Chasing Oranges Read online

  chapter

  “Does the wine always taste of purple velvet?” he asks, sitting back softly into the big black leather sofa, his head leaning weightlessly over the back of the morbid headrest like it had done so many times before. He can’t tell how long he’s been sitting there. It sure feels like a long time. There, is a stained army green sofa with deep crevassing rips in the armrests. He’s picking at the foam with what’s left of the nails from his right hand. His nails have been gone a long time. Substituted with a thin sheet of aluminium sheet, the stuff those old coke cans used to be made of before they became extinct. His hands are a mess. The cuts and bruises and the scars, and the stories they tell. The sofa is, by the way, a total disgrace. Tattered and blattered, and infested with all manner of suspiciously looking stains.

  Now, is actually some time in the near future. All that obviously depends on what time and reality one finds oneself in and whether one choses to accept it as such. For all he can tell, the now felt, feels and could well come to feel all so much like the present moment but he couldn't swear to that. He’d been to a lot of different places and times recently. It was starting to get confusing.

  He’s far up, in some long forgotten building, in some government forsaken end of town. The lift only worked a third of the way up, so they had to walk the remaining 42 floors. It took longer than expected. They’ll be camped up there for a while, perhaps a few days, until he does something about it.

  The degenerates he was forced to follow across town and up so many flights of stairs are starving for a hit. One precious mind boggling hit of the OrAngE stuff. Moving around the place like preying hyenas, the lot of them.

  “Does the wine always taste of purple velvet?” He asks again, a little unsure of who he’s addressing. No one seems to take the least interest in him anyhow. There's no point in pushing it any further. He’s found his own answer to the question. It’s a rhetorical question of course. The wine does taste of purple velvet. He’s sure of it. Just like the black leather sofa tastes of liquorice. His pink, dry skin of the sweet scent of caramel candy, the sweat on his forehead of tabasco sauce and the fresh air, whose scent he can taste and flavour on his tongue, it tastes of freedom. Of course it could all be down to the corrupting smell of Natroliium Peroxide coming from the damaged ventilation system, or perhaps just the deteriorating state of his ever decaying brain matter.

  “Guess it's already getting to you,” the punter says, as he sits there, bent over the glass table. Chipping away at some one thousand Kredit bills. Now that's big money.

  He just sits there, smiling. What else can he do. A victim of his own miserable circumstances. A prisoner, sixty odd floors up above the smoggy grey clouds. The guy’s holding his little, sharp pocket knife tightly in his clenched fist as he desperately tries to clip the notes into smaller pieces. How small is it humanly possible to cut paper bills he wonders?

  The sound of the knife hacking away at the glass surface is enough to send the poor cat into a meta-contraptual tantrum. That tends to happen sometimes with some of those cheaper models. There’s a sudden bright flash and its’s only gone and duplicated itself. There's now two identical copies of the beautiful grey and black striped cat with a pink patch on its nose. One of the two copies leaps up to the windowsill. There's no telling which one is the original anymore. The one on the windowsill takes one last look at them all and dives out, 63 stories down into the busy streets below. Somewhere in the distance he hears a glass smash and another sweet looking piece of mechanics, child-laboured technology bites the dust. Its new duplicate looks a lot calmer. An instant adaptation, like a growing cell. This new version feline is bound to fit into its new surroundings a lot better than its predecessor. It has no other option, like us all. That’s evolution for you, nature at its worse.

  Incidentally, these peculiar recurring events have become an integral part of his everyday life. He still hasn't decided what degree of reality they belong to, but in the present moment it is all very real.

  “How small you trying to get them?” he asks intrigued, biting away at the inside of his cheek. There's a good dozen of them all over the table. Clipping at them ever so precisely. Like he's trying not to harm the poor things while he coldly clips away limb after limb. Stacking them up into smaller and smaller piles, he continues to chop away at the blue coloured paper.

  “The bills,” he hears the punter grunt between his teeth as he grinds them together like stones.

  “The bills. They're so fucking…”

  He never does get the last few words of anything he ever says. His sentences are small continuous bursts of brilliance which always inevitably end up losing themselves in the vacuum which separates us all. Up there with the wonderful things, mainly words and ideas that float around in the ether. Wasted on deaf, unaware ears. Space must really be full of wonderful things.

  “So, fucking big…I think I need…”

  All he can do is smile.

  “Where’s the fucking blender,” the fellow bursts out.

  “The damn blender. Go get it! Now!”

  That was loud. The frustration is evident in his jaw. The muscles in the side of his face are tensing like the back legs on one of those pumped up racing horses. Someone better get him that blender before he bites his teeth to shreds. He’s seen it happen once before. Not a pretty sight.

  “I said, where’s the fucking blender,” the fellow cries out again. He’s dead serious about finding this blender.

  Taking another sip he can’t help but be amazed at the taste of velvet silk. Or did he mean purple velvet? Shouldn’t it be burgundy? Perhaps it all makes sense, somewhere.

  He’s slowly sinking back further into the infinite comfort of the sofa and wondering how it would feel like to ride time. Ride it like a wave. Like the intergalactic time surfer he is, or rather could turn out to be. It's never too late. Of course he never learnt how to surf. The acidity levels had already reached harmfully high levels when he first tried to dip his toes into the sea as a dare. It was to impress some girl. The things one does. He still has the scars to show for it. Can he remember her name? Of course he does. Dorothea Tumbling. A dumb shit of a person she was. Wonder what corner of space she’s ended up banging her head into? Everyone does at some stage.

  He’d do it naked. Surfing time that is. Surfing time naked, perhaps on a naked woman’s body. A beautiful specimen of a naked Hawaiian beauty. And him, riding her like a board on the never ending wave of time. The perfect wave. Time just seems to stop when strange things happen.

