jamieproctor.ca

November 2^nd – Finished moving in – both the bedroom AND the living room are now furnished with my total of five bits of furniture. The bathroom I’m leaving as it is. This house really is a piece of shit – three rooms, one garage, and ten feet from the highway. God knows what sleeping’s going to be like. This job had better pay off…

November 3^rd – Apparently when someone says “we’d like to hire you” you should know that they are also saying “if the five better-qualified applicants all drop dead of heart attacks within the next two days.” Assholes. Now I’ve got nothing to do but sit around in this shack, with nothing but fifteen boxes of Kraft Dinner for company, and check the classifieds. And I don’t know if I can take much more of this… last night was hell. I just sat there in bed with my eyes wide open listening to that goddamn highway; the noise was almost hypnotic. I could barely blink. My eyelids are so dry that I still don’t think I can.

Well, it’s nine. Time for another night from hell.

November 4^th – The classifieds suck. But they did offer me five minutes of entertainment when fashioned into crude paper airplanes and hurled across the room. Then one bashed into a wasps’ nest that had been quietly sitting unnoticed in the corner of the living room and I had to spend the next hour fighting for my life. I really do hate this house.

Now for another restful sleep.

November 5^th – What is it with this town; did all the jobs fly south for the winter?! Out of the five thousand, nine hundred, and forty-two cars that passed last night, not one stopped in this cow-pie village. Yes, I counted. In addition, two thousand, three hundred and seventy-six trucks went by last night. And one boatmobile.

Three nights with no sleep and no blinking – strange, I don’t seem to need to anymore – have glued my eyelashes together into two solid masses. It’s almost a good thing – gunk had started to accumulated on my eyeballs, but now I can kinda twitch my cheeks and these things brush ‘em off.

Night four begins in five minutes.

November 6^th – I can’t blink anymore even if I try. I’m getting better at the eyebrow wiping, though. Now I can do it almost as instinctively and periodically as blinking. Whoop-de-do.

I’m starting to get more used to the highway sound, but I still can’t sleep. Not that I care anymore.

November 7^th – Yeah, still no sleep. I think my eyeballs have enlarged; somehow, there doesn’t seem to be much room left for my nose in the middle of my face now. Also, my premature baldness has accelerated. It’s like the house is determined to drag me down with it.

November 8^th – I couldn’t sleep last night, so I moved into the garage. I won’t say I fell asleep, but I got some rest. I’ve just noticed that my skin’s getting all weird now – almost calloused-hard, but smoother – so maybe that has something to do with it.

Time for another evening of highway music. Y’know, I almost welcome it now. Though since my days are spent looking at the classifieds without really reading them, I guess anything’s an improvement.

November 9^th – Rested in the garage again. I think I’ll move in here.

I’m getting fat. Not sure how, since I’ve only been eating Kraft Dinner, and that’s twice a day. All I know is that I have to go sideways through doors. Getting harder to turn myself around, too. I’m looking forward to a good evening of highway.

I think my eyeballs met this afternoon. My perspective just went “bink” and there they were. Makes spotting flies before they land on me a helluva lot easier.

November 10^th – When I came out of my rest this morning, I was listening to the Pussycat Dolls somewhere behind my left ear. What was left of my hair had twisted itself into a little aerial overnight. Found out I could change channels by sticking my finger in my ear and swivelling it, switched it to a classic rock station, and left it. Useful. I’ll turn it off for the highway tonight, though.

November 11^th – I lost my nose this morning. I’m pretty sure that no one else besides Michael Jackson can say that. I just came out of rest and it was gone. Feh, the thing was too big anyways. Although it had been getting smaller recently. Commemorated the moment by switching my head to Michael Jackson for five minutes, then turning it off when I remembered how much I loathed his music.

November 12^th – Stopped eating Kraft Dinner. Not really hungry anymore, although I keep getting bulkier. It’s getting harder to even use this Dictaphone – my fingers are getting stubbier.

Highway was nice last night.

November 13^th – Gasoline is surprisingly tasty. No, really, it’s great. If it tastes bad when you drink it, you’re just not doing it right. The trick is to pour it into your ear.

That’s odd… my other ear vanished. Probably not important.

November 14^th – I’ve discovered that it’s far easier to move around on my hands and knees than any other way. Well, I think they’re my hands and knees. They’ve kind of blended into my arms and legs. Eh, same difference.

November 15^th – My teeth have intertwined into some sort of grill. This is really, really, REALLY bad news. I hate rappers, and I hate bling. At least the grill isn’t gold – it’s more shiny, like stainless steel.

November 16^th – Thought I saw something on my grill, looked in a mirror, and realized it said “Honda” right in the center of it. Also found out that my nose hasn’t vanished, it just shrank. It looks like some kind of little ornament sitting on my hood. I mean face. Whatever.

