HOME | DD

Description
       At the end of my search there was a Frenchman named Claude.  He told me in a stiff tone (every word spoken in roundabout code) that his daughter could help me; she dabbled in this sort of thing, and she was good at what she did.  He left the bar before I did, directions to their little hovel hastily scrawled on a napkin left crumpled against my glass.  I finished the sludgy, bitter drink I had ordered, and wobbled back home to Kurt.
       I told him, in whispered tones too low to be heard by anyone listening, about the girl.  I trembled as I spoke, my fingers dancing like twitchy spiders against his hip as I leaned in close.  He humored me – listening quietly, his eyes never moving from the sleepy static winding its way across the television screen.  I twisted my fingers into his belt loop when I was done, staring up at him with an excited grin.
       "That," he said in an equally quiet voice, "Is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard."
       I assured him it would be worth it.
       "You," his words came out even lower this time as he finally tore his eyes from the screen to look at me, "are going to get killed."
       Kurt's monotonous pleas fell deaf against my ears.  He was the solid part of my life – unchanging, always following the rules – and he tried to keep me in line.  But this time there would be nothing he could say to stop me, no amount of begging to change my mind.  I rested my head on his shoulder, and we watched in silence as the spiraling black-and-white snow blew across the screen of the old television, turning into white noise before it reached the speakers.

       I reached Claude's house around midday, when the clouds were heavier and the dust in the air swirled in an entirely poetic sort of way.  Life was all back-and-white now.  Some scientists, working for the government, had made it that way.  They decided that living in a world where color affected us humans in so many adverse ways, when it caused so much conflict and anger… well, it was just a bad idea.  So we all got surgery.  We all had chips put into our heads, little tiny things that blinked light off and on.  You could see them just behind your ear, just deep enough under your skin that you couldn't see their exact shape, but superficial enough to see the dim light, the tiny rectangle pushing up out of your skin.  You could see the tiny wire going up, over, and just under your brow.
The little building Claude called a house was far from the glaring light of the city, set far out in a little field along a dirt road.  I ran my hand over the chest-high hedge of alternating light and dark leaves that guarded his little mailbox like a castle gate.  He was sitting on an old light wicker chair, smoking a pipe and looking entirely picturesque.  I offered him a halfhearted wave, which he returned in an equally halfhearted manner.  He stood to greet me, and as I tripped over the crooked cobblestone path to his front porch, he called for his daughter in French.
       Chartreuse came from somewhere around the side of the house.  She was a tall, thin young woman dressed in stained overalls and not much else.  She had a gentle oval face inlaid with a splash of dark freckles across her button nose, and over her eyelids.  Her hair was dark, and pulled awkwardly around the back of her head.  She snapped a brusque reply to her father – more words I couldn't understand – and bounded up to the porch, crossing her arms over her narrow chest and eyeing me as Claude spoke to me again.
       "You go with her now, Miss Bogen" was his only brusque direction before he turned away from us both to stare once again out at the vast expanse of colorless field.
       I couldn't tell you what the inside of the little house looked like.  That part of my experience is blurred and morphed with the anticipation of what was to come.  I remember pale, lacey curtains, and light from the open windows reclining in lazy patterns across dark rooms.  But I remember with distinct clarity the Salles des Arc en Ciel – what Chartreuse told me in a soft, bemused tone meant "The Rainbow Room".
       The Rainbow Room was small and square.  The one window in the room was covered with a thick piece of dark cloth, making the only source of light a small, pale bubble fixture clinging to the middle of the ceiling.  It was quiet and completely empty, aside from a small computer and something obscured by a blanket in the middle of the room.  Chartreuse instructed me to go sit next to them, and I complied sheepishly.  She turned off the lights and came to sit across from me, the computer and the blanket between us.  The computer was turned on, and for a moment she said nothing to me as she sat there, cross-legged in front of the screen, wiggling one bare foot.  I sat there in the dark, waiting silently for Chartreuse to finish whatever it was that she was doing.  I stared at the covered window in a mindless haze until I realized that Chartreuse was leaning towards me, brandishing a small computer cable inches from my nose.  I nearly fell backwards as I tried instinctively to get away.  She only laughed at me.
       "Come here, I have to plug you in."
