I Am Made Of Chalk: Excerpts Part II

Excerpts from the Time Capsule collection.
Read Part I: https://heartflowtransmissions.com/i-am-made-of-chalk-excerpts-part-i/

The last third of this short story will not be posted here, though I will share a few more excerpts from other sections

Purchase the short collection here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GFG6L6TW

“I Am Made Of Chalk”

Three

After being blacklisted a few days, I felt some sense of relief. I had a place I could stay and no one would really bother me. They simply would pretend I wasn’t there and I liked it. I liked it a lot, actually.

“Tiny little nothings,” I’d sing. For the first two days it was all I would say. Nothing mattered. I could sit around and eat pancakes and smoke cigarettes all day and nothing would change. In truth I was still in shock, but this approach worked for a few days at least.

I couldn’t get the black triangle out of my head. I couldn’t get the nothingness it contained out of my head. I couldn’t get the stranger who appeared out of my head. Sometimes I would think so deeply about the whole event that I thought I could feel myself drifting out of my body until I realized what was happening and grabbed a cigarette. For several days it consumed me and I paid no mind to the rest of the blacklisters until I wrote exactly what had happened to me and I sat with it. The fourth day I returned to the alleyway, and as I neared it fear again grew in my heart, but I reached the dead end and there was nothing. So I again told myself that the black nothing was just that nothing at all. That’s what Allan and Crystal wanted me to think. They insisted that if I take some of their products once more I’d be off the blacklist for good. But I liked the blacklist. The blacklist was safe. Yesterday I finally decided to go upstairs and discover where the blacklisters hung out and I met an interesting array of people. There was Darren, Natasha, and Aldous Ray Orwell.

Darren was a rather chubby old man in his fifties who refused to wear shirts and spent his day rocking back and forth. He claimed that his graying body hairs were actually memories from his distant past. If you pulled one out, he’d tell you all about it. The first day I met him, I grabbed at his chest and pulled out a fistful of hair. He looked at me, eyes gleaming with excitement as he began:

“When I lost my first tooth, my mother told me that I had to force it back in because the tooth fairy had run out of dimes for a few days so if I wanted anything I’d just have to pretend I didn’t lose it for a bit and she’d understand and maybe give me a bonus. My grandmother once told me that she had her bag packed for the day Jesus gave her the sign it was finally okay to murder my alcoholic grandfather and move to South America.”

Darren had a lot more memories than that, but those are some of my favorite. It was nice to meet someone who actually had something to talk about, and the more I thought about it I was sure everyone had quite similar experiences. At least Darren was honest about it.

Natasha, on the other hand, spoke not a word. I tried to ask her about herself but all she did was grab some chalk and write on the wall. “I am made of chalk,” is what she wrote.

I thought about it for a moment while staring at the wall. “I’m a tiny little nothing,” I told her. She nodded and smiled and I sat down next to her. That day it was HyperVision day and the two of us sat together, watching our “family” stare at the rapidly changing images on the walls in shared disdain. Our silence seemed to unite us, and in a way we spoke without words. It felt more real than anything I’d experienced in a while.

Aldous Ray Orwell, though, he was the one who really turned my world upside down. I suppose my world was already upside down, so perhaps it’s more fitting to say he turned it right-side up.

“How did you end up here?” he asked.

“I’m not entirely sure anymore. I lived here for a while, then it became too much to handle and I lost my mind, so I wandered through the city until I fell into a black blob and brought a man here who caused the entire house to riot until he vanished into thin air,” I told him.

“That sounds like a story,” he told me. “Work with it.”

“I am,” I told him. “How did you end up here?”

“How do any of us end up here? We grow up poor because of the system and then we discover drugs and think they’re cool because they’re illegal, we do too many of them and become mindless and fall into this fucked up system, which is part of the bigger system, which is going against the biggest system.”

“That sounds like a story,” I told him.

“It’s the story,” he said. “And I have it right here.” He handed me a large book called How Things Got to be the Way They Are. “You should read this. There’s a lot you don’t know.”

That night, I read it straight through and I could feel my world spinning. It made me know that things had to change. I really don’t quite know how to change them because I’m still so disturbed by everything but I think he has more to say than I do, so I decided to put the first chapter of his book in my book. I hope it sheds some light.

How Things Got to Be the Way They Are

by Aldous Ray Orwell

One

The year is 2019 and the world is in shambles. The violence of mankind against the environment has reached an almost irreversible level and the collapse of the economy has made class division even more exponential. The war has been going on for five years and at this point there isn’t an end in sight. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the middle class watches HyperVision. Who is responsible for this? You are. And so am I. So is everyone else who continues to neglect to do a thing about it.

