the confines of the room at all, couldn’t trace a wall or a ceiling or a horizon; when I looked out it was like the white went on and on forever in every direction. It overwhelmed my senses, making my mind stagger and give up on trying to orient itself. The only aspect of the place I could be certain about was that there was a floor, not only because my feet were planted firmly on it, but because I could see the person a short distance away from me sitting cross-legged on it. But I couldn’t find any source of light that was enabling me to see this, to see my feet on the ground and my hands in front of me and the man sitting there; everything shone brightly but without a lamp, without a sun. It shone from some internal source, like the bioluminescence of a deep-sea creature; as though the whole place was a living organism, shining with its own sentient power. I knelt down and placed my hands against the floor, spreading the fingers out carefully, and it was hard and cool like marble. I lowered my body, rolling my legs in front of me and crossing them to mimic the man across from me, and stared at him without fear or even curiosity. I felt that I already knew him, better than perhaps anyone else.
The man sitting in front of me was emaciated, his ribs and collarbone jutting out of his skin, the bottom of his rib cage dramatic against the hollow of his gut; thin folds of skin drooped around his skeletal hands, thin folds of skin drooped around his tendon-and-vein-webbed neck. Long hair, dark, dull and fragile, dropped from his head down his back, with strands falling across his chest and collecting in his lap. His legs, like his arms, were long and thin and insect-like, with frail feet folded underneath them. The dry, cracked lips on his face were slightly parted; eyes closed and lightly fluttering as though from a bad dream. His smooth, hairless face was slim and feminine, and nearly healthy-looking in comparison with the gauntness of his body, with bright, even skin. He was murmuring something to himself quietly, in an endless stream, but no words came out; nothing I could hear. On the left side of his chest, between the nipple and the bottom of the rib cage, there was a hole, a narrow slit that was several inches wide. Its edges were smooth and even with the skin, not red and raw as though it were a wound or a scar; it was as though it were a natural feature of his body. Liquid was streaming out of the slit, a black, thick substance flowing evenly and unendingly down into his lap, splashing onto the floor and moving across it like a stream. I stood up from the floor easily, my body not aching or tired, and moved to follow the flow of the muck, the river that cut through the overbearing whiteness. My steps were careful as I walked along the side of the stream, the sound of my footsteps swallowed by the white floor, muffled so that I couldn’t hear them at all, despite the hard, marble-like surface of the ground. But I could hear the thick trickling flow of the ooze, gurgling and frothing and bubbling, the eager, lively murmurings of liquid in motion. I followed it as it travelled across the ground, my body strong and light but my mind heavy and slow, like I was peacefully underwater. When I had walked for just a few minutes the stream suddenly ended; there was a circular gap in the ground, clean-cut and perfectly round like an ice-fishing hole, around the size of my hand. The black, thick substance flowed straight down into it, all of it falling through the hole, down into the depths. I crouched down on my hands and knees and, adjusting myself carefully so that I could see around the falling stream, peered down into the hole.
Through the hole was a brightness that was brighter than the glow of the white room; I couldn’t make out anything at first because of this and blinked hard, squinting until the shock of the glare wore off. On the other side of the hole the sun was shining with all of its strength; glowing fiery and hot, bearing down with ferocity, with severity, as though trying to ignite the flat landscape beneath it. The ground underneath the terribly bright sun was covered in weeds and grass, a mosaic of patches that were scorched dead yellow and trembling or that were lively green, and standing in the midst of these patches was a horse, bending its long alien snout down over the mess of vegetation. Its gentle, leathery snout with nostrils like gaping caves carved in stone, nostrils carved into the massive boulder of its head. Lining its sad eyes were whiskery, tender lashes, the large, dark pupils sitting behind them like giant glimmering marbles, and suspended in the pupils were gloom and melancholy, and hovering starkly, frighteningly, behind the gloom and melancholy were timidity and intelligence. The impossible mass of the animal’s body was ancient and visceral, both a part of the world and alien to it; the body wrapped in the slick oily brown-black of its coat, its hues shifting subtly as the horse moved. Behind the body its tail flicked fitfully against the air, and across the muscular neck was a line of flowing hair, dark and shining and human-like. Between the horse’s torso and the ground its legs stood in the grass like weapons: bony, gnarled staffs encoded with the threat of their strength and virility, of their speed. The animal was beautiful in a terrible, sad way; completely innocent. I was looking out at it through a hole in a wall, looking horizontally across the landscape instead of down onto it through a hole in the sky, as I should have been. The dark substance was flowing out through the hole, around my eye, down the wall and across the landscape where it gurgled in the weeds, seeped into the soil, puddled in the dirt, staining the green and yellow and brown field with black oil. In the distance the horse stepped cautiously through the brush on its sturdy legs, bending its neck down and sniffing at the green parts, raising its head and gazing disaffectedly toward the horizon, not noticing me as I looked out at it, not noticing as the substance streamed through the hole.
