Alex Rises out of the Cave

A Story by lyt4

Alex is hit by a car and then strange things start to happen.

As Alex walked through the rusted gates and past the neatly pruned hedges that bordered his school, he reflected back on his day.

School, or what school was supposed to be " learning facts and how to think critically about facts, learning how to successfully maneuver around and manipulate social connections, learning how to eat well and exercise, and so on " did not interest Alex at all. Only two things about school were worth looking forward to as he dressed early in the morning. He enjoyed having the freedom to sketch whatever he wanted while almost never being intruded upon by his teachers in every class except Physical Education. He did enough work well enough for them to have finally given up trying to motivate him, although they never really put much effort into doing that anyway.

Alex liked to sketch things that he had no chance to encounter in his everyday life. For example, his most recent project was a comic book about a household cat named Tracey that had miraculously accumulated the exact mutations needed in its precursor gamete cells, and was surrounded by sufficient language-related stimuli during its critical period of development, to gain the ability to speak and understand a human language " a scenario which most biologists would estimate to have a change of occurring once in the time-span equal to a trillion lifetimes of our Sun, assuming that birth and mutation rates stay at its current level. That cat went from being a world-famous circus attraction to, during the waning period of its life, a highly sought-after university commencement ceremony speaker and a fearless advocate for greater mutual respect between pets and humans.

But as Alex left the school that day he was thinking not of his cat Tracey, but instead of the second thing about school that was worth looking forward to in the morning - Raina from his English Literature class. To Alex Raina had a certain aura that attracted his attention whenever she was close by and visible. While she was indeed pretty, and her appearance had a certain alluring quality, mostly because of her rainbow-colored nostril ring and perpetually dyed hair, Alex´s attraction had less to do with her having a unique combination of physical qualities matching his particular taste in girls " for he had not really experienced enough life nor interaction with females to develop such taste " and more to do with the fact that Raina seemed to be the only person in school who consistently showed an interest in his sketching; albeit she never expressed that interest to Alex in words. She sat in the same row as him, two desks over, so Alex could feel her glancing at his sketchpad, then at his face that was lost in concentration, then back at his artwork. She never held a gaze for long. Recently, over the last fortnight or so, she seemed to subtly smile at him whenever they passed each other in the hallways. Alex was not about to make a move as drastic as approaching her and talking to her; in fact, he was not planning to do anything extraordinary that would indicate that he also found her interesting. So when he thought about Raina he was not conspiring " he was merely replaying memories and commenting on them to himself. It was probably a combination of shyness and a lack of motivation (an aversion towards actions that he was not good at, and which seemed to be somewhat hard to develop talent at) that was to blame for his passiveness.

After Alex walked two blocks away from the school gate and reached the first traffic light out of the three that were on his route back home, his thoughts had switched from Raina to dinner. He loved to eat almost as much as drawing. At the exact moment when he was wondering what meat dish his mother was going to cook he heard the screech of two bicycle tires´ vulcanized rubber grasping desperately at the stony concrete of the sidewalk about three strides to his right, madly praying to the gods of friction, and as a last resort the front wheel turned left in an attempt to avoid skidding straight into the traffic of the cross street on the other side of Alex. The sharpness of the turn, combined with the bike’s incredibly high velocity, jammed the vehicle and threw the rider off forwards, at an angle that caught his legs about the handlebars " for a split second man and machine were a single object soaring with about a foot of air beneath, and the primitive bionic man would have continued forward for another few seconds, and been crushed by a car, were it not for Alex´s body, with head turned to the right as a reflexive response to the screech, presenting itself as an obstacle. A split-second before he inadvertently helped the boy-bike avoid a gruesome impact with ground and chassis, he saw a tangle of aluminum alloy bars and flailing human limbs coming towards him and splashing into the steaming and perfectly browned meatloaf that he hoped to eat for dinner.

