Metamorphosis is a tale told through writing and music; the story that follows accompanies the album of the same name. Listen to the album on streaming services (Spotify, YouTube, Apple, Amazon), or visit the store to purchase it, and read lyrics from the record.
THE WAITING ROOM
Light from a lamp overhead flickered as it threw a circular glimmering onto the floor and transformed the large empty room into an island of dust and cold concrete surrounded on all sides by an oceanic darkness. Cesar was seated in a chair at the center of the atoll, listening to the sighs and hisses that washed onto his shore from the sea of black – murmurs from creatures delivered by the darkness that whispered to one another as they waited for his concrete refuge to sink beneath the waves.
Cesar looked up at the lamp that cast angular shadows on the uneven ground as he listened to the whispers, knowing that when the light went out, the darkness would rush in to fill the void, and with it the others would come. Like phantom marauders carried in with the current, they would bear down on him, with a perilous bounty he knew he would not survive.
“The cure is inside.” A woman’s voice slid, delicately, from the shadows. She spoke in Cesar’s direction, but her words were meant for the others in the room, the sudden halting of the whispers made that clear.
Cesar was bare. His body exposed and spread open to the world, he unfurled like a blossom in the heavy oak chair. Thick, rough ropes bound him to the wood at every possible joint, scratching at his naked skin. His head was held stationary by way of a gag that connected him from his mouth to the back of the chair. He could taste the knotted fabric on his tongue, though it was soaked with saliva that flowed inexorably out of his mouth and down his chin. Now that the whispers had retreated to the darkness, he could more easily hear the rapid pulsing of his own panicked blood as it raced through his veins and rung in his ears. He stared up at the thin string of the lamp cord that hung from the ceiling, blinking through tears and sweat as he imagined the dark waves that were rising up to engulf him.
Emerging out of the shadows from behind Cesar, the woman stepped into the lamplight and took up an unnervingly close position at the back of his chair. He perceived the sensation of a hand coming down to rest on the top of his head as she spoke softly to him.
“We’ve been watching you,” she said, and from the edges of the room came the chattering whispers again. Louder this time.
Cesar tried to move his head away as he choked out a low, piteous, weeping sound.
“You’re just afraid, Cesar. It’s okay to be afraid,” she traced the chair with her fingertips as she circled him, taking up a position at his side.
For a moment, Cesar squeezed his eyes shut tightly, as if by dulling one of his senses, the horror of his current situation would somehow be lessened by an equal degree. As the woman spoke, however, the whispers from the darkness mutated into eager yelps – Cesar’s horror was not dampened.
“I know who you are,” she pronounced, and reached up with a long, thin arm to the lamp, wrapping her fingers around the glass bulb. The others began to bark and howl. Cesar could hear them scurrying around the banks of his island.
Cesar strained in the chair, causing the ropes to dig deeper into his skin. The light sputtered as the woman turned the bulb, the metal cap scraping against the socket with every rotation.
Squeak.
Shadowy waves lapped at his ankles. Cesar cried out, muffled by the gag and hacking on his own spit.
Squeak.
She bent her head down until her lips were touching his ear. He could feel the heat of her breath on his skin as he looked up with wide eyes to see her wrist curl once more . . .
Squeak.
The light went out.
Darkness flooded the room.
And as he sunk beneath the waves, he heard the woman as she sighed in his ear:
“It’s time for you to wake up.”
THE DEPARTURE
Cesar lay in the bed in the center of the room, blackness reaching out to him from the outskirts of the night. It was late and he was alone in this empty house with no lights on. Twisting atop crumpled sheets, he looked toward the window above his headboard but could see nothing except darkness and moonlight that bloomed through the weeping rain. Looking up at the ceiling, he imagined hundreds of watery fingers tapping messages to him in Morse code:
Wake up.
He sighed. Storms like this usually had a way of lulling him to sleep, but not tonight. Propping himself up on his elbows, he squinted into the black. Even with his eyes adjusted to the dark, the world around him was a grainy, featureless greyscape and the harder he looked at a thing, the faster it seemed to disappear.
