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Complexes
In the theology of our Complexes no heresiarch has proven quite as contentious as the great-aunt on my mother's side, who posited in an anonymous exegesis that the dispensation of corpses to trash chutes was neither blasphemous nor necessary. For the sake of my social standing I cannot comment on the former charge of blasphemy, but upon the death of my grandmother, my mother chose to wrap her body in parchment paper and leave the corpse in the hallway of the apartment complex. This deed was executed out of ideological commitment, of course. Her corpse was gone by 5AM, her name added to the great concrete necrology of the Complex. Things always disappear here—hair ties, bread heels, feces, corpses. We always assume it's because they are meant to. As anyone who has observed a pot left to boil for too long can tell you, what seems to disappear often changes form instead.
My mother, her lineage perhaps cursed since before that fateful manuscript, decided to take the lot of us and leave ten years later.
My great-aunt was too old to join us, and so the first order of business for the rest of the family was to decide what to do with her. My father thought she should live with our neighbors, who would almost certainly be too polite to object. My brother suggested we build a tent out of deli containers and plastic wrap for her to live in the hallways, preferably a quiet corner by an electrical cabinet. This raised an additional set of questions, of course—if Mercer's Summa Portus was correct, the electrical cabinets placed every fifth floor were never opened, and their interior existed outside creation itself. My father vehemently objected, arguing that the electrical cabinets were maintained in secret, much like how cobwebs never seem to appear when one is looking at them. The debate continued until my great-aunt piteously suggested that she leap off the balcony into the children's playground ten floors below. We agreed this suicide was a noble sacrifice in the name of metaphysical truth. Such things happened occasionally; the balcony railings were low and the hallways narrow. If our family's experiment with my grandmother ten years prior was representative of general reality, her body would be gone as long as she flung herself off the balcony after midnight. My father opined that things are never truly destroyed, and that the complex would simply turn her corpse into rust, wheat, or the moss that grows in the cracks of concrete.
Five days and many prayers later, we had placed our earthly possessions into packs made from moth-eaten peacoats belonging to my grandfather, and left the apartment behind.
My mother's reasoning was thus: all things have an inside and an outside: a corpse, an egg, a complex. I argued this reasoning was faulty, of course; if one can breach the interior of a thing, it is either because the thing was made to be opened, or because it has been destroyed. In the former category one may place boxes and rooms, while eggs and corpses belong in the latter. The Complex, as is self-evident, belongs to neither of these categories. My mother could not be dissuaded; it had to be possible to leave the complex.
We knew the Complex had an end—some unknown hundreds of floors down, there was a sub-complex, a place not of people and homes but of pipes, concrete, and rust. My great-aunt had supposedly seen it (or knew someone who had), as had numerous other itinerant denizens who lived long enough to drift upwards from there to here over the course of their lives. The source of contention among the family was if there was if there was anything beyond the bottom.
It was only a few days—and around a hundred floors—before discussion of the sub-complex turned to the inevitable: the Benthites. Save for my brother, we all knew Benthites were a myth, a fable refined across generations to frighten young children who may be tempted to wander after the lights faded. My brother, however, had ruined his nerves with Candelan-era natural philosophy, during which time it was in vogue to theorize that the Benthites were in fact quite real—and lived in the sub-complex. I told him that if he sees a naked man with ashy skin, red eyes, and who crawls around like a cellar spider, he can go ahead and warn us. He was not amused.
Two months in—two months of stairwells, rats, cobwebs, stale air, and the omnipresent hum of electrical work—we awoke one morning, three hundred stories down, to find my father gone. The nighttime chill and dire selection of food (again, there are a great many rats in the complex) had slowly chipped away at his health, and so we were forced to come to the conclusion that he either died in the night and befell the same fate as his in-laws, or that the horror of our journey had simply drove him to leap over the edge of the railing.
The bottom of the complex was within sight—less than a hundred floors—but my father's death snapped the threads that my mother's lifelong ontological struggle had wrapped around me. I had enough. The following night I waited until after dark, and abandoned her and my brother.
Within hours I realized with sinking horror that I had no idea how to return home. The floors had passed as minutes or drops of water—uncountable, indistinct, pooling together into the urn of time. After months of my mother's pilgrimage I no longer saw floors, just anonymous landscapes of concrete, doorways, and the clattering drumbeat of footsteps echoing through stairwells.
