Chukwa
“You look terrible.”
Susanna said, and Cassie couldn’t tell from her tone if ‘concern’ or ‘gloating’
was the intention behind the observation.
“Yeah, well thanks for that.” Cassie fired
back. She took a slug of liquid caffeine from her travel mug. “Still, seeing as
we’re playing ‘say what you see’, you look fat in that dress.”
Susanna laughed.
“I’ve never looked fat in anything.” She
said.
They both laughed.
“I’m just tired.” Cassie said. “Very, very
tired.”
Susanna raised an eyebrow.
“A new boy toy?”
“Don’t be daft. I still haven’t recovered
from the last one.”
“Sometimes you have to get back on the …
horse.” Susanna raised both eyebrows this time.
“It’s nothing to do with my lack of a love
life.”
“Honest, your honour.”
“I’ve just got a lot on my mind …”
“That’s your problem, girl. You worry about
things too much. Sometimes I think you’re trying to carry the weight of the
world around on your shoulders.”
Cassie winced, looked down. Susanna didn’t
notice, and why should she? She was
already getting up from the table.
“Anyway,
tea break is over, I’m returning to my desk before Landell notices I’ve been
here wa-a-ay too long. Catch you at lunch?”
Cassie dared to look up.
“Sure.”
She said.
Susanna hurried off, leaving Cassie in the
break room, alone. Susanna was right, Cassie knew. She did look
terrible. Face drawn and pale, dark circles around her eyes, hair lank and lustreless.
It was true, she was tired.
But that was just part of it.
There was a reason she was tired.
She was being haunted.
Haunted by an idea.
An idea that was stupid.
An idea that would not leave her alone.
She sipped her coffee. It tasted bitter.
She’d been worrying
about it for over a week now.
A middle-of-the-night thought that had
taken root and stubbornly refused to die. Daylight hadn’t shifted it. Neither
had logic. Neither had the passage of time.
The thing was: the thought hadn’t just
stuck; it had started growing. Growing at an alarming rate. Sometimes it was
all she would think about. Sometimes it was all she could think about.
Madness,
she was sure.
She
was losing her mind.
It
was the only explanation.
Led
to the brink of self-dissolution by a dream.
Because
everything – the thought, then the word, then the mental turmoil – had all
started with a bloody dream.
Now,
she didn’t see herself as the kind of person who put any stock in oneiric
flotsam and jetsam. To her, dreams were just the brain sorting things out; filing
memos, documents, images, sensations, emotions, encoding what it found useful,
what it wanted, discarding what it didn’t. Dreams were a nocturnal editor and
admin clerk, and not worthy of a second thought.
Sigmund
Freud might have made reputational and financial capital from writing about
dreams – and many new-age scribblers had followed his lead, although with even
less scientific rigour – but for Cassie they were foolish and irrelevant.
Interpreting dreams was simply pareidolia. Pattern-seeking animals end up
seeing patterns where none exist, and any attempt to draw meaning from those
patterns was doomed to failure. Or worse, ill-informed success.
But,
and it was a big but here, her dream – and its subsequent thought – had
pretty much taken over her life. Had reconfigured her consciousness into a
machine for processing a single thought, for understanding a bloody dream.
So.
The
dream, then:
infinity
She
has no idea where she is. She is just aware of
the
vast immensity of the universe as it spreads out
around
her. She just is. She exists. That is all. All that
matters.
Time
passes.
Or
space passes and it just looks like time to
her…
Slowly,
she becomes aware of … of others.
She
has no idea where her body ends and
the
others begin, but she feels them there around her.
Pressed
in.
Pressed
in tight.
Impossibly
tight.
Other
people
[but that’s not quite
accurate]
other
beings
[closer, but still
no cigar]
just ‘others’ will have to do.
She
is not even sure she is a ‘people’ now. She
too
is an ‘other’. Less an individual being, and more a
tessellating
component of some vast
[structure?]
[machine?]
[organism?]
[god?]
She
isn’t even sure that she is separate from the cosmic
Immensity
she is part of. Maybe she is just an organ that
has
suddenly become sentient. Or a skin cell that just
gained
a soul.