Slowly he sat up and slung his feet over the side of the bed. He’d been sweating – he could feel the clammy chill licking at his naked skin. Wondering what time it was – sometime after two at least – he paused for a moment to listen to the watery fingers above him. The rain was coming down in waves. Thinking about how cold it must be out there, another chill brushed over his skin.
Cesar had always suffered nightmares. Ever since he was a child he’d been plagued by almost nightly terrors; horrifying visions that brutalized his sleep until he’d wake soaked in sweat, or worse. Often, he would forget them as soon as he’d open his eyes, his only souvenir being wet bedding.
This one was different though, not only was he having it every night, but its memory lingered throughout the day.
No, not lingered.
More like pursued.
Stalked.
“Fucking dreams,” he scolded as he stood up and stumbled – naked, damp, and groggy – towards the bathroom. He’d always hated sleeping because of his dreams, but lately, he was beginning to hate being awake too.
Cesar considered himself to be a logical person; a proud realist. He was arrogantly well-organized and disciplined, almost systematic with his routines (unfortunately that seemed to include recurring nightmares as well). He was intelligent and intuitive and very little surprised him about the world, save his one glaring blind spot: himself.
It’s not that he wasn’t smart enough to see the puzzle, in fact, and unfortunately, he knew it well. But his inability to stop examining the pieces kept him from ever completing the picture. And his awareness of this dis-ability preserved him in a state of perpetual, inwardly directed, frustration and shame.
Stepping through the narrow doorway and turning the bathroom light on with a slap, he shook his head in an attempt to shake the images from his nightmare out of it. A trail of sweat was drying on his back as he stepped onto the fluffy, cream-colored bathmat and stood at the bathroom counter to face the mirror.
Cesar looked younger than his age of 38. Naturally dark hair, thick brows and a smooth face gave credence to the involuntary deception. And at 6 foot 5 inches, he towered over most people. He wore glasses, but those were on the nightstand. Leaning forward, he examined a few tiny lines that were beginning to convene at the corners of his overtired eyes.
Opening the medicine cabinet, Cesar scanned the contents of the shelves: bottles of preparatory over-the-counter medications and supplements, arranged by ailment, bandages and a small plastic tray that held dental floss picks, cotton swabs and his shaving paraphernalia. He reached past the dented tube of toothpaste to the row of facial cleansers and grabbed a small pot of eye cream, which he set on the counter next to a neatly rolled, stack of washcloths.
Turning on the cold water and cupping his hands under the faucet, he bent down and splashed his face. Droplets hit the counter as he tilted his head down and massaged the back of his neck with cool fingers. He licked the water from his lips as he remembered the saliva that ran down his chin in his dream. He’d woken up choking on his own spit only moments ago and he could still feel the tension from it, digging unforgiving fingers into his throat.
We’ve been watching you . . .
He remembered that phrase and it sent a shiver down his body. He thought about the room from his dream, the others that whispered from the darkness, and the woman’s words.
Standing up straight, he reached forward to close the cabinet door. It latched shut with a muted click . . . and he met his reflection again.
What makes up the sum of a person? The curves of their face? The length of their body? The color of their hair and skin? What about their eyes? Is there something behind them? What creates an individual beyond the physical appearance and underneath the cellular structure? Is there an entity within the entity operating the machine?
It took Cesar a moment to see it, but when he did, he jolted back, his body stiffening as the air in the room seemed to vanish, snuffed out in a single, suffocating gasp.
The resemblance only made the image more terrifying – the curves of his face, the length of his body, the color of his hair and skin – all of it in place. All but the eyes. Behind the eyes. What he saw defied all of his reasoning. Behind the eyes, it was not him.
Cesar stumbled and hit the wall behind him with a thud. Whatever it was that was looking back at him in the mirror, it was not him. Whatever it is that makes up the sum of a person, it was . . . missing. Presently, he felt as if his body might crumple to the floor as his heart hammered skipped beats in his throat.
