Blue

In retrospect, I should have chosen another color. 

This is best listened to with https://www.buzzsprout.com/811181/episodes/6523558  (Nailed to the Floor) in mind, as this is a continuation of it. But,  if you don't go back and listen to it, here's the gist; a guy wakes up to find everything nailed to floor, he searches for the cause, and is horrified to find that the cause is a horde of ordinary people. He then joins the mob in their insanity.

That should be enough context for it to work. Or maybe even that was unnecessary. Everything I do starts in the thick of things, so if you've followed me this long, you're probably acquainted with not knowing what the heck is going on for a while. 

 Sharing Links:  
 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-pantheon/id1498984739
 https://www.buzzsprout.com/811181
 https://www.instagram.com/the_pantheon_remembers/
 https://open.spotify.com/show/6Pmngtn7BBnOeAiOzAriHJ
 https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-the-pantheon-57860820/
 https://podcasts.google.com/?  feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5idXp6c3Byb3V0LmNvbS84MTExODEucnNz 

Transcript

(I know, I know, this is similar to something else. *Cough* Earthbound *Cough* But the source comes from me managing to trick my sister into thinking the ground in Mexico was blue for a second. I just wanted to do something with that, so this came about.)

My night’s sleep was finicky. I tossed and turned, cursing myself for my cowardice and insanity. But even the tossing was not so relieving, the sheets having no give on either side of the bed. They were taped there. And had the other madmen done it? No. That had been me, and yet there had been no people around to observe me doing it. The coffee pot, the faucet, the fridge, all of them were decked out in so much tape that they had practically become useless. But there were no cameras in my apartment, no other soul to watch me adhere to the absurd creed. I had simply kept holding onto my madness by my own distorted will. I had kept patrolling the streets until two A.M. And it wasn’t my rationality that saved me, not the virtue of my soul, but by the exhaustion in my legs and the hunger in my belly. Had it been up to myself, I would have died. 

And that was why I tossed and turned. Not because the world had changed, but because I had proven to myself that I was a worm. I had always had dreams of myself standing up to things. The Nazis was the usual example. Jeremy at work. My mom with her incessant demands for money. But I never did. I just kept dreaming of having an adjoining set of bones in my back, aka a spine. But I had none. And I had no one to blame but myself. So the world had ended, and I had nothing to show for it, no grace, no pride in myself at the last second. I would wake up at some point in the moment and keep taping things to the ground, even if the horde had moved somewhere else. Or maybe I would follow them out of town, forever enslaving myself to the whims of a madness I could barely comprehend, let alone agree with. That was it. There was no courage for me to draw on, no way I could persuade myself of salvation. 

But I eventually fell asleep in my uncomfortable sheets because I had to. Even if my mind had broken, even if society had shattered into maddening shards, the physical universe continued its eternal grind unabated. Just another thing in existence to remind me I was small. And so I woke up, barely a ray of sun peeking through my blinds, for I had bolted them to the window sill. That was perhaps the one decent thing of all of this. I never had to get up early in the morning for work with it being in the middle of the day and all, and I hated waking up with the sun. So my insanity stricken self had done one thing right in freeing me from the burden of morning light. One thing. A paltry prize.

But then I saw the obvious thing. Because how else could I? The blinds were now blue. A light sky blue, but, you know. Blinds are usually a creme color, maybe black or brown. Mine were creme. Were. As in they had been the night before. But now they were blue. The walls were, too. But then why was I even acknowledge that? Of course the walls were blue. They’d always been that way. It was a nice, soothing dark blue, maybe Prussian or navy, like you were drowning in the somber ocean of sleep. A comfy sort of feeling. 

But then the floor wasn’t supposed to be blue.

And the sheets… they’d been black. 

My heart pounded against my chest like a drum. Again. This madness had happened again. Twice in two days. First the nailing of everything to the floor, and then things were getting painted blue. 

But the stranger thing was that I couldn’t even smell the paint. Everything was dry, and the room smelled of the usual air fresheners and sweat. 

There was still a chance for my salvation though, wasn’t there? I hadn’t put my contacts in. Maybe my eyes were just going bad. Yep, that was the silver lining to the cloud. What a thing to be grateful for. So, I strode into the bathroom with my contact case in tow, popped them in, and… 

My eyes were blue. Well, not my eyes. The contacts were. Colored contacts that perfectly fit my prescription that had never existed in my apartment until now. And, sure enough, everything was blue. The ceiling, the walls, the floor, all various shades of the color. I wanted for a second to hold my breath in an attempt to pass out, wake up in a time that made sense. But then I figured against it. This, all of this… 

Also the nails and tape were still all there. Worse upon worse. What was I expected to do, now? To go around with a tape dispenser in one hand, a paintbrush in the other? Make everything blue and then secure it to each other? That seemed the direction this was all going. I was being played with, clear and simple, and whatever god out there was orchestrating this just thought it was all very funny. 

