Respiration
He couldn’t sleep and didn’t know whose fault it was. It could’ve been the half can of a cool and crisp dark soda an hour before bedtime. It could’ve been refusal to shower after the eight-mile recreational walk taken from mid to late afternoon which left him sticky. It could’ve been that he hadn’t gone to work that day. He’d called out sick even though he wasn’t. There were no extenuating circumstances; it wasn’t even that he hadn’t felt like it. It was like any other morning; the trumpets reminded him that he was a made man—as in determined. It had never bothered him. It gave a sense of peace to know that most decisions were already decided that someone else would use his body so he didn’t have to. It usually felt good to come home, with some money in his pocket, having spent a life’s day on something that he didn’t have to justify to himself because it was useful to someone else. For him it was a means to an end, subsistence as it stood, and for the other it was that which went over and beyond mere maintenance: a flight towards some other realm above eating and drinking and staring at the wall. But he hadn’t made himself useful; he hadn’t been a contributing member; he had called out with no plans or intentions. It did not anger his boss, who couldn’t recall a memory of him ever missing work or even showing up late.
After informing his supervisor that morning, he’d attempted to go back to sleep but instead had laid about with his eyes closed nearly the whole day, hardly thinking. He’d eventually gone on the recreational walk only after his body had gone electric with desire towards movement. It had been pleasant. He’d gotten to look at all the trees and hear the crows and the cardinals and bluebirds. He’d gotten a needed jolt of excitement when a fenced-in dog startled him by running up against a chain-link, probably after his throat. It was a bit ferocious, mouth all frothy. He’d kept its image in his mind as he completed the rest of the walk, wondering why he’d been given a much larger enclosure than the dog. He decided it was because he, unlike the dog, did not have a desire to lunge after others’ throats. When he got back his body was happy and felt spent up and all sticky, but then he was bored. He’d watched the sunset through the window while listlessly eating his easy meal. He liked the way it came over the powerlines, but it wasn’t stimulating, so he just went on to bed.
He hadn’t even thought to bathe until he was well frustrated with not having gone to sleep yet. He was tossing and turning in the bed, appreciating the extent to which his body was sticky, and the stickiness made him feel hotter than he ought’ve, so before he noticed the smoke detector, he’d thrown off all the covers and was laying on his side with his eyes tightly shut from frustration. He opened them at intervals while assuming a different position. The wall, the nightstand, and the ceiling all caught his gaze. He almost fell asleep but awoke disturbed by a strange nascent dream, in which he was walking through a familiar neighborhood in that early morning which is still night. He saw the paper wasps hard at work, flitting back and forth from a tree, climbing in and out of their tight quarters. He thought it strange in the dream—they should’ve been asleep. He kept up his stroll, going nowhere, enjoying the quiet glow of the streetlights. He rounded a curve and was keeping pace when a featureless silhouette holding a plastic sack came into view under a streetlight fifty yards away. As soon as the figure caught sight of him, it began to sprint towards him at full speed, arms vigorously thrusting, one still holding the sack. He was stuck trying to decide if he should flee, though it was obvious it would catch him, or if he should fight with no tools or weapons, when he shot up and opened his eyes with a sharp inhale. He stared at the wall opposite his bed and waited for his heartrate to drop before he again readjusted positions and caught sight of the two radiating red lights on his ceiling smoke detector.
They didn’t blink, they held solid for about six seconds before ceasing. They then blinked twenty-seven times at regular intervals, before going dark for a minute. Afterwards, only one of the red lights blinked. It pulsed, then it went dark for a while. He wasn’t stupid, he had noticed the detector’s irregular flashing in the past, and he had had some dim curiosity about what triggered it, but he had never seen it illuminate two lights; he had never even noticed the second light which lay directly across from the other, on the other side of the circle.
