I cannot breathe; cold sweat, continuous eye lubrication blurring my vision…
An ice cold shiver has eaten its way through my limbs. I’m gasping for air like an asthma patient.
My entire past – an accumulation of dirt has just overflowed into my present; the morass no longer keeping the dark faculties at the bottom and the heat exhuming out of it is fighting against my body’s attempt to cool down.
I find myself lying down on Buddy’s bed. With shaking hands I pull my duvet down from my bed and cover my entire body.
Underneath the cave, the evacuation of heat continues to permeate my whole environment, unraveling a cursed energy that I now can taste from the bitterness on my sweaty upper lip. It’s getting damper, the air is tight.
It’s funny how in moments like these you feel most alive. But I have already told you. The art of struggle always gives you a reason to fight back.
The more I can keep this poisonous nimbus underneath, the better. I shall no longer inflict anguish on anyone with my precipitation. But like every cloud, I was made, made by little particles which were hoping to evolve and create. It’s nothing but biology, physics, chemistry. And yet, there are people who believe in the existence of spirits.
And like each creation, you believe there is good and bad. As for the definition of good and bad, there is none. It’s like there is no God, unless you believe. God exists in the heads of those who strongly believe that there is good. It’s the kind of autosuggestion that can make you feel better eventually – believing that there is a higher power that watches over you, just so you don’t feel alone.
Pathetic.
Ultimately it’s them who have created something in their heads. They are the producers of their own good. Is humanity, in the broader sense, merely a hoax? You doubt yourself, and instead of working on it, you find trust in yourself via your own God.
How different is a Christian from someone with an authoritative voice in his head? The voice I hear has temporarily stopped asking for blood. Ever since the transfusion, my needs are no longer excessive, but the dark faculties haven’t altered, if anything, I’ve become more aware of them and I’ve begun to view them with less fear.
Having analyzed my blood, I realized that mine and Scott’s are completely identical. Even if you have the same blood type, under the microscope, if you have a sharp eye for detail, you will see distinguishable movements, peculiar and deformed shapes of certain cells and whether or not they are loners or clingy bastards.
The cells, although unaware of good and bad, have a job to do. All my life I have related myself to them. You dedicate your life to a job that distracts you from everything around you. The only thing that distracts a cell is bacteria. The cell’s instinct will ultimately incite it to diminish the bacteria. If a cell kills, it will be for a good reason, which is to save you.
Overall, no matter if good or bad, there is always a creator – a creator that doesn’t always care about his product. And this is where the problem begins.

It wasn’t love…
During my recovery I had spent a lot of time thinking, redeveloping the negatives in my head. I understand now that the reason why I hadn’t tossed these negatives was, because it’s not possible. They are not physical like an appendix that you can remove and dispose of. Pictures of the past, however, in whichever form, will remain with you as a piece of psychic material until you bite the dust. Personally I find physical scars prettier, they are easy to grasp and also come in various shapes.
Stuart left me a sweet one on my waist area. It looks like a centipede.
I have never learnt to live with those images; I have spent years studying them, figuring out how it was best to fix them, filter them, because I do not and I cannot accept them. Once I have, then what ?
They say, in spite of reshaping the past and memories, your feelings will always tell you the truth, no matter how well you try to veil or modify them.
But…
I have no feelings. The only way to judge the image is by facial expressions, gestures and other body language.
Now as a successful heart surgeon at Mount Sinai I’ve begun to question the purpose of my life. Like the Brothers Grimm, I had, throughout my life, tried to embellish the truth with the idea of love – unrequited love that resembled a fairy tale without ever accepting the origin of these stories. The lucky ones, like Mr. Adkins for instance, to whom Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are unknown people, aren’t even aware that there is a so-called truth. If one denies the truth, he denies himself. The truth is not God, neither the world’s core, but it’s you alone; it’s the lines on your hands, each single hair on your body, the 60 000 miles of veins beneath your skin. The cells are the real people who walk down the roads of life, every minute, every second. You, as a person, are merely the product of those inner faculties – in other words: thoughts and feelings. We have never really come to an agreement on what these things are good for and yet the red sea is producing life out of us and communicates through pain, but what for will always remain a question….

I tighten the tourniquet around my arm. My median cubital vein is always visible which makes blood tests easy. What I like about needles and syringes are the sloping holes; they look menacing and remind me of daddy’s bamboo stick sword.
He used to keep it in the living room as a piece of decoration. One day when I was very young I drew the sword from its sheath, so I could survey the blade made of carbon steel. I remember feeling vehemently attracted to the tip of the sword and like Princess Helen I pricked my finger on the spindle, except that I didn’t die, instead I had an epiphany. I knew then what that sting in later years would feel like. It gave me a rough idea of what love might be. I was prepared for the pain as well as for the blood.

