The Sun Shines With A Post Apocalyptic Glow

Seth could feel the vibrations of the blades of passing helicopters overhead as a symphony of distant sirens melded with the wafting fumes of noxious burning chemicals. His head ached and the long walk ahead seemed like a journey into into the pit of bedlam, all local transportation services had been cancelled, everyone who could hitch a ride with a someone had disappeared by the time he made it to the office lobby and for the first time in his life he stood alone on a London street.

Fear would have been the logical reaction but somehow there was a liberation in solitude, as he peered down the empty road in each direction he felt a sense of freedom although he knew his city was burning his mind felt free and his skin felt warm with a post apocalyptic glow. Instead of the drudgery of his soul destroying work at a boxed-in desk that felt more like a casket he would have to fight his way back to Clapham as if he were a soldier facing the Viet Cong, the prospect of violent conflict around every corner made him feel more alive than he had in years.

With the absence of the throngs the spaces he passed through seemed to emanate a different vibration, he experienced jamais vu, as if all the familiar streets he had passed day after day, year after year had altered through some supernatural force although these roads were still intact. The anxiety in the pit of his gut made gave him a sense of hyper clarity, everything around him was now in technicolor as if he had awoken from some monochrome trance that had dulled his senses for decades.

TK Maxx was in flames, they had once tried to prosecute him for returning a jumper that didn't fit and although Molotov cocktails might have seemed like harsh retribution he felt a secret sense of satisfaction that their temple to corporate exploitation was alight. As he inhaled the black smoke he wished he had purchased that gas mask he had seen on eBay many years earlier during the anthrax scare, then he could enjoy gloating at the foot of their doorstep without his lungs burning. A drop of guilt crept into his conscience for a nanosecond but then lucidity set in as he thought to himself, “screw the sweatshop bastards, that's a building that deserves to burn.”

As he exhaled he felt light headed and pockets of the atmosphere around him felt like transparent chemical clouds that altered the space he walked through, a shift in his perception of time felt like he had crossed a threshold and suddenly he understood everything that had led him to this point in his life, a spiritual revelation in the midst of the broken glass and distant screams.

He witnessed his birth in reverse as if he were inhaled back into the womb, then at the speed of light his mother's life and birth in rewound into reverse, sucked back into the womb of her mother whose existence was encapsulated down the maternal line in a domino effect of every preceding generation until he felt a sudden stillness and the sounds around him had ceased as if he had met the cusp of an event horizon. He was on the precipice of losing himself in the vacuum until he heard a distant cry.

“Somebody help! Help!! The plants!!,” the voice of an elderly woman cried.

Seth ran around the corner towards the screams and found a Jamaican woman in her seventies with a plant pot cradled in her right arm and a broken gnome in her left hand. She had tears streaming down her face as she stood in her perfectly manicured front garden trying to rescue her potted fuchsias. Seth grabbed several random terracotta vases and helped her carry them into her terraced house, which looked like the set of a 1960s kitchen sink drama.

“This violence, I don't understand it,” she cried, “why take it out on the plants? I worked all summer to make this garden beautiful...this is all I have here.”

He had no answer and his machismo fantasy of celestial awakening in post Armageddon Clapham crumbled as found his eyes too were filled with tears. His ears tuned once again into the howls of nearby police sirens and his lungs filled with a rancid burning stench as he laid a potted bonsai tree on the kitchen counter.

“I'm sorry about your gnome,” said Seth with grave melancholy as he contemplated the remainder of his journey home.

© Naomi C. Pattirane 2011

The Devolution of Faith

There was something wrong from the very beginning but Faith chose to ignore it. Once upon a time she had been able to rely on her instincts but her mind now played tricks on her that made her question her ability to judge reality, life seemed like a representation of itself without the texture or substance that once made it genuine and the emotions of others seemed like faint hieroglyphics on a screen of flickering pixels.

It had all started 12 years earlier when she suddenly had difficulty recognising the faces of people she knew quite well. At first she tried to conceal the deficit, hoping it would resolve itself, perhaps it was some sort of temporary paralysis of the mind. Yet unless she heard a familiar tone of voice or had some other sort of visual queue to signify who someone was she was not be able to tell a friend from a stranger. Her prosopagnosia had developed virtually overnight and since that day her life had never been the same.

“Faith? Faith? It's me!” a voice with a familiar silhouette cried. He could be any one of several dozen people and deciphering which one had begun to take it's toll on her.

As a result she gradually withdrew from social life as crowds would send her into state of anxiety that could take weeks to recover from. She could only deal with one person at a time, absorbing information from conversation and body language, covering her occluded senses with social graces and a smile. After conversing with someone for an hour, if she could not determine whether or not they were known to her she would not even bother to ask, “who on earth are you?,” the omission of identity just became the pattern of her normal existence.

