THE WOMB - ANURAG DASGUPTA

The Womb

By Anurag Dasgupta

I can feel the earth around me shake in the darkness. It is cold, colder than the usual set temperature. There has to be something wrong. I look around, trying to focus on to something in the nothingness but I guess we designed this room a little too well. I can see nothing. All I hear are the slight vibrations in the air that rise through the floor of the padded room. I slowly get off the steel and rubber bed and put my feet down on the rubber floor and say“Activate Lights”. I look around the tar colored room while a dim orange light slowly fades into my sight, slightly lighting up the edges of my surroundings. As my eyes get adjusted to the sudden light, I can feel another vibration rise up through the ground, this time, stronger. I cling on tightly to the sides of the bed and sit there waiting for the earthquake to go away. After a while of feeling my insides shake and hearing the sounds of muffled booming vibrations, I walk out of the ‘womb’ into my living room.
In the isolated confines of my cold living room, I realize that the light from the outside world is gray and dark. The weather is much too cold for a usual December winter and the stillness in the air is unnerving. I walk ahead of the table on which photographs of my ex-wife, Natasha and my 5 year old son, Alex are kept framed next to some old pizza boxes, milk cartons, empty packet of cigarettes, one over flowing marble ashtray and some files with papers sticking out of them. I look straight at the window leading into the balcony and see dew clinging on to the surface of the glass which makes it impossible to see clearly what is happening outside. As I walk closer to the balcony door, I feel cold water touching my feet. I think it’s rained really hard and the water has seeped in through the door of the balcony. I unlatch the door and pull the rusty handle to be greeted by a world that I have never felt or seen before.

The world that I know of is finally coming to an end.

There is water till the 30th floor of my 70 storey building. It won’t take very long for the water to reach my 63rd floor. There are people floating face down in the visibly cold water, silent and dead. Fuck! The sight of so many bodies, floating there in the water that has overflowed from the ocean and the sewers makes me realize how insignificant and helpless we are as a race in front of our planet. I look at my watch to see the time. It’s 3 pm? But it’s almost dark. I look up to the sky to see something extraordinary. They sky is covered with clouds. Layers and layers of clouds of gray and black and it looks to me as if there is an electrical storm happening inside them. There is a whirlpool in the sky and I can see a slight hint of warm yellow sunlight getting mixed with the grays which makes that spot in the sky look as if it is on fire. It seems as if the gods are having a war up there in the sky and we humans down here are suffering for it. There are short spurts of lightning inside the cloud that illuminate that small patch of the sky for that fragment of a second.

All my science and all my mantras seemed to me, unable to cope with the basic understanding of this catastrophic situation. This was inevitable; this was something that I had heard about before. How could I, Dr. Edward Irons, a man who has been trying to find ways to travel to different dimensions stated by the string theory, overlook my own dimension and not realize that the end is so near? How the Fuck did I not estimate this? All the money spent on development of research, trips, funding, designing and execution of the ‘womb’ now seemed to have been for nothing. The world will never know what all I know. God damn it. This can’t be the end. There has to be a way.

I walk over to the table where all my files are kept and start going through them. The file for my trip to Tibet is filled with mantras and symbols that I had been using in order to get my physical vibrations to a different plane. ‘Om Mani Padme Hum’ fills most of my pages in different colors.

My idea of combining spirituality with science in order to find pathways in time and space was slowly getting approval within the community, after almost ten years of trying to find a common ground. Finally with the development of string theory, things started to fall in place where the main source for the scientific and spiritual research found its basis in vibrations. I, with the help of some research scientists and psychics, tried to find a way to combine the vibrations of the physical body with the vibrations and frequencies of the mind. This finally led us to the formation of ‘the womb’.