  The search party is back from their excursion. One of them is handling one of those old-style blenders from one of its ears. He’s seen one before in one of those antique shops back in the city. They don’t make them any longer. A big glass jar on an electrical 12volt base with a spinning axel. One of those old plugs hanging out of a long black snake lead. He can hear the poor thing’s cries of despair as it’s displayed like some war-time prize, an animal in a circus.

  “I hear you blender,” he can hear himself think, “I feel the pain. I’m an old-styler just like yourself and I suffer this modern reality as much as you do.”

  The plug’s shoved into the socket on the wall with mighty force, yet the two seem to meet with gentle nonchalance. Like they’ve done it hundreds of times before. No need to be embarrassed. What is embarrassing is the state of the place. He hasn’t been there that long, but long enough to tell the room smells and looks like waste. Like shit. Like the shit normal folk have come to know all so well.

  There’s laughter all around. The blender has come to solve their problems. Finally. Any longer and the fellow’s jaw would have come off like an unhinged door. He feels like a pigeon at a football game, goofing around cluelessly. He never did get his head round the game of football. Luckily he’s not a pigeon and this isn’t a football game so he takes another sip of his purple velvet.

  He wonders whether purple velvet tastes of wine? Highly likely given the circumstances.


  “This’ll fucking work like a bloody treat” someone cries out.

  The guy’s jaw starts flinching rather violently. There’s bruises and scabs on the back of his head where he’s been scratching away at some invisible itch. An itch that’s been eating away at his insides for some time now, and has only recently made its way to his epidermis. Scratching will do nothing but ease the momentary feeling of discomfort that years of OrAngE Haze have caused the man and a whole generation. And now here he is, leaping down that same rabbit hole with them all.

  rchapte

  He lived in a house with no windows. Had anyone ever bothered to ask him at the time, he’d have answered that his name was Jack Landan.

  This is his story. It’s the brief tale of a few brave men, two very different worlds, and the civilizations that prospered and perished there, only to end up committing the same mistakes, as is generally the case. It’s Jack Landan’s story. His attempt to finish a book he never remembered having begun. The story of the world he came to call home and despise. The struggles he went through, like so many, to make it through this thing they call life. It’s a tale of all manner of bizarre occurrences that should, in the very least, keep you entertained. His name was Jack Landan, and this is a condensed version of the truth. It shouldn’t take too long.

  Born thirty-four years ago from the conception of this work, give or take a few time lapses, on a distant place, in a world far from anything considered to lie within the acceptable boundaries of normality. That is of course unless you’ve also made the twenty-two-and-a-half-thousand-light-year journey to the remote Wallonian Constellation, where the small bright, blue planet, known in our tongue as Pazanna, hovers peacefully in the fabric of space. His parents were Eugenius Landan (an Earthling) and Trapezian Zorga, (a beautiful Pazannian female species of a woman, his mother). She gave birth to over forty-six individual eggs during the three weeks it took her to conceive him. He and his two sisters were the lucky ones who made it. It was decided that they should be delivered on Pazanna because of a lack of adequate structures on this, all so civilised, planet to provide the needed assistance to Pazannian females during their short delivery period.

  Four days into their existence, with their brand new subcutaneous identification stems implanted into their arms, the new family made the long journey back to Earth to start a new life. Pazanna was still busy picking up the scattered pieces left over from half a century of civil war. It was no place to bring up kids. The rest, as they say, is just plain boring, at least until the meltdown happened and changed everyone’s life forever.

  The Big Meltdown occurred in the usual manner the best of fuck-ups tend do. Like dumb kids and fire crackers. Fuck-ups just seem to happen when there’s too much time to burn and nothing much to do.

  By some dark set of circumstances he was on a school trip to Callisto, one of Jupiter’s many moons. A memorable school trip it would have been if the scientists back home on Earth at the Antarctic centre for Meltdown Studies, as it has since come to be ironically known, hadn’t decided to cause the partial collapse of the Southern hemisphere.

  The four week school adventure might otherwise have been remembered for very different reasons. The outrageous news that a classmate of his, fourteen year old Maggellana Townsporter had gotten herself pregnant. Not literally though. Someone had obviously helped her in the process. Her spacesuit had picked up a secondary, weak but unequivocal heart beat deep within her. It hadn’t crossed the minds of the awesome engineers who’d designed that particular feature for the spacesuit. They never foresaw it causing somewhat of an embarrassment and one hell of a headache. That is what happened. The biometric-scanning system unexpectedly decided to announce to a room full of students and dubiously drunk teachers that the subject in question was pregnant and that a doctor should be consulted as soon as possible. The subject in question was 14 year old Maggellana Townsporter. Her inseminator, a 46 year old middle school teacher sitting across the room from her. A one Mr. Trippintoff, notorious alcoholic, teenage-flirting physics teacher. The scandal however was soon forgotten. For it was scenes of total silence and mystic sub-sonar laments when the news came, with nearly a week’s delay, of the terrible destruction and cataclysmic events which had taken place back home on the precious little blue and green planet they called Earth.

  Science, or perhaps just simple scientists, had decided to make their way into the age of fourth generation natural resources with one Big Bang. Not as big as the one which gave birth to all of this, but big and destructive enough to destroy the lives of over two billion people.

  In a split second, the lives of Jack Landan’s beautiful mother and hard working father were cut short. The day the world stood still and a few greedy, and incredibly short sighted men blew a hole into the one thing we should all hold most sacred.

