Rust

Pipes

1

Before me lies a landscape of pipes that runs for as far as I can see. They twist and turn over and under themselves, ceaselessly running against and over an endless black expanse that marks the limits of my failing vision. They lie at right angles like massive grills placed over another, filthy and rusty, their surfaces glistening with whatever the stinking brown fluid that flows through their lengths is. And these pipes, I cannot get over the fact that they must have been laid out by someone, somehow, in this endless dark chasm of no walls and no surfaces, transporting some dark liquid to and from some unknown destination.

I hang helplessly among these pipes, starfished, gazing at the horrific landscape before me, at the endless gloom. How did I end up here? And why? Metal rods protrude from my flesh, from my wrists and calves and back, displaying me like some sadomasochist exhibit. My head has been left loose so that I am able to peer around at the vast intersections of pipes that surround me, and so that it can flop over when I pass away with fatigue as I always do, escaping to a timeless dream world of nothing, only to later awaken in the same rusting void.

Countless times I have awoken to this metropolis of pipes, expecting for it all to have gone away, for it to have all been a horrible nightmare as it always was in every horror novel I have ever read. So many times has my heart exploded with black terror when I realise that I still hang precariously over The Pipes, The Pipes that govern my life. For aeons I have hung

here, and for aeons I have not felt a single flutter of hunger, a rasp of thirst, or even a throb of pain. Clearly something beyond my comprehension is at work here, rendering me immortal for an unknown reason. But as I hang here, drooling with anxiety and madness, though mostly with frustrated wonder, the same question rolls through my head repeatedly: is this, hanging here, my ultimate fate, or is this only the lead up? Am I destined to hang here for eternity, or is there something much worse waiting for me in the future, perhaps only once my mental condition has deteriorated sufficiently, enough to withstand the sight of an intense finale.

I turn my head to my left and gaze at the pipe that runs perhaps a meter away from me. Its surface is an atlas of rust, brown continents stretching along its glistening surface, some sections seeming to throb slightly as though paper thin, tempted into bursting with the influence from the fluid within. I wish I could reach out and stroke the pipe, to feel the liquid and perhaps see what it really is, to taste it and perhaps die and finally escape this hell.

I turn my head to my right and peer at the pipe that has caught my attention for longer than I can remember. It is different from the rest, for its surface has not been eroded by time as much as the others; about a meter of its length remains almost unscathed, only the beginning of the browning process has begun as though it has been repaired fairly recently - either before I awoke here, or during one of my empty slumbers.

I find it impossible to remember a time before the pipes. Traces of memory still linger like leaves from an autumn tree, slowly drifting away until there is nothing. I remember I had a family - I think - and that I loved them very much - whatever that means. I remember simple things like floors and buildings and walls and skies, none of which exist here. I remember

friends and laughing and sunny days and sex. I remember television and books and motorways and airplanes. I remember a beautiful blonde woman who must have been my wife, and I remember the child who must have been my own offspring. I remember a pet dog and my workplace and the endless changing of weather. I remember normality.

But most of all, I remember taking in a breath of fresh air and feeling it fill my lungs. I remember holding it in there and savouring the healthiness before letting it out in a myriad of relief. I remember the feeling as a section of well-done steak met my tongue, the sensations of flavour exciting my mouth as I chewed at its intriguing texture, its intensity shooting around my mouth, the ecstatic climax as the meat was swallowed and slid down my throat. I remember the excitement of sliding inside a woman, of feeling the soft tissue inside, so fragile and welcoming and nurturing as I feel around, keenly exploring, her hands on my arms, my back, my face as I move my hips against hers, urging myself onwards inside her, the approaching culmination, our increasing volume and movements as I draw closer to the brink, our breathing heavy and hoarse, until, finally, we arch stiffly together, morphine shooting through my body like a tsunami of pleasure, a torrent of heroin. I empty myself, once, twice, thrice, four times, five, and I fall, exhausted. We lie together, her hands on my chest, playing with my hair, our rate of breath decreasing as we fall asleep together; the best way to slip from reality.