She feels the weight of the vast
mass pressing down
on
her, squeezing her, flattening[?] her …
She awakes with a
lurching start, a scream locked in a throat that refuses to release the tension
it creates by becoming a sound. Her room falls into focus and the thought is
born.
Her bedroom – her sanctuary – becomes the
delivery room of the thought and will forever remain tainted by that fact.
The thought is, in truth, made possible by
the familiarity of the room into which she awoke.
The thought.
Six words.
Six words to shake her world to its
absolute core. To haunt her waking hours. To nag and scrape and chip away at
the illusion of comfort she had surrounded herself with.
Six words.
What if THIS is the dream?
World shattered.
All
that remains is for the pieces to fall.
And then there was
the word.
Six letters.
After the six words, the six letters.
She saw the word everywhere.
The first time:
She is walking down the High Street.
Dragging herself through a world she is no longer convinced is real. Her brain
feels like a blister: hot and swollen and full of sickly liquid. People pass by
but she can no longer trust in the certainty of their existence. She avoids
meeting a man’s eye and instead looks at a stand of newspapers outside a 7-11.
A headline catches her eye:
THOUSANDS WATCH UK WARSHIP SINK IN CHANNEL
She feels something roll around in her
head, and then the headline’s spacings shift, like a pulse in her head forces
the letters into a different configuration.
THOUSANDS WAT CHUKWA RSHIP SINK IN CHANNEL
The new word formed near
the centre of the sentence brings bile to her throat.
CHUKWA
She
has no idea why the word makes her feel like another part of her world just
broke. It’s not a word she has ever seen before. Hell, it’s gibberish.
Still,
everything else in her mind was pretty much grinding itself to gravel and dust,
so why not throw in a nonsense word to put fear and horror and the feeling of
her world ending into the mix, just to really stir the bloody pot.
She jams her eyes shut. Tight. Clenches her
jaw. Tight. And when she opens her eyes again the headline has returned to its original
spacing. To make perfect sense again.
The proprietor of the shop is staring at
her from his position in the shop, in relative darkness behind the counter, but
his eyes seem to glow with a pale luminescence that seems to look into her soul
and she tears herself away from the newsstand and bustles down the street, mind
racing out of control and …
The second time:
… the bus thunders past her, then hisses as
it brakes and she is startled by both noises and looks to her right and the
side of the bus, bar the windows, has been consumed by a gaudy advertisement
for the latest fragrance from Dior. A woman with her head thrown back in what
looks like ecstasy, airbrushed to within an inch of her becoming a cartoon, hair
flowing behind her in a perfect arc, with the copy for the ad reading simply:
The New Fragrance from Dior: CHUKWA
and her mind, reeling
from so many punches, feels like meat beneath this latest blow. She reels away,
her lips moving in a mantra
no no no no no no no no no no
to try to banish the
sight, banish the word, banish those six letters before they drive her out of
her godamned mind and she keeps her eyes down to the pavement, her eyes
squeezed almost shut so anything she does see down there is just a blur, and
she stumbles, wheels, reels and almost breaks into a fight-or-flight run but
she remember a line from a James Bond book, about once being nothing of note,
of two being coincidence, so it’s just that, random coincidence, nothing more. Nothing
more. Nothing more than that. Nothing.
She reaches the underpass that takes her
across to the other side of the street and onto her workplace, and she scuttles
underground. Away from a world that no longer makes sense to her. It’s cooler
and darker down there and it serves to quell the panic that she was on the very
edge of falling over. Sure it smells of urine, sure it’s strewn with litter and
used condoms and a couple of hypodermic syringes, at least it isn’t trying to
drive her out of her mind.
She feels weak, faint even, and steadies
herself with a hand on the underpass wall, but it feels odd to her. Its texture
is smooth and slightly warm, but feels organic rather than built. She sucks in
a breath and looks at the wall.
