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

The Demon and the Menorah

Maury was trying to access the space in his mind that was once inhabited by peace. Now steeped in his meditation on inertia he sat at the kitchen table staring at the menorah, the silver plastic gleam of its rounded arms dancing capriciously with the rhythmic flickering of the neon sign from the sushi joint across the street.

Last night he had destroyed a spiritual experience. His wife had told him so and the anguish in her eyes was resolute. He was the destroyer of traditions, the thoughtless defacer of metaphysical truth.

“One lightbulb, Maury!” more misery emanating from her, this time with tears and a disconsolate glare of trauma, “All you had to do was buy one tiny light bulb and you couldn't even remember that. You've ruined Channuka again, you thoughtless, insufferable moron. Don't speak to me for the rest of the week.”

That evening, scanning the half lit rococo décor of his marital bedroom as his wife slept, he stared in the mirror above the boudoir and entertained the darkest thoughts he had ever allowed to enter his mind. A pernicious desire that he had kept from himself had suddenly been unearthed from the depths of his subconscious. In the shadows and stillness a barely audible sound, an exhalation at the back of his head changed the focus of his meditation. An enveloping cloud of something that seemed half substance, half dark energy started to emanate from the foot of the bed as he lay without movement, immersed in primal despair. At first there was the aura of a sudden chill and then the swift revelation of an oppressive radiant heat encompassing him from head to toe. The formless mass solidified, gripped him for an instant and with a single inhalation pure fear entered every pore of his body.

“I usually visit Christians,” heard Maury, yet these words were without sound.

“What do you want?,” rasped Maury under his breath, his eyes scouring the room in startled wonderment.

“This is more about what you want,” said the voice without sound.

“What I want?” Maury had never let this concept enter his mind since he had married the woman sleeping beside him.

“You know what you want. That's why you summoned me,” said the voice with crystal clarity yet no audible substance.

Maury knew what he wanted, he knew quite well. Yet it wasn't compassion, empathy or sentimentality that kept him from elucidating it immediately. He felt fear but of a different kind, as if he had lived his life on a tightrope and had never been aware of the possibility that he could slip.

“What I want isn't right. It's evil, pure evil. This feeling will pass and everything will go back to normal in the morning,” Maury muttered under his breath.

“Look, the Catholics are expecting me within an hour. I only have limited time to spend with you so make a wish and make it swift.”

Maury searched the depth of his soul to extract the definition of his feeling. He knew it was time, there was nothing else to know. From the void of the clockwork that makes eternity move forward or unravel he found himself back in the kitchen searching for the menorah lightbulb in vain. His wife entered the room and stood beside him at the windowsill, looking at the artefact without cognizance.

“I can't find it, the shops are closed. I've ruined our spiritual moment of the day,” he exhaled with resignation.

“What are you talking about Maury?,” she murmured in bewilderment, “You know I'm an atheist.”

The darkness that had descended upon his soul was gone and he knew this moment would be the start of his new divinely altered days.

© Naomi C. Pattirane 2010

Kinesis

Peace of mind was no longer a state attainable, at every turn there was something clouding the thought process and something jumbling the reasoning. It was a balancing act to sort the current waves of reality from the white noise but somehow Atha had learned to adapt. The realization that normality would never be obtainable again was a mind numbing prospect and in this corner of the universe there was truly no where to run. If one was to feel suppressed by a person or place there might be the option to leave or disconnect but to be a prisoner in one's own mind was truly the worst type of punishment a human being could endure.

There were distractions, necessary to the survival of the psyche or there would be no option but to self destruct, although the distractions themselves became progressively more and more self-destructive. One could now question whether these were more a slow motion method of suicide rather than the constructs to keep a tortured mind occupied but at the end of it all there she was and that was preferable to not being.

Nowadays it was understood, the process behind what had caused this disaster. Machines may become progressively more human but a human is not a machine, all we share is the electricity that runs through our circuits. The interactions betweens biological systems and man made ones were not fully understood when she was a child and as a result she was amongst the first to develop the disease and through another process in which the human mind becomes more adaptable, her abilities.

Myelin sheathing protects the neural circuitry of a humans brain, without it we either end up with neurological disorders or mental illness. The brain finishes laying down the sheathing sometime in our mid forties when the ability to access and handle all the information in it becomes easier. Children were the first to be affected but it was attributed to a variety of other disorders and for big business there was too much money to lose to admit the real source of problem. Immunizations, drinking water, air pollution, every other possible cause imaginable was attributed as the reason behind it but as the rates soared it became apparent that there was some other mechanism at work.

