The Edge of The Table

Part I:
The Non-Discovery

I picked the lock & opened the small, metal warehouse door; it opened into the darkness of a vast garage; into something of the darkness & dankness of a boarded-up greenhouse; it was a room left to rust & fall in; the odor of rot, of a garbage disposal, hung amidst its black.

The flashlight I had brought barely pierced the dusty, humid air, the grayish-brown air, the oppressive air. I walked slowly alongside the corrugated, aluminum walls, searching for a light-switch: I found none. It was apparent, however, from my tour along the walls, that this room had the approximate square-footage of a military hanger—the lightless center of which could not be illuminated from the perimeter by my flashlight; so I, with a sense of mild dread, pointed my light & shuffled into the heart.

It was not more than ten seconds before something appeared from the murk: something low to the floor, & rectangular—a sort of moss-covered conference table. The table seemed to hover a mere foot from the floor; it was still mostly indistinct before I pointed my light around it. There I found another table, another conference-style table, perhaps three-feet in height; this table, it seemed, in the poor lighting, was also moss-covered. Everything remained indistinct, still shrouded in darkness, still clouded with dust & moisture; I desperately wanted to find an overhead lamp, a switch or rod to open a sunroof—something brighter than a five-dollar flashlight; but with no other option, with nothing but my desperation & curiosity, I went on exploring & squinting.

Another table appeared: this one nearly five-feet & likewise indistinctly moss-covered, but of a bushier moss. I did not look thoroughly at anything; my sense of mild dread had been stimulated by, as I saw it, the oddity of these tables—their different heights, their ascending order, their unexplained existence. I felt that a simple & quick survey would be the safest thing to do—safe, that is to say, from my own menacing expectations.

Then I found something, which upon finding turned my subtle dread into confusion: a table of assorted gadgets, instruments, tools, & general miscellany. I inspected this table with some thoroughness: there were toothpicks, magnifying glasses, tweezers, sharp pins, knives, glue-sticks, acrylic paints, spoons, matches, scissors. There was also one microscope—an impressive, professional microscope. Strangely, but no more uncharacteristic than any item of that strange assortment, there was a night-vision goggle headset; it was interesting, but only mildly so relative to its context. Everything was neatly laid out; everything was, after a little examining, functional. I worried that the owner of these materials had only recently left—that he or she would return shortly. Despite my fear, & in view of the condition of the place—the dankness, the moss-covered accouterments, & the general sense of forsakenness—, I decided to remain, to fill in the blank, to kill time in random exploration.

The table of miscellany was fairly long; its contents fairly strange: there was some theme to them, some relation to small tasks. I thought that these things were possibly the utensils of an artist or amateur naturalist; something was meant to be meticulously picked at, tinkered with—something intricate perhaps. There were instruments of a seemingly medical nature: scalpels, droppers, etc.; there was a syringe, which made me suspect, even more, my struggling artist theory.

Of these tools & accessories, there was one very atypical gadget: a listening device. It was obviously modified, but it was not clear in what way, or to what purpose, it was modified. It did not fit the theme of the other objects. Its cumbersome black headphones & visibly high-grade microphone seemed out of place; I theorized of what occupations or hobbies would require such combinations of things.

At one edge of this table, this long, antiseptic, well-dusted table, stood a cheap electric fan; I switched it on—& followed its cord to an electrical socket in the cement floor. The freshness of circulated air was welcome relief; it partially unclouded things: the other tables had more definition in the purer dark. I thought I should reexamine these other tables; perhaps there were more odds & ends, more hints.

So it was: there were, immediately noticeable, table lamps—the kind of jointed, necked table lamps one finds on a slanted drawing table; the kind of lamps that are simultaneously magnifying lenses, for exacting artists or such. One necked lamp per table, it seemed. I hurriedly turned them on; they emitted a warm, natural light; but it was what the lights revealed, what unbelievable things lay under their mundane glow, that all at once made me forget the other items; that all at once revealed something more profoundly unexplained.

The sudden illumination made their faint voices rise; faint shouts, faint murmurings—but nothing clear; their quiet words were too quiet, too muffled in the moss & murk, too stifled in the humming of the fan. I did not truly listen; I did not want to listen at first: I did not want to listen to my delusion. I did not want to be swallowed up in such derangement. It was too ugly to think it true; unsettling, disconcerting—too intimately displeasing: but they did not disappear. Their voices quieted because, I imagine, I had stayed silent for so long; silent, staring, glazing, & waiting for their voices & their miniature forms to recede into the hiccup & daydream from whence they came, squirming. They did not fade out. They continued to stare up at me, as children might stare up at an imperious, human-faced mountain. Miniature human beings—I thought, I dazzled; “it is not true,” echoed irresolutely through these thoughts. Everything felt too rapid. I unfocused my vision; I refused to concentrate. “It is not true,” I whispered as I hurriedly turned all the lights off.