I stood back up in the matte white space. My hands were dirty, stained with grime; I had gotten some of the substance on them and it was sticky and thick against my skin, clinging to me. I wiped my palms on the front of my pants, leaving large dark streaks, but my hands still looked the same afterwards, as though the substance had simply duplicated itself on contact with another surface, as though whatever it touched could never be free of it, would be stained for eternity. The man was still seated with his legs crossed on the floor, his face bowed, his eyes vacant and far-off, not focused on anything; there was nothing in his face other than the smooth gleam of his skin and the perfect snowblind silence. With the ooze leaking out of his wound he was a fountain, quiet and devout, committed to his task. I stepped away from the hole in the ground and walked back toward him, and as I walked toward him I could feel someone else doing the same, from the opposite side of the room. I couldn’t hear their footsteps or see them but I could feel the slight shifts in the atmosphere, a tingling awareness at the back of my head that alerted me to another presence, a familiar, intimate presence. I spun around looking for it, my heart pounding in my throat, the blood whipping around in my body; my blood that was happy to rush along the same pathway, again and again for years, no exit, no way to get off the ride, my blood that was resigned to its biology, to the singularity of its purpose, and I wanted to be, too. I wanted to be resigned to a singular grand purpose; with all of my movements and thoughts I begged for it. The man sat still with the ooze falling out of him and behind him I could see the thing approaching, the shape of its body vague against the luminescent white of the room, like it was emerging from a cloud, a splotch of colour marring the uniformity.
I was in front of the man with the fountain-body, looking over his shoulder at the thing approaching us. As it got closer its body clarified in the midst of the whiteness, as it approached us with even steps on its tiny legs, the tiny legs that carried its tiny body, a body that hadn’t truly defined itself yet, hadn’t yet laid claim to the form it was fated to take, all smooth dewy skin, with slight, frail wisps of hair on its awkward, pudgy head. When I saw it I could feel the emptiness inside me, the emptiness of my muscles tensing and relaxing, the emptiness of blood shifting back and forth, of the cyclical pulsing of organs. Nothing as solid as a voice, as the presence of another, of a thing greater than me, just the mechanical indifference of biology. It was completely gone, the blessing that had placed me outside of the confines of myself, the blessing that had freed me from my death and swaddled me warmly, that had grabbed me by the loose skin on the nape of my neck and placed me in an open field, taught me which direction to run in and how to run as quickly as I could. The blessing that had chosen me, that had turned the key in the lock and slid open the large metal doors, shown me what lay inside the hidden vault, the vault that had blended into the wall until it was pointed out to me. The blessing that had permitted me to understand the secret sickly sweetness hidden in the pit of each passing moment, and I had lowered my trembling tongue to it and tasted it, lapped it up until it melted under the heat of my breath. It had left me and I was empty again, not knowing in which direction to run, not knowing how to continue on. The child walked out of the matte whiteness and stood beside the emaciated man, looking at me with strange, indifferent eyes.
