Artifact (9 page)

“So tell us,” a woman said. “Tell us what you see.”

“A nightmare.” I said, “An epiphany.”

“Go on.”

There was a closed pocket–watch in the lower left corner covered with ants, and another open–faced watch draped over a lifeless figure which could have been a flesh colored duck, or a badly disfigured person.

“This is Salvador Dali’s
The Persistence of Memory
.”

“The persistence
,”
the man echoed sagely, as if he were a teacher whose student finally said the answer he was waiting for.
“
Of
memory…”

“The persistence of memory,” the little girl said softly.

“I’m getting close, aren’t I?” I asked, “To figuring this all out?”

“Just two more.”

I relaxed a bit, sensing a change in them. I was beginning to trust that they were trying to help – whoever they were.

We stopped at a glass case containing a violin. It was very old, and very beautifully crafted. Careful grooves trailed the length of the neck into the scroll, where the finish aged to a deep black. Its beauty rested in its simplicity, but the care with which the carpenter molded the body around the top–block was unlike anything I had seen before. The ribs were chipped around the corner–blocks, and I tried to imagine how old it was – what appeared to be brittle was somehow reinforced by the solid–wood test of time, and although it projected a sense of strength, it still looked as if it would shatter at the merest touch. “I don’t know the builder, but that is a very beautiful looking violin.”

“And if you had to guess the builder?” The voice asked.

“Stradivarius,” I intoned. “I would have to say.”

We moved away from the case, and came upon another painting. Again my heart dropped.

I knew what it was supposed to be.

“This isn’t right,” I said.

“Why?”

“This isn’t the painting.” I said, “It’s been changed.”

“In what way?”

The original painting depicted a man – although it only vaguely resembled a man – with a lion’s mane of gray hair splashing a black backdrop tinged with red, which in reality was just a wall inside Goya’s house. He was supposed to be crouching in rictus – eyes opened wide and manic, maddeningly rending the remaining stump of an arm with his blunt teeth. He was supposed to be essentially eating the headless carcass of his own child. “This is supposed to be Goya’s
Saturn Devouring His Son
,” I said. “But this…”

I had to look away. Instead of Cronos and his darkened maw, it was Alice. And she was eating what looked like an image of me.

“Please,” I said finally. “Just let me go. I’m tired. I’m just so tired of all this.”

A warm and comforting hand gently squeezed my shoulder. “Do you know what this place is?”

I thought about it. “It feels like a maze. Like an epistemological snare.”

“No, this
place–”

The person turned me in a circle so that I could take in the vast, white emptiness of the room, which was filled with thousands of pieces of art.

“No.” I said, “Where am I?”

“It’s a mausoleum,” the woman said. “A tomb. A place where memories are allowed to persist.”

“It’s a prison,” the little girl said solemnly.

“A prison for what?”

“Genius.
”
The man said,
“Miraculous self–reflections and truth.”

“I – I don’t understand.”

“What good is that violin?” The woman asked. “What’s the point of keeping it locked away like that?”

“To preserve it, I guess.”

“Why?”

“Because it holds historical significance.”

“How? There’s nobody here to use it. There isn’t even anyone here to see
it.” She said, “The violin, Lance, has lost every speck of utility. It has even forgotten how to sing. Without the delicate touch of an artist, what does that violin even mean? It is utterly worthless without the appraisal and admiration of such a mind that has the capacity to appreciate and understand what it is. It is a collection of dumb matter afloat in the ungraspable construct of time, without purpose or meaning.”

“The answer is nothing, Lance.” The man said, “It is good for nothing.”

I craned my neck around to look at the violin. I studied it for a few moments, admiring again the detail of its workmanship. I wondered who built it – who gave it the illusion of life. I wondered about what it must have survived to get there, how many generations it had been passed to, how many wars it had seen, how many hands that have held it, and in how many museums it had lived.

I wondered about the tree that had been cut to harvest the wood. How old was that tree? Where did it grow?