Nothing to do, then. I took a shower, went into my closet, and… yep, all various shades of blue, from turquoise to baby. Even the socks. Whoever heard of blue socks? But, I mean, blue jeans and blue dress shirt weren’t all that bad. It was the shoes and socks that did me in. They looked terrible. Horrible. Just disgusting. But there were no other socks and shoes around. So I put everything together and sat down for a box of blueberry cereal. And that, unfortunately, wasn’t even a result of this color madness; it was just the thing I usually ate in the morning. Just another incredibly unfortunate detail. 

While I ate, I thought to myself about what I should do. There was the temptation to simply leave the city, to walk out into the wilderness where I would survive or die in a much less demeaning manner than if I stayed. But today made that proposition even less attractive than yesterday. The nailing of everything to the floor… I figured that was something a horde of people could do in one nighttime. Painting everything, and I do mean everything blue? No. Just… I guess if the entire government of the United States decided on it, they could orchestrate it for a few million dollars. But that somehow seemed less likely than something purely supernatural. 

I vacillated about what I should do in my dining room for a good thirty minutes. Should I go, or not go? Should I wait for this round of madness to blow over, or should I run away? The internet still wasn’t working, neither was my cellular service. There was a good chance that insanity had taken over the world, and that there was now nowhere to go. Well, the middle of the woods. I could build a hut out of sticks and scraps, eat berries and drink river water. And then die of a parasite within three weeks. Yep. Yeah. Ugh. 

At least the water and electricity were still working. The colors of the walls might change, I might have to constantly remove tape and nails from things in order to get them working, but I had enough food to last myself a month. That was the blessing of my pessimism and paranoia. It bought me time. But then the lunatics outside had clearly shown themselves capable of the supernatural. Mere walls and a door were not enough to stop their antics, but distance might. What would the next plague of madness be? Slathering the world in honey? Putting rabbits on top of every tv? Or maybe something worse, right? There were a thousand different rational reasons to fear madness, for within the realms of illogic, everything was a possibility, from the benign to the inferno. Yep, tomorrow everything could very well be set on fire. Nails, blue, fire. A really stupid, stupid pattern, but it made sense in my heart. 

So there was only one real option, then. I would pack some stuff and try following the road to the next city down. If I kept myself going all hours I could get to Sanford in three days. And then? Well, if they were stricken by madness too then I’d be back at square one, just as doomed as I was sitting still. And there was wilderness out there, too. No reason to make my hometown’s forest my home over any other. Square one. And if things made sense over there? Well, then I was back to a normal, trashy life with less than a thousand in my bank account. Would be absolutely hilarious if they kept charging me rent for my apartment here, but then they probably would, wouldn’t they? Even if the city murdered itself, the financial group would still have my numbers to claim. But that was still probably better than burning to death in my sleep, or waking up to see my bed covered in roach corpses, or whatever. Probably. I hated that I wasn’t confident about that. 

So I got my stuff together. Cans, can openers, plenty of bottled water. Just enough to last the road, if I wasn’t robbed. That was another risk, of course. But then there was no sense in not taking risks. Backpack in tow, I hobbled over to the newly blue door. There was a faint brushing sound outside. Some lady coughed a couple of times from across the street. But the brushing sound was much, much closer.

My heart started pounding in my chest again. Other people. I remembered what they had done yesterday, that brutal shattering of that young lady that had turned me insane in their stead. So many hours spent taping, nailing, all to escape their ever present gaze. But they hadn’t been in my neighborhood yesterday. But the sounds were inescapable. They were there, the utter insanity of their actions accompanied by plentiful eyes and hands. All instruments of my death, were I not careful. 

But where else was there to go? I’d decided I couldn’t stay. Perhaps I could wait a few hours for when they moved on to another section of town. Or maybe tomorrow. Maybe I could wait out the fracturing insanity of one more day before making my break. But then they’d probably be out here, too. The first day was a fluke, wasn’t it? If I was to make my escape, I had only one reasonable time to do it, and that was now. 

I twisted the blue doorknob. I could feel a bit of paint splash onto my palm. Damnation of damnations. And so I walked out into the blue toned light.

It was much more obvious than yesterday. Every. Single. Building. Blue. Yes. All of them. In one night. But the worst part? There was still much work to do. There was a man painting a tree just twenty feet to the left. That was the direction of Sanford. He seemed to be pursuing the work in a lazy, melancholic sort of way, unlike the others across the street, who slathered themselves in almost as much paint as they put out onto the town. Suddenly, the fear in my belly was gone. I was more… sorry. Concerned? Curious? A combination of all of those, and a whole slew of slightly nasty emotions that I couldn’t put a name to. If I ran down the side alley, he would see me. If I went in the opposite direction, certainly I’d stumble into someone else. I was tired of being afraid. I was getting answers. 

