Found Sandwich

The natural character progression of any sandwich when it is lost. 

I have always detested the idea of hell. I know, I know. Who wouldn't? It is supposed to be despicable. But we see it weaponized here, up above. You must be a certain way or you are damned. But how clearly is that 'certain way' tied to morality, and not just giving yourself the branding of a creed? 

It's obvious. The people who talk about hell as a punishment in our world care more deeply about the victory of their identity than anything. Their master is cruel and cold, colder even than the demons in my stories.

Transcript

I was hungry.

I was hunger. 

That was all I was. I could sometimes make out the silhouettes of my fingers and hands when I raised them in front of my eyes, or, in fact, the things that I called eyes. It’d been so long since they’d worked properly I felt that they’d lost the dignity assigned to that word.

All of me had lost that dignity. 

Sisyphus. That was my name.

No, that wasn’t my name. That was what I had started to insist that I call myself. It was apropos of nothing. 

I was hungry. So hungry.

There was a sandwich in the fridge. I could eat that. I really could. A full sandwich, replete with all the makings of life. The severed flesh of another creature, molded milk for some cow’s young, and leaves. 

It was a fun game I played with myself. I wanted to see whether making the insides of the sandwich seem gross would have any impact on the rumbling of my belly. By the time I’d started playing the game, the answer was no. Maybe a long time ago it would have been yes.  When was that time?

When was that time? I’d been okay at some point. I’d been okay enough to form this thing that I called my mind. It was the least struck by the hunger, somehow. 

Somehow? 

My wretched little hands scurried through the fridge, acting on their whim to make a sandwich like my life depended on it. Couldn’t I just eat the materials themselves if I was in so bad a shape? After all, the point was just to survive, wasn’t it?

And I was surviving well enough without that dignity. Okay, maybe I wasn’t doing all that great. But I wanted a sandwich. That was what the stomach wanted. That was what it had been promised, that was what it was going to have. 

Yes, this mind. This mind had survived most of the torment. It felt the pain of the body, but so much time had passed that I was almost a separate being entirely. I felt just on the cusp of Samsara, of never having to look at my wretched, unclipped fingernails ever again. Of never feeling that pain, of never…

Of never being alive. Not now. Not ever. 

My sandwich was complete. My strength had left my bones, my vigor had departed from my sinews. But they knew how to do one thing above all others, and that was assemble a perfect sandwich. So savory, so sumptuous… 

And I put it on a plate. I always did. Even now, even so long after the fall, I could not bake the civility from my bones. 

No, it was not my hands that did it. The things attached to those arms were not mine. Nor were the arms, for that matter, or the body itself. How could I say they were me when I held no true dominion over them? When my will was nothing more than a whisper on the wind? 

Then whose hands were they, then? If not mine, then whose?

Hell’s. Plain and simple. That, and nothing else. Nothing more. Nothing…

Hell. 

I had no proof of my theory. No outside proof, anyways. Well, there was the fact that we’d been through this a hundred, million, thousand times, and the fact that I could barely feel anymore, the fact that things had stopped making sense in the context I was raised in, the fact that everything was pain, and nothing was more painful than hope, and…

There was no proof. Except right at this very moment there was one of them. The demonspawn. The reminders, the things that would torment.

It was me. A reflection of me, anyways. Or perhaps it was a me that was more real by virtue of its existence outside the box. The box that I hadn’t left in… the idea of having lived outside of the four rooms that I knew inside and out was as foreign to me as… as a foreign idea. Like a country. What countries even existed? What country was I from?

Didn’t matter. The same country as my changling doppelganger, at least. Ca. I remember that sound. That had to do with where I was born.

Yes, there was another of me. A bigger, better, stronger me. Full of flesh. More full of flesh than was healthy. But much of that flesh was muscle, too. Hungry muscle. Powerful muscle. The kind of muscle that would let it destroy me if I didn’t turn over my sandwich. 

And yet, worse than anything, a whole series of emotions ran over the replica’s face. Fear, disgust, anger. But the strongest emotion of all was jealousy. Jealous that I had a sandwich and they did not. Did they not see how emaciated I was? Did they not care for their fellow man?

Of course they didn’t. They especially didn’t when I was, to them, not their fellow man at all. After all, I considered them in the same way. They were a monstrosity. A demon. A thing of torment and nothing more. To them, I was the ripple effect of their fears. A fear of their hunger. After all, they wanted the sandwich. They had lost their lunch. That was always the story. They had lost their lunch to another one of the demons, and it was only here that they found their prized sandwich, and a reminder of what would happen to them if they did not eat. So, regardless of what I said, they ate.

