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
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