Ligotti Hears a Who

I am consumed in mystery such that I do not know which aspect is of the maximal weirdness: Is it that I can see in light for which there is no source, as if the light itself has chosen to float like a cloud of smoke in my environment? or is it that I am writing--I am sensing I am writing, I am choosing words, then erasing words, seeking the right way to express all this strangeness--when I have neither writing instrument nor stylus nor tablet nor paper at hand? or is it rather that I am walking down a staircase that seems to have no bottom and may no longer have a top anymore? or is it finally that these three aspects must of necessity be merely effects of some fourth principle that would seem to be some kind of conscious force intending to make me nothing less than at the brink of a stark raving madness? I am on an eternal staircase, writing on nothing, using a light without origin. These are all facts just as surely that it is a fact that I was once at the top of the staircase, nothing in hand, about to descend a staircase that used to number in total fifteen steps down into my basement, thinking it was an ordinary evening except for a noise from below--the water heater I assumed--which I felt it my responsibility, as the man of the house, to investigate. In the distant past.

There is no sound here on these steps, not even the slightest sound; there is just the scratching of my invisible pen or invisible pencil on this my invisible notebook or invisible whatever and the sound of my breathing and moving on these steps of which I can see four below me and six above. How safely can I believe that somewhere about me, somewhere far above me, is my house, my living room, my wife, my bedroom, my cat, my neighbourhood, my world? After descending twenty or twenty-five steps I knew that something was terribly amiss; where had my basement gone? I believe I took fright at that moment--the first moment of fright--and turned around, no longer seeking the light-switch that held against the wall at the bottom of the steps of the house I once knew, to travel up again into the evening's living room, whereupon I noticed (as I had no choice but to notice) there was no longer anything visible up forty-five degrees in front of me. But still I stepped dream-like up the steps, expecting the top of the steps at any time really; but the steps did not end, and I was then in a panic akin to a vertigo as my entire world had seemingly vanished in some blink of an eye. And yet the banister beneath my hand was entirely familiar to me in its thickness and its strength and its winter warmth. I held to it tightly for some time, wondering how to escape this waking dream.

Now I sit, some hours and hours later, having tried both directions (half naturally being of the classification 'pointless') for tedious durations, uncertain which step is right and which step is wrong, and in the end--in the now--knowing that every step was a wrong step--except perhaps for the first fifteen; or ten; or five; or one. I'm existent, that I know, but what else do I know, or at least how can I possibly judge what I know to be either the truth or truly what I think I even know? I think I know that somewhere high above my head there's still my wife, my world, and so on, and that perhaps this is all a pure-wool dream even though I cannot pinpoint when it could have started. Was it when I thought I heard a noise from the basement? Was that the onset of the dream? I know that one who is asleep can easily incorporate and explain away any sort of noise; so am I in a dream-segment whose onset was a noise at my bedroom window at three a.m. during a dream in which I was sitting in my living room? That seems possible--though it doesn't explain why I feel so real. I can account for the beating of my heart and pulse; I can account for my steady breathing. The sensation of writing, though I cannot know I am writing, is heavy. Even this miasma of light seems completely real as if part of an unknown quality of the natural world. Sometimes, the world changes in a flash. Ask the Hiroshimans.

Should I try going up again, or should I try going down? Either way ... seems I'm leaning over more though I don't know why. These invisible writing machines seem closer to my eyes. I wonder if this light without a source is, I don't know, closely connected to my body and its pulse and beat. I remember the staircase that was my first staircase, when I was two years old, in the house my family moved to in a Montreal suburb. I grabbed the rails of it and hopped up and down. That's my first memory, too. I've seen so many staircases since then; there were two staircases in Sarnia, two staircases in the place in Toronto I moved to, away from home for the first time; then none in the apartment, then some in the place I moved to next, and now I'm in a house with my wife and we only have one staircase here and I am on it or I think I'm on it or I'm dreaming I'm on it. High school had stairs, so does my office building. All the subways, I think, have stairs. Stairs, stairs everywhere, but none to compare with this staircase. It's like Jacob's ladder, or maybe even the famous Stairway to Heaven, lady that's sure all that glitters is gold. Should be glisters, I guess.