Over the years she gravitated towards the freaks in life, those who could be recognised many miles away by some distinguishing feature that did not rely on the contours of their face. These were the people in life whom others avoided, the social pariahs who were easy to distinguish from those considered the norm.

“Freaks are my element, these are my people. I can identify them and I can identify with them,” she thought to herself as she ventured out for a rare excursion, “everyone else seems like a blur of mediocrity. Perhaps they are.”

The sun filled the horizon with rays of electric amber as she turned the corner into the alley between her local jazz club and the garish windows of a fetish porn shop. Half a century ago the area was once a run down street of pet shops that had deteriorated into a red light district but recently it had seen gentrification subsequently followed by a quick downgrade as more up-scale seedy elements had now replaced the old ones, lending a more expensive variety to the gentrified aura of sleaze. The poverty, dirt and degradation was now upgraded to social mobility, grime and degeneration but now that it was a more stylish slum people paid good money to feel that they were part of this esoteric urban myth.

Many of the inhabitants sported asymmetrical hairstyles and brightly patterned retro shirts yet somehow they all seemed to be wearing a uniform, these were not true freaks like Faith's friends, these were disingenuous pseudo freaks trying to lift themselves above their class of banal conformists who wanted to fill the world with advertising slogans, bad graphics and the cancerous seeds of corporate corruption. Faith's affliction was a gift she thought to herself, I don't have to engage with these people because I won't be able to recognise them from day to day anyway.

“Faith, how's it going?” The statuesque rag clad figure with flowing grey dreadlocks chimed, it could only be Cecil the Rasta smiling in the midday sun. He had just married Mad Marion, a deranged poet who scrawled her work on random scraps of paper and photocopied them to distribute to the disinterested masses. These were people beyond the fringes of society, the inhabited a universe of another vibration to those around them but felt no sense of alienation whatsoever.

“Enjoying my reclusion this summer, getting a lot of writing done,” Faith mumbled half audibly.

“Good! But remember...solitude vivifies, isolation kills!!” said Rasta Cecil with a big smile on his face. He could make the darkest observations seem inspirational.

As the distant cathedral bell struck a resonant five a glistening beam of light shone through the display window onto a glowing fluorescent purple strap-on that was central to the gaudy collection of fetish paraphernalia that her Swedish ex-partner was once so fond of, leading to a misguided excursion through the shops of Amsterdam many years earlier. Faith had been celibate for three years now, in part due to trauma from this man's escalating obsession with bizarre sadomasochistic practices which had left her with internal bleeding on her last evening in Gothenberg. If she could never remember the man's face it would be through the grace of the universe but visions still ran in phases through her mind as she realised that perhaps trauma was the only thing apart from distinguishing features which could unravel the tangled neurons of her memory.

“To think of previous lovers I have to disengage myself from the concept of love, because the root of the word has never been an element of any relationship I have ever had,” Faith told her therapist.

Virtually every man she had known had treated her like a possession and a faulty one at that. Although she had specific affliction of the mind she did not have any problem with her intellect yet was still treated as though she had to be cloistered from life, somewhat like a cross between a gilded flower and a quarantined patient. She now felt that she no longer needed the complication of yet another lover without love or respect, over the years eventually all yearning had ceased and biologically it was all systems shut down. Only the emotional vacuum remained but that had always been there, regardless of the presence of one man or another through the revolving doors.

Through the window a melodious flow of sounds split Faith's stream of consciousness and for a brief moment in time she stood outside of herself. There is an out of sync symphony firing through my brain, she thought in one stream as harmonies gave rise to fragments of her mind's eye wandering far and wide. Through this vision she found herself some place familiar yet not referenced anywhere in her mental geography, a darkened room with double doors opening onto a balcony, a small circular bistro table with a white tablecloth, a vase of oriental orchids and beside it a bed on which she sat as a man in a suit from an era long gone placed a fedora on the bedside. His presence brought her to another level of reality, as if everything within her present life had been muted. This is the missing piece...this is who I am...and everything else is a house of cards, a delusion.

And there it was, the pure beauty of simplicity which did not exist in her life now, the wholeness rang in her soul with a familiarity that excavated all the layers that were the illusory concrete of her psyche. More exactly she felt that this was her real life and that so-called reality was the nightmare, she had somehow been robbed of her genuine existence by a cruel twist in the fabric of reality. Inexplicably she found herself grieving for a place she could never have been with a man she had never known.

All at once it was dissolved in the wakening of consciousness. Faith's rational thought told her that the labyrinth of imagination must be to blame, although the tears on her face were real and her nostrils were filled with the scent of the man she left.

“The clarity is too painful,” she thought, “I need to escape with the freaks.”

© Naomi C. Pattirane 2011