Chapter 1: Hallways Within

[Heyoka note: What follows is the beginning of a prose narrative drafted with Montauk's support to reflect true autobiographical narratives of his life. Specific changes and redactions are made for personal protective reasons. It is also a reflection of what common experiences and trials we have shared.]



Here is what folks won’t tell you about other people's thoughts.

They’re loud, and they’ve got weight.

Not the quaint philosophical weight of a tautology, not the borrowed gravity of someone else's clever figure of speech nestling in astute ears. It’s tangible, molecular weight. The kind that presses against the underside of your eyes like a thumb finding the soft hollow at the back of an orbital socket, which – if you let it – could push through.

Picture the brain: yours, anyone’s, it doesn’t matter whose. At its core, it’s a small, fragile clump of wetware sealed within a terrarium, generating heat that it inevitably cannot keep. It bleeds signal. Twenty watts of electrochemical mythos unfolding in cascading patterns, and the skull is not a vault, but a lampshade.

You are sitting inside a restaurant where each table has its own candle, and every candle is screaming in a different frequency. With enough concentration, you can hear all of them somewhere behind your ears.

Call it a déjà vu, or kindred anemoia, if you wish. For most people, the leaked neural whispers arrive dulled as mere mood, as atmosphere. You walk into a room where two people have just been fighting and taste copper on the back of your tongue, a quiet malice still gripping the vacated surroundings. You stand beside a blind woman who weeps quietly on a subway platform and – for no reason you can defend – your sternum fills with an ache that doesn't belong to you. It’s just ‘intuitive empathy’. You write these sensations off as barometric pressure and go home.

Nevertheless, energy cannot be created or destroyed, it is simply transferred. The loudness of a billion action potentials, rallying through oscillating circuits, persists. in their symphonic ensemble, the crux of an entire person is carried outward. Released, as promised, and received within the architecture of the self that lacks a name. Naming it would require one to admit it exists.

For most, it is invisible. For Sonny, it was something else entirely. For him, the candles had faces, and those faces had him.

He called it The Fire, because it came the way fire comes: without warning. It’s suddenly present in your curtains, your furniture, your carefully cultivated domestic arrangement of self, all of it engulphed and consumed before you can even muster a scream. He'd learned not to scream.
Instead, he sings.



The Parkway Shore veterinary clinic at 11:55 PM smells the way all institutional buildings smell once thinned of humans: antiseptic over fear-musk. A bright chemical falseness of pine-scented cleaner spritzed over the older, more honest smell beneath, that of creatures who cannot deceive us about what they are.

Sonny Volero shuffles his mop bucket down Lower Ground Corridor B, annunciating his proceedings with the faint squeal of an askew wheel – and trying very, very hard not to sing.

The mop handle is worn smooth in the exact spot his palms fit. He knows this handle; he and it share an understanding. He leans into it slightly and the wheels of the bucket croon again, pitching ever so subtly melodically and, oh – now that’s dangerous. That is how it–

“Don't.”

He silently mouths the word to himself, a painstakingly trained disciplinary crack.

His reflection slides and warps in the wet linoleum ahead of him: an elongated lanky frame, which casts a wiry shadow punctured by amber eyes that hold something so feverish they glow a dim orange. The overhead fluorescents give his pale skin the translucent quality of something fished up from a cold depth. He wears fingerless black gloves and a stock-issue, duck-egg-green facility polo that's two sizes too large, with blue nitrile gloves over the fingerless ones as he'd needed to empty the sharps earlier and never got around to swapping back. A 35-year-old, six-foot-three mass of janitor who would, under different circumstances, look ridiculous. He still looks ridiculous. He has made peace with this.

The Fire burns low tonight: a tempered smolder. The caged animals held in the overnight ward are quelled, laying either sedated or asleep. Their slow dreaming pressing against him like warm palms tightly enwrapping glass. A bird whose benzodiazepine cocktail renders its plexus a vast dessert plane of flat plateaus; a cat’s anxious discontentment flicking through in strobing, electrical fragments which make the edge of Sonny’s vision tick like a clock’s second-hand. A dog deep in chase, the shapes of it joyful and simple, all grass-smell and the rubbery cartilage taste of the thing in its mouth. He breathes through it, steady and rehearsed. Holds it at arm's length the way you’d hold a picture-frame to gauge its proportions before committing with the nail.