  As for his sisters, he forever lost contact with his youngest, Brezna. She was born 23 minutes after himself. She took off not long after the great meltdown and had never looked back since. For all he knew she could be as dead as a cat. There are no such things as cats any longer. Just cheap electronic replicas, but don’t tell anyone, whatever you do. Especially the kids.

  His eldest sister Kabrina, born 42 minutes before him, made a lucky escape when she found refuge in an underground anti-missile bunker. The bunker had been built decades earlier to protect whatever power it was from whatever other nation it was they were all hiding from. Ironic that they should have to resort to such measures to hide from themselves, and no one else. They occasionally still wrote to each other. She stubbornly refused to leave the bunker. She and another 17,000 souls continued to live the life of a mole, three kilometres under the ground. According to what she’d written, the good Earth provided them with all they needed. Water, nutrients and most importantly, a shelter from a world which in their eyes had gone completely mad. He couldn’t really argue with her on that point. Few rational people could either. Shame that there should seem to be so few of them left. Most of them, of course, had accidentally blown themselves up on that dark day. Perhaps rationality isn’t the solution to all our worries after all.

  For twenty-two months they orbited the Earth’s atmosphere, waiting for permission to return to the planet’s surface. And when they eventually did it was in a manner most unorganised and extremely confused. There was little or nothing for him or any of his 114 classmates and 12 teachers to go back to when they eventually got home. Home was a big dark hole from which nothing had been able to escape. The world was still busy coming to terms with the fact that a hole of biblically deep-space proportions had been blown into the underside of the planet and was threatening to get even bigger. There was also the more pressing issue concerning the manner in which it would affect the planet’s orbit around the sun, and how life on Earth would suffer because of that. Talks ensued about the possibility of using controlled explosions to give the broken sphere of the planet a more quadratic shape. Geometrically speaking, and metaphorically thinking, it was agreed that the planet would be much more stable as a spinning cube rather than the chewed up wobbly sphere it had become as a consequence of the meltdown.

  No one had the time of day for 114 orphans travelling home from a school trip. And so it was that they were shipped, much like goods, to different holes across the globe, if one could still call it that. (Of course one couldn’t, but most of us still do.) Jack Landan was, like so many others, posted to one of an terminally awful amount of survival camps. When the time came, he was sent to what would eventually become his new home. Notobia. The stamp of refugee clearly embedded on his forehead, as if to remind the good people that took him in that they would now have to share whatever little they had with him, one of the unwanted, landless people. Few things ever change it would seem.

  terchap

 

  At some stage, about 35 years, into his miserable existence Jack Landan noticed his flat start to shrink. His obsessive habit of aligning every possible object in his vicinity wit
h the nearest straight line available, soon started to drag him into an uncomfortable and spiraling situation. The lines and squares which had worked as the basis for everything in his little world had started to mutate unannounced. And like most unannounced mutations it came slowly and painfully.

  A 50cl bottle of the good stuff. Roughly 16 and one third glasses, give or take a few decimal places, would get him through an entire bottle. Then he’d wake up a different day wondering to himself where the past had gone. That was back in the days when they still made the stuff from fermented potatoes. Before potatoes became extinct and they started using god knows what to replace them. There were a few people who could probably tell him how they made the stuff, but he chose to ignore them. In all his wisdom he still craved a little ignorance to get him happily through that thing they called life.

  The sun had been in the habit of casting a shadow across his living room and onto the creamy coloured wall of his living room at an approximate angle of 58 degrees without fail for 17 long years, 103 days, 13 hours, 27 minutes and 46 seconds. On a good day the temperature in the room would crawl its way up to a miserable 14 degrees celsius. That was before the windows went.

  He despised approximations. It was appro-ximations that had blown a hole into the underside of that once beautiful world. Of course they would never admit to it. Instead they had preferred to blame it on the poor quality of the imported prime element they had used to fuel the experiment. How very human of them.

  His plastic basil plant lived happily on the dark wooden table in the hall, by the kitchen, 6.3 metres across the apartment from where he would sit and watch it. The door to his peculiarly small toilet was 4 paces, 3.75 metres from his habitual sitting place at his desk, which lay facing the South wall of his 4 by 5.27 metre living room. The fridge stood 3 cm to the right of the main supporting wall, which wouldn’t allow for the fridge door to arch open more than 63 degrees. The paintings all hung precisely 1.55 metres from the floor and no closer than 33.33 centimetres from each other and so forth.

  Sometimes he too would wonder. All manner of useless measurements and obsessively compulsive bad habits defined the rules by which he lived his life. He kept all measurements and numbers updated in a little black leather notebook which he stacked under one of the floorboards by his writing desk. The desk measured four and a half hands by three hands and four finger. He’d started to use limbs as measuring units the day his tape measure went missing.

  He first reacted to the dark shadow hanging over his left shoulder one grey, autumn afternoon. Flinching to peek over his shoulder he expected to find the demon himself standing there behind him. Instead he was depressingly met by the same predictable vision of his plain old living room. Only there was something ever so slightly different about it that time. He was on that first occasion unable to put a metaphorical finger on exactly what it was that had changed in the ever so mundane surroundings. And yet, a certain unease began to take hold of him as he struggled to piece together that something.

  Like so many things, even dreams can begin to bore one into remaining awake. Even a beautiful flower needs to die and be born again. Only whiskey seemed to hold its unique grip on his poor soul. He would come out of his daydream-coma, one little realisation at a time, just like the other few before him had. The cracks in the pavement. The shopkeeper. The teenage girl rebel who would flash her freshly shaven pussy at the shopkeeper whenever she thought no one else was looking. The secret agent, piece of shit, noting it all down in his digital eye-piece. The acidy taste of the rain. He remembered how it used to taste like before the big meltdown. The cries of kids, the sound of laughter, the smell of laughter. “Have you ever smelt happiness?” someone had once asked him.

