between the two lines of officers was empty, and I felt the urge to walk that line with a middle finger extended towards either one. I’d be caught on camera doing it as well; I’d be a walking, talking neutral party, an Ireland, a Switzerland. But, my home lay in the other direction, and my mood immediately soured as I thought of that place. Still, I had to be home; I had work to do, before the night and the illness truly came.
Even then, I could feel it; it had risen, as I had told Bernard it would, to my knees and I could feel it testing my lower thighs, like a hesitant mountaineer looking for purchase. It didn’t hinder me, far from it, but instead it pushed me onwards like a wind buffeting my back. In the mornings, in the extremely early mornings, before the sickness had made it past my ankles, I endured an unbearable stiffness in my right calf. On those rare occasions I was forced to walk any great distance so early in the morning, I had to struggle not to limp – the tendon which runs from my ankle to my knee freezes, like it had looked Medusa in the eyes – but after a few minutes I know I develop a slight limp. It feels as though my entire foot curls in on itself, as though it adopted a foetal position to defend against the pain, as though I were developing a club in its place, and I am forced to make a conscious effort to flatten my foot before my sole touches the ground.
When the illness strikes me, and my flesh and blood and bone are completely numb, I can’t tell if I’ve got a limp or not. No, that’s not right; it is more like a relied, like shelter, like the pain is separated from me by this great, yawning chasm from which no sensation can escape – it was as though the universe itself had sheared, ruptured between myself and my body, between me and everything, and I was left blinking in the white scars that crossed my path and they were so blinding that I could make them out and so brilliant that I couldn’t look away. It is a sympathetic agony that I feel, in its place – like I am listening to someone describe their own invalidity and my joints are whimpering along with their words.
There was a shop window that I used to walk past, and in the sunlight it was practically a mirror. I liked walking past it and running a hand through my hair in such a way that nobody would notice as I glanced at myself. I looked good; I didn’t look ill; I didn’t look unhealthy. In fact, on that day, that might have been one of the best I have ever looked. I had my jacket tossed over one arm, had my messenger bag hanging across my body and my shirt was a pleasant, muted blue, and rolled up to the elbows. Personally, I prefer to look rough, harsh – like a real northerner, but I hadn’t the shrivelled cheeks of the drug addict, the skittering eyes of a wanted murderer or the giggling, hesitant demeanour of a madman – I looked normal, that was it, average.
There was this young couple, I remember, and they were trying to cross the road from the opposite side to me. Just as we got up to opposite ends of the crossing, a low-riding Mercedes appeared from the wrong side of a one-way street, and tore between us, just as they were about to step in to the road. They shook their heads in unison and I heard the girl say ‘I’m not sure, really. What do you,’ and then they were gone; gone. I had to look back at them for a moment, just to convince myself that they were real, that they existed, to fix them in my memory.
They looked like such a nice couple – I would hate to forget about them.
I consider the pain in my leg for a moment, just half a second, a flash across the synapse, and the illness recedes for a moment. It is spiteful, my sickness, and it flashed me with the agony that makes me draw in a sharp breath between my teeth and I feel my hands clench into themselves, my fingernails digging into the flesh of my palms. I remember a flash of the notes that I had scribbled out some time before; just an idle little footnote which read something like – ‘this illness could have its advantages; it would make me the perfect soldier, the ideal assassin, the most careless enforcer. I would be numb, completely numb, numb to mercy, numb to the pleadings of my enemies as they cowered in their dusty-huts and mud-bound shacks, numb to pity, numb to pain, numb to the threats of shell-shock and PTSD; what would I be then, but the enemy of life, the enemy of sensation – an ultimate form of apathy, apathy against horror and in the face of fear’. In the half instant I see my reflection, I realise that I would look good in a uniform – I would be well-suited to the angular lines of an officer’s dress.
