ganymede 1: tetrapharmakos (don't fear)
Three things. Sound, sand, and a sharp object. The woman called Leonie Ania realizes consciousness in a subterranean, starchy hotel room. Low ceilings. Thick, hazy air that tastes like the hot burn of an overzealous teenager’s bitten-out words.
Her first thought: To exit. Irrational, she knows, yet as she feels sand uncomfortably rubbing up between each crevice down her body, she realizes that she does not know much of anything at all.
Leonie sits up very straight in the slatted cot. Slowing her breathing, she can hear muffled voices outside the room. A singular voice, if separated from the mass, sounds ghastly and atoned. When combined, the voices compose desperate brays of a deathbed’s song. No, she decides, those aren’t voices that I know.
Leonie tends to know a lot of things. But not right now.
There’s a mirror slightly to the left of her blurred vision. She glances at her disheveled self, giving her familiar body a heavy look. Leonie’s all dressed up in the last party dress she remembers putting on, her glittered features matching the style she had done for a friend’s special occasion, shoes gone, her hair up in an extravagant flair done once for a celebration years back. These are all her memories, but they don't align. She doesn’t even recognize the little room.
She climbs out of the bed, not bothering with the sheets. Material permanence is something she’s always struggled with; she tends to believe things just disappear when they’re out of her sight.
Maybe they do. She decides not to look at the stained mattress any longer.
As her breathing quickens, the sheets not providing grounding contact any longer, Leonie buries her feet deep in the long fibers of the scratchy nylon rug. Promptly, the sand grains between the strands become intolerable. There’s a basement window settled in the top corner, crepuscular rays of pale ginger light burnishing the few reflective surfaces in the room. Situated on the floor is a clay vase with two wild roses wilting in it, dodged expertly by the light. Leonie directs her attention to the paint-stained walls instead of the ground beneath her, uncomfortably brushing up against her skin. Her shallow breaths slow, her deep-seated panic pushed back to the furthest ring of her consciousness once again, and she’s left alone.
Leonie can hear again, though she hadn’t noticed she was tuning anything out. The unhurried, indolent voices from the outside are still droning on. They’re not as haunting anymore— still unfamiliar— and they’re shaping up to be the company she longs for, despite her nescience on the question of if they’re people at all. Dragging her blurry body towards the door, the motion makes her hair blanket down her back.
The choristers outside don’t change in volume as she nears her means of egress. In fact, Leonie doesn’t even think they’re on the outside anymore; the sounds seem to coat the room in an oily wrapper of essence, invading the consolidated air in a hostile manner. If this makes her demeanor hesitate, it doesn’t show in her actions. The unremarkable mahogany door cracks open, blending with the increasingly higher-pitched voices that part the room in two. Leonie gingerly steps through it, noncommittal, giving the outside a quick sweep. The doorstep below her is rough concrete, a discrete contrast from the tender wood of the interior.
Looking around, Leonie sees nothing. Anticipating lightness, she lifts her hand out to the nothing, but reaching back to her is a heavy weight that doesn’t push her hand downwards, simply pressing on all sides. She becomes aware that the area is not merely the complete absence of space, rather a physical manifestation of the existence of a nothing.
Frankly, she is unhappy with the events of her day so far. The small part of her unaffected mind throws repeated red lights: for one, the speaking— singing— of the shrill ensemble have reached a point of unfortunate enveloping, filling her psyche— they’re self-contained, she notices— with a distinct sense of insanity.
Second, looking down, everything seems to just be a concrete plane before her. In every other direction is the unending fullness of dark. Two things— weight and void. Intertwining and swirling in the definitely-not-air. Leonie takes a step.
Time is an accident of motion, and motions never have a goal. In situations like this, she tries to leave herself for the quiet of blissful dreams, yet it never seems to work.
Almost immediately after her first footstep, the heaviness shoves Leonie’s body in every direction. She feels exactly like how a pile of pulverized bone feels while being dusted into an especially marvelous vase. Jauntily jabbed in different angles across the self-operating concrete plane, she resigns herself to this particular pressure-filled future. The sounds crescendo to a head-splitting volume.
She examines her fingernails, barely resisting the urge to drill her brain out. Her nails are a light taffy, slightly longer than the tips of her fingers, and sort of cracking off. Moving her left hand in an attempt to pinch her wrist, she finds complete restriction. The same hand is involuntarily thrown behind her back in the next motion.
“God, this is an awful hangover,” Leonie mumbles, the signs all there, wildly scanning the dimming plane for any sign of what had happened before. She can’t remember, can’t think, and for that matter, she doesn’t want to try anymore.
A dazzling blaze of colorful light takes Leonie by surprise, but she just as easily embraces it, angry brilliance washing over her eyes, raindrops clutching a glass surface, and she knows she is not real.