We barely have seasons anymore. One day it is 90 degrees and the next it is 50. This didn’t used to be the case. So quickly we have forgotten that the Earth used to be moderate. Now we simply expect the worse and stay inside. Natural disasters have almost completely wiped out California, Mexico, Southwest Asia, Southeast Europe to merely name a few of the affected areas. Most major population centers and American cities have completely devolve into slums.

Parts of both the Middle East, China, and the United States have been bombed off the map. Our youth are brainwashed by HyperVision programs created by the military to get them to enlist.

HyperVision is the biggest cause of our current affliction. Seven years ago, neuroscience and nanotechnology saw their deadly union and our already morally devolved and materially addicted culture became ten times more insidious.

If you are reading this, I’m assuming you are one of the few without the chips installed, which means that you are also quite low on the economic scale. I am sure your life is filled with torment, but again if you are reading this I will assume you’ve managed to avoid falling victim to the any of the many synthetic drugs which ensnare the lower class. If my assumptions are correct, I will also assume that you do not fully understand the mechanism behind HyperVision.

HyperVision was first developed as the next step in the evolution of television, which sought to make it more user interactive and more high definition to the degree that the program plays inside of the viewer’s head. It works through a tiny cyborg which is implanted inside the pineal gland. The pineal gland is located in the center of the brain and is connected to all of our sense receptors. The pineal gland was once thought to the seat of the soul; during sleep, it is responsible for producing the chemicals which cause dreams. In the Hindu chakra system the pineal gland is said to correlate with the third eye. The pineal gland was once subject to transpersonal psychological research dealing with natural hallucinogens, some of which, specifically dimethyltryptamine (DMT), are produced endogenously by the human brain. But in 2014 the government put an end to research into all approaches to psychology other than the cognitive behavioral approach. Some occultists also claimed that they were developing technologies in order to enlarge and activate the pineal to its full potential; they claimed that through these techniques, anyone could become a mystic and a clairvoyant. However, also in 2014, hysteria generated by the media brought about a collective phobia of all alternative approaches to religion and spirituality, and many were persecuted or forced to emigrate. The next year HyperVision was introduced to the populace and the epidemic began.

With HyperVision, the viewer wears the HyperGlasses. The HyperGlasses transforms the vision projected onto the screen through the HyperVision Projector as the cyborg in the pineal gland picks up signals from the HyperVision Sattelite. The physical eyes communicate with the third eye to produce mind-blowing visuals which transfix the viewer. The signals from the HyperVision Satellite communicate non-verbal messages to the viewer which have a serious lasting effect on their behavior. The effects it produces are not fully understood by any members of the growing underground rebellion. We only know what we can deduce through reason, and it is easy to note that viewers of HyperVision merely go about their daily obligations and necessities and then spend the remaining amount of their day fixated on the HyperVision screen. HyperVision programs make the viewer depart on their own personal experience of pre-programmed HyperShows. The viewer is free to do whatever he pleases, whatever he can possibly imagine while in the HyperVision program. The effects of HyperVision can be compared to that of a simulated lucid dream. Except in modern day society the average person does not even seem to remember any one of their dreams. In fact, the phenomena of dreams seem to be completely forgotten by most of the civilized world.

Seventy percent of the US population uses HyperVision at least 5 hours a day. Twenty-five per cent of the US population uses synthetic drugs, and most of these users are addicted. The drug problem began a year after a national bill regarding the legalization of marijuana was vetoed by the president in 2015. Medical use of marijuana was banned nationally and all research on natural hallucinogenic drugs was ceased. In the underground, more powerful synthetic derivatives of methamphetamine, cocaine, and heroin were discovered. These derivatives were available in capsule form and hit the streets of most poor neighborhoods by 2016. At the same time, psychedelic cocktails containing only synthetic tryptamines and phenthylamines were formulated. The cocktails typically contain at least five types of synthetic psychedelics which, when combined, produce powerful visual hallucinations and launch the user into a disassociated state in which the user “forgets” that he is human. If the user views HyperVision while under the influence of these drugs, the experience can reach the level of such intensity that the user begins to believe that the world of HyperVision is more real than his waking experience on planet earth.

