I’m not sure how I got here, where the electrodes came from, or why there’s jelly on my freshly shaven head. I can’t move. My hands are firmly strapped to the bed. I’m naked. Everything is cold. I’m cold. Iridescent light shatters the deadening silence, crushing me with its random cycling. There is no pattern. Everything is light. My eyelids are no haven. There is no solace. White maddening flickering, where are the colors? are they entirely awash? will they return? Everything was built from insufferable verisimilitude. Beating, orange, metallic, cold, my ears are deaf but my nose cannot be mute. I know there is a machine. I saw it and it’s beside me. It came through the door on uneven wheels. A child, or some simple mind must have built it. There were wires, chaotic, scattered wires. It has no structure. It reeks electric. And then shade, beautiful shade. Something is there. The burning in my brain is gone. The shine is gone. Worlds built passive and no way out. I thrash and I bruise. Again the rays explode into my temple. Then cold, dark, orange, wait: red, light, darkness. Please don’t go gray, please.

Warmth, wet, warmth. Do you see? I am dead. I know it. It is so. It has to be. The air is dark like the chilled effervescence of my home. There my room was always cold. The heat from the stove never reached my little corner of the house. That’s why in the mornings, before I went to school, I would wake early to light it. Then I would sleep until my mother came to wake me. She always came, she always took me to school, and, for a time, she would walk me to the entrance. My attendance was impeccable. I never rode a bus. My mother drove me. I was special. I was deaf. She never told me why or how. I can’t remember. There just isn’t anything there. I never asked because I was afraid. I tried but I couldn’t see back to the beginning. I don’t remember. No one remembers. If only I could see back to then. Now is color: vivid blue-gray haze. Everything is floating in the pond behind my house.

It would freeze in the winter and in January my father would let me clear a patch, by then he was certain it had frozen. Sometimes I went out before he said I could, when everything was still brittle. Once I fell through, though not far. My legs cracked the surface and plunged under, but I was tall and the water shallow—my thighs never fully submerged. I raced back to change before they came back. I don’t think they ever knew, but maybe they did. I always wanted to swim there. I was forbidden to because the water was dirty and full of mud and animals. I caught frogs and tadpoles. They were slippery and smelled like moss. If they squirmed they would get loose and it didn’t bother me. They wouldn’t go far, and I could catch them again. I would float in the pond, lying on my back, staring into the sky. The water was pungent and sticky, and when I stood my feet would sink into the muck, and my parents would smell it. I never bathed, except when my mother would come take me to scrub in our big white tub. Sweat didn’t bother me; it was sweet and dirty. Not sweet like the smell of my mother. She was white like vanilla. It was the brown stain of smudged green mud and grass, infused with yellow dandelions. No, to me she was as the flower of an orchid, harvested pure.

Her smell was as the joy of catching even the faintest glimpse of the letter “o”. For me it glowed more brightly than anything. It possessed the inimitable beauty of the pure, clear, white light. My father, though, was never consistent. His smell to me was a mystery, an ever-shifting collage of colors and images, muted heavily by the soap he slathered over his face to protect it from his razor. He wasn’t particularly tall, and though he wasn’t thin, he certainly wasn’t fat. He was my father. There were no other children; perhaps they were simply content with me; perhaps they supposed their next child to be some other crippled little thing. I never asked. They never told. My father had a difficult time learning sign language, though it came naturally to my mother. He never really learned. He never really tried. It was easy for me. I was a good student, and I made friends with the other children. Some of them could hear little bits; they went to classes that helped them develop their speech. Eventually, a few left for the public schools. I don’t mind, I never wasted my time; I had other things to do. I loved to read, but I loved the letters more than the words. Every letter sparkled, and I would stare at a page for hours, moving languidly from word to word I would smile with every color, every tint. I only confessed these sensations to my mother. My father wouldn’t have understood. She never said anything. She never told a soul. She was a glittering white “o”; sometimes he was muted black “i”. Other times he was gray; oftentimes he was nothing.

