Forget About Me: 3rd Floor Part II

Don't forget to read the first part!

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DAY 13

“Kaff… kaff…”

I was not smiling.

I coughed up a mixture of phlegm and sand, the only thing my body had produced all day. I’d stopped sweating four days earlier, and the heat was unbearable. I could barely produce saliva anymore. The phlegm was immediately absorbed into the sand, and it was a good thing too. If it hadn’t been, I might have tried to drink it.
My head now felt like the night before had consisted of 4 bottles of Swedish vodka, a case of domestic beer, and a ball-peen hammer. My knee had started to smell badly, too. I didn’t know what it smelled like, but smelling like anything didn’t seem like a good sign to me. The sunburn had faded on most of my body, but my face, which was only protected by the T-shirt, was still daily exposed to UV rays, so its healing was going much slower. I had long ago thrown the pistol aside, too tired and hurting to care for the loss, unwilling to carry even that much extra weight.
The mountains, though I had marched every day, did not seem any smaller. I didn’t know if it was an optical illusion, meant to torture those trying to reach them, or simply a testament to how mind-bogglingly far away and gargantuan they must actually have been. Either way, I had not yet been convinced that I was going the wrong way, and had continued in the same direction every night.
The night, after two weeks, had lost its sense of rugged beauty. The stars still shined, and the sand still dully glowed, but they were no longer images of admiration. Now they represented wild nature, the untamed world, a world in which modern man was not meant to occupy, and nothing more. The stars sneered at me every night, and the dunes asked disparagingly why I was there.
I had no answer for them.
I unearthed myself from the sand and stood up, sneering at the night sky as I did so. The sand sloughed off of me like old, dry skin, and I blinked a few grains out of my eyes. I had grown thinner, and the feeling of general sickness had settled quite snugly into my bones. My knee was now rotting, the surrounding flesh a pale green-black. The smell frightened me. However, its obvious infection did hold one positive aspect; the pain had subsided considerably. In fact, it had dulled down to a vague ache which made the traveling easier, but the idea that a wound so grievous hurt so little deeply bothered me.
Night had fallen, I started walking. The way I approached moving across the desert had changed in the time I’d been there. Instead of aimlessly sauntering across the sand, half-admiring the view, half-heading towards nowhere, I had developed a destination. My stride was stronger, my eyes were fixed steady on my arrival point, and it seemed to almost give me strength to have a definite place to head for, to have a definite distance to count down from. I had my destination: Forward.
As long as I kept heading for forward, I knew I’d be okay. I had a place I was going, and that seemed to mean more to me than either my leg or my head. I would go forward to the next dune, forward into the depression beyond it, and forward up the inevitable following grade. I was dying, maybe, sure… but at least I had a destination.
After I’d passed my previous destinations many times, the sun started to rise again. I hastily made my makeshift snake den in the sand and got ready to sleep through the boiling sun and heat of day. It had occurred to me a few days earlier that each time I lay down in one of my trenches, I might not get up the next day. I was, therefore, digging my own grave each and every night. Originally, I wasn’t sure how to feel about that.
I thought maybe I should find a way to bury myself completely, head under the sand, without cutting off my supply of oxygen, but the idea quickly became a low priority. I reasoned that putting my shirt over my face would constitute a burial shroud in some way and that would suffice. Besides, there were more important things than burial rites, especially considering the circumstances.
I couldn’t take this much longer. If I didn’t die of dehydration, I wouldn’t be able to maintain any level of sanity for too long. I at least wanted to be able to know what was happening while I died. I needed to get back inside the building.

Was I even outside the building?

I put myself in the ground again, the sand clinging intimately to my skin but not sticking, my body no longer able to produce any moisture. I sighed a few times. Not the sigh of resignation, but the sigh of a man whose situation was not quite hopeless enough to go mad, but not quite believable enough to cry. You’d know it if you heard it. There’s no other sound like it in the world.