It seems that I remember sensations with crystal clarity, while material things are but a glimmer in my head. Not that that matters, now that everything physical that I remember is gone. Now, only me and what I can see exists. No more positive emotions, just apathy and anxiety. No pain though, thankfully, though the thought of feeling agony brings wonder to my mind. Perhaps a jolt of it would awaken me, bring me back to life to a fully functioning

order, and return my eroded mind back into a semi-functional state so that I can escape this numbness and the emptiness that comes with it.

2

Every now and then, what I’d say feels like every hour or two, there is a distant but great boom as though a giant door has come to a jarring halt against a vast floor somewhere in the darkness. What this noise is, I do not know, though there is a part of me that believes that it is the unbearable sound of something huge, gradually approaching.

I do not wish to be alive when the thing arrives.

Why I can see in this dark, I do not know, for there does not seem to be a source of light anywhere around, just infinite blackness, as though nothing exists outside of the miles and miles of pipes besides black. Despite this, I can see the surrounding metal tubes, and my own flesh, yellowed with time and exhaustion, with azure clarity. It is but yet another of the things that my mind fails to comprehend, as though this enormous landscape was created by distant hands and minds, far more advanced than the human reach, their vast intellect enough to drive a normal person to madness. Maybe that madness is why I see what I see.

The odour is like nothing I have ever sampled before; a combination of everything unpleasant that I have smelled in the past, rolled into one acrid mixture with a pinch of some new reeking spices. At first I could not take the stink; I have thrown up down my naked body, and

sent thick tendrils running over my withered belly and shrivelled penis that I fear I will never be able to clean. However, I am now used to it, though not in the sense that I am comfortable, merely that I no longer wish to throw up every time the odour meets my nostrils.

I now believe that only three physical things exist: myself, the pipes, and the blackness. All of my memories, my experiences that have shaped and scarred me into who I am today - did they really happen? Or have I created them from my mind as I hung here? Does such a world as Earth really exist? Or did I create that too? The pipes - are they the only thing to have ever been?

That would explain my lack of hunger, of thirst and pain; perhaps they were only concepts I created in my head, and that none of these unpleasant sensations exist in the real world, the world of the pipes. If this is so, then perhaps it is not so bad here after all, and that the world of laughter and families and mortgages is not as pleasant as I had once pictured, it being riddled with black patches of misfortune, unhappiness, depression, war, disease, murder, rape. Perhaps my skin had never been a coral tone, that it had always been yellowed, and that my mind had convinced myself that normality was not right, that yellow was associated with unhealthiness and sickness when it really links with normality.

For a while, my fantasy world governed my mind. Now I know that the world of the pipes is the only thing that’s real, and for a moment I think I feel empathy.

I smile to myself, to the pipes, and to the darkness. It’s not so bad here after all.

Then there is another booming, and the horror rushes through me again, wiping away my

delusions. The noise sounds louder and keener than before, as though the great thing has caught a whiff of my nicotine skin, and is excitedly on its way. I think I begin to sweat, although the sensation of salted water trickling down my forehead and face may be my imagination. Did I invent sweating too?

The feeling of sex, the elaborate act; the chase, the catch, the climax - did I create all of this? Am I the architect of this unique concept? It is hard to believe that such an elaborate ritual could have been created in my head, though with all the time I have had to think and slowly disintegrate it is not impossible. And my penis, sitting forgotten between my legs, still crusted with traces of my vomit, that would explain its presence, a glimpse of proof that more exists than just the pipes, that sex and everything else was not my own invention.

Or perhaps in this world of the pipes my penis serves a different function than what I have imagined, and that I created a new purpose for it with my corrupt and inept mind. A purpose that is purely fictional, though intensely detailed at that. It is a conundrum that I do not think I will find the answer to; there being no-one around to ask.

Do other people even exist? Are humans - if that is what I really am - really a species, or am I the only one, and in my imagination I have multiplied myself in order to deal with this condition I call loneliness?

Did I create the female species? Did I create gender?

A single droplet of rank fluid falls from a pipe above me and sails past my head. I find myself wondering what is inside these pipes, and where they go. There must be a destination, or is

destination something else I have entirely made up? In fact, the ability to question, is this also my own invention? Now that I think about it, I do not remember ever questioning anything prior to waking up in this surreal realm. I think that I am right; this is but a single creation in a torrent of creations.

