A loud bang jolted me upright, and I was awake with the cold night air humming around me. Rising, I glanced at the clock, which showed that I had pre-empted my alarm by over an hour.
I decided that it was not too early to shop, and so I showered and dressed, then left. Immediately outside my attention was caught by a black plume of smoke that rose into the sky a few streets away from my house.
I paused to gawk at the column of impossible height rising into the air, its underside lit with flickering yellow flame. Entranced by the scale of the phenomenon, I stood watching the silhouetted shape roll and coil against itself.
Eventually I broke my gaze and set off.
Despite my few hours of sleep, the night before had been filled with a sequence of vivid dreams that were starting to come back to me.
In the first dream I was at school, walking through the dirty
hallways, morbidly embarrassed, as I was too old to be a student. A male teacher that I recognised stopped me to ask me a question. I strained to hear him. Then, the purple-trenchcoated woman laid a hand on my shoulder from behind. I turned around to face her, and she leaned forwards, putting her lips to my ear.
"Can you see beauty?" she said, and her voice was clear and loud.
I answered her, struggling to make the sounds with a thick tongue.
"I can see what is beautiful, but how can I see beauty? What does beauty look like?"
She looked disappointed. Turning around, she walked out of the school, and I followed behind her. The teacher was forgotten.
Then I was at church. We had stood up to sing, but I did not know the hymn. I searched furiously through the song book, but it was upside down, or inside out, and I couldn't quite read the text.
I became aware of the purple-trenchcoated woman next to me. Wordlessly she shared her own book, opened at a page that was filled with a single sentence: "What about time?"
I spoke, and the words came more easily.
"About time? Around time? Time isn't anywhere, or it's everywhere. If anything's about time, everything is."
The hymn had finished, and we sat down. The preacher, staring directly at me, began to shout about responsibility and decency, but I laid my head in the purple-trenchcoated woman's lap and, lost in thought, she stroked my hair until I fell asleep.
In the final dream I was at work. I had woken up in a metal-framed bed in a large room like a hospital ward. I knew that I had been drinking the night before, and that I had behaved atrociously. I stepped carefully over my sleeping co-workers, heading towards the door. They grumbled and stirred, and I gradually felt the danger increase of treading on splayed fingers or a stray elbow.
A hand reached up to grab my forearm. The purple-trenchcoated woman pulled me down to lay beside her, and her warm breath stirred my eyebrows. Looking directly into my face she asked me, "What is living?"
Confidently, too confidently for a dream, I answered "Nutrition. Growth, movement. Irritation, excretion—"
And I had woken, with a bang.
The giant sweeping machines rumbled along the aisles of the supermarket. I moved around them and the night staff—their annoyance at my presence was likely only my imagination—and picked up a tin of this, a box of that. I shopped in the same trance that I entered when driving or walking.
Turning into my driveway, my headlights picked up a hulking figure and I slammed on the brakes so that the car lurched sickeningly to a stop. Adrenaline flooded my body and I was out on the gravel in an instant.
"Who are you?" I roared, "What are you doing on my porch?"
The man lit a cigarette, illuminating his face, and I recognised Alex. He shouted back.
"What do you mean by asking me who I am? And why shouldn't I be on your porch?"
Despite his bravado, his voice sounded chewed up and hollowed out. He was in his dressing gown, and that the right side of the dark red material was obscured by a black smudge which terminated on his cheekbone.
"Alex," I said, "you'll have to forgive my impatience. I couldn't see your face in the dark, but I can see who you are now, and it's always good to see you. Why, I wouldn't have challenged you if I had known who you were. You're always welcome on my porch, even at this hour, and you must admit that it's terribly early. But you look like you have been burned, or run over, or been in a fight. We were only
drinking together last night, did something happen on your way home?"
Alex waved aside my questions.
"Where have you been? Why aren't you in bed? I know you wake up early, but it's ridiculous being out at this hour. Where have you been?"
"I've been shopping. I was woken up, so I thought I'd put the time to good use. I can't get back to sleep once I've woken up, and so I thought I'd do something useful if I'm going to be tired all day, as I'm bound to be."
"Someone destroyed my house, with a bomb! You talk of compensation for lost sleep, I've lost my house! You were woken up early? What woke you up?"
"Well! There was a loud bang—"
"That was my house, blowing up! And you went shopping?"
"I didn't know it was your house," I said, lamely.
The fight went out of him and he nodded. He looked at his cigarette as if seeing it for the first time.
