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“You´re so distant,” The Woman said as they left The Nest, walking once again through the maze of concrete structures and passing the hordes of people invested in queues or hope of some sort whose numbers dwindled by the end of the day.
The sun was still sitting high, but it was leaning towards its descent into zero; shining bright through the grey and stinging their eyes as they walked along the path lining the outer wall. To their left, an old man sat covered in his own filth, pulling a spotted blanket up over his shivering body.
The old man watched Marcos and The Woman walking together and thought to himself how nice that must be; having someone who may not understand, but even through mankind’s prolonged prosaic descent to the lower rung of the universal food chain, by your side, still, she stood. It was something to dream, something to want and much more than what he had. The old man retreated under his blanket, closed his eyes and thought of things that were warm and cosy while he shivered his way through another night, prolonging the inevitability of his molecular subtraction.
As the sun shone its brightest passing through the grey sky and their worn bodies like a river of light, their shadows stretched out far onto the path behind as the night in their souls crept out of their bodies. From above, they appeared as shaded giants, as men perched on the tips of buildings, leaning their sight over the edge, watching the two leave the complex. Their eyes fixed on the pair of dark shapes as they slid along the path until they crossed the town square and then vanished into the cover of the cavernous maze of towers encapsulating the centre of town.
The eyes retreated into the forlorn faces that with their creeping hands, pulled back from the seeing ledge and into the asylum they fashioned for themselves to wait out their growing hunger, thinking until the morn, when the men dressed in black brought more news.
A sharp stabbing emotion wrecked at Marcos’ well-being, his state of one; his ethereal balance. He took upon himself a breath and held it in his thoughts and when he exhaled, so too removed, was the discomfort in his being.
“Why am I distant? I’m not distant, I’m thinking” he responded with slight frustration begetting his state of calm.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said coldly.
The Woman breathed out heavily in a show of unacceptance and as Marcos continued in his stride, she reached out to his hand pulling him closer.
“Do you still love me?” she asked.
“Oh god, here we go. Of course, I love you. Don’t be stupid” he said bluntly.
“I know, it’s just... You don’t touch me anymore. Not like you used to. Do you even find me attractive, I mean, are you still attracted to me? I know I’m ugly. My skin is bad, the sores, they’re horrible and my hair. You used to love my hair. I’m so ugly” she said.
“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” he said under his own disheartened breath. “Yes, you are attractive. You’re beautiful ok. To me, you are beautiful. I love you, isn’t that enough?
“You don’t desire me,” she said.
“We just had sex,” he said fuming.
“Six weeks ago,” she said.
“A day, a week, whatever. Do we have to do this now; here on the streets? Can’t this wait?” he pleaded trying not to lose his rationale and base with anger.
“It can always wait, can’t it? Fine, forget it, forget I said anything” she said.
“No. It’s not fine. Tell me, what’s really the matter? Tell me, I promise I won’t be irrational. I’ll listen to you and we can resolve this. What’s wrong?” he asked slowing his pace, facing The Woman and discoursing in a gentle attentive tone.
“Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s fine. Forget it” she said.
“What’s wrong? Please, tell me. If you don’t tell me how the hell am I supposed to make things right?” he said, anger rising with his tone.
“It’s nothing,” she said.
“Fuck it!” he screamed swinging his head back to the front, clenching his fists, squinting his eyes and feeding destruction through every fibre in his being, willing someone or something to come out of the darkness so he could rip its head off and just get this woman out of his veins.
They walked for a few blocks in silence, Marcos drifting like the sun, from a violent bright star set to explode, back to the shadows of exhausted acceptance; unable and unwilling to keep up the fight. When his anger retreated, The Woman once feeding on his energy, lowered her guard and pulled closer to her lover.
“I just want to know that you’re not running away that’s all. I love you” she said before pausing. “God, you’re so warm” she continued; holding his arm with her two hands and pulling herself to his body; she, forgetting of the day’s tumult and repressing the concern that had erupted between them. He, painting in his conscious mind a single white dot on a black background; focusing on the dot and returning his state of one; calm, right, rational.