Don’t you… forget about me…

Recently, the song had been playing more frequently in my head. It started gradually at first, but its rotation in my skull had almost doubled in the last few days. It was almost becoming a sort of curse. A reminder of a world I would never see again. That the songs and the people would go on, but I wouldn’t be a part of it. It played more and more. It was starting to play in rounds.
I couldn’t think like that. I knew I’d find a way out. I had no other choice. I’d find a way out of this desert, back into the building, then I’d find a way out of there. The building no longer seemed so foreboding compared to this place. At least there, for each floor there was a tangible danger. Something to be confronted, defeated or avoided. Something that could be done. Here, there was nothing. Just the time, and the wind, and the endless, endless sand.
I didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t even that I wasn’t sure which path I should choose, it was that there were no paths. There were no choices to make, no problems to solve. I just had to keep walking until I died, or until I ended up in a state that I wouldn’t realize my dying. I was helpless. I couldn’t even struggle against what was holding me back, because the thing holding me back was my failure to see any options. A line from an old movie I saw ran through my head. “I was backed into a dark corner. Someone was beating me, and I couldn’t see who it was, and I didn’t know how to get out.” Something like that. My head hurt.

…jingle…jingle…

I blinked. Twice. I didn’t remember any jingling in “Don’t You Forget About Me.” And I would remember if there were, I’d been hearing it non-stop for almost two weeks now.

…jingle…jingle…

I blinked once more. Freeing my left arm and, remembering the hand, subsequently freeing my right arm, I pulled my shirt off my head and looked around. Hopping up between the peaks, moving across my line of vision, was a light.

I stood up out of the sand, which fell away without prompting. I squinted in the half-darkness of wild night to see what the light was, not realizing I’d already started running, towards it in a limping, crabbish gait.
From what I could make out, it looked like a tent. A great sheik’s tent, out of an Aladdin story, purple and pink striped with at least ten or more posts holding it up. Listening closer, I could hear laughter. Maybe even music, though it was hard to distinguish from the radio in my head’s narrow selection.
It seemed to be moving across the dunes at a great speed, as if someone was holding each of the posts and running with the tent along the dunes, spinning the great pavilion across the desert. I ran as fast as my emaciated body would allow me to, trying to catch it. Half of me wanted to reach it to be saved, to possibly get some water and food. Another half (and quite possibly the stronger) wanted something, anything, other than the sand and the night and the time to be affirmed. I prayed it wasn’t a hallucination.
I ran as fast as could be expected of me. As fast as my injured knee would carry me, feeling the stabbing pains in the back of my head but not reacting to them. Registering them as if counting stop signs. I moved faster than I had in days. But no matter how hard I pumped my legs, the tent seemed to glide farther and farther away from me out over the sands. It started to look like a jellyfish, wafting lazily in a strong current. After a while, only a bobbing golden light was visible on the horizon, and then there was nothing.

I fell down to my knees, ignoring the crunch of the sand being ground into the wound, staring at my hands as if blaming them for what had happened. Blaming them for whatever would happen now. I felt the stabbing pains from my knee now, not just registering them. I’d left my shirt on the ground where I’d buried myself, and in the pitch dark I couldn’t follow my tracks back. I tried, but it didn’t help. By morning the tracks would have been blown away, and the morning would bring the burning sun. All that came from the tent’s appearance was loss. The loss of my shirt, what little protection it gave me, and the loss of the tent itself. Real loss. Real, tangible loss. Something to hold on to. And all the trauma, all the horror I’d sustained in the time I’d been there was suddenly drawn into perspective.
I sat where I fell and wept. I wept all night, my knees hugged close to my chest, pining for a piece of cloth and a phantom caravan. Screaming out into the night, wanting anything to make it stop, salvation or death. It didn’t matter anymore.