“You’re wrong,” I said finally.

“How so?”

“There is
someone here to admire and love it,” I sighed, and turned my head back toward the front.

“Who? Who is here that could do that?”

“Me.” I summoned a bit of strength and said, “I’m here.”

The wheelchair suddenly jerked forward and someone started rolling me toward the abhorrent version of Goya’s painting.

“I hope we see you again, Lance.”

“What are you doing?”

“Letting you go.”

“That’s it, I can go?”

“Of course. We don’t lie, Lance.”

Alice’s deformed head grew larger as they pushed me toward the painting. I noticed that there was a slot in the floor below the golden frame, and it grew as well, until it was slightly wider than an open coffin. I realized then that it was simply a hole cut into the floor, and as we drew closer, I failed to see how deep it was.

“Lance,” the woman said. “These pieces of art will remain imprisoned forever. For being a masterpiece, there’s a price to pay. A consequence. You have to realize that these things remain significant only as long as there are people around to appreciate them. They will remain entirely meaningless until someone comes along and gives them meaning again. Do you understand?”

“Yes, but I don’t know what this has to do with me.”

“Then you don’t understand.”

The person wheeled me to the edge of the hole, and my heart dropped into my stomach. I realized that it was as close to bottomless as I had ever seen.

“Don’t do this,” I said breathlessly. “Please.”

“A word of advice,” the man said. “Those things that you think are zombies? You’re only half right.”

The woman was behind me, too. “This isn’t as much of a dream as you would think.”

“Don’t let those zombies bite you.” The man continued, “And Lance, if you want this to end, you have to open the artifact. You know that, right?”

I couldn’t breathe, certain that they were going to roll me into the pit. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from it.

“Who are you?” I tried to stall, pulling at my handcuffs as hard as I could.

“Oh, come now. Isn’t it obvious?”

My whole world spiraled down a deep dark hole of which there was no end.

“We,” they said. “Are you.”

And then they pitched me into the hole, wheelchair and all.

As I plummeted – as I knocked and tumbled and fell for what felt like forever, ripping strips of skin away with each contact against the shaft’s interior, approaching terminal velocity – the dream changed again–

4.

As a new plane of existence whisked away the deep shaft of darkness, I realized then that my understanding of time as a concept, as a relative progression of movements, made adjusting to those liminal temporal disruptions easier for me. The fact of the matter was that I seemed to be cutting to and from different points in time.

As a physicist, I knew that time was as much of an abstract as it was an actual descriptive dimension. It was a singular thing, past, present and future – like how a whole book is itself a singular object, instead of just the collection of moments therein. The closest I ever came to describing the physicist’s concept of time in any coherent way was at a high school teach–in. I explained that we are capable of understanding time, and even experiencing it to a certain extent. Because the human mind is only limited to three dimensions, we can only perceive time in slices, and only in one direction. We need an array of instrumentation to even begin to visualize the shadow of anything further than that. To us, perceiving time is like something in the second dimension perceiving human beings as a stack of thinly cut slices – as if we were a deck of playing cards that could only be seen one card at a time, or a book that could only be seen one page at a time.

It’s a static thing that only looks different because of where you’re standing. Time passes differently for an astronaut in orbit than it does for a science crew deep in the Marina Trench.

If we were to have two people synchronize their watches at the same exact time on two different planets – one on Earth and one Mars – and if we measured time against a wayward Kuiper belt object, let’s say, as it passed between the two planets, then each person would perceive the same event as happening at different times. In other words, the same time on Mars would not be the same time on Earth. Each would experience time in their own way, on their own accord. The event is the same – it’s one, singular
thing
– but it’s not isolated to one moment or another. It just is.

I think that’s why adjusting to these changing realities was easy for me, when I would be running with Sid toward the double–door entrance to the CEM, and be inside the CEM, in my office on the second level at the same time. This even reinforced the suspicion that I was dreaming – or at the very least that none of this was real. The sheer amount of impossible shit that has happened since the accident was just too much to ignore. At least that’s what I thought.