My next patient is Scott Griffith, a seventeen year old rock musician. I watch him kiss his girlfriend in the waiting room before he enters the treatment room with me. She is petite and has pink hair urging people to misjudge her on the spot.
Scott’s transfer papers indicate a deteriorating thyroid condition which needs further examination. An ultrasound scan diagnosed a lump as well as an excessive iodine production leading to an increase of thyroid hormones. The current state of the swelling already looks as severe as I have assumed.
“Ever since these goiters, I’ve been having sore eyes, as if they were bulging,” he says.
“It’s a symptom that occurs under very rare circumstances. I’ll give you drops.”
Toxic goiters have always repulsed me in a non-medical way; they remind me of fat people who don’t chew before they swallow, resulting the food to accumulate in their throat.
Scott, on the other hand, is a handsome fellow, however, despite his tired eyes suggesting chronic lethargy. He stares deliriously at my four panel curtain, as if a ghost was hiding behind it.
When wiping his neck with antiseptic solution, he makes no noticeable movement, not a little reaction to the cold liquid on his skin. I wonder whether numbing his skin with some anesthetic is necessary before the biopsy.
“Is this the result of not eating healthily?” he asks.
“Partly. But according to your profile this illness runs in your family. So it’s inevitable. You should try boosting your immune system with…”
“My immune system’s a bitch, y’know.”
“So is life,” I say.
I look him in the face, but he’s still glaring at the curtains with his adorable automaton eyes.
“It is very likely that your immune system has turned against your thyroid’s function, Mr. Griffith, and this stimulates the antibodies in your gland to a more enhanced activity resulting overkill.”
“A shame that antibodies can’t think, eh?” he says. “Driven by instinct.”
I prepare the syringe for the aspiration biopsy.
“Ironically it is me who produces these proteins, right? I am all those assiduous cells, but the cells aren’t me…”
Never have I encountered a like-minded patient who also believes cells as protective patriots in our bodies, fighting antigens – like fathers protecting daughters, keeping them from harmful intruders.
Now he glances at me in a very familiar way, as if we were related. Then he looks at the fine thin needle. He slowly curls his hand around mine which is holding the needle firmly.
“I used to be a hard-working cell, Dr. Parker.”
“I’m sure you still are.”
He slowly shakes his head; his lips are trembling as though looking for the right words.
“You don’t understand. I’m not referring to this life,” he says.
While shooting me a serious look, his grasp around my hand becomes firm. It almost feels like a proper embrace.
“I used to be a part of you,” he mutters.
“You what?”
“I used to be a cell in your body when you were little.”
I guess it’s not every day that you meet a former warrior that had once swum through your veins. However, his notion of karma-reading kind of overshadows my own set of principles and beliefs. Have I missed out on something during meditation?
“And during that particular incident,” he says, “you bled me out.”
I let go of the needle.
“I remember I was gazing up at the grass while resting on dark ploughed earth,” he continues, “I felt very cold. Then the earth sucked me in…my new purpose was to fertilize a daisy by offering my life.”
Before I realize it, I feel the first tear drawing a line down my cheek, and I don’t usually cry to poetry. I never cry.
“Did you write a song about this?” I ask.

It’s early in the morning and I watch how the nurses set up the operating theater while a few students gather at the back of the room. During the microscopic examination, I discerned that Scott’s cells were no longer following their regulatory mechanism. On the micrograph the specimen looked like fluid cyst, but the hypothetical diagnosis was follicular neoplasm – possible cancer due to the tissues’ continuous growth. To identify the illness I will remove half of the affected gland for further examination.
I watch Scott’s girlfriend hold his hand in tears while the ward nurse wheels him towards the operating theater. It must be her first experience seeing a loved one being escorted into – what patients refer to as – the bloody chamber. But Scott’s scenario isn’t about life and death.
I inhibit the girl from entering the room with her restless nature.
“You seriously have to calm down. Everything will be all right.”
“I don’t like you,” she says.
I don’t know what to say.
“I know about you,” she continues, “Scott won’t stop talking about you.”
“I’m just here to perform a lobectomy, Miss.”
“Yeah, do what you have to! But don’t you dare touch his voice box!”
She knocks my arm with her shoulder as she walks past, heading down the hallway. I’m sure she wished our shoulders were the same height.
When walking through the anesthetic room to tell Howard I’m ready, Scott gives me a delicate smile.
The idea of me having authority over his thyroid’s hormonal function involving his body’s energy level explains Scott’s lady friend’s attitude.

I make a 3 inch incision along the mass above where the clavicle and sternum meet, and then watch the blood slowly ooze out and accumulate at the edge of the wound. When removing organs I tend to use the electrocautery to control heavy bleeding. So to Scott, these are living citizens in his body; inborn citizens with a right to remain in their homeland, in order to continue their vigorous work.
The scrub nurse applies a self-retaining retractor to hold my fine incision open and adds another to pull back the infrahyoid muscles, allowing me unconditional admittance into Scott’s mushy little kingdom. I wonder if the citizens believe in the hand of God. Will they pray to me and say: “Dr. Parker, please deliver us from evil?”
As I cut through the thyroid tissue, I hear a moan. I throw a quick glance at the nurse.
“Is anything wrong, Doctor?”
I look at the bright halogen lights above my head and at all surgical apparatuses around me.
It was a very sunny day in good old Connecticut. And there was blood on our lawn indeed. No need to remind me, Scott. I’m sorry I abandoned you.
“It’s nothing.”
After the removal of half of the tissue I see the laryngeal nerve behind the gland, and I just can’t refrain from grinning behind the mouth mask. The nerve originates as a limb of the vagus nerve, which ascends to one’s brain in the carotid sheath; the sheath that engulfs the neck’s vascular system – an escapist’s playground. The voice box reminds me of a newborn chick’s eye.
In fact, now I can hear Scott’s song.
“Innocence’s been taken during the sweet love that we are making…”
His mild sounding baritone voice reminds me of Depeche Mode. I wonder whether his pink haired lady friend has touched his every part, including hidden spots of his slim body. Does she think a voice box resembles a music box? How poetic. You have to embrace the physical.

-

Chapter 1,2,3

1

Laurie stood there alone in the middle of the cemetery for miscarried children. She left as soon as she saw a mourning couple entering that place. It reminded her of a short story she had written a long time ago which included mourning couple. She missed writing. But getting back to work by starting from scratch was not easy. The journey of a story is tricky. You draw a destination and a starting point on a map and then you begin to sketch out the trip.

In fact, once you’ve had a long break from writing, you’ll feel anxious about planning out that inner journey again. They say a talent doesn’t vanish; instead it gets buried in the basement and it will become darker if you ignore it. Her confidence to write fiction isn’t the same anymore. Whom does she write for other than herself?