DAY 18

I’d woken up the next morning tingling again from the familiar promise of sunburn I hadn’t felt in almost a week. It wasn’t pleasant, but I’d started to grow used to it. Besides, physical pain, let alone discomfort, wasn’t the worst of my suffering at that moment.
It had been five days since I’d seen the sheik’s tent and there had been no more sightings. The song had faded for the first day or two after I saw it, but it was back in my mind now, as strong as ever…

Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t…

My skin was now a lobster-red, my lips jerky. Sometimes when I blinked, my eyelids would get caught on a dry patch of my eye, and I’d have to rub them free to un-stick them. My sight during the daytime had been reduced to being able to discern between the ground and the sky when I looked at the horizon. I could see my ribs beneath my skin, and my stomach looked deflated and sagging. I didn’t bother to bury myself for protection from the morning sun anymore, I figured it was just slowing down the process. I could still see the mountains behind me, not getting any smaller or any larger. I’d been walking for almost three weeks, and I seemed to be getting no farther away from them.
My knee was now an angry black, green in the best places. I couldn’t feel it at all anymore, let alone any degree of pain. I could still hoist my leg around, but the blackness was spreading down my calf day by day, and my thigh had started to ache at night. It hurt to inhale. My stomach wrenched itself regularly, lurching in on itself for lack of food, and I cringed every time. I’d started to become delirious, and regularly questioned whether I was dead, imagining this whole thing, or actually out in some random, remote desert and no longer in the building. Was I still in the building? Was I still alive? Was I…
I still walked every day, for lack of anything else to do. I didn’t look where I was going anymore, I just walked. The power was within me to keep moving, and until it left me I was going to keep using it, knowing that the next day I might not be able to. I woke up each morning, stood up, and limped across the sand, waiting and hoping to collapse and rest. Just rest. I never chose to stop moving, though. I always chose to keep going.
That night, when my thigh had started to ache too much to move anymore and my knee had started making a sickening, clicking sound with every other step, I stopped. The smell from it was enough for me to lay down to increase the distance between my nose and the source of the stench, and I laid down, on the top of a high dune, and looked at the stars. The billions of twinkling stars that had seemed so beautiful the first night I’d come here. The stars that laughed at me now.

As you walk on by…

I had to win. There had to be a way out of this. I needed to find it. Every other floor in the building…

Was I still in the building?…

…had a system. Maybe the way to get out of here was to not have a system. Instead of trying to logic my way out of it, like by catching the tent or moving away from the mountains, maybe I had to let go of ‘figuring it out.’ Maybe I had to guess.
Of course, figuring this all out was using logic, defeating its own principle. But nothing else worked, so maybe there was a way I could not logic my way out of this but not think about not logicking my way out of this. But thinking that was using logic. My head was starting to hurt again. Worse this time.
Well, let’s try this.
I stood up, there in the darkness, turned right and started walking. I’d gotten two steps when I decided to rotate my right foot slightly to the left, just slightly, then started walking again. I didn’t sleep that night. I just walked, in a random direction, and kept walking until the sun came up. Then I kept walking.

DAY 19

I walked that whole day, the sun protesting every step I took, burning my back and shoulders and blistering my face and lips. I didn’t even feel the heat anymore, or if I did, I didn’t notice it. I had a destination again, after having lost the concept, and even though I had no idea what the destination was, I kept walking, knowing that a destination, any destination, is better than none at all. Often, it’s what saves us.
Night fell, and I still hadn’t stopped marching across the desert, not having slept in two days. I wasn’t even sleepy. Maybe it was my body kicking out all its excess energy before finally quitting out. I blinked, rubbed my left eyelid free, and kept walking.
I blinked again to clear a spot in my vision that had formed from the dryness. I blinked again. And again. I closed each eye, one after the other. I passed a hand in front of my face. The spot was in both eyes, and it didn’t go away until I blocked it out with my hand.

I could see a light in the distance.

I stood perfectly still, not willing to move towards it, afraid it would disappear right in front of my face. I just stood on my two ruined legs, one destroyed from exposure and over-use, and the other from a psychotic apparition with a knife.
The light flickered in the distance, like a beacon on an airplane’s wing. The light was different from the golden glow of the caravan’s light, it was a washed-out blue-white light, shining far, far out over the dunes, but definitely, definitely there. Or I was hallucinating.