Looking up to where the slanted green ceiling is supposed to be, I notice there's a single point of light, maybe at two o'clock if my understanding of military direction-pointing is correct, and maybe twenty degrees off apex if my understanding of astronomy is correct. It's a dot--a dot at what distance I can't tell; at first I thought it was some piece of a crack somewhere in the ceiling and that I was seeing back out into the outer world again but now I'm not so sure of that because it doesn't seem to move like it's that close to me. People have habits; my habit, my silly habit, is that I always forget when I come down these stairs (if these stairs they are) that there's also a light switch at the top of the stairs; I always use the switch at the bottom. I don't think I should attach much reasoning to this. I don't think there's any need to zychoanalyze it. It's just that I don't need any light until I get to the bottom of the stairs. It's easy to go down a flight of stairs in the dark; in fact it's easier than crossing a room, since you've got a banister to hold on to and there're never any sharp-edged coffee tables on a staircase. If a message is needed, maybe it's that I shouldn't be so confident that reality is shaped so-and-so and such-and-such-like--but how could I be faulted, punished even, for expecting this-that-or-the-other to remain essentially the same? how can I be faulted for thinking that if someone could understand my language yesterday then they can understand my language today?

I'm standing again, and I reach out to grip the banister, but the banister is a little lower than it used to be, and it's also considerably thinner. It now feels almost like a dowel, or like a piece of steel cabling of maybe four inches in circumference. I take a step down and find that the step is no longer whatever-it-was before, seven or eight or nine inches different, but rather it's closer, as if the steps are flattening out a little at a time or maybe they flattened all at once. Without a yardstick I can't really tell. I use my hand--I put my hand such that my middle finger touches the base of one step while my wrist touches the top of the step above and now I have a measurement: the step measures from fingertip to the fatty part of my palm, which doesn't seem to be that great a distance at all. I take the thumb of my other hand and measure this distance, and I find that the step of five thumbs tall. Five thumbs, five thumbs. I'll keep that in mind. Then I put my hand out to the wall and I notice that it seems to be sloping away from me. Maybe I should lay off the potato chips before I go to bed.

One day later. I walked up and up and up, but I seem to have gotten nowhere. I can't see that there's any difference between where I was and where I am now. Everything looks exactly the same. What have I missed? What did I do to deserve this? I was an okay guy altogether. There was nothing really remarkable about me. Houses to live in, jobs to work at, people to know, date, etc. Maybe my health wasn't the greatest, maybe I drank too much on weekends, but same with everyone and so does everyone. Another hypothesis just came to me. Could I be dead right now? Maybe when I was upstairs watching television I suffered a massive stroke or a heart attack or whatever, right there on the couch, and now I'm ... in limbo, that's what it's called? I know limbo is kind of a waiting room for heaven or hell, but I always imagined it as a whole pile of womb-like balls all set up in a warehouse someplace--not as a set of wooden stairs leading nowhere. I don't think that part of the hypothesis works out. Still, I could be dead--but this place isn't any limbo, not by a long shot.

Looking up, I notice there are now seven spots of light above me. They may have all appeared at the same time, or one by one. Is one of them the light I saw yesterday, or is that one gone ... I wonder. I suppose I could find out by staring up unblinking and waiting to see if others appear. If only I had something to measure by. It doesn't look like any constellation now why am I thinking that? It's because the lights up there look like they could be stars, suns, distant suns, kind of, but they're not twinkling, they're perfectly obvious and plain, just light-bulbs in the sky. Plus, why would they all be clumped together like that, directly overhead? It has to be something of a crack in the ceiling, wherever it is, how high it is. Up there somewhere there's my wife, there she is, there's...? Slipped my mind, isn't that strange. She has dark hair, she weighs one ten, couple inches shorter than me, so her name, her name. This is nuts. A.... B.... C.... D.... E.... F.... G.... H.... I.... J.... K.... L.... Strange. Where was I? M.... N.... O.... P.... Q.... R.... S.... T.... U.... V.... W.... X.... Y.... Z. I'll try again later, right now I find the step I'm on has gotten very wide. Walkable from one end to the other, eight or nine feet from the forty-five degree wall to the wire banister. I've never had a dream last so long. I feel like I've really been on these steps for two days--but maybe I've thrown myself a false memory and I got here a second ago and invented the past two days. Nothing's impossible.

