Dark Waters

Dark Waters

The mattress dissolved into a warm, hostile and shallow swamp. He rolled up his blanket, crawled out of the mire, and floated, glad to be out of the reach of dreams. Fresh out of the waters, the cross breeze coming softly through his room felt cool on his skin. He breathed deeply, happy for the moment to be awake and floating. In the dark waters he had slept for nearly half a year, only waking to flashes of light always illuminating the faces of men who he greeted with screams of either horror or anger, often smashing his head against the wall, or thrashing around the waves in his bed, always waking his neighbors.

But for the moment he floated. “Asleep I am a monkey, awake I am a man”, he thought, “a man, I am alone”. He lay floating on his blankets, feeling the cool breeze. In his mind he pictured a group of monkeys in a tree above dark waters. They felt the cool breeze, unthinking. Peacefully they groomed each other while passing small bits of food from hand to mouth, content in each other’s presence. “Awake and alone, I think of the cool breeze and of being alone”, he thought

He thought of the monkey he was moments ago and screaming at the faces of men. In sleep we can see much farther, and in his sleep with each flash of light he could see across space and time. He saw her in pain, alone on her bed at night, far away beyond oceans and mountains. He also saw him, just on the other side of the ocean in that great city of millions of caves, haunted in his bed. They could see him too. Together they were monkeys, separated. It was only when they woke up screaming at night that they could no longer see each other.

“Somehow, as unthinking monkeys who felt the cool breeze and who fed and groomed each other, we became separate”, he thought, alone.

He remembered biblical tales of a world long vanished. There was a face that moved across water in the dark. It was searching, or hunting, alone. It looked like the face of men, but was something else, something that felt like fear. It knew only itself. It was the face of God.

From somewhere else it came, no one knows where, to please itself. It could dream waking. In its transparent mind, reflected on dark waters, it imagined lands to pass the time, and filled these lands with animals and abundance. It was a paradise for him to play with like a child with a toy. It kept its pets from seeing him by keeping them from thought, and the monkeys sat in a tree, grooming and feeding themselves, together and unthinking of the cool breeze they felt stir their shiny coats.

can be imagined can become real, and artifacts left by Gods, Men and Monkeys testify to this.

This floating face of God was always a hunter and a gambler. He tired of watching the unthinking monkeys he imagined, and thought to increase the stakes in the game. Monkeys are by nature curious. So while they were asleep he placed at the root of the tree a food they had never seen. It was such a fruit as to give them thought, and to allow them only in flashes of light, to see his face. The price he would pay for this, should they take the fruit, was to be seen, a delicious fear that he savored. The price they would pay was to be cursed by thought, and to float alone in dark waters, in sleep remembering togetherness, and in waking to flashes of light, screaming. It was such a game in which no party really won. Thus the race of men was born, alone.

In the morning, after hanging the blanket so the sheets could dry, he put out the countless, empty bottles of dark waters he had drank to forget his loneliness, and in defiance of God he sought out the company of others, just like a monkey.