  The poor beggar sitting in the cold, his arse turned to marble. His blood worth more to science than his presence to humanity. His smile. The first time he noticed his nails, the smell which his unwashed body emanated, and his smile. His ever so human smile. He could remember smiling as a kid. Recalling how it was the norm back then. Not something to be punished for. When they all smiled and no one thought anything of it. Before a smile meant I want to fuck you, and a misunderstanding meant a rape. Days when people still shook hands, kissed, looked at one another in the face and smiled. Would they outlaw that too and pin big heavy metal weights to their faces so that they wouldn’t be able to smile anymore like they did on Pazanna?

  He remembered the day the beggar first smiled to him. It was the same day he noticed there was something horribly off with the accurately calculated geometry of his little apartment. When upon placing his shoes by the entrance he spotted the markings on the floor. The shoe-rack had scratched its way about an inch towards the door. It was then he began to worry that he may be showing the first signs of a madness.

 

  Like a slow spreading cancer, the mould began to grow from the floor up and along the recently white painted walls. The smell of dampness infested every crack in his skin. The food in the fridge soon went off, no matter how cold it was. And there was no means of drying any of the clothes he hung up to dry. All manner of vermin and rodents began to move into his apartment, their new home. He felt the flat was gradually being taken over by a living form, a cellular organism that lived and breathed, and whose only goal was to kill and subdue his soul, his very reason to exist. And yet, despite the horrid living standards, just as he had done for years, he continued in his footsteps, working his body and soul into slavery. A slave to his own sad existence. Force-feeding himself all sorts of artificial junk before returning to the hole which was his small apartment, his den. And he returned to it, each time with the same sad hope that within its increasingly mouldy walls he might find some form of happiness. And every time he was tricked into believing that it would be so. And for so many years it continued, an unhappy existence, but one which continued no matter what, because there was always hope.

  The painting of the black and white pelican hanging from the wall had by then grown nearer to his desk by a whole foot in length. As he sat with his back to the wall, typing away his thoughts on the Olympia Traveller de Luxe typewriter, he began to feel the presence of his very own shadow growing closer and closer every day as the apartment grew smaller. The ceiling had also dropped by about 16 fingers and he had been forced to remove the door to the toilet completely. Space was becoming a commodity which he could no longer afford. He had increasingly less space. Just as he had increasingly less time. He wondered if the two were connected.

  The most peculiar things started to occur with ever increasing frequency. Returning to his den one day, he sat, trying to make the most of the 26 minute bus trip home, with his face up against the bus window, the sun shining dimly onto it, breathing a little life into his deflated soul and the cool glass. The girls were out in shorts and colourful dresses, their pale legs freezing in the winds. The boys with their dark glasses, sipped at their power drinks, and made dirty remarks about them, their hands suspiciously deep in their pockets. Between the smiles, and the red cheeks and the embarrassment someone, against all odds, actually managed to pull a girl once in a while.

  He cropped off the bus and, with his head held low, made his way up the steep hill which to led to the apartment block. A block so limp and undecorated and so infested with rats that he was essentially the only two-legged being still inhabiting the premises. The short-lived comforting feeling of the sun warmed his back and shoulders, his forehead sweating as he pounded up the hill. For a moment he thought he too deserved to be happy, to have a dream, perhaps a few dreams. He too wanted a girl to call his own, and some people to call friends. He didn’t ask for much. He only needed a few. But that would all have to wait. He would soon have to deal with a much graver situation.

  The eternal rays of our burning ball of fire shone across the dark tarmac surface of the street, and its loyal companion, the pavement. Somehow one defined the subtle boundaries of the other. The plastic flowers hanging from the balconies bathed in its glory, as
did the pretty young girls in dresses. Yet all this glory and beauty was lost on him the moment he noticed, with much anguish, that the building, the entire apartment block at Park Avenue number 11, had completely disappeared. In its place only the empty space of nothingness.

  He took a few steps back across the street to confirm his momentary hallucination. Indeed, it appeared to be just the way he was perceiving it to be. A dark cloud had momentarily blocked out the glory of the sun and cast an immense shadow there where his apartment block had once been. The yellow building at number 10 and the rusty orange building at number 12b were still both visible whilst there, where he had expected to find the keyhole to the front door of his apartment block, lay nothing. Just the gentle breathe of the acidic sea air blowing across town.

  It didn’t strike him at first. The problem of where he might have to spend the night, now that he had nowhere to live. Rather he was taken aback by the meaning of it all.

  He took refuge on the curb of the pavement hoping for something to happen. Something, would certainly have been better than nothing. He spent the first part of that peculiar first evening staring at empty space between the two four-storey buildings. Waiting for the apartment block to reappear. And funnily enough it did just that some 78 minutes later.

  As the odd dark cloud eventually began to move on behind the hills surrounding the city, the first rays of light began to shine again. Slowly revealing to him the building, brick by brick. He suddenly noticed the top left corner of the apartment block reappear ever so slightly until enough sunlight shone all at once and allowed for the front door to appear. A few minutes later he was finally able to insert the key into the damn thing.

