Memory's Domain


      Thermodynamics by mneysome

      Sound has color. Cael flinches from a bright-orange screech of metal on glass. Its fiery color bursts through her eye-lids, blinding, until roughly cut off.
      Cael opens her eyes. She is in a room of limitless white. A metal framed bed stands in one corner, its only ornament. The metal curves protectively around the white mattress, holding it in place. Bolts hold its feet to the floor. Dazed, she drops her heavily laden pack, staring at the place before her. Its brown thud echoes through the walls, the walls that seem to stretch endlessly before her.

      Where am I?
      She moves to a far corner, placing a hand on its utterly flat and blank surface. It feels smooth to her touch, yet solid as brick. Looking in one direction that another, she tracks the room. One hand against the alien wall, following its length. The only landmarks in this place, indeed the only objects in this room beside herself is the bed and her ragged pack.
      A shock wave, electric blue in its intensity, pulses into the room. Cael collapses, her heart a lump of pure fire in her chest, spreading through her spine to the heels of her feet and the palms of her hands. The breath is knocked out of her lungs, leaving her gasping. The pulse charges forward and retracts with equal fury, leaving the room as it was. Cael presses her forehead to the smooth floor, trying to calm the fire in her body.
      ^^^
      Its not my fault. Jack sits sullen in his car. His hands clutch the steering wheel, trying to keep them from shaking in his rage at Jendra's betrayal. Damn slut. He drives down the school zone, back to his home. His head pounds, he thoughts filled with the sight of her in bed with his brother. Her eyes as she had looked at him as he stood in the doorway, her caramel skin luminescent against the white of the sheet. Cold eyes.
      Bitch.
      Clean out the house, toss her trash to the curb, leave the bitch. He shakes his head, clearing it and forces himself to concentrate on the road. Forcing himself to watch outward. His feelings vanish, pushed down into the deep void within. Replaced by cool observation.
      He notices the classes have let out. He notices the students getting into cars or crossing the streets ahead of him. How the students move like ants to home. The autumn sunlight enriching the colors of their backpacks. Luminenscent color. Like her skin. The feelings well up again and he presses his foot to the accelerater. He feels himself turn inward, the eyes looking through the windshield, blinded.
      ^^^
      The pain goes quickly and soon Cael manages to stand. She finishes her search of the room. She sits remembering the texture of the wall under her fingertips. Silken leather, like the skin of a boy's back. How she ran her hand on all four walls, not feeling a seam, only its soft texture. She looks up, the ceiling above unseen, only an endless white. Pure. Empty. Nothing here, No lamps, doors, windows. There is no sound. Only the small black tick of her watch breaks the utter silence. She doesn't look at it though. Since she has come she can feel the gears of Time click by in her bones. Her own internal clock taking over 23 hours. She knows that as she knows the sun will rise in the east, the day is twenty-four hours. She also knows that she hasn't slept or ate in 23 hours, nor has felt any need to. So Cael sits, her body boiling with unspent energy.
      The light doesn't change, I don't change.
      Cael goes to her backpack, pulling out the hefty blue notebook, flipping through her Physics notes. For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction. And ahead. Energy is neither lost or gained, only changed. She flips to the blank space behind. She writes then, pouring out her repressed emotions to the paper, letting her head fill with the noise lacking in the room. Trying to create in the vacuum.
      ^^^
      He had been going 60. 60. Jack swallows the number into his throat. He wills his hands to move from their death-grip upon the wheel, forcing them to open the car door. They shake. His legs are also unresponsive and with heavy, slow careful step he moves to the front. A chill wind cuts through him. But it makes him no colder than the sight before him. The twisted chrome fender with the holly- berry red blood starting to drip. He sees people around him starting to gather, the richness lost from the color, becoming lost in a fog, as he shuts his eyes, willing to turn time back.
      ^^^
      She finishes the first of the passages, putting her pen down to relax the growing cramp in her hand. The pulse comes again. Its tears forward through the room, bringing the fire to her heart. She curls to the soft floor and whimpers even as she unknowingly balls her hands into fists. As before it charges only to retreat, leaving her writhing on the floor. The agony begins to fade, yet slowly. Cael doesn't feel the hot tears dripping down her face, to blur the words on the page into obscurity.
      ^^^