In the break room at the end of the hall, a sharp effervescence sparks with needle-pricks cutting through the miasmic musings: someone left the radio on. The radio is, by significant margin, the worst thing that can happen to Sonny.

033 009N 004W… 033 ‘CALLING SIT. STOP. FIND REPRIEVE.’

His internal monologue punches the thought in some register humming beneath language, some stratified computation that predates whatever he became after becoming, echoing through a decades-large hole in personhood. He doesn't know why he thinks in these fragments sometimes, in perforating clusters of notations that feel less like thought and more like the remnant syntax of his machine code. He doesn't examine it. Examination is a door, and he keeps this behind deadbolts.

He swivels before reaching the break room. Takes the long corridor instead. Past the recovery cages, past the equipment room, past the closed surgical suite. The surgical suite light is on, its thin gold seam glinting from under the door into his eyes.

Odd. It was off at nine o'clock during his first pass. He slows inquisitively and The Fire picks up a notch.

Not with the stereotypical danger-pitch it spikes to when pre-empting something violent, that hot iron taste it develops, the way the visions cluster in from the periphery like pedestrians pressing toward tensioned accident scene tape. This is something quieter. A person alone with a task and a grief they are metabolizing through it. He's familiar with that specific frequency. He's broadcast it himself. It has the quality of struck tuning steel: resonantly clean, sustained, kneading the air for a lost harmony.

He knows he shouldn't linger yet persists anyway. He knows because The Fire wants him to. For all the problems it has caused him, it has never once steered him toward something unremarkable.

He leans his mop against the wall and crouches to refasten his already secured left shoelace. He attempts this with the focused intentionality of a man who absolutely belongs in a corridor at midnight and is certainly not eavesdropping.



Inside the surgical suite, Amelia Wren's hands work steady. This is not an achievement. This is discipline, meaning she has fought them for it.

The rabbit's name was Sniffles; right now, Sniffles is a limply contorted mass growing rigid in a sealed biohazard bag within the cold cabinet. Amelia has taken that fact and folded it away, the way you roughly fold something too large for its container -- poorly, with the corners sticking out. She's arranged this somewhere behind her molars where her jaw can clamp it. The mournful center in her brain that spent hours scanning Sniffles’ small body is now dedicated entirely to her practice sutures. She scrutinizes the needle driver and angle of entry, how the tension should be taut, should be constant, as she works the interrupted pattern through the pig skin practice pad. Pig skin stays just as it looks in the medical catalogue. It doesn’t bleed, shift to a hypoxic gray in its periphery and stop responding to stimulation despite all your efforts. It just sits there: patient, inanimate and accepting of her correction.

She's been practicing for forty minutes now.

Before that, she stood frozen in the cold room with one hand on the sealed bag for roughly five minutes, which is long enough to acknowledge something without consenting to feel it. Then she washed her hands, put on a fresh pair of gloves and retrieved the practice pad. It’s a requirement of the field: you build competence out of failure like a mason points mortar into the cracks, until eventually the structure holds.

Her mother would say: ‘offer it up’. Amelia has long since lost interest in offering things upward into the indifferent, transcendental ceiling of a pre-supposed God whose primary feedback mechanism is silence. She instead swallows it inward. Down through the needle and into the pig skin. Into the next suture, tighter, cleaner, the knot properly squared. Amelia Wren, a 29-year-old trainee vet, the daughter of a woman who crossed an ocean and a man who crossed a line and never came back. Five-foot-five in compression socks and scrub-top with an infantile cartoon beagle slapped on the pocket that was on sale when she needed scrubs. Gray-blue eyes which look, in these specific fluorescent lights, as the sky does five minutes before determining upon imminent meteorological calamity. Amelia cuts the suture. Begins again.