  In the oddity of it all, he paced up the three flight of steps, not thinking much of what had just happened, brushing it off as some mystical cosmic fuck-up. He’d read about it before. One of many that had started to plague his existence of late. Rather more urgent was the fact that his apartment’s re-dimensioning had begun to accelerate. The kitchen cupboards had started to crack off their hinges as the walls grew closer to one another. And whenever he sat at his desk he could feel the oppressing presence of the ceiling pushing down on him. He knew he didn’t have much time left to finish his masterpiece. His desperate attempt at a first novel. A work which he hoped might incorporate everything he knew he should stand for. It was then that a certain urgency began to run through his veins. A tingling sensation that reminded him that somewhere there was a clock ticking. A clock with his name clearly engraved on it. And although there was no way of finding out how much time he had left, he knew it was ticking down to something.

  ptercha

  Somewhere along the line, the end of the middle meets the beginning of the end. A cold room, the steam condensing helplessly on the windows. One early spring morning, god knows the fuck what March forsaken evening. The year was a blunder of a mystery like so many other things round his way. He’d stopped counting just the other day and it felt like years ago. The slick leathery surface of the wooden table. The one his cold elbows lay upon every other time he hit down on his typewriter was one of the few things he knew was real. It felt so. He was a writer. An unestablished one, but nonetheless a writer. Busy trying to find his soul in a place which seemed to have abolished the very concept of one. Apart from his thoughts and the paper he had to write them on, he had only the booze to keep him company. To remind him that he was still alive and that not all was lost yet. There was still much fight left in some hidden part of him.

  The plastic basil plant lay slain across the table. The sun had all but checked out for the day. The photos, that had once told a story, stood limp around the place. The frozen figures they depicted, fading day after day, in the apartment he once would have been proud to call his own. The wooden floors were full of cracks, like hints of things to come, things past and worn-out, things yet to happen. The shivers rolled down his spine daily, they had done for some time now. For years he’d gone through the motions of life, one small dream after the other. The sleepless nights slowly but steadily beginning to blend into interminable and undistinguishable memories. He felt like he hadn’t had much of a say in anything that had happened to him. And perhaps that was part of the problem. Like a cork floating across the oceans, a victim of the currents flowing below the surface, unable, no matter how willing, to steer its own course.

  “How do you know you’re not dreaming,” a gypsy girl begging for her life had whispered into his ears as he had crouched down to hand her a few cold Kredit coins. It must happen in that subtle moment when you realise that you might actually be dreaming he figured. A look into the mirror which is the soul, and just as you ask yourself the question the answer stares you straight in the face. Such moments can send even the sanest of people spiraling into a dark hole (of insanity).

  In those days he had only the swollen, broken cracked skin on his knuckles, and a lifetime of empty whiskey bottles to show for a life spent. Spent doing something. Things, which he found increasingly hard to recall. Waking up, half way to some place he never remembered having set out to visit. His job. The people. The machines he was forced to deal with on a daily basis. Those 8 long years he’d spent working at the Population Ego Inflating Department. Sweating away for the state and its almighty power. The same vicious, heartless state which had taken him in when his home and family was swallowed into the dark deep hole. That had educated him and assigned him a number. The state, and its square mentality, the four walls of an institution which would eventually bring them all crashing down.

  For days on end, for years he sat at his work desk. Checking in and checking out. His smile gaffer-taped to the back of his ears, telling people things they already knew. Reminding them on behalf of the great state that their very existence was down to the uncanny ability of the state to sustain peace in such times of horror. The days went by, and one by one citizens would smack him across the face. A custom brought along by the few in order to bring order to the many. And many a night he would spend seeing to his cracked lips and black eye, dreaming of one day dodging one of those hardy slaps and of slapping them straight back. He so very much felt like sticking it to them all. But between dreams and reality lies the ocean of uncertainty which few ever venture across.

  What little joy the feeble warmth the sun ever did grant him was always cut short the moment he set foot on the trolley network. The mechanical like caterpillar monsters built of goodness knows what precious metal. Swirling and stretching its long neck across the whole city, like a constant current, a blood feed. There were no drivers anymore. They all got beaten up and killed or removed for making inappropriate remarks like most people. Personal opinions had long become a thing of the past, so last century. And yet trollies, trams, strasseban monsters, whatever one chose to call them, were the one place left where one might still be lucky enough to hear a whisper, a slight murmur of what might have resembled an opinion. So they got rid of the drivers and replaced them with an artificial heartbeat. A flat red line of an electronic pulse that opened and shut the doors on elderly war veterans and pregnant young ladies as they made desperate leaps of fortune in the attempt to get on board without losing a limb or their life in the process.

  He smiled to a man on the tram once. He did. He took one deep breath, held onto his case and hoped for the best. As the muscles in the side of his face pulled ever so slightly, he figured he had seen him before. Spotted him a couple of times running his artificial wife in the park. Picking up her dumps in small green coloured bags and then walking her home, hand in hand. He thought he’d seen a smile on his face at the time.

  So there he sat, waiting, one heartbeat after the other. And just like that he felt something occur, a little spark of life left in the being sat across from him. There was still the remains of a soul screaming from within it. It sat miserably in its seat, its eyes piercing through the deaf and dump lumps of shit standing between them. He watched eagerly, hoping for a sign, something to take home with him, something to
write about. As its face contorted in a desperate attempt to smile back at him, he watched in horror as the thing’s jaw slowly dislocated from its sockets and began to slip down the side of its face, its eyes flinching like an old light bulb. And as the jaw dropped, the look of terror began to fill the poor thing’s eyes as its tongue surely started to melt out of its mouth. Such horrid sight continued under the scrutinising eyes of countless empty (soul) vessels standing all about. Had he not witnessed a similar event only a few days earlier he might have reacted like an empathy driven being, but instead he sat there like the rest of them, in silence, wondering when his stop would come. Only the week before he had spotted the resemblance of an individual which he believed to be an old acquaintance from his time in the refugee bog camps, where the shit they bore had more rights than the blood that ran in their veins. Kalahn Sanga, he called out to his existence from a distance. He was unsurprisingly ignored by the man, the thing he had become. And as he pulled at his shoulder calling out to him again he was met by the wretched look of a stranger, an alien entity that had taken over his old pal’s body and mind. And it stood there staring him straight in the eyes until he pulled at its hand in a move he hoped would cause some long lost memories to surface within the misty sea of its mind, but nothing. Only the shock of having ripped its cold, pale hand right off its arm. And the worms which had burrowed their way into its meat twisted and turned, cursing at him for destroying that which they held most sacred, their home.