The man finally raised his head and looked at me, with the same incomprehensible, vacant expression as the child’s, an unbothered animal loosely considering its familiar scenery. I couldn’t tell if there was intelligence behind his eyes, or something different, something I couldn’t quite understand, a different way for a mind to engage with the world around it, not greater or less than intelligence but outside its scope entirely. The child had the same thing in its eyes; it was a cold, alienating gaze, and with both of their gazes locked on me they isolated me from them and from the white space. I was stabbed by the acute sense that I didn’t belong there, that I was an intruder, that everything about me clashed grotesquely with the air: the contours of my clothes and flesh, my hair and my arms and legs, the way I breathed. I was a hideous sharp accent against the serene atmosphere of the room, a drop of oil in a glass of water. My heart beat sluggishly against the wall of my chest, and now that my awareness had sharpened with anxiety I could feel, inside me, almost imperceptibly, the little crawling of insects. Inside my body were dozens and dozens of little insects, enacting their drama in the gaps between my ribs, burrowing holes into the softer parts of my marrow, fighting and crawling and shedding exoskeletons inside me; I was the stage for the drama they were enacting. This whole time I had been the stage. And as I felt the insects crawl over me there was something else, something that was waiting patiently for me to understand it; that I was inching closer to understanding, but that I couldn’t bear to understand, a burden I would never be able to bear.
The child held out its hand to me with the palm upturned, and the drama that the insects were in the midst of exploring stopped in its course. I stepped outside the way the narrative was unfurling and things slid into a different gear; the child’s extended hand was another option. The man on the floor uncrossed and recrossed his spindly legs, turning his upper body to face the child, and with his left hand touched the tip of his thumb to the tip of his forefinger, the other three fingers extended out. With the two fingers pressed together he reached out and touched the child on the left side of its chest, just below the nipple. The man traced a line with his fingers a few inches long and then twisted his body back to face forward again, returning his hands to his lap and facing down. The child just stood there with the same blank expression, hand held out to me, waiting for me to clasp it with my own. On its chest where the man had traced his fingers the flesh began to part, without redness of blood or friction, opening up smoothly and gently as though tenderly unfurling a pair of wings after a long period of rest, and from behind the parting flesh the dark substance began to stream out; first hesitantly, in little drops, and then in earnest, flowing forth, falling over the child’s body onto the floor. The substance flowed across the floor next to the stream that flowed from the man’s body, the two streams twisting and curving parallel to one another until a few feet away they joined together in one singular thick, full river, before dropping off into the hole in the ground.
The whiteness of the room wrapped around me like a cocoon, and I stood quietly waiting to see what would happen, unsure of where to plant my next step, waiting for a guiding light to descend onto the top of my head and drape itself over my shoulders, over my back, over my stomach and calves, to warm my muscles and stimulate my feelings, propel me into motion, show me which way to go. The child stood patiently, hand held out to me, the dark substance streaming out of its body and over the floor, and even without words I knew what it was saying to me: sit with us and work. I could perform the work alongside them, and through the work I would keep all things at a safe distance from each other, I would keep myself at a safe distance from all other things. And as we worked, overtop of the world would hover an illusion weaved to keep the fantasy intact, to keep the world believing it’s made of solid objects pressed together when it’s really made out of gas, out of inexact sentiments and necessary delusions. I could become an artisan of the impenetrable distance between everything, I could become a tool for the dream of the desire to keep everything apart; I could blend into the throbbing eggshell-white of the room, melt into it like sugar under intense heat. If I became a tool here, my death couldn’t scare me, I could hold my death in the palm of my hand, clenching and join them; this was a choice I had to make on my own, of my own volition. I didn’t move toward the child’s outstretched hand, I didn’t step back. And through the hole in the floor the black substance fell, a terrible waterfall nourishing the world.
Supplication is now available from Influx Press. You can order a copy here.
Nour Abi-Nakhoul is a writer and editor based in Montreal. Her work has appeared in a variety of Canadian and American publications. Supplication is her first novel. Twiiter: @nourabinakhoul
minor literature[s] 