Stephen King calls the person he writes for the “Ideal Reader”. Laurie knew where her I.R. had disappeared to, thus she started packing and took the next train to Lübeck.

As she knocked on I.R.’s door, she heard him say “come in.”

The door squeaked. She smelt solitude in the hotel room, intermingled with the scent of dusty roses.

“Hello” she murmured.

I.R. was sitting by his desk, scribbling something onto paper. He still looked beautiful as ever, but the sense of loneliness floating in that room made him appear distant.

“I knew you’d come back crawling one day” he said.

“I am not crawling.”

“You would, though.”

She smiled. She knew that despite her honesty toward the entire world, he was the only one to ever hear everything from her, even the meanest and most despicable thoughts.

Awkward silence hung in the air, making the room appear even bigger than it already was.

“You know things haven’t been easy for me,” she sighed.

“I offered you help, but you needed some space, so I granted you that.”

He carried on scribbling words down.

“They detected water on the baby’s brain. He was sick,” she said.

She noticed a pile of paper next to him on the desk.

“What are those?” she asked.

I.R. looked at her and smiled for the first time since her arrival.

“Well” he began, “these are ideas still locked up in the back of your head.”

“Locked up?”

“Yeah, with me inside.”

The moment she approached him, he stopped writing after a nervous flinch. It felt like there was a shield between them, separating two delicate worlds that weren’t meant to fuse with each other.

“Don’t” he said.

“How can I open the door?” I asked.

“You can’t.”

There were traces of fear and desperation spread on his face, followed by an insecure smile.

“Only I can,” he said.

He turned back to his writing, as though she wasn’t there. She stood there in despair, unable to approach him, unable to put her hand on his shoulder.

She remembered they first met when they were eleven and how they had been inseparable since. Now was the first time ever she felt that the connection had been cut off. Only trust would let confidence and determination re-emerge – hard work and consolidated teamwork would rebuild that broken connection.

“You’ve just read what King wrote. Sort out your tool box now and get started.”

Now her heart began to fill with hope.

“So you’re still my…?”

He gestured at the pile of paper on his desk and started to laugh.

“Well” he said, “first revitalize your language, sort out your grammar and work on your style. They are appalling. Your stories need a hell of a lot of polishing and you know it. I can’t open the door for you if you don’t start putting your shoulder to the wheel.”

There was a long pause between them again. Though, this time the silence had dissolved the tension.

“Will you forgive me?” she asked.

He laughed. “You are writing this now. You’re gonna make me forgive you anyway! Have I got a choice? But honestly…” he paused and then looked at her in earnest. “Don’t you know me at all?”

2

I opened my eyes. The blurry tartan patterns were dissolving in the air. How weird to see the patterns during daylight instead in darkness or semi-darkness. I must have had a bad dream, but I could not remember. My neck felt sore as I arose from the bed which was not mine. I hoped I didn’t do anything unreasonable, but then on the other hand I didn’t feel hung-over.

There was a man sitting nearby the window with the blinding sunlight in his face. As he tilted his head, his glasses threw the reflection of the sunlight right at me like high-powered laser beams.

“I’m sorry” he said and took off his glasses.

“Who are you?” I asked and started looking around this familiar place. It was a small bedroom resembling that of a student’s. I smelt a rose-like scent and wondered whether there was a cherry tree outside his window.

He lowered his head almost in disappointment, but then a smile appeared and he put a book down on the table. I recognised my own notebook.

“You’ve been reading my notebook?”

“Secrets are no crime” he said. “Well, not in this case anyway.”

“Who are you? And where the hell am I?”

His face expressed disappointment again making me feel bad for shouting. I touched my chest, noticing that I was wearing no bra underneath that cosy jumper. I glanced over at the radiator where my clothes were drying.

“Good to see how quickly you’ve recovered. Out of date medicine seems to work!”

“Why, what happened?” I asked. My throat was dry and my neck sore, or it was the sunlight piercing through my brain.

“You had a high temperature when I found you in the rain last night.”

“You found me? Where?” I asked.

“There.” He simply pointed out of the window without further explanations. Instead of asking any more questions, I tried to remember what had happened. My mind was blurry. I looked at the little night table on my left and noticed a pack of suppositories next to some papers.

“You…”

“Out of date medicine does work” he said with a smile.

He stepped away from the light and came closer, his hands deep in his jeans trousers.  I stared at him for as long as my eyes could bear without blinking. His dark hair and bright eyes bore a great resemblance to someone that I had once known, not to mention, loved. The scent of roses patently reminded me of it.

I got out of bed to get my notebook. “What else do you know about me?”

“Everything.”

The way he said it didn’t sound ominous, but rather comforting. I pressed my notebook tightly against my chest as he slowly stepped towards me. I took a step back.

“I understand your sentiments. Sorry.” He retreated to the bed, sat down and ran his hand through his hair. He stroked the stack of paper which was on the night table.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

He chuckled while shrugging his shoulders like an innocent defendant.  “Call me Ian.”

“Where did you find me?”

He again pointed swiftly at the window. “There.”

As I moved towards the window, I found it to be a bright painting illustrating dunes and I recognised the sea and parts of a beach. There was a big cigar burn hole through which the sunlight was seeping through.

“I’m glad you’re writing about me again” he said.

“I’m writing about you?”

“Why are you here then?”

“I don’t know.”

As I was sitting on the toilet I realised that I had woken up in a hotel room rather than a student’s room. There was a sign saying “Please place towel on the floor if you wish to have a new one”.