Stop now. Everything is crushing red vapor, wafting smoky “a’s” enveloping my mind like clouds over the sun. And they cast shadows! Unbearable haze. There is no clear path; it’s gone. Why am I dead? how am I dead? why? Everything should be black, but I can’t find it. Oh, there, I see; this is cold. It’s cold like the winter. During those months the ploughs would come and push giant piles of snow to the edges of my elementary school parking lot. When they finished we would climb the embankments triumphantly. At the top we would play king of the hill. The pandemonium subsided after the first brief moments, yielding to the single-handed dominance of one boy over the others. Before all this, before recess actually began, we would put on our snowsuits and boots, neatly kept during the day in a small corridor at the building’s entrance. The clothing manufacturer’s claimed that such vestments would keep out the cold and keep us children safe. This wasn’t always true. Once, I fell from the top where some bigger, older kid knocked me down. I fell onto a piece of metal protruding from the snow at the bottom. The moment was an instantaneous wind-swept swoon, and I was bleeding. I didn’t move. I didn’t know it but a circle of people formed around me. One of the teacher’s came and found blood seeping into the snow cradling my small head. For me there was only the freezing cold bite of the snow beneath my face crushed up and compacted into my cheeks, oozing into my pores. The teacher, she lifted me into her arms and I screamed. I screamed and her face contorted and she dropped me and I screamed. I didn’t know then, but I scared that teacher. It was my first sound and it was terrible; she never came back to the school. I don’t know where she is now. I never did it again, I can’t. I can still see her face through narrowly squinted eyes.

Shattering black silence crushes my mind. My eyes are closed. My mind is drifting. I can see it. I can see the colors everywhere. Why am I in the darkness? There, over there. I see the white. No. It’s gone. But red, there, there it is. I’m in the red vapor. Here is good. Good like my mother. I hadn’t seen her for so long, and now she is here, she came. I know it now. She came to help me because I wrote her. I asked her to come. Why am I dead? Why won’t my eyes open? Who did this to me? Everything is gray and there are no answers. In school I always knew the answer. I was always the first to raise my hand, and I was always right. I signed better than everyone else. My mother explained to me that that was why the children didn’t like me. I didn’t care about them. Why should I have? There’s no reason. They didn’t care about me. My teachers were happy and my parents were happy. That’s what I thought. But things changed. I got older and I stopped caring about them. What did it really matter if they were proud? Why were they even proud just because I knew the answers. I knew I knew. That was all that mattered. I stopped raising my hand. Stop it. Don’t think about these things. They don’t exist. This isn’t it, the white is gone. Where did it go? Outside, everything is outside.

There, I am here. I wrote her. I needed her. Without her I couldn’t have gotten here; I wouldn’t be in the mist; I wouldn’t be seeing these things. It was in the books. The way out, it was written in the books and they all said one thing: the world is sound. Everything is composed of vibration, it reverberates through every pore in my body, but I can’t hear it. That’s it. She’s here to make me whole. But my father never cared. No, why should I be whole. The way I am is the way I should be, in his mind the road to salvation leads purely through the realm of acceptance. Well fuck him. I don’t accept it. I know there is something beyond this, but I must be whole. It is written that there is a way beyond these things, beyond these infirmities, these petty sufferings, beyond this horrible world. But, to get there, I must rectify the fatal flaw with which I am most regrettably afflicted. I must leave the gray vapors, I must stay beyond the disparate fields contained within the i’s and o’s floating beside me. I must find the white light, I know its there. I know there is nothing else. I am nothing.

But when I stopped caring I was nothing and nothing was all I sought. Why worry, why try, in the end I would only die. There was no one to please. They were all going to die. I could read every book, I could see the entire world and where would I be? What could there possibly be at the end of such a road? But the question itself is preposterous. There is no end to the road. It stretches onwards into the infinite horizon and every step taken along the path only increases the journey that much further. Without any reasons I would have abandoned hope but for my sense of sight and smell. For it was there that I derived my greatest pleasure—they were intricately intertwined. When I would read I broke each word into its individual letters. Some of them carried distinct beautiful and bright colors, and with these colors I smelled the most fragrant smells. These letters gave me joy, but then, others brought a great burden. For these letters smelled of decay, or, even worse, they carried no odor at all. These letters were gray, existing in many different shades of darkness. Wait. Let them go. In between the pigments is the white. There, in the spaces between I can see it. I can feel it. I can feel my body again. Everything is sticky everything is warm. Everything is soft. I squint my eyes to see the white moving towards me. The brightness is intensifying. Everything is blinding piercing clear translucent white light. I can feel my body shudder. There’s something moving over me. I am inside of her. I shudder. She is moving, but I cannot. I can feel her. The spasming is uncontrollable. Blissful currents course quickly through my veins. I have come.

