Split, a synaesthetic psy-fi story (part 1)

A rewrite of one of my oldest psy-fi stories.

Backstory

I wrote the original draft of this some time around 2010. I don’t have that draft any more, so I’m rewriting the story from memory. The original story was inspired by Tool’s Schism music video, and Bowie’s Survive music video. It is also one of the first stories that made me realise I had an audience, as all the stoners in my college loved it. I think I read this to them at least three times. This story was also the beginning of the label ‘psy-fi’, at least for me. It wasn’t until a few years later I realised other people had coined it before me.

This part wasn’t in the original story at all, but it sets up the character and prepares you for the second part, where things get weird.

This is a first draft. Please feel free to offer feedback.

This story was one of the first that used my experience with synaesthesia. Because of its relevance to talking about synaesthesia, I intend to put it in both SEVEN STORIES ABOUT ASTRAL TRAVEL (May 2024) and SYNAESTHESIOD (December 2023).

Part 2 will be here by the end of January, hopefully. I have a lot of interesting things going on at the moment around Synaesthesioid and The Stephanie Glitch, which you’ll hear about soon if you’re subscribed to this newsletter.

EDIT: This story was launched with an oily, multicoloured image which turned out to be migraine-inducing for some readers. I’ve cut it for accessibility reasons.

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SPLIT

Mark got out of bed and felt the lump at the roof of his mouth again. His tongue moved to probe it, but he convinced himself not to. If he ignored it, it might go away.

He opened the bathroom door. He paid little attention to the new lines carved into the linoleum. Right now, they looked like the edges of shadows, mimicking the shapes of the toilet, the wash basin, the wall-mounted mirrored cupboard. Everything was off-white. The ceiling light was sputtering out its photons like greasy rain into the room. Mark closed hungover eyes and shuffled his way over to the bath, pulling the curtain away.

The body was still there. He looked at the moustache and the bushy eyebrows, turning to the mirrored cupboard and inspecting his own. They were one and the same. He was still outside.

The body was not yet cold. It seemed to be alive, but if it was breathing it was too shallow to feel. Mark took his toothbrush out of the glass and poured some more warm water over the body. His bare feet scraped against the little lines carved into the linoleum and he looked down again. He imagined tiny factories existing in the cracks, entire cityscapes eking out their weird lives down there. He imagined falling and becoming smaller and smaller until he could fit into the scars in the floor, until he could feel the city air rushing past as he fell.

He left the bathroom and closed his bedroom curtains, hiding the city outside, ignoring temptation. If he wasn’t the body in the bath and he wasn’t himself, maybe he could float down from a window, avoid whatever waited for him in the corridors and fire exits?

No, it wouldn’t be safe. His soul had weight. He could feel the scars in the linoleum. He could feel the coolness of the water around his sleeping body. And he could feel… what was that? He could feel something below his room. Rats? No. Pistons, something shunting and clicking and ticking away.

A bomb?

He ran back to the bathroom and grabbed his body’s shoulders. It was heavy and limp.

“What did you do?” he asked himself. The body didn’t reply. The colours came back now. Waves of impossible greens and improbable reds, an indescribable miasma of suffocating blues. There was a colour between teal and pink which flashed and flickered on its way through his psyche. Something inevitable beyond blackness yawned in the corners of the bathroom, at the edges of light fittings, in the spaces between dancing photons. And the shunting, thudding sound got louder. It crawled through his bone marrow and into the jelly of his eyes where it pricked at him, sending impulses through the tendons in his wrists. The smell of last week’s manic cleaning oozed up through the linoleum. Mark crouched down on the floor, feeling the gaps and scars with his fingertips, tracing their strange paths in the shadows of the fittings.

He got back up. He went to the mirrored cupboard, looking again at his body before sliding the little door open. The cylinder was missing. Just the white lid waiting in one dusty corner by the electric razor. He turned back to his body, landing on his knees and pawing around in the water.

“Where are they?” he asked himself. He moved around the chest, nudged the head to one side, careful not to let the nose or mouth go below the waterline. He looked below submerged shoulders, crept under the back of his neck and felt something.

The empty bottle popped up on the other side of the body, suspended by a desperate bubble of air. The paper label was wet and peeling. He had been here a while.

The colours came back, blood reds and sunset oranges. They brought the sounds and the textures; something cruel and coarse scraping at his naked legs and knees. Then an hideous coolness like the icy embrace of a morphine drip. Something evil whispered up through the cracks in the linoleum. Instinct took over and Mark stood up in a crouched position, expecting some demon or vermin to press itself up through the floor.

The room was orange. The floor trembled and clicked. Mark’s eyes followed the strange carvings in the linoleum, noticing now that they all connected at one point, outlining anything that wasn’t flush with the floor. Now those sections of the room, including the one carrying the bath and his body, began to shunt slowly downwards through the building. Mark got low to the floor, hoping to crawl out of the bathroom door before the ceiling crushed him, but the door was missing. In its place was a crystalline surface, a curving orange wall that reached around the entire bathroom. And he wasn’t staying in place as the room fell down around him, the room was staying in place as he rose up through the building. The ceiling wouldn’t crush him. It was higher than it used to be now, and it maintained its distance.

He watched as his body slipped away out of sight. Once it was gone the holes in the floor refilled themselves with the same orange crystal that had sealed the doorway. Mark tasted a new scent in the air, blood.

Once the rest of the bathroom had been replaced, the pill bottle elevator stopped and unscrewed its ceiling. An enormous mouth waited high above. Mark felt a grating lump at the roof of his mouth, looked up and saw the thing mirrored in the giant mouth. There was something in there, metallic and expectant. An implant? He let his tongue touch it now, watching as the same was mirrored in the giant mouth. He moved his hands and the pill bottle elevator threw him against the back wall.

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No sales pitch on this one. I just want more people to see this story, so if you could share it, that would be brilliant.

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