"Like you," he said, "I woke early, though I do not know what caused me to wake. Perhaps it was a noise outside my window, perhaps it was nothing, and, as sometimes can happen, I had drunk too much the night before and slept fitfully."
"I felt terrible, light-headed. My blood fizzed in my veins and beat in my ears, and my mouth was dry and sticky. I needed air and nicotine, so I made my way outside to smoke."
He took a long drag before continuing.
"As I walked outside I saw a short but well-muscled man, wearing a skirt and with hair like a bird's nest—"
I interrupted.
"A bird's nest?"
"Yes. Like an 18th-century French gentlewoman."
"How do you know it was a man?"
"Will you let me finish!"
I nodded, cowed, and he took a long drag before going on in a burst.
"And so, he was scrambling up the side of my wall when I saw him, and at the top he straddled the wall and threw back his head to laugh in triumph—I'm not making this up, actually laughed like a madman from a silent picture—before fiddling with some sort of control in his hand—by this time I was running as fast as I could towards him but I don't think he saw me as he was concentrating on his device—and boom!"
Here Alex waved his hands about expressively, making loops of smoke with his cigarette.
My brow creased.
"Is this a joke?"
"A joke! I'll take you to the ruins of my house, and you can tell me that it's a joke. But perhaps I destroyed it myself, for fun. Perhaps I burned all my clothes, apart from this nightgown you see me in, rolled my car over and collapsed my garage on top of it, left every scrap of identification I have buried in the ruins. Look! You can see the smoke from here."
And he pointed at the dark column standing in the distance. My gaze briefly followed the direction of his finger.
"All right. I'm sorry, I believe you. Of course I believe you. It's a shock to me, that's all. Your story is so strange. I don't think I've ever heard anything like it. Why would anyone do something like that?"
His tone became low and urgent.
"I have enemies, political enemies. People who want me dead. My service to the GHA has not gone unnoticed."
Though his last sentence was delivered ironically, there was pride in his voice.
It bored me when he talked about his party. I asked, "Do you need a place to stay?"
He shrugged, and I took this as assent. I opened the front door for him, reparked, and took my shopping from the boot of the car.
Going inside, I led Alex to the living room, then put away some of the food before joining him. When I came back into the room he was sitting on the sofa, very upright. He grabbed the ashtray from the coffee table and lit a cigarette with a trembling hand.
"Mind if I smoke?"
"Go ahead."
I stood up and began walking back towards the kitchen.
"I'm lucky, really," he said, causing me to turn around.
"Oh?"
"I'm alive, aren't I? I should have died in that explosion. I
survived."
"You'll be alright," I said. I hoped that I sounded reassuring.
He got up and started to pace the room, ashtray in hand.
"You know, I will. Because I have something to believe in. For the past seven years, the GHA has been a beacon in the revolutionary darkness of Britain. We have overcome the pedagoguism of the ivory-towerists, and we have brought back class struggle as the central battleground in our movement. And so—"
"Are you sure it wasn't a gas explosion?"
He stopped suddenly.
"You mean the unions?"
Scorn crossed his face.
"Oh, I see what you're getting at. You don't have anything to believe in, do you?"
"Well," I said, "I'm in love."
I offered this as a gambit, but as soon as I said it I realised that I was telling the truth.
A ridiculous smile came over Alex's face, and he sat down, leaning forwards with his hands clasped in front of him. "Oh?" he said conspiratorially, "who's the lucky lady?"
I blushed.
"I don't know her name."
He leaned back in his chair.
"Describe her."
"Imagine a forest, in the early morning. The air is wet and cold, the sky red, the clouds gathered overhead. Imagine walking through this forest in absolute silence, making your way over the springy ground until you come across a break in the trees. In this clearing there's a single purple flower, of a kind you've never seen before. A beam of light forces its way through the clouds and lands on this flower,
giving it an other-worldly glow."
My voice raised to a shout.
"She's everything! She's the air, the trees and the clouds. She is the sun and the flower and the ground. She's the whole fucking world!"
I was suddenly swimming in pain, and I crumpled to the floor. Alex had stood up and hit me, faster than I had imagined he could move. As I gasped for breath he stood over me.
"Do you feel that? That's real. Your feelings about this woman are pure fantasy. Live in reality."
I could see what he was driving at. I was in an agony like nothing that I could remember, and this pushed out all the trivial concerns that usually filled my thoughts. I no longer cared about the tedium of my job, the paucity of my social life, my failures in performing my role as a human being. But, even so, I felt my love for this woman as an unchanging physical reality, and this calmed me. Once I could breathe again I stood up, and inwardly laughed in relief.
