The Stillness Required

Photo by Alina Grubnyak on Unsplash

They brought me to the chamber before the light had properly decided what it wanted to do with the morning.

I had been here before. I remembered that much. The memory lived in my lower back, a slow complaint that began the moment they helped me onto the stone. Because that is what it was, whatever name they had given it in this age. Carved smooth, shaped for a body and not for comfort, the way all sacred things are shaped. The way altars are shaped.

They fitted the cage around my head. Delicate in its construction, deliberate in its placement. I understood I was not meant to move. Not a suggestion. A requirement. The stillness was the whole point. The stillness was the ritual.

One of the officiants leaned close and said something. The words arrived soft and formless, pressed flat by the wax they had set deep in my ears before the cage went on. I caught the tone, reassuring and procedural, the voice of someone who has performed this rite many times and expects it to hold. I nodded, which seemed enough.

Above my face, angled so that I could not look directly up but only outward and down, a looking glass. Tilted to show me the length of myself receding toward a circle of pale and sourceless light. An aperture. A mouth, already open. Already patient.

Something arrived that had once been music, passed through too many stones to retain its original shape. I recognised nothing in it. It did not matter. It was not there to be understood. It was there to remind me I had not yet left the world entirely.

The stone moved. The mouth swallowed me. I was inside the sarcophagus, and the sarcophagus was closed.

---

The noise began the way a storm begins when you are already inside it. Not a crescendo but a sudden total fact. Clanging, battering, a fury so all encompassing it ceased to be sound and became instead a kind of weather, something that happened to the body rather than the ears. I lay in the absolute centre of it, in the eye, the one still point the storm required in order to exist.

I could not move. My nose itched. The itch was extraordinary in the way that only an itch you cannot scratch can be extraordinary, specific and insistent and almost philosophical. My body cataloguing everything it was being denied.

I let it go. I had learned this, last time.

I breathed down through the itch, through the noise, through the stone pressing its cold claims against my spine. I breathed through my shoulders and released them. Breathed through my hands and released them. The fury continued all around me and I went further down, further in, finding the small country of stillness that exists below sensation, if you are patient enough and ruined enough to reach it.

My toes disappeared first. Then my fingertips. The pain in my back softened from a voice to a murmur to a rumour of a whisper. I was no longer quite in the chamber at all. I was somewhere older than the chamber. Somewhere the noise could not follow.

---

I was almost gone when it entered me.

Cold. Starting at the inside of my arm where they had opened my vein before the ritual began, some preparation I had barely registered at the time. Cold moving upward with steady and unhurried purpose. Along the inside of my forearm, crossing the joint, climbing toward the shoulder with the patient certainty of something that knew exactly where it was going and had always known.

I returned to my body to meet it.

My chest waited. The cold arrived there and I felt my heart acknowledge it, a solemn and ancient recognition, the way you might nod at someone in a dark corridor you did not expect to see and yet somehow always knew you would. And then it passed. Dispersed. My own warmth reclaiming the territory, absorbing the frost, making it part of me.

The fury wound down.

A voice came through the shapeless music and the wax and the cage and the looking glass and everything else standing between that voice and whatever I had briefly become. Muffled to almost nothing. But I knew the shape of the question.

Are you all right in there?

I opened my eyes. Above me, ordinary ceiling tiles. Beside me, a woman in pale scrubs with a kind face and a clipboard, waiting.

I thought about the country below sensation. I thought about the cold moving through me like something finding its way home. I thought about the storm I had slept inside while it did its work around my head.

“Yeah,” I said. “Fine.”

She made a note. Someone else was already waiting for the stone.

---

I pulled my jacket on and reached for my stick, the one constant that follows me in and out of every room I enter.

I thought about the word they use for what they are looking for in there. Not a mystical word. Not a word with any ceremony in it at all.

Lesions.

Spots of damage mapped onto the white matter of my brain, each one a small country of its own, each one a record of something my body did to itself without asking permission. They photograph them. They count them. They compare this year’s photographs to last year’s photographs and they look for growth, for new arrivals, for the slow or sudden expansion of the territory that is no longer quite mine.

This is why the ritual recurs. Not once, not as initiation or rite of passage, but on a cycle, called back whenever the doctors and neurologist need to see what the damage is doing now. I have learned the stillness because the stillness was required of me. I have found the country below sensation because the alternative was a half hour of unendurable noise and itch and cramp with nothing to show for the suffering but further suffering. Today, I found my way home.

The contrast dye they push through the cannula in my arm lights up active lesions differently to old ones. It finds the places where the inflammation is still burning, still working. Cold entering the body to illuminate what is on fire inside it.

The morning outside was ordinary and grey and going about its business. I had been inside the sarcophagus and I had come back out, the same as always, carrying the same small interior silence I find in there, the one that outlasts the noise by a few hours if I am careful with it.

Next year they will call me back. I will lie down on the stone again. The mouth will swallow me once more. The storm will do its work around the one still point I have learned to be.

And somewhere in the white matter of my brain, in territory I will never see and cannot feel, something will either be the same or it will not.

I try not to wonder which.

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