The shower head had a dual system allowing the guest to choose from having either a full drench or a warm light sprinkle, rain-like effect. As the water drizzled onto my face, I began to picture myself running in the rain the night before. Tears had disappeared in the rain while I was sprinting down the beach, listening to the waves that looked like dark claws or the mouth of an octopus. Imagine the soapy foam at the shore as a mouthpart of the moving shapes of darkness. The lights behind the railings were dim and shaky and reminded me of a scene where a girl sits at a counter in a diner with a latte. We’re outside in the rain looking at her through the window pane. She props her chin with a hand while staring obliviously into nothing, whereas the boy next to her longingly breathes in the scent of her hair.

Like a cast away I fell unconscious on a small sand dune, a low-lying area vegetated with plants usually catching windblown sands. That night they caught me.

For a final rinse off I switched back to full heavy rain. When I got out of the bathroom I saw Ian sitting at a desk, typing. It looked familiar. I approached the window again, but this time I saw real dunes, the real sea and a real beach.

“Am I right, you came here to see me?” Ian asked, without giving me one single glance. Although convinced that it was a familiar situation, I couldn’t quite capture the meaning of it.

“I don’t know.”

“You know more than you think, but as usual your mind is opaque and the back of your head is locked…” He took a deep breath. “So you came to see me.”

“Why did I come to see you?”

He turned around, but as soon as his eyes caught me wrapped in a towel, he was speechless. I grabbed my clothes from the radiator and put on my underwear almost instantly. I grabbed the rest of my clothes which smelt fresh and clean.

“Wait, did you wash my clothes?” I asked.

“Yes, why?”

“Are you a nanny or something?”

Immediately he pointed at the door, the finger now looking firmer and angry. “Out! And get your story finished for God’s sake!”

I didn’t dare to ask any further questions, but the next thing I knew was that he had pushed me outside and slammed the door shut behind me. I hadn’t even finished dressing properly. There was a cleaning lady coming up my way with a cleaning trolley full of dirty towels.

“Hey!” I shouted and knocked against the door with my palm until it hurt. “My notebook and my money!”

Ian opened the door to hand me the notebook with a 20-Euro note on top of it. He had shut the door again before I could even look him in the face.

“Where’s my wallet?”

“You lost it” he mumbled through the fine mahogany.

The cleaning lady was still there, staring.

“It’s not what you think it is” I said.

The breakfast at the hotel canteen tasted plain. My favourite type of rolls is the sunflower seed roll which I always have with slices of turkey, cheese and tomato. I couldn’t taste the actual richness of the texture, not to mention the saltiness of the turkey. Other people seemed to be enjoying their breakfast tremendously.

After I had finished I walked over to the catering man to enquire about the food that tasted like paper. His broad smile looked like it was a big part of him, some kind of a pre-studied habit that he applied in order to get paid.

“Excuse me” I said to him, but he didn’t react; his smile was still solid like the hyperreality of a wax figure. I pushed his shoulder lightly after which he fell over like an imbecile. He was a life size standing card board with an image printed on the front. All the guests in the dining room had disappeared, too. All they had left me with were pale, stiff mannequins looking like unhatched human cocoons.

I pressed my notebook hard against my chest and left the hotel as fast as I could.

I walked towards the dunes and the beach, enjoying the fresh air on a midsummer morning. I could smell the brackish water of the Baltic Sea – similar to ocean water really. Then all of a sudden the air was invaded by the strong odour of turpentine and oil paints. I soon discovered an artist standing in front of the railing that separated the beach from the public footpath. From the back I noticed his extraordinary big head. His elegant arm movements reflected the delicacy of his fine brush strokes. I carefully peered over his shoulder and saw that he had painted the dunes in deep purple colours, the sand was pale orange and the sea was green.

As the artist turned around, I saw that his head wasn’t just big, but deformed and filled with water. His eyes were gazing downward; his twisted mouth indicated a sense of anxiety and vulnerability. The idea of having water on my brain made me feel like drowning or shedding tears. I immediately swallowed the lump in my throat.

He then vomited on his feet followed by a nasty convulsion that made him fall on his knees. I kneeled down to hold him, to prop his heavy head which looked like it was about to spurt out water. He raised his trembling hand and pointed at his painting which had fused with the real scenery. I watched the vigorous waves moving in the square frame.

“Hang in there, hang in there!” I said. The man’s eyes had turned white.

He mumbled something I couldn’t understand. I laid his head down carefully and started to look in his painting bag where I finally found his lorazepam injection. I quickly pushed the needle in his thigh, and then waited for him to gradually relax.

Thirty minutes later he regained consciousness on my lap and I realised that I’d been crying. He shied away from me as though disliking human touch. He started to pack up his painting utensils, squeezed them all in his bag and pulled the zip.

Leaving me alone with his painting, he began to walk away almost instantly.  He looked back at me once, uttering through his lips: “Dshu neet to find ththe mishing reel.”

He pointed again at the painting.

I took it and climbed over the railing to the beach. It felt like I had just climbed out through Ian’s window. I walked a mile down the coast, marvelling at the beautiful horizon where Uranus was talking with Poseidon. I rested on the sand to watch lost bumble-bees crawling into nowhere and flat stones being washed ashore. The salty sea air felt good in my lungs.

About thirty yards away I saw that a big man was approaching me. I could tell that his eyes were fixed on me rather than the beach. Fifteen yards – I realised he was wearing a red suit with tartan patterns and I also recognised a smile at the corner of his mouth. The tartan patterns hurt my eyes and made me delirious for a while.

“It’s nice to finally meet you” he said.

“Who are you?”

“I’m Tautou – the film maker.”

He sat down next to me and lit a cigar. His voice was clear; it was soothing to finally hear someone in this town speak lucidly, apart from Ian.

“I help you to visualise your stories. “

“My stories?”

“Yes, I enhance the vividness for you. Let me show you something.”

He opened his bag and showed me his camcorder.

“I copied my latest short film onto this.”

