Assyrian Mind

01/29/2019

(NYC Midnight Challenge submission)

Genre: Mystery

Subject: Medical condition

Character: Prisoner

A man wakes up from a long sleep. He has been imprisoned in and by his own mind, struggling to free himself.

---

The rattle of iron on iron woke him from a desperate, agonizing slumber. The vivid, light-consuming midnight of his mind had taken him once more, deeper than the night before. The absence of light in his tiny, familiar cage had become a predictable comfort in comparison. Slick, running walls, a constant bend of legs or spine or neck, the almost euphoric pain of attaching his suffering to his servitude. None of those realities could keep him from his mind’s abyss.

Zahir opened his eyes and closed them again quickly in a eye-blink prayer. His hands traced the roughly hewn stone floor right at the creased intersection of the walls that kept him from the world he had promised to serve. Brown, light-starved algae and the remains of centuries-survived insects speckled those walls; those walls that had become an omnipresent enemy and reliable friend. Those walls listened to his laments, spoken and silent. Those walls.

The guard turned his head, light from a half-lit torch seeping into zealoutrous eyes. Those eyes that saw the same prisoner crawl ever closer to insanity with each new dawn. Those eyes that laughed delightedly at his charge’s unchangeable reality.

“Wake, fool.”

The guard rattled the iron bars again, drawing the reaction he sought every day, that slight disturbance in the tiny cell. That wonderfully sweet knowledge that the most insignificant, almost casual of actions could induce sorrow. A sorrow that tasted like the pomegranates he ate the evening before. He saw his prisoner stir ever slightly, half-woken, miserable. The guard smiled and turned away, his day accomplished before the sun had raised its chin to the world.

Zahir shifted his body towards the torchlight and began to work through each of his nervous paths, waking them gently with flex and breath. He had heard those very same words for so long but time had melted them away, leaving only a thin layer of despair. Questions used to be the tunnel’s light, eroded by the repetition of unanswered prayers and his caretakers’ sadistic playfulness. He no longer asked.

The guard stood facing away, a statue asleep in its maker’s image. Zahir had never actually seen his face in all the years they had coexisted. And they had never spoken more than a few words at any time. But they knew each other, well, sharing the same space and sentence.

As his mind had wandered, so to had the guard. Back on a stool set several meters from the cell, facing away, shoulders slumped. A slow, melancholic rasp began, the sound of stone on metal. As the blade cradled in the guard’s arms became sharper, so did Zahir’s focus. A memory tickled the fringe of his mind, begging him to advance into its warm embrace. It felt known. It felt…

“Show me your face.”

The blade lay silent. The guard straightened his back. His brow creased, reacting to the range of possible reactions and the pure surprise of an implied question.

Why hadn’t he ever seen the prisoner’s face?

“Show me your face, brother.”

The request emanated softly, it’s hidden gravity pulling the guard to action. The guard’s leather breastplate creaked as he stood. His feet shuffled. His neck bent to one side, then the other. He tried to turn but found himself immobilized, struck frozen by a creeping realization.

He had never seen Zahir’s face.

A crack of sunlight peered through the ceiling, a purposefully constructed pinhole to the outside. It drew a fiery arrow to the locked keyhole on Zahir’s cage. It did this every day, another purposeful construction, a tease of freedom. Whose freedom, Zahir pondered.

The light shimmered. It had never done that before.

His eyes caught the guard’s eyes. Two pairs of burnished yellow globes surrounded by thin rings of dark matter wrestled in the space between them. Darkness dominated that space, but the outside light...that shimmering, inescapable beam screamed a new truth. And their eyes locked around that truth, wrestling with the cave, the cell...the impossible coincidence.

The guard inched his feet forward towards the bars, knees wobbling with exhaustion as Zahir stood and flexed his dirty, wrinkled hands. Hands that had grown weak without purpose. He looked at them, frowning. Those were not his hands. His fingers had the calluses of a soldier; his knuckles were bruised as if from repeated impact. The palms of his hand were crusted with old, black blood. Those hands were not his own.

Zahir looked up to see the guard’s face lightly touching the prison bars. Not the guard’s face. Sunken eyes, roughly cut jaw, scar above the right eye, nose broken by childhood street brawls, lost wagers and war. A face he had seen in the mirrors of his old home. Zahir looked at himself and his mind crumbled.

The iron bars melted away and the guard staggered forward. Zahir put his hands up to steel himself and found his hands touching the guards hands, fingertips lightly aligned. The light from above intensified, obliterating the rock ceiling, melting the keyhole, destroying the solitude inside Zahir’s mind. He had finally found that all this time he had been both prisoner and guard.

---

Zahir awoke to the sound of doctors and nurses teaming around his hospital bed. He blinked his eyes and the room ground to a silent halt. Bewildered faces turned to him at once. A pen dropped to the floor, the sound of its fall causing a ripple around the room. Zahir’s blurred vision slowly caught up to the silence of the room, focus returning as his mind restarted. Why was everyone staring at him?

A tall, lithe shape approached him, hand extended in a protective gesture. As it touched Zahir’s arm, the mask around its face slipped and lips marked by a wry smile spoke:

“You’ve been asleep for a long time, Michael. A very long time. It’s good to have you back. We need to talk about your condition.”