She wanted to speak of the incidents, of the distractions, of the uncontrolled and deluded dreaming during he day, and of the sickness that baited in her gut, but she let the urge subside and instead settled into his stride.
She didn’t want to upset him further. He didn’t need this extra stress, not now, while things were so bleak at The Nest. What she logically thought he needed or at least would suffice somewhat would be for her to do what he needed her to do; to fulfil her role and to not make any mess of his mind or his matter.
Marcos wanted to tell her about what he had seen, of his growing concern and of the visions of desire and despair that played to his conscious mind. Instead, he too settled in his stride and said nothing.
The two made their way through the sprawl of hope and desperation and arrived at their dwelling, a twenty five storey building on the east bloc of the town centre. The Woman cursed her partner’s choice every time they made their way through the heavily gated entry and passed the open doors of the elevator shaft where time after time, a haunting cold draft snaked its way through her clothes and inside the thick of her skin, chilling her to the bone and frighting her sub conscious.
Every time she passed those doors she felt a little death; the ghost of the past age inching its way inside her and tightening its grip on her lungs commanding her to shortness of breath and state of alarm. The elevator itself sat idle between two the floors, although they didn’t know which. Marcos fared not to open the doors and set light into what preferred to stay in the dark.
Before its occupation by Marcos, the building had been the vice of idle play. Children would race through the lobby and burst through the stairwell doors feasting their childishness; their primitive play, with competition; running as fast and with as much strength to arrive first at the top of the building.
They would at first restrain from barging, building upon their will to power, an impotent and destabilising state of emotional urgency and frustration at a lack of continuity. They would then barge, running over one another, focusing only on their direction, their force, the bend in their knee, the planting of their heel, the spring in their step, the ending in their sight and one pure focused streamlined emotion; one.
When they reached the top, they would thrust their arms into the air shouting like savage beasts over the railing, into the core of the stairwell, their voices flowing like a waterfall over the edge and filling all of the floors as it travelled down to the bottom where the slowest and weakest of The Children still sat idle defeated by their own self-disgust.
Then they would race back to the bottom, their hands gripping the railing as they thrust upwards and soared through the air, over the steps and over the children coming upwards who then cowered to the floor under the impending force of their hyper confident alpha stated downward momentum. And when they got to the bottom, they would race back up again.
By accident; as coincidence and the labelling of luck hath been described many a time, Marcos had just taken flight from a violent tumult that had erupted on an underground tra
in platform not far from where they stood; a place now that was ruled by savage dogs and no man dared to venture.
He had taken with momentum; The Woman who shared his life and ran from what would become just another incident, but in reality, for those unable to adapt to flight, would be a bloody violent end to their desperate plight for a return of something fair or common; like sensibility, decency or simple abiding rule.
He had put himself in front of several blows and taken the brunt of the attack, pushing The Woman away from the tracks, back up the steps, putting himself again in front of her, pulling her close to his back and holding her tight with his right hand low to his back while with his left, he extended into a fist and lunged forward against a flow of people herding downwards toward the commotion, splitting a path right through the middle by the sheer force of his will, his focus, his state of one.
Marcos had taken his direction far from the erupted chaos and made rest through the doors of this grand centrepiece of The City. When he was inside catching his racing breath, he heard the ruckus coming from the open stairwell. Upon inspection, from the foot of the stairs, he looked upwards following the spiral of steps to the ceiling and watched in learning as a horde of children raced to the ground floor, their eyes unnerved, their emotions charged.
He saw there at that moment, the natural innateness of direction and propulsion in an uncompromising environment and the children´s disconnection from self and the physical and psychological interplay of defeat which was ubiquitous everywhere in this decaying city, everywhere except here; in this stairwell. He saw the simplicity, of one; the core of his philosophy.