       She didn't explain what she was doing, the entire time.  Her hands – and the cord – disappeared around the side of my head.   I felt them pushing into the little square protuberance behind my ear, felt the pressure and the pinching as tiny prongs bit into my skin.  I squeezed my eyes shut against the digging pain.  Then flesh gave way, and she announced to me that I was, in fact, 'plugged in'.  She told me not to open my eyes.
       "I'm going to plug in, too.  Just keep them shut until I tell you to open them."
       Her fingers sped audibly across the keyboard, and then there was silence.  I heard fabric being pulled away, and a click.
       "Regen.  Open your eyes."
       When the light hit my eyes, I couldn't speak.  The blanket piled up in the middle of the floor had been pulled away, to reveal a spinning light machine that cast orbs of color across the walls and ceiling.  For a moment I was silent, my system in a state of complete sensory overload.  They were different shades of light, but they were more than just dark and light – they were deep, they were wide, they were long and tall and close and far.  Some felt like the loud blast of sound from a trumpet, some like the deep vibrato notes of a cello.  There were colors that felt like they could be the warmth of the sun as it set, or the rush of wind through trees.  Chartreuse gave these strange images names for me:  yellow, purple, orange, green.  There were red and blue, pink and black and white.  There was indigo, magenta, cyan, crimson, and of course, chartreuse.
       She pressed a little white capsule in my hand and suggested I take it.  I did so almost without thinking, and for twenty minutes or so, she went on, naming color after color after color.  When she finally stopped speaking, the colors had changed.  They shifted from being definitive orbs of light to abstract shapes, melting down the walls, twisting in jagged patterns across the ceiling.  What were circles were now spots and swirls and lines and zig-zags, all bursting forth like flame, twisting like leaves in the wind.  They curled into themselves and became new colors entirely, they split and divided like fireworks.
       Everything slid and blurred when I moved my head.  I looked at Chartreuse to ask her what was wrong with my vision.  No words escaped my throat, as I found myself suddenly and completely captivated by her face.  Her eyes were a pale, glowing green that I had seen writhing in wild, wormy shapes across the ceiling.  Her skin was a color I hadn't seen in the lights roaming the walls; it was a color that was thick, heavy, smoky.  It was peaceful and deep, and there were darker spots of it marking her nose.  Unable to stop myself, I touched her cheek.  My hand was the same color as hers, but shades and shades lighter.  She smiled at me.  Her lips were bright pink, and like a child mesmerized by a shiny gem, I couldn't resist touching them.
       Suddenly she kissed me, and captivated by the colors of her face, I was unable to resist.  I tugged at the straps of her grey overalls, feeling that nothing so bland and colorless should ever cover skin so full of life.  She held me and I her, and the colors flew and roared like wind across our faces and over our heads.
       For several hours we stayed in the Rainbow Room, and when it began to get dark outside, Chartreuse turned off the swirling light machine and ripped the heavy curtain away from the window.  The pink, orange, yellow, purple and blue of the sunset crawled madly into the room, distorting the colors of the walls and our hands.  I hardly noticed that I had fallen asleep until I was awoken by the angry voices of men.
       I heard Claude's deep bass, words indistinguishable from the forceful cries of the other men.  Chartreuse reached for me and ripped the cord out of my head, plunging me back into a world of cold black and white.  We made for the window, but it was too late.  A crowd of men in police uniforms crashed through the door, tearing us back inside by our waists.  I screamed, Chartreuse screamed, we could still hear Claude screaming from outside.  They dragged us through the house, out into the still-grey front yard, towards great black vans.  I struggled as hard as I could, screaming and crying, reaching for Chartreuse.  She reached for me, her own blood-curdling shrieks matching mine in volume.  Then she was thrust into the back of a van, and I did not see her again.
       I scratched, I kicked, I tried to bite.  I did anything and everything I could think of to escape the men that were taking us away.  I managed to grab onto the side of the van, and held on with as much strength as I could muster.  I looked for Claude, crying for him to help his daughter, to help me.  I searched wildly with my eyes the front of the house, and was silenced for but a moment when I saw who stood on the front porch.
       Kurt was speaking to two of the men in uniforms.  His face was calm, untroubled.  His hands were tucked into his pockets, and he shrugged casually when they addressed him.  I screamed his name, howling words that were hardly words.  I swore, I pleaded, even started to babble words that were not words at all in my hysterics.  He merely glanced at me, and then away again.  Still screaming, the men threw me into the back of a van, and the grey of the world was enveloped in darkness as the doors slammed shut.

