Excerpts from D O W N

By Jaspar Aslan, written at age 14

Chapter #1

I am running. The thought hits me now as if I were brain dead. I believe I have been running for a while. 

Step-step-step-step-step.

Again and again, my feet hit the ground a little too softly, a little too visually incoherent.

Step-step-step. A small pause. Am I in midair?

I can’t remember why I am running, so I slow down. Eventually, I come to a stop, and my legs remain motionless. I become aware of my breaths. Clear, but with weight, building up in my esophagus. Making it harder to do anything but exhale. Tall stakes of wood, those are trees, tower before me, beside me, and everywhere in between. A few more steps forward. Dry, dry ground crunches beneath me, with strange patches of moss and roots protruding through the ground. Why am I here, in this wonderful place? Where am I? My thoughts are cut short as my next step causes me to stumble, falling hard and smashing my jaw on a long, thick root. Fresh, cold blood seeps out of my jaw, dripping with the consistency of water.

As I sit up, I let it fall gracefully into my hand. Cool, crisp liquid, flowing slowly through my fingers, dripping off in the same manner as it had arrived in my hand. I bring my roughly cupped hands to my mouth, taking a slow, soundless sip. It tastes like, well, blood. I’m not sure what I was expecting. No matter, the flow has stopped, a surprisingly quick interval as well. I lie back down. The trees are neat and top-flat, blocking most of the light. Even still, the lights that penetrate are blinding, and a clear grey sky, my favorite color, is peeking through, almost playfully. Lifting myself off the ground is an effort, but, once standing, I can fully take in my predicament. 

I am in what appears as a forest. A large one, dense in some locations, less so in others. I have developed some degree of amnesia, at least to the point where I cannot remember what forest I am in, nor entering a forest at all. I glance around the canopy of trees, looking for one that I could climb, one allowing me to survey the somewhat-symmetrical landscape. Standing right behind me seems a complex organism, one that looks as if it had been split clean down the middle, yet is just two trees helixing upwards. It is ideal for climbing. I loved the idea of climbing trees when I was little. My parents owned a dim yellow cottage in some obscure, rural environment. There was a lake, lined with fruit that looked happy and would open up and turn themselves inside out for you. But in the center of the lake, there was a small platform, a miniature sandbar, with a big tree. They loved showing it off. I remember, with the deep, dark water and the brightness of it all.

But I couldn’t climb it. No no no they said, nobody is allowed to touch such a wonderful tree, not our tree. But a tree that could elicit so much attention never sunk from my peripheral. It was sticky in my head, like an old antique store. So when I walked through the blinding white gate, the ground slowly gathering moisture as if to peddle it on the streets the next morning, the fruits with their smiling faces curving down into a cupped mouth, colors, red, blue, gray, black, swimming with each other in the murky black water leading my gaze up to the sky and then around, back down behind me and finally, when the spinning would stop like it always did, the tree, the big beautiful tree, its brown veins sprouting, spurting up from the ground like a wrist with the skin removed, peeled back into a stump rising up from the lake. I only noticed I was in the water once my torso went under, as if my legs weren't there anymore, but I knew they must be, as the water climbed up higher on my body, its frothy nails gripping my skin, pulling itself up, not with malicious intent, but as if it had seen salvation at the top, a place where it could just be water and not a dark, murky lake. One where it was not condemned to be consumed by the tree nor sold by the mud nor killed only to reform somewhere else as a middle finger from god. Or whatever the lake believed in, a holy pool of water from a time that no-one remembers but still existed.

Counting the second before the water reaches its prize, before I am held under, it is at my mouth now. I close my eyes. My senses go to the equilibrium between water and not water, the microscopic line where I am or am not submerged. The water is cold in some places but warm on top, a layer of silt on dirt or the dirty fireplace without any wood in the room with yellow walls, a lampshade but no lamp, a television, and an old, very old chair with flowers depicted in its plump cushions, it belonged to your great grandparents but you don’t believe it really did, in fact, you don’t think you had great grandparents. You can’t picture them in the beige fields climbing up to the chimney with a soot sponge, a large one on a stick that you named Pan when you were little because that is what you thought it looked like, but it didn’t look like the frying pan in your head and you kept thinking about why you said it did. You can’t picture them sitting in the chair on your porch staring at the glorious tree amidst the lake amidst the rows and rows of wheat in the field, relishing the separation from politics and culture and humanity and all the rest of the horrible, horrible complications of the world.

