Basal Ganglia (5 page)

“I do not understand why you want to force it down. Why are you eating like that?”

Heavy breaths escape his stretched throat, emerging amidst wheezes and coughs. Rollo feels as though he has accomplished something. He is just not sure what. He knows Ingrid is staring. Her eyes direct columns of strange energy that settle in his skin, making it itch. Now, more than ever, he wishes he could understand the sound of her thoughts. The compulsion that led them to this point. The emergence of a new order.

“You seem distressed,” she says. “Are you sure this is something you want to do?”

Each new question removes more of Rollo’s subjectivity. He is not permitted to respond in the manner he would like. A thought passes through many filters before it emerges as something communicated. Each filter works to remove venom. Spite. Responsibility. Rollo’s filters remove so much there is nothing left to communicate.

“I am fine. Just hungry. When do we start?”

Ingrid approaches Rollo. Arm outstretched. Fingers bent slightly at each joint. She presses the back of her hand into his forehead. Ingrid’s touch. Her flesh merging briefly with his. This tactile interaction does not comprehend itself. The two have not touched one another for longer than can be measured. This absence of touch extends beyond time. The chill of her hand sinks into the sweating heat of his brow. Ingrid reads his heat, searching for signs of illness. Degradation of physical condition could compromise what they have agreed to do.

“I think you should go to bed early,” she says. “I want you to start collecting materials tomorrow. If you are not feeling as well as you could, focus may elude you.”

She places a hand on either shoulder and guides him to his feet. He finds he is allowing her to lead him toward his bed. Myriad mental voices form a chorus, repeating the thought:
this is not what I want
. The voices are ignored in favor of whatever force compels his acquiescence. Gentle pressure is applied to either shoulder. Ingrid communicating through her hands. Encouraging him to sit on the bed. Then to lie down. The touch of another is new to Rollo. It casts a hypnotic fog he struggles to see beyond. Her hands are removed. The current connecting him and her is severed, but the residual touch remains, ensuring continued pliancy. Ingrid’s confident hands pick up a blanket and drape it over Rollo’s pathetic form. Ensconcing him. Capturing the hypnotism, forcing it to remain active.
This is not what I want. This is not what I want. This is not what I want. This is not what I want.

“I’m going to make sure you have food waiting for you when you wake.”

Rollo’s eyes are fixed ahead. Ingrid produces curious sounds beyond his line of sight. These are sounds that provoke something beyond what is remembered. Something a pre-fort version of him might have experienced. There is a thought, residing in theoretical realms, that Rollo once had parents. He must have been born to someone. The sounds Ingrid continues to produce are of a type one might associate with the notion of parents. Perhaps there was a point in Rollo’s life where he lay frozen, similar to now. Where someone he might have called a mother or father made these sounds when he should have been asleep.

Rollo is going to be a parent.

The thought now feeds on this moment in time. He is experiencing something that the child…
his
child might experience. Bricolage music played on domesticity. Ingrid is rehearsing. Readying herself for her debut as a mother. Training innate functions pertaining to parenthood. Developing the fledgling form of new patterns. Patterns beyond Rollo. Patterns beyond the fort. He longs to learn these patterns alongside Ingrid. If a new pattern emerges beyond his understanding, he will fall behind. Loss and risk combine their dark strength and run circles around his mind. Distorting the moment and directing Rollo’s body to shut down and introduce itself to the world of sleep.

His last waking thoughts take a merciful detour from Ingrid and the baby and visit the readings in the Cerebellum Chamber. There will be no readings tonight. The atmospheric properties of the fort will, for the first time, become a horrible unknown. His relationship with the surrounding environment is already changing. When time dictates the baby’s arrival into their physical world, the dread will become much greater. Change is scheduled to arrive and there is no security measure Rollo can perform to deny it access.

Ingrid is at the bureau, notebook open. Her eyes smile at the impending existence of what she sees. Circle within circle within circle within circle…

 
6.

When Rollo considers the introduction of a baby to their dynamic, the fear it invokes is new and uncomfortable. Life within the fort entails a necessary fear, which functions as an added security measure. All fear, until now, has been used to keep their world safe from whatever exists outside. It is fear Rollo uses to keep himself moving forward. Now he begins to comprehend the existence of an anxiety quite different to what he has always known. A hive within is awakened. In this simple request, Ingrid cannot be denied. There will be a baby. There has to be a baby. Rollo senses the death of the absence he shares with Ingrid, a death that threatens to reignite blame between the two. The alteration of any dynamic is the death of that dynamic. Rollo and Ingrid were fueled by a dynamic based on distance, but the baby is pulling the two closer together, unconcerned by what may result.

In this development, Ingrid resides in the pit of Rollo’s stomach, churning his anxiety into thick butter. His role in the baby’s creation feels perfunctory. Just enough to satisfy the basic criteria in which the baby can be considered
theirs
rather than
hers
. The residual bewitchment of her hands has evaporated, yet he feels no more control over his agency. He moves against himself to satisfy her. In the task he has been given, he feels as though he is participating in his own end.

He must select the wool. The child must be the result of their combined efforts. Rollo will set aside the best materials, materials intended for maintenance, and he will give them to Ingrid. With these materials Ingrid will build their child. It takes significant effort for Rollo to approach the task with integrity. He fools himself into believing inferior materials are the best so as not to dishonor the fort. The process is slow, exacting. Each selection is a potential trap diverting Rollo’s attention. All he can trust is pain. When a selection results in pain, he knows he has the best. He resents the child and resents his role in the creation of the child. He resents Ingrid for introducing the concept of the child. He resents Ingrid for her control over the process. The strength of his resentment resonates with shocking clarity. Immediate waves of guilt surround the wicked thoughts he is producing. The guilt pushes him further in a direction contrary to his desire. As resentment for the baby elevates, so does his commitment to the task of producing the baby. Thoughts of sabotage stoke guilt, which pulls him further away from agency. He becomes exactly what Ingrid needs him to be in response to not wanting to be what she wants.

