The Asylum Chapter 1

Univesity student Gabriel Aldis is driving across Arizona to see his sister, who was recently hospitalized with a life-threatening illness, when a strange boy causes him to crash in the desert.

I would pay a million dollars to the first man who could look into the depths of himself without averting his eyes. Seeing what he was, what he’d always been, and what he was condemned to be- it would drive him right out of his mind. And I’d throw in another million if, after what he saw, the same man could love anyone ever again. Hateful, repulsive, vile creatures… and completely shameless, too, walking around barefaced in the light of day as if we had the right. It’s almost funny. Still, I consider myself and the human race lucky that no such man exists. First off, If he did, if it were possible, the rest of us would sink down to the level of monsters, worse than vile, malicious, even. Secondly, and perhaps more important, I don’t have a million dollars to throw away to some pure-hearted scoundrel. I barely have enough for myself- being buried alive in student loans as it is. If anything, I’d use it to fix my windshield. It was cracked almost a year ago. The nasty fracture goes right down the middle, like little white lines, visible even now against the dark sky. It does need to be fixed eventually, but I've gotten better at ignoring it. I just drive down the flat, empty road through the desert, criticizing human nature instead of more pressing matters, like that midterm paper I have to start. I could be planning out what I’m going to write for it, I have plenty of time. I could be planning how to tell my boss that I won’t be at work tomorrow. She’s not exactly lenient, especially since this isn’t the first time I’ve called off on such short notice. I can’t lose that job. It’s practically my lifeline. But why, that’s the question, why must everything alive work to keep on living? Is life even that great? Do we just scrape ourselves hollow to stay alive because it’s wired in our genetic code, or because life is just better than nothing? And even if life was all that amazing, what rule of the universe made it so it must be worked for? Honestly, we could have all been like living rocks. Look at them. They seem just fine to me, sitting there and slowly being pressed together under layers of earth. But of course, it just so happened that consciousness had to be sustained. That’s when mother nature butted her fat head in, and things had to eat other things, but those things wanted to live, too, and so everything worked harder and got better and wham, disgusting human beings everywhere. She took us by the arm and yanked us to the top of the food chain. If we were anything but beasts, we would have then turned to whatever truth was around us, maybe even thought of becoming good. But why would millions of years of biological coding just stop there because it was no longer necessary? The thing’s still in us, where it fixed itself. It is us. So we reach the top, gaze out over everything we’ve conquered, maybe ponder how to torture it for a bit, then let instinct do what it’s always done. Mother nature, sweet and caring as she is, has us jumping and scrabbling like we’re out of our wits. We’ve grown weaker, more cunning, into unrecognizable things- something more than animal, with a desire to understand- but driven by purely animal desires. We can slap ‘progress’ over this whole thing; we’ve cured diseases, been to the moon, invented all kinds of art and math. But what’s the point? To make us happy, comfortable? If anything, the more we learn, the more isolated and miserable we make ourselves. Whether there's a reason why I can’t say. Perhaps nature itself has turned unnatural. No, that can’t be, It’s much more plausible that we’re just another rise and fall of a bitter cycle, and my trying to make sense of this is about as worthwhile as trying to make eye contact with my hand. Yes, I’m just thinking myself in circles, getting all tangled up, but that’s completely natural, too. Everyone does it. We’re genetically wired to eventually frustrate ourselves with these thoughts and torture ourselves even more with the frustration. Is this the end of the cycle? How much closer do we get before completely destroying ourselves? How much more can it bear to repeat?

I make myself stop. Shaking my head, I glance at the illuminated digits of the clock. It’s 2:32 a.m. It makes sense why I’m so exhausted. I’m running on barely any sleep from yesterday, and barely any food either. For the past few hours, I’ve been burning through caffeine like fuel to stay awake. I make a mental note to never do this again. That is, not if I want to live a long and healthy life, which is debatable. Maybe when I grow old I’ll want to keep on living. Maybe I’ll be ready to go when I hit 45. Maybe I won’t even have the chance to decide, and I’ll get hit by a car tomorrow. Time is strange that way. You can see everything behind you but not a second ahead. Nevertheless, at present, I have about two and a half more hours to spend rolling in a metal box across the shriveled gut of Arizona until I reach the hospital. I can probably do it with my eyes closed. The only things I’m in danger of hitting are tumbleweeds, maybe a rattlesnake if I’m lucky. But if I wreck this car, I’m screwed. I take a sip of my now-flat energy drink and put it back, finding it’s sickly sweetness repulsive.

Suddenly, something flashes in my rearview mirror. I look up, startled, but the reflection of the road is empty, going off into the pinkish horizon. I slow down to look around. I could have sworn there was something right there, on the road behind me. There’s just desert. Parched, rocky ground with spiky patches of grass and shadowy blots of cacti in the darkness. There’s a small clifflike drop-off not too far from the side of the road. Whatever I saw, it must have been a tumbleweed, which my fatigued brain twisted into something else. That’s a common occurrence- people seeing faces in rocks and shapes in shadows. Our minds are always trying to find patterns and filling them in, making sense where there is none. If I were to see the world without all those adjustments and compensations, I doubt I would recognize any of it.