The only place you can see them is banging on the glass of their black-and-white photos in their rosary baptism picture frames, bleeding from the ankles from whatever cult sanctum they had been assimilated into. You remember their pictures somewhat like that, and had talked for hours- no, days- about great-grandma and great-grandpa and all their exciting intricate adventures. But he stopped believing in them when he stopped believing in god, in superheroes, in Santa Claus, because that is all they are, some made up character to exploit for one's own personal gain. Candy. Followers. Money. A chance to have some quality time, to sit down on your lap and laugh with you and hear you tell me how much you love me when I really never cared, a chance to win me over, to make life easier in the long run, so maybe I’ll stop hiding and come downstairs for dinner, stop reading and hang out with us, stop writing and make some friends, or just fuck all that and come crying back to us so we can take care of you now. So I don’t think I had great grandparents and I couldn’t feel the line anymore because there was no line, and when I opened my eyes I saw black. And as I motioned forwards and the water took me there, grip the ground with my scratched fingers, break the surface as if I was breaking apart all the lies in my head, I realized that I was standing in front of the tree, in all its mass and omnipotence. 

And so I began the climb.

Chapter #2

A busy person, but serving for a purpose with cost. Your definition of a devotee, though as you can’t understand phonetics, you have to stick with the unimaginary /ˌdɛvoʊˈti/. You are one able to physically move god away from you. From your everything. You are seated at your office, a small, dim lit chamber with beige, thin walls like cardstock. They bend, and bend back, but will stay up. You know they will. Even if only yours. Your desk is cluttered, but in order, holding a computer screen and keyboard, both tucked into the edges of the desk, as there was really no need for them anymore, a stack of papers, yellowed from your colleague’s light shining through the screen doors and the old bulb sitting in the white lamp with the black cover, casting shadows over the paper and forcing your hands to as well. If it wasn’t so late, you would’ve turned it off. It is quite irritating to see your own shadows. A pet peeve, if you will. Next, a stapler. Small, plastic. You don’t staple your ideas together. Unneeded. Most of these things are. 

A rectangular box of items. Some big, some smaller than those which are big. Cords weaving around and sometimes through your clutter, the gaps in your fingers, the legs of the desk, with spherical bulges near the feet, and curving indents that the cords love to hide in, strangling the knees and crawling up and down playfully. The carpet is gray in the room. It is whiter outside, but gray in here, a trick of the light, or perhaps the filth and sand that crumbles from the dilapidated desk, filling the carpet and the cords and the christmas carols sung outside, losing their enthusiasm as the door fails to open, and everyone in the building stays in their offices and nobody opens the door. And then the sand spills over the top and you can’t hear them anymore. 

A knock on your office door, but you know it isn’t carolers. “Nevermore” you think humorously, remembering all the poems you used to read and write. But not anymore. Nevermore. Your muscles shift and snap as you get up. The brass peephole burrowing into the door makes you shudder. It watches you like a parasite, digging in deeper. You attempt to ignore it, but you avoid putting your eye to it nevertheless, feeling that it wants you to, even as it stays powerless, extracting its sustenance from the door, as if it knows you have caught it doing something bad, but doesn’t care, because it knows that you won’t try to stop it. An empty mind is a quiet one, like the quiet, empty building of those called terrorists and those called saviors. What is your job supposed to be, anyway? What is of such importance that you are being paid to practically do nothing? 

You open the door. A limp man is held in place, arcing over himself, an abnormally tall figure and a large, pale face, both joined in tandem to outline and fill the man, the man at your door. He must be a coworker or one of your superiors, but you never had time for names anyway, thinking them only useful if one was around others. 