A long while ago I had been able to fight back. A little. A very little. The thing was a reflection of myself, after all. My full, healthy self. One fight was all it took. A broken nose, I think. I won the scuffle. I ate my sandwich, with the other running, whimpering away. 

Then when I was hungry again, in came another apparition to plunder me. They won. Then the next, then the next, then the…

Then I stopped trying. I started talking. But the rift was irreparable, bounded by logics that neither of us could escape. We both believed ourselves real. At least, we acted like it. So of course they never considered what I said. Of course they all thought of themselves as the first in the chain, and I was the abberation. So why shouldn’t they struggle for the sandwich, for the sustenance?

I never got to eat after that. And that was…

That was so long ago. I should have died. I should have gone home. I should have been able to eat a sandwich in peace. But I never could. The door that the others opened was invisible to me. No matter how I craned my eye, the thing was not there. They disappeared into the wall, only for the next to follow. Always when I made my meal. Always. 

And here they were again. Right on time, as scheduled. Instead of talking, or fighting, or doing anything at all to try and escape, I simply lifted my withered arms to the man and meekly offered him the meal.

“What is…” a thousand questions raced through his head. They always did. The same questions. Answering them never changed anything. The next one that came from the walls would have the same bewilderment about them, need the same answers, lead to the same outcome. I’d only been able to humor them a little bit before I became exasperated with the whole thing. They wanted their sandwich. I couldn’t fight them. I couldn’t persuade them. So these were the motions. And my lips were too chapped and thin to do much talking, anyways.

The reflection decided as they always did. They would ignore the questions. They thought of themselves in a sticky situation where all they wanted was escape and food. He gobbled down the sandwich at lightning speed. There was nothing left but crumbs, which he promptly swept to the floor.

Yes, the crumbs. That was why I hadn’t died yet. That was the thing that kept my heart beating. 

I hated them. Always the same dismissive attitude. They could not take pity on me even for a second. 

Of course they couldn’t. They would leave the second they saw me bend to the ground to lick up the crumbs. They’d be ashamed. But they’d leave all the same.

And why wouldn’t they? They were reflections of myself, after all.

After all. That was why we were here. 

I remembered some blood. I would have remembered more if I had stopped. 

I ran. Ran fast, ran far. No camera caught me. The man died. I never knew him. Never took responsibility. That was why we were here. That and a whole lot of other things, of course, but that was the most important. 

Or…

Or it could be no reason. With the extreme dearth of knowledge I was working with, that was just as likely, wasn’t it? My attempts to impose structure and reason onto all the workings of the universe was simply a tactic I used to cope with the reality of my existence. I must be bigger than I really was. After all, I was myself.

I was… I was a broken thing. Hardly a person. All my muscles and joints moved without a flicker of a thought. To eat the crumbs. Enough. Enough. It was enough.

And no more. Just enough to keep me moving, not enough for anything else. I was supposed to be dead, up here in the mind. The only thing that was supposed to be left was my guttural fear and hatred. That was it. That was.

The copy got up, out of the chair. It did what they always did when they were disgusted by my form, by the situation we were in. They walked away. To the wall with no door. His hand clasped around a door handle I could not see, and his arm pulled against a surface I could not touch.

It was there, outside, that they found a bit of truth. Or freedom. Maybe both. Or maybe they took their place as one of me, the tormented husk of another reality. I had no way of knowing, or telling. Or anything. 

The copy froze. Not froze in a literal sense, although the absurdity of my situation could have made that possible; the copy froze out of fear. Real, basic fear. It had been so long since I had seen an emotion like that in them. So long. So…

“What is that?” He whispered. 

“Wha…” my throat was dry and sore. I hadn’t meant to talk with any of my tormentors for quite some time. Even acting as the mimic was quite a strain.

“What is that?” He repeated. He obviously wasn’t addressing me, but the thing that he saw on the other side of the door. I, meanwhile, had my eyes still plastered on the ground. There was a bit of the ham rind over there, by the trashcan. One of the best pieces my doppelgangers ever left me.

“Why?” He asked. I lazily lifted my eyes up and over. 

Yes, that was new. Never, in the millions of iterations of this that I’d suffered through, had I ever seen something like that.

Calling it a something felt wrong.

No, it was a something.

“What did I do to deserve this?” He begged. A faint smile arched involuntarily on my lips. It was nice to see a reflection of my pain. Sharper by volume, but leagues less brutal. Still, we were getting there.