It was here that a new rationale was born. It was on this very first step, that a seed was sown and from it, an idea; and unto it, a strategy and from that, the building of a new empire, The Nest and the children who awoke him to this logic, the first new philosophers, and of whom would become, the first of many Fathers to the new dawn.
These stairs bore the ingenuity of progression. They were the catalyst for what would be, their only hope. From the innocuous play of child was born the future of mankind.
With one in their mind, they moved up the spiral staircase and when they reached the final floor, they were greeted by a guard at their door who ushered them in. Marcos moved straight to his throne, the grand window which overlooked The City and The Nest. There he stood in a pensive stare, looking out at what he alone had created and the work that still had yet to be done. The Woman crept up on him with distraction in her step.
“Can I finish what I was trying to say earlier? Without getting yelled at?” she asked.
“We’re back here again are we? Earlier, when, what, finish what?” he responded.
The approaching conversation sent him into vocal and mental dissipation. Only she could unglue him and maybe it was her nature to do it, or maybe she knew and she just wanted to pick at the frame, take it apart piece by piece, so that later, when she desired loving, she could mend her misgivings and piece it all back together again and it would look better than before, but every time, it would get just a little bit weaker and one day, maybe soon, maybe long into their future when they are old and still bickering, when they least expect, the frame will collapse under a lifetime of maltreatment and subconscious nit-picking.
Maybe it was the former and maybe the latter; one could argue a case for either but one thing was for sure when she started on this, Marcos always consciously felt like a wet cloth, a little bit less intelligent than what he really was.
“The class, The Children, the method. It’s not working you know. I mean, I don’t know if it is and I don’t know if it isn’t, it’s just it doesn’t feel right. And I don’t know what right should feel like, but things feel different recently and I know I know, visualise only the result and equate only what is equitable to achieve the result. I get it. I get your logic. But it’s not that simple. I nearly got hurt today. Look at this; I have cuts on my arms. What the hell was that anyway? Did they really have to smash the windows? I think it was too much Marcos. It was too much” she said.
“What was the result?” he responded.
“The result? The result? The result was I thought I was going to have a fucking heart attack. Those kids, I don’t know what hell they endured, but that is not what we have been working on. You said that the loving condition would work, it just takes time. You said that, you, no one else, you. This was not you; it was not your philosophy. It’s not what we agreed was right” she said coming to tears. “We lost one,” she said blubbering.
“Only one?” he said laughing. “They seem like good numbers. You shouldn’t invest your emotion on footprints, there’s no logic in mourning a memory” he said.
“Numbers? You didn’t see this boy, his face, the emptiness in his eyes. Have you ever felt the true weight of emptiness in a child? Have you ever even witnessed one your experiments? It’s not right” she said.
“One should give for the good of many. It doesn’t matter if we lose one, two, ten or a thousand, as long as in the end we cure this Famine and we find a way to repopulate this planet; to keep our blood warm, to father our ideals and to no longer be less than a fucking earth worm in this forgotten shit of a city. Being human should not be a curse, not anymore. It’s not fair that these fucking dogs can breed as they do, can scavenge with such might as they do and can take our claim to this city. It is our right, to be in control. We shouldn’t have to be ashamed of our race. We shouldn’t have to feel inferior every time those beasts whose backs warm the sun pass us on the street. Do you know what it’s like, having those mongrels look at you, sneering? We are human, the sun warms our minds. It is our universal right to be above everything, to father this fucking planet and if I have to sacrifice a million ugly children to make one beautiful again, then so be it. And if anyone wants to stand in the way of my saving grace then do so knowing that my will and the love in my heart will knock you down, one by one. Now, you want to tell me that one child was affected. I ask you, how many were unaffected? We lost one, how many did we save? We are so close right now, I can feel it in my skin” he said, his voice quietening in the end as he leaned back against the edge of the table where they had eaten so many meals over so many nights over the past ten years.
