Snake Eyes

When everyone had left, he went upstairs to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. It was there as, he assumed, it always had been; a huge black artery. He seemed to have shadowy memories of it from his childhood but couldn’t be certain if he was imagining such recollections.

Does it really matter now?

It surprised him that the answer was yes.

He realised that he could not have been born with the tube attached to him. People and tubes were solid things. It would have been impossible. Either the tube had become attached some time after birth or he and everyone else had not been born in the normal way. Feeling the weight of the implications bearing down on him with sudden and irresistible force, he decided to get away for a while. He needed time to think on his own. He didn’t say goodbye to Angelina or the children. He didn’t take his phone or his wallet. He took the car and drove into the hills outside the city.

The higher roads of the mountains had lookout points for picnickers and tourists and it was to one of these that Johnson drove, parking the car with its bumper right up to the safety barrier. It was long dark by the time he arrived. He put the seat back and tried to sleep but couldn’t sink any deeper into unconsciousness than a light dream state. There he encountered only the nightmares that his conscious mind hid from him during the daylight.

He dreamed of umbilical strangulation and Ventouse delivery during which the vacuum sucked out his brain rather than drawing him intact from the womb. He dreamed of running to escape cohorts of black eels that flew though the air behind him. He dreamed that he was paralysed in the trailing stingers of a giant jellyfish. He dreamed that each time he woke and checked his watch, the dawn was always farther away. That was the nightmare that distressed him most. Each time he had the dream he would moan, a dull cry muffled by the leather interior, heard by no one.

Finally the grey mountain light seeped through the car windows and into his eyes. He put the seat up and stepped out of the car. His body was stiff and the chill morning did nothing to ease him. He sat on the bonnet of the car and stared into the valley where he and his family had lived for three generations.

The light came slowly. He didn’t know if he wanted it to come faster and reveal the truth or for the sun to change its mind and never illuminate his life again. At first when he saw the column above the city he thought it was smoke but the shape was to uniform for that to make sense.

As the morning gained strength he realised that what he could see was a hundred thousand tubes stretching beyond vision into the sky. Everyone was wired up to…for the briefest moment he had the word ‘heaven’ in his mind but it was gone almost before it was formed. Johnson knew that heaven had no wires. That which was above him, beyond his sight; no, that was not heaven.

He abandoned the car and walked away from the road into the hills. Finding himself somewhere in the tree line, he was cocooned for an hour or so in the damp air of pine shadow. Too soon though, the trees thinned out and ended. He was nearing one of the lower summits.

His body eased out with the walking and although the air was chill against his face, his blood was warm. He stopped for a moment. There was no one around. The forest and the hills were silent apart from the occasional birdcall. The solitude embraced him and for a short time he felt a positive surge, a thrill of freedom.

A rustling nearby caught his attention immediately in the quiet ambience. He looked to where the noise had come from and saw a fox darting for cover in the undergrowth. From the top of the fox’s head a thin black tube extended skyward. The fox was there and then gone in an instant but the image did not escape him. He knew what he had seen and what it implied. A bird flew overhead. It too had a tube connecting it into the blue. Looking back at the trees, he saw that some of them were similarly interfaced with the sky. He turned away and struck out a pace for the top of the mountain.

Half an hour later he was there, staring out across the land. Back towards his city the view was relatively normal although he could still see the waving tower of black above it.

When he looked deeper into the range of mountains, a harsher cold than any frosty morning could instill spread out from his heart. The highest peak of the range was partly shrouded in mist and cloud but he could still see the monstrous black colon that protruded from its loftiest crest. The mountain’s tube must have been dozens of metres across at least.

Nothing was free; the very land itself was invaded and ensnared. He raised his hands to the sky and dropped to his knees in the loose shale of the mountainside.

“Why?”

The tears came first. He covered his face with his hands, hiding himself from the truth of the world around him and wept. When he was spent, a rage grew in the vacuum behind his sobs.