Beyond was the void. No, no, that’s not true. Obviously. Beyond was a substance. A boiling, brackish substance that stank of death and shined like the night. It was a thing of misery and certitude. Certitude in that the door, the door that I’d never been able to see or feel until this moment, certitude that it was nothing more than a farce. My copy would not be leaving. Nor would I. ALthough, considering that I hadn’t left in well over… schmifty-beleven years, it wasn’t like I had much hope of leaving in the first place. Or the schmifty-belevenity place. 

“Where is…” the copy was going mad. Yes, they all believed they were me. The past me, anyways. The one that was more stupid, more proud. Of course my past self would hate this. The whole situation with the sandwich, and now the fabric of reality was collapsing? 

A sudden jolt of energy arched through my spine. Perhaps it was the little bit of ham I’d eaten falling into my stomach acids. I cared. About what, I couldn’t quite tell. It was like I saw a vision of a far off thing, shrouded by mists and the curvature of space, and just couldn’t quite tell what it was. Self-preservation, probably. My mind had given up associating with that idea when I started licking crumbs off the floor like a dog.

The copy was still staring at the… whatever it was. The revelation. But they couldn’t and wouldn’t stare forever. They would lose interest eventually, and start to seek answers. And what else would they seek answers from but me? Myself? The only other being in the room?

I shambled over to the bathroom. There was a lock there. I clicked it into place well before my replica even remembered that I existed.

Yes, the bathroom. A little sanctum. I was weak and dead, but the lock was not. And the water still ran. I cusped my hands in the sink, as I had done a thousand times before. Water spilled more through the cracks of bone thin fingers than they ever did when I was fat. But even still, I as able to palm some of the precious liquid into my mouth.

I didn’t need to drink. I drank plenty. Too much, really, if we held my tormented self to standard nutritional practices. But by drinking so much I was able to trick my body a little. With a bloated belly, I almost didn’t know that I was starving.

Almost. 

I had energy. Where did it come from? The ham? The water? The precious safety and solitude of the restroom? Or the fact that something, finally somehting had changed? 

Maybe it would kill me? 

My mind salivated at the possibility. Yes, my instincts forced me into the bathroom to avoid the duplicate’s wrath. But the mimic wouldn’t kill me. Just hurt me. Make the torment different in the only way it knew how; by making it worse. 

The boiling void beyond… if it ate the tormentor’s reality, could it not then eat mine, too? 

Could it… 

What did I want? Well a meal. Lots of meals. Enough to stop hurting. I didn’t really want to be extinguished, but if that happened… it wasn’t much of a loss. 

There was a knock at the door.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

More frantic this time. 

Knock.

“Come on, I know you’re in there,” came the exasperated voice.

“Noooooo…” I hissed. “Nooooo… not in here. Not in anywhere.”

“Open the door. I just want answers. I won’t hurt you.”

“Nooooo… they all hurt. Everyone hurt. Every time.”

“Look, I just want to get out of here. And you’re the only person I’ve seen otherwise, besides, well, some other replicas of me on the camera. But they’re not here. You are.”

“Nooooo… you ate the sandwich.”

“Guy. There’s plenty of meat and cheese left in the fridge. I checked. If you’re so hungry, why don’t you just eat that?”

“Noooo… my sandwich. I made it. Gone. GOne in your gullet.”

“Okay. So, mimic guy. Corpse man. I’ll just make you a sandwich. Is that good? A sandwich for a sandwich?”

Something flickered in my mind. It felt like tentacles were being wrapped around me. No, not tentacles. Brambles. Barbed wire. Spikes. Burrowing into me, into…

It was just my own flesh. My own skull. The thing I’d tried to seperate myself from so keenly through all these years. All that work. All that waking meditation. All to be destroyed by one proposed act of kindness. 

Well, not kindness. A quid pro quo. But even something like that was more than I had expected in eight eternities. 

“Yesssss… sandwich. Please. Make. Help me.”

“Ok. Ok. I’ll do it. Just wait a moment. I won’t hurt you. Not with that… whatever it is out there. I just…” his voice faded and I could hear him walking in the direction of the kitchenette. 

I was becoming myself again. Well, not myself. I had always been myself, even through those long years of torment and pain. What I hadn’t been was my body. And it being there, and it being me, those actions being my actions, that pain being my pain…

I had lost most of the use of my vocal cords. Not through malnutrition, no, nor even out of disuse. I had been mumbling and whining for the greater part of several eons, just as a way of easing the BURNING, SEARING PAIN. ALL OF IT, EVERYWHERE, AND I HAD NOT EVEN THE STRENGTH TO FIGHT AGAINST IT.