Having made up my mind, I accelerate again, shaking the small rose-colored lucky cat that dangles from my rearview mirror. My sister gave it to me a while back, after she bought it in Chicago.  I hated the thing, but I put it up to make her happy, and I guess it sort of grew on me. I can’t bring myself to take it down. Especially now, when it very well may be the last thing I have connecting me to her. At the thought, I press the gas a little harder. I still have miles to go. Miles and miles of dirt all piled up on earth’s core, moving faster than I am, and in the opposite direction. That doesn’t change how fast I get there, but the knowledge that I’m going backward is irritating. I can’t even make a call. There’s no service out here in the middle of nowhere. Not even the middle. Just nowhere.

Arguably, it’s completely possible to be nowhere. From the standpoint of linguistics, that is, nowhere is a place. But in reality, there’s nothing that can be nowhere. Nothing can be outside of the layers of dimension that make up space and time. Time is just as much of a dimension as the rest, although there’s no way to move through it. If anything exists, even for a trillionth of a second, it exists, but nothing can exist without occupying time. There’s nothing outside time, there’s nothing that can be nowhere, and perhaps best of all, there is no nothing. We have all these words for a nonexistence that simply isn’t possible. If anything, in order to be nowhere, something would have to be quite literally everywhere. And in order to be outside time…

It strikes me that time may not be a dimension at all. It makes the most sense, of course, to imagine the length of time in which something exists in the same sense as height or width. But time… time is completely relative. And infinite. If time is in the past, if it ever was, there is necessarily a present. There can’t be one without the other. And if time doesn't exist, the result is the same. A second and a million years are the exact same length in proportion to infinity. There are no atoms or molecules to build up time. Seconds and minutes are all liquid, relative. Maybe time It’s all just black and white. It either is or it is not. Everything could be happening at once, and there could be no starting or stopping, no beginning, no end. It all goes on for infinity.

Then the reason we don’t experience everything simultaneously is that, although we are conscious of every moment at once, we distinguish them into some sort of order. It’s almost fractilic, like the petals of a rose- the way we process it. If I were to see the world without the veil of my humanity, and that’s what I saw, I’m not sure how I’d stay sane, or even human. Perhaps, once I began to experience every point that expanded into infinity, my awareness would cease to exist altogether.

But that’s not the only truth to the matter. I can’t say so surely that time never began, and I can’t claim that it has no end. To my logic, it’s quite impossible, but my concept of infinity is considerably diluted, at the very least. There could have been a before without an after until an after was created. Likewise, time itself could have an end. Time could be like space, being taken up. It could cease. I’m not quite sure which one is more terrifying- that everything will continue forever, or that everything will end.

Neither, really.

What scares me most is that time, whatever it is, just keeps on happening. The past is just buried deeper and deeper under its own dirt. And then you can’t dig it back up. You can’t even conceive getting back to it without one foot in the present. And there are people that were there one second and gone the next, buried in the past, and buried and buried and buried-

I shake my head again, wanting very much to slap myself. She’s not dead yet. She’s not going to die. She’s still alive, leaping around on the surface of time in that way of hers… she’ll be hard to bury. She won’t sit still for it. In the meantime-- I need to stop thinking. Thinking about these things is like jumping off a cliff and expecting not to hit the ground. I can just think about other things, can’t I? Like when I was a child, just thinking about one thing to the next, from seashells to cotton candy to worms- anything, really. Maybe we all lose the ability to think that way because our minds are constantly thinking of what we don’t quite understand, reaching for what’s just out of grasp, and moving on. We stop being fascinated by the world at one point or another.

I make up my mind to stop thinking about thinking, too. At least, for the rest of the way there. It’s miles and miles to the nearest gas station, let alone the hospital. I’m going fast, but the terrain is all so monotone it’s hard to tell. The faded lines on the dusty road blur by, accompanied by the occasional rock or pothole.

I’m not prepared to stop. There’s nothing in the road.

And then there is.

I don’t know how I didn’t see him sooner until he was right in front of me. A boy, no older than twelve, his pale skin white in the glare of my headlights. He’s wearing a tattered khaki jacket and a matching cap. I just catch a glimpse of him- with his arms limp by his sides and his mouth wide open, as if mid-scream- before I swerve. I swerve as hard as I can. There’s a sickening thump. Then I’m skidding to the edge, the momentum indifferent to me slamming the brakes. The car half-skids and half-rolls down the hill. I feel like I’m in some kind of dream. Like it’s someone else in the car, frantically trying to undo his seatbelt. I hear something shatter. My head bangs against the steering wheel. Then everything- the car, the hill, consciousness, thought- just stops.

Author's Note

Let me know what you think! I want to make sure it's clear, flowing, and engaging.