And for a few minutes today, for the first time I can remember, I was allowed exit from this enclave that descends unknown depths into the ground, in which I have always lived, chained, facing a flickering wall that before today was the entirety of my world. I glided up the steep ascent towards a magnificent source of light. I reached a point when that light bathed me and the walls with a white glowing ether, until it consumed everything. This is what I remember: a blissful heat rubbing my skin, and a light that blinded.

Alex had been knocked out cold and woke up on a bed in a hospital. He had some severe bruises and cuts, but there was no internal damage and he could go home soon after awakening. The clock in the ward indicated that it was about two hours after school ended, but Alex could not tell whether it was still the day of the accident. His parents were waiting for him in the hospital when he woke up.

That night they ate steaming, perfectly browned meatloaf, exactly as Alex had imagined, even though he could not recall ever asking for it. He chalked it up as good luck and shoveled his meal into his mouth. His mother must have noticed how quickly he devoured his first plate and asked for more, since they had meatloaf the next three nights as well. He had no complaints until the morning after the fourth meatloaf night when, while dressing for school, he suddenly felt bored and imagined having steamed salmon with green peas for dinner instead.

People seemed to treat Alex differently after the accident, but he could not quite pin down in what way. People around him were quieter, and no one ever talked to him unless he wanted to have a conversation. People avoided looking at him as well. But he did not mind the decreased attention at all. The important thing was that Raina still showed interested in him. In fact, during down times in class she started to approach him and ask him about his comics, whatever he was working on at that moment. Alex was sure that she was genuinely interested.

And then almost ten days after the accident Raina asked Alex out on the first date of his life. She wanted to go to an ice cream shop; she asked him to bring his sketches so he could tell her about them.

Alex noticed some other changes. He had difficulty falling asleep, and it was gradually getting more and more troublesome each successive night. By the fifteenth day post-accident he was only sleeping about two hours each night. However, he did not feel tired during the day and so was not really bothered. Furthermore, the rest of his life seemed to only be getting better. The date with Raina had been successful and a lot of fun, he thought; even though he had been nervous she was very engaged and he was surprised at how her words and actions had such a soothing effect on him. He was also enjoying food a lot more. The school had upgraded the cafeteria recently to include his favorite snacks, such as churros stuffed with strawberry jam and giant soft pretzels with nacho cheese dipping sauce, and dinner at home was consistently perfect. His mother indeed set steamed salmon with green peas on the dinner table that fifth night. The next night she presented fried chicken and mashed potatoes, followed by strawberry cheesecake, just as Alex had expected.

He quickly became bored of lying awake at nights waiting to fall asleep. Since he knew exactly when he was destined to fall asleep " twenty days post-accident it happened about an hour before he awoke for school " he spent the rest of the night doing anything he pleased. The first ten days or so he spent those free hours working on comics and occasionally strolling around the neighborhood seeing how different things looked when illuminated by moonlight. But mostly he sketched.

In fact, after the accident Alex discovered in himself an unprecedented vigor and intensity directed towards his comics. He spent more and more time on them so that when he was only sleeping an hour per night he was drawing comics about thirteen hours each day. He completed the story about the mutated speaking cat two days post-accident, and successfully submitted it for publication as a series in the school newspaper. The comics were undeniably magnificent. Colors sparkled and breathed life into the characters; ocean blue-green contrasted with polished metallic silver, hues and shades flowed realistically to depict motion about the page, as if characters were alive and three-dimensional. Alex had tapped into a limitless source of artistic force and inspiration.