“I asked you to trust me before and I ask you to please, don’t stop now,” he said.
“Can you explain it then? I mean if I don’t get it if it’s not cruel then paint me a picture” she said.
Marcos took a breath diminishing his anger; the force of his truth settled his mind.
“I don’t know honestly. I don’t know anything anymore. I’m tired. I’m trying to change the world and it feels like you’re trying to change my mind” he said.
“I’m not trying to change anything I just wanna know why I’m bleeding and whether it worked because I don’t get it. I’m not a philosopher; I’m not like you and your buddies. I’m not as smart as you, but you know what, it feels wrong and I don’t know why I’m saying this now, but it feels wrong. You can’t do this anymore, not like today” she said, her voice trembling, tears running from her eyes.
“Honestly I want to, but I don’t understand really what you’re saying. You say it feels wrong. But what does that feel like? How do you know what they feel? It doesn’t make any sense” he said confused.
“I can’t explain it. It’s just something in my stomach keeps turning and I’m not sure, maybe it’s cancer, maybe it’s a virus, whatever, but you have to believe me, a voice in my head says that this is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong; it’s all wrong. The Loving, the class, The Nest, this world, us…” she said falling desperately into the last word.
The Woman couldn’t hold back the wave of emotion that pressed against her heart and she let go, falling to her knees, her face buried in her palms, her cry travelling from a soft whimper to hysteria and her lover, without care, looking out into the distance.
Marcos let her words run past his ears as he always had, paying her sigh
t but not a drop of attention. Instead, he ran with the gist of what she said and interpreted it to his necessity hearing only that she doubted his ability to save the world. This was no reason to hate her; he had plenty more of those, but it was the fuel he needed to continue with his plight. She was his zero. If they ever found common ground, their story would come to an end.
“What about the dream scribing? Are the pictures similar? Is there symmetry?” he asked while The Woman quietened her sobbing.
“Yeah. Sort of” she said.
“Nothing is sort of. It either is or it isn’t. Pull yourself together. Which is it?” he yelled.
“Yes… it’s the same!” she said shouting at him in a childish tantrum.
“Good. The dream is fine then. The problem is somewhere down the line. As long as they all have the same focus then everything is working.”
“Some of the pictures are different, though. It’s exactly like the Tellings but... I mean… some of The Children, they focus more on The Collector than on The Collective. They detail the tower so vividly. It scares me. This is why I question stuff like these psychos from At War this morning. We’re doing this you know; we’re putting this image in their heads. What if it doesn’t work? I mean, what if we’re hurting them? There’s this boy, Donal, I see him play sometimes in the courtyard with the other Children. I was watching him today. He is so unaffected, he worries me” she said.
“And why is that?” he asked.
“Because he reminds me of you,” she said.
Marcos remained unaffected. He put no greater thought or connection into her words, simply accepting that she had spoken and allowing her to vent her misdirection.
A war is only won when it is never fought. To respond to her would be to acknowledge that her insanity or that this highly contagious state of distraction was true and this, of course, was not the case and more so, it would perpetuate the frustration of unsuccessfully trying to prove her wrong. When it was that she would return to logic then he would join her in discourse. Until then, he would refrain from being At Being with her for the sake of sinking to her level.
In his conversations, he always engaged indirectly with his partner. They never spoke of their lives in terms of relation or wishes, only the work being done and that still to be done. They especially didn’t reflect on their past. The strength of the new way depended on the abandonment of the past and one having no emotional assimilation to events having had once been.
When Marcos would hold his partner or react to the touching of her hand, it would be almost in the maintenance of a tool; tightening a lid, refitting a glove or oiling a chain. He touched The Woman without touching The Woman and this she felt. Every absence etched a more insoluble fissure in her heart, compounding her repressed discontent and surmounting her volatility.
