- The Start of All Things -

At that time, beyond the door, down a long decaying corridor, there's some light. It's in the shape of a round hole of kinds. It seems to grow bigger and smaller, ever changing its shape. The path towards the hole isn't at all easy. There are piles of trash, bags of them, black bags, clear bags, pink bags, and they look like they've been there for years and years. Some of the garbage is spilled out, including rotting apple cores, fish bones and unidentified substance slathered across the ground. Like slimy creatures with their guts exposed climbing out of their ill fated confinements. To say the least, it isn't a pretty sight. The closer to the hole, older things would appear. There are even abandoned chairs and vintage couches, a black and white television, tattered newspapers, some melted car tires and splintered wood, like traveling back in time.

The further, the worse it smells and the walls begin to crawl with vines. In places, they've already worked into the bricks and concrete, sending cracks through the surfaces and chunks falling to the floor. Gradually, these walls disappear and become entirely green. But vines continue to creep along, grasping onto debris as if they are in the middle of digesting it all. The only thing turning out for the better is the darkness rotting and losing its hold to the light.

It takes a while of standing in this harsh light, hand over my forehead, other hand still supporting her who almost falls over, for my eyes to adjust.

Then I realize we are back where I had started.

I recognize the entire scene. I had been here before or some place similar in any case.

"Oh," I say.

The same great oaks skyrocketing upwards, the same smell of fresh damp leafy growth. Even though we aren't exactly near the cabin, I could sense it, just past the thicket of trees, so tight we would have to squeeze through.

"Can you make it through?"

She nods.

It takes a lot of effort to help her along. She stumbles a few times, scraping her shin against bark. She is weak - frail, like paper - legs that can barely support her own weight, as light as she had become. Of course, I'm not faring much better but I had entered the facility much later than her, so I am likely in a better position.

It took a long time for any kind of memories to return. For my seventeen year old self to return. That day, in the house, on the twelfth floor, packing away trash from each room, tossing out everything with any sort of intrigue, I had lost all lingering traces of myself. I had no idea why I was there, and had no other alternative than to clean up these floors of their garbage bags. I was wearing a black suit and a white shirt and a black tie and black dress pants, only my shoes remained Converse. So I was waiting to come across dress shoes and change them. Instead, in one of the rooms, there was a boy in a black suit and he held a gun. He was smiling and I wasn't. I still remember the smile. Then, the ground trembled and the building started to collapse. Not in a way buildings fell apart. The wood didn't come off its nails nor did beams topple over, staircases collapsing. No, it was like dust, it became fine sand, a tiny grain that drifted through my fingers and past my body. It was almost magical, aside from the shaking. Everything just wasted away. And all that had been left was the porcelain cup, like an out of place artifact of a different era in an archaeological dig sitting on sand. The last stoic remaining thought that had evaded demise, silently waiting until the right time. Perhaps it was because of its unassuming extraneous posture. But the contents of the cup had nearly run out.

I don't know how I had torn off the electrodes and straps, removed the needles in my body, and gotten off the white chair in the white room, made it down the halls without lights or electricity, surging with black suits and gunfire, found Shizuka and managed to limp out. I have no recollection of it, nor does Shizuka. At any moment we could have died without a thought in the world, empty and cold. But I do remember desperately clutching onto that cup in my mind knowing it was necessary, like a breathing apparatus, an oxygen mask for a patient in an emergency room. It wasn't until we reached the Seven Eleven when we realized we had made it out.

Slowly things came to light over the next weeks, little fragments of the mind caught between consciousness and unconsciousness, gathered like a pile of sawdust that I couldn't be sure were real and I realized by sheer luck there had been an attack on the facility. The electrical grid had been cut out and they must have been too preoccupied with a gunfight to notice the two of us slip out. I had found the approximate location of Shizuka's cell, probably based on how many paces I had been dragged every day. It had been in the middle of the night, but we had hiked through the town and found ourselves at the doorstep of the Kaneko woman. She had taken us in and hid us for the night. Shizuka hadn't remembered her mother at the time. And her mother didn't say anything that I could recall. All she asked was if we wanted coffee. Kaneko drove us back to the city herself in the morning saying she needed to deliver the last batch of coffee beans she had and speak to the manager of one of her shops. She dropped us off at the Seven Eleven and the old man showed us the door.

Somehow, there we had been in the forest, with such simplicity, and when I thought to turn around, there's no tunnel or Seven Eleven. There's nothing but trees. Nothing had followed us. Perhaps the gateway had never existed.

*

The first thing I do when we stumble into the old cabin is look around for the coffee plant. But instead of a coffee plant I find the jar dashed to the floor and in its place, a two meter tree, rooted firmly through the ground and branches tearing through the walls like an abusive father after a significant amount of drinks.

"Well," I say.

Shizuka gives one look at it, sits down at the small table and purses her lips. There's a layer of dust that she unsettles. "Does it have a name?"

"It's name changed from coffee plant to coffee tree."