This was a stranger – staring back at him from beyond the glass – staring back at him from behind his own eyes.
The chill on his skin was arctic. So cold in fact, that he didn’t notice how his ears were beginning to ring and how his arms tingled with numbness. It wasn’t until the tiny sparks began to cloud his vision did he notice the uncoupling sensation that began to crawl up his body, endeavoring to remove him from his current state of consciousness.
Breathe! He commanded to himself. But he couldn’t. It was as if, all at once, air had just become inaccessible to him. Trapped under invisible waves and gasping for air, he looked back at the stranger in the mirror, and it stood, motionless, staring, watching.
We’ve been watching you . . .
A horrifying paralysis howled in his ears as it hastened to draw him into the black. He felt as if he were sliding backward, out of the room and out of his body.
And still, the stranger watched.
Desperately, Cesar clawed at the wall as the room began to swirl and the edges of everything burnt away. Reaching out to grab anything he could, his hands gripped the shower curtain but the metal rings buckled under the weight of his panic and snapped with a series of clanks, sending folds of neutral fabric to the floor.
It was as if he were falling down a well, looking up at a surface he would never reach. A surface occupied by the stranger who stood, unmoving as it watched him.
He could barely make out the tiny speck of light in the expanse now.
For a second he almost thought he could hear the stranger saying something in the distance, but he was so far away. All he could hear were muffled babbles that sounded like the whispers from his dream.
And he plummeted into the darkness.
THE DESCENT
Cesar strolled along the wet pavement to the rhythm of some unheard music. He’d learned to tolerate sleep’s elusive disposition long ago and he felt confident that they wouldn’t be meeting up again tonight. Besides, the rain had stopped and the chilly night air might just be the bracing tonic he needed to clear his mind of nightmares, shadows, and visions in mirrors.
That was what he told himself as he slipped on yesterday’s pants and a clean pullover from the mound of unfolded laundry in the corner of his room. His shoes were parked by the front door and he grabbed them on his way out, along with his jacket and keys.
It must have been the dream, he assured himself. In his sleep-deprived, over-tired state . . . and that dream . . . the same recurring dream he’d been having for weeks now . . . autosuggestion, that’s all it was. Self-hypnosis.
It must have been the dream.
Cesar continued to walk, trying not to think about his nightmare, the stranger in the mirror, or his subsequent panic attack. In fact, he was so involved with not thinking about any of those things, that he didn’t even notice the fog when it rolled in, submerging the world around him under a thick blanket of somber ambiguity. It wasn’t until he noticed the silence that rolled in with the fog that he stopped walking and looked up.
The fog was dense to the point of opaque. An impervious mist that swallowed up sight and sound, for it was eerily quiet. But was there sound before? He wasn’t sure. It was late after all – or early depending on how you look at it – so a lack of people or traffic wouldn’t be unusual. Had it been this quiet though?
Slowly Cesar turned, trying to see his way through this strange new space, cocking his head to the side as if he was trying to peek around a corner that wasn’t there. All he saw was the fog, staring morosely back at him.
Then he thought of the night that lay beyond the grey miasma, and of the darkness that lived there. A gnawing darkness that drooled syrupy blackness as it chewed at the edges of . . . everything.
A twisted and cleaving, thicket with long and thorny fingers that sprung from broken boughs. Cracking as it stretched out like subcutaneous tissue, reaching in every direction to strangle and drag this place into the gaping maw of the night. The same darkness that reached out to Cesar from the corners of his room. The same darkness that crept through his house, causing his body to shiver as it watched him.
We’ve been watching you . . .
He heard the woman’s voice from his dream again, thought of “the others” that surrounded him in that room, and of the stranger’s eyes in the mirror. A chill lapped at his skin as the night crawled out through the fog. Instinctively he spun around as if he sensed some impalpable presence behind him. Nothing. Only fog . . . and his own imagination.