It can be noted that the HyperVision user ceases to do in his daily life what is not desirable or plausible to do in a HyperVision program. For example, if you open a book in a HyperVision program, every chapter is but a few pages short and says the exact same thing. The information contained in these books is also incredibly boring. This has lead users of HyperVision to cut out all reading in their daily life. The dawn of HyperVision also brought about a major decline in tourism and hospitality as people no longer find pleasure in travel when they can go wherever they please for a cost they can afford through HyperVision.

HyperVision has been implemented in the public school systems as the main mode of education, and members of the military are required at least 100 hours of HyperVision training before being deployed. In 2017 the Internet “upgraded” and made available through the HyperVision cyborgs in a new program called “HyperNet.” With HyperNet, all the information contained online is now constantly readily available to all members of the human populace with the HyperVision cyborg implant. All they must do is think about what website with which they want to interact. However, the Internet has been stripped of all information deemed “inappropriate or irrational” by the International HyperVision Committee, which includes the subjects of social reform, environmental sciences, the arts and humanities, and religion and spirituality to name a few.

The majority of our population is addicted to a highly individualistic and incredibly pleasurable form of brainwashing. A much smaller, yet considerably large, percent of the population is addicted to synthetic drugs, and the more the growing underground rebellion investigates, the more we reach the conclusion that government agencies such as the CIA were involved in the production of the more addictive versions of the synthetic drugs. A society so built around addiction is a society in which death is stripped of its meaning. This begs the question, what are we, the tiny, miniscule percent of the population with control of our own minds to do?

The first chapter of the book was actually the only chapter of the book. The remaining chapters were simply the first chapter, repeated over and over again. The next day Aldous Ray Orwell was nowhere to be found. And he never returned. I think I knew some of the information his book contained at some point, but I suppose being part of the family made me slowly forget it. Still, with my new take on things the world seemed even more hopeless than it did before. Yet at the same time I was glad I knew, and I was even grateful that I grew up too impoverished to afford the HyperVision cyborg implant. Letting it all sink it made me finally feel like I wasn’t the crazy one. I’m certainly crazy, but at least not as crazy as everyone else. That’s what counts, right? This world I’m stuck in is a fucked up mess. It’s a fucked up mess but it’s really nothing at all. Nothing ever happens.

Four

To make a long story short I think I’m in love. I’m in love and I’m more happy with the fact that I’m alive than I’ve ever been. I’ve even quit smoking!

A few days after Aldous Ray Orwell disappeared, I gave Natasha his story and let her read it and when she was finished she looked over at me and nodded apathetically. We were the only people who really understood how disgusting the whole scheme was and it bound us together, even if she couldn’t speak a word. I stopped writing for about a month or so because I gave Natasha the rest of my paper so I had someone to talk to for once. She grew up in the nicer part of the city, but her parents were Wiccans and they were slaughtered in the riots. Her older brother took her here and shortly after overdosed. She’s spent several years here now, but she can’t remember how many. The only reason she never tried to leave was because she knew she wouldn’t survive on her own without being able to talk, so instead she sat around and drew on the walls upstairs with chalk. Her drawings were really quite breathtaking. Sometimes they looked as if they were close-ups of microscopic particles, some landscapes of deep space, and others just blobs of color and intricate patterns that played tricks on your eyes. After a few weeks together we were sleeping next to each other and after perhaps another week we were cuddling.

Natasha was quite a beautiful woman, too—at least to me. When I first met her, her hair was sparse and patchy because in her spare time she’d grab at her scalp and pull clumps out. That stopped for the most part, now, though. Now her hair is short and brown and neat, and she has a perfect round face and glowing blue-gray eyes. Her skin is almost translucent pale and her body’s almost nothing but skin and bones. But to me she’s perfect. Everything about her is perfect.

We decided to leave the house, to try and make it on our own together. The city’s over 1,000 square miles and we’re nowhere near any of its edges, so for now we’re stuck here. We’ve been sleeping in parks, mostly, and stealing non-caffeinated food from wherever we can find it. Buds have been forming on the trees. When we first left we were freezing, but recently there’s been a heat wave. It hasn’t rained in weeks.

We stole a few blankets for the night time. During the day we wander aimless and Natasha draws on the sidewalks that aren’t too crowded. People would crowd around us in amazement after a few hours of work on it. When they asked her who she was or anything about her she’d just write in huge letters under her drawing: I am made of chalk. People would give her perplexed glares, but all she did was smile the sweetest smile back at them.

I never thought I was attracted to women. I kissed girls before but found no pleasure in it. But it really isn’t about sex at all with Natasha. No, our bond is much deeper than that.