It was a month before I found a roof over my head in the form of a noodle shop carved into the carapace of a former two-bedroom apartment, where I exchanged dishwashing duties for a spot opposite the walk-in, just large enough for a bed. In another two years I found a second family, in the form of a woman two floors down who lived with her brother and grandparents. We married only a year later, rushed by a familial insistence on great-grandchildren, and by my emotional wounds from all the pilgrimage had taken.
Shortly after the marriage, on the advice of a priest who I consulted on matters of the heart—and the only living person besides my wife who knew of my past—I traveled the remaining fifty-six floors to the bottom of the complex. Beset by a heart-rending terror that I would again become lost and loose both home and family, I carried with me a pen and paper which I used to count the floors between my home and the bottom.
The denizens of the final floors spoke in hushed tones of the sub-complex, and to my shock, firmly believed in the Benthites that the rest of us regarded as childhood fables. All who I talked to, no matter how cordial and neighborly, refused to direct me to the doors of the sub-complex. I asked if they had seen anyone like my mother and brother, and they had. They had reached the final floor three years ago, my mother's grim and rancorous disposition still memorable to any who had met her. After that day, they were never seen again.
I eventually found the doors on my own, set at the end of a vertiginous concrete hallway. Folk-magic symbols and obscene graffiti covered over the layers of rust and off-white paint. I refused to come within a dozen paces, fearing that the Benthites would reach out and pull me inside.
My daughter was born six months later, bearing eyes that resembled my mother's to a startling degree. Being a rational adult I considered this nothing more than an accident of genetics, and for a number of years I settled into domestic life with a routine comfort that I had not known since my own childhood. What wounds cannot be healed by time are often healed by love, and soon Summa Portus, the pilgrimage, and the lifetime of ideological furor passed into memory. On late nights, when the wet summer heat interrupted my sleep, I would sometimes wonder what had become of my remaining family. Had they found something in the sub-complex?
Some eight years later, I again found myself on the bottom floor with my wife and daughter, where we had come to seek the advice of a well-regarded priest. For months our daughter had been dogged by nightmares: twisting hallways, tangles of rusted pipe and red eyes peering at her through cold, black murk.
By happenstance we passed by the doors leading to the sub-complex. My daughter stopped and turned, those familiar green-blue eyes widening before she let out a throat-torn scream that would not cease until my wife pulled the girl into her arms and tore her away from the hallway.
My mother, her lineage perhaps cursed since before that fateful manuscript, decided to take the lot of us and leave ten years later.
My great-aunt was too old to join us, and so the first order of business for the rest of the family was to decide what to do with her. My father thought she should live with our neighbors, who would almost certainly be too polite to object. My brother suggested we build a tent out of deli containers and plastic wrap for her to live in the hallways, preferably a quiet corner by an electrical cabinet. This raised an additional set of questions, of course—if Mercer's Summa Portus was correct, the electrical cabinets placed every fifth floor were never opened, and their interior existed outside creation itself. My father vehemently objected, arguing that the electrical cabinets were maintained in secret, much like how cobwebs never seem to appear when one is looking at them. The debate continued until my great-aunt piteously suggested that she leap off the balcony into the children's playground ten floors below. We agreed this suicide was a noble sacrifice in the name of metaphysical truth. Such things happened occasionally; the balcony railings were low and the hallways narrow. If our family's experiment with my grandmother ten years prior was representative of general reality, her body would be gone as long as she flung herself off the balcony after midnight. My father opined that things are never truly destroyed, and that the complex would simply turn her corpse into rust, wheat, or the moss that grows in the cracks of concrete.
Five days and many prayers later, we had placed our earthly possessions into packs made from moth-eaten peacoats belonging to my grandfather, and left the apartment behind.
My mother's reasoning was thus: all things have an inside and an outside: a corpse, an egg, a complex. I argued this reasoning was faulty, of course; if one can breach the interior of a thing, it is either because the thing was made to be opened, or because it has been destroyed. In the former category one may place boxes and rooms, while eggs and corpses belong in the latter. The Complex, as is self-evident, belongs to neither of these categories. My mother could not be dissuaded; it had to be possible to leave the complex.
