On the first night, I had to sleep half-sitting, my head resting on my knees and my arms wrapped around my legs to avoid rolling onto something that stank terribly and felt disgustingly warm and wet. As my head cleared, I realized it was my own vomit. On the second day, two shallow tubs were shoved into my room, one containing food and the other intended as a chamber-pot. Before long, it was difficult to distinguish between their respective contents. My sense of time soon atrophied to a simple count of how often these tubs were replaced. I think I was kept in that tiny room for three months, more or less. I must have passed some test of behavior during this time because I was then moved to another room.

The new room was immense: high-roofed and very wide, roughly rectangular. The vastness of this place dwarfed me, emphasizing how small and helpless I was. There was a cot built into the two longer sides of the room – these were just concrete shelves, provided with bedclothes that were covered in stains and stiff with dirt. High up on the wall facing the door – always securely locked – was the ventilator, girded with steel bars so that only a little outside air and a faint, greyish light were let into the room. Below this vent was a commode fitted with a faucet in such a way that I had to lean over the soiled commode to wash. A sliding panel in the door was used to deposit and remove plates of lukewarm, tasteless gruel and jugs of brackish water at regular intervals.

I had a cellmate. An older man, with a high forehead, wisps of greyish, unkempt hair trailing around his ears and a tangled, dirty grey beard. He was dressed in the same standard-issue prison uniform as I was, but his was much more ragged and worn. All his features were long – a long nose, a long, lean face. His skin was very pale, almost colorless, and covered in a fine web of wrinkles. His eyes, a cold blue, were the only trace of unequivocal color in his face. He was very lean and seemed tall, although I never saw him standing.

The only other creatures in our room were a large black spider with a pattern of orange and yellow streaks on its back and the small insects it fed on. It had woven a large, intricate web high up on one of the walls. At first, I spent a lot of time watching the spider, perched impassively at the centre of its web, the bodies of its past victims dangling from corners of the web, mummified in their silken shrouds. Then suddenly, there would be a slight twitch and the spider would dart across to where some hapless fly or bug had been caught on the sticky threads. Their deaths were swift and merciless. I envied them.

The walls were high, grey and empty of any interesting features; some stains of indistinct color, a few cracks in the plaster, pockmarks of age, nothing more. Despite this, at first it seemed that my cellmate’s chief occupation was to sit on the edge of his cot and stare at the wall. Perhaps some chance combination of stains and marks had formed a pattern; maybe he thought he could see a faint likeness of someone’s face, or the fields he once knew.

He never acknowledged my presence. I tried to talk to him at first, but my voice, so long unused, had turned into a hoarse croak that startled me back into silence. As the days went by, I found myself increasingly fascinated by this strange, silent man. I knew nothing of what he did when I was asleep; in all my waking hours he remained completely still. He must have occasionally eaten and used the commode – I didn’t eat all of the gruel, after all. Still, I never saw him doing anything except sitting there, perfectly still, an intent look in his eyes. I could only tell he was alive because of the faint rise and fall of his chest.

One day, emboldened by his passivity, I went over to his cot and tried to look at the room from his perspective, to see what had caught his attention. I couldn’t see anything special. The patch of wall that lay in his field of vision was just another undistinguished stretch of prison wall. I concluded he was not staring at the wall at all, but at some fixed point in the air. What was he seeing? I became increasingly absorbed in this question, spending hours staring at my cellmate, staring at that point in the air which corresponded with the line of his vision, trying to see what he saw. I made a few more attempts to catch his attention; they failed, and I gave up.

And so the days passed, my cellmate transfixed in his reverie as I tried to unravel this mysterious vigil. Gradually, I ate and drank less and less, tearing myself away from my contemplation for just a bare minimum of sustenance. I still had to sleep from time to time, even though it seemed as if my cellmate never did. When I dreamed, my dreams were no longer the dreams of my former life. Those had been heady dreams – dreams of anarchy triumphant, of freedom and dignity restored, dreams of tearing down the control towers, wiping the word tapes, wiping the sound and image tapes, restoring unmediated reality, paving the way for a new, beneficent order with true freedom for all. Instead, my dreams revolved around a different sort of freedom, a boundless freedom that came with the complete cessation of everything I knew. In these dreams I was completely passive, a detached observer as all the structures and forms of the world I knew crumbled into nothingness and an outer consciousness moved into the minds of humanity. It was the consciousness that lies at the heart of the void, staring back at the intrepid, lulling them into a false sense of safety by mimicking their own features.

Sometimes I felt I needed a respite and I distracted myself by watching the spider perched in his web, weaving his plans and his traps. It struck me that he was trapped too, for he could not feed or live if he left his web. Once, I destroyed the web, thinking I could free him from the necessity to live, and prey. The next day, there was a new, even larger and more elaborate web, with the spider perched at its heart. Already, there were victims swaddled at its edges.

