Short Story: Camera Obscura - A one-eyed man climbs the mountain

Camera Obscura

Pascal ascended in a whirl of blades. The visceral discombobulation of air seeking elsewhere and matter demanding otherwise was deafening from the moment it started but formed into a single choir more easily overlooked. The rhythm sets to the routine humdrum. The word becomes percussive, the image sets in frames. It begins with the beating, but submerges in its presence. It’ll return when it changes, or if there’s nothing to beat against it.

When the beating starts, they begin to move. One beat further away from Something and one beat closer to Something else. Something always changes.

“Time is a flat circle”, says a god from above.

“So it would seem…”, says a man from below.

But elsewhere, the boy sitting in the dirt field drawing ducks with a corn stalk instead of shoveling in the embankment dam sees something as well. An infinite plain of mountains and coal mines. Spirals of stone.

Pascal released the breath he hadn’t been holding and became aware of his heart slamming against the seatbelts. With every beat, the ground shrank but the sky didn’t change. Ascension was an overall demeaningly uninvolved process for him.

“...”, Pascal heard a sparkle in his ear. To his left, the pilot tapped two fingers to the side of his headset. Pascal mirrored the motion, finding a dial that he engaged.

“To lift and be lifted. It’s a miracle I tell you. It’s all shapes and rhythms and whatnot. The birds proved it possible”, he heard in his ears.

“We’ve got it down pretty good, yet it feels like we’ll never be more than visitors”, Pascal voiced into the microphone sturdily dangled on a black wire across his cheek. It was impossible to to track their movement through the air, though the air rushed about as the helicopter lacked any sort of reasonably enclosing glass.

When the pilot had first decided to live in the sky, he had acquired the aircraft and named it the Kingfisher, thinking it sounded striking and probably symbolic of something. The pilot himself was grout with the potential to be jovial, a grin-grimacing, well-cropt Claus under his heavy bomber jacket, black domed helmet, and silver pushbroom mustache. He filled the cockpit in a way that Pascal, having first met him already aboard the Kingfisher, could entertain the idea that the pilot did not have a seat but rather a deeper interface.

The sky around him was pointless and blue, sharing nothing but weighted wisps of condensation that appeared to be clouds. It went over there, spanned across there, and even filled in the little crannys there. But as it flowed towards him it seemed to dissipate entirely. After a few beats, Pascal ran out of names in the sky and looked elsewhere. Downwards, blazing white flattened the land. Peaks of primordial structure drowned in cold water. He watched as it settled into setting after a few beats without noteworthy change.

Thinking Eye

Pascal had not been on a plane since it crashed. Before things could be expected to break and reveal how fragile our definitions to be. Like how a familiar childhood toy could disappear or how an everyday crosswalk could become a close call. The captain had picked the wrong autopilot on landing and scorched the tail across the tarmac. Thankfully, the front half of the plane had suffered no casualties, the tight seating ensuring that disaster was ambient and that eyes should be shut, hands should be clasped over heads, and gods should be chosen for prayer. At the time, Pascal had not read enough books to know about gods. He had also not seen enough movies to know to scream and flail. Instead, the curiosity of youth sought a lesson in this new facet of life called, “fatal accident”. Pascal’s schema for death became defined as a rapid disappearance from sight.

In the moment of impact he had shut both eyes and in its wake only one had returned alone. The shrapnel had entered into his eye like a maple seed, declaring purchase in his iris and carving its path through his membrane. For the beats it took to bleed after a cut, nothing about Pascal had changed at all. Everything was still there but oriented a little differently. When he finally emerged, he had looked at the wreckage and its entirety and could not see a euphemism. Maybe a bird– a meaningful white dove– sprawled dead, but the enamel white was too scorched, too fibrous, fire unspreading. It would also make sense to see an angel. One that had fallen upon their back to look to the spitting sky for last words or first curses. They would lay themselves on top, bending the light and tinting the metal. But Pascal only saw that it couldn’t be those things. He was too close to the checkered hole for it to be otherwise. It was too broken to be something else.

The mountains began to eat the sky. They climbed atop each other until they could no longer breathe. Some believe that gods live on top of mountains. Some believe they live on top of the sky. Others believe that they live elsewhere, in a place that is more than the sky. It is even said that gods are born on the ground, floating off until they are lost in space or pulled down to be strangled. Perhaps distance is what defines divinity. If Pascal were to stand where jagged ground stabbed deepest into the sky, from where would the second sun shine?