November 17^th – Der grill haff competely fealed off my teef. It’f getting hard to tark. Feh, who caref. Der highfay iff ‘ooking ‘etter and ‘etter. I fink Im gonna go for a drife foon.

Problem iff… the garaffe door iff fhut. Im gonna haffa get fhrough it fomehow, an’ my handff are gone.

Hey… there’ff some high-octane fuel in here. Wonder who left it?

November 18^th – Vrrroom, Vrroom, Vrrom, muuuuuuururrrrrrrr – screeeeeeaaaaaaacccchhhhh…

–CRUNCH clANG CRunK!

Vrooooommm…

Copyright 2007, Jamie Proctor.

Rocks. Damned rocks.

There they go, on as if without end, past the horizon and the horizon beyond it, over and onward, backwards and forwards, in front and behind. Big ones, medium ones, and little ones that are just chips off the first two kinds. Rocks. Damned, damned rocks. Black, jagged rocks. Damn them.

I don’t know a lot about geology, but I’m sure these aren’t granite, gabbro, slate, sandstone, flint, or limestone. They’re just rocks. Black ones. Come to think of it, they might be obsidian. Who knows? Not me.

I hate the rocks. I hate them so much that there’s barely any effort in it anymore; the kind of old, polished hate whose reason is a solid and fused mass of issues and grievances all tangled up beyond unknotting. Still, easy examples leap to mind.

They’re rough. Very rough. Rough and uneven, hell on your feet, like walking on sandpaper forever and ever. They have sharp edges to cut yourself on and blunt ones to stub your toes against, and there’s never telling which you’ll see next. The sun lies funny on them, so you can never tell if that’s a shadow lurking there or a hidden indentation that’ll trip you up and send you stumbling, grating feet and fingers alike as you flail and struggle to keep your balance, grasping at rocks to save yourself from other rocks. It’s self-defeating, like everything else here.

It’s a Sellennian custom, you know. I don’t know how long they’ve been doing it, but it’s been time enough for them to make it an art, an art out of a criminal sentence. They serve out the verdict (guilty as hell in our case, with loads of witnesses to boot – god, we almost deserved acquittal on grounds of mental incompetence), they let you stew over the prospect of a long, hard slog through a prison, years of your life delicately sliced off day by day, and they watch you squirm very calmly and politely, and then, discreetly as hell, they inquire if you would prefer the alternative sentence. It’s all very polite and very neat and, in retrospect, funny as hell. I tell you, no matter how well-known it is that Sellennians have no sense of humour, it’s a lie. They like a joke as much as any of us, it’s just that they’ve got stuck on this one and like it too much to let go, setting up the delivery and listening to the punch line over and over and over again. They never get tired of it.

So, cautiously, you ask what this sentence is. And they lay it all out for you, openly and without a fuss: you must walk.

It’s a long way to walk, they say – halfway across the planet’s largest continent, they’re more than willing to produce a map and give you measurements and distances – but it’s doable. They’ll give you supplies of a sort, and drop you off with a bunch of other people who took the same deal. They never let you go in a group smaller than ten, and some people have to wait a few weeks until they’ve got a full quota. If you wait for more than a year, they let you go. Or so they say. I’m more than sure that no one’s ever been able to test that promise.

The supplies aren’t a lie. They shoot you up with something in a series of injections with pointlessly large needles. They say it’ll keep you going without food or water for months and months, maybe a year or more, if you’re lucky. I don’t know how it works; if I did, do you think I’d have sunk to trying to knock over a bank? It also cuts down on your need for sleep, which, they so graciously inform you, should reduce the duration of your little pilgrimage by quite a lot. It doesn’t work like you’d think; it’s not that you don’t sleep anymore, or that you sleep less. It’s that your sleep isn’t sleep anymore. You’re only half-awake, half-asleep, and you can walk like that. It’s harder, and you slip up more often, but you don’t feel it as much until you’re awake again and you’ve got another cut, another bruise, another scrape to watch and not-quite-notice over the days it takes to fade.

What it all adds up to is that there’s nothing to distract you from your walk. You’ll get tired, yes, but once you get tired enough you’ll drop into half-sleep, not-sleep. You’ll get hungry, but it’s not real hunger. And you can get as thirsty as you please, but no further, because you really aren’t. Which, strangely, doesn’t make it any less of an irritant.

Anyways, after they’re done pumping you full of mystery drugs and nutrients, they pack you into a cargo flyer and zip you off smartly. It takes a few hours, and then you’re being set down above what you have been told is one of a score or so locations within a few hundred miles of the center of the continent. Start walking in any direction, says the pilot. Sellenn’s coasts are packed with one-hundred-percent of its population, so as soon as you hit the sea, you’re safe in civilization again. Make it to the coast, and you’re free with all charges cleared, no matter the crime. And they won’t hinder you in the slightest, which makes the whole thing even funnier.

