Chapter 1: This Damned Timer in my Brain

They exist among us in secret. Their ancient war has spilled across the borders into our world, and what passed for blood from their undying energies inked the provisions for a halfhearted truce. They are the two great primal forces; the superpowers of the afterlife. One spawned by light, the other by darkness. One tasked with repurposing everlasting souls into mortal shells, the other with banishing them into a perfect, lightless prison.

They come in many forms but all of them discreet, misleading. Some mortals regard them as angels. Others worship them as gods of destiny. All reduce them into familiar myth and superstition to dull the world-shattering implications of their existence. Ultimately, the two warring camps take their most consistent and harmless forms: stalwart storks and ravenous ravens. Any human word or symbol would be a cliché because they’re as familiar as the laws of physics or the number of fingers on one’s hand. The true mistake is man’s habit to value one to the exclusion of the other. Because the two forces necessitate each other, they’re two sides of the same supernatural coin.

Who would believe the truth even if it stared them in the face? Many choose to ignore it, content to live in the safety of lies, the delusion of control. Mortals find comfort in the belief that they devise their own fate and pass time at their own steady pace. Yet deep down they know they’re merely sojourners from this realm to the next. Behind every wall and through every crack, other worlds exist beyond the senses. Parallel to the human dimension and in perfect opposition lie two realms: Helium, kingdom of the Balloon Man and the great white Storks, and Soul City, dungeon city of the Grim Reaper and his insatiable Ravens.

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There are several layers to true darkness. It’s like when you go freediving and the transparent, color-tinged water gets bluer and bluer the farther down you go, to a perfect violet shade. You’re an insignificant speck and the single breath you hold in your lungs is the only thing that prevents you from becoming one with the bleak, eerie, Godforsaken landscape. It’s at that point right before pitch-blackness when you realize you’ve already ceased to exist.

My name is Janet Buenviaje. I was born one day in October. One day, pick any day. I was abandoned on the porch of a children’s home when I was just a few days old so nobody really knows the exact date. My first name supposedly means “God’s gracious gift” but, as it turns out, I’m His unwanted gift. My family name is just as full of irony but it’s not worth ranting about because it was just the name of the children’s home where I grew up: Nuestra Señora de la Buen Viaje.

Withdrawal’s weird. All I need to do is get up from this foldable camping chair on the porch where I’ve been sitting all night philosophizing about the universe and my place in it, but standing up feels like way too much trouble when you weigh it against the alternative of non-existence. This is what happens when I run out of vortioxetine. I turn into a puddle of anxiety. Add to that my latent psychic talents and you’ve got the perfect condition for nightmares.

Did I say nightmares? That isn’t accurate because in fact there’s just the one and it’s always been the same. Nightmare, vision, whatever you want to call it. I know its peaks and valleys like the back of my hand.

First, there’s the strange room whose walls are covered from floor to ceiling with computer monitors. With a steady, almost insectile hum, the hard drives fire data at the speed of light, tallying mutations in sequences of genetic codes. Infinite strings of destinies. A voice whispers distinctly: {Lachesis}, the name of one of the three personifications of fate in Greek mythology. Then I’m whisked away into the post-Apocalyptic ruins of the world. Every grain and chunk of rubble littered as far as the eye can see echoes the entomo-mechanical buzz of the supercomputers. Amid all this chaos, a solitary figure walks wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a black gown. He appears human except that instead of a face, he has a raptor’s beak.

The whole thing ends with the ravaged land growing wings and rising as a flock of angry blackbirds, all determined to blot out the heavens in both shape and sound. And it’s always at this point I wake invariably soaked in cold sweat.

The bad dream is a fairly recent affliction, as though it was triggered like an alarm, pre-programmed in ever crescendoing intensity. But I’ve known its chilling soundtrack ever since I was a teen. The noise has hung around me like a shroud and I didn’t use to mind it so much when I was younger. Now it seems like I was ever only this bisexual metalhead who couldn’t function without meds, who’d drown out the tinnitus with constant noise, who couldn’t go to sleep without loud music blaring in the background and who’d wake up as soon as it turned off. That was the kind of person I’ve been, always wired and restless inside.

I can count on one hand all the times I’ve been free of this curse. The first was when I lay in bed with Marisol and listened to her whispered secrets. Sol; living, breathing, all-natural white noise machine. The first time I made love to her, everything fell into a deep hush. I caught a spell of peace, too, when I moved here to Concepcion, a tiny seaside village in Southern Luzon, where the air’s salty and fresh and the people still haven’t been tainted by materialism and greed. Once a week, Sol takes a drive from her work and friends in the capital to my self-imposed exile down here in the province.

As a docile public-school teacher, I teach Math and a bit of guitar. The second is unofficial and the first is the more sensible foundation of my musical proclivities. Don’t freak out but the truth is, I see the world in completely different lights; in shapes and angles, in fractals and pixels. When it comes to metal music, I’m completely self-taught. I mastered the guitar just as soon as I picked it up. As it turned out, I can break music down to its core components and find structure. Humans react to harmonious frequencies and progression based on preset logic relations inside our brains, and something that jars against logic jars to the ears. Even the much-maligned growl of heavy metal requires traditional vocal techiques. As the lead singer of the now-defunct gothic metal band Eve Serrated (formerly just Serrated), I was also interviewed once by a Music major whose thesis was about exploring the correlation between classical music and heavy metal.    

My students are the teen children of hick fishermen and tenant farmers. Around these parts, they have plenty of sugar canes to practice counting on. Money not so much. Even the fishermen’s catch is dwindling. The mackerel scad, once dubbed “the poor man’s fish”, has become a luxury on the dining table. My teen students’ stutter and abysmal self-esteem were what necessitated our foray into music and the guitar.

I remember the day I arrived and the first time I saw the sea up close. It lay just beyond the welcoming smile of Mrs. Salas, the thin school principal who constantly exudes this aura of frayed elegance. I hastily excused myself and couldn’t help laughing as the surf rushed and drenched my jeans. Its roar and rhythm felt all wrong when in fact it was my own senses that had been set to the unnatural beat of the city. A lullaby as I lie in bed at night or a blanket of silence in my many dives, the music of the sea had never failed to soothe me since.

Until last week.

The drone of Hell’s supercomputers came back with a vengeance. Pretty soon, I was back inside the suffocating shroud of their noise. God help me but I’ve finally figured out what it all means. All those years of auditory torment have helped me piece together my tinnitus’s dark import. Like a superfluous and cruel joke of fate, I know exactly what death sounds like. Can you believe it? The first part of the vision that plagues my sleep? The otherworldly supercomputers record the accumulation of damages to the genetic code of every human being. In other words, the noise I’m hearing is a biological countdown to expiration. The mass expiration of EVERY living soul on the planet.  

The second segment of the dream is much harder to interpret. But an unholy feeling in the pit of my stomach tells me it’s a darkness no human mind is ever meant to fathom.