Most unusual was a new facet of his life that was entirely unrealistic and fantastic, but almost certainly out of reach of Alex´s memory during the day. The first occurrence was on the seventh night. The anthropomorphized dog from the comic that he was drawing at that moment started rippling, like a clear pool of water violated by a small dropped pebble, but the rest of the page stood still. The dog then literally peeled itself of the page with one of its paws, and was for a second a two-dimensional object standing upright on the unfinished sheet until it started to blow up like a balloon into a life-sized version. As it grew it sucked Alex into its mouth and he tumbled down through its endless throat; he gazed at the blackness around him; his surroundings gradually heated up into a redness like the air around the setting sun, and then into molten lava, oozing and filling out all space except for the four square feet of stone that he and his mom were standing on, courageously teetering on the edge of destruction. His mother grabbed his left hand, and Alex felt more concentrated fear in his chest than he had ever experienced. He noticed a trail of stepping-stones in front. He did nothing but follow as his mother pulled him along, jumping over bubbling molten lava from stone to stone. “Hold tightly to my hand,” she screamed, and they reached a stone that was slightly larger than the ones before. A girl was sitting on it cross-legged, wearing a frilled dress and a large green brooch in her hair, a relic from an older generation. She said “hi” to her visitors in a soft voice. Standing behind her, with his hands firmly grasping her shoulders, was a solemn-looking man, whom Alex recognized as a young version of his grandpa he had seen in photo albums. He emanated a sense of humor nowhere to be found in the serious poses captured in the black and white photographs. Both he and the girl were strangely calm considering their hellish surroundings. Alex and his mother continued to the next stone, which suddenly disappeared right under their feet, popped like a balloon, or maybe swallowed whole by the lava, as they were about to land on it. They crashed into the lava, Alex clenching his eyelids and fists in horror, but it was not hot, just lukewarm, and had the consistency of warm risen bread dough. He fell onto his back, but not before Young Grandpa, for the first time showing a sense of urgency, dived to cushion his fall. As he became parallel to the ground he changed instantly into a very comfortable mattress. Alex landed and was back on his bed in his own room. He fell asleep two minutes later and woke up five hours later to get ready for school.

And Alex´s nights were from then on filled with many fantastic voyages, They were sometimes beautiful, sometimes horrifying, at times inspirational, and at times mundane, and often a mixture of all of the above; further, they always slid smoothly out from and into the normal world when they began and ended, and the next day Alex never seemed to show any signs of recollection. During those nights, even though he still held some control over his thoughts, they seemed to naturally conform to the situation, no matter how ridiculous it was. He never questioned their reality, significance, or their provenance; like a train on rails he was just guided along. Thus he often thought or acted in ways that he normally would not; it was not much different, one might imagine, from being a character in a story being written by somebody on a powerful hallucinogenic drug.

After four years of gradual increase, the number of adventures per night started to slowly diminish, until about twelve years later when they came at a steady rate of about one every two nights. There were certain patterns and trends that even Alex, with his counterfeit conscious control, noticed. For instance, some adventures seemed to repeat on different nights with only minor differences. There were more subtle things going on as well. His mother, father, or brother starred in many of the scenarios, and by the time the steady rate had been reached they were the protagonists in pretty much very adventure. Each of them seemed to be accompanied by characteristic themes. In short, his mother often came with an epic struggle to survive against some element of nature that was determined to kill her and Alex; his dad frequently came with either a world where humans learned to breath underwater or fly with birds, or had something to do with big and fast cars; in his brother’s adventures his brother was totally inept at wooing women, while in complete contrast Alex was reincarnated as a suave conversationalist who was extremely confident around women. Everybody would show up once in a while in somebody else’s adventure, but in a slightly unusual form: they would act queer in a subtle way.

Twenty-eight years later Alex ceased to have journeys that starred his dad, but it took him about two years to notice. By that time his mother’s adventures had ceased to occur as well. This time he only needed a year to notice. Another forty years passed before the next significant change - he completely stopped having any adventures at all. By that time he was only sleeping five minutes each night.