…

The material stockpiles never seem enough. Each sits neatly according to type. Rollo will not allow for cross-contamination and should two different materials come into contact prior to their use, he has determined they must be destroyed. Each individual component is accorded this respect and subjected to a process that, to Rollo, is akin to sanctification. He grows troubled when he considers a baby constructed from such finery and wonders if perhaps a certain amount of imperfection is necessary. The qualities of any individual surely rest within the core of their imperfections. How can one be determined from the other without the impurity of idiosyncrasy? Could it be that perfection, in and of itself, is the ultimate failure? A place one should strive for, but never reach? Something beginning at the end can never truly begin. How can existence mean anything when lost to perfection?

Rollo is able to convince himself his child needs imperfection. He controls the mounting guilt with something similar to logical reasoning and replaces a ball of wool with one of lesser quality. If their child is to truly embody them both, it must contain his imperfection. It must experience the weakness Rollo introduces to the bloodline. His staunch adherence to the needs of the fort could be construed as a weakness. Preventing the child access to the best materials the fort has to offer is Rollo’s way of honoring the child. Surely Ingrid will introduce inconsistencies into the child when she uses her own imperfect hands to make it. Each defect will be Ingrid’s way of honoring the child with her own imperfection. Rollo has a duty to do the same.

…

Pathogenic air gains strength from its dormancy. Expanding. Breaking through what binds it. Imperfection, abundant and strong, peels apart the pathogenic shell. Permitting infection of the stable air. The disease in all things will find a way to thrive. It possesses patience quite unfathomable to conscious experience.

Pathogenic Bildungsroman

He alone was bacterium, existing on the polished floor of an empty stage. Absorbed in the loneliness of his reflection. In want of progeny in which to share the expanse of stage. He alone was bacterium, seeking materials in impossible places. Materials were food and property. Food so it may grow. Property so it may understand what ownership meant.

As one alone, bacterium enjoyed the food, taking it inside, introducing it to him. Within him was finite space. Growth bound to limitation that, when reached, introduced bacterium to its fission. To bacterium, binary fission came disguised as death. Tearing him apart. Leaving him both less and more.

He alone was bacterium, waking from death, staring into the heart of stage lights. At once seeing everything and nothing. Not yet aware that he was no longer alone in his loneliness. 

He alone was new bacterium, prone beside old bacterium. Unaware that one came from the other. The two bacteria wandered the expanse of empty stage. Each seeking more food, more property, and gorging upon what was found.

Both bacteria experienced a new process of fission. Both believed they would die. Both unaware they were instead conducting the introduction of further life. Each bacteria woke as one of four. Abidance to their pattern soon ensures each bacterium wakes as one of eight. Then 16. Then 32. 

Without intervention, materials in which each bacterium can feed remain abundant. With abundance comes continuation of process and multiplication of their population.

A society of bacteria exists on a crowded stage, rehearsing lines fed by the inspiration of pattern. Now at want of an audience in which to experience performance. The performance is further fission. The performance is perpetuation of existence. A drive toward multiplication. 

The audience sought is merely environment. The audience is space in which to thrive. A host willing to provide materials. Food and property. Food and property. Greater numbers of bacteria require more. More. More. More. More. More. More.

What of the first Bacterium? The bacterium to which the society owes so much. It exists as one of its innumerable facsimiles, no longer aware it was first. This is not a society allowing for thought to grow in isolation. The process is thought. The bacteria are signals dictated by process.

The successful proliferation of bacteria will eventually destroy the stage on which it lives. The process only knows growth, and growth can only work toward its end.

7.

The outline of a humanoid form has been sketched on graph paper by Ingrid’s hand. The empty space inside the outline represents her baby. Possibility exists in abundance, almost overwhelming in what it offers. So many directions. No way of knowing if one direction is preferable to another. A dilemma pulls into focus. How can one create a child that possesses both the certainty of choice and the unpredictability of chance? Ingrid feels chance must dictate some portion of the endeavor.

She scrawls chaotic shapes over the outline, obscuring what it once was. Her child will not be the result of a blueprint; rather her hands will move as their immediate will dictates, knitting something potentially flawed, but undeniably unique. The eradicated outline provokes relief. The agony of choice diminishes into the momentum of process. A process of automated creation. Elements of the child must remain a mystery. Misunderstood. Poorly translated. Everyone, living or otherwise, is entitled to secrets. It is within the darkness of our secrets that personality is born. What we conceal resides at the core of who we are.

The materials collected by Rollo sit in neat, separated piles, calling out for veneration. Ingrid squeezes her eyes shut and reaches into the collection of material. She extracts the first item. A ball of light green yarn. It is a system contingent on the memory of tactility. The ghosts of former touch translating all touch that follows. Ingrid’s hands work in accordance to a history hidden from the conscious.

Light green yarn is extracted, therefore their child will be light green. Reason gathers around Ingrid, attempting to dissuade her from such a system, but she perseveres. Each blind excursion into the material threatens internal anarchy. Each choice undermined by lack of choice.

Ingrid stares at her knitting needles, somehow understanding that they possess a tension of three millimeters. A glossary of knitting-specific abbreviations, hidden until now, sparks synapses.