How much time did I spend in this cell? I don’t really know. I only know that one day, my cellmate died. It took me a while to realize this, because his body remained fixed in its familiar posture. It appeared as lifelike as it ever had. It was only when a fly started buzzing around him that I began to suspect the truth. I did not think my cellmate would break out of his stupor just to swat a fly, but the persistence with which the fly hovered around him was odd. Even then, my first thought was for the spider, which should have captured the fly before it could trouble us. I inspected the web; there, among the dried-out husks of his victims, lay the spider, as dead as they were. There was no wound or mark on his body. I suppose he had reached the natural end of his lifespan.

I turned back to my cellmate. The fly was still humming around him. Irritated, I drew nearer to chase it away. It was then that I noticed the smell. It was a faint odor, dry and slightly acrid. I reached out to swat the fly; instead my hand struck my cellmate’s shoulder. His head fell to a side and he toppled over. I tried to feel for his pulse, and then attempted to hear his heartbeat by pressing an ear against his chest.

I was locked in with a dead man. A very strange dead man: his body had neither stiffened nor begun to rot; instead, it had become light and desiccated, as if the fleshy, wet life-stuff had been sucked out, leaving behind an empty shell. In the past I would have raised my voice, calling for the guards; I would have pounded on the door, scratched at the walls, even leaped at the vent. I no longer had the energy or the spirit for all that. Instead, I crawled under my cot, as far as I could get from the sight of the dead man and huddled there, whimpering softly. To me, his death was not an end in itself, but a token of my approaching dissolution. He would carry on, in some form; the shedding of his body only meant that a new stage had been reached and my own death was now nearer.

After a time, the door was unbolted. Uniformed figures moved about the room with quiet, impersonal efficiency. The dead man was taken away, as was I. They brought me to a place where I was provided with water and food and placed under observation. I tried asking who my cellmate had been, what he had been imprisoned for. The phrase ‘criminal dreaming’ was whispered in an undertone by one of my captors. The whisperer was quickly hushed.

Subsequently, I was moved to a large dormitory in which rows of cots housed numerous other prisoners. I ate and perambulated with these men, slept when they slept and woke when they woke. Yet, there was an unbreakable barrier between them and me. They were prisoners like me, men who had run afoul of our state and were paying the penalty – the only penalty ever given out under the enlightened dispensation of our rulers – incarceration for life. They were my kin in a sense that the soft, docile creatures outside the prison walls no longer were. But now, something had changed. I was no longer quite like them. They sensed this as keenly as I did, and gave me a wide berth, even sleeping two to a cot or on the floor to avoid me. There was no taunting or hostility; I was just completely ostracized. It didn’t bother me; I wasn’t longing for human company at this point. I went about the routine established for me; ate my meals, stood my turn under the showers, submitted to weekly tonsures and examinations, paced the walkways with everyone else and then went back to the dormitory where I sat on my cot, not looking at anything in particular.

I saw now that my old plans of action were futile. Action itself was futile; it was not an effective vector of change. We thinkers had misunderstood the basic stuff of reality. It was not matter; it was not mind. Only in dreams can we begin to grasp what reality actually consists of. In cold, empty dreams that slowly, seamlessly merge with reality, because they don’t reflect or respond to reality, but are reality itself.

The days passed. My fellow prisoners began to change, to become listless. I paid them very little attention, but it was easy enough to observe that something was happening to them. It seemed as if something had come undone in them, in that soft, warm, vital part that isn’t shown in any anatomical diagram. They became more and more passive, just going through the motions as the increasingly baffled guards pushed them about. There was only one aspect in which their passivity failed. Nightmares are common in a prison; in this dormitory, there a came a time when every man woke up screaming from a nightmare at least once each night.

As for myself, I could not tell if I even dreamed anymore. Waking and sleeping, everything seemed part of the same drab continuum. The authorities must have concluded that the change was linked to my presence in the dormitory, for I was shifted again after a few weeks, this time to a room that resembled my previous cell, except that I was alone this time. A contagion had been passed on; a containment protocol had been refined. Procedure, order: an attempt to impose a pattern on a featureless void, to drag the unknown out into the clear light of day, where it could be controlled.

I sat on the edge of my new cot, in a web of silent passivity, staring into the grayish obscurity that passes for light in these prison expanses. Sleeping or waking made little difference; an incision had been made, the venom injected. It was within me now, at all times, a vast obsessive insight, a consciousness of the void, a fascination with the inanition that was subsuming everything I knew. Our rulers struggled to impose order and structure on a world they wanted to own; the forces of chaos rallied back. And the forces of chaos are only the forerunners of the vaster forces of pure negation; most of the universe is empty, rather than merely chaotic. I was cocooned in this insight, wrapped up in my own stillness, staring into nothingness, ready for the final moment of mortal life. I knew that if I stared long and hard enough, I would begin to see what lay there, beyond this world of entropy and strife. Perhaps I would see my old cellmate staring back at me triumphant, engorged, his carapace gleaming in burnished shades of yellow and orange, his eyes a bright, cold glint of blue.