“Fucking dreams,” he whispered through a tight jaw with contempt and frustration. That was it, it must have been the dream.
He began to walk again – though he couldn’t see where he was going – wading through the murky night as the fog ran silver hands across his body with every step. As he walked, he maintained his calm by relying on his skepticism and analytical pessimism as he allowed himself to return once more to the dream. Not to replay the horrors, but to let himself look for the reasons why.
He’d been having it for weeks now. Not every night at first but tonight was the fifth night in a row and it seemed to be growing in intensity.
Five nights of this dream, he thought. No wonder he was seeing strangers in mirrors. It almost made sense when he put it that way; he’d been sleeping so badly and the dreams had become so severe, it was no wonder he was hallucinating. Especially hallucinating doppelgangers.
Cesar had recently been self-diagnosed with a kind of internal division, like an unnerving duality within him. Something was bubbling up inside, something far more substantial than what his supplements could treat; he was a geological fault and forces from deep down were displacing him.
It all started earlier this year, but he’d not yet been able to determine its source or reason. At first, the sensation was quiet, like something suspended in the periphery of his consciousness that spoke only in muted, hushed tones. Recently though, it had grown shrill, and he felt afflicted by the divergence it was creating in him.
For a moment, as he paced along the sidewalk in the direction of a glow that he was certain was an intersection, he imagined his reflection in the mirror and himself the personification of the internal division. Two separate individuals in conflict with one another. It was these two individuals – this internal division – that played hob with his anxieties and needled him into sleeplessness.
Two opposing forces occupying the same space, he thought. Perhaps if they were equal within him, he would explode. He chuckled at his own gallows humor.
That was the thing though, they were not equal. Something had been advancing within him for some time now, tipping the scales and insisting to be heard. Perhaps that’s why he manifested the stranger in the mirror, he asked himself.
Cesar stopped. Initially struck by his own meandering revelation but then, by the awareness that the fog had grown less dense as he approached the traffic lights, though the unusual stillness still surrounded him. There were no cars on the street. No people. No sound or other lights coming from anywhere. He was all alone, afloat in a sea of quiet that was disrupted only by the metered beating of his own heart and the rise and fall of his breath.
A streetlamp above him glared down at a signpost, casting a long and lanky shadow on the ground. A shadow like the ones he’d left behind only a few hundred meters ago. Reflections from the traffic light in the various puddles danced in a psychedelic pattern of green and yellow and red and he let himself rest there for a moment, staring.
Cesar mused to himself as he watched the arrangement of light disrupting the asphalt, and for a few minutes, he forgot about his dream, the duality inside him, the stranger in the mirror and all of his other worries. But the feeling was brief, and the lightness he felt watching the lights soon only filled him with sadness and longing.
He wanted to feel that lightness all the time, not just in brief moments at whatever unholy hour it was as he stood, staring at traffic lights. Much like a child who pulls a blanket over their head to protect themselves from monsters, however, in his attempt to shield himself from the darkness he most feared, he’d unknowingly hidden himself from all the light as well.
It was then, in the scattered refraction from a windowpane across the street, that he saw a glimmering in the black. Like hints of light peeking through the holes of his blanket, the faint glow from inside a house called out to him.
He took a step in the direction of the light and noticed the other houses on the block. Painted wooden boxes stood neatly in a row, shoulder to shoulder with one another like tiny cakes on a serving platter. But they were all grey in the dimness of the night, their only colors being whatever they could borrow from the repeating pattern of the traffic light. As he stepped forward, he admired the glinting from their wet, ebony lawns, but this house was the only house with its lights on, and something about it called out to him – at least to investigate.
Inside, the building was a sharp contrast to its brick and wood façade with smooth, sleek walls and shining floors. The room where he stood was dimly lit in pink light that rose up from the edges of the floor, blushing the bare, walls. It was impossible to make out the color of the walls. White, maybe?