To live in a world where sounds have shapes, optic nerves can pick up the signals of other people and devices, your thoughts can mingle with others and your emotions can change the substance of the world around you is not an explicable experience for a small child. By the age of 7 Atha was recieving psychological counselling and was diagnosed with a severe mental disorder, although the therapists who had seen her could not decide whether or not she had some form of schizophrenia in conjunction with synesthesia or some as of yet undefined type of high functioning autism. They sent her to a school for children with developmental disabilities which simply served to her disconnect from the world around her further.

Decades later in this seedy world where almost everything is a commodity, even the human mind and soul, Atha was at the top of her game. The years she had spent being treated with condescension rather than being given the tools she needed in life meant this was all she had left for survival

“This is the target,” Yôsuke patched in a neural transfer of a man, clean shaven in his early thirties, a French military type. “He lives in Unit 87 at the end of Kojima Block. He has a history of drug use so we believe liver failure would be appropriate.”

“I'm low on energy this week so I'll have to rest a few days or I'll burn out,” Atha was getting white noise for days now, 72 hours in a darkened room was the only way to recharge or she would be virtually disabled.

“Okay, but the hit has to be completed by the end of the month, your drop will be 24 hours later as usual,” Yôsuke had a sudden small convulsion and then returned to himself. As many others did, he had a form of epilepsy that was caused by the neurotechnology he used and abused so frequently. He left abruptly and Atha turned off the lights to commence her three days slumber.

In dreams most people find solace or escape but not for Atha, these were the tunnels of terror and that dug deeper into her psyche and siphoned up every aberration and malignant spirit that clung to the trenches of her marrow. Years of abuse had ensured that she would never have a peaceful period of sleep and even this could be turned into a commodity for someone, a type of pornography for the new age of perversions. There was no possibility of tranquility or any juncture close to it in either state of consciousness but even when she considered the only other possible option the thought occurred to her that perhaps even this state could be interfered with, her soul being used as energy from the vacuum to power some device for the rest of eternity.

Often the faces of the people she had eliminated would appear to her but she still somehow felt detached from what she did to them. She felt as though it was almost a natural process, someone had called her because their time had come and this was virtually a cycle of nature, like the food chain. As of yet there was no law against what she did, it was not recognised as a crime because it could not be traced. Perhaps she was able to do what she did to these people because they had bad karma, perhaps she was simply a conduit for what they had brought upon themselves?

“Listen to your conscience,” said the wall of whispers, commanding Atha to do something of which she was incapable. The voices may as well have asked her to paint the sky green.

A hazy holographic image of face of her new assignment appeared beside her and stared serenely into her eyes. His pupils were black and wide, his expression was calm and she could feel his breath until it turned into the sound of a loud rumble that shook the room. He ran his fingers from the tip of her chin down to her jaw and throat, reaching with his other hand into her breastbone which transformed into a glowing dance of lights and forms that twisted into shapes around his torso. He thrust into the mass of light and Atha saw a collision of shapes and colours diffuse into the white noise that now blinded her vision.

Yôsuke then appeared abruptly and his eyes rolled into the back of his head, he convulsed again and again in a digital like loop. He would often appear when the dreams became too vivid, like a valve to release the pressure of her neural traffic.

“Unit 87 at the end of Kojima Block”

Atha walked along the path until she reached the turn at Kojima Block, the noonday sun blinding her sight as she tried to read the numbers along the residential units, she walked until she reached number 57 and stopped. A strong wind nearly blew her off her feet and she held onto the handle of the door.

“Atha, I'm waiting for you,” the whisper was a single voice now, that of a man.

This was the very first time she had experienced this feeling. It felt like uncertainty but she couldn't quite place the emotion, it was almost like physical nausea and she didn't understand why. Here in this place that she would soon be visiting in her mind's eye during her waking hours she would do what she had done time after time without malice or remorse. There was no need for either of these emotions in her line of work, the execution of her targets did not require emotional involvement, simply mental concentration.

There was a darkening of the sky and a flash of lightening followed by a clap of thunder. Atha braced herself for rain but then there was none. The door to unit 57 opened.

