There’s the familiar crackle in my vision, and the itchy feeling, then ssssnap! I’m in the room again. It’s dark wood panelled this time, deep reds and golds. Sometimes its pearl white without corners, other times its filled with row upon row of neat glass display cases. My mind likes museums, libraries, mausoleums; those sombre places where words are sucked into invisble slits in the atmosphere and silence is a thick, tangible substance that races to cram itself into my ears. The fire is lit, but its still a little cold. He swaggers in, (this time its He, not always), and whirls about unnervingly acrobatically for a rotund man on such spindly legs (note the small leather shoes, nice buckles; but who wears buckled shoes these days?). Pirouetting and making grand sweeping gestures with his arms, fabric of his clothes creeping up and revealing his stomach stretched drum tight, he takes it in with a taut grimace; ‘Yours, all yours!’ More whirling and spinning, more prancing and unrequested eyefuls of slivers of greasy pale skin. ‘Yours, all of it, darling, darling, darling!’ Now squatting and jumping, more crab like, less graceful. ‘Yours!’ Shrill, less than human, noises become gutteral, words disintegrate as he lewdly twists out the finale to his solo and leaps into the fire, immolates and disappears, leaving two shiny buckles clattering in the grate.
Quiet. So quiet. Sometimes I think I prefer it when he/it/she is in here. My back prickles, a hundred invisible fingers brush my spine and ruffle my hair, as cold mouths whisper their mocking hello darlings. I do what I always end up doing, as there is little else to do in this windowless, doorless room to pass the time until I get let out. I go over to the bookshelf and let my fingers glide over the familiar letters embossed in so many leather spines.
I first discovered the room in high school. I’d been sent away on a study skills course, and our instructor was an underrated genius who taught us to read with the aid of a metronome, which gave me the special skill of being able to hear very loud and only slightly infuriating tick tocking in my head whenever I encounter a textbook. Our esteemed leader spent two whole days honing us into sharpened sticks with metronomes, motivational posters and vaguely terrifying arm waving. His final parting gift was to lie us all down on the floor, instruct us to all close our eyes and relax (we were all friends now, comrades in arms, sailors in the wild seas of academia) as he counted from ten to one, all the while instructing us that when we reached One we’d be in a Special Place inside our minds; the calm sanctuary we could take ourselves to prepare for the epic life and death battle of the high school finals.
Typically, I fell asleep somewhere around ‘7′, as our wise Father’s voice droned on and embedded itself into our impressionable psyches, somewhere amongst thoughts of “embarrasing moments I will never get over even after everyone else has long forgetten them” and “regrettable haircuts”. I must have been somewhere in dreamland when he gave the instructions on how to leave the Special Place. I’ve tried everything from tying thread to my ankles when I feel the familiar itching in my head, to eating an atlas to stay grounded, all to no avail. It swallows me when it wills it, my special place subconscious clam, mine-all-mine.
So I slide out a heavy volume and settle into an armchair, (I always seem to have nice furniture in my mind), take a deep breath and open the covers. The books in here are peculiar beasts, you can open one and fall Alice-like right into it, gingerly fold back a cover and have it pop up in your face like an exploding one-liner, turn a page only to have all the words crumble into your lap, and have to spend the next hour painstakingly picking apostrophes out of your cardigan and reconstructing your own history.
Everything I’ve ever learnt, ever thought of, ever glanced at, even the fragments overheard, is somewhere in here; in the exploding, bottomless, dissolving or disintegrating books, or in the glass tanks, in the drawers and endless cupboards and shoe boxes which are either crisp and pristine (good days) or buried under rubble amongst torn off bleeding limbs (bad days) but never with any kind of obvious ordering system.
Today’s selection is titled “Lies”. Its a hefty tome, with an extensive index. My my.
