Digression of Air

1

They say they see me in places I don’t remember ever having been. I seem to linger in the interstices not just of existence, but my own memory.

2

It used to be that people screamed. Now they just stare at me with goofy smiles.

3

I have been conjured into existence by sheer weight of historiography.

4

As proof of an afterlife, I’m surely something rather shabby. More glitch than glimmer?

5

Perhaps we’re crushed into existence by coastal shelves of humanity past, the pressure forcing us, fragments of many deeply flawed creatures, into visibility. Fleeting indications that something has been going deeply wrong for a very long time. I am a long way from myself and I can feel the others swarming around, into and out of me. Countless others. You can’t comprehend quite how countless.

6

They clothe me in outfits I never wore, which change as their perceptions do. Some make a great effort, others none at all. If my feet touched the ground, I’d be a walking anachronism.

7

For some reason they think I’m trapped within these walls. But where else would I go?

8

I don’t understand where I am. I was good and devout and minded my own business. This was not one of the options.

9

The other layers are forever with me and yet not. It’s as though I’m haunted. They are not simply existential, but also temporal and spatial. One might be one thing here, and another over there while also essentially the same. Perhaps it’s more a transfer between layers and tendrils. Or a matter of one part of the weave lighting up at any one time. Or several, like fireflies on a summer’s evening.

10

Expectations thwarted, good intentions forgotten, anger repressed, joy deferred, but instances of pleasure and ecstasy too, anything strong enough to leave a footprint. It’s all in there, maybe?

11

Their faces!

12

If there’s one thing I know, it’s this: when Death looks surprised to see you, for goodness’ sake stay right where you are.

13

Tap into the ancestral fear of wandering in the woods. We’ve pretty much cut down all the trees now so it’s hard to imagine, but these were hostile places full of the unfamiliar and potentially threatening. And it’s unquiet too, see? That’s another part of the trick. There’s always a racket going on in the woods with the chirping and the rustling and the gusting but the sounds are so alien it feels deathly silent. A third part is the knowing that no one’s going to come help you in a hurry because you can’t tell them where you are – even today, you don’t get signal. Which is why your abandoned mansion comes so in handy: dark, confusing corridors recreate that inaccessibility and disorientation, the creaking of floorboards, doors and windows, rustling behind the walls, the rushing of pipes: these are decent substitutes for the background noise of the forest. A forest that may well have been cut down to build the mansion. It all lays the groundwork for the sudden, unexpected jump. The fact said jump comes from someone who’s supposedly long since dead … that’s almost incidental. Back out in the woods you’d be almost glad to see a ghost – it means you might have someone to chat to. In the woods, they’re called naiads or spirits. Far scarier are worldly dangers like wolves or bears or snakes. Or just a malevolent tree root or dip in the ground eager to break your ankle.

14

When you think about it, we represent a triumph over death.

15

Triumph is probably the wrong word.

16

Boo, Boo!, Boo (emphasis on the first ‘o’), Boo (emphasis on the second), Booo, Boooo, Booooo (and so on).

17

But I want.

18

I can be used to fill an empty spot at a table, or stir an existential crisis in my son, I can even appear as an instrument of my own creation, but I am never returned to after my initial return. I am forgotten immediately after being so feverishly remembered.

19

I seem to be both harmless and deadly. It’s all a matter of perspective.

20

All it is is a dark corridor that stretches out before you with no way of knowing what’s at the end. But isn’t that everything?