“Ayn Constantine.” He refers to your name in the odd in between of boredom and a focused purpose, where he mustn't waste time but is realizing that he does so much too often. 

“How have you been? What would you say about your time here as an employee and devotee?” Strangely, he uses the same voice, yet with a more positive message. Your blank stare apparently is enough to elicit a tertiary set of grievances.

“We’re collecting feedback.” Snap out of it.

“Oh.” He gives you a form.

Employee feedback form, it so unceremoniously reads. How do you feel about our office space, one-to-ten? How satisfied are you with your working hours, one-to-ten? One-to-ten. One: ten. One? Ten. You don’t care, putting tens on all of them. By the slim chance that they advertise the forms, they would only show the good reviews, so leaving a bad one wouldn't accomplish anything. Plus, they would know it had come from you, making it all the more hilarious. You sink to a state of anger as you realize how much thought you had put into this. 

Back to your desk, this time complete with the finished form, eventually getting entangled with the cords and wires. You sit back down, being left again to ponder what exactly you were supposed to be doing. Your mind starts to wander, and you notice how cold you are. Cold yet warmly isolated, as the temperatures war with the back of your neck, so unaware of everything around them. Why are you like them? Why are you unaware? Did you fail to explain to yourself that you got a job when you got it? How can you exist so differently from the norm that you don’t even know what you’re doing, sitting in your chair, in the same office that you have been working all day in. Working. It feels as if you woke up about five minutes ago. What happened yesterday? The day before that? A poem comes to mind. “Do you still feel / all the weight you hold / from below”. You hate the thought that you could be important to anything. Anybody. 

You’ll come to terms with yourself, eventually. You don’t mind not-knowing like you used to. Just sit in your cold-hot room and let the knives climb through your back and scalp until they reach your eyes.

You won’t have to work anymore when they do.

•   •   •

Journal entry, day 266/1?

I went home early, sat outside the house and cried.

I’m not sure why.

After that, I went inside and tried to write. It was all wrong.

I showered and went to sleep. 

To-do:

• Pay taxes

• Finish chapter eight

• Find out what to do at work tomorrow

• Call Mom

• Save for therapy

• Lock the house

• Put the keys in your pocket

3.12.23

Chapter 3

And now, the orange sunset shines over the ruined world, its wings as lavish as the fish that isolate themselves deep in the bottom of the well, the well that you stand tall next to, asserting yourself over the well yet it still mocks you. 

“I am still here”, you hear yourself say to the well. Just as much as it is, yet you aren’t, and the well sits cross-legged to listen to your confessions. You know you need to fall away, to leave, but exhaustion makes futile any efforts that you know never really were there. You have been here five days. You do not plan to leave. You have eaten nothing, drinking from the well’s bright viscous water. You close your eyes and hear blackness washing the inside of your ears, scraping layers upon layers of plaque and mold and all the bad things that have found their way into you. Maybe it's time to sleep.

•   •   •

Go backwards.

Focus again.

One two three four

Five six seven ei-

Miru stretches open her eyelids, a short-long process that she despises. It is her least favorite occasion of the moment. At first, she feels her eyes start to strain, pulling them closed while they writhe around like bugs trapped in a glass. Then comes the moment where she knows her eyes are open, yet open to the point where she cannot see anything, still in the deep brownness that she could only experience when viewing the backs of her eyelids. Then they are open, and her eyes push forward impatiently, struggling to exit her skull yet failing; settling down once her vision comes into focus. And when she finally does, she sees the same sight that she fears could be a slug burrowing in the back of her skull. She lies, half submerged, in a river, lined with reeds and suspiciously clear, more of a flowing gas than a liquid. The sky is gone. Up in the air there ceases to be a sky, only negative. Miru sits up. Her pants have become saturated now, tightly adhered to her legs, yet the water stays lukewarm, not cold, though it is quite a cold… day? Night? Without a sky Miru can’t tell. Miru presses her palm into the ground, pebbles worming their way into her hand, but not penetrating. She lifts herself up off the cold ground. Nothing. Just a field of gray reeds, sticking out of moist ground, save for the sediment resting at the bottom of the stream. The terrain is flat, the ground is wet, the sky is gone. Miru sits back down, feeling the water running into and through her legs, leaving no trace or seams, like it was never there. And to exhale, in that moment, was like sucking out the blood from behind her brain; expelling all her insides into a gaseous river that flows indefinitely in a sea of gray reeds. Miru decided she didn’t want to be here any longer. 