The clear translucency surrounds everything and I can feel myself in two places at once. Remember, remember to move towards the red. There are two planes. I can smell the red and I creep toward it. I am a being of white light and I am moving through the channel. I can see my destination. It’s so close. It’s so very close now, the looming red egg. I move faster and I am inside of it. The shroud explodes into a cascading shower of heady colors—permeating throughout every particle of the universe back into my mind, into my very consciousness. I am whole again. I can feel it. I have taken his place, now he’s gone forever. I am here. I will never leave. She will never leave. I know that. I don’t dare think it. They were right, and I can hear the great sound of the universe echo throughout my head. Blissful release into existence: it was accomplished.

My eyes open. The light is everywhere yellow. There, I see the machine. The wires are aimless. My arms are loose as they rise slowly with the force of weakened muscle. The iridescent light is still above me. I feel my head—gooey—the electrodes are still attached. I detach them carefully. They are joined to the machine, which—I have to squint—seems to be attached to a CD player. There are red and white wires connecting the two objects. They are clearly both unplugged. I am completely free. I am naked. I see splintered sunlight through the corner of my eye. There is a woman in the distance; she is naked. She moves carefully and gingerly pulls open the window shades. The light from outside is diffused morning-sprung semi-darkness. She circumambulates the room carefully; raising and lowering her feet in a silent, perfect motion. She stops beside me reaching for the cord dangling above me. I know this woman. I love her.

“Are you alright?” she says this as she pulls down on the cord, silencing the bright light hanging from the ceiling above. Everything is much darker now; the fractured light through the windows imbuing the room with a bluish pallor. I had never heard her voice before. I had never heard anyone’s voice before. It’s a rainbow connecting the earth and sky, a vertical shaft rising like a great beam in the horizon. My eyes shut instantly—the sound consumes my brain as gigantic pulsing waves of rumbling foam tumble across my ears, causing the nerves of my body to tingle in the wake of the white-blue vibration. Again my eyes open.

“Are you alright?” this time her voice quivers with the light vibrato of concern. I close my eyes even more tightly and the ocean roars through my temples. I can feel her fingers moving in slow circuits over my head. Her breath is pungent and sweet. Her face is near. I open my eyes to her eyes. She breathes heavily and sighs with her breasts. I open my mouth; I close it. I breathe deeply and lie back to rest. I close my eyes, and her hand is over my head. I can feel its warmth above me. The sensation is icy-hot, cold and strange. It’s made of skin and jelly. I had never been bald before.

I open my mouth again. This time I make a word: “Ma.” I scarcely finish my sentence before her body presses hard against mine. Then everything is warmth—sticky, wet, warmth. My body instantly relaxes under the pressure; I wilt with the force of her skin. Everything is limp. I try again: “Mama.” My words are feeble; my mouth lacks years of training. But I can’t worry; how can I worry in her arms? Surrounded by that soft suppleness I cannot help but smile.

“I thought you were going to die. I really did. But it worked. Everything worked. I love you so much, I love…”

“Yes,” the word explodes out of my chest and she stops talking, though I knew what to say before, I hadn’t been able to speak. It’s much easier now. Sensing her unease I continue: “Yes, mama. I am fine.”

“I know,” what little tension existed in her arms subsides and she turns me to my side holding me from behind—no longer clutching, our bodies melt.

“I am tired,” the waves crash at an ever-increasing speed throughout the synapses in my skull; each with a deepening peace. I feel the world and it’s beautiful.

“So am I. Go to sleep.”

“I love you mother.”

“I love you son.” No man has felt such joy. She rocks me slowly, somehow sensing the movement of flickering patterns in my eyelids; perhaps she’s controlling them with the light sway of her torso.