The Brick House

23 May 2000

Inspired, no doubt, by the photos of Khmer Rogue prisoners that I saw at MOMA in the afternoon, I dreamt that I was a political prisoner.

I was in a prison; my captors, at various times, seemed to be southeast asian, or insectoid, or hairy goblin-ogre creatures. They were quite capable of speaking to me in very clear, vaguely European-sounding English but often they did not bother to, instead speaking in a completely guttural series of noises. It was hot and humid; everything dripped. I think perhaps it was the jungles of Cambodia, but I do not think my captors were actually human... or perhaps it was the horror of what they did to me that made me believe they could not be so.

For whatever reason, they had decided to put me in a place called the Brick House.

You got to the Brick House by going into a special wing of the prison. Through a series of gates, through a cast iron door, and then you slid a huge metal panel to the side, like a hangar door. Beyond it was a meticulously arranged wall of ordinary bricks. Every few feet, in staggered columns, were holes which led into the brick wall. These tunnels went into total darkness; they were about 2' high and 4' wide. Just big enough, in other words, for most people to be placed into them lengthwise with a few inches of space to spare. Each hole had a hinged brass door that could be closed over the end. There were several rows of them, one above the other, in this wall of bricks; the bottom row was just an inch above the floor level. The highest row was higher than I could see; the whole chamber was not well lit.

There was one brass door open, on the third row up. Clearly, they were going to slide me in there and close it after me.

The head of the guards-- I think he may have been the camp commander, in fact-- took great pleasure in explaining how the Brick House worked. As he explained it to me, the guards began lacing me into a straitjacket which bound my arms at my side, and my legs together. I was to have no free limbs at all.

The Brick House was three hundred feet deep... that dark shaft stretched for three hundred feet, on a noticeable downward decline. The far side of the Brick House was not inside the prison; it faced out from a hillside onto a large concrete yard outside the prison entirely, in direct sunlight through most of the day. This would cause the entire structure to become extremely hot and oven-like, especially at the far "deep" end. Already, from this end, I could feel some of the overall warmth radiating from its surface.

Half of the shafts stretched well into the Brick House, where they eventually terminated in a dead end. The other half of the shafts, however, went all the way through to the outside, where they had plywood panels covering the opening, to prevent any leakage of light or cool air into the shaft. The distribution of openings was fairly random and there was no way to tell from this, the interior side, whether any given shaft would go through or not.

Eventually, he said, they might come around and open the interior door at this end. Occasionally, someone would check the exterior and if there were any broken-through plywood panels, they would be replaced.

The obvious implication was that prisoners were free to wriggle down the brick shaft and, if their shaft ended in plywood and an opening, they could try to break through the plywood and escape into the outside. He very specifically did not mention what would become of anyone who made it to the outside but was then picked back up again.

I wanted to ask many questions, of course, but then the guards picked me up bodily, and I began to plead, beg, anything they wanted, I would tell them anything, I would betray anyone, I already knew that I was not going to be able to survive this. I was already broken, and I was ready-- eager-- to admit it.

But they just nodded and smiled and showed me their stained, split, reptilian insect goblin teeth, and then they placed me into the shaft headfirst and on my back, pushing me all the way in and, without ceremony, closed the brass door behind my feet.

Immediately, all the sounds that I'd been unaware of... the fabric of the guards' uniforms, the dripping, the occasional slamming of an iron door elsewhere... suddenly disappeared and I was acutely aware of the darkness and the silence. And the heat. And the smell. The air in the prison tunnels had been stifling and foul, but this was as far beyond that as that air had been beyond a cool breeze in a forest.

There was a period of, for lack of a better word, unawareness. Did I scream? Did I sob? Did I just pass out? I do not know what the first thing that happened was after that door was closed, or how long it took, but after what seemed like a brief discontinuity, I began to think.

Head-first on the slight downward incline made the blood begin to drain into my head, and my first thought was that the increased blood supply was going to help me think a lot more. Of course, it was much later that I realized thinking more was not a benefit here. What were the problems I need to deal with? I felt some concern that eventually I was going to urinate and that this would flow downhill around my head... I began to wonder if I should attempt to roll over so that I might be able to regain some drinking water from it. But the brick had seemed very porous and would likely absorb it all pretty quickly. I had not eaten in some days already, and I remembered that I'd been lucky to have avoided any sort of major digestive parasites recently, so the prospect of diahrrea was not as dire as it could have been.