I walked up to the man with as friendly a smile as I could muster in this pale imitation of hell. “Hello! How are you?” The standard greeting. Nothing.

“Hello? You feeling alright?” Nothing.

“Look. I get it. Stuff’s weird. But why are you painting the town blue?”

He turned around to look at me with no particular emotions in his eyes. Not rapture, not hatred, not even boredom. Just eyes. 

“We’re painting the town blue because it ought to be blue.”

This, um, yeah. This sort of thing floored me. I’d always considered myself to be insane, that was, until yesterday. But with the revelation of that last sentence, I figured my insanity to be a blessing, if this is what sanity meant. 

“But why’s everything gotta be blue?”

“Because it ought to be.”

“But… but… why?”

At this I finally felt a glimpse of emotion in his eyes. It was sharp and painful, like he meant to stab me with his gaze. “Listen. It’s not good to ask these questions. You think I want the town to be blue? You think I wanted to nail everything to the ground and then remove the nails the next night? I’m exhausted.”

“But then why are we doing it?”

“You think I’m stupid? You think you’re so wise, you go and talk to every single person. You’ll get the same answer. Nobody liked the nails and tape, nobody likes this. But we speak too loud, we get the attention of anyone else, crrrrrik.” At this he pantomimed his throat being slit. 

“But if nobody likes it, if we all agree that it’s insane, why…”

“I don’t know. And frankly, you’ve distracted me from this for far too long. You see that guy down there?” He pointed down the street to a gray haired man who was spray painting some bushes. He was watching us. “That’s Bruce. He was a POS before and he got three people crucified yesterday. I don’t think he likes the blue, or the nails, or whatever. I think he just gets a kick of seeing us all in pain, even if he’s in pain himself. Now I gotta get back to this before he calls the others in on me. And if you value your life even a little bit, you’ll get to it yourself.”

“But…”

“Oh, stop being Socratic. You want to be idealistic. But we’re doomed, alright? Stop pretending that we aren’t. Get to painting.”

“But…”

“Paint.”

The gray haired man down the street was done spray painting the bush and was now watching us with a haunting intensity, even from a hundred feet away. The kid I was speaking to obviously noticed this, as he darted away with his paint bucket without saying another word. 

I remembered that kind of stare. It had built on me in the park as I did nothing. And joining them had led me here. So, instead of grabbing one of the dozen paint buckets which crowded the sidewalk to join in the maddening dance, I simply started walking. No answers but authoritarianism, no hope but separation. 

Street upon street, alley by alley, always hoping to encounter nobody but always catching the gaze of somebody. A thousand piercing eyes were drawn away from their blue stained murals to the miraculous rebellion of my legs. Miraculous? Hah. Sure. But they attracted attention all the same. 

I made it about thirty blocks before I noticed it. See, humans are loud creatures. Even when they are not speaking, they produce so much noise that their presence is unmistakable. Coughing. Sniffling. The steady beat of their hearts, the dragging of feet, the scratching at itches in the arm. Take one person, and maybe you forget the noises even as you listen to them. You think of them as commonplace, as ambient as the wind. Take twenty, their footsteps echoing behind you, and then… then you stop looking back.

Thirty. Forty. Soon so many that their numbers would overwhelm the legions of hell. That same, sallow presence. But the footsteps never stopped. I kept walking. I tried to pick up pace a couple of times, but then they followed suit. Each minute I felt like I lost another foot of distance from them. Each minute it grew louder and louder. But I was nearing the end of town. I would be free, damnit! I would be free! 

And then I tripped on a little rock in the road. Normally I would have been able to stabilize myself mid fall, keep walking. But I was wearing my backpack, laden down with days of supplies. I completely tilted over, my knees and arms colliding with the asphalt in a painful splat. 

Louder. Louder. Still no words, somehow. 

My heart pounded louder than a drum, and then… it stopped. Steady. My mind recognized its doom, finally. Meaningless, pointless, like any other death. But then what was there to fear, really? I did not believe in hell, I only used it in metaphor. So there was just me, and death.

I got up from the ground to find myself surrounded by them. I recognized none of them, vast as the city was. But I recognized something in their eyes. Not nothing, as I had observed in the young man painting the tree, but misery. Pure and utter sorrow, not for any actual pain, but in feeling as though their humanity, their very element of choice, simply did not matter. That they would survive was no consolation to their enslavement. 

I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t think of the proper words. I think I said stop, what are you doing, this is madness, all the usual things. But those weren’t the right words, if they existed out there at all. So they grabbed me, hauled me off to an empty lot where one of them tied me up with some rope to a metal pole. I tried to plead with her, too. None of the right words. 