“There's an alternate universe in the rotation of electrons,” shouted the unshaven maniacal man with heavy rimmed glasses, one lens of which seemed to be shattered to pieces but hanging in place.

“What?” Atha was startled.

“Come in, it will start raining in a couple of minutes,” the man beckoned her into his squalid room which looked like it had not been cleaned for several months. Something about the place was reminiscent of a mortuary yet it also stank of stale beer. Stacks of science periodicals and notebooks were towering all around, threatening to swamp the furniture and Atha was not sure whether or not she should sit down or exit immediately.

“Here, you can sit here. Don't worry, you won't damage anything. Wait, listen...”

The rainstorm started and the violence of it shook the unit until the stacks of books toppled beside them. As the lightening struck the static of white noise appeared before Athas eyes and the frequencies of different channels, conversations, radio shows, the images from random transmissions and whispers of the past melded into one another as she tried to focus on the moment to no avail. Sounds dissolved into shapes, colours prickled like sensations and she at once knew the neural web was tangled again.

She awoke from the absence to find herself on the strangers couch with a strange smelling concoction propped beneath her chin. She could see him at his desk immersed in reading and wondered what this madman's position could be in the corporation. He detected her movement out of the corner of his eye.

“You've recovered! You're okay. Epilepsy? Not uncommon these days.”

“No,” Atha was still disoriented as she spoke, “a type of synaesthesia, it's difficult to explain.”

“Ah yes, yet another type of neurological disorder. The cause is all the same nevertheless. I have the beginnings of MS it seems, now there's something to look forward to. The price we pay for technological advancement. My name is Jerome, by the way.”

“Atha.”

“Are you new with the corporation? Or are you just visiting? Work placement? Yes, you look like you're here on some sort of internship, is that what it is?” Jerome was sifting through the avalanche of papers on the floor as he interrogated Atha, oblivious to her stone cold eyes piercing through him.

“This should not have lasted so long,” Atha suddenly possessing the self awareness one sometimes perceives in dream states. This state of consciousness had never lasted more than a couple of seconds without her waking.

“Ah yes, but it has and here you are,” exclaimed Jerome, oblivious to his status as part of her subconscious.

“Then you should know precisely what I know. I'm here on a mission, to terminate my target,” Atha stated without emotion.

“I see. Then it must be essential for your survival,” Jerome sounded like a therapist reasoning some minor irrational behaviour. “But that doesn't explain what's been happening to you.”

Atha again felt the nausea. It was inexplicable, completely unexpected and she had a flashback to the luminous pool once again. Strings of light pulled a figure toward her from the ether and all at once time seemed to fold into itself as the shapes and sounds melded into a continuum that became a symphony and then once again a single vibration. The white noise enveloped her field of vision again and Jerome became an outlined figure in the static.

“Atha, I've always been here for you,” said the whisper of the unknown man whom she now recognised.

“I know,” she answered and for one exhilarating moment she did know but then forgot once again.

Jerome and the room now appeared as normal and she was back on the couch amidst the piles of books and papers. She felt out of control and this was unfamiliar to someone who was paid to control her mind to phase into the realm of matter. She could not wake from this dream but she had to, the target was due for elimination within 48 hours.

“I have to leave now, I have work to do,” Atha motioned to get up but found that her body would not cooperate.

“You can't leave Atha,” Jerome murmured, “until you remember.”

She could remember breath and skin, space and time, the strings of light that reached into the abyss to pull out pieces from another dimension but the puzzle was still in scattered sections, her mind was still fractured and the nausea continued. Her dreams had never lasted this long and she felt as if her sanity might be annihilated forever or perhaps that she never had it in the first place. What was it that was lost in those moments that slipped away like mercury and why did her body now feel like lead?

“Who is the target?,” Jerome's voice seemed hollow.

“Who?” Atha echoed.

“Who is the target?” Jerome repeated once again.

“Who?” Atha echoed again.

“Look at yourself,” Jerome's eyes motioned downwards.

Atha looked down at her swollen belly to find she was heavily pregnant.

“Benoit!” Atha awoke.

Yôsuke entered Unit 87 at the end of Kojima Block to find it empty, the sole inhabitant vacated and Atha nowhere to be found. The sound of white noise enveloped his hearing and static jumbled his optic nerves until he was blinded and could no longer see the door before him. He felt a sharp pain on the left side of his chest which radiated down his arm and up towards his jaw. Yôsuke was a company man no longer. Long at last in the infinite realm of the ether Atha was free.