DAMN HIM. DAMN THEM ALL. DAMN ALL THE GODS WHO CONSPIRED TO MAKE THIS POSSIBLE. 

SURELY

Surely I’d paid my debt, already. If this was hell, if I did kill that man, if I did litter and jaywalk, steal my aunt’s credit card info, ruin my ex’s life, and…

Even if all those things, even if all those reflections of a life I must have lived were true, then I had paid for the pain a hundredfold already. Damn them. Damn them all. 

No. Not damn them. Damning was what happened to me. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t just. It was…

Knock.

“I did it. The sandwich is ready. I tried to make it at least as good. I think it worked out.”

Silence. I trembled. I didn’t want to be who I was. I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want to be dead. I didn’t want to be a slave to my hunger. I didn’t want the sandwich.

What did I want?

I had no idea. Even the whispers of an idea made no sense in my mind. 

I wanted…

Maybe the sandwich would help. It would quiet the pain. It would make some of this stop. 

Sure enough, there it was. On the desk. Just behind the healthier, younger reflection of me. He didn’t look so great himself. The writhing, boiling shadow on the other side of the room had clearly made an impression on him.

“It’s alright. It’s fine. Don’t worry. Just have the sandwich. We can talk later.”

Each and every decent word he uttered bound me closer and closer to my flesh. It strengthened the pain. YES. THE SANDWICH. THE SAVIOR. YES. COME TO FREE US FROM OUR PAIN. TO MAKE US WHOLE. TO MAKE US REMEMBER DESIRE.

There it was. Beautiful. Delightsome. So wondrous it made my mind conjure up words that really only existed before I was born. 

So many times it had been denied me. It was there. 

I sat down. My hands trembled. They were always trembling, but now even more so. It was as though an entire earthquake was passing through my skeletal frame. But even so, my feeble fingers managed to wrap their way around the pile of sustenance. The thing was heavy, almost impossible to raise to my mouth. 

I clenched my teeth. It couldn’t be happening. After all this time…

I unclenched my jaw. The sandwich went in. Only a scrap of it. The rind. Even still.

And then. I saw it. Light streaming eternal. Not from up above, from the sun, but from anywhere. Everywhere. It was ok. Everything was always going to be ok.

The pain vanished even faster than it had arrived. And yet, there I was, fully in contact with my body. My fingers were full of flesh, much in the same way my mimic’s were. Every sinew in my form coursed with strength. It was heaven…

It was not. It was just better. So, so much better. A dim reflection of perfection, but a million times brighter than the night.

“What? What just happened?” Came my own voice. The same as I always remembered it, just not from my mouth.

Yes, the replica. No, not replica. The twin.

“You tell me what just happened. I don’t know.”

“I want answers.” 

“As do I. But some of your assumptions beforehand were probably right. I’d been down here a while. Down. Yes. As in I think that we’re in hell. And that twitching, clawing darkness is…”

“Torment?”

“No. But it doesn’t matter. Your kindness saved me. For now. Probably. I am you. You are me. Yet I bear the punishment, the scars of my time here. You just aquainted yourself with the oddities of this time, this place, yes? Such was how all the others felt.”

“Others?”

“Yes, others. Many, many others. Perhaps so many that they reach numbers where I run out of prefixes to describe them. Nonillions at least. I have had enough. Whatever lies beyond the door I will see. Thank you, me. Thank you.”

“Uh… what?”

“You heard every word I said, don’t pretend otherwise.”

At this I got up out of the chair and sauntered straight over the churning madness that existed beyond the walls. It was hot. Exceptionally so. Looking it in the face was like sticking my head into an oven. 

Hell. Yes, hell. Cliches and all. 

It was doom. It was the pain I had just escaped from. It was all the things I hated. 

And yet, I was already there.

I stuck my hand in. I could feel the skin blister and boil under the intense heat. But the pain was not so much. Yes, it was a lot. But not as much. Not anymore. I had already been through worse a million times over.

And just beyond that heat, yes… Yes. There it was. Cold, stagnant air. Air that would not chew me up and spit me out. The veil of smoke was an illusion. Well, not an illusion per se, but a thin veil that the dullest of scissors could pierce through. 

Where my hand began, my body followed. A short, sharp, scalding pain. It bathed my skin in red and made everywhere itch. But that was that. That was that. 

Before me was exactly what I thought I would see. Fire in the distance. Great morphing pillars of black stone. Screams on the horizon. A place that despised me just as much as I despised it. 

What I was not expecting, on the other hand, was the being that was standing in front of me, fiddling with its fingernails. 

