The silence after the thunder is not peace. It's the wait for the next lightning strike. Kneeling on the garden's cartilaginous ground, my mind, the newly cleaned canvas, had filled with a single, monstrous image. The pain was not a wave; it was the ocean. And I was at the bottom, the pressure threatening to implode my very soul.
For a time I could not measure, I did not move. The world was the pulsating garden and the translucent phantoms floating in its warm air. My body was paralyzed, but my mind, in its newly broken state, began to work in a feverish, terrible way. Logic was gone. Reason was a foreign language. All that remained was pain, and pain needed an outlet.
Slowly, I lifted my head. My eyes fixed on the form floating directly in front of me. The small luminous fetus. The unspoken future. My unspoken future.
And I began to speak to it.
"Hello," my voice was a croak, a dry, alien sound. "I... I'm your father."
The word felt like poison on my tongue. Absurd. Presumptuous. A lie. I wasn't a father. I was an empty space where a father should have been.
The fetus floated, indifferent, peaceful in its eternal slumber.
"I'm sorry," I whispered, crawling a little closer, extending a trembling hand, not daring to touch. "I'm sorry, I didn't know. I swear I didn't know. If I had known... if she had told me... everything would have been different."
Lies. Sweet, desperate lies my broken mind was constructing to shield itself from the abyss. But a part of me, the cold observer that had been born in the previous levels, knew the truth. Would it have been different? Or would I have just dragged two more people down with me into my vortex of self-pity?
"We would have been a family," I continued, my voice gaining a maniacal urgency. "I would have bought you a crib. One of those nice wooden ones, not the cheap ones. And I would have read you stories. All the stories. And I would have taught you how to ride a bicycle... not like my father, I wouldn't have let go, never. I promise you."
Promises poured from me, promises to a phantom, to an echo. Hollow promises that bounced off the garden's silence. The fetus continued to float, its soft glow undisturbed. It didn't react. It couldn't.
"Do you hear me?" I asked, my voice cracking. "Please, tell me you hear me. Open your eyes. Just once. Please."
My plea hung in the dense air. And the silence I received in return began to transform. It was no longer a peaceful silence. It was a silence of rejection. A cosmic, absolute indifference.
The first crack of true madness opened.
"Why won't you answer me?!" I demanded, my voice rising, the sadness beginning to sour into anger. "Is it because of me? Are you angry with me? You have every right. You have every right! But say something! Scream! Cry! Do something!"
I passed my hand through the form. The hollow coldness ran up my arm, a sensation of nothingness that was an affront. My hand came out the other side, intact. There was no substance. Nothing to touch.
"You're not real!" I shrieked, leaping to my feet. "None of this is real! It's a joke! It's another trick!"
I began to run through the garden, flailing my arms, trying to hit the other floating forms. "Wake up! All of you! This place is a lie!"
My hands passed through them, again and again. They were intangible, unreachable. My fury grew with every failure, a helpless fury against phantoms. The garden began to respond to my escalating hysteria. The soft pulsation of the coral-plants accelerated, becoming an erratic, nauseating flicker. The milky light turned into an angry red, plunging the landscape into the color of blood and muscle. The silence broke. A low, rhythmic sound began to emanate from the ground, a dull, heavy heartbeat.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
The beating of a giant heart, beneath my feet.
I stopped running and covered my ears. But the sound was in my bones, in my teeth. The entire world had become a feverish womb, and I was a virus within it.
And then I saw her.
Valeria.
She stood by one of the largest coral-plants, her figure silhouetted against the pulsating red light. She wore the same dress she wore the day we broke up. Her face was calm, but her eyes judged me.
"Valeria?" I gasped. Was it her? Was she real?
She didn't speak. She simply raised a hand and pointed to something beside her. It was a crib. A wooden crib, like the one I had promised. And it was empty.
I began to walk towards her, stumbling on the fleshy ground. "Valeria, I'm sorry. Please, you have to believe me, I..."
As I drew closer, her image flickered like a bad TV signal. For an instant, her face shifted to my mother's, with an expression of deep disappointment. Then, to my father's, with his impassive mask. Then, it was Valeria again, but this time she was smiling. The vacant, porcelain smile from the banquet hall.
"No!" I shrieked, recoiling.
The hallucination intensified. Now, the garden was filled with them. Ghostly Valerias walking slowly, some pushing empty strollers, others cradling bundles of air in their arms. They didn't look at me. They acted as if I didn't exist, their movements slow and ceremonial. They were the priestesses of this temple of grief, and I was the blasphemer, the only one screaming amidst their silent procession.
The heartbeat grew louder, and another sound joined it. A chorus of high-pitched, distorted baby cries, coming from everywhere and nowhere. It was a sound designed to break the mind, to attack the most primal instincts of protection and turn them into instruments of torture.
My own mind surrendered. Language broke. Coherent thought dissolved into a torrent of images and sensations.
Empty crib, cold katsudon, pregnancy test, two pink lines, I hate you, get up, ctrl+z, the creak of the swing, the taste of ash, the weight of the manga, the porcelain smile, the crying, the crying, THE CRYING.
I fell to my knees, hands clamped over my head, rocking back and forth. I no longer knew where I ended and the garden began. The heartbeat was my heartbeat. The crying was my crying. The red light was the blood in my eyes.
My pain needed a physical anchor. The torment was too abstract, too immense. I needed something real to feel. I began to hit my head with my palms, again and again, to the rhythm of the garden's heartbeat. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. The dull impact resonated in my skull, a counter-melody to the piercing cries.
It wasn't enough. The skin on my forehead felt numb. I needed more. I dug my nails into my own arms, scratching the skin, opening red furrows. The pain was a flash of clarity in the red haze of my madness. I clung to it. I scratched harder, until blood welled up, warm and sticky. The metallic scent filled my nostrils, the same smell as the garden. It was my blood. I was part of this place.
The ghostly Valerias stopped and turned to look at me. All of them. Dozens of pairs of sad eyes watching my self-destruction. There was no judgment in their gazes. Only infinite sorrow.
And then, everything stopped.
The heartbeat ceased. The crying faded. The red light dimmed, returning to its soft, milky glow. The Valerias dissolved into the air. The silence returned, and it was the deepest, most absolute silence I had ever experienced. The silence of a tomb.
I remained there, gasping, blood running down my arms, the pain of my self-inflicted wounds a beacon in the darkness. I looked up. The luminous fetuses had stopped moving. They were all oriented in one direction, like a flock of birds frozen mid-flight.
I followed their collective gaze.
Across the garden, in the midst of the stillness, it had appeared. A staircase. The sixth. Carved from a black rock that did not belong in this organic landscape, ascending into nothingness.
I stood up, my body moving from an impulse that was no longer my own. My legs carried me towards it, through the now silent garden. I passed by the phantoms of lost futures. I passed by my own lost future, which had now joined the silent procession, looking towards the staircase like all the others.
I felt no relief. I felt nothing. I was empty, but it wasn't the clean emptiness from after the landfill. It was the emptiness of a house that has been plundered and burned. Nothing left to save. Nothing left to break.
I placed my foot on the first step. It was cold. My bleeding arms brushed against the stone. I left a trail of my own blood on the path to the next hell. I did not look back. There was nothing to see, except the remnants of my own shattered mind.