A river loomed. Terse whitewater. It moved steadily and powerfully -- It was coherent, lacking the random plosives and misdirected washes of more violent siblings. A broad geometry of motion defining its own anti-equilibrium.
It confused him. It was above him, sometimes angled behind his head, sometimes angled in front, which didn't make sense since it was a river. He rolled his eyes up to see it while heading and stumbling towards it, reaching out with one arm, not aware of his other, feeling a queasy undulating low frequency in his gut approaching but not reaching audibility, a motion sickness. The river's straightness was geologically defined and immobile, but individual segments still seemed to bend out and back in, kinetically, at random points in random intervals, like watching the moving impression of an invisible ball rolling over a sheet. Sometimes the entire river wobbled like a rubber pencil illusion.
He realized he wasn't moving, had never been moving. More to the point, he realized he was rolling, not walking. Rolling on his side, then his back, then returning to his stomach, and doing it with no pattern he could sense, ultimately pivoting in the same spot, not going anywhere. And there was blood. He moved his chin down and no longer saw the river but instead saw blood. On him, on the ground, blood. He kind of sighed, kind of moaned, and raised his chin again to see the river, his arm still stretched.
There was no chance he'd get to it. He understood yet could not let go, the river a single need disabling his connection to the alarm and crisis assaulting his awareness. A focal distraction from the certainty of his death as now confirmed as the certainty of his existing. Struggling even as he knew he'd do no more than roll in place. His mental redirection the only comfort available, a psychic self-medication, minimal primal comfort in the negative space born of false hope, in which he can at least not feel absolute despair.
The inaudible queasiness started verging on sound. Low amplitude low frequency sine waves of pain. Logarithmic cycles whose peaks pushed against pain, a balled fist momentarily pushing against thin rubber, slightly protruding into the stretched material, then receding. The cycles remained fairly steady and slow, a comfortable, unrushed pace. But the tension was slowly, just perceptibly ramping with each cycle, an organic parallax towards volume, each cycle stretching towards an horizon gradually closer yet still moving out of reach, stress still subsonic. It ramped up so slowly that he should have needed many more generations before noticing, but he had little to distract him. So he noticed. He noticed with renewed alertness on each pass. A vibrating awareness buzzing and skimming and sparking with each upgrade of each peak, the fist's protrusion stretching his threshold thinner, the pain intensifying with each pass, the fist's imprint now never fully fading even at the anti-peaks, the motion never fully ceasing.
And he waited. And it tortured him. He starting dealing and begging for the next wave to finally arrive, since arriving was the only way for it to finally pass. Knowing the irrationality of it, since he knew a worse one would follow, but still pleading for the swelling to peak, no matter how bad, so he could have the descending relief now, so now would be ok, because he only cared about now, only now, knowing now would be followed by worse, but having no capacity to care beyond now.
And his awareness shifted for a moment when he realized it had been silent around him, and because it had been so silent he didn't realize it was silent, hearing had been cypher, a concept that didn't exist. It emerged again into his awareness because the low frequency was starting to resonate. The same fist trying to tear through his threshold membrane started modulating white noise, and each peak brought a new, more intense swell of aural awareness, the white noise fading in and out, its filter and veiled screech matching its volume, starting black. Then brown. Then brick, then pink then white. Then white. Then white. Then pink. Then brick, then brown then black.
And with each cycle the fist pushed into his threshold deeper and longer. The pace picking up while meeting dynamically adjusting resistance, a near stasis being won by the progression of pain. The pace adjusting faster based on some unrecognizable impatience, a feedback of pace feeding impatience feeding pace feeding impatience. Feeding a sense of rolling over himself vertically, which he knew wasn't happening, yet experiencing the inertia of flipping forward and over in an antigravity field, even as he knew he was still laying on the ground rolling on his side.
With his vision snowing out. At first slight pinpoint sparkling on the surface of his eyeballs like distant interstellar explosions. As the thrusts increased, so did the intensity and heuristics. From discreet sparkles to banded beacons to brilliantly dithered streams to devastatingly white clouds with no definition, three dimensional and material, the phases of snow cycling up and down in complete sync with the noise and undulating nausea, a multimedia spectacular of base discomfort and pain.
He stopped begging over the cycles. He saw past them. Their comparatively mild origins had distracted him, kept him in a profound immaturity that only let him see the now. Their growth facilitated his own new found omniscience, forcing his focus so deep into them and their physics that his consciousness condensed into critical mass density and blew back and out, and he saw their end game. He discovered their strategy.
He started demanding (and knowing his demands were impotent with no power and no authority) that their final act -- the puncture -- finally arrive. Eternity ceased and nothing would matter until the moment the fist finally ripped through his threshold. And small tears in the threshold coming and growing into larger tears with the continually more frequent and deep cycles concentrating white noise and white vision and white body buzz and brown gut undulation into ever-multiplying companion shards of awareness within the larger enveloping wash and flow.
The cycles and wash and flow and shards and impotent demands and rips and tears and fists and blood lost their clock and started phasing, creating ceaseless, undulating blankets, syncopation of activity always in motion, with extra chirps and squelches of pain as unanticipated resonances gathered and dissipated and cycles amplified to the point of clipping, and the fist and noise no longer proceeded and retreated but just proceeded, and the tears gathered, and the distortion and insane kinetic electricity started expanding exponentially in all directions, and white is white is white, shades and points of white, but all white, there are no senses, no activities of time, just a universe of physics within white, all possible events, all possible thoughts, all possible pain, all white, the fist and its success gone and never was in the instance of success and corrupted and consumed by the gaping puncture it facilitated and the floor of white rising against the ceiling of white, shades shifting into white and white shifting into white and the illusion of not white shifting into white and white as infinite as white and white and a void and white.