Greetings Everyone, I have lots of Great News!
Soon, Escape Plans Unlimited will be conducting secret, underground Escape Planning Sessions with experts in the field. We cannot reveal the identities of the people who participate in these Secret Meetings until after the meeting is over. Keep an eye out for the first one in the next week.
Jack wandered back into the Creative Deconstruction Caves this evening to drop off his latest story for us. He tells me that he has a few more surprises up his sleeve this time, although he doesn’t expect much from any of this.
Jack, let ‘em have it:
Thanks Garrett. Welcome back to my world…
Tonight’s story takes place somewhere between the center of my brain and the far reaches of the cosmos, whatever that means.
I found myself frozen in time but still able to move. It felt bizarre to get trapped in my own memory palace. I had taken to studying memory enhancement, and David Jones recommended I check out these books:
Derren Brown’s book taught me how to build a Grand Palace in my mind, composed of buildings worn deep into my memories. Once I established this memory palace with daily practice, I could wander around in it in my head. I walked down streets of my childhood.
I lived on Lucia Lane. Lucia means “light” in Spanish. The Lane of Light.
Each building has a character all its own. The technique sounds like a cute trick for memorizing and counting cards. It is capable of far more than that. For one, it assists me in storing insane amounts of information easily. I can memorize anything I want in very little time.
After six long months of installing all kinds of expansions to the memory palace, I dropped it. I gave up on it and let it fade.
That’s when it happened.
I decided to hit the trail for a couple weeks in Wallowa mountains in eastern Oregon. I had all the gear I needed. Hell, why not? It was August anyway.
I remember nothing of the trip once I hit the trailhead, parked my Jeep, and set out for Eagle Cap. I went back to the summit register–a coffee can with a small waterproof notebook inside–Jack Bishop. I saw my name already scrawled on the paper next to the date 9.3.2003.
…
Suburban ranch home in Minnesota. Kitchen. Feeling. Mice ran around the vinyl floor in the kitchen. My parent’s divorced here. My stepdad made my Dad’s face bleed with his fists in the kitchen and entryway. The bedrooms held fun, sadness, prisons of childhood sins, and toy-filled gardens of Eden.
“Go to your room!”
How come we all get banished to our rooms? That made myself a place to run away from.
My sister’s bedroom, we sat on giant stuffed animals and rode them off dressers to the floor. The big stuffed dog named Henry. A giant turtle. We created adventures out of the sensation of falling. We threw ourselves off the dressers over and over again. We rode couch cushions down the stairs for indoor sledding.
So I got trapped in my childhood bedroom in my memory palace. This bedroom my parents banished me to. Mom used a washcloth in the door to keep it shut.
I had a bed with drawers under the matress in the side of a large frame. I kicked in the thin pieces of wood paneling at the base of it. Rage had gotten hold of me once my mom secured the door.
Every experience began to stimulate a memory in one of these rooms. I fell asleep.
I woke up in the kitchen, eating pancakes with my 9-year-old sister. We knew how to cook, even way back then. We played together all the time. I wandered around the house–one moment, empty. The next moment–filled with people….Aunts, Uncles, stepdads, relatives, dogs and cats, …I had gotten lost inside the river of my past, or somehow crawled into the folds of my own body of memory.
The bed had a hollow underneath it. Cobwebs in the corners fed my trembling–it took a renewed effort to crawl under there in spite of dark creatures spinning webs.
“Go to your room!”
Stomping feet pounded through the dark hallway, under a huge 3-foot glass globe, through the door on the left, slamming it shut behind me, I went to my room. That day, I discovered the hollow under the bed, my secret place. My ten-year-old muscles shook and shook. Aspen leaves a-tremble in a hurricane of my mother’s hot air.
I laid down at the tail end of the bed on the carpet, pulled my knees up to my chest, and kicked the slats until they splintered and fell into pieces.
My eyes got huge. I broke some unspoken rule. Trapped in my room, I still had my revenge.
How I woke up 20 years later with a stuffed lamb in my arms still seems unreal. The door would not open. It got slammed shut by mother twenty years earlier with a washcloth in between the door and the jamb to keep it closed. The house felt empty, but the intercom still worked. It had buttons on it that weren’t there when I was 10.
It had a list of names:
-Donnie
-Dad
-Mom
-Leslie
-Grandma
-Deborah
-Jorji
-Joe
and on and on, all the people who passed through that house when I called it home.
I left the intercom alone and sat on my bed for awhile. My feet hung over the edge, and sleep would not come upon me. Something told me to keep looking. Arising to open some drawers, I saw my old snoopy phone and Castle Greyskull near the closet. No dial tone. Time had stopped. All that remained was the house. Why, then, id the intercom start talking?
It was my sister Leslie’s voice, when she was 7-years-old, “Come to my room. Let’s play!”
I pressed the button, “Leslie,” and told her through a face of tears, “The door won’t open, I’m trapped in here.”
“Come to my room. Let’s Play!”
She said the same thing every time I pushed the button. No one was there to hear me. This house I found myself in was more of a grandiose recording than an actual location in space and time.
Compelled to keep pressing the buttons, parts of the room shifted after listening to each of the people speak. Some had more to say than others. By the time I decided to crawl under the bed and wait for something new to happen, everyone I had known over the first 10 years of my life had projected their movies through my brain and body, repeating over and over until the tracks started over at the beginning.
In a flash of brilliance, I remembered the folded piece of parchment I had stuffed into my breast pocket before I went to sleep that night.
I crawled under the bed and unfolded it.
A Hollow Never Exists. An Absence shaped by everything else, Such is man. Empty. Hollow. He never existed. Everything else gives him the illusion of a self. Absent, hollow, empty. In this way, you must proceed……
At that moment, my apartment started to extrude out of the ground and all around me.
The couch I had passed out on reasserted itself under my weary bones. I put the parchment away in my safe and went back to sleep.
-Jack
Tags: Creative Deconstruction, escape plans, guest post, Minnesota, Post apocalyptic thief, tales of the post apocalyptic thief
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