This Waking Nightmare
The first in a series of student testimonials about life on campus and the general academic experience
I don’t know if I can get the hang of it. The not sleeping. I keep finding myself in a cell in this massive clay-and-paper nest, waking up with no air, no space to move, no space to breathe, having that same nightmare that I’m still shredding my nails and scalp and clothes and skin and tendons and muscles wriggling through black black black shattered stone and gritty muck, through choking dripping limestone and granite and basalt crevices smelling like the inside of a rifle breech made of a crocodile’s cloaca and popping and cracking as the living rock breathes and shifts in restless dreaming, wriggling through passages corked with freezing water or boiling mud or maybe even lava, who knows, advancing and getting stuck or blocked and retreating again and again and again in a three-and-a-bit-dimensional maze made of tectonic convulsions, knee caught here, skull wedged there, ribs crushed yet again in a narrow crack of unforgiving rock that I swear just shifted, hallucinating with every sense while waffling between sensory deprivation and sensory overload, a lifetime of freezing damp cold first then another lifetime of choking crushing steaming heat, unable to tell whether I’m being slowly digested or enduring a simultaneously corrupting and purifying birth, trying to rest enough to move again through interminable cramps in demented spelunker’s yoga poses while sharp grit is ground into every scratch and cut and scrape through a nightmare maze, forever downward, downward, downward, all the way to hell, leaving behind a trail of parts of me I never thought I’d lose, parts of me I’ll never get back, the back-trail lubricated with liters of blood and square meters of skin and kilograms of rubbed-away fat, the odd finger or toe or ear not the least of them, caught in a pinch and ripped free to feed the hungry things that follow.
I lost count of how many times I died on the way down. But every return to consciousness was the same: electrocuted with dread and panic and despair and the swarming of the hungry dead all reaching in and trying to grab a piece while I, with dreamlike weakness, swat and kick and punch and try desperately to grab everything back and tuck it away inside before someone or something else makes a grab, snarling and screaming and panting at my tormentors until they back away just far enough to let me know they’re still watching, following, just outside of my range of perception.
That’s the nightmare/memory I wake from. The black black black cell I wake in, cramped and stifling and sealed air-tight, is a cozy crib in comparison. I pack smaller now. I’m much, much thinner. I bend in more places. So now when I fall asleep in class, in the lab, in the goddamn bath, at the fucking market outside the grounds, I wake up—eventually—wadded up in one of these little clay-and-papier-mache wasp-nest cells, the howling dead kept at a distance by the campus walls.
But intact.
As intact as I was by the time I got here, anyway. Like most new students here, I still wear bandages to hold my remaining organs in until I figure out how to get by without them.
Whatever organ sleep is in, whatever deeply embedded gland, that’s the one I’m supposed to figure out how to get by without next. Somehow I didn’t manage to scrape it off on the way down. Somehow it hasn’t been drilled out of me by the faculty here or my tutors.
The most disturbing part of waking up in the Nest is that the Archivist is outside the main entrance lately, waiting. The last several times.
I don’t know how to describe the Archivist because the Archivist is like one of those people—or people-like things—in your dreams that can look different every time you look at them even though you always know who it is. The Archivist would be easier to describe if I was staring right at her while I was describing her, but in those instances where I _am_ staring right at her, all of my words dribble out of my head through that hole at the bottom of my brain stem and there is no capacity left for verbal feats. A bunny on the highway, frozen, staring at oncoming headlights.
Imagine what a person would look like if they’d become bloated with everything anyone ever committed to memory, with everything ever written down or recorded or transmitted as song or art or performance or article or diatribe or wild imagining, saturated to the bony core with the memory of every human act ever committed and every thought ever contemplated, keeping in mind that much of it is puerile and shameful and horrific and full of the ridiculous errors, mostly willing, that outnumber successes hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands to one. Imagine the face of the Archivist to be one of someone who is proud to keep all of these safe and indexed and organized for rapid retrieval, and will exhibit them mercilessly to you one at a time to prove to you that you contain no surprises.
Imagine the face of something willing to interrogate you for a thousand years and dissect you atom by atom to discover if indeed you might contain a surprise after all, no matter how insipid, pedestrian, or irrelevant to anything of import, even an old bad joke told wrongly but wrong in a different way from any other wrong way in the catalog. Imagine a face that will happily add a tick-mark next to the indices of all the non-surprises you contain so that their tallies of occurrences in the world can be faithfully incremented—and then decremented with your passing and dissolution, the tick marks moved from “current” to “historical.”
B ut also imagine that face to be somewhat crocodilian, on a largely upright form that is equally at home on four legs—leonine up front and hippopotamous behind.
The Archivist isn’t the Library of All Knowledge incarnated, but merely the card catalog, perhaps. The filing system itself. She may or may not have once been known as Ammit, but almost certainly has had plenty of other names.
