I walked out of the house. The leaves were still on the trees but they were covered with a thin layer of snow, undisturbed by wind or human hands. The pavement in front of the house was dusted similarly, a thinly visible series of footprints now looking like natural formations.
My legs propelled me unconsciously through the night. I had some vague sense of my destination as not a place but as the deciphered meaning of my thought, which had no form yet and no shape but was there nonetheless. It gave me a gentle urgency, a constant push which never entered my conscious mind. It was subtle and insidious. My feet crushed the yielding snow like machines I didn’t know and I wondered where I was. After a while, I looked up from the constant rhythm of foot and snow and my feet stopped. I was at an intersection.
A car idled at a green light. It was a white, old model beater, one of the thousands of generic beaten up old cars I’d seen over the years. It blended into the scenery. The only movement was the exhaust swirling in the light wind, curled plumes spinning themselves into nothing. The night was still and I couldn’t hear the car from where I was standing. I breathed, staring at it. It was sitting right there, and I didn’t know what to say about it or think about it- it was neutral, held no value and no meaning to my clear mind. I was standing in the middle of the street, right in front of the car, and I looked down at my feet as if to ask what to do next. No sound. I looked up at the car. No sound. The white field of the car and the empty, dead intersection was reaching out a tentacle, a white smoking hand, faster than I could react. No sound at all. The idea curled in my head and dissipated the way the exhaust had and the space behind my eyes suddenly felt empty. I felt air rushing around me and then I could see no more. Black. The night stars probably twinkled down from their stretched black sheet and the snow-stars twinkled back up. I lay there, with a sudden awareness of things outside of the night and the secret machinations of my mind. Sound came back, a hiss too low to hear except for the fact that I had been hearing nothing, then everything. All the sounds I could conceive of, rumbling and screeching, closed like a huge falling cloth onto my ears, but I lay still. My body tingled and smoked and howled and an electric feeling, but more than that, an energy feeling, jazzed me up and made me draw my breath. My whole body breathed fire and spat electricity out into a surrounding void. I couldn’t feel the ground or the ice, and my eyes opened, and I was blinded by a sort of more-than-light. My body was numb but consolidating all the energy left in the cold world into itself. My senses failed me. I was awed into nothingness, my consciousness became a speck and I fell far away from myself, from time, from substance.
I awoke. I felt first the wind blowing hairs on the back of my hand. Some biological circuit was sparking and short circuiting in the follicles. I reconstructed the hand in my mind and felt it clenching as I willed it into existence. From there, I felt my arm, knew it as one with my hand, and built myself back up. I was sweaty. I opened my eyes. There was the same white field, untrampled and unchanged, occupying my field of view. My eyeballs twitched, and I could see the variation in the dominion of the white. A horizon appeared, and the street. The same desolate wasted street. It was light out, the dim thin half light of an overcast winter day. I was dusted with a snow that was taking an insistent hold on my body, pulling me into the white. My sweatpants added to the illusion of being overtaken by the cold snow. They were spotted with blood, and I tried to move my legs. They responded to my command, quickly, overeager. I stood up. The dimly sparkling whiteness slid from my coat. I wasn’t cold. How long had I been there? I looked down to appraise myself. There was a droning pain in my left knee and the dark dried blood covered the leg of my pants. I listened to myself breathe and found a rattle lying in wait in my lungs. A hand clenched at my chest and wrung out the blood which had seeped there. I coughed, and a black-red lump the size of a human fist landed steaming in the snow. My back felt wrong, like someone else had been walking around with it. I tested my left leg and found it to be stable. I walked haltingly and gingerly on the leg but I didn’t know where I was and there was nowhere to walk. The knowledge of the idea was gone, and what remained was a hollow awareness that it had once existed. I wondered how I got there. I was in the center of the intersection. The intersection was like any other intersection, the kind of intersection driving instructors and car commercials like, an idealized place for the meeting of machines working in systematized time. It began to snow lightly, white particles brushing the cloth shoulders of my coat. I tromped through the snow, and listened to the broken rhythm of my feet, now syncopated, as they beat their march for a little while in the cold floor of the world. I decided to go down the road the car had been on, and in the decision, realized there had been a car. A dull memory bobbed to the surface of my mind. The wheels left nothing on the road and I wandered toward where I remembered the car stopped, humming there before the green splayed across the road. There was nothing. No trace that a car had been there since the snow. I replayed the incident in my mind but it was but a dim impression of something that happened to someone else, a movie which I had seen once. I walked onward with the knot of some intangible unease tying itself in my mind.