In the dark, I exhaled slowly, therapeutically; to calm myself, to fight off the sensation that some disorder had seized me—& that it would seize me again, & again: perpetually. The flashlight was off; the fan was whirring gently. The tiny voices seemed, from the distance I had put between them & I, stopped. All the spacious isolation of this warehouse, this hanger, or whatever it was, had returned—with its burden of weightlessness & blindness. I exhaled & inhaled; I felt that it would be beneficial to lie on my back, on the cool cement; just relax—let things come into proper proportion; find some reason for this; disregard it: no, it did not happen. My eyes were closed.

It was an illusion, some hallucination, the effect of darkness, humidity, confusion, unpleasant odors on the psyche; it was, perhaps, a table infested with roaches, or a species of noisy insect—yes, & my brain went temporarily south: maybe out of shock, disgust—cockroaches are repulsive. The combined effect of darkness, humidity, confusion, the abrupt sight of a shiny, nauseating infestation, the anxiety that an owner would expose me amidst his or her privacies, all of this, more of this, could trigger—did trigger—derangement. It was a temporary delusion: miniature human beings are physical absurdities.

I had contemplated the event; I could say, with confidence, something realistic about the event. The breathing exercises had worked: I was again breathing naturally, unconsciously. Something was still skewed; my feelings remained, in some sense, unreturned. Yet, I reasoned, as anybody must reason, that something as powerful, as overwhelmingly in possession of one, as delusion or hallucination is not easily removed from one’s mood; its reality in the memory, its reality for the emotions, recycles itself. Nevertheless, I was breathing naturally. I expected the delusion to surface again, with some lesser degree of force, but I knew, after all, that it would be a delusion. I expected it to return, because I essentially did not want it to return.

Lying on the floor, in the blackness, I felt things were intelligible—except for a few loitering questions, a few holdovers: I still did not know the why of those tools & items. The question imposed itself; it was there, naked in the light of a possibility: it was there as an adjunct to my delusion: did those instruments relate to those little insects? I thought ‘insects,’ but the words ‘miniature’ and ‘humans’ stirred underneath—held down, as I needed them to be.

It followed: my amateur naturalist hypothesis is true. The owner studies insect colonies; dissects under the microscope; observes through the magnifying glasses; injects insects—but with what solution, I did not even attempt to guess. The listening device, I reasoned, must be for the listening & recording of insect vocalizations; its modifications must serve for focusing on local, individual vocalizations—for very precise listening, I mean.

Some of the items, according to this context, made less or no sense: matches, for instance—or, the glue-sticks. I could think of many outlandish uses of glue-sticks for the study of insects, but nothing familiar; these things, to be honest, suggested inhumane techniques—imaginative little tortures, I suspected. I was not disturbed by the suspicion, but very persuaded by it: the whole off-putting environment impressed me as being suited for an off-putting personality. I was not so enthusiastic of insects as to condemn an entomologist from a little, infrequent misuse of his materials: I doubt insects experience pain in any lucid, racking sense.

I remained on my back, amusing myself with speculations & inferences. After a few minutes of this, I decided to get up & have a second look at the insects—still not without a worry, but a very diluted worry. I stood next to the lamp on the tallest table; I hesitated; the light clicked on.

I stood there. I thought: this is delusion—this is delusion. I said solemnly to myself, in a broken, half-brave voice, “this is delusion.” I spoke as though the statement was a charm, a physical negation of the realities before me, yet there was no change.

Tiny, nearly inaudible voices, small human voices, floated up—as before. Once more, as before: tiny, barely visible bodies: tiny, yet correctly proportioned human bodies: human bodies no larger than my fingernail: they stood crowded, like bipedal ants: crowded into little huddles, little aggregations of life, little tribes of little human families; they looked up at me; some flailed their arms, their one-centimeter arms; some were jumping; others were sitting; others were lying on their back. Children, the elderly, the middle-aged, teenagers, infants; men, women; girls, boys; all the human types: alive, but extremely miniature.

The deepest aspects of my theorizing imagination were reeling: How are such existences possible? Why is this phenomenon here? Am I irretrievably deluded? How am I confounding insects with human beings? I felt the heaviness of the air more intensely; its pressures intruded from every direction. It was obvious, in an absurd way, that a substantial number of these human creatures were trying to correspond with me; but I stood gawking—& glazed. I do not recall the amount of time that passed, or the majority of the thoughts I had during that time. I do not recall what it was that carried me back into myself, but that unhurried force eventually restored my judgment, my feeling for facts. The shock bled out; it was, or seemed, manifestly true: these small humans were manifestly real—& they were interacting as I was integrating.

