mass of filth and domination.
Or perhaps my sickness is a distance within the body itself – the gentle deadening of nerves, allowing sensations to arrive at their own pace or not at all – like platitudes shouted across a vast gorge, leaving the wind to carry the mocking remnants of sound. Perhaps all sight is filtered through the haze like Northern-town mist, through a dull, unreal layer of pixels which all but reduced existence to nothing; an idle motion; like every decision is inconsequential – like virtual reality, like a video game which sees you raise your hands and watch them warp into claws, talons which spit out great plumes of fire from beneath the nail, like dragon’s breath or a factory’s chimney stacks.
Perhaps you are right, specialist with no name – perhaps diaries and papers like these are the key. Perhaps the Mychandra is, simply, the feeling that one endures after having stared at a piece of paper, when one suddenly sees these lines as prison cells, as bars – when one mutters the words they write and finds no meaning in their sound. After all, what do these symbols mean? Are they even symbols at all? What is these lines that spit out from my fingers are merely shapes, lines uneven and untidy, empty of subtle meaning attaché; what if this is all that there is? A high-contrast against a cheap whiteness, and an emptiness that we are destined to fill at the cost of meaning.
And what if it is simply a distance between objects, forces? What if this distant sickness, so close to my organs, making its way through my lifeblood, is the same sickness as that which permeates the very air? Who says, after all, that these pages are pages? Are they not separate entities? Are they not marked with different shapes, with different repetitions? Are some not scarred with the pressure whilst others are perfectly smooth? One of these pages is slightly ripped – is it still a page? Is it as much of a page as the others?
Or does the distance come from external forces acting upon my flesh? The weight and the existence of everything, coming together, pushing against me like a wave – the force of these papers, this pen, this table, the bed, the pillows and the duvet, the light-fixtures, the television and its remote control, the radio, the armchair, these clothes, my shoes, the bedside cabinets, the wardrobe, the key card on the desk; the bathroom door, the basin, the cold and unfeeling tiling, the bath itself, the shower-curtain, the shampoo, the soap, the taps, the toilet bowl, the radiators hanging from the walls, the stock landscape photographs which have been printed off, the room service menu, the - all combining into one to strike at me, to squeeze me from my body from the ankles up – a slow and creeping extradition, a conspiracy as organised by the universe itself!
I leant back in my chair – I remembered writing it. I remembered writing it all, with my head in my hands, with the numbness rolling around my arteries and settling in my stomach. I remember the distance launching its bloody campaign against me, spitting upwards and through me like a mushroom cloud, leaving me wasted. I pictured my soul as a scientist in an underground bunker, scribbling away the cure to the curse of existence until the very moment that those shock troopers, with their heavy boots, kicked against my door.
The room was hot and stuffy and it mocked me. The air itself seemed to beat with its own peculiar pulse – one that I couldn’t align myself with – and I was caught within it. I moved over to the window and opened it, stretched it out as wide as I could. The breeze scouted my fingers, my hand, my arms and cut through the room in a matter of moments.
The fresh air was a shock, like agony and I drew it into my lungs deeply and painfully. I drew it in until they threatened to burst within me, until my eyes began to water and my chest burned and my throat closed itself in the face of my desire. I closed my eyes, and felt the Mychandra react, felt it cut and crawl across my thighs and my stomach. I felt the air in my throat as a solid thing, like a blockade and my mouth dried almost instantly. When I ran my tongue across the roof of my mouth, it was dry and tender and the coarseness of its tip was like a needle, edged with gold, being dragged along my palate.
Still; I held on to my breath.
The Mychandra didn’t panic; I didn’t either, but the body became some wild animal, some ill-trained creature that we fought over. My head swam, and I focused everything I had on staying still, on living out my last moments in that one position. The air fell out of my lungs like meat falling from a hook and the body drew in another breath like rushing water through a badly caulked hull.
