Wednesday, July 31, 2013

2013 - Rituals in the Dark

In a bare, white room, he sits gathering his thoughts and discarding them like loose trash cluttering an otherwise clean space.  As ancient and pure as meditation can be, he empties his mind through patient, singular focus.

He is dressed in white, loose-fitting, disposable clothes.  Paper shirt, pants, nothing more.  When the exercise is done they will be burned.  His eyes are closed, lost in lack-of-thought, luxuriating in the nonbeing.

The walls are white with no adornment; no pictures hang and no color is visible.  The room is small, a cynic might call it a cell.  There is a light antiseptic smell but otherwise no scent.  He sits cross-legged on the floor before a low table.  There are three items on the table before him.  A sheaf of papers with writing on them.  A sheaf of papers which are blank.  A fountain pen.

It is dark in the room, no light can enter it.  One might wonder how a room can be both white and dark, if the absence of light means an absence of color.  One might further wonder just how far the absence goes.  To a creature such as this, does even time itself exist in this room?  If the time has no immediately measurable effect on him (as it does not) and cannot be measured at all in this space (as it cannot), who is to say it is even there?

One might wonder, but he does not wonder such things now.  Such thoughts do interest him from time to time, but now is not that time.  Only the blessed blankness for him now, the total now, the total nothing.  Darkness in the white.

In this time which is not time, in a place which might not be a place, Lord Quinn reaches out his hand.  He picks up the pen.  He begins to transcribe words from the papers on his left to the papers on his right.  He sits in total darkness, eyes dispassionately drifting from one paper to the other as he writes, accuracy his only goal.  He drafted his letter earlier, but this is the copy that will go out.  The copy he will allow out of his control, that may end up in the hands of...who knows who.  It pays to be cautious.

His thoughts briefly drift back to a time before, when he was not so cautious.  When a letter he had written fell into the hands of an enemy and was traced back to him.  He sighs over all that it had cost him back then; it was long, long ago so there was no sense being emotional, but at the time it had been disappointing.

As quickly as it happens, Lord Quinn realizes that he has allowed himself thoughts.  When he looks down at the page before him now it is rank; it smells like rotting garbage, disappointment and regret, and a burning villa outside Paris.

He crumples the paper up and tosses it aside.  Then he closes his eyes and starts again.

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