The light presented everything around him in monochrome, save the ebony floor that was polished to a mirror shine. Four large vases, made of stone and approximately a meter in height, framed the only two possibilities Caesar could see now: either the door behind him that led from where he came, or an open doorway on the opposite end of the room that led to a passageway he couldn’t see the end of.
Nothing about this made sense, and at this point, Cesar began to wonder if he was dreaming again. Had he fallen asleep staring at the lights on the pavement outside? Perhaps he was still laying on the bathroom floor back at his own house? Either way, at the moment it seemed clear to him that there was only one way to find out. Knowing already of the world he came from, he took a breath and stepped across the threshold and into the corridor.
The fleshy glow of the walls reflected in the black mirror floor but cast no shadows as he walked through the passage. Other halls, like conduits, branched off in different directions as he walked. Doors to other rooms appeared and disappeared along his path like mile markers on an endless highway, but he walked forward in obligation. Compelled to find the end of this hallway that was the connection between where he had been and where he was going. So onward he walked, further into the fleshy-colored nowhere. And just as Caesar began to feel as though he would be gulped up whole by this limitlessness, he came to the ending. The world opened up.
Opened up and into a room of immeasurable size now as he found himself standing at the edge of . . .
A library?
Before him stood a massive structure, surrounded by a perimeter wall about two and a half meters high that created a rectangular channel between what he perceived to be a library and the main chamber where he stood. Doors positioned at every 10 meters extended along the outside wall.
Directly in front of him and ornamented with forms and shapes that resembled ivy, a massive bronze archway interrupted the perimeter wall, serving as the library’s entrance. Caesar approached the arch and looked inside.
While not a historian in the slightest, the space appeared to him to be ancient in origin and expression. Like something from a dream one would have about history before history was ever written down.
It was practical as well, not as orange as the bronze archway but more utilitarian, and meticulously kept.
Rows of bookcases, taller than the perimeter wall, fanned out farther than he could see. Incalculable volumes of cataloged data sat tucked neatly onto the shelves. And yet still, as he looked around, he saw no one.
“Caesar.” A woman spoke and he spun toward her voice.
She was standing behind him in one of the doorways of an adjacent room.
From where he stood, he could see that the room she guarded was darker than the others around him. No. Not darker. Black. Like the house he’d left behind just hours ago. Featureless and overflowing with darkness.
Caesar watched as the woman stepped backward and dissolved into the black of the room. Swallowed up by the darkness.
This is the dream.
The realization hit him like a train. This was the dream. He was in it again. He must have fallen asleep on the floor or . . .
“Fucking dreams!” He shouted this time and his voice reverberated through the vastness of the colossal chamber.
Alone again now, Caesar thought of the empty house with no lights on, and of the darkness, of the featureless greyscape and the fog, of his two opposing forces and the stranger in the mirror. He thought of how faint the whispers of his sensation were in the beginning, and how loud they had become (so loud that he began to wonder why he would still call them whispers at all). He thought of the discord within him, the forces in opposition with one another that created dissonance.
And he thought of his puzzle; the picture he could not put together because he couldn’t see past the pieces. The days he spent concerned about the future and the nights he spent disquieted by the past. He thought of the little worries – worries that had some merit to begin with – little worries that warped into all-encompassing fears.
His life had become a well-choreographed dance of little rituals set to the repetitious pattern of the unending echo of his unease.
He looked to the hallway he’d emerged from, and to the blackness beyond the doorway that the woman from his dream had vanished into.
If you go back now, he thought, the echo would truly be unending.
One more breath, and he stepped forward into the darkness.
THE DESTINATION
Cesar lay in the bed in the center of the room, blackness reaching out to him from the outskirts of the night. It was late and he was alone in this empty house with no lights on. Twisting atop crumpled sheets, he looked toward the window above his headboard but could see nothing except darkness and moonlight. It had been raining earlier, but the rain had stopped and the room was quiet now.
Slowly he sat up and slung his feet over the side of the bed. He’d been sweating – he could feel the clammy chill on his skin.
It was that dream again.