We knew the Complex had an end—some unknown hundreds of floors down, there was a sub-complex, a place not of people and homes but of pipes, concrete, and rust. My great-aunt had supposedly seen it (or knew someone who had), as had numerous other itinerant denizens who lived long enough to drift upwards from there to here over the course of their lives. The source of contention among the family was if there was if there was anything beyond the bottom.
It was only a few days—and around a hundred floors—before discussion of the sub-complex turned to the inevitable: the Benthites. Save for my brother, we all knew Benthites were a myth, a fable refined across generations to frighten young children who may be tempted to wander after the lights faded. My brother, however, had ruined his nerves with Candelan-era natural philosophy, during which time it was in vogue to theorize that the Benthites were in fact quite real—and lived in the sub-complex. I told him that if he sees a naked man with ashy skin, red eyes, and who crawls around like a cellar spider, he can go ahead and warn us. He was not amused.
Two months in—two months of stairwells, rats, cobwebs, stale air, and the omnipresent hum of electrical work—we awoke one morning, three hundred stories down, to find my father gone. The nighttime chill and dire selection of food (again, there are a great many rats in the complex) had slowly chipped away at his health, and so we were forced to come to the conclusion that he either died in the night and befell the same fate as his in-laws, or that the horror of our journey had simply drove him to leap over the edge of the railing.
The bottom of the complex was within sight—less than a hundred floors—but my father's death snapped the threads that my mother's lifelong ontological struggle had wrapped around me. I had enough. The following night I waited until after dark, and abandoned her and my brother.
Within hours I realized with sinking horror that I had no idea how to return home. The floors had passed as minutes or drops of water—uncountable, indistinct, pooling together into the urn of time. After months of my mother's pilgrimage I no longer saw floors, just anonymous landscapes of concrete, doorways, and the clattering drumbeat of footsteps echoing through stairwells.
It was a month before I found a roof over my head in the form of a noodle shop carved into the carapace of a former two-bedroom apartment, where I exchanged dishwashing duties for a spot opposite the walk-in, just large enough for a bed. In another two years I found a second family, in the form of a woman two floors down who lived with her brother and grandparents. We married only a year later, rushed by a familial insistence on great-grandchildren, and by my emotional wounds from all the pilgrimage had taken.
Shortly after the marriage, on the advice of a priest who I consulted on matters of the heart—and the only living person besides my wife who knew of my past—I traveled the remaining fifty-six floors to the bottom of the complex. Beset by a heart-rending terror that I would again become lost and loose both home and family, I carried with me a pen and paper which I used to count the floors between my home and the bottom.
The denizens of the final floors spoke in hushed tones of the sub-complex, and to my shock, firmly believed in the Benthites that the rest of us regarded as childhood fables. All who I talked to, no matter how cordial and neighborly, refused to direct me to the doors of the sub-complex. I asked if they had seen anyone like my mother and brother, and they had. They had reached the final floor three years ago, my mother's grim and rancorous disposition still memorable to any who had met her. After that day, they were never seen again.
I eventually found the doors on my own, set at the end of a vertiginous concrete hallway. Folk-magic symbols and obscene graffiti covered over the layers of rust and off-white paint. I refused to come within a dozen paces, fearing that the Benthites would reach out and pull me inside.
My daughter was born six months later, bearing eyes that resembled my mother's to a startling degree. Being a rational adult I considered this nothing more than an accident of genetics, and for a number of years I settled into domestic life with a routine comfort that I had not known since my own childhood. What wounds cannot be healed by time are often healed by love, and soon Summa Portus, the pilgrimage, and the lifetime of ideological furor passed into memory. On late nights, when the wet summer heat interrupted my sleep, I would sometimes wonder what had become of my remaining family. Had they found something in the sub-complex?
Some eight years later, I again found myself on the bottom floor with my wife and daughter, where we had come to seek the advice of a well-regarded priest. For months our daughter had been dogged by nightmares: twisting hallways, tangles of rusted pipe and red eyes peering at her through cold, black murk.
By happenstance we passed by the doors leading to the sub-complex. My daughter stopped and turned, those familiar green-blue eyes widening before she let out a throat-torn scream that would not cease until my wife pulled the girl into her arms and tore her away from the hallway.