He didn’t have long left now; he knew it as surely as he was once so certain of his invulnerability. Though his youth had yet to wane, He could feel the great ‘Other’, that personification to whom all existence must declare themselves opposed to, encroaching on his sanctuary, on this man-made prison designed to maintain this half-efficient productivity.
His world had shrunk, and shrunk, and shrunk until it was nothing but white sheets of ignorance, criss-crossed with a dying pink highlighter like a word search in a retirement home, and the computer screen which remains engraved on his retina even when he succumbs to the siren call of sleep. His only sounds are the wracking of his tortured lungs, coughing out their illness, and the dull repetition of fingers against a keyboard, like nails against faux-marble.
* * *
A Worthless God. That is where you left this plot, where you left me, where you left the creature you see above, in the position he has grown accustomed to. You left us splintered from each other; the Author locked away like some wild animal, the character kneeling, drowning in the depths of his undesired sobriety and the personification of the narrative crumbling like flowers in the grasp of the Beast.
What? Did you expect us to have moved on from that, to have forgotten the state in which you abandoned us? Lost as we were, deep in that useless admixture? Did you expect to return from your freedom and find us still awaiting you, held in position by your selfish ignorance? Life moves on, in its stolid, unimaginative way, and so must this fictional non-fiction. Our character has matured since then. Though his age has barely increased, your sudden volatile gaze against his spine and the equally sudden disappearance of said voyeurism has warped him, making him more and making him less and more and less again than the person he once was. Did you hear that, at least? Person, not character, not fleeting narrative given form, but an identity in the midst of some crisis, some theological and opinionated tragedy, one which you would know nothing about, with your dismally uninterested reading, and callous clicking of your lips at his every mistake originating from simplicity, from an apathy he would fight, if only he had a reason to.
He lives still, of course, but I wonder if He would dare to call it living. The role of protagonist is a heavy one, but it is addictive. Everybody, our pale imitation of a character included, desires to be the hero, to rescue the vulnerable in a darkened alleyway, to stroll into the burning building and emerge with a lover in your arms. When you left him, when your voyeuristic gaze was satisfied at His word, his supposedly hidden exhibitionism was realised. He couldn’t live with the sudden knowledge of your absence, despite him remaining unaware of your original presence. You, with the eyes of preying birds, left him to fend for himself, without the contractual promise of a ‘joyful’ ending.
He has done well to fight it this long, to resist the liquid which offers him respite from the need to be seen. His confidence, one he once professed to be hidden behind his arrogance which, in turn, he kept behind his doubts, has not grown, but has at least crept closer to the surface, an assassin moving in a swift crouch towards its target.
* * *
The dull clicking of three fingernails against the replication of a marble worktop was annoying me already. The noise had barely begun four repetitions ago and already the ‘clack-clack-clack’ of irritation, boredom and anxiety which found themselves chained to the sound was stinging my attitude, the same stale acidity of which the room stunk, entering this sorry excuse of form through the repetitive sound.
When my eyes had opened themselves, slowly, ominously and without any hint of my permission, I had been greeted to a very personal image of Hell. Not of that archaic design, all brimstone and blood and bone, all screaming fire and sobbing torture, but instead one of adulterated pointlessness. Of falsity, subsidised with some pathetic excuse for drama, all publicly hidden angst and tears disguised as nothing more than tears.
The fridge, yellowing with the disinterest of its temporary owners, formed the current target of my irritation, though the room was laden with other such possibilities. Though it contained the typical fare for the denizens of such a place, all cheap wine, expired milk and one, solitary, piece of fruit skulking in the corner as though it had become institutionalised through its commandant’s disinterest, it was the supposedly inspiring phrases written with determined hands onto the forefront of the box that give me an almost physical sensation, one of pain I knew was unnecessary, combined with contempt which I knew was.
‘When in doubt fist pump it out’, ‘tonights the night the mood is right’, ‘train insane or remain the same’ and ‘this is the bassline move move move your waistline’, formed the four corners of my rectangular focus of contempt, each meaningless phrase separated as they were by flowers drawn with a drunken hand, innocent of inebriation. My emotions, the cold rage I endeavoured not to feel seemed to change with every reading, with every irritating time I was unable to stop my self-abusive eyesight trailing over this excuse for inspirational literature.
What did they know of doubt? This small apartment, so high above a port city, and yet so close that one could see the dull, urban squalor of an affluent area, seemed suffused with optimism and naiveté. Around me, cultivated like vultures whilst I enjoyed some sorry excuse of slumber, a small ring of half-empty bottles had formed. Were they their shield, as I had once thought their cousins were my own? Or, instead, was it those phrases that offered some respite, like the rosary repeated in the night; the Lord’s Prayer muttered before sleep?