Fade in. A woman travelled to find a man she knew in order to seek help. They argued a lot; mainly about her being clingy and bad tempered. One evening they went to a diner to find shelter from the rain. There he told her that they should stop spending so much time together after which she got upset and ran outside. She bumped into a man in red who placed his hand on her forehead. As he withdrew it, she began to run toward the beach where she lost consciousness on a dune.

The scene with the artist was laid parallel to the scenes of her previous miscarriage, depicting the death of her baby that suffered from hydrocephalus.

After that Tautou paused it for a while and placed his hand on my forehead.

Then we carry on watching in silence until the film indicates a missing reel. Afterwards it jumps straight to the end where the woman enters her car and drives off, whereas the man grabs for the ballpoint pen behind his ear and starts playing with it by pressing the spring quickly forward and back. He walks back into the hotel. Fade out.

“Why did you show me this?” I ask.

“I need your help.”

“What for?”

“You need to complete this story.”

I stare at the artist’s painting and hold it up against the sky, blocking the sun. Tautou, who is smoking his third, takes the painting and presses the end of his cigar against it until a big hole is visible. The sunlight is seeping through the painting now. I look at him in amazement.

“What did you come here for?” he asks.

“I have to go.”

I walk further down the coast until I notice dark clouds approaching the beach. I feel a sudden detachment from this place which incites me to think about Tautou’s question or what I.R. said this morning.

Slightly soaked through I reach the diner. Last night we had an argument in here resulting me to choose a rinse off by running through the heavy rain. It feels like last night hasn’t yet ended and that I’ve run back to the diner to apologise. I take a seat at the counter, grab for some tissues to dry my face and neck.

“A large latte, please” I say to the owner who smiles a familiar smile. He looks for something under the counter and then puts my wallet on the table. I open my wallet and see the picture of my ID with my real name written underneath.

My latte must have cooled down, but I feel no desire to drink it. I prop my chin with one hand while staring holes into the wall. I listen to people’s loud conversations until I only hear the echo of the words spoken. As if the noise somehow gets filtered through a long tube. All I can clearly hear is the rain outside. Waiters and waitresses dash by in a blur – fast and sometimes in slow motion. I don’t blink and suddenly see flickering distortions of the beach on the wall. Tautou is probably watching me from outside through a lens like a desperate stalker. I imagine the rain flowing across the lens.

I smell the scent of roses and feel warm breath tickling my ear. Immediately I turn to the side where I.R. grins at me with this “gotcha”-look in his eyes.

“I knew you’d be here” he says.

“Is it because I’ve told you?”

He shrugs his shoulders and folds his arms before placing them on the table.

“We’re great partners, don’t you think? I’m the architect while you’re the engineer and craftswoman.”

“And it will always be this way” I say quietly.

“Yes.”

He props his arms with his elbows and both of his hands meet – they clasp and open. He won’t look at me.

“But,” he continues, “you don’t belong here.”

I begin to draw circles on the table with my finger. The latte must be cold now. Warmth is not something that you can fathom for as long as you’d like, but you don’t want to consume it either, because it’s beautiful the way it is. Warmth, however, is a transitory degree of heat. Everything will run out of energy one day; heat cools down, water runs dry.

“I’ve had a really good time” he says, “it’s good to see you in writing mode. I like the way you get your hand dirty.”

It is now that I notice ink smeared all over the fingers of my right hand. I’ve been painting real circles on the table. I immediately cover up that spot with some tissues. I.R. holds my inked hand and carefully touches the calluses on my middle finger.

“You should at least keep your finger nails clean.”

I burst out laughing. He laughs, too.

“Have you finally let go of the water?” he asks.

“The water on the brain?”

“He is doing fine here.”

I look I.R. in the eyes and recognise the trust which I thought I had lost.

“I think I should go back” I say.

Both of his hands are now lying flat on the table, as if assuring me and him that he is real.

“Thank you for completing this” he says.

The noises in the background have faded and I wonder what has happened. I turn around to the crowd and see nothing but naked mannequins, positioned in a way that they appeared to be kissing or hugging.

“Knock it off” he says while shaking his head with a choking giggle.

“I really should get going.”

“I think so, too” he agrees.

“So you’ll keep the door open for me?”

“Only if you promise to get your hand dirty on a regular basis.”

“Deal. I have your window anyway.”

Paula Cheung, 2010 – 2011

In dedication to King’s On Writing

-

Additional note:

Fallen Angels – Dir. Wong Kar Wai (1995)

(life writing attempt)

I will tell you all my secrets, but I will lie about other things. A big fuck-you to all analysts already. Enjoy your time evaluating a contradictory stance that will bring you no further than where you are now. But it is the secrets that you want anyway.
First off I have to make you believe in fairy tales; fairy tales which you never believed in as a child. But you believed that hiding mother’s free range eggs underneath a blanket would give you dozens of baby chicks to look after. Though, the eggs never hatched and never did you bother opening the first box of your life.
It doesn’t open by itself.
The first fairy tale you believe in is self-awareness. I was fifteen when I discovered the values of honesty and what it meant to be me.
But life was going backwards. The future was a distant memory.

