away from me; I was blurring, blending into the world around me – vanishing into the air itself. My flesh crumbled until I was another object; no, not another object, I was part of the world, not even a shade of colour – just a molecule, caught on the wind and cursing itself with thought! No; no! I looked into the mirror with what rage I could muster and tightened my jaw like I was preparing to take a punch and stared into my own eyes like a narcissist.
The eyes - set deep in that yellow face, pockmarked with spittle and given cruel angles by the shadow of my angle – were not angry, did not contain the fury I forced into my set features. They had a strange, startling kind of apathy – some fierce normality. They were a strange combination of blue and green and grey, with a golden honeycomb flickering out from the scarred rings of my irises. The pupils themselves, like great black pits of American culture, seemed to stretch out overly-wide; they looked like I had spent weeks in the dark and couldn’t narrow in the face of the sunlight.
I knew what the emotion in them was; I’d seen it before. It was hunger – a hunger they attempted to hide out of some desirous furtiveness. They had a dull sheen, like a varnish treatment, which diluted their starvation when it should have filtered out like ambition and blazed and left scars in the air as they passed. They weren’t cruel eyes, I remember thinking, but merciless. I told myself that they would have looked very fine in a handsome face, in some perfectly-proportioned angelic feature; even my Victoria could love them in such a face! They were the eyes that wanted and wanted; the kind of eyes that wanted and wanted and wanted so much that it hurt and they would draw everything in until there was nothing left and still search for something new, some other view, some other sensation from halfway across the world. They might as well have been the eyes of a prince, of a depraved Conservative politician at an orgy or a war-hungry Labourite running his hands over someone else’s missiles.
I gagged again – retched again – caught my breath on existence and choked on the air and the weight of the morning. Time raced past and ran together and melted and twirled in ecstasy, and the great ticking biological clock of astrology hung in the moment, paused, held its arms back from the next cruel strike like Zeus waiting to hurl a lightning bolt at some undeserving creature in the sea; all the moments were one moment, the flickering of a mayfly, the beating of a stone heart beneath great mountain ranges; the pulsing of the water beneath Venice, the howling of some great phoenix trapped beneath the city; Fenrir and the Gytrash together, scratching at their chains and gnawing at the scarred stumps of the claws; where was Kronos’ great mathematical hand – held, held in transit until it shook from his vicious intent and smashed through the moment with inevitability; the inevitability of murder in every moment, the inevitability of skyscrapers tumbling to the ground and a lone radio operator tapping out the last language to an empty world.
It wasn’t my illness; I don’t know what it was, but it shuddered through me and everything seemed to blur into one – there was me and there was it and it was so heartbreakingly beautiful for all its faults. I slowly loosened my grip on the basin, but I still felt weak – the weakness of hunger and exhaustion; the hangover of life. I smiled without looking at myself – perhaps I was drunk on life, drunk on the Victoria that was life, and I was paying for it.
‘I’m drunk on her.’ I said into the air, proudly; I liked that.
I peeled my sweat-clothes from my body and lay in bed, naked, with my right arm crooked across my eyes and muting the brightness of the sun which my bedroom blind failed to stop. I almost managed to doze, but every time I felt the fingertips of sleep brushing against me I would shiver, and frighten them away like the rustling of foliage spooking a midnight deer.
‘Was this to be my existence now?’ – with every shiver, the worry would rise in me like the heartbeat tide – ‘is this some new illness to plague my mornings as the Mychandra rots my evenings? And which is worse? Would I suffer from them both, or could there be some way to convince them to fight each other? Or was this morning simply a one-off, a fluctuation, the result of a bad steak and poorly-poured Guinness?’
I spent some time, when I realised that I wouldn’t be able to sleep, staring up at the imperfections in my flat, cream-coloured ceiling. There should have been slanted lights falling across my body, a ceiling fan spinning and whining to itself as I panted in the heat like a dog, but there wasn’t nothing but the sound of my own breathing and the room and the town starting to waken itself in the early morning. I wasn’t myself, for a while, I was just a thing, some comforted creature in a box-cage.
