The Drain

It began quite quietly and unthreateningly. A word was lost here and perhaps a number there, but not so dramatically as to cause alarm.

And then one morning he mislaid his notebook. This too occurred without the sirens of drama; It had been in the left inside pocket of his jacket and then just as naturally, it wasn't. The weather that morning was warm and pleasant and welcoming and he sat on the terrace sipping a coffee and thought little more of it. Returning to nature he thought with a shrug, this is no more than the next step on the road to freedom.

It is true that considered within the pattern of events his life had taken over the last few months, there was nothing really strange or out of the ordinary at play here. At first he had sold his computer, being sure to shut down each email account and means of social networking before doing so - just in case he should be tempted to scurry into an Internet cafe and fall back into his old routines. He had also rid himself of his cell and house phones and had made no effort to inform friends of this fact. Yes, this is freedom he thought. And then the word freedom itself slipped from his memory and he asked himself what this feeling was and found nothing offered in response. And so he thought of other words but each, in the moment he glimpsed them, flew from the branches of memory and hurried out into a silent white expanse. Anxiety gave way to acceptance, gave way to relief, until he found that instead of scaring language away one word at a time, waves of emptiness were flooding into his mind and washing whole paragraphs away, and with the paragraphs went the chapters and with the chapters went all language in volumes and novels, each pouring rapidly out and away from him.

Then what? Then nothing. Or worse than nothing, a space with no means to describe it. Emotions flashing in pulses and pictures. He pulled himself from the chair and walked through a garden and made his way to a staircase that led down onto a beach. The weather was beautiful but the beach was quite empty. He could see children a little way off prodding a large jelly fish that had washed onto the shore with large sticks. They struck quickly at its body before retreating back up the sand toward the cliff face. He removed his shoes and waded out a little into the water and for a moment felt a sensation that had once been happiness or joy or contentment. But just as quickly as it arose, he found that it flickered and died and with it went anger and misery and confusion. The water was nothing and he was nothing and the jellyfish was nothing and the children were nothing and he lost sight of the boundary between the water and his body and between the jellyfish and the children. Everything melted then into a soup of color; colors swirling as though a rainbow were pulled into a whirlpool. The whirlpool revealed a drain latticed with bars of metal to stop objects too large from being sucked down to block the pipes below. But there was nothing large enough to worry the drain here which drank in all color and all shape so that everything became a blur of spinning grey like a pulped book. And then the drain gurgled and fell to what he would once have called silence.