© Naomi C. Pattirane 2010

Vasily and The Lamb

He was a master of deception, or rather misperception and this activity had become as banal to him as filing was to a secretary. He understood that there was a threshold to which he had to adhere or his subject would normally detect an anomaly but this was no normal subject and he was able to push the limits further each day.  

Vasily was having the laugh of his life as he stirred two more lumps of sugar into his coffee.

“Did he include the baby lamb in his report?” asked Dmitri.

“Yes,” he laughed as he clicked through the Colonels algorithm profile, “he thinks this will be a new era in US military warfare strategy. He's waiting for more visionary dreams to come to him.”

The Colonel was a battlefield implant and one of the first they had ever experimented upon. Many of his men had been using drugs on the front-line and were also easy targets, they were on the lookout for a different enemy using a tactic they were more familiar with and were instead used as guinea pigs for the first series of long range experiments. Vasily and Dmitri had worked in this department since the mid 1960s when the subjects were always close range, usually in Moscow and the techniques were far less subtle leading to neurological deterioration or mental instability much sooner. For a person in Moscow this type of damage was much more apparent, for someone in California it was barely detectable.

“You know what the frightening thing is Dmitri? His colleagues think this is a great report. They have passed it on to be taught at the warfare school. They are not on drugs of any kind. They haven't been altered or influenced in any way. What is wrong with these people? Do you know what this means?” Vasily's voice took on a resonance that seemed to lift their stagnated mood.

Dmitri sat contemplatively chewing Levi Garrett, a habit which he had picked up from an American soldier he had been assigned to reprogram several years earlier.

“If we can find more people like this then we have the power of gods.”

This was a type of long distance culture shock for Vasily, who was used to driving political opponents to suicide and discrediting witnesses against the state. He had come to accept his humble life in his tiny apartment in Moscow and the few extra “luxuries” he was allowed with his special position but now he started to yearn for more. 

From the states point of view it was difficult to find men like Dmitri and Vasily. A prerequisite for the job was to be technically bright enough to handle the equipment and understand the techniques, to have an underdeveloped enough conscience not to care how or if the subjects children or other family members were affected and to not possess any personal ambition whatsoever. This last point was of the utmost importance and these two men were vetted to ensure that they were completely devoid of any characteristics that might put them at risk of future insubordination. Yet somehow through a mysterious process of neurogenesis or some other tic of evolution Vasily was starting to think outside the box and get ideas above his station. 

“You know Dmitri, I think we could change our lives.”

Dmitri stopped chewing and stared at Vasily as if he had shat on the desk. They had worked together for 15 years and he had never heard him talk like this. 

“Are you taking the same drugs as the Colonel?”

At the end of his shift Vasily walked down the long dark underground corridor which ran parallel to the metro tunnel and for the first time thought to himself that perhaps his days here were numbered. He had given the best days of his life to the state and now they were gone. He was the perfect citizen and had followed all rules, up until this day he was not even mentally capable of insubordination but now due to some disruption of his neural connections something had shifted. 

Outside in the evening air he stopped at Red Square and looked at the domes of St. Basil's Cathedral. This was the first time in 15 years he had actually stopped to look at this building, so engrossed he was in the world of his work and unable to lift himself outside of the minutiae of his own pathetic existence. All lit up in the night sky this was indeed the most beautiful building in Moscow. Yet the work he did not far from it was some of the ugliest work in Moscow, he had institutionalized thousands of enemies of the state, he had destroyed families, he had driven men and women to suicide and up until now he had felt nothing because he didn't have the capacity to feel.

Most people experience their formative years in their youth but some remain formless, a void where a human being otherwise would be. This could be due to motherly neglect or childhood trauma, emotional abuse or social maladjustment. In Vasily's case it was simply a complete lack of interest in life around him. There was nothing that could spark passion in him or lift his imagination beyond the grey world of his immediate survival and servitude to the state. He was a scientist, not a schemer, he left this part of his work to the experts and obeyed their orders, regardless of how inhumane or degrading they might be to the subject. This was not his concern.

Perhaps it was the American Colonel and his childlike enthusiasm that swayed him or maybe it was the freedom he had to present the most bizarre ideas to his superiors and be greeted with earnest interest. Anyway, thought Vasily, the baby lamb was my idea and it was a joke. I swear on the grave of Stalin it was meant to be a joke.

