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Neerie McCloud has never been anywhere but Elsewhere. Elsewhere stretches on for eons in every direction. It’s full of white waves, pale as clouds but iridescent as an oil spill. Unnatural and everything and all-consuming. The Elsewhere is all that there is. The Elsewhere stretches and shifts as though it is designed to be lost in. But Neerie isn’t lost in it. Being lost means that you had a direction to start with. That you had some home to go back to, in the first place. But Neerie has never been anywhere else, so it can’t be lost. No path can lead it home--it has no other home to go to. Neerie belongs to Elsewhere, and Elsewhere belongs to Neerie, and there has never been anything but this.
Sometimes, Neerie remembers water. Water is not like the Immateria. The Immateria froths and churns until it’s too much to see through.The water, once, was clear, and blue-tinged, just like Neerie himself is. It was welcoming; it was everything the Immateria wasn’t. The water had things in it--living things, bright and colorful things.The Immateria has things in it, too. It has people, visitors that are swept in. But nothing living in Elsewhere belongs to it, not like the bright living things belonged to the water. Nothing belongs to the Immateria, except for Neerie. But the people float through it, and they are Elsewhere, and then they leave. Neerie doesn’t leave. He asks the visitors for their names, when he finds them. Sometimes, they answer. Comfort. Nic. Beck. Kichiro. Carmelo. They ask for Neerie’s name, and Neerie answers, when he can remember an answer. They ask, “who do you play for?” and “what team are you on?” and Neerie doesn’t understand the question. Neerie doesn’t have an answer.
Most of the time, Neerie is alone. The Elsewhere is too vast, and even if the visitors wanted to stay with Neerie, they can do nothing to control where the Immateria takes them. So the visitors are swept away, swept deeper into Elsewhere or back to whatever homes they come from, and Neerie drifts alone. It isn’t lonely. Neerie thinks it remembers being lonely, but Elsewhere is different. It’s comforting. It wants Neerie to stay, and so Neerie does. Neerie has made itself a home here. No structures, no walls, but the familiarity of the endless, oil-slick waves is something that belongs to it, now. And so even if it is alone, Neerie is home. Neerie belongs here, and so it can’t be lonely. When Neerie comes across the visitors in its Elsewhere, it doesn’t think it knows how to speak to them quite right, anymore. Maybe its been alone too long. Maybe the visitors need to be alone longer.
The visitors miss people. Some of them tell Neerie this. It means nothing, when they explain. A visitor named Pedro talks to Neerie, and tells him of someone called Valentine.
“I miss them,” Pedro says. Neerie cocks his head at him.
“Miss them?” He asks.
“Yeah, like--I’m sad, because they aren’t with me. I want to be where they are.” Pedro pauses, looks at Neerie like he’s seeing him for the first time. “Don’t you have people you miss, from before you were here?”
Neerie stares at Pedro for a long, long moment, stretching the silence out until he feels like he could hold Pedro’s gaze between his teeth. “No,” he tells him, slow and unbothered. “There was never any ‘before.’”
Some emotion shows on Pedro’s face that Neerie can’t place, some furrowing of the brows; the corners of his lips turn down. “You didn’t--did you ever play blaseball? You don’t remember having a team? Or a family?”
Neerie smiles at him, wide and sharp. “No. I’ve always been here. I have the Elsewhere, so I don’t need to miss anyone.”
Neerie doesn’t remember any before. Neerie can’t remember any before, it can’t. The Elsewhere doesn’t like it, when Neerie tries to remember. The Elsewhere wants to keep Neerie all to itself. Neerie wants to keep Elsewhere too; it does. But sometimes--sometimes it tries to remember anyway. The trying, most often, makes Neerie go all fuzzy, its head feeling far away, as though the Immateria has pulled Neerie’s thoughts out of it. As though part of Neerie has started floating away on the current. So Neerie doesn’t try, not often. Sometimes, though, it manages to hold onto its thoughts. It manages to pull something out of its memories, sifting through them like shards of glass or colored beads. The before only comes to it in pieces, little kaleidoscopic bits that it struggles to keep hold of. The memories don’t stay long, or they do, and Neerie just can’t remember. It wonders, sometimes, though it can’t remember, it wonders if it was scared, when it first started to forget. Now, it scares it when it tries to remember.
What memories Neerie can find seem mostly to do with the water. There’s something funny about that, he thinks. A life spent in the water; a life spent in the Immateria. The lives look completely different. The lives look just alike. Neerie remembers before; Neerie remembers the sun and its light and the way it would glitter across the waves. He remembers pulling the fins on his arms through still water, making little waves of his own. He remembers feeling warm, and laughing, smiling wide enough to hurt. Sometimes he remembers crying enough salt tears to fill a ocean on his own. There’s another memory he has, somewhere else, of floating through the Immateria. A conversation; a man with mechanical wings and a sad smile. When Neerie can remember the water, he thinks he might understand what it is to miss things after all.
Neerie holds the memory of being swept away in its hands, rubbing it like a smooth stone between its fingers. It’s been held for so long that it’s begun to warp and fade, the way the water wears the edges off of glass. Neerie’s memories have no sharp edges to hurt it with, anymore. Everything is dull and flat and soft; everything is distant and harmless. Even if Neerie can remember someone screaming, it can’t remember calling back. If it remembers choking on the Immateria as it was swept into the unknown, it cannot remember the stifling feeling of drowning. In the moments, few and far between, where it remembers, it watches the memories from outside of itself with something almost like disinterest. The shocked faces are there, but they mean nothing. They watch as the pain happens, but it doesn’t hurt anymore. There’s nothing left of Neerie-from-before to hurt; there is only Neerie-of-the-Elsewhere, and its soul is a grey, cloudless sky. No weather is left to disturb it.
The Elsewhere is always gentle with Neerie. It wants him to feel safe in his home. It wants him to feel held. The Elsewhere holds him. It is not just his home, but his companion, too--it is the only constant. It is the only thing Neerie can hold onto when he has no memories, and no self, and no one else. Neerie says this once, to a visitor. She seemed worried for him, when he said he was supposed to stay here. Most of the people Neerie says this to look worried, but not all of them say anything. She does. She rests a hand, gentle, on Neerie’s arm.
He says, “The Elsewhere is all that I have.”
“The Elsewhere took everything else you had away from you,” she tells them. Neerie, abruptly and with more intensity than he tends to feel things these days, decides he is done speaking with her. He closes his eyes and waits until she floats away. He tries not to think of her again. He thinks of her again, and hopes the Immateria has kept a hold on her. Or--he hopes the Immateria has spit her back out.
All that Neerie knows is the Elsewhere. All that Neerie has ever known is the Elsewhere; those who ask it to remember a “before” are wrong to ask.The visitors are afraid of the Elsewhere. They don’t trust it. Some of them don’t trust Neerie, either; maybe they can see that Neerie and Elsewhere are the same. It’s okay. Neerie doesn’t need their trust, their friendship, their concern. Neerie only needs the exhaustive, vacant waves of Immateria. There’s a fading, distant voice that it can hear, sometimes, a remnant of before. Someone saying “
come home, Neerie, okay? Don’t forget to come home.”
Neerie smiles, when it remembers that voice. It has come home. Cradled in the soft, cool foam of Immateria, and resting within the Elsewhere, it has found where it belongs at last. Neerie closes its eyes, and drifts.