Part 4 to this story posted previously (here)
“Stay with me to the end.” She asked, having to speak in a normal tone to be heard through the wind, even though her face was leaned against my shoulder.
“I will.” I agreed. “The war will end, you know, at least for now. I think this will be its last battle.”
She nodded, and swallowed. “That’s something.” The leaves were whipping about in the air, but none of them came within a foot of us, as if we were in a bubble. I noticed that the wind seemed to be moving to the right no matter where I looked - as if it was circling the two of us. “Matt, do you think I have a soul?” She asked suddenly.
“What?” I asked.
“I mean, do you think there will be an afterlife for a person you imagined?” Her voice was brittle, like the slightest touch would shatter its composed veneer.
I squeezed my eyes shut. The simple question deserved weeks of thought, and I had probably ten minutes before the question was answered for her, one way or the other. “I don’t... I don’t know.” I admitted. “But I hope so.”
“Oh?” She looked up to me hopefully.
“You are genuine. You are more a person, more human than I ever learned to be.” I replied as the wind again gusted. In the distance there was a crashing sound, as if a tree had fallen.
“You’re human, Matt.” Laura’s head again fell to rest on my shoulder. “I think you just want to think you aren’t, it makes things make more sense to you.”
“I just killed you.” I replied, and my voice cracked considerably. “I was able to do it. I’m a monster, Laura. Have been for some time.”
The wind was now an even roar, as loud as the gusts had been, though it didn’t seem to touch us. The branches of trees just at the edges of my vision were all being shaken and pulled, and the leaf litter around them was blowing into the air. “No.” She replied. “You cared enough about me to let me choose.”
Tears stung my eyes, and I blinked them back. I could feel that sensation cascading down to the baseline world, where I became conscious of the fact that it was dark, and that I was alone, so no-one would notice. As soon as I had verified this, though, I dived back in to be with Laura. I didn’t answer her, I just held her in what I hoped was a comforting way, as the blowing wall of dead leaves and sticks grew closer to us, closer to the bole of the great ash tree which we both stood below. As trees vanished behind this maelstrom, there were crashing noises, as if they were being shredded by the wind. “Not long now.” I finally said numbly. For some reason, my words carried over the sounds of the world’s oncoming end.
“Will you be okay?” She asked shakily.
“When this world is gone, I will be left in a void in my mind, which is full of voids.” I offered the explanation to console her. “The destruction of this world will not harm me in that way.” I had to use that caveat - I already suspected what would become of me and my war.
“Okay.” She breathed into my shoulder. The wall of wind was now only a dozen yards away, closing at a steady rate of a few inches every second. “Did you plan this show out for me, Matt?”
“I didn’t.” I admitted. “Ending in a windstorm, though, seems fitting.”
“The birds knew before we did.” Laura gave a breathy, dry laugh. “I don’t envy that knowledge.”
I nodded silently. Now the wind was beginning to spiral around us, too, swirling up from the ground, lifting Laura’s hair to brush against her face and mine. Some leaves, too, were lifted, but only a few of the lightest, driest ones.
I watched the wall of wind and debris close to five yards, then four, neither of us speaking. What could I say to her? The raw emotion that was coursing through my veins in lieu of blood was wordless, soundless, hopeless. I couldn’t possibly begin. I didn’t want her to be destroyed, but that was already done - I had already murdered Laura by pulling the ruling thread out of her reality. I wanted to tell her so many things, but my mouth stayed closed - I didn’t want to make this last span of her existence as much a heartbreak for her as it was already going to be for me. Heartbreak, of course, is the correct term - I realized then that I bore inexplicable, unbounded love for this person, who was about to cease to exist, to leave no trace in the world, in any world.
The wall of wind was mere feet away now, and I could see that it was not flat - it was curved, the edges of a contracting sphere of chaos. As the top of this sphere drew down, the light itself faded out, leaving Laura and myself clinging to each other in an ever-smaller space surrounded, I knew, by intellectual void.
“Will it hurt?” She asked quietly. Despite the cacophony, I could still hear her perfectly.
“No more than drifting off to sleep, Laura.” I replied, unsure but trying to sound confident in my suspicions. “Sleep well, Laura, and dream of better worlds than I could ever have shown you.”
