It's about trying to reach that blackout point where words just start to appear on their own. Where you wake up in the sitting position with no concept of what happened in front of you. I need something to eat. Then it's bullshit story time.
The voice presupposed Calvin was someone important. He asked it why he remembered this number and didn’t remember much of anything else. The voice on the other end laughed, unsure what to make out of this. It asked him if he was a plumber, or some sort of city worker. Calvin racked his brain for evidence of this, thought for a second about whether or not he had a toolbox, and couldn’t make up his mind one way or the other. He felt like he was playing 20 questions where neither party knew the answer.
“Do you know why you’re calling?” The man asked curtly.
“I had something to do with this number, once.” The phone clicked and went back to a dial tone. So much for progress.
Calvin fell asleep in the early morning hours. The dawn sun functioned as a night light. He dreamed through a green diagonal filter. He was walking down by the firefly pond, and he kept jerking back and away from an imaginary line he knew he shouldn’t cross. The crocodile had jumped out here, Calvin imagined. It had removed the head of that guy in a snapping sidelong swipe. His neck was 3 slabs of skin. It bent the spine cavity in a direction where it leaked specks of juices onto the path like a wet pixie stick.
It was a flashbulb memory was the last thing he remembered before he woke up in a cold sweat. He rose in bed, arms crossed, like a practical joke which was “not funny” had been played on him.
He was starting to become anxiously overaware of each hour of the day. He realized how much time he had been wasting, although he couldn’t think of anything constructive to fill the time with. It was becoming increasingly clear he should find a way to combat the white jackets before they left him without a place to live, but it was the others job as much as it was his. In his barely lucid woken state, he wondered where the inhabitants of the floors beneath had went when their rooms were destroyed. In his assumed inferiority, he had assumed they were all simply more resourceful than he was and had easily found new homes elsewhere.
Calvin rigged the elevator so it would open without the elevator there. He did this by prying the doors open with a crowbar from the utility closet. He thought of the different ways he could keep the elevator from reaching this floor, but then remembered the stairs, and remembered that he himself had to return to this floor so it were best he didn’t seal it off.
Gloria came from the end of the hall when he sat kneeling in front of the elevator well, and he almost fell in. His arms waved akimbo over the shaft like the falling dream, and a feeling of hopelessness spread over him when he realized his legs were ineffective tools for pulling himself up. She grabbed his shirt, inadvertantly grasping a hand full of his back hair, and he felt more embarassed than scared at this point.
He rolled over to his side like an infant that hadn’t learned how to walk yet, and saw a cross, stern face looking down at him. All of the angles of Gloria’s face were exaggerated from this angle, her chin and cheekbones looked more rounded, and her bottom row of teeth protruding out like a small stone wall on the face of a planet.
“Calvin!” She said. He was startled that she knew what his name was. “Just what are you trying to do?”
He rose up ungracefully but quickly, concentrating his balance on one foot. “Well… see… well… you know…” She looked at him impatiently, like a mother who caught their child attempting to drive drunk. “The gentlemen with white jackets are already on floor 17 and… well they’ll be here soon.”
“They won’t come here!” She knew more than she was letting on. Her cheeks changed from peach to red. “They have already got almost all they need and they will stop. Atleast that’s what DJ says. Just what did you think you were going to do to the elevator, anyway? I am not going to climb all of those stairs on account of you, Calvin.”
He turned into the blubbering fool he was trying not to be. It was going to take him hours of yelling at himself in the mirror to work out of this haze. His arms dangled in front of him and he fell slack, not inclined to defend himself because he no longer knew what he should say. “Yes, ma’am,” He conceded, starting to walk back down the hall.
He heard her cursing him as he closed his door, and then the sounds of metal against linoleum. “Don’t even pick up after yourself,” She said.
The floors in between him and the lobby were becoming ossified, a fragile brittle structure which appeared on the inside like gossamer bone. Only, these men were human, and the process seemed to contain a spurious step which was omitted from the visual version. He didn’t notice them working with the effectiveness of bees, spraying their own paper mache mixture on each side.
Calvin had found a small café on the other side of town where he would sit and drink small amounts of gin and eat walnuts. There was a TV which would run on an 8 Volt battery, showing reruns of classic sitcoms on the emergency broadcasting channel. He had no way to trim his beard other than a scissors and looked homeless.
The rain began to fall, washing a mixture of soot and grime from the top of the unseen towers, or possibly just what was deposited in the clouds. You couldn’t see the clouds from the sidewalk below, the sky was covered in an enveloping blackness. Things looked a lot worse during the night. The pedestrians started scurrying about like rodents, and a man with a moustache and glasses crabwalked across the sidewalk and slipped through the door of the café.
Yup this one isn't good either. I'll start a new story but I think eventually something will end up happening to Calvin. If I drew it as a comic I think more shit would happen.
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