Just a wall. Graffiti-covered, but a wall. She
starts to relax …
The third time:
… and then sees the elaborate design
sprayed onto the wall with almost exquisite skill. The metallic paints depict a
cartoon tortoise or turtle, up on its hind legs, a baseball cap twisted on its
head in that casual way she so hates, skateboarding a cliff-top of letters, six
of them, beautifully rendered, easy to read:
CHUKWA
A nail of horror is driven deep into her
brain, so acute it might as well have been a physical pain. She stumbles, falls
to her knees, and it’s like she’s genuflecting before a depiction of a saint.
She
whimpers in lieu of a prayer.
When she had regained
her composure, she’d gone into work. There was mud on the knees of her
trousers, and she’d made some stupid excuse about getting knocked over by a man
who hadn’t seen her in his path and that had bought her tea and biscuits and
sympathy and normality. It was the sense of normality that she had needed the
most, and it had steadied her mental equilibrium, so much so that she was ridiculously
glad to get to her desk and let spreadsheets impose order on her chaos.
She’d worked the rest of the day within the
narrow parameters of office life. Susanna had joined her at lunch, and the day
had got back on its proper path, like it had been before the dream, the
thought, the word, and it was only when 5 o’clock started moving into view that
she’d started thinking about it all again.
More to dispel the nonsense than in
expectation of an answer she’d fired up her web browser and typed CHUKWA into
the search box.
Her finger was
trembling as it hit ‘return’.
No result would have been better than the
ones she got.
A Tibetan language.
Some open-source software.
The World Turtle of Hindu mythology.
She clicked on a link for the last, and it
took her to the Wikipedia entry for ‘World Turtle’. The picture on the
right-hand side showed a turtle supporting elephants supporting the world.
She closed the browser, grabbed her purse
and phone from her desk, and headed off home.
She
didn’t say goodbye to anyone on her way out.
She took a taxi and didn’t look out of its
windows.
That night she
dreamed again.
infinity
(bounded by a half-shell)
She
feels the weight as soon as the dream begins.
Immense
weight.
She
tries to move, but that isn’t happening. She tries
to
look around her, but yeah, ditto, that’s not possible either.
Time
passes.
Or
space passes and she can’t tell the difference.
A
lot of time.
She
tries to get a sense of the others pressed in around
her,
but there’s only the knowledge that they’re there, with no
further
insights available.
She
realises that she has been here for a long time. Not
days
or weeks or years or even centuries, but a period of
deep
time, where even aeons look like a quick lunch break
on
the go.
Eternity.
Pressed
in. Weighed down.
For
eternity.
She woke up and the
thought was back.
What if THIS is the dream?
She showered and breakfasted on autopilot.
Took the bus to work.
CHUKWA was everywhere.
On billboards and bus passes, on street
signs and in supermarket windows, on phone screens and posters, on currency and
car number plates.
World turtle.
A creature that supports the world.
She’d read about it in Stephen King and
Terry Pratchett, and it had always made her smile. Oh, it hadn’t been called
CHUKWA in either of those, she was sure, but she’d loved the image. She’d loved
the question she’d once heard ‘but what is the turtle standing on?’ and loved
the answer ‘a bigger turtle’. And she’d loved the phrase that had come from
that, that had provided a mind-blowing image of infinity and a perfect name for
infinite regress: ‘turtles all the way down’.
Now the idea just made her feel sick.
The days and nights
blurred.
By day she was a cog that was losing teeth
in a machine that was only too happy to grind them away from her. By night she
was a surface that bore weight, aware but utterly incapable of action.
Until Susanna came back for lunch to find
that Cassie hadn’t moved, was just staring into a far distance, crying.
The psychiatrist was
nice. The sign on his door said Doctor Chukwa. He got her sat down and listened
to her speak, and then he folded his hands in front of him, and looked at her
with his wise and kindly face. He wore a bow-tie with a repeated motif that Cassie
didn’t want to focus upon. Just in case.
“Well.” Doctor Chukwa said. “That’s quite a
tale. What do you think it means?”
Cassie spoke in something monotonous and
joyless.
“I think I’m a part of the world turtle
that supports the Earth. I think that all of this…” She gestured around her,
“…is the dream that I escape to make infinity less … tedious, I suppose.”
“So I am in your dream?”