And, by what right did these creatures, the girls, certainly not women, to whom this apartment temporarily belonged, have the right to merely pump their fists, as though they knew what the action had done, what the action had meant before they usurped it, and feel their doubts hurtle from clenched hands, squeezed through narrow fingertips? How could they take an action which had changed the course of history in its time, not necessarily for the better, and parody it so? Or was it the ultimate rebellion, the final sign of historical rejection, that the actions of the past meant nothing to these hopefuls, to these rising stars with a cloned personality and any intellect they professed to possess hidden behind such repeated mantras?
So, with a malice I was scared to recognise, I wrapped my fingers around the pen, abandoned on the table like a bloodied scalpel after the torture, I rose from my seat and closed the distance between the plastic tablet of their commandments and myself, my knuckles white around my weapon.
Moments later, I stepped back from their supposed art, from their inspirational practicality, cooling both their wine and their insecurities; both those deserved and those not. My alterations to the off-white canvas raised my fleeting spirits to such a level that, laying the pen back on the counter, I somehow managed the confidence to turn to the room at large. The decision was one which I, for all my temporary optimism, regretted almost instantly.
Ignoring the few sleeping figures, sprawled against the white-washed walls like mannequins, tossed across the twin couches like some branded toy, all of them gently groaning in their respite from themselves, I crept across to the small window, stained as it was, set on the far side of the room. The smell was familiar to me, far too familiar. It was the scent of sweat and stale alcohol
Lime Street stretched out below me or, at least, the repeated pattern of the train station’s roof did so. How many times have I been here now? How many mornings have I leant on this windowsill, knocking aside ashtrays made of shells with my elbows, gently moving bottles aside, struggling not to cough at the smell of smoke? How many mornings have I nursed a hangover on that couch, made a cup of tea with ingredients stolen from the denizens, though always repaid with a small pyramid of change from the evening before? When was the last time I enjoyed being here?
Was it the result of some holy sense of martyrdom to a cause, any cause I could comprehend? Some masochistic desire to be the man I once was, to be the character whose role I enjoyed so much? Why do I attempt to recapture that first miserable glory, to re
live those events, to repeat my past as the drunk, though now in the absence of alcohol, and the stranger, the narrative explorer and the shell of some varied personification? I know what remains absent from that first time, of course. It is the poison, the vile substance I have forsworn.
I placed my head in my hands, breathing deeply in the cold, stale smoke, the hot stench of one debauched evening, turning into hundreds, one I had been present for, but had not been part of. Even without the substances which had, previously, made life bearable, I always woke up with a headache, with a sudden unknowable desire coursing through the sluggish veins residing within my body, one destined to remain unfulfilled as I breathed my way through another grey, literary dawn.
Beans on Toast
He pulls at the chains here, his struggles fruitless in the darkness, though in the light they might have possessed some form of information for his maligned audience. The struggles should have shown his unwillingness to do this anymore but, in the darkness, all gloriously failed attempts are simply failures.
He closes his eyes, able to see the screen even through his lids, though the memory of them, burnt into his retinas as though he had stared at the eclipsing sun for too great a period, still hovers clearly at the forefront of his mind. He can see all his imagined wit, all that quasi-intellectual folly spread out before him, like existence unravelling before a physicist given to deep, scientific insight.
His writhing increases, his shoulders digging into the back of the chair, his feet weakly kicking at the foetid air below his desk, arms drawn towards his face until the chains bite into his flesh. They didn’t break it; they didn’t rend his pale physicality into a red, raw existence. Rather, they simple reminded him of their existence, that without them, he would have nothing distinctive to struggle against, nothing to define himself by.
* * *
He is lonely, if such a human emotion can be applicable to a God. No one remains on his idiomatic level, so far has he surpassed them all. The creature, whose story he tells, this pointlessly choreographed narrative, is his closest contact to the world outside. But there can be no friendship there, despite their shared experience, their replicated emotions, for one resides so high above the other, that the first’s entire world is merely a whim of the second.
Does he know that, do you think? Has it entered his alien consciousness that the character is, in no comprehendible way, grateful to him for this parody of life, for this semi-existence? How can he be? When the only emotion one should experience is gratitude, how can he feel anything, but to hate his patron? Or does he cling on to some smattering of self-delusion, that his creation must love him, for he gave him life?
His chains are his joy, and his struggles against them are his fleeting identity, soon to be lost amongst the cacophonous voices of literature. His existence depends on those chains, his very definition of who he is, of who he once desired to be and now whom he desperately wishes he were not, wrapped up in those metallic coils.
He wonders, briefly, when was the last time he had eaten, or drank. ‘How odd’, he thinks, or perhaps he says, or as close an action to either of those vague description that it will suffice, ‘that I don’t seem to feel the need anymore.’ Whether or not that idle musing was vocalised, it seemed to echo in his room, in the shadows that surrounded him, whilst his attention was set on some never-ending diversion, designed to trap the unwary and those who thought themselves artists.
* * *
The door clicked into its former position, like some displaced heir returning to his throne with a fanfare and a great rejoicing, the cacophony of which twisted in on itself until the noise of mass-produced wood, rattling against a carelessly designed frame, echoed around the hallway.