Images of Goya and Dali occupied my thoughts. The portrait of Alice eating me was especially unsettling, but the
Persistence of Memory
was probably the most indicative thing I had seen so far. There were two certainties. One was that the presence of death in this dream was very real, and although the imagery may have been fantastic, like zombies for example, I knew that it symbolized something wholly tangible on the outside of wherever I was. If I died in there, I died in the real world as well. The second certainty was that what was unfolding – somewhere in the recesses of my mind – would have real life consequences.

The fundamental issue was time. At least, I think it was starting to become the issue.

There seemed to be several Me’s
converging onto the same moment. What that moment was I couldn’t tell – it hadn’t happened yet.

So when I fell down a hole into oblivion – shoved by some invisible art cult that claimed to be me – as a singularity collapsed into a deterministic universe of infinite possibilities – I was, at the same time, suddenly lying in my hospital bed again.

“Do you need anything, Lance?”

I could move, I realized, and made fists with my hands a few times. I noticed Alice’s pink stuffed animal on the sill. The nurse lowered her clipboard slightly and frowned. “Are we okay, Lance?” She asked. “Need anything – cup of ice, some water?”

“Can you hear me?” I asked.

She frowned and set the aluminum clipboard onto a shelf next to the wall–screen. “Of course…”

I gently touched my chest and a sliver of pain touched back.

I quickly sat up, ignoring the roaring flames under my skin and started ripping all of the tubes out of my body.

“W–wait, what’s wrong?!” The nurse screamed. “Nurse Alex, I need you in here!”

I ripped the intravenous–drip, feeding tube and catheter away and rolled onto my feet. The hospital gown bunched around my waist, and I felt a breeze.

Two additional nurses came running into the room and tried helping me back onto the bed, but I shoved my way through them, snatching the aluminum clipboard from the shelf before stumbling into the hallway.

It looked just as it did before, except there were people. The institutional beige felt a bit warmer, and the scent of chemicals was less punctuated. To my left was the perpendicular hallway that branched in opposite directions. To my right were the elevators and the emergency stairway – and the dark hospital room at the end of the hall, with the dying fluorescent lights. Only this time they weren’t dying – this time they were burning bright and true. I ran, ignoring the pain. I passed the elevator just as the doors opened, and–

–Patrick’s heavily muscled frame stepped out, flanked by two men in suits. “Lance…”

I kept going at a dead sprint while the balls of my bare feet screeched on the linoleum.

“Lance!” He screamed, scuffing his shoes on the floor, reaching out to grab me but missing.

I careened into the room at the end of the hall and slammed the door closed, ignoring the blood that poured down the front of my body. I quickly grabbed one of the portable beds and wedged it between the door and the opposite wall. I dropped to my knees, and there it was–

–A bright green, glowing letter
M.

I took the aluminum clipboard with both hands and hacked the door with its edge, trying to scrape away the paint.

Someone crashed into the opposite side, and Patrick yelled, “Open up, Lance – you’re not safe!”

I slammed the clipboard repeatedly until enough of the paint scraped away that I could see another glowing letter, like the numbers on an alarm clock:

MO

Patrick and the suits methodically rammed the door. “Lance, you don’t understand,” he said. “You’re at risk. I don’t know the extent of who or what has been compromised!”

I kept scraping.

MO–

They were ramming so hard that the bed was beginning to shift, and soon it was going to vibrate away from the door just enough for one of them to work their way inside.

MO–ST

“There’s been a serious security breach, pal.” Patrick yelled, “This whole place is coming down. We need to get you out of here. You’re all that matters!”

MO–STA

“I know I screwed up,” he said. “I’m sorry, and I didn’t mean to scare you. But we’re trying to help, okay?”

“Then why’d you kill Joseph?!”

“I had no choice, Lance,” he said. “He was infected. He would have killed you, and then all of this–” He took a breath. “All of this would have been for nothing. You understand, don’t you?”