Who is The Undigestible Man?

When you join a twelve-step group, the first task is to find a sponsor and admit to him/her the nature of your addiction. Since I'm winging it here, the Internet will have to serve as my sponsor, and this post as the brunt volley of my first admission.

So, yes, the Undigestible Man.

Well, let me first say that I'm kind of a wuss in a lot of ways. I tend to mentally over-react at the tensions in my life, and maybe brood on the darkest aspects of a given situation. I think part of this is healthy sublimation - I push the dark ideas into a story so they don't overwhelm my overall outlook. But really, it's the kind of thing where right now I'm logging a lot of hours in my generally ideal office job, and this progression has recast the setting of the mythology entirely. It currently takes place in an office-setting, a mysterious(ish) company operating in the end times of society. Although we don't know it at first, this corporation also serves as the government of the society (and maybe even the state religion), and the Undigestible Man is an office worker responsible for analyzing and parsing the quantitative patterns in your average person's subconscious brain activity. That sounds dark (and fairly generic, I concede), but it also proves a point about how the mythologizing is tied to my current life situation: I'm working in an office for the first time, I have some friends who are generally obsessed with libertarianism right now in anticipation of the upcoming election (hence the corporation vs. government factor) and I'm watching a lot of Lost. That last point may seem unrelated, but only because I haven't mentioned that the current mythology is a serialized TV show featuring mysterious and largely allegorical characters. And also the Undigestible Man is kind of like Locke right now.

It feels good to get that off my chest.

Now to the point: If an office job in a pleasant community can engender those kinds of themes, imagine what my brain did when at 18 years of age I took a job on a remote oil rig in Canada's frozen north. I always feel like a ponce bringing that up, like I'm trying to make a case for how hardcore I am, but seriously, it was miserable. We worked twelve hour shifts in two week stints, a week of 7am-7pms and then a week of graveyard equivalents. It was sometimes minus fourty, often minus twenty, and from my perspective we were literally raping the planet of its precious bodily fluids. I lost my sense of smell for two years following. There was one point where we had to use the buddy system at all times, because at any moment odorless and colorless H2S gas could leech from the hole and kill everyone instantly. I was constantly reminded that my immediate superior had told everyone else on the crew that if he ever caught me off the rig site he would beat the crap out of me. It was, generally, what you would call a bad scene.

And of that came the Undigestible Man. He also worked on a rig, at the end of the world, after the end of time. Society had fallen and risen as many times as it was going to, and the natural cycle of history had resolved itself into a grey palette of non-time. The Undigestible Man had worked on the rig for longer than he could remember. He wasn't aware of the passage of time anymore, and as far as he knew, it wasn't even passing. He was scorned by his superiors, the shadowy over-figures that controlled this massive operation. He kept to himself, barely conscious, hardly coherent. He had noticed that death seemed impossible; he remembered a few times when he had been moments from death, his sleeve caught in the girating arm of gargantuan machinery, but every time he would wake up in bed just before the final blow. The rig didn't change holes ever, because his rig was, and always had been, in the process of drilling the deepest hole there is. Deep into the crust of the planet, into its brain, into its very psyche; drilling not to the core, but to the Core (if you'll forgive pretentious distinctions of capitilization, which you probably shouldn't - remember at least that I have a problem).

At some point the Undigestible Man hears rumours that the drill bit is stuck, they can't seem to drill any deeper. This can happen for a number of reasons on real-life rigs, usually because the hole has started to collapse on itself and needs to be restabilized. The key to this is to dump tonnes of mixing powder down the hole at a regular rate, forming a kind of concrete casing around drill and piping. I did this a lot in my time there, sometimes for twelve hours a time, one 100lb bag every minute down the hole, hence my loss of smell. The Undigestible Man is doing this for weeks, months, maybe. He doesn't know what's going on in the hole to make it so unstable, but he catches whispers of it being bad. This badness is hard for him to discern, however, because he's generally pretty haunted at this point anyway. He sees things occasionally coming out of the hole. Human-like things, but more shadowy.

Anyway.

Eventually the Undigestible Man is told by his superiors that something has happened at the bottom of the hole, and somebody has to go down there to check it out. He's been elected. They've rigged up some kind of device to the drill piping so that one person can be transported down, crammed into a tiny receptacle with his knees pressed into his face and no light. The time it takes to travel down the hole is immeasurable. Not only is there no reference point to measure it by, but the hole is also immeasurably deep. During this time the Undigestible Man thinks about his entire life, and then spends even more time thinking about absolutely nothing.

When he emerges, he finds himself in a dead world at the center of the Earth. Here he finds thousands of dead bodies, the shadowy-humanlike things he saw coming out of the hole. He doesn't know what they are (and I only have a vague idea myself), but he knows that he was responsible for their deaths, the toxic powder he'd pumped endlessly into their underground civilization. It's around here that he discovers the control room to the planet, now left vacant, its operators dead with the rest. And then he makes his final decision, which I think has stuck with me because it's about the darkest thing I can conceive of but still find morbidly interesting (as in, I can think of darker things, but they're more immediately repugnant and gross).

So there it is. Pretty dark. When I was first obsessed with this concept, I pretty quickly decided that it would be best for me to think about other things. But other stories that have emerged since then usually end up here. Given enough time they all do. I always hope the Undigestible Man will make a different decision, but the few times he has I think it's because I've forced his hand. Given his predicament, what other decision could he make? I've thought of one potential out, which has obsessed the mythology since I thought of it, but I'll get into it later.