I was light-headed, drunk on the absence of air, and I stepped away from the window. The light was burning me; suddenly I could feel it scorch the hairs of my arms, could feel it smoulder between the hairs on my unshaven jaw and warm my face. My pupils had widened again, distended, and I could feel the Mychandra spreading around them like a vice. It felt like there were grains of sand, or sugar, twisting within my iris. I fell to the cushions of my couch, blind, blinking, drawing in great mouthfuls of the warm air, poisonous like smoke, and I was dragged beneath the sands of the desert – like golden, sun-baked ground had claimed me, surrounded me, demanded me, surmounted me, consumed me and, there, waiting in the light like a humanist’s epiphany, lay the Mychandra.
IX
I am weightless; weightless beneath the sun. I am an angel.
Above me, the ceiling spins around the lightbulb. I am aware of the coarse luxury of the disordered cushions against my back; I can’t feel it, not exactly, but I know that it is there. The light is blinding, still, but I can see through my peripheries. It is as though my pupils have whitened and blinded me; it is as though I have been raised into the air to meet my Victoria; it is as though they cannot filter out the world, and that all existence had become light, concentrated, blinding light like waking up in Heaven or a hospital bed.
It could be hell, this life – not a blindness, but a heightened sense of sight, the moment of being so amazed by light and pigment and pixel that your eyes are locked into a state of permanent, ecstatic rapture. Perhaps, in this moment, I truly know what It means to be a super human; part of a master race that has seen the ultimate glory of the world and lain down their arms for something to cover their eyes with instead.
The light is a penance, perhaps, for the arrogance that drives me, a curse from the next thing above man, as if there was such a thing – but, then, who could blame me, or anyone, for arrogance? Was it not a natural thing? Evolution, self-obsession, narcissism; gossamer threads that are so tightly intertwined that nothing could sever them, not Alexander’s blade, not Dostoyevskian argument – nothing.
I sit up, my back running flat against the back cushions, and close my eyes. The blinding light faces, and I blink back the dust-ridden illuminations that break through the space of the window, that burn a long and slanted pathway through the air until they reached me flesh; until they reached this broken and compacted creature. I hold my arm out, and when I open my eyes I see the sunlight playing across my hair, puncturing beneath it to glance across the bare skin of my forearm like a teenager’s razorblade. I expect, for a few moments, to see scars there but when I mock myself and pull the arm back into the shadow there is nothing. I punch back into the light and my arm glows; pale skin made ethereal in the light.
I stand, and pace the room wildly, like a caged thing, like a man out of his mind; I can almost watch myself, without passion – almost without interest at all. Its motions are nothing, inconsequential; just an ape swinging its arms. It’s a vessel, nothing but an empty, impulsive vessel, marvelling at the sunlight and loathing the world around it. It could be trapped in a zoo, a menagerie and I could be watching it from one-way glass above, admiring the stifled fury of nature as it moved from one corner of the room to another and back again, as it paused in the shadow before it broke the sunlight, and ducked through the angular beams as quickly as it could, like a game.
In the hallway, a door opens and closed and the creature turns like a wild animal sensing its prey. It moves to the entrance like a killer, and stares through the peephole with all the desperation of a panting dog. An old man, the things neighbour, w
alks past his door, moving down the stairs towards the exit. The bar, no doubt, to indulge in schedule; to eat and drink in front of a silent television screen and fade away with the sunlight into the dry, empty night. The creature saw one of his own, not prey – he saw some other helpless animal, drowning in seconds, in time, in the flickering moment between one and the next; how they spent their time didn’t matter, not really – so long as they spent it.
It is walking again, limping along the bank of a low river as it moves between two barriers of beaten cobblestones, black with scratches and grey with intense, publicly funded maintenance. It looks down at the floor, sees mud and dirt where there is stone and the moments waver; he angles his feet to meet the demands of baked dirt that just isn’t there. That hasn’t been there for two hundred years and more.
It walks strangely; not just a limp anymore. It angles its foot as it walks, so that its left-foot’s left-hands sole touches the ground first and it then lowers the rest of the foot to meet it. Whenever it forgets to step like that, its entire body shakes like a carcass being hit by a boxer’s fist; its bones and muscles shiver