I ran a hand, one which seemed to possess its very own sense of drama, across the outline which once supported the flat’s number. It was coarse, in comparison to the oily surface of the door itself. This numerical belonged to a different time, to the personality twinned with my own, to the character whom, in some twisted monologue, discusses narrative with the unhearing, with personification of pretension and literary rage whom lives in a world of a single dimension; where good and evil fade away into neutrality, and mediocrity is the replacement of any talent and passion, and apathy takes the form of ignorance. Behind the door, I could hear them waking, these creatures I oft times used for security against the inebriation, against the solitary evenings.
They would wake to find their monolith, that symbol of all that they think they are, torn down. Not in any physical sense, but the punctuation added in a separate colour, as immovable as the very attitudes themselves, would remind them that they know nothing. That, against the majesty of the English Language, whatever malignant, cancerous dialect they dared to speak, would fail like chaff before the saw, like ash on the breeze. Like the conception of privacy.
I know the camera watched me, it always did in these early mornings, when the words of a so-called terrorist, and a genius whom I cannot help but despise, wrack my sub-standard mind with their warnings, with their desire to smash the small black orb clinging to the corner of the ceiling, like an arachnid caught in the midst of some deranged, semi-nocturnal activity.
That same hand, one which no doubt felt destined for some horrific career in some masturbatory Shakespearean troupe, raised itself and uncurled twin fingers in that direction. The spider fitted perfectly between the V, as though its proper place was between those two skeletal claws, hung with flesh, already sagging from existence.
* * *
‘Is that action aimed at me, I wonder’, he asked himself, guilt and a vague, inconsequential sense of unease wrapping their tendrils around him; ‘does he feel me as the hand of some forgotten deity?’ He made to rise, realising too late that the chains which held him to the desk would refuse such an action. In a sudden, confusing moment, his legs and arms froze in position, and the chair slipped away from him, leaving him in one partially stretched heap on the ground.
Like some building scheduled for extermination, he lay there with flesh as cold and hard as masonry, the faint breath emerging from his lips a product of some innocent creature trapped beneath the rubble. His limbs appeared elongated in the darkness, highlighted as they were by the sickly electrical light of his indulgently empty masterpiece. Their assumed length was as much a product of the tortured stretching, formed of gravity and idiocy, as it was of the shadow of the desk, hinting at greater mass than would ever be possible in the day.
It could be day; he had no real way of knowing. The numbers which twisted and flickered in the corner of that screen, ticking away his life with a noticeable lack of tick, could lie to him where those celestial bodies had neither the ability, nor the inclination. He slumped, lowering his head between his shackled arms and closed his eyes again, whispering quietly to himself like some long-forgotten mantra, spoken by Elder Gods in some subterranean realm.
This far in the depths of a metaphor, time was as fluid as the saltwater and day never seemed to come.
* * *
Look at him, this pathetic creature. Entangled as he is in a transparent metaphor, its very existence a response to the obvious truths, he still believes, however faintly, that the resolution he has denied the world will find him. In his heart, one belonging to Idiom, not to biology, and in his soul, which he assures himself he possesses, he still believes that to merely finish his narrative would offer him freedom. That Art, or the modern day equivalent, would appear from the shadows and strike off those chains. That it would unlock the door he did not even know existed and, with a motion both gentle and determined, turn the monitor off. That it would take him by his shaking, malnourished hand and return him to humanity.
He pours all his semi-formed hopes, all his self-delusional talent, into the ideal that his character will save him in the end. That by pouring himself into this relatively innocent figure, he might find some way to exorcise the poison he senses swimming in his arteries, coiling around his bones
and flickering from nerve to nerve. He is a fool and a coward, simultaneously blessed and cursed with all the folly of arrogance. He will die alone in this cage he has built around himself, chained to the pursuit of his Muse, and, more importantly, he will deserve it.
* * *
I emerged into the sunlight; a patchy, washed-up kind of sunlight which already felt second-hand. The vending machine set beneath the canopy of the building’s entrance was empty, hanging open from a broken lock. I swore softly, rejoicing in the solitude which enabled such an action. I moved out from beneath the canopy, and my sudden appearance startled a pigeon squatting on the edge. It spread its wings, a dramatic action which would not have looked out of place on Smaug, and leapt into the air. For a few moments I feared the weight of the thing would drag it down, but by some trick of physics it caught the air beneath it; gaining air and speed until it vanished into the jarring tones of light and shadow above me.
There was vomit on the wall to my right, a black streak of wetness against the brick collating into the yellowed mixture against the floor. I could all but see the handprint against the wall, the student away from home for the first time indulging in all those things he is told to indulge in. He thinks of his mother, I believed, as he bends his head to vomit into the cowering dark. He feels her cool hand on his brow, her whispered words in his ear. Then the laughter hits him, from the vultures grouped behind him, and the coolness is a brick wall in a foreign city. In those twitching seconds, surrounded by life, he knows what loneliness is. He wants to go home, to be a child again. Then he joins in the laughter and he is gone.