The decades and centuries passed by and Alex stayed forever young. In fact, just like his age, nothing in the world really changed. Leaves were perpetually autumnal brown and falling off trees (trees that did not grow nor blemish under the strain of natural forces) the same way every day. People repeated their daily routines with pristine precision. Things were stagnant here and there and everywhere across the globe. Nobody started any new wars. Any old wars never ended, and never progressed. A week before the accident The People’s Liberation Army of China laid siege upon the Republic of China and used it’s immensely superior naval forces to blockade the import of all important raw materials. They never reached their goal of claiming control over the island, but never recalled their forces surrounding the island either. At first, he looked forward to dinner everyday, but after a few decades the predictability and repetitiveness of dinner dulled its luster.

Everything became more boring. Twice a week Alex and Raina had ice cream and talked about comics. They never stopped rendezvousing and always had something to talk about, but in the later years Alex might as well have been asleep, for as his mouth chattered, eyes stared attentively, and ears gathered all sounds in the vicinity, an important part of his brain was hibernating. The part of the brain that signals to its owner that this thing it has encountered in the external world deserves real attention, for it is interesting, and thus in the owner is sparked a deep motivation to interact, learn, and remember.

Drawing comics continued to absorb most of his time, but after a certain amount of years each one was just a re-imagination of an older work: same story, plot twists, and graphic style, but with a different anthropomorphized animal here, a different world in outer space to colonize there. But Alex continued because a voice that he had to respect told him it was what he had to do. Life became precise clockwork with an emptiness of meaning not necessarily greater than before the accident, but undeniably far more apparent to any all-seeing observer that would have cared to peek into his world before and after.

Come the darkness of the night, however, the universe became unpredictable, uncomfortable, catastrophic, full of heartfelt triumph, wonderful " completely opposite from the world that the sun illuminated. Only at night did Alex ever cry, feel lightheaded from love and the passion of its carnal actualizations; only under the moon’s watch did Alex explore new fantastic environments sand encounter things that did not conform to his desires and concept of the ideal; only at night did that important part of the brain " the part that went missing during his ice-cream dates and hours spent drawing " spark with life! But, alas, the following days Alex did not show signs of being impacted in any way by the previous night. Hours spent flying over rainforests and vast crystalline blue oceans of spring water that extended forever; the bushy tail that his brother sprouted one day, which Alex was forced to chop off with a butter knife that miraculously cut cleanly through the leathery reptilian skin and fortified bone; going snowboarding with his father on Mount Kilimanjaro, but forgetting to bring snowboards (“No worries son, we’ll just slide down the mountain in our Jeep”). All those memories disintegrated in the sun’s heat and the days stayed monotonous and forgettable.

But at least Alex was able to carry into the nights memories of the days; the stark contrast between the two made the nights that much more fantastic in his eyes.

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Raina had indeed developed a curiosity towards the beautifully drawn comics that the boy sitting two seats to her left in English Literature class drew unceasingly. That interest spilled over to include the illustrator as well; he did not seem to pay any attention to her, but Raina admired his independence and that he didn’t need the companionship of anyone else to do things that he obviously enjoyed.

She wondered whether he noticed her quick glances at him during class, or the subtle smile she offered him when they passed each other in the halls. She wanted more than almost anything to have a conversation, understand the way he saw the world, read his comics, and had finally mustered up the courage to ask him out for coffee, when she heard the news eavesdropping on the two girls in front of her on the school bus who were loudly discussing with disbelief how a student, yesterday, got knocked into the path of a car going at forty miles per hour by a tumbling bicyclist while walking home yesterday, and was pronounced dead lying in the ambulance a few minutes later (but his heart probably ceased beating less than ten seconds after the gruesome collision with the one-ton vehicle). They said he was called Alex, and wondered why nobody really seemed to know him that well. Raina felt a jolt in her chest when she understood what she heard, as if a sedan had smashed into her body as well, but she was bludgeoned so hard that she felt no pain, was entirely numb. She had no idea how to regain her feeling. Time, as it does for most ailments that do not lead one into the embrace of Death, was the only cure.