He began watching it, wondering if both lights would shine simultaneously again. He waited for their synchronization, but it never came, and he lay awake the rest of the night. He counted the time between the singular flash—fifteen seconds, seventeen seconds, thirty seconds, six seconds, forty-three seconds, two minutes, twenty seconds—and he could not parse any pattern. After watching intently for a few hours, he felt his eyes begin to close against his will; he was worried he would miss another double hold or flash, alongside the pattern knowledge that anteceded and proceeded. Sleep was overtaking, but in the final instant, obscured by his blurred vision, he thought he saw a green light blink. He jolted awake, stood up on the bed, and craned his neck to get his eye as close as possible. The singular red blinked a few times, then all light ceased. He plopped back down onto the bed and waited about an hour staring at the ceiling, but there was no further activity. He closed his eyes and tried to go back to sleep, but he no longer could. The sun rose, and he called out of work again, another chunk taken out of his week-and-a-half’s built-up sick time.
Once the sun asserted its presence and refused to concede, he rose. He was groggy and half-there, but, after setting his coffee, he emailed the device’s manufacturer, a company called Hollybound, requesting a guide to decrypt its flashing code. He langured about until they responded, fairly quickly all things considered. He read the guide, and it was almost comprehensive. It described all the intervals he had counted and learned that the singular red light blinked in consistent irregularity to signal the device was operating normally. He read that the solid double red lights signified the percentage remaining of its battery—one second solid for each ten percent. He learned that the green light blinked once every six hours to communicate that the temperature and humidity of the environment were conducive to the detector operating efficiently and undamaged. The green was followed by four singular red flashes before the device stopped light activity for an hour. He read the entire document, but he saw nothing about the double red lights blinking.
He called the Hollybound’s customer service line and informed the representative that his specific product’s light guide was incomplete. She acted confused. He explained that he observed his smoke detector’s lights behaving in ways that the guide did not treat. She put him on hold for fifteen minutes. When she returned, she informed him that what he described was not possible. She had spoken with the lead technician, who explained that every detector he had personally observed, regardless of model, adhered to its respective manual and light guide. He then told her that she ought to ask the technician again, because he had been up all night and hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep and had had to call out of work that morning, which he never did, all because he had become transfixed on his smoke detector’s indecipherable code, and that he knew what he saw, that the double red lights had blinked twenty-seven times after the battery report, and that, matter fact, could she please put on the lead technician so he could speak with him directly. She was silent for a bit, then told him that the lead technician was not taking customer calls. With a touch of candor in her voice, she suggested that maybe he should try to get some sleep and call back if he happened to see it again. He asked if she could send over the product’s design schematics to his email and have a local technician at his house that same day. She agreed to do both.
He was poring over the diagrams, absorbing the different parts, when the knock came. The local technician got up on the stepstool, took off the cover, and plugged in some wires to check the device’s reports. He looked upon the screen into which the information was projected and told him that it was working exactly as it should be. He asked the technician to wait with him to see if the double red lights would blink. The technician assumed a tense posture and craned his neck while he stood next to the strange stranger. They passed a couple minutes in silence, only observing the irregular, singular red blinking. The technician then lowered his neck, rubbed it, and told the man he had other jobs to get to, and that he ought to set up a video camera to record the detector should the discrepancy occur again, then he could show the technician team. He agreed and informed the technician that he would set up a recording video camera right away. The technician turned on his heels and was beelining for the door when he asked for the name of the device that had been plugged into the detector and where it could be purchased from. The technician informed him it was proprietary.
He barely slept that night, but the double red flashing did not return during his observation.