“Your name on the door is
Doctor Chukwa…”
“It actually says Doctor Chowdhry, but let
that go for now. I don’t feel like I’m in your dream. I have a whole history,
it’s very detailed, I can assure you. It will contain lots of details about
growing up in India that you cannot possibly know. Would you like to hear some
of it?”
Cassie shook her head.
“Wouldn’t matter. If I’m right I have been
a part of the turtle for … well, for eternity. Who knows how many other dreams
I have had. How many other lives I have lived. Some of them might even have
taken place in India.”
The doctor clapped his hands.
“It’s a perfect ‘brain in a jar’.” He said.
“I’m sorry?”
“The brain in a jar. How do we know we’re
not brains in jars experiencing an elaborate simulation? We don’t. Can’t prove
it one way or the other. But here’s the thing: do we live life as if we are
brains in jars? I would say a most emphatic ‘no’.”
“But how do we carry on when we know
we are nothing more than a brain in a jar?”
“Or a part of a World Turtle? We don’t know
that. You don’t know that. You say that in your dreams you are aware of
others, pressed in around you, I believe you said. Does that mean I am there
too? Do I dream here too, to escape the pressure, the weight, of supporting
everything we know on our plated, turtle back?”
Cassie’s brow furrowed.
“You could be on to something.” She said.
“I know.” Doctor Chowdhry replied, smiling.
“How do you think that knowledge is going to change my life?”
“Completely?”
“Not a bit.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I will not alter my life by a step. Not a
beat. I will continue to help my fellow apes with their problems, I will go
home to my wife and children, and I will love them no more nor less than I did
before. It does not matter. Even if your dream is true, and it is true for me
too, it does not mean you have interpreted it correctly.
“You see this as a binary system. You are
either awake or asleep. On or off. In one state you are the turtle. In the
other you Cassie. You judge one to be a falsehood, the other to be a reality. I
say that you cannot possibly make that judgement.
“If you are the turtle, or a part of it,
then conventional reality is nothing more than an illusion. We have seen the
Earth from space, and we have not seen this turtle. I think NASA might have
mentioned it in one of their press releases. So maybe you are looking at the
same thing in two very different ways. Maybe it’s not a case of either/or.
Maybe the answer is ‘both’. You are both the turtle, and the woman I see before
me now. All that is different is your perception of reality.
“So maybe through one set of lenses you are
the turtle. And through another set you are Cassie. Maybe both are true. But
only insofar as any perception can be said to be truth. And in this moment, it
matters not.
“Your life on earth is real. As real as it
needs to be. It might be not the whole picture, but then what is? Maybe
we are all the turtle, and it is our duty to support the planet on which we
ourselves also live. The weight is the price we pay for the life.
“Most of us do not remember the weight.
They do not know that they are the Chukwa. Except, maybe, occasionally, in our
dreams. I would state here that I believe the weight is worth the reward. That
being the turtle is worth it, because we also get to be the person, and that is
surely worth anything.”
Cassie nodded.
“It’s how we choose to look at it, isn’t
it?” she asked.
“I mean, yeah, being
the turtle is terrifying, but being the human doesn’t have to be.”
“Exactly. We cannot know for sure, but if
we get a human life – with all its sights, sounds, smells, feelings, art,
beauty, nature and technology – because we are already the turtle then I
can see no other way to view it. Our life is a reward for our burden.”
Tears soaked Cassie’s cheeks as Doctor Chowdhry
led her to the door.
“Come back if you have any other concerns.”
He told her.
“I won’t have.” Cassie said. “You’re right.
Life is worth it. It’s worth the price.”
Doctor Chowdhry smiled and closed the door.
The sign on the door said ‘Doctor Choudhry’.
When she was gone,
the doctor took off his mask and whistled.
“That was a close one.” He said.
The phone on his desk rang.
“Hi.” He said into the receiver. “Yes. She
just left. I gave her the binary/life is a reward speech and she seems
reassured. I’ll monitor the situation, but I think it was a blip.”
He hung up and stroked his trunk,
thoughtfully.
Holding up an illusion was as hard as
holding up a world, but it had its benefits.
He reached into his desk drawer and took
out a plastic tray of fruit salad.
“Worth it.” He said.