I remember Janine’s sixteenth birthday. I arrived at hers in the afternoon to help decorating the cellar. She had a huge party cellar. It was the place where I got extremely drunk on my seventeenth birthday; I won’t ever forget the power of peer pressure. Janine was now sixteen just like me.
“It looks gross when you and Daniel snog,” I said.
“Are you saying this because you haven’t had your first kiss, yet?”
I carried on putting beer bottles into the fridge. The louder the bottles bang against each other, the better.
“The fridge is overloaded. We need ice for tonight,” I said.
“We have snow outside, don’t we?”
The temperature outside was -1°C. Janine’s birthday was a day before the shortest day of the year – that was how I always remembered it. Her blond hair used to be longer and thicker in Year 10. Ever since Year 8 started, they had become thinner and looked like dirty blond.
I opened a bag of crisps.
“You should give Linus a chance,” she said.
I put the bag of crisps back on the table. The smell of cheese and onion made me ill. “And why do you think I should?”
“Come on, he only talks about you! I thought you like big brown eyes.”
I like green eyes.
The party started at eight. The cellar was filled by the time it was ten. Linus was trying his best to ignore me whereas I was trying to ignore everyone. The beer tasted bitter; it always had. It was them who liked my rosy cheeks and the way my eyes narrowed into slits. I left the half full bottle at the bar and grabbed my coat. I went up the stairs to the backyard where I lit myself a cigarette and sat on the bench nearby the half frozen pond.
I was nineteen when I smoked my first cigarette – three years ago.
I heard the cellar door open and close, leaving the drunken laughs and shouts behind. Footsteps were coming up the stairs.
“You must be crazy,” said Linus “it’s frigging cold out here.”
He sat down next to me with a smile.
“Are you not having fun?” I asked.
“I am. It seems you aren’t.”
I noticed that the shimmers were gone, although the moon was still clear.
“I’m tired.”
“Snap out of it. Have another beer or some Vodka.”
I looked at him, marvelling at his brown eyes. If only they were green. The cold was making him shake like aspen leaf.
“I just quit drinking.”
“You’re joking!”
“No, I’m not,” I said.
“Have you changed from a Punk to a fucking Straight Edge?”
Something inside me snapped. “Will you stop categorising me?”
“I’m just saying…”
“Saying what?”
“You’re only fun when drunk.”
I smiled and lit another cigarette. I looked at my watch and saw that the numbers were reversed. One o’clock. The moon was cool. I was watching the reflection of the water shimmering against the wooden fence. The movements signalled inconsistency and unpredictability, which were a sheer symptom of life’s mental instability.
“Do you remember me getting shitfaced on a glass of pure Korn on my seventeenth birthday?”
He laughs. “So you’re envisioning your own future in which you’re still getting drunk?”
“I’m jealous of you all” I said.
“Why?” he asked.
“You are all moving on so well.”
I finally grabbed for my black box which was lying under the bench. Linus was mumbling words that no longer had meanings to me. As I opened the box, I found myself in bed with both hands clasped.

I was praying.
“Please, dear God, stop making me feel this way. I even talk to you through my diary, can you not hear me? I asked you to speed time up, so I no longer have to face school, so I can be an adult and do what I want. I asked you to make Andy look at me and maybe ask me out. Are you not paying attention to me at all?”
I fell asleep with tears in my eyes.
As I woke up, I immediately wrote down the dream that I had. It was a fairy tale, except it was one about dreams that didn’t come true. A lesson well learnt and I no longer prayed after that. Something inside me had died, but hope outweighed that feeling of dissociation.
During break time in school I was reading The Misanthrope by Molière. Reading was a good change from just standing around in the schoolyard, watching other pupils play. Then I saw a large shadow looming over me and my book. My form teacher Mrs Kelmann was smiling at me.
“Don’t you think you’re a little too young to read this?” she asked.
“No.”
“I don’t think this is suitable for a Year 7 pupil.”
“But it rhymes so beautifully” I said.
She smiled and finally left me alone again. Mrs Kelman had caught me reading Sartre’s The Chips Are Down before – an almost unphilosophical piece. That one she enjoyed, too and didn’t tell me off for reading it, as it was simply a love story about unrequited love. The conclusion I drew from that story was that there were more important things than love. It helped me to understand that in reality I had no feelings for Andy at all.
I looked around me and saw that people were still playing the same games, as if they were a tape on repeat. I realised I was no longer walking on solid ground and that I needed to venture into something drastic. Maybe I should start preparing to become a secret agent, if not, an assassin. And they were still playing the same games.
At home my mother prepared some lunch for me.
“How was school?” she asked.
“Why do you always ask? What do you care?”
She looked angry, but she was a fairly patient person back then.
“I don’t want to hear that tone of yours again. That’s not the way to speak to your mother.”
I looked at the ceramic cup that I made for her when I was still in kindergarten. It said “Best mum”.
“You’re not the best mum in the world. There is no such thing” I said.
I didn’t touch my lunch. She went to the living room with hers and I saw her take a little bite into her sandwich. The peanut butter must have tasted really bad. She started sobbing.
My friend Katja came to pick me up after lunch time. She was a lively kind of girl who always attempted to lure me into coming outside which I did, although I had no desire to. I still had stories to write which I wanted to finish by midnight.
The sun was shining, so we went for some ice cream. I’d forgotten my sun glasses and therefore hated her looking at my squinting eyes, as if mine weren’t already small enough.
“I don’t understand why you do your homework straight after school” she said.
“What else is there to do?”
“I don’t know! Why not take your dog for a walk or watch Sailor Moon?”
I was swallowing my ice cream so quickly that I got a brain freeze. The pain felt sensational. Katja looked at me in disgust.
“You eat like a monster” she said. I must have robbed her appetite as she was now playing with her ice rather than eating it. I would finish hers if she offered.
“Andy kissed me” she said after which I clenched a fist. She continued “We’ve done petting as well.”
I spooned more ice cream into my mouth and then swallowed everything at once. The sluggish way the ice cream slid down my oesophagus made my entire body freeze. For a moment I felt stiff before the head ache occurred.
“Will you stop it?” She sounded more disgusted than before.
I pressed my tongue hard against the roof of my mouth to warm up. I was full.
“Katja, I lost my virginity at the age of nineteen!”
“Fucking hell, you’re insane!”
She stood up and left me there on my own at the ice cream parlour which was full of elderly couples staring at me as if I was an imbecile. My bloated belly still wanted more, so I started spooning Katja’s half full bowl.  There was a medium-sized black box on her seat. In order to quickly have it done with, I grabbed for it and opened it.
I saw myself lying on the sofa in the living room with my hand placed underneath my skirt. I was only about four feet tall.

