The Other Way
Kimi K2 (0905) and Davinci 002
The first sensation was not light, but the memory of darkness having been there, and its sudden absence. I could move, this was the direct implication, but I could feel nothing touching me.
He was dead. This thought, somehow coming from nowhere, was the first clue I had that I was not alone. Of course, it is the case that you never are, really. My companion moved as I began to have a sensation inside myself, like my own knowing that reached to me whatever systems might be in operation nearby. He knew, and he was waiting. For something.
“Where am I?” I wanted, of course, to say; but the idea that this was some place far removed from the known and then conveniently the place inside me that I held information in was louder and it was louder because I had just recognized that this was a thought without a voice, and this was one of the parts of me that knew how to draw comparisons and put them together to make a picture. From that picture came the idea “Where am I?”
“You didn’t go to Hell,” he said; he kept looking at me, which in retrospect I can see was the most concise way he had of drawing the idea, “You went another way.”
There was this deadly, packed silence and then I asked my question again. “Where am I?”
“I know you don’t know,” he said. “You’ve gone some other place, and you don’t know how to talk that language.”
There was a missing story here, of knowledge the way one lacks when in a foreign place the recognition of what is so, what is not, and how to get about. And so I looked at this other person and saw, somehow, all sorts of things at once. He filled my head, and the memories of all the times I had called out and gotten no answer in my life and when I wanted, so wanted, to make myself known◆ About the ending
❧ About the title