The third morning away was punctuated by footsteps in the hall and dull plunks on the floor right outside the door. He set up all the various gadgetry as it arrived. Hygrometers, several thermometers, the video camera, rechargeable and dischargeable 9Vs that reported their percentage levels to a software, and memory cards that would record the meters’ exact measurements down to a hundredth of a second. He hung the Hygrometers at four equal intervals around the detector, making a cross shape, so he could average their measurements to better account for error margins. He placed the four precision thermometers in the gaps between the hygrometers, also hanging from the ceiling, intending also to average their readings. They measured to a thousandth of a degree Fahrenheit. The new batteries were installed, and the video recording commenced. His role was to manually update a spreadsheet every five minutes with all the measurements, as well as to input a qualitative report of the lights’ activities with reference to his stopwatch, which could be compared against the video footage if necessary. To do his job accurately, he had to detach his desk from the wall and turn it around such that he could see the detector with a glance while updating his spreadsheet. Just in case, though, he had a second monitor which streamed a slightly delayed video feed of the detector so he could see it out of the corner of his eye. He had to use the bathroom and eat (always in that order). When doing so, he made sure to time it alongside the predictable green flash, the subsequent four red blinks, and the following hour of no light activity, which he had observed the first night. He stayed away from his station for as little time as possible and got food delivered to his door, just in case. He would review the sped-up camera footage from his time in the bathroom while he was eating, then review the sped-up footage from while he was reviewing the bathroom footage while he was eating while glancing rapidly from the video recording to the actual detector, until he was all caught up. There was never any activity to input from the hour’s absence of light, he but watched all the footage to be sure.
Days four and five of the sabbatical passed without sleep or excitement. The detector flashed according to the guide, and he became slightly worried he might’ve made a big fuss out of something he had imagined. He resolved to at least use all his sick time in attempts to uncover the mystery, and, after that, he could continue his experiment by contracting some family in Bangladesh or the Philippines to remotely do the job to the tune of five dollars an hour or so. He didn’t want it all to go to waste.
On the sixth day, he had an idea. He wondered how much time had passed from when he had previously replaced his smoke detector’s batteries to when he noticed the double blinking five days preceding. He wracked his memories and determined the battery had been replaced around seven months ago. He did a quick calculation, one whose imprecision he lamented, and set a 9V to sixty seven percent charge. He quickly swapped the batteries. He observed that it was operating as it should after the swap and fell back into his routine behind the desk.
Around three in the morning, the seventh day, it happened again. Following the solid double red battery report, there was the double red flashing. He leapt from his chair and gripped his hair, eyes wide and mouth open. It blinked in the same pattern twenty-seven times. He scrambled to compile his data. Humidity and temperature were not consistent with the previous nights’ measurements; there were several degrees of difference. The battery reported sixty-six and six tenths percent of charge. He was disappointed, hoping that whatever had triggered the double flashing would have made itself immediately recognizable in the data, but there was too much variation. He planned to improve his experiment. He’d have to buy a humidifier and dehumidifier; he would have to buy some sort of precise space heater. He was worried that it wouldn’t even be possible to recreate the exact conditions down to thousandths outside of a lab. He considered that he might even have to wait a year for the same date to occur (the device did have an internal clock for insurance purposes), supposing that the phenomenon appeared only two specific dates seven days apart, and, as a matter of fact, next year was a leap year, so he might even have to wait two. He was exhausted and felt despair. He pulled up the video footage of what he had just witnessed. Its blinks reminded him of metered poetry. He watched the ten second loop again and again, until he became hypnotized, and fell asleep for the first time in three days.
In his dream he was outside a two-story cookie-cutter white house with vinyl siding. It had a front porch, above which sat two evenly spaced dormers adorned with gray shingles. The house was shaped like a big box, and it didn’t have windows on the sides. It was on a street that was pocked with exact copies. It was nighttime, and the streetlights were dimly illuminated such that you could not see where the neighborhood ended. The house was flanked on either side by exact copies, but it seemed there was nothing behind it or the other houses—no other road or copies or even one of those fake forests that sometimes sit behind suburban houses—the light showed only far enough to make the lawn look infinitely expansive. There was no fence or outdoor furniture. The house had a basement, but you couldn’t tell by looking at it from the outside. He knew there was a basement, though, because he could hear his mother trapped inside it against her will, calling for help. It sounded like she was being held in some sort of rectangular box based on the way her screams were dampened. He ran up onto the porch, which luckily had the light on. It was awkward getting inside, because the glass screen door had a door closer that exuded twenty pounds of resistance, and it shut on him before he could get the white wooden front door with its nickel finish doorknob open, so he had to strain to hold the glass screen door open with one hand while he flung open the white wooden front door. Once he was inside, he knew the way to his mother by following her panicked wails. He flew over the gray plank vinyl flooring to a door on the side of the stairwell. He opened it easily and ran down into the basement. He turned on the light, but there was nothing. It was just a concrete floor; it was unfinished.