Something is beeping in the room. I trace it to an answering machine with a red blinking light on it. I have 2 messages. One is from Natasha telling me that she is in Egypt with Alex and that she saw the news of the eruption of Yellowstone super volcano on a local news channel. They said that the sudden unexpected explosion has released an immense amount of ash and volcanic gases in the atmosphere which in turn has resulted in the plummeting temperature and heavy rainfall that is extremely poisonous. Air evacuations were taking place in order to take people away from extremely affected areas around five hours ago. She says that she has been trying to call me since the past hour but I didn’t answer so she hopes and wishes that I am safe, far away from harm. I can hear Alex speaking in the back and I feel vulnerable. I can hear his voice getting muffled by Natasha’s voice and slowly from nowhere the static fades in to the sounds replacing their voices and the machine stops working. Nothing electrical in my house is working now. I guess the main fuse has blown. Fuck it’s really cold now. I’m sure it’s 15 degrees below normal. I wish I hadn’t left my jacket up in the cabin last month. I try to rub my arms and hold myself closer to keep myself warm. Fuck! There’s no way for me to leave either. I don’t know if the air rescue will come anymore and there is no way I can travel through this water. Fuck FUCK FUCK! I grab my lone blanket from my bedroom and wrap myself in it. Walk around the room, walk around, move your muscles, become warm, sweat a little, sweat a little…I feel better, I can focus now. I walk out into the balcony and as I reach closer to the door I start hopping a little bit so that my body doesn’t go cold. I rub my arms with my hands inside my blanket as I stand outside in the balcony and look down to see the water.
The fucking water is almost up till the 40th floor. The ocean must be overflowing into the city through the port and the drains. I can imagine a tsunami wreaking my building right now, or a twister that will consume everything around it. A whirlpool also could take out a lot of things.
The rain has been falling continuously and the color of the water is almost black. The sky is dark, covered by layers of ash through which you see slight hints of electrical explosions that light up the sky for a split second.

Is it strange that in all this chaos I still find everything so calmingly beautiful?

I can feel slight vibrations rising through the ground, into my feet, get mixed with my blood stream and send signals to my brain. I shut my balcony door shut and stumble through the room as the earth shakes much more violently than before. I try to find some sort of balance, but everything around me is drowning in darkness. I can hear sounds of glass breaking and utensils falling in the kitchen. I get down on the floor and hold myself. In a fetal position, trying to feel secure, I clench my teeth, I want a cigarette, it calms me down always, I want to drink some brandy to warm myself, and the earthquake comes to a stop. I get up and sit on the floor trying to figure out where I am in the room. I get up and take five steps to my left and am greeted by my alcohol cabinet from where I take out a small bottle of brandy. I walk blinded over the cold white marble floor trying to find the table full of files which also had a packet of cigarettes on it. While walking I step on some small pieces of glass which sting my feet and get stuck into my skin like a giant mosquito that got stuck while drinking blood, just that I’m sure this is more painful. I slowly take the pieces of glass and feel warm blood on my hands. Oh no, it’s the photograph.
Alex.
I wish he was here, my son. I love him so much. I love him.
Stumbling and chucking things about in my frustration and pain I finally find a match which I use to light the stove. I start picking up files from the table and going through them in the light coming from the stove flame.

“The room will be covered in layers of black lead lined sheet rock and above all of that, there will be another thin layer of black sound proofing rubber that will reduce the possibilities of injuries in the darkness. A voice automated light control will also be installed in the room that will enable you…”

That’s the womb folder. Fuck. It took us so long to finally design the room and when it was finally designed we couldn’t find space to make it in, so finally it was put into my house instead of the other bedroom. I pick up another folder.

“The vibrations of the room will slowly adjust to the vibrations and frequencies in your brain which will result in the enlargement of your pineal gland. This in turn triggers off and enhances your perception. The pineal gland is like a gateway through which you can use your subconscious to merge with the conscious and you don’t really realize how much is under your control.”

Control? I spent shit loads of cigarettes, coffee and money on this idea of controlling the travel between dimensions when I couldn’t even come up with a simple way to deal with the end of the world.