Believing that if I can once again properly employ the form of proper grammar--knowing beforehand that I have in no wise a problem with spelling--I shall be able to most clearly analyse the reality of this situation--for situation declenses as situ, place, locale, I think, and I have nothing if not situ and solely situ--I sense a beginning, or re-beginning, of a fresh start on this passage of my life, in which I may re-state hypotheses and add another. The new hypothesis, hinted at a couple minutes ago, is that I never had a life outside of these stairs that are slowly changing under me and that which I believe to be my previous life was never anything more than a kind of a phantasy or dream created possibly out of pure wool. Consanguent with that, a further note on this situation I have to make which is far-fetched--fundamentally fetched far since nothing is out-of-bounds in this game--is that before this all 'started' I was a wisp of string, stretched vertically from heaven to hell, which was expanding into a third and is now expanding into a fourth dimension, namely a dimension in which time is taking place and hence requirent of a sense of it with the result that a past was forced into being. O for a measuring stick of the absolute! with which one can judge the probabilities of hypotheses, steps, or distances.

The name of my wife is Helena, full name Helena Maria Palatto; she is the daughter of Tomas Palatto and Anna Palatto and she has two sisters and two brothers, names being (in birth order) Victoria, Bernetto (Bernardo), Helena (my wife), Julia, and Robert(o); Helena has black hair and has always had black hair which she keeps in length but buns up often using an ivory pin thst once belonged to her grandmother; she wears glasses to read and does not like to be seen wearing them such that in dark restaurants she prefers asking me to elucidate the menu when it is printed small; she is a draftswoman in an architectural firm which I have visited twice, once for a matter personal and once to take her out to lunch on her 31st birthday; she seems to be getting interested in the matter of childbearing even though I am indifferent to the matter and we do not use any prophylactic sensing that we should let nature take its course but it seems she wants to use fertility drugs or at least get me in to an MD for a test; we have plans for a European journey if not this summer the next; and finally all of what I've said is probably not true at all since I simply invented it to show that it's relatively easy to cut from whole cloth a coherent and plausible narrative and thus that it's relatively easy to implant a fiction into the real such that the two are indistinguishable and thus that maybe I don't have a real past at all: or at least I can never quite be sure of anything I believe other than my situation.

I feel like I'm on a raked stage; the banister is gone (save for tiny bumps); to my left, past where the banister was, there's a bit of a downward slope, and to my right there's an upward slope. Above me: stars, stars, stars. Like the night sky, but there's no constellations I recognize. I don't know why I'm looking up at a foreign sky. Maybe the stars have been positioned completely at random--no that can't be true because stars go where they are because of physics and gravity and so on. They can't be where they can't be. For example, if they're too close together, they can smash into one another, making another star, or one of those binary stars. Maybe some, maybe all of them, up there are binary stars. Who knows? This is the stuff I'm thinking about. Perhaps I was always here, on a (slightly sloped) plane, with the stars above me, imagining that once, a couple-three days ago, I was living in a world of connections with others. That was all false, I think. This is what life is, here, now. I suppose the ground beneath my feet will continue to flatten, maybe tomorrow (whatever that means) I'll be on a perfectly flat plane, with nothing in any direction, and the distant stars above. OR I'll wake up, in my bed, after this very long dream, and see my wife, and my room, and the stairs leading down into the cellar (which I'll look at differently from now on). I suppose I could walk to my left or right, up or down, and see what's there, on the wall to my left, past the banister to my right. Or was it the other way around? I don't know, I don't recall. There was a noise in the cellar. I went downstairs to check it out. I intended to turn on the light at the bottom. I never made it to the bottom and I couldn't return to the top. I wish there was some kind of metaphor in that. Then I could see the intelligence behind my dilemma, if dilemma it is. After some time you cease panicking and you don't mourn what you've lost. Goodbye, knowledge, fictitious though you might have been. Goodbye to all that. I wonder if there are other people in my situation; I wonder if all people are in my situation. There's nothing but gravity anywhere, holding things together, holding me to this ground, keeping those stars where they are. I am writing this on nothing, with no light source, trapped forever; I could keep on going but I don't think anything is going to change. Tell you what: if anything changes, ever, I'll continue writing this. Otherwise, or until then, here is silence. Silence.