They started piling up wood by my feet. Some of it was blue, some of it wasn’t. A few of the more skittish folks tried to paint the wood even as it was piled up at my feet. I begged, I pleaded. Not one solitary right word. Then I yelled in frustration at the heavens as they hauled up the kindling, but those weren’t the right words for God, either. Just words to match my death. 

Silent whispering among the crowd as that same gray haired man took a blue matchbox out of his pocket. One flick of the wrist, and my doom leapt ever closer. But the fire was not blue. I almost wished it was. 

You ever felt the heat of a candle? You ever pressed your fingers close to an open flame, just to understand what it feels like? I did, before. And I would always goad myself into trying to snuff out the flame with my fingers. I never managed to. I always got scared just a centimeter away from it, as the heat overwhelmed my senses and I was forced to yank my hands back. I’d always wondered how some people managed that trick. But there was the heat from one candle, on a couple of fingers. Too much.

And then there was this. I could barely hear the commotion over the pain. So much pain. I really… there’s no analogies. I feel like I should be making similes, metaphors, that kind of thing, but there’s a point where an experience becomes so real that any translation you make of it into text, words, whatever, just doesn’t work out. So I’ll leave it at that. I was hearing, sure, I was seeing a bit behind the smoke, sure, but I didn’t actually. You have to have some smidgen of your mind not entirely encased in suffering for those things to mean anything. I couldn’t hear my screams, couldn’t even feel them as they left my throat.

But it was over. There was another sort of pain, now, a describable one. Like getting punched in the gut a thousand times a second. Like having my feet be bitten by a thousand fire ants, who then proceeded to crawl up my legs. I could see the water, hear the chaos, and I hated that I hadn’t been allowed to die. 

They took me off the pedestal still screaming. The pain was a hollow echo of the inferno, and there was no way in a thousand years I could ever be grateful to them, like they felt I should. I berated them even as they laid me on the gurney, cursing their names, their mothers, and everything in between. They slipped something under my tongue, and then I fell asleep. 

I woke up with the pain being a constant, dull thud, mostly localized to my feet and lungs. Permanent smoke damage, the doctors said. With luck I’d be able to do normal tasks in a couple of months. I said nothing. I guess I meant that to be poetic. But literally, I said nothing for a long time. Just texts and everything. That kind of stunk, but it had to be done, the doctors said.

When the interviewers came around they didn’t have any poignant questions. Never, not once, did they ask me about why I thought it happened. They talked with a nervousness that belied a lack of understanding on their own part, but they never asked that one damnably important question. No, they asked me simple things. What I had seen, what I heard, what I had said to others and what others had said to me. Basic stuff that veered so far away from the truth of the matter that they might as well have not asked it. I tried to turn the sessions back towards the question of why, but they were obstinate. They were simply giving the questions they were ordered to give, and me, voiceless little old me, couldn’t do much to persuade them otherwise. So, nothing was learned. Horrors from beyond the stars? The charisma of an insane prophet? A particularly hypnotic tv program combined with a chemical spill in the water? The pronouncements of GOD? Nope. Nothing learned, nothing gained but a bit of emptiness in a city, a name on maps that would soon be erased for the sake of stability. So I gave up trying to get anything out of the sessions, and just let them proceed with the shallow hope of getting benefits through cooperation.

I was given another name, one of my choosing, fortunately. I had a different haircut, different clothes, a new, yet similarly decent house, and a couple of reports to fill out every day to collect my stipend, least until they felt it was safe for me to go working again. It was a relief, almost. Everything was still in pain, of course, but it was getting better by the day. I was lonely, sure, but I found respite in books and shows. Nothing unusual, nothing good. But certainly better than the blue. 

Three weeks of solemn contentedness passed. I sat down in my chair. It barely budged, and for a second I felt like jumping out of my skin. I dropped to the ground to investigate the legs, but there was nothing. The chair was simply heavy, nothing more. No nails, no blue, just the crippling of my strength. I sat back down at it and stared at the gray wall, barely any thoughts rolling through my mind.

A tiny swishing sound, paper against metal. It was unfamiliar, so I treated it with paranoia. But then I found the letter lying starkly on the dark brown floors. This house had no mailbox, but a mail slot. An annoying change against my preference, as I had to lean down to pick the letter up. I would have much rather walked an extra twenty feet than be forced to lean, but such was my present. It was addressed to me, sure enough. The new me. But it wasn’t anyone of the old town come to claim my life, no. It was from St. John’s hospital. I opened the letter with an utterly cruel sense of irony. Of course. A bill. The federal agents had paid for half of it. This amount of money… but they said I couldn’t work, least not for three years, and the interest… the stipend… nothing added up to anything other than silent doom.

I laughed. I laughed so hard at the expense of my lungs that I could taste a hint of soot in my mouth. One insanity for another, one cruel human hive mind for the god of money. Not much of a difference. The world could be blue, nailed to the floor, or it didn’t really matter. All the same. Always the same.

I laughed again. There was little else to do.