Alex made a disgusted noise in the back of his throat.
"Well, for some there is no hope. One more try, perhaps."
These words did not register with me as I sat down. I saw Alex make his way to a lamp, turn it off, lift it up, and slowly unscrew the heavy base. Armed with this he approached me, and I quickly started to speak.
"Now Alex don't you think—"
He drew his weapon back and I lifted up my left arm in front of my face at the last instant as I was filled with a blinding nausea. I was dimly aware of my body collapsing towards the carpet and sensed the blood draining from my head, imagining the skin being left a pallid white. It was all I could do to keep from vomiting.
I laid there stunned. All I wanted to do was rest. Minutes passed, and Alex, his chin set and his breathing deep and regular, eventually laid the lamp base on the floor and went into the kitchen. More time passed, and a pulsing pain began in my forearm, gradually growing in intensity. I sat up and cradled my arm, seeing that blood had made its way through my shirt and stained the white carpet. Stumbling up, I made my way to the bathroom, peeled up my sleeve and washed my arm, grabbing the first aid kit from the cabinet by the sink. There was a ragged tear in the skin that oozed blood, which I swabbed iodine on before wrapping a bandage tightly around the wound. I threw the shirt away—it wasn't something that I wanted to explain to the dry cleaners—and went upstairs to change. Thankfully, the bandage did not make too visible a bulge under my clothes.
Alex was still in the kitchen when I went downstairs, staring into the darkness beyond the window pane. He turned around as I walked through the door.
"Nothing's changed," I said.
He nodded.
"I'm sorry. I was too harsh. It has been an unusual day."
"It's barely begun."
He turned back to the window, then back to me again.
"Don't give up on this woman. I can see you're sincere. It will be difficult but—"
"I don't have a chance. Even if I ever saw her again. I can't talk to her. She might feel about me as I do about her, and there's no way that either of us would ever know."
"If you lack confidence—"
"It's not about confidence."
He sighed.
"Well, then you have only one option."
Reaching into an inner pocket in his nightgown, Alex produced an efficient-looking pistol. As soon as I realised what it was I was struck with terror. I took a few quick steps back before he could offer the weapon to me.
"That's your option? That grotesque off-switch? Is that all living is to you? Win or die?"
I took a few jagged breaths.
"My life isn't my goals but my values, and I'm in love. I can't even think of killing myself without recoiling in disgust."
"It's enough to be as I am. I don't want or need anything else. That's something that I couldn't say until now."
The day dragged and my arm burned. Finally, lunch time came. As I walked down to the entrance lobby I knew that she wouldn't be there but, regardless, I could not surpress my excitement.
She was not there.
I slinked off to my self-storage room to read, but once there, it was worth it. I shivered with glee at every use of the word glorious, for the heroes, and hordes, for the villains. A princess was described as ravishing, and I made a mental note to find out whether the author of the book was also a romance novelist.
Armies clashed, and thousands died. Comic characters revelled, seemingly invincible in the face of war and bad luck, and human-interest subplots—carefully calculated to demonstrate the author's depth of experience—were set forward whenever there was a break in the action.
I had spurned the carpool as I had needed to take Alex to work that morning. I drove home quickly, cooked and ate simply, dressed in a suit without a tie, then drove downtown to pick up Janine for the theatre.
I honked the horn outside her house and her husband's face showed itself at a window, looked at me with his brow furled, then vanished. A few minutes later Janine appeared in a paper-thin black dress. I opened the door for her and we set off.
"You look beautiful," I said.
She looked out of the window, apparently not having heard me.
"I'm sorry I'm not wearing a tie. I just always feel a bit pretentious wearing one, you know? Though plenty of other people wear one. But I always think that they're showing off. Either that or they've just come from the office, and they haven't bothered to change. Whichever way, it doesn't seem right."
I swallowed.
"And I'm always worried that it's come loose, or gone off to the side. I don't really know how to tie a tie, if I'm honest. Which is strange, because I sell them."
I chuckled, briefly. Silence filled the car, which I again broke.
"You must think that I don't see you as worth dressing up for. That's not it at all. I do go to an effort to make myself look good for you. You are precious to me; I do appreciate you going to these places with me. You know how out-of-place I'd feel going by myself. Anyway, no-one important wears ties, these days. It's usually t-shirts and suit jackets, at least for the younger ones. Do we still count as young?"
We had reached a red light, so I turned to look at her as I said this. She glanced at me in surprise.