Obviously, what I needed to tackle was the question of whether or not to attempt the crawl down the shaft to the outside world, which had a fifty percent chance of being there if I made it.

If I made it.

To make it to the far end, I would have to wriggle headfirst, most likely on my back, down an incline that was shallow enough not to make descent much easier... but steep enough to make wriggling back up, feet-first, very difficult. I thought it likely that I could make it down to the far end... but what if it was solid brick? I would have to return to this end, and that seemed like it might not be possible. Especially since I could tell that the deep end was tremendously hotter and more stifling than up here. It was deadly down there.

Then I heard a sound from somewhere below me... a little squeak... and I began to think about what could be between me and the deep end. Such as rats. Rats that would no doubt be very happy to have a slow-moving, mostly-immobilized meal crawl down into their lair. They were probably scuttling around in tunnels they had cut between shafts, chewed out with their teeth, finding the occasional giant laced-up grub trying to crawl past them. And then they'd eat what they wanted and leave the rest to spoil.

At this point I became aware of part of the stifling odor of the place: a broiled meat smell, the smell of flesh that has simmered on hot stone for a long long time. And I realized there were probably corpses all through the Brick House... people who had not made it all the way through and died from disease, starvation, the heat, the rats, or whatever. People who reached the far end and found they had no exit, and started back up but just couldn't make it, and they died down there and cooked in place. Were I to start my way down the tunnel, would my head eventually bump into the corpse of the person who had last been pushed in here? Would I smell him strongly enough that I'd know it was there before I got close? Would the sounds of my scraping crawl echo strangely as I got near? Did he try to crawl down and then get stopped by the corpse of the person before him?

Perhaps my shaft was mostly full of corpses already, and they expected me to crawl in until I was stopped, then die, exhausted, right there. And another poor soul would be pushed in after me in a few weeks. Perhaps there were no exits. Why should I expect them not to lie? Perhaps every shaft ended in death, and the Brick House was only meant to slowly fill up with baking corpses. It was not enough to kill us, or burn us up... they had to make us cook ourselves, to make our hope kill us.

Or perhaps every shaft went through to the outside. Perhaps this was some sort of test to weed out the will to survive from the fragile and weak. Those who would do anything to grasp even a tiny chance of life would see some sort of reward... or perhaps the entire process of wriggling down that shaft, through rats, through corpses, through anything that might block my way... perhaps that process would turn me into one of Them. Maybe the Brick House was a womb, a place of birthing, where many did not survive but some emerged on the far side.

I began to build up mental will: Yes, I would go forward and I would not hesitate to do whatever it took to get through. I would not become one of them. I would stay sane. I would push forward quickly and strongly enough that I would get past whatever might get in my way, and if the freedom of the outside awaited me, then I would run. I would run as far and as fast as I could.

But just as I slid the first inch forward, down, I heard another new sound. Muffled through all the brick though it was, I knew what it was: It was a terrible scream, the scream that comes from a mind that has crossed the event horizon and will never come back. And I could tell that it was from downhill, from the deep end. I knew immediately what it meant. Someone had made the same bold choice I was making... and they had been stopped. They had gone as fast as they could and found that there was no freedom... and they were not going to make it back up to the high end.

I tried shouting out to this person, whose screams might have been resonating through the bricks from far far away, or who might have been in the next shaft over. But even after his scream ended in a minute, he gave no further sign of hearing me, and I stopped shouting. Then I heard more voices, more people, around me: Someone began singing something inarticuate, and another began to cackle. Some other shouts, using words I could not understand. Another shriek. I could not tell how close, or at which end of the shafts they were. I could not hear them moving around, just the sounds of their voices. I shouted some more, trying to establish any sort of communication with even just one of them, so as not to be so alone. We could plot something together! We could share what we suspect might be going on! Though we admittedly had zero resources to pool, we could not be in this alone! Even just one other!

But one by one the voices faded away, leaving just me and my shouting. And I realized I'd used up way too much air trying to speak with people who had all gone beyond speaking, and now I was in even worse shape physically and just as alone. And I was sure, now, that at least some of the shafts did not open to the far side. Who knows how long some of these others had been in their shafts? Surely not more than days, or dehydration would have killed them. How soon would I be like them, cackling or shrieking or singing, ignoring the articulate calls of new prisoners around me?

How long had I already been in here?

