Lira woke at about 4 in the morning and went to the loo and collected a couple of chocolates and two biscuits. She returned to bed and ate the biscuits, lay down, turned off the light, and was imagining she was going to fall asleep. But there was something in her mind. As if she was very near to understanding something that otherwise seemed impossible. It seemed inextricably linked to her current disastrous relationship. As if, if she could just understand that one bit, so much more would suddenly fall into place.
She had an idea that every other event has something in common that has mislead her to expect it is true of the one event in which she is involved but can't explain. It's as if Harry is accusing her of doing something, and his reasons for believing his conclusion, seem equally convincing to Lira. It is one thing Lira seeing how he has interpreted the world, and another thing for her to have to interpret the world the same way. For a fleeting moment she had an evanescent comprehension of how things, which appear improbable or impossible, are actually quite easily understandable.
Lira suddenly remembers that between going to the toilet and collecting chocolates and biscuits she had stopped at the kitchen sink and filled a glass with cold water and drunk about 75% of it? She wonders if that seemingly insignificant event just may become important later.
So then Lira finds herself lying down attempting to sleep. The time is now about 04:48 and she hasn't got as far as turning the light off because her mind is trying to hang on to an invisible virtual Ariadne's thread of an insight into the imagined manifestation of a scenario which reveals the complex arrangement that explains how something that appears to be exactly impossible would obviously mislead anyone into thinking it could not be true and that therefore the exact same pattern of relationships, that can be seen in everything else, when applied to this otherwise impossible arrangement, would conclude that she did it.
What is it? What is this thing that she thinks she can see? And it reminds her of the hidden tape recorder that she found in Desmond's office, and how she realised that Mavis was lying. There is something sitting there. There is some arrangement, in her neurological network, which momentarily revealed an otherwise hidden pattern, which, when overlaid with this mysterious something, would explain it.
Lira wondered what she could possibly write in her diary to hold the set of things that she currently perceives that leave her with the belief that she can see something behind them. If she can't recall that fleeting insight just now, what can she leave on paper to record the current arrangement such that she gets the chance in the future to return to her diary in the hope of piecing the mystery together at another time. It is as if she wants to take a 4 dimensional snapshot; she wants to put the virtual reality on hold; she wants to pause the game and save it to disk, so that she can pick it up and carry on at some future time when she doesn't need to be continuing in the way that she now has to proceed and which is obscuring the reality, the real reality, from view.
Lira was also telling herself, or at least she was at around 04:48, that there is something equally mysterious about her multi-base machine. It may even be that there is something she is missing, which relates directly to the mystery she has failed to adequately describe to herself earlier, which relates to a similar mystery about her multi-base machine. Maybe she could, she muses, use the multi-base machine to unravel the other mystery. Perhaps if she solves the first mystery it will reveal how she could successfully utilise her multi-base machine for the purpose of materially improving the quality of her current relationship.
Being a biological blob that self formed from a magical mixture of rather weird oozing and throbbing other blobby stuff, Lira finds herself consistently distracted from the task of comprehension and realisation by the continuing need to process the biological blobby stuff and the environment from which it is formed. She was endlessly frustrated that she had to interrupt her stream of consciousness by something as mundane as going to the loo.
It has happened so many times before that it comes as no surprise this time that, having performed the compulsory ablution, Lira has not only dropped the thread of Ariadne which she was so desperately hanging on to, but has moved along the corridor of time to a place where there is so much more light stimulating her awareness with such an intensity that what was previously perceivable in the half light has effectively been swallowed up by the relative darkness of the tunnel that is now behind her.
Lira muses that one of the intriguing things about writing stuff down in her diary is that sometimes, when she goes back and reviews it, it then appears evident that she knew something which she didn't know she knew at the time. "So what the hell was it," she demands of herself, "that I woke up knowing in the middle of the night, that I am so anxious to hold, in some conscious form, that I am compelled to sit freezing at my desk attempting to put some words in my diary to describe adequately the state of affairs that might give rise to that comprehension again?"
