Chapter I

This is the very first draft of the very first chapter of a novella I'm writing. See what you think; would you be interested in reading more...?

 

 

CHAPTER I

 

 

 

The memory that insisted on remembrance, which pushed itself to the fore of her mind in its need to be expressed, was a name. Not just any name, it was her name. ‘Ester’. Yes; that was it: Ester. This was good, she thought, she had somewhere to start, a beginning of sorts. A point to work from and remember who she was, what she was, when and where she was.

 

My name is Ester.

 

She had awoken not long ago inside a painting. It seemed that way at least. Around her she saw �" or perhaps even dreamed �" specks of white pitted upon a black background, like a child having flicked paint at a canvas in a fit of fun. There, all around, was the light and dark, the chiaroscuro of contrasted space.

 

It was a strange sight and she wondered whether her mind deceived her, when she may yet have been in sleep. And so she waited within that painting, ready to wake. If it was a dream then it was a strange one. In dreams things happen. But in this, nothing did except those specks of white that mocked her consciousness with their unmoving stoicism. There the specks remained, painted against the vista of all she could see.

 

She was wrong, she realised, after some moments’ contemplation. Over time it was possible to see that those specks of paint were not immutable and fixed; instead, they shimmered somewhat, like something alive. And they moved ponderously in a chaotic dance against the backdrop that bore them.

 

With this primitive awareness of her environment she became part way conscious of her physical self, though it was unlike anything she had previously experienced. Her body rested on nothing, felt nothing. For her, it was almost like being under water, where bubbles of one organic thing or another may signal life, but where the body floats listlessly against the friction of atoms that altered one’s vision to suit the mood of the current. But she couldn’t have been in water �" she still breathed air.

 

Discarding the dubious evidence of her eyes she tested her other senses. Touch rendered nothing. She would clasp her fingers and they would close upon nothing, not even feeling themselves. In this world, whatever it was, sensation shrank from experience like smoke.

 

With no proprioceptive ability to perceive the physical self her body became confused, not comprehending itself. Perhaps, the question came reflexively and unwelcome, she had no body? With this absurdity waves of nausea broke upon her body and she pushed the mad idea to the back of her mind, at the same attempting to control her anxious breathing.

 

Then with methodological nerve she tried instead to test her hearing, but that, too, yielded no empirical results. She spoke, but the ears would not catch the sound, or else her throat would not manifest a voice in the first place. One or the other she just couldn’t tell.

 

She thought some more, trying to remember something else that would give some clue to this strange condition she found herself in. Some piece of knowledge to which she could cling that would diminish the nausea she felt. Images ran before her eyes before fading fast, quickly to be replaced by another. Words came fleetingly to her tongue and left before they could be properly grasped, appearing and disappearing at will.

 

From the array she ventured a sentence, grasping tightly each word in her mind’s eye and phrasing it with careful deliberation: ‘Ester… is an astronaut’. She said it to herself once and a few more times again, her lips shaping the words, her mind getting used to it now. She liked the way it sounded because it sounded true. It was something familiar which touched the core of her soul, and that way she knew it was right.

 

With that one statement firmly in mind giving some clue to identity, she tentatively began to try to answer the rest of the question, that most fundamental of questions: who was she? She had suffered a lot but she remembered this much: her name was Ester and she was an astronaut.

 

This she considered until another piece of information occurred to her, ‘astronauts are in space’. It seemed to make sense. More than that, it was the next reasoned step in the salvaging of a broken memory. Her name was Ester… she was an astronaut… and she must be in space. At this, she looked around, and the child’s painting spattered with white was illuminated. She was in space, with each piece of white a star, and the black the emptiness of the void.

 

With that realisation she suddenly became fearful, and she clung to what little she knew like a drowning sailor to a piece of wood in the greatness of the ocean. She tried hard to think; closing her eyes tight in concentration, trying to recall other memories, other clues to her own identity. Knowledge, she felt, would give her sanctuary against the desolation all around her. Knowledge of the self would be a bulwark against the space, which oppressed her from all sides with silence.

 

Who was she? It was a hard question to answer in the vacuum of space. She had nothing to compare herself against; nobody to tell her she was witty or charming, aggressive or annoying, pretty or ugly. Neither did she have any points of fixed origin in the horizon that would give her some sense of physical locality. Nor any means of manipulating her environment that would have at least given her presence the validation it craved. All she had was that thing which looked like a child’s painting and some memories; and there she was, in outer space of all places, cast adrift somehow. 

 

Her head ached and her body felt numb. She tried again to move her fingers but she couldn’t see them. She thought she felt them clench and unclench but she couldn’t be sure; the evidence of her eyes simply did not �" or could not �" support the activities of her body. She tried to look down, to see her body, but could only discern the narrow confines of the helmet she wore.