Marcos, on the other hand, felt none of this. He could see her lingering every now and then, taking pause when she thought his sight was elsewhere. He could see it in her writing, how the tail of her letters seemed to flick and drift whimsically. He could hear it in her breath as he closed his eyes to fall asleep, the slight tremours of air that no doubt echoed some unsettling picture she was painting in her mind. He could see it in her doubt that even now, questioned his logic though the voice of fear. He saw this and he said nothing. He saw this and still, he felt nothing.
The two stared in silence for a while out of the window, watching people shuffle about below them and seeing new fires being lit in the near distance. The Nest they had built from an idea and with their own struggle; although crippling under the weight of its own potential, stood as a testament to continuity, new directions, and a new horizon.
When they cast their eyes to its foreboding stature; its colossal walls stretching into the heavens and its expanse enveloping the size of a small town, they were overcome with different states; The Woman, lowly pride and for Marcos, dissatisfaction; she, amassing the fortune of her partner’s brilliance, and he, for what it still had not become. Each reserved in the display of their internalisation, unwilling to let the other in.
Outside those walls, in The City below, the remnants of a forgotten age clung to their primitive emotional devices. For the most part, they were unattainable; beyond repair and out of Collective influence; so far down the spiral were they that one would have to lose themselves just to find themself low enough to wind them back up.
Marcos chose to live in these remnants, high above the flux of stillness that commanded this other existence. He made his bed in their abode and nursed his reason in their insanity. He couldn’t explain it within simple logic, but he needed to be in the midst of this lost tribe.
The Woman dared not question his reason or input underpinnings to his logic. She attended, without condition, the direction Marcos had mapped and bore acceptance of their destination, come what may.
Her need of him grew like an unattended tumour, but she willed her restraint so as not to contravene the ideals and conscious control to which Marcos adhered. The tyranny she dictated upon her own heart at first by command and then by choice; strengthened nothing of her resolve, in fact, the continuity of such weakened her position and engorged her emotional reserve; leaving her perpetually on the verge of something prodigious. Still; for him, she would tear out her own tongue if it was that her silence would bring him closer to birthing his vision. So devoted was she unto him, as he, obsessed unto an idea.
Marcos stood in the failing light, pencil in hand, deep in figurative thought, sketching on a scrap piece of paper. He looked longingly into the distance, into the orange hue pulling over the horizon above the weary city and when it became that his sight had filled with enough colour, shade, form and idea, he turned to the paper and continued to sketch, laxing his fingers and wrist, then scratching away with intensity.
When he was done, he folded the drawing placing it neatly into his pocket. He turned his gaze to The Woman who was boiling some water over an open fire in the adjoining room; the iron pot sitting upon a rusted grate and below it, wood and paper scraps, kindling. Under the reflection of light, shadows swam across the shape of her body and invited him to misdirection.
Before him now, through the play of light and umbrage he saw The Woman, younger, as she had been, at a time he knew she beckoned to return; when at night, the veil of darkness was just the grander setting for a far greater luminescence, when the exuberant colours of The City brought life to the people, awoken from the drudgery of whites and greys that commanded their days; marching about in expectative succession, acquiring imaginary distance from themselves and the monotony of their tireless pursuit of defining purpose and self-worth in a tirade of imaginary titles, pacified idealism and concurrent introspection. A time when the cerebral senses were overwhelmed with the magic of light and sound and how these two vices in the hands of man could attain so much wonder. In a world of imaginary ideals, of conscious binds, one could be anything.
In his sight now, The Woman; pristine, turned to his direction, her black hair swishing in front of her hazel eyes and her chimerical smile drawing him to his knees. She rushed from where she stood; perched over the bathroom sink, and jumped into his arms. She squeezed so tightly that he thought for a moment that either one of them would break in two and that what he thought to be true; what for so long, he had wanted, to be true, was now palpably real.