She looked up at me for a brief moment, and I saw a single tear break free from one eye and trickle a jagged, wind-blown path down her cheek. “Thank you, Matt. I - ”
I felt the touch of the debris vortex on my feet and head, and drew back, out of the world, into the baseline. I found myself next to a guard-rail overlooking the decorative pond on the north side of campus. It was late, perhaps two in the morning, and the cool air was painting me a very clear picture of where the tears had tracked down my face, and dripped onto my collar. I gripped the guard-rail, leaning on it for support, and took a few breaths, before diving back into my mind and entering The Room. The fire was far lower than its norm, and a very deep shade of blue.
You promised her you would end this. The words of my second pattern rang out immediately. To suspend her in that state is... Wrong.
“I can’t do it, my friend.” I whispered, shaking. “I can’t go back there and feel her dissolve from my arms. I can’t. It will kill me too.”
Doubtful. The parts of the whole that are most at risk are those that cause the most conflict anyway. Came the reply. You must be strong. I cannot enter worlds without you, you know that.
“I wouldn’t ask you to.” I managed to get in. “Imagine, this is your fault.” I called out lamely, not that Imagine was conscious.
Imagine’s usually confident, cock-sure female voice was broken, shaky in my mind. “I did not want this, my old friend.” It seemed to say. “This was not supposed to happen. You were supposed to choose her over the world that so hurt you, and instead look at what you have done. You could probably have preserved that world from the madness, and lived there for all time. Do not place blame for this tragedy upon me.”
“I could not choose that world over the baseline.” I shouted back. In the baseline, this shout escaped my lips as a loud whisper. “I couldn’t.”
I could tell that my mind’s impression of Imagine was accurate - it was weak, perhaps dying. “Why not?” These two words came unbidden into my consciousness, barely a broken whisper, a dying breath.
“Because...“ I started, but trailed off. “Because it would be wrong...” I lamely finished, after a few seconds, clinging to morality out of the same desperation that a drowning man clings to the lifeguard saving him.
There was no reply. Imagine, in my mind’s self-generated impression, did not have a retort for this argument.
Finish what you promised, and our war is over. My second pattern said after several minutes of silence. Then we can rest, we can learn to live in our worlds in peace.
“But no matter how much I look in those worlds, I’ll never find her again, or anyone like her.” I pointed out.
The baseline holds many real people like yourself. Perhaps even like her.
“And I hope they never have the misfortune of crossing paths with me.” I replied angrily. “Don’t you see? Imagine’s way would have saved everyone! It would have put me out of the position to bring any harm to any person, except Laura. My friend, what have we done? At what cost have we come to win our war?”
At great cost, my friend. The second pattern’s voice never held tone or inflexion, it was only words, but this time I thought I detected a hint of pain in it then. But we have preserved the integrity of our being, and we need not maintain the moral contradiction of keeping an intelligent prisoner in a fabricated world.
I nodded. “Was it worth it?” I asked.
Let us live, friend, and in years to come you can answer that for yourself.
I moved to stand over the dying fire - I could tell now that it was dying - and stared into the flickering blue abyss. “Is Imagine right?” I asked. “Could I have made that world proof against the storm of madness?
Unknown. However, it was unknown until recently that worlds could be destroyed by force of will, so the possibility exists. Would you willingly live in a world of lies, and deceive someone you love into accepting it as truth? Could you do that forever, my friend?
“I don’t know.” I admitted.
Then let us not speculate further.
“Let me at least sleep through the night, I will re-enter The Forest tomorrow and end this.”
That compromise seems fair.
Rather than respond, I pulled out of The Room and hurriedly wiped my face with the sleeve of my sweatshirt, then headed for the dormitories, checking the time as I went on my watch. It was three fifteen, give or take, and I had class at nine.
Rather than bother with conventions like a shower or changing into the loose athletic shorts that passed for my sleeping garb, I merely snuck into the room, under the light-blocking curtain, and up into my bed. I thought I would have trouble sleeping, but sleep came in an instant.