It’s weird how in my memories of her, her nightmarish visage wears half-moon spectacles over those hugely magnified yellow eyes with the vertical pupils, but when I’m looking directly at her, still staggering and waking up from my time in the nest, her face is unadorned. Not counting fangs and bony scutes. I tell myself, “See? No spectacles,” and those words I remember, but when I try to picture the chaos that is her face, I picture the spectacles. And a chain beaded with pearls to keep them around her neck.
“You are as good as mine,” she tells me. “When you fail here—or anywhere, really—everything you know and everything you are will be cataloged and filed and made available to the University.” She opens her mouth in a big, big smile. “Should I take you now? Or should we let this farce play out?”
She’s not asking me. Why would she give a damn about my own self-assessment? She’s asking herself. She’s asking whether she can get away with jumping the gun, whether the others of the faculty will contest her judgment for washing me out.
I do my best to pull myself together, check the bindings holding in my remaining innards, check my pockets and the simple canvas sack with the shoulder strap where I keep my notes and modest supply of writing materials and study samples that the staff who collect me allow me to keep when I nod off because I keep it strapped to my body. Also I do my best to ignore the Archivist. I’m sure it’s partly from terror, but it’s also from simply not having the tools to address her on any terms.
I need a bath. Preferably in dark water. The bath house is nearby.
When fully open, the entrance to the ponderous raw stone bath house could admit a wagon drawn by a team of horses, and I suppose it does admit such a thing when a research project needs a few hogsheads of water from below. Though not drawn by actual horses, no. We have our own beasts of burden here, made to order.
I picture a horse making the same trip here that I made. I’m certain that what would emerge from the pores at the roots of the mountains would be completely insane even by horse standards. Besides, the school would be obligated to enroll it as a student. If it survived to complete the journey, it would be qualified.
I use the smaller door that’s inset into one of the larger pair. I pad across the stone-flagged vestibule to the interior doors and wait until the attendant there allows the inner door to open. The inner doors and outer doors are not permitted to be open at the same time, or even within a few minutes of one another. The vestibule functions like an airlock. Or a light-lock, perhaps. Or maybe there’s some other essence that I brought in, clinging to what there is of my body, that must be allowed to dissipate.
Not a light-lock, as such. I’ve seen no visible light, at least none of the ambient sort, since I exited the first several turns of the caverns that began my journey. We don’t use light to see here, regardless. Maybe it’s a sound-lock, and the inner doors do not open until the last echoes of echoes of echoes die away.
On the other side of the inner door the air is dead, dead, dead. No sound, no motion. But the space inside, roofed by stone, is open. Across the center of the space is a broad jetty separating the water on the left from the water on the right that after about fifty paces rises to be a wall up to the top of the cavern, spreading out on both sides in natural arches. Fresh on the left, salt on the right. The waters are as still as the air.
Just inside the door is a nested stack of large plastic pails with wire handles. I take the topmost, checking to make sure it is dry. I place my satchel inside and top it with what clothing I continue to bother with. On the jetty I place the pail atop my thin sandals. I add my bandages and wrappings to the pail, using my arms and hands to hold what the wrappings have released.
Gently cradling the remainder of my innards, I wade into the waters on the right. After about twenty yards the water is up to my chest. I crouch down and sit on the loose silty muck at the bottom, letting the blood-warm waters close over my head.
I wait until the silt I’ve stirred up settles. It is an excellent sulk. I consider sitting here forever, dissolving. I consider walking out on the bottom of the Tiamat Ocean, climbing down into the bottomless crevices to remain until I fall apart. Or get eaten.
It isn’t so easy to avoid the terms of my contract. It’s not like I’m going to drown sitting here, no matter how long I stay submerged. It’s not like I can avoid having my pieces collected and filed away in the Library by the Archivist, to gather dust through the ages or be repurposed as components for porters, for psychopomps, for maintenance and construction staff, for temporary locomotion for Professors Emeriti when they are checked out of the Library to tutor students who need extra help—in my short time here I’ve already met two—for beasts of burden, for spare parts for animated waste collectors and janitorial servitors, perhaps even for bribes to officials or functionaries of other polities or even for snacks for the faculty.
I slowly lift myself up to emerge to the bridge of what’s left of my nose and wait for the ripples to die. There, in the middle distance, I see the two yellow eyes of the Archivist reflecting the non-light of this place that has never seen light, staring right back at me.
She can’t possibly have followed me through the doors I used, coming in past the attendant. While it’s not beyond her ability to come and go as she pleases, even to go out to any of the salt seas and cross to the joining with the Tiamat, and then to swim her way here, there has not been nearly enough time.
So I’m dreaming. Already. I must be asleep again, coddled off to dreamland again by the warm comfort of the blood-sea. Which means I will wake up yet again in the clay-and-paper hive of the Nest. Again. And when I emerge she will be waiting for me. Again. And maybe this time I will be decommissioned and dismantled, according to the terms of my contract.
I wait. I wait some more. And I wait to wake up.
But no, I’m not asleep. Not entirely. I’ve just entered the realm of waking nightmare. Both awake and asleep. As long as I maintain participation in this waking nightmare, I’ll never need to sleep again.
I guess this is what success feels like.