Description
       At the end of my search there was a Frenchman named Claude.  He told me in a stiff tone (every word spoken in roundabout code) that his daughter could help me; she dabbled in this sort of thing, and she was good at what she did.  He left the bar before I did, directions to their little hovel hastily scrawled on a napkin left crumpled against my glass.  I finished the sludgy, bitter drink I had ordered, and wobbled back home to Kurt.
       I told him, in whispered tones too low to be heard by anyone listening, about the girl.  I trembled as I spoke, my fingers dancing like twitchy spiders against his hip as I leaned in close.  He humored me – listening quietly, his eyes never moving from the sleepy static winding its way across the television screen.  I twisted my fingers into his belt loop when I was done, staring up at him with an excited grin.
       "That," he said in an equally quiet voice, "Is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard."
       I assured him it would be worth it.
       "You," his words came out even lower this time as he finally tore his eyes from the screen to look at me, "are going to get killed."
       Kurt's monotonous pleas fell deaf against my ears.  He was the solid part of my life – unchanging, always following the rules – and he tried to keep me in line.  But this time there would be nothing he could say to stop me, no amount of begging to change my mind.  I rested my head on his shoulder, and we watched in silence as the spiraling black-and-white snow blew across the screen of the old television, turning into white noise before it reached the speakers.

       I reached Claude's house around midday, when the clouds were heavier and the dust in the air swirled in an entirely poetic sort of way.  Life was all back-and-white now.  Some scientists, working for the government, had made it that way.  They decided that living in a world where color affected us humans in so many adverse ways, when it caused so much conflict and anger… well, it was just a bad idea.  So we all got surgery.  We all had chips put into our heads, little tiny things that blinked light off and on.  You could see them just behind your ear, just deep enough under your skin that you couldn't see their exact shape, but superficial enough to see the dim light, the tiny rectangle pushing up out of your skin.  You could see the tiny wire going up, over, and just under your brow.
The little building Claude called a house was far from the glaring light of the city, set far out in a little field along a dirt road.  I ran my hand over the chest-high hedge of alternating light and dark leaves that guarded his little mailbox like a castle gate.  He was sitting on an old light wicker chair, smoking a pipe and looking entirely picturesque.  I offered him a halfhearted wave, which he returned in an equally halfhearted manner.  He stood to greet me, and as I tripped over the crooked cobblestone path to his front porch, he called for his daughter in French.
       Chartreuse came from somewhere around the side of the house.  She was a tall, thin young woman dressed in stained overalls and not much else.  She had a gentle oval face inlaid with a splash of dark freckles across her button nose, and over her eyelids.  Her hair was dark, and pulled awkwardly around the back of her head.  She snapped a brusque reply to her father – more words I couldn't understand – and bounded up to the porch, crossing her arms over her narrow chest and eyeing me as Claude spoke to me again.
       "You go with her now, Miss Bogen" was his only brusque direction before he turned away from us both to stare once again out at the vast expanse of colorless field.
       I couldn't tell you what the inside of the little house looked like.  That part of my experience is blurred and morphed with the anticipation of what was to come.  I remember pale, lacey curtains, and light from the open windows reclining in lazy patterns across dark rooms.  But I remember with distinct clarity the Salles des Arc en Ciel – what Chartreuse told me in a soft, bemused tone meant "The Rainbow Room".
       The Rainbow Room was small and square.  The one window in the room was covered with a thick piece of dark cloth, making the only source of light a small, pale bubble fixture clinging to the middle of the ceiling.  It was quiet and completely empty, aside from a small computer and something obscured by a blanket in the middle of the room.  Chartreuse instructed me to go sit next to them, and I complied sheepishly.  She turned off the lights and came to sit across from me, the computer and the blanket between us.  The computer was turned on, and for a moment she said nothing to me as she sat there, cross-legged in front of the screen, wiggling one bare foot.  I sat there in the dark, waiting silently for Chartreuse to finish whatever it was that she was doing.  I stared at the covered window in a mindless haze until I realized that Chartreuse was leaning towards me, brandishing a small computer cable inches from my nose.  I nearly fell backwards as I tried instinctively to get away.  She only laughed at me.
       "Come here, I have to plug you in."
