The Naked Truth

She leans over the edge.
“Where are you?” she asks.
“In a place of great blackness”, I reply, and my voice bounces echoing off the round ridged walls, all the way from the bottom to the skylight of daylight at the top.
“You poor thing!” she calls down, not even attempting to disguise the soupy insincerity of her tone. “Do you suffer terribly? Is your life bereft of all joy and meaning?”
“Not really,” I say, sulkily. “But I’m tired of my job and I could use some cash.”
“How awful for you. Do they work you very hard in the salt mines? Are you forced to camp out there as well, slinging your hammock from stalagmites of sodium, (hoping the stalactites hold firm and don’t pierce you with their well-seasoned spikes while you sleep?) just so that you have shelter from the raging storm?”
“I wish you’d go away if you’ve just come to mock. It’s damp down here, and the self-pity is rising round my ankles.”
“But my heart goes out to you, so sad and lonely down at the bottom of your well of misery.”
“Thank you. A little sympathy and fellow-feeling is all I ask.”
“Are you unloved, undervalued, depreciating fast in the present emotional climate? Are you helpless and homeless and hateful? “
“I’m loveable!” I yell. “My value rises steadily, and holds firm and steadfast in the face of adversity, even when it oozes through the laces on my boots”, but she’s on a roll now.
“Are you deformed and warped and twisted by misfortune?”
“No! It’s just that I think I’m getting a cold, and it’s making me look a little peaky.”
“Ah”, she says. “So not some life threatening disease, just a semi-fatal psychosomatic malingering?”
“As usual,” I say. “It’s the cross I have to bear.”
She laughs softly, and I hear a muffled rattling against the walls, and then a splash and the watery push of a ripple.
“Goodness, you are a long way down,” she calls, and lets another handful of gravel and not over-small pebbles rain down on me.
“And where exactly are you?” I ask, when shouts, curses and imprecations have managed to dissuade her from heaping the threatened coals upon my head (“But just think, the ones that missed you would fizzle out in the water, and at least you’d have a little light while they fell. And if you didn’t manage to dodge them, and they burnt you, then I’d have really given you something to cry about, wouldn’t I?” “I’d rather you didn’t”, I reply, with all the dignity that can be mustered from the bottom of a pit of darkness).
“I’m in a very peaceful place,” she says. “A little like a padded cell, but more stylishly upholstered. I requested plum-coloured velvet on the walls, none of that unpleasant white vinyl stuff.”
“You’re very fortunate,” I say. “It sounds like a much happier place than the one I find myself in.”
“That’s because they wouldn’t allow me to keep any baggage,” she tells me, and the faint light where I can nearly make out her face peering down at me seems to dim a little. “I brought you with me but you kept tripping me up with your despondency, and that annoying little cough you’re developing, with its reproachful phlegmy rattle. They said you had to go, and so I tossed you down here.”
“I think my cough is lifting,” I tell her. “I think I see that perhaps, in the great scheme of things, the torments inflicted on my soul are only minor inconveniences. I think I see thankfulness for my blessings glimmering in the dark, like little fireflies of hope and happiness.”
“This is the thing about the isolation room”, she continues, as though I’d never spoken, “ they stick you in there with yourself. The one thing you’d like to be isolated from (immunized against) gets thrown in after you just before the door clangs and the lock turns.
“Objectively, I have no problem with your company. I generally find you amusing and sometimes surprisingly interesting. My problem with you now is that I want a kind of brainwashed and freshly laundered peace: to lie on the floor and gaze up at the skylight, and fill up my mind with emptiness, and to let the good roll across me unimpeded. And instead I find you ambling aimlessly across me, trailing grubby cobwebs of thought and memory and apprehensive expectations: all the baggage I’d have liked removed from me at the door. This is the problem with DIY padded cells: you don’t get the rigorousness you really need when you have to negotiate your own details.
“But I had the forethought to ask for a nice dank hole, as well as the velvet, and you foolishly leapt into it.”
“I think it’s too dark down here even for me,” I call up, somewhat forlornly. “I think the dankness makes me cough, and the mustiness makes me sneeze, and that if I came back up again, we might find some compromise between my wish to wallow and your need for empty-headed tranquility, and that if you allowed me up, the mud would dry, even though I feel it rising to my knees now, and we could brush it off and pretend it never happened. ”
“I think I’ve had enough of you”, I think she says, just before she lets the trapdoor drop shut.