© Naomi C. Pattirane 2009

Xavier and the Great Depression

“Focus.”

Somewhere between the insomnia, the brain fog, the throbbing heat between his temples and the car alarm outside Xavier was trying to access a file in his mind that wasn’t corrupt. When the futility of this became apparent he would seek refuge in sleep, sometimes for twenty or more hours at a time.

This of course was not conducive to holding a full time job and his psychiatrist had diagnosed him with clinical depression. He thought he was lucky to have spent 15 years paying his taxes to a socialist state whereas elsewhere he would have soon become one of the faceless shadows that lurk the subways and alleys of cities such as this. At least here he was able to maintain the dignity of going mad in the solitude of his own home.

“The satellites can read your mind,” his neighbour Edgar mumbled to himself as he trimmed the rosebush in the communal garden. In a way, it was a comfort to have a neighbour that was more mad than he was. Depression seemed a logical state in comparison, the inevitable consequence of a world increasingly filled with chaos and despair, whereas Edgar was in a world completely disconnected from causes or consequences or any logical sequence of events.

“They can influence your entire psyche, you know,” Edgar proclaimed in his loud stage whisper, the shaking shears in his hands making the statement all the more ominous, “It’s the microwaves, they penetrate the molecules of your body.”

“Your roses are looking very healthy this year,” Xavier remarked as he shut the window to concentrate on his own universe of misery.

Everything leading to this state of affairs seemed a blur. Now all that existed was this room, his cat curled up on the armchair and the sliver of sun from the gap in the curtain slicing a beam of amber light onto the radiator. The stillness had a life of its own and if his mind could mimic this scene then perhaps he could find some peace and clarity. The telephone ring broke his meditative state.

“Hello, is this Xavier Peters?” the urgent male voice inquired.

“Yes”

Then just as abruptly the caller hung up. Whatever it was, which sounded of the utmost importance was now hanging in the air. Was he trying to sell something? Had someone died? Was he from the benefits office, calling to check if he was depressed enough? Unanswered questions perturbed Xavier and the only answer was another cup of tea.

Across the street from his kitchen window was St. Denys Bookshop, a theological bookstore that had been there for nearly thirty years. There wasn’t a day that went by that someone didn’t go into this shop and now that times were getting harder there wasn’t an hour that went by without someone walking through its doors. Yet everyone he knew was an atheist. Most of the local churches were either empty or half full of sleeping pensioners trying to save on heating bills. Who were these holy people?

Beside it was a five story building that had been newly constructed three years earlier but remained empty ever since. There had been a problem with the electricity supply ever since construction was completed but somehow nothing had been done to remedy this. Once every month or so the owner, a fat Indian man with a clipboard would go into the building with a couple of builder types and conduct some sort of inspection which never seemed to resolve the issue. Sometimes in the middle of the night Xavier thought he could detect movement on the top floor and thought that perhaps squatters were making use of the empty space.

At least he could throw some perspective on his situation from the less fortunate specimens around him. He wasn’t talking to rosebushes, he didn’t have to squat in an abandoned building and he wasn’t desperately searching for spiritual enlightenment in some dusty corner of a bookshop. He was mentally ill in a normal reparable way, the consequence of unfortunate circumstances and a chemical imbalance that could hopefully soon be remedied.

In Xavier’s state of mind the simplest everyday task had become a monumental effort. He had devised a method to help counteract the paralysis of his dulled mind, he had taken to counting and mentally cataloguing every step of each task he undertook regardless of how simple the activity might seem. This way he would never leave anything undone unless it was by design.

“Cup of tea, step number one. Place water in the electric kettle. Step number two, turn on the kettle. Step number three, get a mug from the cabinet. Step number four, get a teabag from the jar. Step number five, get a teaspoon from the tray. Step number six, scoop a lump of sugar from the jar into the mug. Step number seven, pour the boiled water into the mug. Step number eight, remove teabag. Step number nine, add milk.”

It was the analysis of each task broken down into it’s components that made him appreciate the complexity of everyday things and feel a sense of achievement in the mundane. The engineering involved in the making of a simple cup of tea culminated in his sense of accomplishment for this hour. In the grip of the worst clinical depression there are some people who don’t even leave their bed to defecate, Xavier thought to himself. Not only can I make a cup of tea but I’ve never soiled myself.

