The Cage

--- I ---

He awoke with the peculiar sensation that he was still asleep. His eyes were open, he was sure of that, but that knowledge made little difference when he saw no more than if he had kept them closed. It was dark. The sort of dark that is so all encompassing he could not see his fingers when he placed his palm across his nose. He rolled over onto his back, a dull ache in the back of his head manifesting itself as he did. He was freezing, the hairs on his skin prickling in warning of its impending numbness. He felt along them and realized he was completely naked, although he seemed physically unaltered.

“Hello?” he called, his voice seeming to come from everywhere except himself. He waited for a minute in silence, but there was no reply.

He stood up, the aching in his head increasing to a shrill throb, and took a few steps forward. His arms were extended in front of him, his hands groping for a wall to support his disoriented body. After two steps, he brushed against a cold steel bar. A few more minutes of groggy groping later, and it occurred to him that he was in some sort of cage. As far as he could tell, it was circular and had no distinct exit. The bars were spaced far enough apart for him to reach his arm out into the nothing, but not nearly enough for anything else.

He was trapped, already shivering and exhausted from just these simplest of tasks. The pain in his head increased yet again to the point where even if he wasn’t in complete darkness, all he would have seen was the blinding whiteness flashing before his eyeballs. They must have drugged me, whoever they are. He collapsed onto the metal floor, no longer capable of lucid thought, and drifted into a fitful stupor that soon enough gave way to sleep.

As he slept, he dreamt of light.

--- II ---

He jolted awake violently, bewildered and gasping for breath. He paused, his mind blank, before remembering with an overwhelming sense of dread where he was. How long had he been asleep? Three minutes or thirty hours, it was impossible to tell. Trying to stand, he took stock of his body once again. His head no longer ached, but his feet felt like they were both smoldering and frozen solid. He tried to move his toes, but found that he could not. It felt like the room had gotten colder, and his joints were so stiff he found he could manage nothing more than to crawl to one of the bars and lean against it.

His feet were like weights tied to the end of his legs, inflexible in any way, and yet he knew they were still there because of the intense pain they were generating at the core of their numbness. Hypothermia was setting in. Pulling himself into a tight ball, he rubbed his skin with his hands furiously, trying to generate heat from the friction. Right now he was entertaining no thoughts of escape, just of survival. If he didn’t find some way to warm himself soon, he was going to die.

“Why are you doing this?” he cried, his voice hoarse against his dry throat. “Is anybody there?”

“I am.” came a voice from the dark. Startled, he looked frantically around him for the source of the response. “Where are you?”

“Here. Where are you?”

The voice was smooth, the words it spoke calculated so as to bear no subtext of emotion. It echoed simultaneously from all sides of the cage, making it an impossibility to determine from which direction his tormentor addressed him. The voice’s tone was not of rage, of jealousy or hate, or any other emotion that might have justified or given any clue to the source of this torture. If anything it was the tone of complete and total indifference, so if its speaker was enjoying this, it was not enough to be discernible in any way. He was fairly certain it was that of a male, but there was no way of knowing for sure. It was just as likely that the voice was from neither a male nor a female, and was actually being emitted from a preprogrammed computer. Nonetheless, it crept into his head and chilled his heart to hear the voice, for above all else it did not sound human.

“I’m in a damn cage! That’s where. Who are you? What is going on? And for the love of god, turn the heat up!” he shouted out of anger now, the only form of discourse left at his disposal.

“I am well aware of your physical locality. That is not what I mean. I am everything and nothing, whatever you need me to be, and you are here because you need me.” If the voice had not been so soulless, he would have been sure it was mocking him.

“Like hell I do! Quit talking in ambiguities and turn the heat on, you bastard. What do you want from me?” This was too much. He no longer could think clearly. The pain in his feet was debilitating, the anger and fear he felt was boiling up his spine, slowly paralyzing him on the inside as efficiently as the cold was his outside.

“Tell me, if you will. What is your name?”

This final question enveloped him more completely then any other sensation he was experiencing, for he realized that he did not remember. In the midst of his immediate pains, he hadn’t even tried to recall who he was, his past or anything of the sort. And now he was drawing a blank, letting his senses fill in a picture for him of darkness, of frozen metal and searing skin.

