Piranha - Chapter 2: Falling

Rayman was lying on the bed, eyes closed, seeing again the rows and rows, the rooms and rooms full of “coffins” that he had been led through on his way to the cabin.  Stumbling along mechanically, dazed, weak, barely able to keep up with his guide, all his attention only on keeping upright, on lifting and dropping foot after foot after foot ... even so, some corner of his mind had been aware of those phalanxes of big grey-white boxes still holding prisoners, how many hundreds or thousands of prisoners from how many planets, stretching off in orderly rows into the distance.  As he struggled forward, he had begun to feel those boxes, the accumulated suffering they concealed, absorbed into the panting haze of his glazed perceptions.

And as he lay now sprawled on the bed, still faint and sick even after having slept for two days straight, a cruel vision of all those lost souls in torment, beings he had never seen, began to close in on him.  They wafted like ghosts out of their coffins, crowded around him, clutched at him like diseased, deformed beggars, beat him into a ball, thrust him back towards the coffin he had escaped.  He tried to push them away, but they were only shadows...  Their unknown groping hands mingled and melded bewilderingly with hands known, loved, gone...  Now and again he roused himself to defense, striking out feebly at merciless grasping hands, at eyeless, formless faces.

But then he moaned, covered his eyes, his ears, he curled up on the bed – he who alone of all had somehow talked his way out of a box – and he gave himself up to them, to their helpless rage, their pitiful agony, to that timeless, endless agony around him and before him and within him, he lay gasping in that agony like a newborn infant in poisoned air.  Submerged, drowning, unable any longer to resist or even cry out, he lay twisted there on the bed, covered his eyes, and wept.

***

The tears were exhausted after a time, but the oppression only deepened.  He lay motionless, crushed under the weight of thoughts that warred around and over him like the trampling of actual independent creatures, in convulsions and tortured jerks and thrusts that sometimes hit home to force a gasp out of him:  his planet, his people, his friends, the box, all the boxes, the future, his enemy, those still in the boxes, the future, his stupidity, the known, the unknown, his intense vicious stupidity, Ly, friends, his village, his home, his future ... his enemy ... his future ... his actions ... his –

Once or twice someone came in to leave him food and water, which he didn’t touch.  Once the human doctor came in and checked his breathing, his ability to sit, stand, respond dully to a question, be exclaimed over (“You call this an anatomy?  What keeps you alive?”), half-killed him by shining a light into his eyes, and then oddly put a hand on his head for an instant, as though the much smaller Rayman were a child, before again abandoning him to yammering solitude.  Rayman sat unmoving for a long time on the bed as the doctor had left him.  Even the minimal motion of lying down might open him to another barrage from those ravenous, pitiless, unknowing victims.  He sat, slumped, eyes mostly closed, head low, swallowing from time to time...

Rayman was more practiced than most at endurance.  But he had never had to endure anything like this.  The box had been nothing to it. He sat, very still, in silence; he must not die; that was all he held on to, he was not allowed to die, he must not die.

At some point, he was led to see his enemy.  Instantly practiced deceiver that he was, he roused himself to the right motions, he talked, he smiled unpleasantly, he said the right things, he promised he would get well.  (He must not die.)  He was taken back to his cell.  He lay motionless just the way he collapsed onto the bed, and was sucked back down into the writhing maw of blackness.

[End of chapter]