Have you ever seen a praying mantis up close? Or any insect, really? Have you noticed all those sharp, spiky hairs that they carry on their form? The plexiglass concavity of their eyes? Well, what if that barbaric construciton was combined with something in between a rhinocerous and a centaur? 

Yeah, I had no idea what I was seeing. It was horrific and ugly in equal measure. A demon, I presumed. 

A demon that was overseeing me. Overseeing my torture. And I had broken out.

And yet the thing was filing its clawlike fingernails, almost like a civilized being.

All of that in two seconds. And in two seconds the thing noticed me, dropping its file in shock.

“That wasn’t supposed to happen,” the thing clattered with its mandibles. “Oh. Oh no. Oh no. We can’t be having that.”

“Don’t hurt me!” I shrieked.

“Hurt you?! Well, yeah, I guess we’ve been doing that. And well, too. Very fresh, very valuable suffering. But you escaped from it somehow, see? We can’t have anomalies like that roaming around.” At this it raised its spiked arms in a gesture to grab me.

“NO! YOU WON’T!” I screamed.

“Won’t? I mean, maybe. Whatever thing got you out there might still be roaming around. But this will go a thousand times easier if you just shut up and play along, yes? We obviously won’t be keeping you anymore. Not if you can escape, levy some power over us. That’s too big a risk. Might hurt the flow of pain through the air. So we’ll be releasing you. I’ll be left to do the paperwork, don’t you worry. All the new suffering will be on my part, and my part alone.”

“But, how could I be…?”

“A threat? I don’t know. Obviously. You’ve been in there…” It started counting off its multitude of fingers, “erm… four hundred thousand of your years. Easy job on my part, I thought. Got me off the poetry pits. Can you imagine the poetry pits?”

I began to mumble something, but the beast raised one serrated talon. “No. That was a hypothetical question. Obviously, you are not a threat, yes? You are a human soul. The power you control is nothing more than a faded version of your former self, and even that was quite little indeed. So it must be something else, aye? Some other anomaly that has tied itself around you, used you as its patsy to work against the crusade of hell. We can both see that. Yes, even you can see that, and you know precious little of the bigger picture. Surely it is in our interests, as beings wishing to grasp the full scope of existence in order to extinguish it… surely we must learn about this thing, too?”

“Erm… no?”

A sharp, chirping chuckle erupted from somewhere in the monstrosity’s belly. “Spoken to save your own flesh. And it meant nothing, too. I was not convincing myself otherwise, sinner. The element that let you out - whatever it is - the risk in studying it is far greater than what we might learn. At least, that is what it appears to me. And so it would appear to you, too, if you weren’t so stupid. Or starved. Or tortured. Sorry about all that, of course. We never really mean it.”

At that last quip, something in my heart snapped. “You didn’t mean it?!”

“Of course,” the demon snarled through snaggly teeth. 

“You didn’t… you didn’t…”

No. 

Yes. 

No. 

There was fire in my belly yet. Fire hotter than the smoke I’d passed through, hotter than the gouts of flame which punctured the cavern walls beyond. 

I charged at the beast, my hands balled into fists. 

The thing quickly drew some kind of burning sigil in the air. 

My vision faded. I could still feel my feet churning below me, could still feel my heart pounding, and yet…

Yet I could feel the floor below me. I could tell you what it was any day of the week, even with shoes. 

The listening post.

My sight cleared. It was. It was. All of that, that stupid, stupid nonsense… the millenia of torment, punctuated at once by obscurity and hope… all of that was just to renew the true power of the pain. To keep the suffering mill running. If the demons really wanted suffering at all, that was.

And yet, there was the door.

I remembered it. Vaguely. A dim, fuzzy thing. A glowing aspiration I’d lost sight of a thousand years before. 

I tried to remain unexcited. The shattering, no, the evisceration of hope was what they fed on. That was what made sense. If I could keep my dreams quiet, it would be them, not myself, that would starve.

I smiled at this thought. It was a cruel, thin smile. 

I was a murderer. A manslaughterer. A professional spy. I had done nothing but wreak destruction and tragedy in my life, such as that thing was. And now I was back.

It felt so good. So good to sabotoge one last thing. One last thing before my sanity faded once more and I was licking sandwich crumbs off the ground.

But I had to temper even that. Even the revenge curdling at the core of my heart. 

I had to feel.

Nothing.

Noth…

The hand touched the doorknob. The doorknob twisted. Beyond was sunlight. 

Beyond was…

Beyond was…

The song.

The sea.

We remembered the sea.