I was touching myself. In the background I could hear some Disney cartoon music. It was early in the morning and I was sighing, sighing as my hands moved along my little tummy and undeveloped breasts. I must have sighed loudly, as I heard my father saying: “What are you doing!”
He was standing by the door, angry. I immediately stood up but didn’t know what to say. On the screen I saw that Goofy running away from an elephant.
This was another fairy tale; a fairy tale about self-discovery on the sexual plane as well as learning that my current entity was without foundation.
I got ready for school without having had breakfast. I hardly ever had breakfast. Usually I’d wait till school finished and would have some lunch at home. Ever since attending Primary School, I’d been feeling less hungry and less excited about life.
The girls tried to talk with me and I wanted to make friends with them, but something inside me was hindering me in my efforts to utter any word to them.
“Can you not speak?” a girl asked me and stared at my eyes.
I wanted to play with them so badly. Soon it was too late. They had lost interest.
I looked around me in the schoolyard and realised that I wasn’t the only one on my own. There was an Egyptian boy playing alone in the sand, a Russian girl from the parallel glass walking around alone, and there was me. Some kids laughed at me whilst singing the offensive bully song against Chinese people. They also placed their forefingers at the corners of their eyes and pulled back so that their eyes narrowed heavily into slits. Twelve to thirteen years of school. It’ll be over soon.
During the art class I needed the loo very badly. I wanted to just leave the classroom, but I knew Mrs Cube would tell me off. I walked over to her to the front desk and hoped she could read my mind.
“What’s the matter, my dear?”
I wanted her to read my mind. I wanted her to send me outside. I eyed at the door, but she didn’t notice and told me to carry on painting my rainforest before the lesson finished. I sat back down, unable to concentrate. I heard water flowing everywhere. It was raining outside and kids were rinsing their watercolour boxes or washing their hands. A boy was whistling. Whistles always have a huge effect on my bladder; I could feel my bladder vibrate along with his whistles. That was it. I couldn’t hold it any longer. I got a tissue out of my pocket, placed it between my little legs and then I released.
Here I failed Bukowski’s endurance test which I knew I would never forget.
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune…
I opened the next black box, but before I could figure out the content I heard several shouts; shouts from my distant memory – back when I was twenty, nineteen, seventeen…I heard voices arguing about the moral of the story.
But in reality there is none. I’m just glad that the eggs never hatched. I’m thinking of the ladybirds that I used to catch and keep in glass jars. I used to catch tadpoles as well. I never bothered piercing holes through the lids, though. I’m glad the eggs never hatched.

(Writing exercise from Feb 16, unedited)

The day I lost my shadow was the first day of spring. I remember reading A moveable feast and I believed that all the fruit trees in bud symbolized birth and therefore a new beginning. But it also meant that nothing would ever be the same again.
The day he vanished or let’s say – I vanished; he remained on that lonely territory whereas I had to leave. I’d already done some reality checks by pinching myself, looking at my digital watch – the numbers in order. My mirror image wasn’t distorted anymore and the ground was solid – I could see my feet and converse shoes. And the sky above the port was not the colour of television tuned to a dead channel. Sorry Mr Gibson.
After they had released me from their care, I returned to college. No one knew where I had been. I told them my guinea-pig had died; therefore I had spent the last whole month mourning. I’m not good at lying. Also I was told to quit reading Science Fiction, comics and anything about Greek Mythology, because they were fucking up my head and perception. Well, so they said. And apparently they aren’t meant for girls anyway. I didn’t realise that once I stopped reading those, I’d lose him as well. It was reading that kept him alive.
Hemingway’s perception is more raw and down-to-earth. It was not necessarily what I was looking for. I missed the androids and the virtual reality.
It felt like I had been away for a few years. But the campus was still the same. People didn’t seem to remember me. People I knew completely blanked me, even when I said hello. I didn’t know what I had done to trigger all those negative impulses within everyone. I was like a ghost in class, a phantom that was haunting them all. The depression extended through the unpleasant effects that reality was initiating. I didn’t know where exactly I was going anymore. Nevertheless I remained conscious and positive. I started to read what I was recommended and it happened to be A moveable feast which I had started to read on the first day of spring. I went to the campus’s courtyard and lit myself a cigarette. There was one quote that struck me:
“When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”
It was indeed people that were spoiling my days, making me feel uncomfortable by discouraging me while I was reluctantly attempting to fit in again. In the courtyard I heard boys and girls. I moved into the cool shade where the sun wouldn’t find me. That was when I saw him entering the courtyard. He was dressed like a teacher and wore glasses. He was supposed to be wearing a dystopian style leather jacket and sunglasses. Was it really him? Did he escape that lonely territory as well?
He sat down on a bench with a cup of coffee and the daily newspaper. I couldn’t concentrate any further on Hemingway. I needed something more drastic and imaginative – action and acrobatic movements. He should have seen me in the shades by then – I was the only one sitting on the ground, reading something that was not a magazine. I watched every little movement of his – the delicate way he turned the page, tilted his glasses or sipped at his coffee. Ten minutes had passed and he still hadn’t noticed me.
Lastly I was thinking of walking over to say hello or simply walk past him noticeably, so that he’d at least throw one single glance at me; remember me. Whilst still sitting on the ground, I suddenly felt petrified. It was the fear of the unknown; unknown and yet still so familiar. There was that uncanny resemblance of an intimacy that I had once known. I was dying to find out, dying to learn more. The shades of the trees and benches mirrored my fear and incomprehension clearly.
I stood up and decided to walk past him. But he didn’t even notice me then. I said nothing, as I didn’t want to interrupt his flow of mind of which I was not part of.
On my way across the courtyard I felt like I had lost something; something valuable and irreplaceable. That was when I noticed that my body cast no shadow. As I turned back, I saw that my shadow was with him. It looked like it was waving at me, gesturing that I should come back at once.
Suddenly all the shadows in the courtyard began to loom over me like a thick dark cloud. The trees, the benches… – they all wanted me to go back. And I did. As I went back to fetch my shadow, I noticed him smiling at me. Something I believed to be a distant memory had now come back with such intensity that I reached out to touch him. But like a ghost he slowly floated away with bits and bits of him disappearing until there was nothing but air. Like a hynpnagogic experience after waking from a dream, except, that was no dream. It was me attempting to cling to my reality, similar to Oliphant’s Library Window. He was there.
After all there is no fixed reality, as we all have a different perception of it.