The abandoned building across the street was a shoddily constructed modern red brick monstrosity only marginally better than the ditch of rancid water that once stood in its place. Xavier thought surely the owner would make more money by cutting his losses and knocking it down to sell the land. It was bizarre that this construction on a prime piece of city centre real estate was sitting idle when surely there would be a queue of buyers waiting to hand over good cash for a location such as this.

This evening he could once again see what appeared to be the reflection of a flashlight on a metallic surface on the second floor. There appeared to be movement in the shadows but it was difficult to tell whether this was an exterior reflection on the window pane or someone moving inside. The ugliness of the building made it almost invisible to passers by, the best camouflage for any sort of unsavoury activity. The architectural equivalent of the banality of evil.

Xavier wished he had someone like Grace Kelly to peer through the curtains with him but in the desolate darkness of his apartment he had only the cat beside him. It’s pupils widened as more movement appeared, proof that there must be more to it than just his imagination. Animals have a heightened sense of awareness in situations where the normal senses are limited.

He had read several weeks earlier that someone had been running a drug processing plant in the attic of their semi-detached. Perhaps this was such a place, or perhaps it was a laboratory for the more exotic chemical concoctions sold on the mean streets to throngs of desperate addled thrill seekers.

Or perhaps not. Maybe it was simply a homeless person trying to keep warm for the night. Calling the police would simply mean turning him or her out into the streets, a pointless waste of time and effort. He couldn’t make the phone call without being certain that something was definitely amiss. That would involve Step One; leaving his chair, Step Two; getting dressed, Step Three; turning on the alarm, Step Four; opening and locking the front door, Step Five; entering the building, possibly by force, Step Six; walking up the stairs and Step Seven; encountering a hostile, possibly violent individual who either wants to evade the law or simply get a decent nights sleep. The variables and the effort involved made this an undesirable prospect for the evening. So Xavier decided to simply sit and wait. Only two steps involved.

As Xavier watched for more signs of movement his consciousness started to drift until he was in a deep sleep punctuated by the flicker of his eyelids signalling his surrender to the world of his sub conscience. It was now that the work could begin.

Dr. Catticus Schrödinger was the best experimental psychologist of his species. He seldom communicated with humans directly unless they were already marginalised, like their neighbour Edgar who could handle the truth because in his view it didn’t conflict with any false mental construct of the world.

The doctor’s specialty was brainwashing and his role as a nocturnal creature was a perfect cover. As humans are more susceptible to suggestion in sleep his experiments would always commence after sundown.

Experience had taught Catticus that human nature is like mercury and they were by far without a doubt the most unpredictable species on the planet. Unfortunately they also held all other life forms to ransom with their whims and destructive nature and as long as they were in charge no other creature could count on their own continued survival. Therefore something had to be done and his organisation was in charge of regime change of the surreptitious nature, secrecy was of the utmost importance so the invisible war could be waged without resistance.

Xavier was an excellent subject for experimentation. He slept virtually three quarters of his life and confined himself to a controlled environment. His movements were easy to monitor and his diet rarely varied. He was on a medication that did not have any adverse reactions with the psychotropic drugs Catticus administered in his evening meals.

The power of suggestion is an amazing way to control most humans, who are at best feeble minded and easy to influence and at worst prone to reactions of extreme psychosis. Catticus knew he was constantly treading a fine line but he was in expert in the field of mind manipulation. The changes had to be gradually implemented as not to upset the delicate balance of the fragile human psyche.

The most important element of this regime was the volume and inflection of the whisper. Catticus had to position himself directly by the humans ear to achieve the most effective frequency to entrain their neural pathways. If a subject was overweight or a sleepwalker this could be a very perilous state of affairs.

“Xavier…your enemies live amongst you and conspire to eradicate the menial comforts that make your miserable existence vaguely tolerable.” It was always best to start with the good news.

“There will come a time when you will have to mobilise against the dark forces of oppression. You may find that you might have to venture out of your home to do this but do not fear, there is a universe beyond this existence that will welcome you when the time comes.”

The street lamp flickered outside and emitted a short sharp buzz before extinguishing. There was movement amidst the shadows in the red brick building across the way and Catticus paused to check for signs of hostility. Espionage was a precarious game for the average human and no mean feat for a foot and a half tall feline.

The souls of certain individuals are not dissimilar to cats and Xavier was such a person. He was easy to placate with food and warmth, sleep was his primary activity and craved peace above all else. Really he was a cat trapped in the body of a human, which might explain why he suffered clinical depression amidst all the expectations and conflicts that humanity inflicted upon itself.