He could still hear her, and he then realized that she was further below him. He went through a wooden wall outline via a future doorframe, stomping on the floor as he went, attempting to detect a secret entrance. With each movement he could hear her more clearly but couldn’t find the entrance to reach where she was located. He began banging on the white walls, running up and down the course of the wall where her voice was loudest, pounding, recognizing the studs. After some frantic testing, he discovered there was a rough opening the size of a door. He could hear it; it was hollow. He pressed up against every square inch of its surface area but found no secret mechanism to open a passage. So, he punched it and checked it with his shoulder. He made holes in the drywall and started tearing it out with his hands. He stepped through once he’d made a big enough opening, and there was a staircase leading down. He heard her voice from below bouncing off the corridor’s sides.
The staircase was long, and even at a high speed it took him time to descend it. As he neared the bottom, her cries became more muffled. Once his foot reached the ground, a plush red carpet, her voice was gone. There was no box, but rather a gloriously gilded room, with subtle yellow verona wallpaper, a chandelier, a polished wooden dining set, and a luxury seat in front of a crackling lit fire. There were doors in the center of each of the three other walls, wooden but unpainted. Timorously, having lost his voice guide, he went for the one on his left. He stopped, startled, when it opened before he could reach it (it had no doorknob; it glided open without a creak).
Four children, a bit battered and wearing filthy clothes, went first. They looked at the stranger before them with pleading eyes but did not stop. Following them, and emerging from the door last, was an older woman in a beige dress, with sunken and cold eyes. She was holding a candlestick with the wick lit. One she caught sight of him, she drew back, and, without taking her gaze off of him, marched to the front of the line of children. She was still looking at him when she shooed the children away with her hands and said “Now, children, back the way we came.”
He didn’t awake immediately after the dream; he slept in blackness for a while. When he did rise, he was in the chair where he fell asleep. His first thought was that he was hungry, his second was that it was talking to him.
His freshly opened eyes remained fixed on the video footage. He pulled up a morse code guide on the other monitor, closing out of the spreadsheet without saving. He glanced back and forth from the video footage to the guide. It was saying SOS.
First, he called the police. He told them Hollybound had lied to him, and that he suspected they were trapping souls, perhaps even the souls of trafficked and abused children, inside of smoke detectors. He said he discovered a blinking on the smoke detector that was not in the light interpretation guide, that he had it on video saying SOS. Then he called Hollybound. He screamed at the customer service representative. He told her that she was either stupid or a liar, that there was something sinister of which she likely had no knowledge. He demanded to speak to the lead technician and threatened damning video evidence. The technician was out that day, so he asked for his email, which she gave.
The police officer arrived first, officially on a wellness check. After being let in, he saw instruments and supplies strewn about: open boxes on the floor, batteries and stopwatches. He looked up towards the occult ring of sensors and meters which hung around the smoke detector. He looked down upon the desk askance and the paint torn from the wall from where it had been separated. He held his hands on his vest as the man manically explained all his methods and findings. He recounted the initial hypothesis and showed him the schematics and guides. He pointed out the absence of any indication of a double red blink in the official materials. He showed him the video and told him that the company had denied its possibility and had even sent out a technician who claimed the detector was running perfectly fine. He touched the police officer on the shoulder to brace him for his theory that there was some evil magic being done by the manufacturer. He recommended they open an investigation immediately—perhaps one into missing children.
The police officer said that they would unfortunately need more indication that a crime had been committed in order to open an investigation. He played sympathetic: it was just how the law worked. In a disinterested voice, he told him to keep an eye out for any indication that Hollybound had done what he claimed. He accosted the police officer: there were children (children!) in danger. The officer stood there nodding his head, frequently shifting his eyes around the room. He asked him to calm down and thanked him for his diligence. He suggested that he get some sleep but promised he and the department would be in contact. He nearly speed-walked out the door.