“I… I don’t know.” He cried out. “What have you done to me?”

“Then there is nothing left for us to talk about.”

At this there was a click and a whirring sound, and then he could feel every inch of his skin again. Electricity shot up through the bars into every pore, his hairs singed and with a surprised, agonizing cry he passed out.

As he slept, he dreamt of warmth.

--- III ---

He was alive, if you could call it that.

Drifting in and out of consciousness, he gradually became aware of his body for the second time in as many hours, and then of the immense pain in his muscles and skin. Flexing his back, his skin cracked along his many burns, and he could feel the blood rush to them, although fortunately none was seeping through. His mouth and throat were dry; his teeth felt metallic. He’d never been electrocuted before, but if this was what it felt like, he hoped he never was again.

The worst of the pain came from a deep swollen gash on his back, where the majority of the electricity had surged from the metal bar he had been leaning on into him, and of many smaller grooves all along his legs and butt. Nothing that had been touching metal was left unscarred, and he ached tremendously. He acknowledged vaguely that sometime during the course of his sleep the heat had been turned up, but amidst the rest of his pain, he hardly even remembered why that would matter to him.

He sat there for an undeterminable length of time in complete silence, in complete misery. Moving hurt, breathing hurt, everything hurt and he gave up on any of the fleeting desires to escape left within him. He then tried to think, to process what was happening to him, and he tried to remember anything about his past. But it was all in vain, and soon he gave up on thinking too. It was at this point, when he felt the first piece of his mental fortitude collapse, that he became aware of a change in the darkness. To his left, several feet away, a flickering light was starkly visible against the horizon of nothing.

He blinked. He blinked again and again, to make sure he was not hallucinating. He stared, marveling at the light, his eyes refocusing to take in the shape of the object. It was a candle. Simple and white, a source of the warmth and light that the cage had none of; he was overcome with joy at the sight of it. Even more so because it was in reach.

With as much haste as he could muster within his bones, he clasped both hands onto the bars behind him and heaved himself upright. He shifted painfully from one foot to the next using the bars as support for his broken body until at last he was leaning on the bar directly in front of the candle. With clenched teeth and nerve endings firing off ceaselessly from pain and excitement, he stretched out his right arm towards the candle.

As his fingers brushed against its slick wax, a great roar erupted from somewhere in the dark and a circle of flame appeared around the cage. The light illuminated his hand for a fraction of a second before the flames completely engulfed it and the candle. The fire burned ferociously as if it emitted from hell itself and then disappeared with a final thunderous roar that shook the cage and echoed in all directions.

Stricken, he fell back clutching his charred hand to his chest. The fingers were stuck together, the skin fused from the heat of the flame. “Why?” he sobbed out. He collapsed down on the floor of the cage and continued to sob uncontrollably, rocking slowly with his hand still clutched to his chest, filling his nostrils with the smell of burning flesh. He sobbed and stared at the candle, despairing at what he couldn’t have. He wanted, needed, the candle and there it sat, so easy for the taking.

From then on the candle appeared and disappeared at alternating intervals around the cage, tempting him with its beauty, but he never reached for it again.

He dreamt of life, but he did not sleep.

--- IV ---

Time continued to pass in the dark, although the destruction of his hand and loss of the candle had completely broken his spirit. He lay on the ground unmoving, not sleeping but never fully conscious either, dimly waiting to die. He was never hungry, yet his thirst had increased to a point where his mouth was devoid of all moisture and he could not open it. Many more hours passed and the only thing that now evoked any emotional response from him was the appearance of the candle. His eyes would flicker with longing as it appeared but he lacked the will to approach it again, or take his chances with the fire.

It was after what could have easily been the twentieth or two-hundredth appearance of the candle that the voice spoke to him again.

“What is your name?” it echoed throughout the room. Immediately the candle disappeared.

He heard the voice, but with the disappearance of the candle his mind glazed over once again and he did not register what it had said.

“Why won’t you speak to me? I know you are fully capable of speaking.”

He said nothing.

“Fine. Then I will make you speak.”