  The parasites were taking over every living thing. He wondered when his turn would come. Or perhaps it had already happened. Surely, he thought to himself, there must be others out there who remembered how it used to be. Others who would happily leave it all behind and risk their lives for something better.

  He’d once managed to spark the sweetest of conversations with the oldest of ladies. She had claimed to be from a neighbouring planet within the Wallonian constellation, the shithole known back on Pazanna as Stratius. She claimed her age to be that of 157. He smiled back politely and figured she still hadn’t learned to compensate for Earth years. The blue blood pulsated calmly through the veins which stretched under her transparent skin. And yet again the warmth and humanity was short lived when as they stepped off the trolley car she knelt down suddenly in despair. And when he knelt down next to her to see what was the matter he noticed the two dark holes in her head where those blue eyes of hers had once been.

  “Help me find them will you,” she pleaded. It was too late, some soulless government functionary in black leather boots and a grey uniform had kicked the things into the way of a coming waste disposal truck. Her precious eyes were gone forever. Mushed under the might of a uniform and that horrid skull and bones insignia.

  The lines that defined his reality were starting to blur and blend with the ones that marked the beginning and end of his dreams. It was about then that he started to wonder, and wander.

  apterch

 

  “Many stars have fallen, they would say. Many suns have burnt out past their expiry date, and maybe on some distant planet in a near galaxy, some exceptional being is being born. Someone to call a genius, a saviour. We hope so. We need that kind of hope. Some say they’re still waiting for someone like that round here. The last one said he’d be back, but it’s been a while since.”

  So that’s when they began to charge their tiring bodies up with electric impulses. After ten hours of long labouring hardships, when there wasn’t a joule of energy left in their lifeless carcasses, they'd plug them all into the wall like batteries. Just when they thought there wasn’t any more to ask of them, the high ranking bosses would come with their obscene requests, hopelessly falling on death, demoralised ears, faces, the lot.

  “Double shifts for you all. Chop Chop!”

  “What is one expected to give when there’s nothing left?” A pigeon once asked a another pigeon. More? What do you do after that? Surely it must end sometime.

  Electric plugs up the backside was the answer. It didn’t take much of a current to get the muscles twitching and turning and the workers working. The right amount of amperage could keep a loyal employee going for an extra sixteen hours, long after his natural expiry date had come and gone. A couple of slaps in the face and an injection of an unspecified agent into the back of the neck would keep him talking and processing basic levels of information long into the next day. Of course they could have gotten monkeys to do the jobs. Thing was, there were none of them left of course. And if there had been, it would still have worked out cheaper to link them all up to the power grid and keep them going like there was no tomorrow, or yesterday. The way things were going meant there probably weren’t many left who could still tell the difference. Time kind of goes to hell once you’re that far out (into the next dimension.)

  The electricity had begun to jolt the nuts out of the shed that housed most of his memories in those days. The time spent plugged into the wall was all a big blue haze which he could frankly have done without. There was no erasing that though.

  The days on end spent sitting at his desk, that tingling sensation running down the back of his spine and down his arms, forearms fingers and out to wherever it was trying to get. Twitching like a muscle with twenty-thousand volts running through it, which he incidentally was. His mouth mumbling out all sorts of obtuse lyrics and noises as the muscles behind his eyes pulled and stretched his eyeballs. His face, contorting in all manner of perilous ways. Someone wondered how long it would last.

  The answer was, not long. Like all things greedy, the greedy masters had developed mutated eyes bigger than their full, swollen bellies. And in all their wisdom they fried the shit out of some poor fuckers who gave everything they’d come into this world with, the skin on their flesh and the remaining spark of life in their eyes. Both ripped from them like shreds and thrown into the back alleys like used dildos.

  There’d been 16 official casualties but Jack Landan could only put a name and face to one of them. That one chap had been Abraham Fry. Incidentally, that’s exactly how he met his end. His moist brain fried dry, by the very organization that had promised him and his family a future of prosperity, a disease free existence. So when the going got tough, the greedy got angry. When the greedy get angry they turn demanding. The demands started filtering down from the higher strata of the power chain, and like all good fellas they each took their orders. Like good old employees, right down to the lowest of the low without ever questioning what a hundred thousand volts might do the shit bags that held their souls. The image of his colleague’s face exploding into a blueberry pie before his eyes would haunt him long after, along with the thought that he had been next in line. It was only by sheer luck that he too hadn’t been splattered across the foyer of the visitor’s centre for the National Ego Enhancing Institution for Law Abiding Citizens.

  Few could argue in favour of keeping such barbaric measures in place after that minor hiccup. Of course the old butt plug technique had meant preferably higher revenues for them all, but even the harshest of the most stubborn lot knew when to pull out of a sinking ship. They would just have to come up with better and subtler ways of squeezing the very life out of them, all in the name of profit.

  That’s when the known teenage-raping, child slave enthusiast, the one Baron von Fucker Heinrich Eisenshower, expert sadist, trusted enforcer and soon to be franchise dictator, came up with the most tragic of propositions. The latest in employee exploitation slash humiliation technology, confirmed, tested and guaranteed to get the most out of even the laziest of employees. It was presented to them like the greatest invention to sweep the 12 galaxies since the cure for ignorance had been discovered under a rock some 4000 years ago, and then accidentally dropped into the depths of the sea. A cure. A medicine. A formula to improve their work rate, their contribution to the greater good.