The white chaos of floating pixels continued to silently come down from the sky as I beat the rhythm of my feet again incessantly down the road. I couldn’t see much, and for a long time, there was not much to see. The cold vastness of the day made me expectant of the settling of cold in my bones. I had not wondered until then why I was not cold, but it was true: I was not cold, not warm, not even numb. There was simply an emptiness of the nerves in my body. I looked down and rubbed my thumb and forefinger together. They sparked together inside and the electric tingle in my hands gave me a sudden vertigo. It was as if the only area of my body with real feeling was in the juncture of those fingers. My body tensed, and I looked around with a sudden doubt about the reality of the world. I reached down and felt the snow. It felt wrong, all wrong, not the snow of childhood sledding and snowball fights, but a uniformly manufactured white sand, cold and wet. I handled it for a while, rubbing it in my hand and thinking it over. It was undoubtedly not real. I shook off my hand, leaving some of the stand-in stuck to it, and leaned down to pick up more. I came up with a handful in the other hand, and realized the fake snow had melted while I was not looking. I raised my gaze to the horizon and began to walk, instantly wondering about the host of other things that had been wrong, wrong in my head, I wasn’t thinking straight, I was lost and hurt and scared more of what I knew would happen than what had.
At last I reach the first place different from the endless vacant waste, and the pain comes at once. A jarring rush of feeling makes me aware that my shoe had filled with blood, and the caked dry blood had rubbed my foot raw. The vacuum pain of cold down to the bones pulls me taut and shakes my body. I had just arrived at a gas station, pushing through the swirling snow, the only solid thing around. It was sudden. I was scanning the horizon one second for a speck, anything at all, and I realized that I was already somewhere, a lonely country gas station and convenience store appearing out of white gradient opacity and threatening to pass me by on my left. There is a car parked haphazardly next to the little bunker of a building, out of the light, the first colored light I’ve seen all day. The car is white. The light is yellow, spilling out like a pat of butter onto the snow. I could eat it up, and I go inside.
Advertisements scream incoherently at me at the windows and I realize that I cannot read them. The letters are garbled, or wrong, or reversed or something. I mumble to myself, “I can’t put my finger on it.”, and the words don’t come out clear, and I make a mess of the syllables, and realize that I just can’t read it. There’s nothing wrong with the letters, it’s that I’m not right or something, that I’ve forgotten how to read. I walk inside and find familiar color schemes, motifs, pictures of things I know, but I am unable to put a name to them. They are objects, ideas which exist apart from their names now. There is no one at the counter. I stumble, my knee giving out at last and buckling out from under me. I fall into a rack of plastic-wrapped pastries and lie bleeding and spent on the floor. I look over at a pastry and it is white. I reach over, realizing my hunger, and tear into it, whipping off the wrapper in one quick gesture, disintegrating it with a touch. The cake goes into my mouth, an apparatus which I had forgotten in the course of the day and I instantly realize that what I have in my mouth is the same white sand substance from outside, the stand-in, the filler, the default. The cake comes apart in my hand and its pieces turn into particles, and then into nothing in the air. The same rushing vertigo numbness behind my eyes as before comes again, stronger and stronger. I look at my hands and I have no fingers, there never were fingers. The racks of the store empty and the light becomes the same grey light of the snowstorm. I realize that there has not been silence all day, but a low, skin-crawling hiss, an oscillation sound made by nothing in nature. It ends and silence shakes my mind. A jowled man stares down at me with detached benevolence, the perfect model of the general store shopkeeper from every movie, every book, any home-town convenience store I’ve ever stopped in. He avoids my eye contact and I cannot see his eyes.
“I need help,” I said, pleading with him to understand my speech.
“You doin’ alright there, buddy?” he asks as if greeting a customer.
“I need help,” I croak again.
“Sure, what do you need?”
“Please, please,” is all I can say, with tears streaming, creating lines of feeling on the numb mask of my face.
“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
As he opens his mouth this time, I see into it, see the white ceiling of the place past his lips. He makes eye contact and I see that his eyes are empty, white, that same idea which stirred me in the night, the same Gnostic vision of my death and the white field behind everything. The light grows and grows past his open mouth and his shining inhuman eyes and I know that what I’m seeing is real, no vision from the deranged brain of an accident survivor, but the white fire of a universal background, the light of death and truth. His face whistles past mine and I can’t turn my head because there’s nothing behind me to see, and the shelves dissolve like the exhaust from the car or white cream in coffee and the ceiling is the sky, which is now just the light. There’s light that I don’t see with my eyes anymore and I don’t even see it with my brain or my mind, I see it with my soul, the pixels of snow pulling me into them, into the colorless blinding field.
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