      Jack runs to the nearest pay phone, the sight of his twisted fender and its gruesome decoration as well as the twisted figure beneath…. His back, his shoulders are tight, twisted with knotted muscle, making movement hard and awkward.
      Whiplash. He manages to pick up the phone, his fingers refusing to quietly dial but instead shake with flashing quickness. Finally, with his greatest control he manages to dial 911. The voice on the other end is cold and business-like, causing Jack to stammer. To feel the rising panic in his stomach.
      Mercifully it ends quickly, and Jack stumbles back to his car, trying to calm the furious beating of his heart. Trying to remain calm. Trying to wait.
      ^^^
      Cael finishes the fourth notch, the fine silver screech of the knife on the metal frame of the bed, running through the silence of the room. The pulse marks her days, always leaving her gasping in pain, but she can feel the agony lessening with each one.
      The worst is over. She has established her routine, filling her "days" with writing in her binder and singing songs to herself. She fills page after page with scribbling of celebrities name, a letter game she used to play during lunch, connecting them in a series of random chains with matched letters. Later she will wait for the pulse to come. To sear her body with hot pain and breathlessness. She also waits for someone to come, to tell her why she doesn't eat or sleep. She feels as if she has forever to wait, that this place will keep her safe for all eternity. She doesn't notice the black tendrils beginning to creep on the walls. The way they twine, holding, solidifying, choking the walls. Their inky blackness and slight, musky scent She doesn't notice the walls beginning to quiver. She remains lost in the silence, and lost in her thoughts of random chains. Disorder always increases, energy is lost as heat to a closed system when work is performed
      ^^^
      Jack leans back against the side of his car, watching the crowd that quickly gathers around him. They stare at him accusingly, their eyes hard, telling him to die, to kill himself for what he has done. He turns his head, noticing the girl's twisted figure. He doesn't see her breathing. A ragged pack lays next to her, lying against her hip. The rest is hidden in shadow underneath his car. He turns away, his stomach rising to his throat, sick with guilt. The heat of the blacktop rises against him, burning his palms. The acrid taste of bile fills his mouth as he vomits, still shaking. He sits up. His head spins whirling like an old spinning top he had as a kid, how the swirls of color of yellow, brown and rich red swirls into the colors of fire. The colors of her. Her rich brown eyes cold, caramel skin glistening with sweat. He loves the top, he loves her.
      ^^^
      "For bonny sweet Robin is all of my joy…" Cael sings. Its rough persimmon sound seems to fill the white sterile room, comforting her. Sitting, she runs a thumb over the notches cut into the legs of the metal-framed bed. There are sixty now, all lined in neat rows. She endured sixty pulses, each one leaving less pain than the last. There are other changes now. Black velvety vines run up the white wall, exuding the heavy scent of an old lady's perfume.
      The scent of death. The wall quivers, threatening to tumble. Held, choked by the vines. Yet the silence and the isolation her prison remains. Yet she knows that this is her last day here. In a closed system…. Cael presses a hand to her heart, trying to reassure that it still exists.
      There is no rhythm. She moves a hand to her neck searching for her own pulse. Nothing comes, her body is an silent as the room she is in. The walls split then, in a rending crimson sound, and an image slams into Cael's mind, a busy intersection, of a metal screech and the needle pain of hot metal piercing her head and heart.
      She screams them, as the walls fall to pieces and disappear. As she feels her body fade into nothingness. Fading into heat.
      ^^^
      Sound has color. Jack sits by his twisted fender when the yellow wail of the ambulance's sirens as it pulls into his peripheral vision. He watches, now finally numb, as the paramedics pull the girl's limp body out, pierced with hot twisted metal in the heart and her left temple. Her skin is only slightly ashen, as if her heart had still been beating.
      "Well that's one of the odder things I've seen…" says one of the head paramedics. "The shrapnel pierced the brain killing her instantly, but the heart kept going, for a minute or so I would guess. Kept her alive for a little longer. It's all nerve endings. Amazing how the body works…" He pauses to close her eyes, before loading the body into the back.
      "Still she probably didn't feel a thing"
      Jack kneels by the girl's pack, needing to know whom he has so easily killed. He pulls out a notebook noting a name, Cael Anders. He flips through the pages of the notebook, to tear-stained blurred pages, to seemingly random chains of celebrities' names with matched letters. Hidden behind carefully written physics notes, the laws of thermodynamics standing out in bold print.

      © 1999 mneysome@hotmail.com

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