Silence was impossible in my flat; whether it was the noise of the town filtering through my ill-fitting windows or the heavy ghosts of the piano keys which still sat in the corners of my room, there was always something there, rattling or ringing in the dust which swirled in the air. The piano was louder than normal, as I lay there and breathed – it rang in a series of discordant notes, like a child trying to bluff their way through a lesson. They rolled from one end of the piano to other, finders spitting out at ebony and porcelain and constantly amazed that each one produced a different sound.
After an hour or so, I threw on my dressing gown and made my way into the bathroom. It seemed even colder than it did that morning, and the gown was uncomfortable, hard and scratching at my shoulders like a horsehair undershirt. The spittle on the mirror hadn’t vanished, but had aged and metamorphosed into white scars which flecked the mirror surface. I set the warm water running, to wash away the few bubbles of spit which lay in the bottom of the sink, and breathed in the fumes from the slowly warming water. My hands found the same position as before; my feet made their way into the same spots on the tiles as they had occupied just an hour before.
I looked myself in the mirror, like a challenge, and realised that I didn’t look as bad as I had thought that morning. I didn’t look bad at all; saying that, it isn’t like I looked good either; I just looked. That was me, I told myself, this is you – this is genetics and personal taste and fashion have created; it was almost like a chemistry experiment, running off a delusional theory. After my rest, my hair had actually flattened a little, so that it no longer stuck out in ungainly clumps. It was still thick, I remained thankful for that, and I made something of an effort to smooth it down a little more. Useless; it sprang up into place as soon as I moved my hand away. With the hot water running, I splashed a little onto my face, I rubbed my eyes, I pinched my cheeks in the hope that a little colour might appear, but I remained as pale as ever. I felt, rather than saw, that I hadn’t shaved for a few days, and promised my reflection that I would.
As I made breakfast, I had to wait for the kettle to boil and so I stared out of the window for a few moments. The sunlight, breaking over the tall terraced businesses across the road, was a distant thing. It wasn’t quite blinding, but it was a cold light – the kind of light that promised rain later, though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I quite looked forward to the idea of rain; it would be good, I thought, to feel fresh water on my skin, before the numbness sets in. It was a vain hope, I thought, but a hope nonetheless.
As the kettle began to rattle as the water boiled, I shuddered – hope? Hope? There was no hope against my illness and I had to fill my lungs with these great, shuddering breaths and exhalations of resentment – hope! What nonsense, what utter gibberish!
‘No; I may not have hope, but I have rage! I have contempt! I will fight the Mychandra! If I must, I will endure this great, dawn warfare with myself – this great fear and shuddering weakness and I will slip into the numbness of nausea every single evening!’ I switch the television on to drown out my mutterings and wait for my cheap, reduced fat butter to melt into the surface of my toast. There had been another shooting in America – twelve teenagers had been murdered by an introvert with a twelve-gauge shotgun. I switch it off again whilst I eat.
I dressed and, after spending a few fruitless hours scanning through Facebook and Twitter, scowling at overly-filtered images and mod
ern self-portraits and the next evolution of art in its simplest, purest form, I couldn’t stand it anymore. The walls were hemming me in, and I felt restless and my feet were numb with the illness, so I left.
The trees which loomed over me, as I walked along the road, were actually quite beautiful. Despite their fallen leaves, which were like a mosaic on the pavement, they still held back the sunlight in great patches, until only pure suggestions lay on the asphalt. It would have been so easy to love under those trees – to love anything, to love everything; the merest graze of the fingertips would have the potency of sex in the shade of those branches. The trees themselves were on the other side of a red brick wall, topped with black iron spikes, but their branches stuck over the edge like the bony fingers of beggars. I was pleased to feel a smile on my face, and in a few seconds I was grinning like a landowner kicking the modern peasant out of their home.
I passed through the old gates, a remnant of the park’s Victorian heritage. They had only been repainted recently, though the flaking remnants of the last paint job still remained – they caused the