 

A helmet! She could see it now. By retracting her vision she could make out the edge of it, framing all she could see, with its various bits of data transposed on the periphery of the glass, telling her how much oxygen was left, how much energy she had, her vital signs. This made her suddenly elated; it gave her an anchor in reality �" something tangible to hold on to.

 

Now looking straight ahead, with fresh awareness of the helmet, she could see in the glass the reflection of her own eyes staring right back. They seemed odd somehow, those eyes of hers. But they were definitely her eyes, she would recognise them anywhere. Their pigment was the familiar blue-green, like the surface of the earth, and they were trimmed with her dark lashes.

 

It was a strange thing for Ester, seeing her own disembodied orbs floating there in space, watching her like some supernatural being. Directly, she addressed them: who are you? They didn’t answer, but they told her something else. They looked wrought with emotion and the strenuousness of the situation that taxed her tired brain. Those eyes look scared, she thought with pity.

 

Turning those eyes beyond themselves she looked again into the depths of space. Her mind was wakening with each passing moment, becoming more conscious of the situation she found herself in, and she exercised her vision with the knowledge she had regained. And even though her mind was inherently logical, the exquisite beauty of space caught her breath and held her in rapture.

 

Here was space. Spirals of galaxies, contours of gas, as well as flecks and beads of stars of every colour, like shining jewels, all woven expertly together in an infinitely extending tapestry. She was sure that if she were able to reach out and feel it, it would be like the finest satin to the touch.

 

There were not just atomistic stars, but other beautiful entities too. Nebulas and gas clouds of varying shapes and colours, asteroid belts and other celestial bodies, all outlined against an obsidian sky. The beauty of space seen from Earth, she finally reflected, is nothing compared to being in it.

 

One asteroid belt stretched across her vision and it seemed to Ester like a river; whilst it flowed it also, somehow, remained the same. The paradoxical feeling of something being both transitory and immutable struck her limited senses and in it she found an insight: timelessness. There was no concept of time here. At least, not in the certain way an earthbound person would recognise. There were no seconds or minutes, no hours or days. If time existed at all it was alien to her. Where there was nothing that changed time became irrelevant.

 

With this, she reasoned that she now lacked two important things, things that would have helped her in knowing who she was: place and time. She had no knowledge of either, and so could not situate herself on any particular plane of existence. No wonder she felt nauseous.

 

She engaged the gears of her mind in analytic thought, trying to remember the extent of her resources. She retracted her vision for a second time and looked about the insides of the helmet. There, in the bottom right corner, she saw the bar that indicated the amount of oxygen left. That was the answer, a grim memento mori. The only way she could possibly tell the passing of the time was by the diminishing amount of oxygen in her suit. She made a calculation and noted, three days. She had three days in which to live, and if no one had found her by the fading of the last sliver of oxygen she would surely die. For the first time she felt coldness, and shivered.

 

What the other information told her was also not good. She had been damaged by something, that was for sure, though by what she could not remember. The representation of her body to the left of her visor had a head that was coloured red, showing that hers had sustained some injury, which would likely account for her inconstant memory. Well, she thought to herself with a wry smile, at least her head was still there. And at least she had some oxygen. At least she had some sweet and precious oxygen. 

 

But still, despite the oddness of her situation, that space was indeed beautiful she could not deny. In the vastness of it she felt somewhat at home, despite �" or even because of �" her loneliness, and in that setting she got to thinking about what had made her want to be an astronaut in the first place, all those years ago.

 

She cast her mind like a net into her memories, in a desperate attempt to draw from the depths the germ of her ambition that had brought her here. It felt necessary to remember the story that had brought this thing to pass. She needed to recall something else than what she knew already, something more �" anything that would tell her who she was.

 

Committed, she closed her eyes tightly and delved into the recesses of her mind. She thought long and hard, in the way that people often do when they have a word lost on the tip of their tongue, trying to open the doors that would allow that memory into her mind.

 

Steadily, over time, parts of her memory saturated, like water percolating through rocks to come up out of the ground. She began to see the pictures of her life form and vanish again under her eyelids, blurry at first, but with an increasing intensity of colour and composition, until those pictures began to form of themselves a film.

 

She concentrated on those moving pictures like a committed member of audience, and she sought to turn inwards, to her past, to remember herself wholly. In looking upon the passing chain of her life, interspersed more or less regularly with notable events, she sought to remember the subtleties and nuances of living.

 

She sought as well to weave the narrative of her story between the events, using as thread the dialogue and thoughts and actions undertaken. In that way she could recreate a rich tapestry of life in her own mind, whilst all about her was that curious mixture of everything and nothing.

 

Concentrating more and more on the film of her life, the memories gradually began to consume her, to become her, to swallow her whole. The story became everything, filling each corner of empty space and lighting every shadow. Whilst the child’s painting of the night sky lay forgotten, the intensity of living played itself out internally; and thus it was that Ester found herself beginning, slowly, surely, to remember…

Author's Note

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