It was not the next day, or the day after, or the one after that, but I eventually did feel the strength in me to take on the daunting task of seeing my intellectual and emotional murder through. None of my friends or room-mates knew it, but that unseasonably cold early fall day was my birthday. They didn’t know because I didn’t tell them, and no-one felt they were close enough to me to ask when it was that my age changed its numbering. My parents called and wished me a half-hearted ‘happy birthday’ at lunch, but the call quickly devolved into snooping into my personal life, asking if I had a girlfriend yet, that sort of thing, so I lied to them, claimed I had remembered I was late to a study session, and ended the call.
In truth, it was their snooping that reminded me that Laura, suspended in time, was still waiting for my presence to finish dying. For some days I had avoided letting my mind be idle enough for my second pattern’s voice to become apparent, and I had not made use of any of my worlds save the baseline. I didn’t want to think, I just wanted to buy time, but I knew that day that I could not begin to heal those hurts until I was done inflicting them.
The blue fire in The Room was barely sufficient to see my usual chair by, it had gone down to the point of being only bluish-black embers glowing on the hearth. Occasionally, the embers would shift, and there would be a flash of brighter light.
You have not fulfilled your promise. My second pattern greeted me. But I sense that you plan to, today.
“Tonight.” I replied. “Let the sun set, let me find privacy.”
Agreed. I trust you. It would be destruction to doubt you.
I nodded, stayed a few moments to watch the blue light crawl across the embers, then backed out and went about my day, trying not to think of the night’s planned grim task.
The night was clear, sharply cold, enough so that even the usual sparse traffic on the campus footpaths had all retreated to seek warmth indoors. It was eleven thirty, or thereabouts, when I stepped outside, and I took a brief time to walk to a safe, relatively hidden place, where I sat down and dived into my own mind, sifting about for the box labeled “The Forest.” Finding it, I hesitated.
A wordless, toneless, expressionless frown radiated from my second pattern. Taking a deep breath, I upended The Forest for the last time.
The vortex inched down, and I could feel it dissolving Laura, but she clung tighter even as her form turned to mist. I almost relented, I almost pulled out of the world to find a way, any way, to undo the damage I had done, to call all of this a bad joke, to have a good laugh, and to leave the woods with her, arm in arm, to see about getting her home. A life unfolded before me in that moment, a life of us kissing on the second date and of her confessing to me that she suspected I was ‘the one’ after six weeks. A life where I proposed to her, and we were married a week after graduation in the beautiful chapel on the hill across town from State’s campus, and where we had a lovely honeymoon cruise in the Mediterranean, after which I took a job to support her, and she chased her dream of becoming a writer. A life where I was promoted to management in only two years, and became good friends with one of the company VPs. A life where Laura’s second book, finished after our son was born, made enough money over the decades to fund my run for city councilor, then the subsequent run for mayor, then after that my play for the local congressional seat. A life where I was pulled out of a committee meeting in Washington to get the news that I was a grandfather of twin girls, beautiful, healthy babies born to my son’s beautiful wife, who we were proud to call daughter-in-law. A life where Laura and I retired to live in a house by a lake, where those grand-daughters came to visit often, but in between we just walked at our aged pace through the quiet woods around our home, remembering the day we’d met, when we walked similar woods, and we laughed about how crazy I’d been, to think a world as beautiful as ours to be all in my head.
Almost, though, never became a reality. Laura became void in my arms, and was gone, there was no more wind, no more woods, nothing. I was suspended in senseless void, and my mind rebelled from it, and reflexively backed out.
Only then did I let the emotions get to me. Even in the baseline, I dropped to one knee because standing seemed impossible, and one hand stabilized me, resting on the cruelly-cold concrete path. I had killed her to end my war, and it was indeed over, for the time being at least. I felt like I should be celebrating, but felt more like dying.
After several deep breaths, I re-entered my mind and found The Room, gratefully entering, dropping into its chair as an exhausted soldier newly home from the front.
It is done. Came the words of my second pattern the moment I was inside.
“I killed her.” I agreed numbly. The embers were almost burned out, and I moved to watch them.
You did what you promised to do.
“That doesn’t make me feel any better.”
How do you feel?
I watched one ember finally go out forever, then another. “I feel...” There were dozens going out now, and the wan light was dimming further. “Broken. As dead as she is.”
The last embers winked out, and I, all the components of my mind, were cast into darkness. I welcomed it as a blessing, because darkness seemed a fitting companion, it promised nothing, but nothing was just what I was looking for, just what I deserved, welcome.
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