After several minutes of silence Catticus could sense that there was no risk of intrusion and once again commenced the subconscious alteration of the subject in his nocturnal laboratory .

© Naomi C. Pattirane 2009

Yumi and the Imperceptable Road to Hell

“Most people in this world are happy to come home from work, eat, drink, watch television and they don’t care about anything else in life. Only about ten percent of people, maybe less care about personal freedom”

Something about what Pedro said, despite his broken English struck a chord in Yumi. Up until the age of 33 she was one of these people, albeit against her will. She was on a never-ending treadmill of living to work 60 to70 hours a week and her fuel was fear. She was an immigrant and felt she had to slave twice as hard to justify her existence.

Now many years later, a divorce and a nervous breakdown later she realised that for so many years she never took a holiday, never enjoyed life and settled in the wrong place. The boulder of Sisyphus had been chained to her neck by the corporate conglomerate to which she sold her youth, answering queries for the customer services department of Hell Incorporated.

“You’re being exploited,” said the voice at the other end of the line. She didn’t understand why a man ordering navy pants in 1999 would want to tell her this.

“You’re being exploited and you should leave this job.”

“Would you like to hear about our special offers?” Yumi implored with a vague sense of panic.

“You don’t understand the extent to which you are being controlled, every moment of your life. Your world is being manipulated in ways you cannot comprehend.”

“Do you have any queries about your account?” she desperately needed to get this man off the line before her supervisor told her off about conversing with dementia patients again. The previous week she had a half an hour chat with a man who thought he had invented radar.

“You may choose to ignore me now but one day you will realise the truth.”

“Well, Mr. Jones, thank you for shopping with us and your pants will be with you in eight to ten days. Goodbye.”

At that time in her life she felt the constant adrenaline of fear in every corner of my life. She felt as if something were chasing her but couldn’t define precisely what it was and she frequently had the sensation of losing vast amounts of time when only minutes had passed. Food was also an enemy to Yumi, something that felt almost as if it were a contaminant. She would buy endless containers of disinfectant to keep her empty kitchen cabinets germ free but rarely did she buy any goods to fill them.

Now that she was no longer bound to her monotonous job or a permanent home, her travels fulfilled her quest for personal freedom. Although she barely had the money to do so she managed to find menial jobs in each town she travelled to, enough to keep her fed but often not sufficient enough to find a roof over her head. She found that the safest alternative was to sleep at airports, which were far cleaner and safer than train stations or parks. Frequently she would stay at communes such as this and share the gardening and daily chores in exchange for a bed or floor surface. Pedro was a fellow commune dweller and world wanderer in search of his own possibly non-existent utopia that he might finally claim as home.

“Stop thinking about the past,” he whispered over Yumi’s shoulder as she dried the dishes. This broke her moment of reflection.

“How did you know what I was thinking?”

Pedro smiled in his all-knowing way and for a moment she thought she felt him answer without words but she reasoned this must be a figment of her overactive imagination.

“Universal consciousness,” Pedro chimed.

“Is that what it is? Or perhaps I’m too obviously running away from my past. Maybe my seams are starting to fray.”

Pedro was the free spirit type that Yumi had once despised. He had never held a real job in his life and did not understand what her quest was about, he had no context with which to measure personal growth or transformation because freedom was a luxury he took for granted.

In the evening Yumi took a solitary walk down to the field of windmills, the large metallic monoliths seemed to possess a life of their own in the night sky, their sharp blades slicing through the constellations emitted a low drone that seemed to come from the bowels of the earth. This field could provide energy for the three adjoining towns but harnessing the power of the wind made the landscape look as if it were taken over by an army of robotic triffids prepared to wreak havoc on all of nature. It was difficult to feel the sense of peace she sought out here alone.

Perhaps the truth was too painful to deal with and her wanderlust was a distraction from the world of aspiration and failure that she found after migrating so many miles to stay in one pointless place for so long. She was no longer sure what constituted happiness or whether she would even recognise it if she found it.

Under the night sky Yumi reflected to herself; we are living in the age of the sound byte, but the byte is getting smaller and smaller until one day it will be reduced to a quark and everything we have left of civilisation and consciousness will be deleted from this corner of the universal hard drive.

© Naomi C. Pattirane 2009