At this electricity surged once again through his body, causing him to spasm and jogging him suddenly out of his stupor. “STOP!” He managed to force up his throat. The word was like a razor and the chapped skin along his lips, cheeks and throat burst open as he spoke. The electricity stopped.

He lay still a moment, wary of a return of the electricity, and then croaked out the

only thing he could think of. “Why me? What did I do to deserve this?”

“You did nothing.”

He stood up, ignoring all of his pain and shouting into the darkness with the last reserves of his energy. “Then what do you want from me?”

“Your name. That is all.”

“I…I don’t understand.” What was so important about his name? “I don’t remember. I don’t remember anything. Don’t you understand that?”

“You are in denial. All you need is more prompting.”

Sensing he was about to be shocked again, he shouted back hoping to avoid any more pain. “If you don’t stop I’m going to die, and then you will get nothing from me!”

“I cannot kill you for you are not alive.” It answered flatly.

The words registered dully in his brain. Not alive? Impossible. If any of the torture he had experienced had shown him anything it was that he felt very much alive. Then a thought finally dawned on him that made him drop down to his knees, total resignation almost overtaking him once again.

“So…so, this is hell?” he whimpered, bending over to spit out the blood oozing from the flesh he had torn every time he had opened his parched mouth to speak. He could feel it was dripping down his chest and forming a pool around his knees.

“No, you fool. This is not heaven, and this is not hell. You are deserving of neither. In your natural lifetime, you helped no one but yourself, and you hurt no one but yourself. Every sin was yours to commit, every opportunity was yours to seize, and you dodged all of it. You accomplished nothing, and now you are paying for it.” Electricity once again surged into him, but at a greatly reduced frequency from the surges of the past.

“How can this not be hell?” He proffered weakly, enduring the mild shocks as best he could. Blood and lacerations covered his body; he’d been frozen, burned, electrocuted and driven to the edge of insanity by the voice and the darkness. How can this not be hell?

“You do not listen well.” The electricity increased again and he fell again onto his back, convulsing. He gave up. The last fragment of his energy he poured into one final plea with the voice.

“JUST KILL ME!” He screamed, the muscles in his neck bulging and contracting from the effort. “OH GOD, PLEASE JUST LET ME GO!”

“There is no escape. You will never die. If I so wished it you would never sleep, and you will be in this place until the very fabric of time is unwoven. The fun is just beginning for you, my friend. So tell me, once and for all, what is your name? For in your name you will find the only semblance of your life as a human being that you will ever possess again, and until you remember, it is not permissible to move you to the next chamber. So tell me! I am done with this game of cat and mouse! I have grown impatient with your ignorance!” Its last words were hissed across the room, full of the vitriol it had so eerily lacked up until now.

The electricity increased to a frequency much higher then ever before, and he was writhing on the cages floor, fully conscious of his skin baking, his hair catching fire. He let out a guttural scream, his back arching so mightily his spine snapped and all of his burn wounds tore, pouring even more blood upon the cool metal floor of the cage.

And then he was floating in nothing, weightless and unencumbered with the trivialities of sensation and life. Everything was pure white, clear in all directions. He looked up to see something magnificent, something impossible appear within his reach. Clarity overcame him for the first time in his entire existence, and he remembered his name.

---V---

He awoke with the peculiar sensation that he was still asleep. Surrounded by a brilliant light that blinded him and from which no other color arose, he rolled over and closed his eyes. He was wearing loose clothes, which at first felt like cotton but itched his skin terribly.

He crawled along what felt like soil until his arm sunk down into nothing and he nearly toppled over an edge. Cautiously, he opened his eyes and saw that plunging down beneath him into the white was a solid earthen platform. The platform stretched down for what seemed like miles until the light completely obscured it, and he realized with revulsion that he was at the top of infinity.

“Hello?” he spoke deliberately, to make up for his disorientation. “Is anybody there?”

“I am.” came a voice from the light.

And it all came back to him. The cage in the room so impenetrably dark his eyes could never adjust to it. The cold. The candle. The electricity. But most of all the voice. That heartless, nameless voice and all that it had told him.

“Where are you?” He cried, audibly and physically. This couldn’t be happening. No, not again.

“Here. Where are you?” And this time he knew the answer.

He never slept again.