  They were all hushed into the small coffee room for a last-minute staff meeting during which they were given a demonstration of how the alluring
power of sadism could be used to improve office efficiency. Not a full week had past since their former colleagues had met their end, fried to a crisp at their desks. There were still traces of where parts of the unlucky sixteen had met the walls and ceiling after the blood in their veins exploded beyond boiling point. Company policy, however, prohibited anyone from mentioning the unlucky happening.

  A seven percent wage increase was enough to convince most of his unwitting colleagues that the new bladder and bowel implant was worth the risk. They had mouths to feed, partners to please, parents to burry and taxes to pay. All that was obviously enough to push them over the wobbly edge of which they were all soon to fall off anyways.

  It happened over night, like most innovations that swarmed through the doors of the institution, taking with it all that was good and pure. They signed on the dotted lines, alas not really knowing what they were signing on for. Confusing, like the best of properly written contracts generally are. Then they took them, did things to them, their insides, and when they were done they posted them back to the offices in shiny new suits, courtesy of that all too desirable seven percent wage increase. 85 of the 113 office staff were fitted with state of the art bowel and bladder pressure controlling systems. This was it, their answer. It meant having your arse and plumbing wired up to the central brain of whatever hollow head that controlled the knobs a few floors above. You pissed and shat whenever they saw fit. That was the agreement. Clock in at 7:30 and out at 26:00 hundred. The extra two hours added to the conventional 24 hour clock to deprive the poor souls of an additional god given 120 minutes. The lucky ones were allowed to empty themselves once a day at most but only if the correct paper work had been filled in, stamped, posted to the correct office and returned, counter rubber-stamped, licked, bum-squaggled and handed in to the floor manager within the standard ten working day period. It was what the big bosses liked best, committed workers working the floor non stop. No time to be wasted on useless toilet brakes and annoying bureaucracy piss-permit papers to fill in.

  The state of the art system failed miserably some sixty-two days into the new project. The hopeless souls took their miserable sewage infested bodies home that night for the very last time, ignorant of the fact that something in the main computer system had gone terribly wrong. The same system that was in charge of regulating their enslaved bowels and bladders. 67 people died that night. Their insides drowning in their own shit and piss, unable to do the one thing that had until a few months earlier come quite naturally to them. They were denied that too, and so they parted with this reality, unwilling. When the problem was solved later the next morning it was all too late.

  Sitting at his desk the next day, the news came in of the unfortunate incident. The few surviving individuals stared at each other in a cleansing silence. Quietly and apologetically they sipped at their coffees, wondering to themselves what next. He couldn’t help think it was all just going to the dogs.

  hapterc

  "Such is the way of solitary madness, a wise green elephant once said. One will just keep on going, no matter how hard things get. They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over again whilst hoping for a different outcome.”

  And so accordingly, for weeks on end, he continued his sad daily routine, deep down hoping some hurricane would come to sweep him away. Of course nothing of the sort materialised and so he went about his business undisturbed. Living a life of obedience, servitude and morality. Following rules and striving to fit in with a system he had been taught to respect. A morphed kind of respect which he sensed had turned to fear somewhere along the way. Fear of dropping out of the rotten system which he, like so many others, had come to depend on. Still, he sat by the candle light and fought on. Typing away words, with the warmth of the whiskey pushing and encouraging him on. The shrinking surroundings only serving to strengthen his resolve. Word after word he wrote without much sense of where he was going with it.

  The living room door soon snapped straight off the hinges as did most of the window frames. All of it, including the kitchen cupboards and the relatively new set of drawers were mercilessly chopped into firewood for the long winter, which he hoped he would live to see through. Only the front door into his little world seemed to adapt to its constantly changing reality. It shrunk, as did the door frame, by a whole three feet within a month of him noticing the first alterations the home was undergoing. Day after day he would return to the pad only to find that in its shrinking act some other piece of furniture had again succumbed to its undeniable end, more fire wood.

  What writing he did, was done in the darkness of his windowless living room. All he knew was that it was a calling. That he was somehow fulfilling that which he was meant to do. That one thing that could fill otherwise dull moments of boredom with something one might call joy.

  The art of writing did not yet belong to the ever increasing list of arts judged to be of disturbance to the greater good of the status quo. Somehow though, the same old ruling figures had found subtle ways of putting most people off reading or writing all together. Countless numbers of murders and disappearances had occurred over the years following the meltdown. Enough to make anyone think twice before they decided to call themselves a writer. It was risky business. A few brave ones still saw to challenge the authorities with the one gift they had. They lived the curious and bizarre life of quasi celebrities. The common folk venerated them and looked up to them as brave majestic beings, the few amongst the many, and wondered what it was they actually did with their talents. Although it was desirable to posses the things they called books, few ever read or could read. Writers wrote stuff, but exactly what, was known only to a few lucky ones. The rich, the ultra rich who could afford it, threw lavish parties of debauchery and late night feasts. And they would pay authors of all calibers vast amounts of money to join their dirty dancing gigs of gang-banging perverts. Secret underground events where the guests of honour would read passages from their books whilst all around them demonic like individuals succumbed to the OrAngE fever and devoured anything that was there for the taking. Such was the life of the modern day writer. Unwilling jesters to a depraved moving feast. A sort of intellectual prostitution, as someone had once coined it.