Before interacting, before I felt it safe & sane to interact, I thought I should see more—that more information would be healthy. I had turned only this one lamp on, & seen only this one table clearly. I wanted to see the other tables clearly: to see their occupants, if they had occupants. My sense of estrangement lapsed into noncommittal curiosity. The other lamps clicked on; I burned the details into me; they were too dissociating to forget—too miraculous.

In that lamplight, in the surreal & naked view of everything, the tables, which were visibly & uniformly fifteen-feet long by five-feet wide, presented themselves as something other than moss-covered, & other than flat. Each of the three tables presented three different environments, as natural, as geographically accurate, & as eye-catching as the professional landscapes of miniature railroad tables. My memory of these tables is vivid, as anything so unreal, so stimulating, so adrenal is vivid.

The first environment, the environment I first lit up, situated on the tallest of the tables, the five-foot high table, was a kind of wide-open pasturage with miniature flora: trees, grass, shrubs, fields, groupings of flowers—a very pleasant, storybook pasturage: sprinkled with ponds; laced with threadlike rivers that snaked through one-inch willow trees, nestled on microscopic shores. Everything was natural, alive, functional—only shrunken, miniscule. This particular table, this beautiful table, was the only table with human residents; the reason for this, I noticed instantly, was given by the nature, the environments, of the remaining two tables.

The second tallest table, the three-foot tall table, presented a bleak & inhospitable desert—with dunes, with relatively high mountains, with no apparent sources of water. Everything was dried-out, lifeless & hot—unexpectedly hot: owing to an intricate system of heating coils, toaster-like coils, built into the underside of the table, which I discovered later. It was a picturesque little desert landscape: a deceptively natural amalgam of Middle-Eastern & African deserts.

The final table, the shortest table, being only about one foot lifted from the floor, presented an unnatural environment: a very miniature, very elaborate, very circuitous labyrinth—whose walls were bare & standing razors; razors standing no higher than one-half inch; razors without holes, without perforated middles—only uninterrupted metal; razors firmly, rigidly connected with, what I assumed to be, rubber cement; razors glued to each other, as the walls & boundaries, & glued to the tabletop, as the foundation. There were corridors, false routes, forked routes, dead-ends; all the intricacies of the most disorienting labyrinth, delicately constructed. It was this architecture, as I interpreted it, which implied an upsetting theory: a theory I kept unmentionable in my imagination—only permitting something abstract & disembodied to enter, & enter only in a vague, undistinguished, passing fashion. I suppressed a word: cruelty.

The tables were parallel to each other, with space sufficient between them to serve as a type of pedestrian path, a type of thoroughfare: on which one had very comprehensive access: the perimeters & the interiors of the table landscapes could be comfortably reached from these pathways—why?

It was after looking over the last & lowest table that a feeling of exhaustion took hold of me; I felt as though the concentrated & persistent energy of the delusion—as I still employed that harmless name—had drained itself & its host. My investigative natures did not want to rest; they pushed against themselves; nonetheless, like a person too long tested, whose eyes were too long forced open, I gave no resistance—I let go. I turned off the lamps, turned off the fan, turned on my flashlight, & found my way to the exit—to a door out of a dream, I thought. I wanted to leave, to sleep, to bury everything I had seen.

As the small, metal warehouse door closed, a deeper & separate door closed—a vast & heavy door: with a sign above it: “Do not close.” I felt this door, felt its heavy tug, as it shut itself again & again—against something dark & radiant. Its heavy pull & soft creaking swayed & sang me to sleep: I was so far off, but inescapably there: there, in visions: of throwing over one thousand tables, laughing.


Part II:
The Discovery

The door is not like I remember it; it is smaller, thinner, & dirtier—perhaps not. I am not like I remember, & the scenery follows. I never closed the door—never really closed it. I have walked through it, & into its boiling gut, so often: for weeks. I could not close the door, so I have returned to open it, to walk through it; I am still inside it, behind it—I want to get out. I am still standing, mute & pale, near its tables; I have returned: to drag my memories from its tables. I must walk, as I have walked everyday, through the door: & do something—search through its illusions, & shout: No.

I open it: the same unpleasant blindness; the same uncertainty: it is dank, as before. I am dreaming. I open it: the humid, black murk: the same fear. “Now open it,” I repeat aloud. I open it.

My new flashlight cuts open the face of the dark, but this dark is severe & deep: so it is again, I am breathing heavily—so it has been in my dreams & reflections, I am breathing heavily. I am shuffling, as I have shuffled for weeks. I am pointing the light around, as I have pointed it every day, in every corner, on every surface & emptiness—waiting for my dream to fade in, & confess, “I am your lie.”

I know where to go: to its center: to its deceptive little nucleus; I feel the image of a table’s edge: reaching out for me: to make me silent, reverent, ridiculous. I know, as I draw nearer, what it is I will see: myself, wild. An edge is caught in the light; I recognize it—but I am unready. I have never so willingly pursued a daydream; no, I want to think no—I am pursuing nothing, & am being pursued by nothing.