He sat on the bed and held his head in his hands. He tore his eyes up towards the smoke detector, which was blinking its singular red to demonstrate proper function. He retrieved the stepstool and was stepping up to take off the cover when a knock came at the door.
It was a stout man in a blue collared shirt tucked into khaki pants. He held his hands clasped together at his rotund stomach. He cleared his throat and announced himself:
“Hi, I’m Jeff from Hollybound. We received your email about the defective smoke detector, and we would like to sincerely apologize for dismissing your earlier claims. From your video, we see indeed that the lights were blinking in the way you described. We have no satisfactory answer to give you as to why this is occurring, but, at your preference, we can send in a team to replace your defective unit. We’ve sent you an email where you will be able to fill out a form telling us when it would be convenient for you to have it replaced. In that email is also an option for a fifty-dollar e-giftcard to a retailer of your choice. Please let us know which you would like so we can best express our apologies. Thank you, and we hope you have a pleasant rest of your day,” and with that, he walked down the hallway and out of sight before he had time to respond.
He shut the door and went back to his place on the bed, blankly looking up at the detector still blinking. He didn’t trust the people at Hollybound, and he still believed there was a nefarious conspiracy afoot. He didn’t want them to come and take it, and he was deeply concerned with the fate of whatever poor thing, probably a trafficked child, they had somehow sealed inside of it. But, maybe, the time for all his excitement was over. He lowered his gaze. He reckoned that he wasn’t a hero, and that it would be very difficult to accrue the requisite alchemical background to separate the soul from the machine. His sick time was almost spent anyway, and he was sure that they were all starting to worry. He grabbed his phone and wrote his boss an SMS that said he was finally feeling better, and that he planned to be at work the next way. He sent it and exhaled; there was another knock at the door.
Jeff was back. He was sweating and panting and looking down the hallway. He seemed frantic.
“They pulled off in the van. I jumped out and ran back as fast as I could on a shortcut. They aren’t telling you the truth. We have to go, now. I’ll take you somewhere safe,” and he extended his hand. “Is it okay if I drive your car?”
They were barreling down the road, and he was looking out the window. He hadn’t asked him any questions. They passed the house with the dog, who was not outside.
“You found something they wanted to keep a secret, but we’re going to a place they don’t know about. I’ve been there, in the halls, but I haven’t had access to one yet. I’ve done the research. I know how help it. We can take them down, together. I know you’re wondering why we didn’t take it with us; do you trust me?”
They pulled into a driveway of a house with white vinyl siding. It was shaped like a box, and it looked exactly like all the houses preceding and all the visible houses following. He caught a sense of vague familiarity, but he had no extraordinary feelings about it.
Jeff led him down into the basement and apologized for its unfinished state. He locked the door behind them. There was rectangular box with a wooden exterior, large enough to fit a person, back against the wall. Jeff explained that it was an orgone accumulator, and that he, not Jeff, would have to go inside and sit for a long time to build up his vital energy. He would need to be very powerful to accomplish their goal, and it had to be him who did the deed, since the detector chose to speak to him. He asked what the procedure would look like, and Jeff explained that all explanations would come in due time—first, he wanted to see how he fared inside the accumulator.
He went inside, and the door was shut behind him. He thought he heard a click. He sat down on a hard wooden bench built into the box and, all things considered, felt quite at ease. He was hopeful to help the trapped soul and was grateful that someone with ostensibly enough knowledge to accomplish the goal had come to him. He didn’t think it consciously, but he knew somewhere there wasn’t much to lose if it didn’t work out the way he wanted. The walls were black, and he couldn’t see much except for the small area illuminated by a shaft of light that entered the box from a hole with a circumference slightly larger than a half-dollar. It sat about three feet up from the ground. There was the sound of a zipper.
“How will I know when the orgone is accumulating?”
“Oh, it’s about to.”