THE RUBIX CUBE
My dream last night was a collation of every party I have ever attended. The uniting feeling was one of insignificance. As is not uncommon in dreams, I was overwhelmed by an ineffable sense of peril, feeling like at any moment I might fall off the face of the earth into oblivion, and because it was a party, that it would all be muted by the shroud of lasers and smoke machines. Even though I was not dying I would perfect my last words, obsessing over the most trivial and insignificant choices of words the way a job applicant gets bogged down in superficial details like whether or not to wear a tie. I would approach and be approached by strangers who knew my name and would indulge in conversations about their future prospects or what it all means or a band they recently discovered. In addition, these people were all horribly agreeable with each other. They would speak in platitudes and false complements, and even though they couldn’t hear a word that was said, would still affect a look of intense, undivided attentiveness; they would nod their heads and raise their eyebrows as though astonished by some revelatory, life-altering statement that was likely a recount of the time they scraped a credit for an exam they took hungover.
I was perplexed and fascinated by these people, imagining circus chimpanzees checking their reflection in the mirror whilst balancing a pyramid of plastic cups brimming with tap beer, and all the while nodding their heads and raising their eyebrows, even when they weren’t talking to anyone. I became entranced by these incantatory head nods and eyebrow raises, which slowly became synchronized so that everyone was moving as one beast. They became little parts of this massive rubix cube, as big as a building, with every square painfully grinding and contorting. There was a palpable sense of desperation; everyone who was part of the rubix cube strove to be the first to single-handedly group the like colours and so solve the great Riddle. So great was their vanity, their wish to disentangle that which so many others had failed to disentangle, that it became even more jumbled than before. For every fluorescent green or yellow there were three flesh coloured, misshapen squares (a geometrician might call them rectangles). These squares, it was clear to onlookers such as myself, had become vexed and disoriented by the movements in which they were forced to participate, and just screamed as loud as they could with the intention of making others as dissolute as themselves.
While all of this was going on, the cube as a whole moved with an efficient, clockwork-like exactness, wholly disinterested in the wellbeing of its aggregate parts. Some simple minded people who abhorred the cube’s coldness accosted me with questions like,
“How are we supposed to live our lives with such an omnipresent evil constantly pestering us?”. I loathed these people and their convictions, but still I tried to answer them.
“The cube isn’t evil”, I shouted above the din of the music, “it is just what it is is, doing what it is preconditioned to do, just like the rest of us.”
And they would feign understanding, unable to hear my reply but acting like they understood the essence of it. They would each nod their head and raise their eyebrows, and would immediately be digested by the rubix cube and assigned a square.
My head was spinning and all I could smell was a sickening perfume of sweat and hairspray. My thoughts came and went, and so all I focused on was my one desire: to exist independently of the cube, the organic ‘antheap’ that this party had become, no matter how unremarkable or mediocre I appeared to others when standing apart from it. I could tell that people felt the same way, but would nonetheless allow themselves to be digested in grotesque, spasmodic lurches. What scared me the most was the way these people acted just prior to being swallowed up, the way they would dance with lifeless vigour, like the needle of a sewing machine dances. I gathered that these people had found consolation in perceiving their bodies, which danced mindlessly on the puce, fleshy tongue of the cube, from afar—that is, they realised they could, at any moment and with ease, flee, but instead just danced like blind animals on their hind legs.
Suddenly I could hear these people in their thousands screaming out at themselves. It was as though each person and their corporeal form were two escaped convicts hobbling to freedom, bound at the leg—the repetitive dance music a prison siren. One of the prisoners, the more resolute one, had Paradise in view, but could only move at a snail’s pace because of the latter, who seemed oddly content with the prospect being captured and living out the rest of his days in bondage.