The needle driver feels off, thread drifting too far up on the handle which requires re-mounting, and in this small recalibrating shift of her attention she hears it: A stifled sound from the corridor.

Not a patient nor the building's HVAC system murmuring amid industrial insomnia, a person. Someone trying – with visible effort – not to make a noise and losing the argument. Because what is easing through the door and just barely poking the audibility threshold, are the opening bars of something. A bubbly melody, hummed with the suppressed focus of a kettle that has decided not to boil.

“’And bright before I break’, s-she says—"

Amelia sets down her Adson forceps and needle driver. She pulls off her gloves and opens the door.



The figure in the corridor jerks upright from his crouching position with the guilty velocity of someone caught doing something far more incriminating than re-tying shoes. He is very tall and almost ghostly. He has the bewitched eyes of something ripped from folklore tales – a charred amber at the iris like a solar eclipse caught mid-transition. They go wide at the sight of her and then, immediately, the wide crystalizes into something neither recognition nor calm. It is the expression of a person whose internal landscape has just furnished itself with new information and is quietly, rapidly, reconfiguring furniture around it. He is wearing two pairs of gloves. She notices this instantly with the clinical part of her brain that is always on and cataloguing.

He has dark, scruffy hair, slicked into jagged tufts as though haphazardly licked by a doting feline. His skin is peppered with scattered freckles, and his green facility polo has a name tag that reads 'SAL' in letters that have been picked at, like someone has been patiently testing the adhesive’s resolve. There is a mop leaning against the wall behind him with the exhausted posture of a thing that has been leaned many times prior.

She waits. He appears to be locked in some internal negotiation.

"Hey,” he finally says. His rugged voice drops into the doorway like a stone into deep water. It is the kind of voice which suggests that the chest cavity it originates from is exerting great structural overhead to filter it down from its true potential. He quickly clears his throat. Something passes across his race resembling embarrassment or perhaps the effort of containing something far larger which incessantly demands its full wingspan. "L-late."

"It is," Amelia agrees.

"You’re–” He cocks his head toward the surgical suite door. "Were you–" He reads the air, in a way that leaves her with the strangest sensation that he is doing it literally. That he is taking a sample of whatever she has left behind in the room and identifying its components. "Something went wrong in there, huh." He says with the finality that makes it clear this isn’t a question, but a description of what is plain to see.

She looks at him with a soft caution. The animal in her chest which snarls in real feeling – the one that she keeps very thoroughly caged during working hours – flexes once against its bars.

"We lost one." she says flatly, not fond of set-dressing for strangers. "Rabbit. I'm practicing."

"You’re working hard. You’ve gotta – right, practicing." he repeats. Not mockingly. Like he is deciphering if this word fits the shape it describes. "Because–"

"Because if I stop," she asserts, "it stays in my hands."

He flinches but the surrounding unit does not stir. The dog down the hall still dreams its simple green dream. The radio in the break room is playing something she can't quite identify. The immense man in his double gloves is watching her with his impossible eyes, as the corner of his mouth tentatively lock-picks something halfway between a smile and its absence. A kind of careful, open attention that most faces don't hold. A window rather than a wall.

"Yeah." he states, solemnly. "Yeah, I know what that is."

She waits for the ‘but’. For the predictable pivot to comfort. For the well-meaning deployment of optimism as a conversational erasure which masks a ‘please stop bringing reality into this hallway, I have floors to mop’.

It doesn't come.

He just stands before her as she looks at him. And the thing in her chest flexes again, irritated and interested in equal measure.

"I need the suture store," she explains. "I'm almost out of practice pads."

"Oh sure! Yeah, the storage’s down at the end," he says. "I’ve got the key. Don’t fret, I’d gladly let you in!"

She gestures a silent ‘after you’ and he nods affirmatively. Sonny collects his mop with one hand, and they walk together down the hall through the mixing feral darkness and the antiseptic, and at no point does he sing. Privately, she can sense – in a manner beyond explanation or desire to pry – that it costs him something.

Above them, unobserved, the lights flicker once.

The dog in its dream starts to run.