"I'm sorry, I wasn't really listening. What did you say?"
"It doesn't matter."
"Oh. I was just looking at that funny lady. You see her, with the kids?"
On the pavement a morbidly obese woman was pushing a pram, while her young son ran around her ankles, screaming shrilly. I nodded, and Janine continued.
"She just made me think of those sped-up films. You know, where the cars are blurs and the crossings fill up with people, then empty, then fill, and empty, and it all looks like they're part of a machine. I was just thinking if she and that kid knew they were in a machine."
She laughed.
"And then I thought about them slowing the film down, instead of speeding it up. The kid would be running about in slow motion, and she would be turning around to see where he was, and grabbing him, and there'd be no indication at all that they were going to cross the street. But no matter what they did, they'd end up at that crossing eventually."
She suddenly sounded tired.
"What happened to your arm?"
I felt sick in the pit of my stomach.
"I cut it."
"How?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know?"
"It was on a lamp. It's a long story."
We had arrived at the theatre. I opened the door, but Janine placed her hand on mine before I got out.
"Next time, wear a tie," she said sweetly.
During the intermission I hung around the bar with a coke in my hand, listening to two men talk about the play.
"His role was very familial," said the first, a gaunt man with wild white hair and bulging eyes.
"I thought it quite original," said his companion, podgy, red-faced, and with thick black glasses.
"No, familial. Not familiar."
"Perhaps a familiar familial role."
The podgy man, who obviously had been told in the past not to laugh at his own jokes, no matter how terrible, raised his eyebrows.
"I thought you thought the role original," replied the gaunt man, in some confusion.
"Never mind," said his companion. "But I agree with you. The family was central to his character."
"The family? The archetypal Family? Or his family?"
"Both, I suppose. But I had meant his family."
"He wasn't central to the family. That was the point, I thought."
"Right. But his lack of centrality in the family made the family central to him. If his role in the family had been more…secure, if you like…the family's role in his own mind— "
"I see."
Conscious of being a voyeur to this exchange, I decided to join in.
"I thought it was about frustration," I blurted.
Both men scrutinised me for a few seconds.
"My dear fellow," said the gaunt man, "whatever do you mean?"
"It was about being frustrated," I repeated.
The podgy man's eyebrows raised again.
"I think you're being confused by a dramatical device," he said. "To keep your interest in the story something must always be left unresolved, characters can never achieve their aims. Certainly not in the first act. There must always be something to want. Besides, there's pacing to consider. Suspense needs to be built in order to control the tempo of the action, but again, no playwright would set suspense as the theme of their work."
"Hitchcock, maybe," suggested his friend.
"Hitchcock wasn't a playwright."
"I'm certain that he wrote at least one—"
"Even if so, plays were not his opera."
I left them to their conversation. It was my tradition—one to which Janine turned a blind eye—to have one real drink whenever we went to the theatre. With this in mind I pretended to head past the bar towards the toilets, but turned the corner to the far end at the last instant. I gained the barkeepers attention.
"Scotch please, a double. Neat."
I winked at him. He scowled at me, and I flushed. I knew that he now hated me.
I paid for my drink, and as manner-of-factly as I could, downed it in one gulp.
Leaving the theatre, I held the door open for Janine. She stood outside without moving. After a while, she said, "Billy, you've been drinking. I saw you."
"But I thought—"
She waited, and when it was clear that I wasn't going to continue, sighed.
"It's alright. I'll drive," she said.
After a journey spent in absolute silence, we arrived at Janine's place. Alex was waiting on the sidewalk for us as we got out.
"You forgot to leave me a key," he said.
Janine looked at him in surprise.
"You're staying with Billy?"
Alex smiled thinly.
"Yes. There was an accident. My house was completely destroyed."
Janine's face turned white, and her mouth gaped.
"That's horrible! When?"
"This morning."
Janine turned to me.
"Billy, did you know about this? And you didn't tell me?"
She turned back to Alex.
"I'm so sorry! Was it gas?"
Alex shrugged.
"Oh I'm so sorry! If you need anything, anything at all. I'm here for you, we're all here."
"I'm staying with Billy at the moment."
"Well, that's good. He needs you, really. Do you know he's been drinking? You'll have to drive him home. Here."
They hugged, and she gave him my car keys.
"Anything you need, just say. Okay? You promise? Okay."
They hugged again.
Alex was tremendously drunk, but we lurched and stuttered our way home without incident. I showed Alex to one of my spare rooms, then changed and went to bed.
With any luck, tomorrow would be a better day.
