The Participants - chapter 7.5Interlude 1 – Hess – Iteration 143

The darkness was everything. Hess lay as if dead, listening to the heartbeat that would not cease counting eternity. Ragged breaths sawed through his parched throat at irregular intervals. Hunger gnawed at his middle and weakness wrapped him like a blanket. A tenuous peace existed in those moments of passivity. The weary emptiness was the state of least pain and he embraced its refuge. Hess forced down the memories struggling to rise within him. There was nothing but the darkness.

Time passed. Whether it passed quickly or slowly he did not know. Such concepts didn’t exist in the darkness. There was only now, one torturous moment stretching to infinity. Hess did not contemplate time. He did not contemplate anything. He simply existed in the darkness.

He existed in the darkness until the echo of his gasping breath in the tiny space sparked a constellation of recollections. The violence of the memories triggered a physical response. Hess swung his fists at the darkness, striking stone surfaces above his face and to each side. “Elza!” Some part of him recognized the hoarse voice as his own. Another part reacted to the sound, imagining rescuers spoke to him. “Help me! Let me out of here! Please help me!”

Yet another part of him observed everything from a distance, chronicling events even though nothing new happened, even though nothing new would ever happen. Panic attack triggered by perceived noise. “Elza? Can you hear me, Elza? I’m sorry! So sorry! Please forgive me!” Fragmented thought processes. “Someone help me! Get me out of here! I will do anything!”

His fists, invisible in the dark, were made of pain. He struck harder and harder at surfaces he could not see, ratcheting the pain higher. Blood began to spatter, raining down on his face. Hess licked the tangy liquid from his lips, desperate for moisture. Animal responses remain strong, instinctually seeking sources of comfort.

“Why?” he demanded of the darkness. That question was everything, but no part of Hess was sure what it referenced. Why did the others do this to him? Why would the Creator allow his suffering to continue? Why had he violated the Divine Command in such a drastic fashion? Why would the Creator make a world where such suffering was possible? The question could be any one of those, or all of them together, or maybe something beyond words and logic, something born of the darkness that could only be sensed and never defined.

As Hess continued to pound his mangled fists, the objective portion of him continued its narration, repeating a story he told himself often. The healing response restores as much moisture and calories to the body as necessary to support life for a short length of time. It appears likely that the atmosphere is being scrubbed free of carbon dioxide, but this is impossible to verify. Likely the products of respiration are reclaimed in the same way as blood. Hess snarled wordlessly at the part of him observing his plight.

The rage that boiled up dwarfed everything that came before. Hess coiled his entire body and launched himself forward the eight inches to the stone ceiling, driving his forehead into it. The rebound struck the back of his head against the stone floor of his crypt. Hess struck upwards again. The impassive narrator vanished with the other aspects of his personality, all of them absorbed into the all-consuming emotion of the moment. Hess struck again and again with as much force as he could generate in his tiny prison until he died.

When Hess woke once more in the darkness, he began to weep, eyes burning but too dry for tears. His body was whole and undamaged save for a touch of dehydration. “Let me die! I don’t want to live! Please, Creator, unmake me! I don’t want to live! I don’t want to live!”

He wept for a time he could not determine but which felt significant. Then emotional exhaustion brought a blessed return to the living coma that was the state of least pain. Memories bubbled beneath the surface, but Hess ignored them.