Five years later Raina gave birth to a beautiful, healthy baby boy that she named Alexander. On Alexander’s fifth birthday Raina bought him a beginner’s comic book illustration set and spent two hours after dinner working with him on Chapter 1 (“A Brief History of Comics”) and Chapter 2 (“Getting started " The tools of an Illustrator”), before kissing the birthday boy goodnight as she tucked him into bed. As Raina herself was lying in bed, the memory of the young boy she had found so interesting many years ago, the boy who was called Alex and loved comics, popped into her head for the first time in ages, undoubtedly spurred by the book she had read with her son. Her thoughts jumped from that to other memorable events in her childhood. She fell asleep contemplating a faint image of her favorite apple tree from her backyard back when she was just eight.

Although Raina would wake up later with no conscious recollection of them, that night she dreamed of bears and bicycles, and taxis and cars being chased by gorillas in the streets of downtown Denver; her last dream before awakening took place in a suburb very much like the one her high school had been located in. Early in the morning she walked into the high school, with a demeanor that suggested a sense of purpose, and went straight to the library, which happened to be the only room in the entire school. The rest of the building was filled with staircases that went nowhere in particular, just perpetually up and down. She sat down on a round table and started drawing intensely. Alex was sitting at the table next to her. She looked at him and immediately their two tables merged into one longer table and she was now sitting right next to him, looking over his shoulder at his sketchpad. What she saw on that page should have astonished her, but at that moment it seemed perfectly natural - the sheet was completely blank! Alex waved and scratched the pen all over the sheet like a magic wand, but left no trace of ink on the page. Regardless, Raina was mesmerized by the way Alex’s hand flowed, jerked, stabbed, and could not, and did not want to, contain her excitement. A black pen appeared in Riana’s grasp and Alex shifted the paper over slightly to share it with her. And she drew, and drew, and drew, with so much fortitude that he stopped working and just watched. She must have drawn enough to entirely cover four pages; images beautiful and expressive, with color that kissed personality and life into all her characters, but in the end all that was produced was a glowing robot, in the center of a single page, armed to look like he had been constructed to effortlessly wipe out entire armies of humans, but with a sadness indicating that he was actually bearing the emotional weight of the deaths of a hundred robot brothers and sisters. Over its left breast Alex added the only thing that he actually drew in the library that night: a maroon human heart that dripped a thick trail of glistening blood down the robot’s outer armor, following a convoluted path along the grooves in the metal.

He lifted his pen after filling in the last bit of color in the blood and looked up at Raina. In the way that people in dreams often are, her outline and features were at times sharp and vivid, but there existed a certain dynamic to her appearance so that he still could not pin down what she really looked like. He could see enough to notice that she looked quite different now than during the day in the ice cream shop. In the library she looked older and wiser and would look away when Alex’s eyes met hers, as if she were too shy.

The entire time they both did not speak a single word, and they separated just as unceremoniously as they had united. Alex got up first, and Raina followed by his side. They walked to a bookshelf, it slid open, and they continued through into a hidden bedroom. It obviously belonged to a girl, probably a teenager; he did not have much time to study the room. He turned to Raina to find that she had disappeared, and when he turned back to look at the posters on the walls, the room became pitch black, except for a bed in the corner that glowed white " his own bed. He walked over and immediately went to sleep.

There was nothing at all special about the next morning, the school day, home after school " they transpired just as they had the last ten years or so. In the afternoon Alex worked on his comics as usual. He sat down at his desk in his room and for some reason that day he felt compelled by that mysterious force which causes people to choose to do one thing out of an infinite number of just as desirable alternatives, to pick up his pen and draw a story depicting a war between humans and a tribe of robots in a future when all terrain has become desolate desert. And so he pressed his pen to a blank sheet in his sketchpad, as he had everyday for as long as he could remember and would do everyday for the rest of eternity, and started to draw a sad robot, which seemed to carry the burden of guilt from countless murders of absolutely hopeless enemies, and somehow possessed in his chest a live, beating, and completely essential human heart.