We feel each other’s feelings. When one of us begins to feel uncomfortable, the other notices almost immediately. Every time I think of the futility of this world and nihilism begins to creep into me, she glances over at me almost instantaneously and gives me a cool concerned look and I gaze into her blue-gray eyes in sudden relief.

Last week I tried to tell her all about the black void I fell into and she listened intently. She tried to write a response but she could think of nothing to say. She simply shook her head and that was enough of an understanding for me.

That night I took her to the very alleyway where it occurred. Walking down to the dead end gave me an ominous feeling as if we were being watched and I could sense Natasha felt it too. We reached the end and sure enough nothing was there. We sat on the ground in comfortable silence as the sun dipped into the west. Natasha got out her chalk and started drawing. That time she drew an anatomically correct human heart in fluorescent green right in front of me. When she was finished she gave me that smile that seemed to say this one’s for you but as our gaze parted and we looked back to the heart it had completely disappeared. We both looked at each other incredibly perplexed. She drew something else, but again once she’d finished it completely disappeared. She frantically drew scribbles and geometric shapes and patterns but as soon as they were finished they vanished before our eyes. We tried to figure out the mystery behind it but we were dumbfounded, intrigued and mystified.

That night we decided we’d sleep in the alleyway. We cuddled up under our blankets and kissed each other softly on the lips before gently rubbing our noses together in a warm embrace. As time passed we continued holding each other until for some reason, we felt compelled to press our foreheads against each other with our eyes closed. Soon I could feel my heart beating throughout my body and quickly afterwards I felt her heartbeat too as our hearts synced together in perfect harmony. From my chest, warmth spread through my body and a smile came to my face. Suddenly, the first picture she drew in the alleyway came into my mind’s eye and began beating steadily with our heartbeats as the two of us slowly drifted into a deep happy sleep.

That night, for the first time since my childhood, I had a dream that I could remember. And the most beautiful thing is, Natasha had that dream too—we were in it together. The first thing I remember, I was lying down in a lush forest naked next to a flowing stream. Birds were chirping and I saw the living natural world, which before I’d only seen once in person when I was a very little girl. I walked upstream, gazing down at the beauty of the clear rolling water, and shortly afterward, I saw Natasha walking towards me and smiled with tenderness as we embraced.

“We’re here,” she said.

My jaw dropped in astonishment. “You can speak?”

“I used to be able to when I was young, but after everything happened I just lost my voice…but I still have it when I dream,” she said.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“Where? We’re inside of ourselves… We’re in dreamtime. And we’re there together,” she said, smiling wide, her eyes glimmering in the pure sunshine. “We’re wherever we want to be.” Her voice was soft and barely audible, tender in a way that made me melt in delight. We chatted for hours on end which, in “real” time, were merely minutes. Then we realized that here, we could go wherever we wanted. We could even fly. And so we did.

Dream flying wasn’t hard, really. All we had to do is bend our knees and extend our arms up, then jump and trust we’d leave the earth and then we were off. It felt incredibly liberating. We could go wherever we wanted, and we did. That night we flew to the tip of a mountaintop, then down to beach and made love. Dream sex… dream sex is quite different than real sex, and much more intense. All I can tell you is that Natasha and I had not quite gone beyond kissing in the “real” world, partly because we didn’t quite have the best place to do it, but mostly because our love was gentle and affectionate, and after what I had with Bruno, it kept me incredibly content and satisfied. But after what seemed like days in our dream land, Natasha and I had grown so close it seemed almost necessary, and as we continued making love… I don’t even quite know how to explain it, but I suppose the best way to phrase it is that we became the same person. I could feel her body as well as my own and her feelings as well as my own and she could do the same, then suddenly we merged together as we reached climax, which was much much more intense than anything I’d felt prior. It was so intense that afterwards we both suddenly awoke together in the alleyway, blinking our eyes open and gazing through each other in ecstasy.

The world around us seemed much more beautiful than it ever did before; the morning sun sparkled over the east, tinting the clouds pink and orange. The landscape seemed so absurdly clear yet at the same time glossed over and absolutely surreal, still quite dream like. We lay back down and watched the world in silent embrace and promised that one day we’d find a way out of this concrete mess and into the forest of which we dreamed.

Since then it’s been perhaps three days and every night we’ve again met in our dreams. Hopefully soon I’ll start recording some of our dreams but at the moment it doesn’t quite seem necessary. It’s almost as if the entire day we wait together to sleep now, but we’re both quite happy and I’d be content if things went on like this forever.