Miru felt the reeds brushing against her legs as she walked up the river, feet skewing to the right along with the riverbank, the stale loam separating the water and the mud. What side was she on? Or was she no side but the loam, the divider of the two sides, possessing no bias yet ultimately creating the opposition. The reeds had a sharp spike, occasionally scraping white and red lines across her skin in an incomplete arc, but they only came so close to the river, likely by reason of the outlying shells of withered plants poking out of the loam, like nails through particle- board. Slowly, as Miru walked, the ground started to change, to rise and fall like mountains on a miniature scale. The river, though, stayed flat, the loam yet again blocking out anything outside. As Miru took her next step, she felt a cold sensation on the underside of her foot. An old fishhook lay, hook deep in the ground, as a notion of stupidity, or confusion, or both. Miru sat down once more, turning the fishhook around in her hand, eyes locked on the river. Could there be or have once been some creatures here? Something to break the solitude. Miru kept her eyes on the river. 

A passage of time later, Miru sees a dark shape wriggling up the river. Up the river, not down, and this reminds her of a children's story, one about a fish climbing up a river to give its kin a chance to glide back down, only to one day make the climb again. No matter. Miru moves forward inelegantly, and the form starts to move upwards, away from her, with intense speed. Miru gets up and runs, sprinting across the uneven ground, her feet coming down with instability, like a table balanced on one center point. Now she cannot be sure that the form is a fish at all, and realized at this moment that she had earlier expected it to be one. Eventually, the form stops moving, lying in wait, swishing around but not moving from its spot. Miru starts to slow down, hearing her feet pat on the soft soil. A wet tapping resounds clearly with each advance. Miru stops once she reaches the river. The form hasn’t really moved yet, despite resting in a moving river, as if tethered to the ground watching her for her next move. Miru opens her hand. She had been clutching the fishhook too hard; the barb had made small cuts along her palm. The moment she brings the hook out the form squirms, but still doesn’t exactly change position. As if it can’t go, even though it really wants to. Miru crouches down, sticking her hand out over the thing, waiting for some sort of action, wary of its strange nature. 

Miru pinches the fishhook strongly between her fingers, lowering it down like a magnet, scanning over the thing. Suddenly, it jumps, torquing Miru’s wrist backwards, as the hook drops down into the river. Silence. Dread creeps up into Miru’s scalp, and in this moment she knows that it was silent. It had been silent the entire time she was here. But it isn’t now, and in lieu of the silence are three immediate problems: One, the form is gone. Upon Miru’s blink, the thing had vanished. She starts to hear it now, quiet in her ears. A small noise, an innocent one. Miru stands up and turns around and back. and then up. Two, the sky is here. And it is falling down rapidly. The sound is noticeable, and Miru runs into the fields, screaming incoherently. And finally, three. Physically out of sight from Miru, yet omnipresent to anybody near, a white shape floats down the river. Slowly. Mercilessly. Because the reeds are breaking; snapping; falling and sinking into the river, destroying the facade of the wall that Miru has been hiding behind, floating lazily down the river as if completely unaware yet knowing its exact destination. And she feels it, because the reeds are breaking, and the screaming doesn't help because the noise that plays miles inside your ears is just getting louder, like an air raid, but this is not from the air, because curled into a ball it is INSIDE. And all Miru hopes and dreams for is mercy, because the reeds are breaking and the graceful white dancer is spinning and spinning in its solitary boat, unwinding the music box, penetrating layer by layer until you cannot see it anymore, only for it to burst out of your eyes and scream. 

And just then,

The sky hits the ground

And everything is gone.

…

Don’t worry.

There is always tomorrow.

You can wake up now.