The mountains around had long since established their treelines, though the demesne of man has been far more unclear. Was it pride taken in declaring realms untouched? Is the facet free of human grasp to be revered or vivisected? Pascal asked into the line. Small talk.

“Humans are conquerors”, the pilot pumped a black gloved fist into the roof of the cockpit with a thump. “From the moment their thumbs bent, they knew to grab. To pull, to yank, to climb. And once they held it in the palm of their hand, they could kill it. But not everything fit in their little palms. So they began to point. And they would learn to talk.” Here, the pilot began a chimpanzee imitation. A brief transmission of ooghs and ah ahs. Pascal stayed silent and waited for him to continue.

“Oogh! It can’t be held, they’d scream. Ah ah, but legends say it could, they’d whisper. So they’d bring a gang out to point together, drag it back into their caves and burn it to death in the dark.”

“Veni, vidi, vici…”, Pascal mused. It sounded like it applied.

“Alright, well, then eventually everyones got a knife in one hand and a hunt in the other, so they point at the sky and they build a tower.”

The pilot spoke funny. He enunciated like the sea. Syllables would catch h’s as they clipped and crashed against his enamel teeth with a dull glimmer. It felt like his drawl would ebb and flow as if the words had to first filter through the baleen of his coarse, ashy facial hair.

“You know what iambic pentameter is?”, Pascal ventured into the headset microphone.

“What? That a fucking disease or some shite?”

“No sir, just Shakespeare”

The pilot grumbled but the sound didn’t pass over the copper wires.

“I get poets every now n’ again…never last long…”, he raises his hand off the stick to aid in a meaningful gesture. Pascal sees a second helicopter peel off before plummeting out of sight. “...too much to say about too much in too little, ya’know.”

“What?”

The pilot continued to face forward, what little clouds that had hung about had been put away so that the sun could descend upon the world.

“They run out of breath”, the pilot says. He turns to face Pascal for the first time and cracks a pearly smile. Pascal squints to avoid going blind, the pilot’s aviators cradling two newborn suns.

“The air is thinner up here”

Theodyssey

When God and Satan spat in their hands and shook on it, and when Job collapsed upon the scorched wastes of all he had ever owned, fostered, and loved, and when he screamed as the smolders and splinters skittered into every inch of his boiled skin, and when he prayed himself hoarse and begged himself dry, and when he had found resolve in his faith when all else was peeled away, and when he decided that there would, doubtlessly, still be a sun that would rise upon another day, and when finally, through the agony, he had cried himself to sleep on the bare earth with nothing below him but his blood pooling ash to mud and the knowledge of a deeper place, a deepest pit in the world where people burned forever, where the soul was furthest from the sky and closest to something else, he had woken up the next morning covered in mosquito bites.

There came a point in which the death of man narrowed. Where predation was swallowed by homicide. But the scope of death by unnatural causes remains even with humans peeled out of the equation, to the likes of langrid maneaters. Crocodiles, tigers, vipers, things with teeth that prowl the outer lawns. Pascal had seen the victims of a bear attack once. It was the first time he did not recognize the human body. But it is none of these that have taken the most human lives. It is the humble mosquito. Prey, pollinator, plague. Vampire, winged night creature, spawn of stagnant water.

The sixth human sense is motion. The mosquito blared across Pascal’s periphery, drawing out a primordial genomic scream.

HUNT.

TRACK.STALK.

SEEK.AIM.CLAP.

And so he did, with a clap that would send sky serpents crying, but not with fear nor hate, but response. It was only after, when he spread his palms and saw the spindly creature still showing the gesture of vitality, did he ponder the path of curiosity. He delicately pinched the mosquito by its wings and raised it to his eye. And in the light of the sun did he confirm that such was indeed a living creature. That she stared back at him in anger, defiance, goading him to make a decision. He knew mosquitos had brains so such sounded true enough to be real. Pascal dropped the mosquito in his breast pocket and set about.