Cesar had always suffered nightmares. Ever since he was a child he’d been plagued by these almost nightly terrors. Often, he would forget them as soon as he’d open his eyes, this one was different though.
Different.
He held the word in his mind for a moment.
“Fucking dreams.”
He stood up and stumbled towards the bathroom. Turning the bathroom light on with a slap, he shook his head in an attempt to shake the images from his nightmare out of it. A trail of sweat was drying on his back as he stood at the bathroom counter and faced the mirror. He scrutinized his reflection, examining the tiny lines that were beginning to convene at the corners of his overtired eyes before opening the medicine cabinet and removing a pot of eye cream.
Turning on the water and cupping his hands under the faucet, he bent down and splashed his face. Droplets hit the counter as he tilted his head down and massaged the back of his neck with cool fingers. Standing up to close the cabinet door, he looked into the mirror and met his reflection again.
It took him a moment to see it, but when he did, he froze.
Paralyzed, Cesar gaped at the reflection in the mirror as the realization of his present state came washing down over him like a wave of recognition.
He stared, suspended in miserable, powerless abeyance, and watched as his reflection jolted backward, its whole body stiffening with a gasp, as if all the air in the room on the other side of the glass vanished.
He watched, his heart breaking as the pieces of the puzzle began to slam into place – one by one – and the reflection stumbled backward, hitting the wall behind it with a thud.
It was terrified, looking back at Cesar as if it were looking into the eyes of a stranger looking back at it. A stranger that was occupying a space where no stranger should – its own body.
The chill flashed over Cesar’s skin as he watched, knowing first-hand the horrifying paralysis that was howling in the ears of his mirror image. He remembered the feeling of sliding backward, out of the room and out of his own powerless body.
Cesar wanted to say something. Anything. He wanted to scream and yell. He wanted to reach out and protect . . . himself. But he couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t yell or scream. He couldn’t do anything. He was frozen – partly in shock and partly in fear.
So, he watched, unable to move.
Until he saw his twin clawing at the walls for support, reaching out for anything to stabilize him, gripping the shower curtain, and creasing the fabric in his fists. It was then that Cesar heard the metallic swish of the curtain rings sliding against the rod, followed by a quick series of clanks and snaps as the rings broke and the curtain fell to the floor, covering his reflection under cream-colored folds.
It was the snapping of the rings that jolted Cesar into the present. He jumped at the sound, freeing himself from his stagnation.
Rushing to the mirror, Cesar called out to his twin who lay collapsed on the floor.
“You’re just afraid, Cesar!” he yelled out. “It’s okay to be afraid!”
It was the only thing he could think to say. He knew what the “other” Cesar was going through, he’d gone through it only hours prior.
He remembered the feeling of falling down a well, looking up at a surface he would never reach. Barely making out the tiny speck of light in the expanse.
“I know . . . who you are,” Cesar said, softly. “You’re okay.”
The water started to rise up around Cesar now, only this time they were not the same dark waters from his nightmare that swirled around him and tried to swallow him whole. These were waters of affection that flooded him from the inside, causing his vision to blur with tears as he looked down at himself, laying on the floor.
“You’re just afraid,” he reassured again. “It’s okay to be afraid. I know who you are. You’re okay.”
Then he began to whisper now. Softly.
Whispers of comfort and consolation, of support and empathy.
Whispers that might have sounded like little more than muffled, babbling chatter to his reflection in the mirror.
Cesar knew who he was now – the man who had looked back at him from behind his own eyes, the man lying on the floor in front of him now, and the man standing in the middle – He’d been there all along, waiting for him, just as he found himself waiting now.
“I know who you are,” Cesar said gently, but with great authority to himself. “I know who you are.” He’d been waiting his whole life to say it.
There’s no changing the past, Cesar thought. There’s no removing the wounds that have been inflicted or the pain that has been felt. But in time, we can learn to take the past into our arms, to speak with soft voices of comfort and consolation, support and empathy. And we can hold ourselves.
* * *