  He shouldered his way through the masses to get a better view of the proceedings. The overstretched car came steaming around the roundabout and up towards the corner where he stood among the many. The glass bell that encapsulated the honourable gentleman flashed in the sunny light of day, as the reflections of the sun blinded the masses ruthlessly. And from within his glass bell the famous individual sat waving to the incredulous crowd of people that cheered and threw flower petals, old car tyres and the occasional baby. Tears were shed, and fists flung among the heat and chaos. The white car and the white suit, the white teeth and the white power lurking within them all stunk unbearably of misogynist purity. The very same purity that only the most degenerate of individuals could possess. And there from the corner of the square, he stood in a confusing state of awe, wondering what it was he was going in for. The future he saw for himself as a writer of written words. Surely his need to write came from a deeper and truer place. He had never really given much thought to what it would mean to be famous and paraded around the place like a golden chicken in a glass cauldron.

  As that thought left his head for another, he was blinded ever so suddenly by a flash of light before a thumping boom spread across the square like a wave. Pushing everyone back onto their heels and disintegrating those standing a little to close to the white vehicle. There were bits and bops of everything and everyone flung across the place like corianders. Broken bits of glass hanging from people’s eyeballs and sharp pieces of metal poking into people from all sides. For a while it was unclear if the execution had happened under the watchful eye of the state or if the secretive resistance, that lurked in the underworld, had anything to do with it. Few ever mentioned the resistance. It appeared seldom in state sponsored messages, and only as a word, void of
any real meaning. Few really understood what the word stood for, and even fewer ever sought to seek out its true essence. After a few weeks of debate the matter was brushed off as an accident and life moved on.

  That is what it meant to be a writer. He‘d smelt it and felt it and lived it first hand. And yet, something inside him told him it would be different for him. It was written somewhere, he knew, that he would make of his talent and uniqueness something special. With that one thought in mind he pushed through the heavy door to his future and prepared to face the nemesis which had become the completion of this unfinished piece of work. The one thing that had haunted him for so long.

  It wasn’t until autumn started to show the first signs of its defeat to winter that he experienced the disappearance of the apartment block for the second time. The dark November clouds made an unexpected appearance that kept his home hidden from him for two whole days. Two miserably long days which he was forced to spend in the wilderness of the outside world. A world taunted with all manner of beings and individuals whose existence he had until then ignored.

  A cheap motel two storeys underground, only metres away from where the people made their ignoble existence. The capsule room he paid for with what little Kredits he had left and a generous donation of semen that would soon find its way to the profitable black market. His sleeping quarters were just small enough for him to lie on his back with his knees tucked up to his ears, his ankles painfully folded behind his head. The forced contortions continued until the day the sun granted him access to his ever diminishing apartment.

  Sitting at his own desk again, which along with all the furniture was showing worrying size mutations, his knees up close to his chest, he sipped from a shrunken glass of liquor trying to keep the mould from the ceiling off the back of his sweater. Everyone else in the world seemed to get on with their lives. Joyously smiling in the streets. Enjoying the open air and getting up to god knows what behind closed doors as he struggled at his typewriter, tapping painfully on the keys. His fingers frozen to the ice blocks which his hands had become.

  At night, in his dreams, or perhaps in the somber sound of the silence which encompassed the city, he heard the screams of torture which occasionally rose from the underworld. The place where the real people lived their lives, outside the precious bubble that defined the lucky ones. The ones that lived high above it all.

  The rain dropped like it was trying to say something. A grey day. A miserable memory of a day. Only the jazz playing in some low life bar across the street alleviated the mellow sense of despair and loneliness which engulfed him, as he sat on the curb across the street from where the apartment block had disappeared for the third time since the beginning of the end.

  He bummed a cigarette off a rabbit in a grey military uniform who spoke with a soft German accent and wore a hat with a pirate skull and bones insignia. His ranks had been ripped off the sides of its shoulders. Its eyes loomed red and it stank of heavy drinking. It asked Jack Landan if he had anything to drink. The answer came in the form of a desolate nod of the head. They smoked in silence, only the fearless notes of the jazz and the sound of the rain in the background.

  “Here my friend,” spoke the strange figure in between puffs, “if in doubt, these tend to work a treat,” he said, handing him an envelope with an orange ribbon and a waxed seal across it. And like that the rabbit got up and disappeared for ever into the mist.

  It just happened one day. In the same way the best and worst of things happen. Suddenly, and without a hint or a trace his flat block disappeared for ever. And as he sat again by the curb, looking into the distance what troubled him most was not that he had nowhere to go. He’d been there before. What troubled him was that his life’s work, his masterpiece in the making, the one thing he had poured his life’s struggles into over the last few years, lay on his desk, within the shrinking room in the apartment which now appeared to have evaporated into the mystic fabric of space, and was showing few signs of coming back. That burned.

  When a certain realisation, that we are all here to do exactly what we want to and nothing else, begins to creep into our minds and sends its shivers of life bolting through our nerves and veins, what are we to do? Break the rules, live a little, take a walk on the wild side. It made him wonder.

  Just him and the hampering, recurring sound of the jazz. The rain, his inner self and that envelope, the orange ribbon, the pills and a need to feel alive. He was now bound to the streets. Not by choice but by fate. It neither scared him nor excited him. At the very best he was free, at last. To fight for his right to become the person he was always meant to be.

  Running his tongue across the front of his dry set of teeth he took one last look up to the beautiful stars shining in the winter skies and popped a handful of the colourful pills the rabbit had given him. He was out for it now boyo. Perhaps somewhere in the mist he would come across his inspiration, the key to it all. He was turning over a new page, and as he looked at it he noticed it was plain and white, screaming out at him. Begging for him to do something with it.

  NotoBiA