My flat was above an old music store, down one of the side roads leading out of the city-centre. The upper levels, which had been split into three separate flats, had once been dedicated rooms for the teaching of music. I knew, from the old man who owned the store, that my bedroom had once been the pianist’s, and there was still the slightly lighter space along the wall of the main room where the two pianos had once sat, side by side. I didn’t mind the discoloured floor – in fact, I rather liked it; it gave the room character. It was only a two roomed place, plus a small bathroom coming off my bedroom, and the main room was some twelve feet square; the staircase ran directly upwards, with only a slightly larger front step to act as my entryway. As a result, I sometimes saw the two furtive figures who occupied the rooms above mine – I knew one was an old man, I had heard him rattling at his door once or twice and seen him talking to the music store owner with an angry expression on his face, throwing his arms into the air in exasperation.
I didn’t bother to lock the door behind me, but I left my key on the inside so that I wouldn’t forget it. I switched the kettle on and watched the television for a couple of hours. The news wouldn’t stop going on about the election, so I switched it over to some new gameshow which saw elderly people learning how to box. They made jokes about how the shorts sitting high on their waists didn’t feel any different than their trousers, and how they didn’t really need mouth guards’ cos’ they could just take their teeth out, I watched it for about an hour before realising it only lasted half an hour.
I let myself doze for a while, and fantasised that my angel Victoria appeared in front of me, wreathed in the fires of her nakedness, and when I reached for her she would laugh and skip out of the way, and only come back to me when I lowered my hand.
I woke up to the sound of the six o’clock news and ordered a Chinese from the takeaway down the road. I said I’d pick it up, and they said it would be twenty minutes, but I knew that they meant thirty, so I dug my notebook from the bag I had been carrying and looked at the one word I had written.
Mychandra. I thought, distinctly, like a solid thought, like a stone in a desert, like a tree sprouting from an ocean of mud, like a mountain pushing upwards and pulsating with life amongst a barren sea.
‘Mychandra.’ I said, out loud; I rolled it around my tongue, felt it slither against the insides of my cheeks, felt it sweeten and rot my teeth.
‘Mychandra.’ It wasn’t the first thing I had considered naming my disease, my unknown sickness; but it was, I felt, the perfect title. I had used an online translator to find different words and phrases – Ilid, Cynddaredd, Raserei, Aversio, Le éloignement – but none of them appealed to me as that word did. I tried to find an English phrase to match the sensation, but there was none – the language of my home, the language in which I write this, is not suited to emotion but I know of no other.
The Mychandra was a sickness, the sickness, the vileness which came upon me and left me shuddering in rage. It was everything I hated about myself, all the spite, all the contempt, all the superiority and the outrage and it all came at once and it was killing me. I was certain of that; every day I woke up surprised to find that I had woken up at all – it was, I thought, a long, drawn-out kind of suicide.
But, still, I was hesitant; I had to create something, something to let me get away, something to earn me a little money, that I might quit my job and live, live, live! I knew, however, that the simple documentation of my illness would not be enough; a dry list of facts, times, figures and emotions was nothing – it couldn’t be a narrative, it couldn’t be anything; I wasn’t a writer, I didn’t want to be – I just wanted my freedom, my liberty from it all and the bonds of my illness.
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Perhaps, I thought, as I sat at my desk and ran my hands through my hair like a tortured soul in the midst of some incredible moment of realisation, an epiphany, a eureka, It needn’t be about me – perhaps, instead, my documentation could be a eulogy; the eulogy for small-town England, a lament for the North, a sad siren song for change, for the evolution of society – no – the evolution of man into something more; a post-human; a technological marvel; a wholly integrated, social creature lusting after solitude and utilitarianism and filled with this aching, unquenchable thirst for love.
Distinctly, I remember running poetry through my head as I walked around my flat. I hadn’t patience for prose, but poetry had this immediacy to it; this rattling thing, this beat, this ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum which seemed to set my nerves on fire, seemed to leave me breathless sometimes, gasping for air and I think I was thinking about poetry when Victoria carved her way into my skull and cleaned the windows of my eyes and left long streaks where her angel wings caught on the glass. I was trying to recite something, I can’t remember what, in time with my footsteps when it