I finally resolved that I just could not deal with it. I had said as much to my captors before they even put me in. I did not want to crawl down a shaft only to find I'd been lied to. I did not want to feel rats eat me. I did not want to press against corpses who had died before me. I just wanted to be dead. I wanted to just be dead.

So I decided to will myself into death.

I just became calm, and relaxed, and I stopped trying to do anything. I did not think about where I was, or what I had done to be here, or whether it would ever end. It would never end. This was the end. I would die right here, my feet touching the brass door that had been closed behind me mere hours minutes days seconds before. I would die for no other reason than I no longer wanted to live. I began to sink into deep darkness, darker than the already perfect darkness of the shaft inside the Brick House. It could get no worse. It could only get better. And then something truly remarkable and horrible happened.

I was aware of cool sheets, almost cold. Sounds of urban life. A pillow. My limbs were unbound. I could feel the warmth of a girl next to me. I was on a futon bed... in a city, on a vacation... with a girl. I could not open my eyes and see any of this, but I could no longer feel the brick, the heat, the restraints. And I realized that I was already too late. Before I could die, I had snapped. I was having an Owl Creek Bridge death. I was probably, in real life, screaming or singing or shouting again. I decided that was fine, I would live here in my little fantasy life while my physical shell wailed and shat itself. So I rolled to the side to touch the beautiful girl who was lying there...

...and found that I was in the shaft, lying on my side, face pressed against the brick floor.

There was another discontinuity, a great sobbing lurch, then I settled back down and began the will to die again. And again, I felt a shift as certain madness took hold and I was elsewhere, in the City, with a girl-- my wife, I was certain of it! I was on vacation. I was having a restless night's sleep, that was all. It happens sometimes. Comforted, I reached for my wife again...

...and, of course, I was back in the shaft. Someone was shouting, shouting just as I had some time in the past. I could tell he was trying to make a connection, contact anyone at all... but his words were gibberish. They weren't even language. They were just noises. He was trying to reach out to someone else in this place, and I couldn't understand him.

Which is when I began to cackle... or maybe scream. All the same, at that point. I had crossed that event horizon myself, now. I could not even get back to the vaguely comforting hallucination of a vacation, with my wife, in a familiar city. I just sank into the darkness, screaming, cackling, sobbing... and a deep deep peace began to settle over me, finally. I was dying. My body shut down, one part at a time. I could feel the death-buzz settle over me, nitrous-like. I wasn't really breathing. I could not move. Paralysis squatted on my body. I ceased to be, except for a cluster of vague senses... hearing, some touch.

And at the exact moment when it all became perfect, acceptable, peaceful... the door opened and rough hands grabbed me and pulled me out. But they pulled me out headfirst. My head-end was the end near the door. Had I somehow turned around? Impossible... but the alternative was even worse, that I'd crawled through to the far end and then stopped there.

But now I was out! I was out! Oh god, it was cool, it was clean, it was wide open. I was out of the Brick House, I thought! This was not hallucination, like the bed and the girl in New York had been. They had pulled me free and now they were stripping off my garments that had bound me tightly. I tried to open my eyes, to stretch my naked body at all...

...and I found that I could not. I had put my body into such a deep state of death that I could not come back. I could not move. I could not speak. I could not inhale deeply. I could not look. I could only hear... and feel... as my captors carried me through long echoey chambers and halls and, eventually, placed me on something vaguely warm and lumpy.

I lay there, desperately trying to break free of my paralysis, desperately wanting life again, after having worked so hard to give it up. But it would not come. And as I was beginning to wonder what I had been moved to, what this warm lumpy surface was, I heard some more of my captors come into the room... and felt as they placed something on top of me. Something warm and lumpy. And I realized what I was lying on, what was lying on me.

It was people. Other people from the Brick House, all of whom had gone into the same dark place I had eventually. We all went there, and then we all got pulled out, stripped naked, and stacked like cord wood somewhere... alive, but dead. Aware, but unable to do anything. Trapped inside the event horizons we had made for ourselves.

As they piled more warm living shells on top of me, I realized that my time in the Brick House had not ended. This was where it really began.

I have been "awake" for twelve hours. I have eaten Thai food. I read a novel by John Barnes, about people having their personalities replaced by synthetic ideas. I have kissed my wife many times and told her I love her. It's raining and chilly outside. All of this could go away at any moment. I'm talking to friends on the west coast on the computer. All of this could go away at any moment. They could go away at any moment. You think you're reading this, but you could go away at any moment.

The Brick House will always be there, waiting for me.