Mytro: Nayzun

Chapter 3: The Builder

Her room made everyone sleepy. She was attached to rows of machines that let out a strange flowing sound, like a brook babbling in a deep forest, bubbling over rocks and then down a short ledge into a deep pool, a watery sound that buried the room in white noise. Those machines were for her breathing, wet and steady. A beep defined her exhalations, the squiggle of her heart rate ran on a monitor next to her head. A machine exhaled - beep - for her then inhaled, the bubbling growing louder for a moment then softly falling. Her nurses sometimes stole into her room to rest there.

She was thin, pale, her arms attached to tubes above the sheet. Her hair was blonde. The thin lattice of the Mytro burned in her head and her eyes moved rapidly behind her eyelids.

Her eyes were closed and she did not move but in her head she was alive and building. It was her favorite thing to do.

Her name was Ruth. She was the Builder.

How she was chosen to be a Builder she did not know. Something in came to her in the night while she slept and changed her and she began to ride midnight rails through endless tunnels. She stopped in strange small rooms and watched men and women board old-looking trains. Some of the rooms were in disrepair so she fixed them, rebuilding broken tile walls and smoothing track beds. She swung from station to station in an instant and in this motion was joy for she was moving, doing, making, even if only in her dreams. Some nights she felt like smoke sneaking under a door jamb. Other nights she felt like a monkey jumping from tree to tree.

The dreams gave her power and they were also calming. Long ago, when she could still move, she loved to find little corners of her grandfather's big old house and to hide there, making herself as small as she could, covering herself with a blanket to make herself tinier. Then, locked up tight like a pill bug, she would imagine herself getting smaller and smaller and smaller, the air taking on a strange hum like the sound of a TV turned on in another room. These dreams made her feel at once safe and small. It was a beautiful feeling. Now that she slept all day and all night she felt warm and small and safe in her own body. She was as small as a pill bug and as big as the world. She could change, she could fly, she could disappear and reappear. She loved her life.

But what were these dreams? She didn't dare ask. They were too wonderful. She had been confined to a bed for a decade. She had fallen asleep ten years before and had never woken up. Her father, a doctor with a gambling problem, had moved her multiple times in those years but she did not feel the movement, she did not speak, she did not eat or drink on her own. She just existed and she dreamt about the trains and their ceaseless travel.

In her dreams, she could move. In life, she could not. So she preferred the dreams.

When she got sick she was angry at everything. She tried to lash out but could not move. She was angry at her father for leaving her at hospitals, at her mother for dying, at herself for letting her body rebel in this horrible way. But now there was no anger, only cool motion through the dark. It was better this way, she had learned. She kept her eyes closed and kept calm.

Don't fight, don't flee. Flow. She had read that, once, above a bathroom mirror in her aunt's house. She had read it when she was probably ten years old, before the disease took her, and, while she had been recreating every room she had ever been in using her imagination - a pastime that had kept her from going mad in the first few years of her confinement - it floated back up at her and she suddenly saw it.

Don't fight, don't flee. Flow.

But some nights she would wake and open her eyes. Some nights a nurse would see her and howl something in a language she no longer understood. They would turn on the bright white lights and doctors would rush in and she'd close her eyes again, afraid. Other nights there would be no one there in her room and her eyes would dart to the far corners, looking for the Demon. When the Demon came she felt cold and she felt fear. She felt a presence then, something that kept her still and sometimes pressed down on her chest. It was then that she closed her eyes again and kept still, preferring to live inside the matrix of green and grey where she existed and not in the world outside her eyelids.

The Demon was another Builder, a maker of the rails. It was jealous of her and of her power. There were only a few Builders in the universe and this backwater planet had one already. It didn't need two. She was proud to be a Builder and she was confused by the Demon. They could share the planet. She wasn't jealous of the Demon's power because she had power of her own.

Some nights she kept her eyes closed and was visited by someone else, not the Demon. She called him the Boy. He was young, or at least his spirit was, and he would show her things. The first time the Boy came to her he brought her to an empty train station in some cold part of the world, wind howling down the tunnels and bricks made of ice that crumbled at her touch.

Fix it, said the Boy he did not speak English but she understood him. You can do it.

She did not know how to fix it. But the Boy prodded her. Fix it. And she did. She would think about what she wanted there and her thoughts would repair the bricks, lay the tracks, install tile. How she did it she did not know but somewhere in the dark her hands moved and she was able to form things out of nothing.

Once the Boy took her to a dark space where she felt like cold stone was closing in on her. She couldn't breathe.

Breathe, said the boy. You can do it.

She did and the space opened, turned into a cube.

Now build.

She thought about what kind of room she'd like. She added wallpaper, a wooden floor. She added a window but she found that the window opened on blackness so she erased it. She dreamt of a chair and a little table and some nice plates. She dreamt of a tea set and she sat down with the Boy who seemed happy with her. She could never see the Boy but, for some reason, she could sense the space he took up, as if he were smoke or a puff of air. She imagined him as being her age when she fell asleep - about eighteen. He was handsome, dark hair, hazel eyes. She imagined herself one day kissing him but it would be impossible in her state, she reckoned. She had resigned herself to being trapped in her body, traveling with the Boy through the tunnels, building stations, repairing walls, making things right again. She was trapped in her body but her mind could be free.

And so she existed, the Boy visiting her sometimes and sometimes the pressure bearing down on her so much that she felt she would die and she existed like that without fear or anger or regret because she could move anywhere and be anywhere and she had control.

If you saw her from the outside you'd see a skinny girl in a hospital gown connected to machines that made her breathe and fed her. You would see a girl who was turned regularly to prevent bedsores and whose arms and legs had turned to sticks. You would see a girl with blonde hair and, if you could see her eyes, blue eyes, a girl named Ruth who once upon a time ran and walked and talked and was a regular girl until something happened and now she was in a hospital forever, trapped but not trapped, building her only joy.

The Demon wasn't coming as much anymore and neither was the Boy. But something was happening. The trains were burning and she sometimes heard cries of pain on the rails, from deep in the crevices that she had not yet visited. But she had no idea where to start looking. She kept searching for the sounds but they died out as she searched.

Suddenly she inhaled. There it was. The sound. The screams. She moved towards them as quickly as she could, her body far behind her in a hospital and her soul free as a whisp.