Solo Inception

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Setting: Cargo-ship bone-yard

Characters: Me, her, the Universe

My heart is pumping. Loud. I can hear it drumming from within my chest, I can hear it echoing off the walls of my metal prison. I’m lying still, across the dashboard, my chin resting on the steering wheel, the soles of my feet against the passenger’s side window.

My breath is fast, short, and guttural. I’m not hyperventilating, but to an outsider it would look like I was trying my hardest to do just that. I’m sitting in the backseat, behind the driver’s seat, my knees across my chest and both hands clasped with my arms around my legs.

My hands, face, and hairline are wet with sweat. If I stay still, I sweat; if I move around looking for a way out, I sweat a little bit more, imperceptibly more. I lay contorted like spaghetti inside a Swiss watch: my face is swaying back and forth against the break pedal, my hip on the driver’s seat, one leg hanging wrapped around the passenger’s seatbelt, the other up in the air.

“Tuu—um tum;

tuu—um tum;

tuu—um tum;

tuu—um tum;”

 …races my heart, the blood speeding through my veins and up to my temples. I feel my chest about to implode, like a street spray-painting artist’s rendering of a galaxy collapsing on itself, but with blood and guts.

“Uoaahhh—ooaahh,

uoaahhh--ooaahh,

uoaahhh—ooaahh,

uoaahhh—ooaahh;”

….breathes my breath like Lord Vadah on a treadmill.

“Thuuumpp.

Thuuummp.

Thump.

Thuuuuuuump.”

My hands thump against the cold windows of my prison.

Arrhythmic silly Hands! They skipped music lessons while Heart and Lungs learned to keep-up tempo.

My thoughts are crisscrossing and convulsing like a snatching rocknrolla as I try to keep my heart from going Super Nova. I haven’t slept in three sunrises and I know I’m beginning to hallucinate, or at least beginning to realize it. Why does my prison cell feel like a padded room with windows? If I were mental, I’d be in one of those white padded rooms with tall ceilings. Not inside a car. Right?

“How long have I been trapped in here?” I wonder out loud. But no one hears me. The sound of my own voice is so alien it startles me to  floor. The barrier between voice and thought is no more.

Or maybe this is what it’s like to be crazy. You are actually in one of those white padded bed³ rooms, but your broken mind tells you to think and believe you are trapped inside your own car, in an empty parking lot, surrounded by old shipping crates and rusting transatlantic behemoths of useless 1.0 cargo freighters.

And a woman staring at you from a safe distance.

Motionless.

For three days.

The B!%ch !

Time inevitably passed, hours, days, perhaps weeks, and I eventually managed to get out. I won’t bother you with the boring details of my daring escapade. All I’ll say is that if the macaques hadn’t brought me that pogo-stick I would’ve never made it out. But alas, the time had finally come to apologize to the woman that had been staring idly at my helpless dilemma.

She was a mannequin. I knew it al along, I’d forgotten.

I felt so silly for yelling and cursing at her, especially now that I realize the rage she elicited had fueled me through days of monotony. I took my car keys out of her fur coat, right where I’d left them so many days ago (or hours ago?), kissed her goodbye gently on the cheek,  threw her to the raging macaques, and drove back home.

The Universe Remains.