The light reveals the surface of the table. It is all still sitting here: manifest, visible, definite. In its glow, I feel nothing; nothing is left to give up: it has been given up in my absence, in the recurring returns to these tables. I sense only what is technical: the shapes, the colors, the sizes, the patterns. I am looking down at my image, at what is incurable & broken in me; I am decorating these tables, as my corpse decorates a gurney: & some will think of my corpse: here is a human—however: here is no human. Thusly, I look down & murmur in my thoughts: here are no humans, but one: me.

The tables lay under the soft lamplight: the miniature human beings appear confused—as they ought to be: they are, as I am, confused—they are as I am. They are hushed; they only gaze up: in anticipation, it seems. Why am I waiting for myself; what do I anticipate in myself? It is too much of a concession to interact; if I decide to talk to them, to myself, I would surely loathe myself for returning to this place. If they spoke, it would be too much of a concession to listen—but I want to listen; I want to speak to my ears: what would I say? What would I say in response?

I leave them in their smallness & stupefaction; I must, that is, I need, or I want, to go to the table of instruments: for the listening device & a magnifying glass. I want to listen, to look; I cannot refuse myself; it is too late: I am already powerless against my own imagination—something has already surrendered to itself. I am already lying—exploring my lie is no more a lie; it is a necessary confession—it must be; it is.

As I pick up the headphones, the microphone, the magnifying glass, I know: these too must be unreal. All of it—there is no distinction: I acknowledge that I am partially out of my mind, & it feels rational; I know that I am rational, that I am only suffering what I think to be delusion, that I am rational for thinking such. It is a lucid dream: so I am lucid: I may participate ironically.

There is a dirtied, single-stand black chair of adjustable height; it sits beside the lowest table, & appears to have been adjusted accordingly. I stand it against the highest table & force it to its tallest position. It is worn, yet strong & comfortable. I don the headphones. With one nearly trembling hand, I aim the microphone at these half-inch human beings; with the other hand, I hold the magnifying glass, & focus it. I should snicker at myself—entirely alone, hunched on a cement floor, equipped with imaginary paraphernalia, examining the empty ground, listening for silence.

They notice me; they gaze up so helplessly: seeming to recognize that I can view them more closely, in higher detail—but they remain very still; no one speaks. The children appear afraid; among the adults & elderly there are looks of wonder, bewilderment, &, as a kind of common denominator, hesitation.

They appear neither modern nor medieval, but rather ancient & agrarian—inhabiting roughly constructed huts of grass, rock, clay, & wood; huts in a variety of sizes: from a dime-sized single hut to a quarter-sized family hut to a three-inch long, rectangular hut—which, if these humans are comparable to real ancient tribesmen, I would assume serves a communal, superstitious function.

Their fashion is also proper to the agrarian lifestyle: pelts & the like—but pelts from where? There may be fauna—I move on: I soar, if you will, over the hills & valleys with my magnifying glass; I am like millions of hawks, millions of clouds; it is very breathtaking for something this miniature; with such access, such velocity of vision, such ease & freedom of movement in something virtually indistinguishable from the earth, I feel weightless; I feel dissociated; I feel as someone above all things—as one dominant, potent, glorious.

I soar over the fields that I had last time given only a cursory look; I see now in higher resolution: wheat-fields. Everything I had seen earlier without magnification now zooms up in rich, vital, intimate life-size: the willows, the streams, the stones—and here: I see a smattering of miniature cattle grazing in the green hills; some are asleep in the shadows of miniature willows. The cattle possess the colors of those pelts—my delusion, at least on this point, is not altogether incoherent; it is sustaining its rhythms & narratives with a degree of verisimilitude beyond, well beyond, any of my relevant precedents. In this respect, my explanations of it make little sense to me—but that I cannot explain it thoroughly has become, so instantly, less terrifying; my dream is mostly beautiful; my dream, my madness, is good.

“Merciful God, speak to us”—it is the voice of an English-speaking male individual. He has addressed me as ‘God’—it is an embarrassment: my puny, mincing ego, extrapolating & flattering itself. ‘Merciful’—my idiocy is outside of me, mocking the both of us. How should I chastise it? It should be reprimanded, kept in proportion: too much perspective has already been lost.

“Who spoke?”—Where is he? Where is the face of my ego? Does he wear my face: in miniature?

“It was I, merciful God; I spoke.” There are too many of them—perhaps over one hundred of them; their mouths are too tiny. They are sporadically set across the table: in five, independent colonies. I require a test: a method of distinguishing, isolating, identifying.

“Separate yourself, speaker; go to a hill, a far away hill—& I will speak to you again.”

(TO BE CONTINUED)