       She didn't explain what she was doing, the entire time.  Her hands – and the cord – disappeared around the side of my head.   I felt them pushing into the little square protuberance behind my ear, felt the pressure and the pinching as tiny prongs bit into my skin.  I squeezed my eyes shut against the digging pain.  Then flesh gave way, and she announced to me that I was, in fact, 'plugged in'.  She told me not to open my eyes.
       "I'm going to plug in, too.  Just keep them shut until I tell you to open them."
       Her fingers sped audibly across the keyboard, and then there was silence.  I heard fabric being pulled away, and a click.
       "Regen.  Open your eyes."
       When the light hit my eyes, I couldn't speak.  The blanket piled up in the middle of the floor had been pulled away, to reveal a spinning light machine that cast orbs of color across the walls and ceiling.  For a moment I was silent, my system in a state of complete sensory overload.  They were different shades of light, but they were more than just dark and light – they were deep, they were wide, they were long and tall and close and far.  Some felt like the loud blast of sound from a trumpet, some like the deep vibrato notes of a cello.  There were colors that felt like they could be the warmth of the sun as it set, or the rush of wind through trees.  Chartreuse gave these strange images names for me:  yellow, purple, orange, green.  There were red and blue, pink and black and white.  There was indigo, magenta, cyan, crimson, and of course, chartreuse.
       She pressed a little white capsule in my hand and suggested I take it.  I did so almost without thinking, and for twenty minutes or so, she went on, naming color after color after color.  When she finally stopped speaking, the colors had changed.  They shifted from being definitive orbs of light to abstract shapes, melting down the walls, twisting in jagged patterns across the ceiling.  What were circles were now spots and swirls and lines and zig-zags, all bursting forth like flame, twisting like leaves in the wind.  They curled into themselves and became new colors entirely, they split and divided like fireworks.
       Everything slid and blurred when I moved my head.  I looked at Chartreuse to ask her what was wrong with my vision.  No words escaped my throat, as I found myself suddenly and completely captivated by her face.  Her eyes were a pale, glowing green that I had seen writhing in wild, wormy shapes across the ceiling.  Her skin was a color I hadn't seen in the lights roaming the walls; it was a color that was thick, heavy, smoky.  It was peaceful and deep, and there were darker spots of it marking her nose.  Unable to stop myself, I touched her cheek.  My hand was the same color as hers, but shades and shades lighter.  She smiled at me.  Her lips were bright pink, and like a child mesmerized by a shiny gem, I couldn't resist touching them.
       Suddenly she kissed me, and captivated by the colors of her face, I was unable to resist.  I tugged at the straps of her grey overalls, feeling that nothing so bland and colorless should ever cover skin so full of life.  She held me and I her, and the colors flew and roared like wind across our faces and over our heads.
       For several hours we stayed in the Rainbow Room, and when it began to get dark outside, Chartreuse turned off the swirling light machine and ripped the heavy curtain away from the window.  The pink, orange, yellow, purple and blue of the sunset crawled madly into the room, distorting the colors of the walls and our hands.  I hardly noticed that I had fallen asleep until I was awoken by the angry voices of men.
       I heard Claude's deep bass, words indistinguishable from the forceful cries of the other men.  Chartreuse reached for me and ripped the cord out of my head, plunging me back into a world of cold black and white.  We made for the window, but it was too late.  A crowd of men in police uniforms crashed through the door, tearing us back inside by our waists.  I screamed, Chartreuse screamed, we could still hear Claude screaming from outside.  They dragged us through the house, out into the still-grey front yard, towards great black vans.  I struggled as hard as I could, screaming and crying, reaching for Chartreuse.  She reached for me, her own blood-curdling shrieks matching mine in volume.  Then she was thrust into the back of a van, and I did not see her again.
       I scratched, I kicked, I tried to bite.  I did anything and everything I could think of to escape the men that were taking us away.  I managed to grab onto the side of the van, and held on with as much strength as I could muster.  I looked for Claude, crying for him to help his daughter, to help me.  I searched wildly with my eyes the front of the house, and was silenced for but a moment when I saw who stood on the front porch.
       Kurt was speaking to two of the men in uniforms.  His face was calm, untroubled.  His hands were tucked into his pockets, and he shrugged casually when they addressed him.  I screamed his name, howling words that were hardly words.  I swore, I pleaded, even started to babble words that were not words at all in my hysterics.  He merely glanced at me, and then away again.  Still screaming, the men threw me into the back of a van, and the grey of the world was enveloped in darkness as the doors slammed shut.