The flame from the gas stove starts to decrease. I think the pipes have become cold and because of that the pipeline is freezing. The flame finally comes to an end and then I again sink into darkness.
My legs and hands are shaking and I feel the sweat on my body slowly freezing. I need to keep myself warm. There’s no fire anymore. I’m getting desperate now, I need to survive, and I need to live. What do I do? How do I keep myself warm? What the fuck do I do?

Burn. A voice in my head tells me.

I look around, focusing on the contours of objects in the darkness and start taking things that I think can burn easily and controlled and put it all next to the table. It’s a slow process as I have to feel everything and then take it because all I am relying on is my ear and touch to know what object it really is.
Finally, I think I have something that I can burn now. I’ve taken some of the cushions from the sofa, drawers from the shelf my father in law gifted me, the wooden spoons in the kitchen, some old papers that were kept on the fridge. I take out the box of matches from my pocket and take out a match. I slowly strike the phosphorus head of the matchstick to the friction. A spark escapes the side of the box and I am thrown almost five feet away into the darkness, close to the womb. All of a sudden I can see in the room. The light is coming from a fire that is working in patches across the room. A part of the couch is on fire, the table is on fire, some parts of the floor, the kitchen cabinet, the shelf and as I move back, trying to protect myself, I see that a large sheet of fire is rising up from the floor to the ceiling. It is eating up everything. Fuck. What the fuck do I do? Fuck!!! I must have forgotten to switch off the gas and it must have leaked a little bit at list. Plus, there is all that chemical shit in the air floating.

I run through the smoke and heat and pick up a couple of burning files from the table and run back into the darkness where nothing is burning. While leaving the growing blaze, my blanket catches fire and I fall on the ground, rolling, twisting and turning hoping that it will get over. The fire on the blanket comes to an end while the fire around me starts to engulf me more and more. Fuck! Shit! Fuck! I take off the blanket from me as it’s already got holes and large patches of black on it now. That’s it; I don’t even have my blanket anymore and it’s really not like I need it anyway. I am sweating and chocking in the heat and smoke of the fire that is engulfing my entire living room, things are falling down from the ceiling, sparkling and crackling as they are stimulating the fire even more because the fire feeds off of all of them. I have the files in my hand. The files of my research, my thoughts, what do I do? Leave now?

Fuck. Is this it? My living room is on fire, which will soon engulf the entire house and I have nothing to stop it. I am helpless and nauseous with all the smoke. The water outside is rising every second that I am here. Hopefully the poisoned rain water will kill the fire, but then I’ll have to worry about the water eating up my skin and vaporizing my insides.

WHAT THE FUCK DO I DO? OH GOD…OH MY FUCKING GOD….PLEASE….I DON’T WANT TO DIE…PLEASE…I Don’t Want to die…Oh god…Alex….I love you son….I fall down on the floor and break down. Tears are streaming down my face and I wail like a little child as I feel the fire reach my toes and see my blanket become prey to it just the way a rat becomes a prey to a snake. I inch back slowly, trying to move away from the heat, from the vapors and the smoke, I get up and slowly take steps back…one…two…three…four…five…six…stop…I’ve reached the door to the womb…I find the hand print and retina check areas and see the light on the door get activated. The womb is still alive! Of course! The womb is independent of its surroundings and that is how we have created it. It has its own source of charge and energy that keeps on storing it in a reservoir like battery. I walk inside the womb and say ‘Activate lights’ and a dim light slowly fades into the room, lighting it up. I close the door shut tight so that the fire doesn’t enter through the security of my womb. My womb. I feel safe in here now, I feel protected and calm. The darkness of the room does nothing to cheer me up but then again, all this was our idea so that the room stays as dark as it can during the journey.
The temperature is definitely fucked up because the temperature is colder than the usual, but at least it’s not as cold as before.
Do I lose hope? I have nothing else to do. No one I can call. No one I can speak to, Nowhere to go, nothing to eat, I don’t know what to do. Maybe this is really the end of my life. Maybe I will burn down with my house or just get eaten away by the rain water.

I sit on the bed that is 7 feet by 3 feet and is covered by a layer of black rubber strips that diffuses the sound even further. I open a file that I haven’t read in a long time. It says ‘Balam’ on top.