The pilot set him down a few miles from base camp. It was a small town, nearly radial in the way it followed the construction of the mountainside. Little square cut flags flickered in lines from sloped rooftop to rooftop, for even the wind passed slowly through here. The ascending rows of buildings were stacked from lodestones, but felt hollow like an empty lobby in a Monopoly colored resort. It was a windswept mountain town, but the paint was too plastic, the posters too high definition, and the signs hung with the disguised familiar. Pascal tread the paved path, stinging from the neonic market windbreakers, before finally finding himself descending a half flight of stairs and settling in an unglazed bar stool steeped by windows level with the street outside.

The dug-in speakeasy was called Asphyxia, affectionately by the owner slash sole bartender who had been keeping tabs for the past sixteen years. It was the type of business that ran on people instead of money. Where time counted by glass and passed with stories. Pons adjusted his round spectacles and tossed the flap of his brutalized knit scarf over his shoulder as he shook Pascal’s drink.

“Hey, tell me if you can taste the special part”, he said as he placed the glass before Pascal with a tinkle. “I just have to ask, you know? It’s the whole reason I’m up here.” Pons sheepishly grinned, his creased hands idly toying with a thin, flower print coaster.

Pascal sniffed then took a slow sip, parting his lips while closing his eyes and ears. He searched in the puddle in his mouth for something beyond or something below. Something meant to be found and reveled.

“It’s really cold… I guess? It tastes lighter maybe?”. That sounded pretty true.

“Hey now, you’re on to it alright”, Pons put his hands on his hips obtusely, “It’s not even placebo or nothing, there really is something to pick up on. It’s the ice is what it is. Legendary Himalayan Iced Water. There’s flavor to legend. At least there will be.” This was Pon’s pitch, his mixology manifesto in the frontiers of contemporary alchemy.

But he hadn’t started here. He had started his path on a scholarship for international law. Pons was a sharp sponge, he did everything right to the tee, balanced the priority triangle, flourished in the system. He was married at twentyfive, lined up for promotion, and primed to begin skipping years, trading age for experience. They were on a picnic in Cambodia when his wife had stepped on a landmine. It wasn’t like the movies, Pons had told Pascal, they hadn’t heard a resounding click as she stepped on it. He hadn’t felt shock, then numbness, then embraced her tightly. She hadn’t cried, held him while whispering love in his ears, before pushing him away in a final cloud of pyrotechnics.

Pons took to drinking in the dark. He found black wells suited him. Bucket by bucket he would fill himself, dripping and dropping new flavor, color, depth, until the brackish muck swirled into spectrums. He learned mixology by the glass, for every birth was a tower of lights in parts and every death a song that ended in drowning. Pons took to drinking in the dark.

“That’s why I’m here, for now at least”, Pons winked and nudged air. “Quite a new world quest. It’s easier when everyone’s passing through here anyway, I’m assuming you are too. But what flavor of man are you, Pascal? You climbing the tallest mountain in the world to stand above your fellow man? Gods? Are you gonna do a little dance at the top–or take a pretty picture– sing a fat prayer…”

“I thought I’d see a story here. On a mountain tall with bodies and dreams, it feels like it’s meant to say something–”

“If you wanted bodies, K2’s across the way and it’s a way tougher climb. Around the same elevation too. Gets away from the tourism of it all…everyone knows about climbing Everest.”

Pascal lifted his drink up to his eye, the light refracted.

“Everest has ghosts”

The air is thinner up here.

Creation Story

Somewhere| |sometime in the blanket of sleep one will awake. Consciousness returns even though it never really went anywhere at all. Dreams bleed from the world as it used to be. The mess and the beneath, the cavernous fumes huffed to keep the soul oracular. The dream of windfall and quicksand and mossy sex and towers toppling and stars soaring. Dreams that humans dream to tell to humans who did not dream that night. Dreams, Pascal thinks, are the plastic bulbs of elsewhere and otherwise. A cloud awaiting a shape.

So that night, it was decided, Pascal would dream. Rogue synapses had already convened and agreed to launch a simultaneous overnight assault across the lobes, when consciousness was dismissed and thoughts retired for the night. They would seize the reticular formation, placing an embargo on the spinal cortex, and from there broadcast their barrage across the network. They would bang upon the walls of the amygdala, shaking free colored sparks from their ossified cells. Images would shock across the dome, looted from the hippocampus to be grafted unstitched into a monstrous idea. There would be no plot, no narrative, no answers. Those would bloom in the wake.

Then there is sleep again. Sleep is nothing. Exit.