Even if other people do not exist, I find myself not wanting to be alone; I believe that I am not. Maybe there are others spread around the darkness, hanging like me, Easter eggs for the great thing to come find and eat as it roams around in infinite, endlessly hungry. I imagine what they look like, if they are male or female, what their shrivelled bodies have become in the passing of time, the colour of their skin. I wonder what they smell like, what they taste like, what their function was back in the world before the pipes - if they even had one, and if the other world really is there.

I imagine my wife, strung up like me, a forgotten marionette, wondering if I too exist, and if she ever really did raise a child with me. I try to cry for her, but I have lost the ability do so. Was I ever able to in the first place? Did I ever even have a voice? Even if I did, I cannot remember my wife’s name, so what would I shout? I could be anyone, a faceless mannequin in this nightmarish realm.

I feel sleep coming over me, weighing heavy on my nicotine eyelids. I do not fight it, I allow myself a passage into a dreamless slumber. It is the only escape I get from this horror, from this ceaseless questioning, however brief that may be. I am thankful for this every time.

3

I awaken thinking about the pipes again, this time mostly about what they contain. What would need to be moved such a distance and why? Such a huge network of them would suggest a futuristic system of transport, but the condition of the materials used for the pipes would suggest a cheap and ineffective design of an inexperienced and dated creation. Maybe resources are sparse in the future, or perhaps this is but a dated and abandoned system.

Perhaps it is waste that they transport, and I have been trapped in an intricate sewage system all this time. But why would I be here? Why would I be strung up in a sewer, and what has been keeping me alive and pain free for all these years? Some sort of chemical? Perhaps the poles that impale my wrists and shins and back are also pipes, keeping me pumped full of a substance that can account for my uncanny survival - some sort of elixir of immortality.

Another thought crosses my mind: why so many pipes? Why not just several large ones for each direction? Perhaps there are millions of destinations for the pipes, millions of cities and settlements brimming with real human people, their skins coral and pleasant, their appearances warm and healthy.

I am taken from my thoughts suddenly by an explosion of weak metal and a splatter of liquid. From my right, about five meters away, one of the pipes has burst and a delicate trickle of liquid now dribbles from one of the ends into the chasm below me. It glimmers beautifully with its brown surface. An acrid stench comes over my nose, much more powerful than before, and once again I vomit over my torso; another coat of paint if you will.

A spattering of the liquid has landed on my skin. I can feel the coldness for just a moment before it dries in. I look down and see that the flesh on my arm now has a brown pattern of freckles along its length, and for a moment it looks like an arm from the world of televisions and cars and wives, and not from the world of pipes. I am convinced for this moment that these things do exist, and that I did not invent them in my head. It’s a pity that I will never see them again.

Later on - though I am not sure how much later as time no longer seems constant - there is a distant rustling from above. I lift my head in response and am almost killed by the shock of what I see. My heart, as weak as it is as of late, does a backflip and tries to burst through my ribcage with new-found strength, as though it had been saving a final gathering of adrenaline for its emergency escape procedure. I manage to hold onto my sanity, or my equivalent of sanity, as I dangle helplessly.

Scuttling towards me is a creature which simply does not exist in the world of children and schools and mountains. It is bulbous and slimy, though curiously robotic. Its stiff movements suggest a lack of importance, that it has been created for one purpose, and I think I am right. Killing. With a fleshy grasp, its myriad of tendrils wrap around each pipe, delicately balancing out its weight so that each one does not give way under its weight. As it ducks under one, I see an exposed section of wiring like a cybernetic patch of muscle. I realise that the thing is half mechanical, its shimmering skin perhaps only an organic coating. I take a deep breath when I realise that it is bearing towards me in what I can only imagine is a hungry fashion. I close my weak eyelids as it approaches, its slavering tendrils drawing closer.

The fleshy fumbling has stopped, and is instead replaced with a squelching and a sucking noise like a child noisily finishing a milkshake. I pry open one eye and reveal that the creature has wrapped itself around the burst pipe, connecting one gaping end to another with its body, and is pulsing excitedly on top of it, its tentacles still splayed across separate pipes, balancing itself out.

