returned to the same dullness as before – victory was the only satisfaction that child knew, and her set lips and eyes half-closed in concentration make her look, more than anything, bored. She really was ugly, with a vulgar little nose and resentful cheekbones and angry eyebrows lowered like a hormonal Neanderthal.
An overweight man entered then, bursting onto the scene like the hero of an American action movie. His beard scurried down his throat and ended just above his collar, which was buttoned tightly. He looked like the kind of man who, had he been wearing one, would have permanently fidgeted with his tie. His hair was short, too short for the shape of his face, but a few strands did drop in front of his left eye. Had his face been harsher, angular, with clearly defined features, his hair would have been perfect. Instead, he looked like an actor playing a role that didn’t suit him. As he walked over to the counter, it occurred to me that I was one of them – I was a citizen of the great Café state; to him, I would have been nothing but a fixture, as inconsequential as the tables, as the chairs.
There was a sudden howl, as a sudden outcry that startled everyone in the room, except for the mother. She slowly turned her head from her phone and leant down into the pram. The couple watched her with something approaching disgust and I heard her mutter something. Her other child, the daughter, rocked back in her seat and opened her mouth with the frustration of defeat. Her eyes went wide, impossibly wide, and her pupils seemed to dilate beneath the café’s lighting. I could see her tongue, twisting between her teeth and behind her lips. She looked like she was preparing to scream. She cast her mother a glance that spoke of murder, desperate for attention. I remember thinking that she would do well in her like; she’d be a pop star, or a local politician or just some bitch in an office somewhere.
Tick, tock, tick, tock – the clock filtered back through the air. I stopped paying attention to the girl and the mother and the room itself and saw that my tea was still sitting where I had left it and, already, it had begun to develop a thin milky surface. I lifted the cup to my lips and broke the surface apart like Pangaea. It was still hot potently hot, but it had stopped burning the air by that point. I could feel it punish my mouth, turn my taste buds to smoke. It stung my throat, burned my lungs, caused my stomach to rebel, but I still forced another mouthful of the tea down. My teeth hurt, each one of them suddenly sensitive to the cold as soon as the heat passed them by and I felt, for one long moment, alive.
Alive, alive in the mix of sensations, alive with the heat in my stomach rising the battle the thick, cold air of the café, alive as they combined and formed the perfect storm in the back of my mouth; alive in the ticking of the clock; alive in the sigh of relief as the fat man sank into his chair; alive in the call of the waitress as she relayed the man’s order; alive as the mother shouts at her child in the pram; alive as the daughter reveals her frustration and her boredom and revulsion; alive as the couple stand up to leave the coarse café and I wondered whether they would take the image home with them – if that café was the society they believed in, supported; alive as a shadow, an unkempt shadow drinking tea after the rush hour; alive compared to the screaming mother, a cruel child and a fat man breaking solitude with his weight.
VIII
I walked back to my flat, and the crowds had already started to grow in size. I had to dodge a few people, and knocked elbows more than once when people were too busy staring at their phones to notice me. One youngish looking man, his eyes burning with a passion that resembled syphilis, stopped me by placing a hand on my arm. I curled my hands into fists in my pockets, instinctively, but he just thrust a leaflet at my chest. I took it from him and he smiled and moved on to the next person.
The leaflet was purple and the words ‘Exposing Britannica’ were emblazoned in fierce, clashing yellow. I didn’t even need to read it, not really; I knew about Britannica, I knew all about Britannica. They were all out that day; the unemployed and the students and the volunteers, all spreading slanderous literature amongst the disinterested crowds. I collected several as I walked home, and saw bullet-pointed lists of party flaws, of racist agenda, of socialist agenda, the threat of Thatcherism on the rise once more – the threat of nationalism was sweeping over the country, one told me, and destroying the Britain I knew and loved.
Good.