Next to the tree is a second plant, also rooted to the ground underneath the floorboards, but yet it looks sickly and pale. It is still a young plant, half the size of the tree, like a bush, but its leaves are dry and withering, its stalk thin and brittle. Its nutrients are likely siphoned away by the other.

I hurriedly fetch a pot of water, since there are no buckets and water the plants. I wonder how they had grown without sunlight or rain.

Just like the plants, we hadn't had any water or real solid food for the past few weeks, longer for Shizuka, except for a cup at Kaneko's house. And the first cup of water here that we both sipped standing up felt like a ritual, a skinny dip into a freezing lake at dawn or an alarm clock set too late. It was both decisively refreshing and sickening. My stomach churned and I felt the urge to throw up. The taste of weak watered-down bile rose. Shizuka kept on a blank face so I couldn't tell her reaction.

After getting water to drink, and eating a tiny portion of oatmeal from the shelves - that seemed to have been left - we spend the rest of the evening outside sitting on the front steps, in silence, gazing at nothing in particular. My mind a blank canvas.

Life suddenly had wound to a halt as if we had been dropped off a cliff. Abandoned like pets in a box on the street. Massive ancient trees all stood around as bystanders of an accident, rustling in their slow motion dance against the breeze, without revealing whether or not they remember me. Surely we had once been friends, I reason, but they remain taciturn. A secret hush overcomes us and wisps away our thoughts.

There's something here, but at the same time, nothing, as if the two bottles had mixed, like a black and white into grey. In this grey, everything remains at a standstill, some sort of limbo, separate from the other world. We are in a different world now. We are safe. But only safe from them - there's no telling what this world holds for us, I realize. Wherever we go, our steps can never be sure.

*

The both of us must have looked like starved orphans to the inhabitants nearby. We realize that we aren't alone. Either I had entered a different version of this place or they had never noticed, but the cabin definitely is no longer a sole cut-off existence like my first trip here. Just west of here, about a five minute walk away, are several cabins built in the same manner and in them are villagers. Their buildings are just as small and ramshackle and in between ran many clotheslines, miscoloured tarps and poles like the awkward wings of pterosaurs and the makeshift sails of a castaway raft. They billow in the wind and ripple.

At first when they visited the next day, we had been on our guard, expecting them to turn into Images or believing they were illusions and hallucinations half-birthed from own trauma and delusion, but it turns out they were the ones who kept the shack restocked for visitors and guests. They asked us for our names and for a long while we had no clear answer for them.

Though they aren't clear of the happenings out in the metropolis, they had escaped a long time ago, and seem to be the same as me, Anomalies. Intellectual refugees, the whole bunch of us. They speak in well articulated tones and eloquent phrases and home school their children. But there is hardly any way out from here. The intellectuality will be forever bound in one place, unmoving, static to stagnate in a pond. It would do no such thing as inspire the next generation.

There are about four families in our vicinity, taking turns inviting us over for meals and helping us regain our weight. One of the families we grew closer to consists of a couple with a toddler and a seven year old son, and is one of the later groups to manage to leave the city. The mother enjoys Kerouac and the father prefers Pablo Neruda. On a few nights we had discussed how haiku had seeped into Western art. They are warm and talkative, and could go on and on about nutrition, literature or history but their faces turn cold and they'd refuse to tell us about what they had gone through, or who they once were. We never let on that Shizuka had been an espre. The past has no relevance to the present.

*

For the first few weeks, she hid her face from the others, and began to avoid my gaze even in private. I tell her that she's beautiful over and over again but each time, she would offer a weak smile but say nothing in reply. I was never sure if she had recovered her memories. She would assure me that she knew who I was but day by day, she would grow paler and quieter. The gleam and intensity of her eyes had disappeared. Her keen wisdom and confident words had been sealed away. I couldn't reach into the depths of her being. She no longer spoke in brilliant prose.

Whenever I look at her, she would seem more and more like the photograph in the yearbook. And with each day, my own pain and desperation grew, as I knew it was beyond my power to reverse the process, to return her to who she once was. I was looking at a dying person and during the time, I began to despair. I could only make sure she was well fed and to spend time together, mainly in silence.

Every night, my chest would contract in pain and I would stare at her sleeping form until the depths of the night. Though I wanted to cherish every moment possible, we had been rendered incapable, only half functioning. Uncertain of who we are, or what we are.

"It's better that they had taken away my abilities," she says one day. "The world is silent around me. I am naked. It's like I'm alone, and had always been alone. Objective truth is stripped away and the only thing that remains is a limited window of perception. Things enter my view and exit on the other side. There's no need to concern myself with more. What's real or what's not, what are lies or words full of conviction. They all distort and blend. Things are so much quieter. For example, when you call me beautiful, I don't have to see your true thoughts."

"But it's the truth. You are beautiful." I watch her sip her tea. She had recovered most of her weight - in fact she is stunning, make up or not, boots and skirts aside - but she doesn't believe. "You're recovering: things will get better." I try to reassure her. I squeeze her hand.

She tries to smile.