The two fell down backwards onto the sofa, she straddling him, her hands holding back his forwardness, restraining his immediate desire; forcing his shoulders to an arch taking away his balance and force; burying her weight unto his, pinning him to the cushion, lilac lighting his eyes as her hair moved about and her face pendulated tantalisingly close to his; their lips, not quite touching, but close enough to steal a portion of his breath and to leave a mark of her own.
Seduction superseded her state of joy as she fell headstrong into passion; giving herself to him, releasing unto the air; from the touch of her hand, a thin strip of paper and on the floor it lay as their naked bodies inter
twined amongst the fading light.
Overcome was he at that moment; so involuntarily, now, though, of self-control, attainable reason, drawing a cold sharp breath, he iced his thoughts, whitened out the expanse of colour in his cerebral eye, unfastened his emotional devices and rationalised his immediacy, abandoning the lunacy of inward travel and memorial divulgences. The lock upon his emotional reserve turned once more.
Liberated from the repression of his emotional debauchery, he put momentum in his self, parting from the balcony and returning to a more residentially practical state of being; At Peace. He moved to The Woman and cut some vegetables and heated some meat scraps as she prepared a tea for their supper.
The blanket of night drew in and the shadows that danced in daylight, uniforming once again, took refuge in the atramentous filling of space. Above The City, in the open night, a million stars lit the sky; the souls of the dead looking down upon the living.
They had taught unto their Children that in the birth of the sun in each new day, the fabric of night was ripped to shreds; spooked into hiding, and clung vehemently to the feet of mankind and that in every eve, at the end of each day, the sun would burst into a billion pieces and scatter into brilliant magnificent forms as the shadows came together to once again dress the night. Every dead sun would be born again in the morn.
The night adorned The City and the streets vanished under its veil; here or there, small fires burned and people continued to be, settling into whatever hope nestled in their unconscious sleep.
Marcos and The Woman lay on their dusted mattress; he on his side, his face turned to the open window, unconscious and dreaming, and she, listening to his light breathing, on her back, her left hand outstretched, but still not enough to reach his distant body. In her thoughts she travelled not in time; her conscious theatre re-enacted no past betterment, but instead she shifted her head to its side and gazed upon her sleeping man’s body.
Her desire and lust magnetised the contours of his muscular shape and her conscious mind filled his cold vacancy with kindness and an adoration of self that gave to the form that now; before her eyes, confounded her.
Her conscious eye infused a time that was into a moment that is; indulging her-self in an orgiastic emotionally drunken revelry of, what could be. She wanted so much to feel like a woman again, for him to extend beyond the expected and ubiquitous pleasantries of ‘I love you’, ‘you’re beautiful’, ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘it’ll never happen again’.
She wanted to feel special, to feel sexual, and to feel wanted. She wanted him inside her. She wanted to be pinned to the floor, to be subjugated; by his passion, by his aching desire for her womanly sex, not for his usual casual cold abandon.
She looked at her lover twitch on the bed realising him still awake, his eyes closed insinuating unconsciousness, obviously to demand solace, but his breath too light for him to be asleep. She reached her hand over to his body and caressed from his neck down to his lower back, running her hand down along the length of his leg and back up his inner thigh until her fingers rubbed against his genitals. She pulled her body closer to his as her warm breath fell on his neck and her fingers; massaging his genitals, woke him into arousal.
“Do you think I will ever be a mother? I want to have a baby. Make the world better so I can have a baby” she said masturbating her lover.
As she leaned in to kiss his ear gently and erotically, Marcos pulled her hand from his groin and rested it on her thigh.
“Why would you want to kill another infant? What would it serve you to know you’re wrong?” he said as coldness swept over her and she pulled herself away from him.
Feeling unwanted and disgusting, she pulled away the blanket to cover her naked body and sat at the end of the bed, weeping. Marcos said nothing. He returned to his assumed slumber and let The Woman alone in the dark feeling the hurt of his love.
At a time unbeknownst to her, long after an entire city nestled into slumber, The Woman succumbed to exhaustion and the anguish of her partner vanished from her waking thought.