Lira recalls that earlier she remembered turning the light off but later recalled that she hadn't got as far as turning the light off. She can hear Harry in her head asking accusingly "So which is it to be? Did you turn the light off or not?" with the explicit implication that she's guilty. "Guilty of what?", she asks the Harry in her head. "Guilty of whatever I want to describe you as guilty of." "Guilty because something is wrong and we don't know what it is." "And you steal our conscious attention because you are so mysterious, magical, bright, light, beautiful, and full of promises of our everlasting life in a state of perfect harmony and bliss."
"You are guilty of not being our saviour." Harry continues to accuse. "You came here and mislead us that you would make everything alright. You would bring meaning and purpose into our lives. You were the purpose of our lives. But you have failed. You are a treacherous deceiver." "You, you, you ..." he shouts as he points his bony fingers at her and with lips curling in vile hatred he screams in her face "You are the manifestation of evil." "It is you who have ruined our lives and turned them from their pure potential into a meaningless experience of pain and suffering."
"You are the problem. You are the destroyer of worlds. You are guilty. You must die, and we will sacrifice you to appease our angry God. We will torture, humiliate, desecrate, and murder you. And then we will know our true God. The God that will save us. The God that loves us unconditionally. The God that pats us on the head and soothes us saying 'There, there, little ones. I love you and you are truly valuable even if you are sinners and do bad things like maliciously torturing and murdering your children.' "
But it only gets worse. He hates Lira watching him doing it. He hates the reflection of his own existence in her eyes. He accuse her of seeing him as evil but she doesn't. Lira only sees him as beautiful but he is manifesting his pain in front of her eyes. Her eyes that are filled with tears of profound sadness at the demonic violence and destruction that he has become. Her beautiful eyes that are so perfect they reflect the truth of his debased and vacuous existence.
And yet, for all of that, there are several possible alternative explanations. It is possible when she thought that she thought she had turned out the light that she had. And that later, and therefore later in the chronological order in which she had thought the thoughts, she was thinking about an earlier time in the timeline of the events being recalled, when she had not turned out the light. This is necessary, in her understanding of the proposed reality being recalled, in order to make it possible and logically consistent, for her to have turned the light out in her earlier recollection which was later in the proposed timeline.
It is also possible that she was simply mistaken and she never did turn the light out but had simply assumed she had because she had assumed she was trying to sleep. Having grasped at her past by pulling on the thread which Ariadne gave her, in an attempt to understand what lies deeper in the tunnel from which she is emerging, instead of a neat ball of string, which it possibly once was, Lira finds she is staring at an impossibly tangled heap of useless string.
It is as if she has somehow hung on to the umbilical cord of her mother and in her desperation to stay connected to the safety of her past she has pulled and pulled on the cord and disembowel her mother turning her inside out. She finds herself immersed in a pile of warm heaving steaming entrails that threaten to suffocate her and can offer no nourishment to her bestial existence. She is simply left to contemplate the utter disaster that is her life. Lira's tortured soul continues to imagine she immerged into this material universe as a self replicating mechanism of resonant consciousness only to find herself not emerging from the darkness into the light but rather transitioning from the light into the darkness of hell.
She prays in her head to some imaginary deity "Oh sublime and beautiful all loving omnipotent God, thank you for this wondrous experience that brands your love with a burning iron into what little consciousness you afforded me. Thank you for honouring me with the privilege of being your foil, your defining otherness, your coiled distorted twist of gripping lick, your trunked and garbled ugly fuck. Thank you oh great magnificence."
And Lira ponders that the drink of water didn't turn out to have any meaningful significance after all. But was its significance ever going to relate to this excerpt of her life? Maybe it is part of a different story. Maybe it is part of the bigger picture. Maybe it is the clue, the rainbow, the promise, the breath of life, the ingredients of love and truth that finally seals the eternal circle of her love.
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Thiis was lovely to read
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