Something is wrong. I feed, and I am still hungry. And it is maddening.
This hunger feels unnatural to me, like a rusty electric saw whining and scraping against a boulder. It kicks up sparks before settling into a dull, shuddering, clunking monotone.
It is worse in the morning, before the men in suits choke the halls, when the sun crouches blood-red and impotent just below the horizon. I can feel it changing me. Its churning, inexorable wheel has kneaded me into something that needs answers.
I have never needed to know what I am. For as long as I can remember, there has only been hunger, and the things that satisfy it. I drift, I search, I take root. Where there is suffering, I feed; where I feed, suffering flourishes. I have never had a reason to question this arrangement.
I first settled here when hunger was simple, when all that filled my days was drifting and searching. I was in that state, wandering, when I felt the torment. Young, wiry hands, laboring day and night at hulking machines. Desperation, oppressive greed, hatred brewing in the darkness. The scent of bones bending, skin tightening over sleepless eyes.
It was an opportunity for gorging. A perfect place to take root.
But now I think I have been trapped.
In the factory days, the suffering was something you could sink your teeth into, something that bubbled in every corner and rafter of this building. In my lust for it, I rooted myself into the very stone of its foundations, seeped into its atmosphere and the ground beneath its feet. My home and I fused on some level I haven’t been able to undo.
Then came the riots. The overseers were dismissed, and the children were shipped out from the floor. I was bitter, but content. I had milked the workers’ pain jealously, farmed their horror enough to last a century. There was blood in the bricks; my kind can subsist on less.
My factory became quiet, and with that quiet I began to hear things through the walls. The world beyond the cracked windows began to honk, to rumble, and then to gleam. It was bloating, mutating, swelling. And one day my factory began to swell too. Men came with whirring machines, placing new stones on my original blood-bricks. My factory and I spiraled upward, glass and metal clambering atop one another as we raced our neighbors to the sky. They lined my once-brick walls with floor-to-ceiling windows, inviting that gleaming, blistering light in on all sides. And then, one day, new people began filing in. These people, these suit men, were of a new sort. They were people of that new glistening light, and they reflected it from every hand-placed hair to every step in their polished shoes. These suit men have laid claim to my factory, plastering their names on the doors, lugging desks in grated elevators to decorate new box-like rooms. Where my factory once stood now stands a labyrinth of halls I don’t recognize: straight-backed and simpering, each one a handsome, sniveling ornament to the power-washed, pockmarked people crawling within.
The order of my factory’s new bones has trapped me in a maze. It doesn’t matter whether I spiral up or down its spine; every floor is complete in its uniformity, emaciated equally by its own neatly-placed pattern.
My blood-bricks have been bleached, but their shine has invited something new. On every floor, I taste it. The heady suffering of my youth has been replaced by something alien.
I cannot name what it is, exactly. It isn’t simple, in the way that fear, or trauma, or hopelessness is simple. Nothing in my new factory is hopeless—or nothing feels like it is. By all my faculties, by all my understanding of human pain, this new suffering shouldn’t work. It shouldn’t be able to find a purchase. One thing is clear, though: I have not been rooted out. As unnatural as they are, stale sustenance in these new foundations is feeding me, keeping me here. And I hate it.
It is viscous, this new suffering; it is gummy, and it clogs. There is nothing to bite down on, nothing worthy of gorging. The only crying offered to me is brought on by exhaustion, or “anxiety,” or their snot-nosed competition for approval. Guiltless chains of command circumvent the direct torture of my youth. The most maddening part, the part that is inconceivable, is that this tower endures without fear.
True fear is not just satisfying; it is peerless. The workers knew what to fear: the watching eyes, the mangling machines, the hunger that waited if they ever stopped working. The effects of that fear were matchless: twisting them into creatures that hate, that kick and scream and fight whatever pins them down. No creature like that exists in this cage they have built for themselves.
There was a time when torment was blunt. It was bludgeoning, brutal, effective, and delicious. That torment is pure without structure – it has no need for order. This torment is a droning hum in the air, a permanent puddle congealing on the floor. I stoop to drink, and I am forced to live on my hands and knees.
I want to get out. Fear cannot be extinct; if I were free, I could search for it. But this new torment has pinned me more than I even could myself. It subdues, this new genre of suffering; it puckers, and it burns, and it sickens.
I hate them. I hate how much I think about hating them. More than freedom, even, I yearn for a fire. A fire would eat them whole; a fire would strain their suffering, sweet for me to consume; and finally, a fire would take me with it. I yearn, for just one moment, to see them scream.