So, right off the bat, you get together with your fellow convicts and erstwhile hikers and have a little chat. You pick directions, ask if anyone else wants to come, and set out. Sometimes it’s in twos and threes, sometimes all in one big bunch, and sometimes they all walk alone from the beginning, out of sight and into mind after the first few miles. Still, the distances bend and stretch as some fall behind and some pull ahead, and the angles of their paths waver unwittingly. Past the first month or so and you’ll walk into people you’ve never seen before in your life, on other courses, moving in other directions, from other starting points. There’s no point in talking to anyone by then, and you’ll move past and around and alongside them with the laden, uncomfortable silence of two men passing in a tight corridor as you walk, hundreds of feet between you while the overlarge sun shines in Sellenn’s wide, damnably-blue sky, beaming down on both of you and the rocks. The rocks don’t mound into hills, they don’t roll into valleys; just rocks, rocks, rocks, all the way from wherever you are down to within a few miles of the encircling coast that surrounds you completely at all times yet remains infinitely out of your reach. Maybe that blurred line in the far distance is the darkling ocean of Sellenn, lapping quietly at a forested shore. And it’s definitely just another row of rocks, squatting on the horizon, blotting out time and sanity.

After a while, your mind starts playing tricks on you. Have you seen that rock before? You shift your vision, halt your pace, and squint, and then decide that you haven’t. Then you resume your trudge, all momentum lost and weariness creeping up in you once more, and sure as the sun rises, five seconds later you’ll have stopped and looked again. The déjà vu will lurk in your hindbrain unceasingly for hours, long after the worrying rock is lost to sight, tickling strange dark thoughts. Have you looped back in on yourself? Are you walking in a circle? No way to ever know.

The sun doesn’t help. It’s hot. Not hot enough to bake, but hot enough to make you uncomfortable, and the damned rocks absorb enough heat in the daytime to get to that exact degree of temperature that makes bits of grit and rock dust stick to your sweat. It doesn’t end when the sun goes down either; the moon comes up and you bump into things even more often with the decreased visibility, its shiny white light just enough to ruin night vision, yet not quite enough to see by. You’ll think about resting, stopping, but then you start to imagine things. You imagine every second between you and the end of the nightmare, and then you imagine those moments of time as a vast pile of those damned rocks, heaped up high in front of your goal, every black stone a second spent walking. Then you imagine resting, and watching another stone drop onto the pile with every idle second. It doesn’t take long for you to start moving again, if you halt at all.

Now and then, people die walking. You come across the bodies; or, more rarely, you’re close enough to see it happen. They come to a spot where they need to clamber up a heap or sidle around a ledge, and they just keep walking, bodies smacking on black, uncaring rocks. The pettiness of it all is the bit that’s really funny, the part that must have the Sellennians slapping their knees. Dying by walking into a canyon, dejected and hopeless, is a tragedy. Dying by falling into a three-foot pit that you should’ve, could’ve stepped across is comedy. For some people. Sellennians.

I’ve been out here for who knows how long. I have no watch and lost track and interest after day eight. I could’ve been out here for two months or three years already, and I wouldn’t know. How long it’s been isn’t what’s bad. What’s bad is how long it feels. It feels like hell, real hell, the kind with no devils or demons or brimstone, the kind that’s realized that all you need to make someone truly face despair and crumble is an eternity of small cruelties and inconveniences towering over you. Forever. This isn’t a bad approximation, for something within the finiteness of life. It certainly explains the ones who walk to their deaths. If the worst theories of the afterlife are true, they’ll at least have experience, and hopefully, a change of scenery from rocks. And if it’s anything else – anything, down to and including utter oblivion without hope or any other emotion, thought, or shred of existence – than it can only be a relief.

Whenever my thoughts head this way, I find myself losing focus on my walking and collect a few scrapes before I pull myself back together. Maybe one day I’ll just go with it, go out without a bang or even a whimper. I’ll give a Sellennian a chuckle, another repetition of the same old vaudeville sketch, another delivery of the finely-aged punch-line. God knows how long it’s been being told, or who the original comedian was. If this is as close to hell as I think, at least Satan, whatever else anyone can say about him, has a sense of humour.

Is it a bad thing that the idea of the chortling Sellennian makes my spirits lift? Just the idea of happiness, anywhere. That it can exist somewhere, somehow. Maybe. I don’t know.

Is that blur on the horizon Sellenn’s tranquil sea? Or is it more rocks, black, jagged rocks. It is. It will be. Forever and ever.

Amen.

“Rocks” copyright Jamie Proctor 2008.