“I seemed to have been traveling into an alternate reality of space and time. I think the vibrations in my body are finally cooperating with the vibrations of this room that are artificially created while emitting certain shock and radio waves in order to elevate your mind’s frequency range.
Every time I close my eyes and the room starts to vibrate in complete silence and darkness. At first my body feels a little weird, but a point comes when I am completely submerged in it and there is nothing else I can think or feel that time, then after a while of lying still in the silent and dark room, I feel some hands pulling me through an area where leaves are there on the ground and the temperature is high. I cannot see anything as it is dark, but I can hear well. I feel someone’s warm hand guiding me through a place. There is so much noise. So many sounds. I can hear some sort of native tribal tune being played in the distance and people around me talk in a tongue I cannot decipher and then I suffocate for a second and come back into the darkness and stillness of the womb. The womb is a sort of capsule that can be used to travel into a different dimension corresponding to your time and space that every individual being in this dimension has…”

The light in the womb flickers on and off. I am scared now. I wish my mother was here. I’m so scared. She could’ve done something to save me. The light stabilizes itself slowly. I take out another sheet and start reading it.

“ Balam. The boy’s name is Balam. He is a 13 year old Mayan boy according to me and he is meant to be a prophet or healer. The reason I can see nothing when I am instead of him in that dimensions is because he is part of a ritual where the elders tie up the young one’s eyes with 13 bandages right after birth and take them off at the age of 13, one by one, on each lunar night.
I know his name is Balam because I can feel him respond to the sound and also, Balam means ‘jaguar’ in Mayan and it is only right for me to believe that the boy who is considered to become a healer and prophet be called a animal that they consider sacred. The weather is hot where he lives but the fruits are always very tasty and fresh.”

I can smell a little bit of the smoke entering through the door of the womb and the temperature rising.

Zero. Nothing. That’s what is left with me now. All those years of research, all those years of neglecting my wife and my son, all those years of insanity and obsession, now finally comes to a nothing. I’ve failed myself. I have nothing left to do now but wait for my death to slowly creep in and swallow me into it’s deep throat and let me feed off the maggots.

I think of Natasha. I think of our wedding day, our first night, our last night, our fights, our smiles. I miss her.

I think of Alex. His first step, first word, smile towards me, crying, his tantrums and his affection.

I think of Balam. He became a sort of refuge for me. Some sort of an escape that allowed me to enter into a realm and dimension where I was never there. I remember the time where I had to stop going to his dimension because after a point there was no understanding of the self. I was no longer me, I was just Balam and everything I said and heard was through his eyes. Also, there was always a residue that I had after I came back from that dimension. No one really knows how long my session in the womb lasted, but mostly I would still be able to smell or hear some things from that world.

It’s time for me to go. I lie down on the bench and close my eyes. ‘Deactivate lights’ ‘Vibration frequency begin with set 2 and 4’ ‘initialize’.
Slowly I feel my body start to vibrate while my breathing slows down. I can feel a slight pain in my forehead, right between my two eyebrows…the pain gives away to light and the light gives away to a shrill sound…just one note…I’m slipping away….I smell smoke…feel water around me….fuck…the water has risen up to my home and into the womb…I am going to drown….the water is cold…cold…cold....slipping away…feeling warm…cold dirt on feet….feet on earth…earth…earth…

Earth, warm harsh earth I feel under my feet in the jungle. The elders just shook me out of a vision. They just picked me up and shook me.The last strip of the bandage is removed. I try to focus in the darkness. Someone holds me from behind and pushes me towards some sort of candle light. There is a clay tablet kept next to the candle. My eyes start focusing on to the tablet…this is the first thing I have ever seen in my life. An elder named chaac comes and asks “What do you see Balam? What do you see tonight? I look closely at the writings on clay.
“I see the earth spit out fire and ash and dust that will make the waters rise and eat away everything. I see the earth die slowly and painfully while I lie curled up like a fetus in the darkness. I see the end”

End)