I watch this thing for what seems like days, for what could have been weeks, taking in the details that spatter over its pulsing skin. The machine-creature boasts slit-like gills over its body which open and close like content eyelids, giving vent to gasps which suggest some sort of pleasure, like those of a woman trying to keep quiet during the act of sex, but hardly doing so.

Over the time that the machine-creature’s breathing slows down It begins to dry, shrivel up and fade in colour to a light brown. After this stunning display of erosion, the thing slowly begins to move, rotating around the pipe that it has spent such a long time over, before slipping off and tumbling into the black void down what I can only imagine to be a calculated route to the bottom, for the thing hits no pipes in its descent.

When I have finished watching the creature, when I can no longer follow its speck in the black void below me, my eyes go to the pipe where it had nestled for so long. I gasp weakly; the burst pipe is now fixed.

So I was right, the thing did exist only to serve one purpose, though not the one I had prepared myself for. No, the thing had not come to take my life, nor had it even come to take me. It was a simple organism designed to fix burst pipes, like plumbers from the other world.

Thinking of the machine-creature’s ecstatic gasps as it gave birth to a new section of pipe, and of its death once its task had been fulfilled, I cannot help but compare it to what I remember to be a black widow spider, of which the male is eaten by the female after it has impregnated her, it dying wilfully, its purpose in life fulfilled. After a while I decide that black widow spiders do not exist, and that I probably created them in my mind either a long time ago or just there, catalysed by the death of the machine-creature, trying to give purpose to what little I know about its life and death, and linking it to the world of schools and children.

I cease to ponder over the machine-creature. I find myself wondering how long it took for that pipe to fail, and when the next one is due. I begin to look forward to it already. Finally, I am given a purpose, a reason to exist at last. I scan the rest of the pipes, looking for the next most eroded, the next contender. I find one that appears battered and flimsy, and I bookmark it with my mind for further analysis later.

The new pipe is pristine, its silver surface glimmers in the unseen light. I realise now what was so peculiar about the pipe that had caught my eye so long ago, the one that had not been as rusted as the rest. The thing had been replaced at some point by another one of those fleshy things, which meant that there was probably a whole livestock of them, waiting somewhere, ready to fix the next pipe that explodes with time.

Several more riddles are brought to my mind since the creature’s appearance, several more riddles that I have aeons to ponder on. First, where did it come from? It had to come from somewhere, it had to be created somewhere, judging by the wiring protruding from its side. This tells me that there must be somewhere else other than this expanse of pipes, somewhere

else where it was manufactured and programmed. And if it was programmed, then there must be a programmer. I feel what may be the ghost of what was once excitement rise in me, and if I could I think I would have smiled. Finally, I am told that there is more than just me, the pipes and the blackness in this world, though I am yet to see anything from what may or may not have been my old life.

The second riddle that had been raised is what was it? A machine designed to repair the massive metropolis of pipes if a single one was to burst, its body containing a cocktail of chemicals and materials able to create a metallic surface, though after one usage it would be expended and drop to its death, its contents depleted. Excitedly, I ponder on this new event for a long time. I am fairly certain that it is weeks that pass while I explore and iron out my new knowledge..

4.

The booming is growing closer and louder, which must mean that the thing is nearing me. I wonder how colossal and horrific its face will be as it appears from its sheath of darkness and breaks though the system of pipes as though they were strands of spider web, its eyes vast and trained on me, its mouth a grimace of schedenfreude as it reaches for my screaming form with an oversized hand and I am plucked from my perch like a strawberry. I shudder, and I think my heart twitches as though having a fit.

There is a trundle from above, and instantly I lift my head, expecting another of the machine-

things to be descending towards me, perhaps on its way to repair another pipe that has burst out of my earshot. I think my mouth drops in surprise as I realise what it is that really approaches.

It resembles what I remember as a platform that window cleaners used to perch on when scaling enormous buildings, though a little more safer. Cables reach from its base and rise endlessly into the darkness above it, suggesting that it has been descending for eternity. But it is not this that I am blown away by, by its epic journey; for I am more amazed at its contents: at the man and woman from the world of dinners and television that slowly descend towards me, their faces full of horror and sympathy at what I can only imagine is the most tragic sight they have ever seen.