I couldn’t bear it; I couldn’t bear to spend my day beneath the sunlight and amongst a vile crowd. Their vileness manifested itself in their loyalty; their loyalty to their ingrained hatred of one another, spilling out of muscle and flesh. You could see it in their teeth, in the way their faces twitched around them and narrowed everything to points of loathing on their incisors.
When I opened my door, my desk was still covered in handwritten pages. The writing was ragged, curving, intersecting lines that I struggled to read properly. They had been written in a mad rush, it looked like; like the author was bleeding out, holding his intestines in his stomach with his left hand and his right twitched the pen in uncontrollable motions. I knew that I’d written them, of course, I could picture myself sat there, glaring out at the sunset, and sweating out my madness like it was ink.
Mychandra, they read, Mychandra, how can you fight the Mychandra? Do you even want to? Would it not make more sense to let it consume you, utterly; to close your eyes and have a mythological illness open them? To become nothing more than walking contempt and, in your turn, the most contemptible of creatures?
No.
I will defeat the Mychandra – I will come through this. Where I have failed before, I will succeed. I will understand my enemy. I will defeat my disability through a bloody-mind, through introspection, through internal exploration – through the most severe exercise of thought and will and all the things that make a man a man.
What is the Mychandra?
The Mychandra is a distance, a distance in the vaguest of ill-defined terms; the distance that is the separation of the mind and the body; the distance between now and then – the Mychandra is the thing that smells the moments between moments, when the water actually moves and I am not human, not really alive – just a breathing thing, just a bellows and a pump.
Look; already the ink has dried upon this page, between these cheap lines – already these words have fallen into the then, not the now; they are immature, naïve, unaware of the million, million heartbeats that have just rocked the world and caused mountains to cave in somewhere under the ocean or in Tibet. The heartbeats have just killed someone, dislodged their pick from an ice wall on Everest; caused a wave to pump that little higher and overturned a boatload of immigrants crossing the Adriatic. Already, these words are those of someone else, someone different, weaker and stronger than me in his naiveté; he hasn’t lived to this moment, this precise moment – he hasn’t coasted down the stream as long as I have.
I wish that I were at a computer, instead of these dead pages. My laptop is a few feet away, but it cannot undo these words. I could destroy evidence of time, if I typed this; I could undo my mistakes as never before, as only the victor could rewrite history. When such a thing was available to all, when the immutable was fluid, fluid like the moment, how could I not be a god unto myself? Shit; how were we all not gods?
There, the author has stabbed at the page a few times with the pen. A few black dots, followed by one long underscore, which hadn’t just scarred the paper, but it had cut it, bruised it, and left reflections on the immediate page behind. Though the writing continued, it had the appearance of rigid control; angles in place of curves; block letters, almost military in regiment.
A tired, old realisation, it read, a malnourished observation – I shall speak no more of this. I shall speak no more, at this moment, of the then, and the now, and the soon to be, all invariably tied together like Siamese triplets, like a three-headed knight of Arthurian legend.
The first page ended, but the second page continued in the same flowing script as before, as though the interruption had never occurred.
When I describe the Mycha
ndra as a great distance, it could easily be assumed that this distance is representative of a physical one; that my explanation is something as simple as the mind stretching and breaking and hanging in the air like an author making some vague attempt to sketch out a universe of her own. That, when the sickness comes upon me, I looked down upon the physical as though I were a higher form, and some base creature of impulse is the thing that directs my body.
It might even be construed, in fact, that my illness resembles the shift from a first to a third-person narrative; I becomes he, we become they; that identity is unimportant in the face of this illness, as small as a building, as silent as a beer mat; that identity has become this weak, useless, superfluous thing – just another extremity, another limb, an external component in a world of components, a force in a world of distinct forces. It may be considered that existence is malformed, in the Mychandra, into a series of abject events; one thing after another, like definable motions. A crazed and hurried stream of solitary things, actions in a riot contributing to this one mass of energy, individual crimes and immoralities in a government, contributing to this one, great, pulsating