Of course, it wasn’t like I had anything better to do.

I started heaving myself toward the light, every time my head bobbed down with my body throwing itself forward against the weight of my dead leg, I made an effort to keep one eye on the light. I didn’t want it to leave my sight for even a moment. It bobbed up and down and blinked in my vision, but it stayed there, and that seemed to give me something. Not strength or hope, but something that was enough to keep me going.
I was running on my bad leg, not limping, though I still couldn’t feel the knee. It seemed to know what to do. My arms, the muscles in them mildly deteriorated after my time here, were swinging back and forth with a flailing rhythm that seemed beyond their power. Still, I was running. Running toward the only thing other than sand and sky and those damned mountains that I’d seen in almost three weeks.
The light was getting bigger. Slowly, but definitely getting closer. I kept running. I wasn’t sweating, the dehydration took care of that, but I could feel tears starting to stream out of the corners of my eyes and flow back into my hair from the wind slicing across my face. I reached up to wipe it away with my good hand, still running as fast as I could, briefly looked down at my hand to see the tears, as if to prove to myself I wasn’t dead yet.
My hand was streaked with wet, glistening patches from where I’d wiped my face. The patches had a dark glisten to them. Too dark to be just water. In fact, I’d seen them glisten like this before, earlier in the stairwell after a hellish floor of darkness. I was crying blood. I blinked, and my vision blurred, tinted red. My eyes stung.

I kept running.

Soon the light was only a few dunes away. I looked directly at it, not wanting it to vanish as soon as I got too close. Once I was only one dune away, I slowed down, crawling up the side of the dune as if to sneak up on it. As if it would run if it saw me.
My legs ached except for my knee, which I still couldn’t feel, and my arms and back were almost numb from the exertion. As I crested the dune, I felt very light-headed, and I rubbed my eyes to clear them as best I could. I peaked over the dune, my face illuminated by the stretched but bright light, flickering teasingly at the base of the mound. My eyes widened.
There, in a slight depression between the dunes, about four feet off the ground, was a vertical rectangle of light, floating in air. It blinked, familiarly, like a beacon, in the same comforting pattern I’d seen from across the desert. I walked down to it.
The thing itself looked familiar. As I got closer, I realized the rectangle was a glass window, showing a small room with stairs going down, but a boarded wall where there should have been stairs going up. The stairwell. It was the window in the exit door.
I frantically felt around the window, looking for a handle that couldn’t be seen, some phantom bar I could pull to open it, but I found nothing. It seemed that the window was the only thing there. I touched the glass. It seemed solid enough. I banged my knuckle against it, and the loud clacking sound rung across the sand in the bright desert night. For the first time since I’d been there, I could see clouds in the sky.
The glass was criss-crossed with little black lines like the windows you see in schools and prisons. I looked around me, frantically, knowing that if I could just get the door open I could get out of this place. I looked at the glass. I stared at the glass. It was only glass. After all, it was only glass.
I reeled back with my good hand and swung at it as hard as I could. My hand cracked the glass, mostly along the little black lines. Hopeful, I swung again, and this time the glass gave away, shattering around my hand and clattering to the ground in the stairwell. My hand bled from several wounds, but the blood flowed sluggish and dark. I grabbed the bottom edge of the window, the shards lacerating the palm of my hand, and pulled. The clouds were getting thicker.
A crack of light opened from nothing. A sliver of light that fell flickering across the sand turned into a wedge of light and soon fell over most of the depression. I stepped through the door and collapsed, falling on my back as I dragged my shoulder against the door jam.
As I fell backward, and as I watched the visible, tangible side of the door close behind me, I thought I saw the clouds forming a shape in the sky. Eyes, and a face. I thought I saw it, I couldn’t be sure.
I closed my eyes in the stairwell, comfortably. I exhaled a long, shuddering breath, although it didn’t seem to hurt as much anymore. I slept.