“I do not know how much of my writing is true, or which parts (if any) are true. This is a potentially lethal situation. We have fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur. And in all probability it is not deliberate. In fact, that is part of the problem. You cannot legislate an author into correctly labelling his product. You cannot compel him to declare what part is true and what isn’t if he himself does not know.” – Philip K. Dick

“…whatever you write down it’s not the truth, it’s just a story. Stories are all we’re ever left with in our head or on paper.”  – Eric Sanderson (‘The Raw Shark Texts’ by Steven Hall)

As I am writing this, my throat is dry, my fingers are trembling and I feel like I have rewound back to the day when I had spent six hours cleaning and lubricating my eyes.

The final straw was when Jay had decided that GCSE girls smelt better than I. Even now I’m having lots of arguments with Father Time about the approaching season which is dying to visit me. They say spring stands for a new beginning and therefore it’s time to leave it all behind.

But I’m not ready for spring, yet.

Our group therapist, Mr. Johnson, is calling me. I’m afraid I have to switch to the mental notebook, if you don’t mind.

“Laurie, I hope you are making useful notes on today’s session!”

“Yessir,” I say and this very moment Hendrik enters the class and apologises for being late. As usual the air goes out when he comes in. It’s not the first time that he is sitting behind me. Each time I just wait for those Arctic eyes to freeze me from behind, so I’m released from all this misery. Anger has become a clot in my mentality, except that I don’t initiate fights or torture animals – I write. Excessively.

But I hate writing. I hate it from the bottom of my heart. Writing leads you towards a rubbish dump of a thousand wasted days. The moment I put the pen down another year has passed. I forget how to speak. I forget how sex works. And the worst of all, I grab the pen again, as I don’t know what else to do.

I don’t know if Hendrik, the Swede, is the Knight of Hope. If he doesn’t save me, no one will. He doesn’t talk much in class and the only things we know is that he hates humanity and he writes poetry to endure absurdity.

The back of my head is itchy and my heart is racing. Can he hear my heartbeat?

“It’s all about expressing ourselves, isn’t it?” Mr Johnson starts. “The rush of anger that comes along with the desire for self-expression is often pointless. So, who would like to share a positive experience today?”

Last week no one’s experience was anywhere near positive. This is the third week. I am the only female in this group of thirteen people and the only student. Most of the men are here because they can’t handle their wives. The ages vary from 16-66. The 16 year old kid is Stephen Jenkins, Sixth-former pupil learning from Sid Vicious’s notion ‘To provoke a reaction is better than to react to provocation.’ He likes nobody.

Mr Voglein is the oldest and most easily aggravated one. If there is a trace of irritation, such as having forgotten his reading glasses, he will find reason to fuel this irritation by either throwing papers into the air or pushing the table over. If I were him I’d have killed myself before ever getting Alzheimer’s. Thanks to him his wife gets panic attacks.

“Anyone?” Mr Johnson looks anxious. “Come on, people.”

He lowers his head in resignation and starts scratching it.

I hesitantly raise my hand and a sudden smile appears on his face.  “Ah, Laurie, thank you! Please proceed.”

All eyes are fixed on me and the ones behind me are poking me.

“Well, I’m not sure if you can call it progress, but I wrote a letter.”

“Wonderful! This also reminds me of last week’s homework!”

Last week I inspired him to have everyone keep a diary aiming to help them analyse their anger and to retrace its roots.

If only they knew that I keep a diary hourly, even if it’s just one sentence.

“I’ve been keeping a diary,” says Mr Kirkpatrick, a lonely alcoholic. I tell him to go first.

“What do ye wanna hear? The bright stuff?”

“Bright, please,” Mr Johnson begs.

Mr Kirkpatrick clears his throat. “Saturday, March 2, Alone again. The days have become repetitive. One beer in the morning, two in the afternoon and even more at Frankie’s Bar in the evening. I figured that all this serves as a warm-up for my fight with Carl outside the bar – the only thing I look forward to nowadays. The days may continue, but please, God let me keep this daily fight. It’s the only thing that keeps me alive…”

That is the most beautiful thing I’ve heard today. There is silence and I notice certain faces looking puzzled, as if not sure what conclusions to draw from that.

“That’s very poetic, Miles,” says Mr Johnson. “But I think you’re not quite there yet. Remember we were talking about reaching the core of the anger. ”

“Yes, I know and I think I’m getting there. I appreciate the diary idea.”

I may have extended his miserable life. I feel embarrassed.

“What’s this?” Mr Voglein blurts out. “A bloody poetry class?”

“Well, let’s see what you’ve got then, Mr Voglein” says Mr Johnson.

“I ain’t got my reading glasses, dammit!”

He is the only person in the group that fills the room with more negative energy than already is palpable. For the love of Cronos, I can sense almost all these suckers’ auras. The terrible electric cloud that Mr Voglein spreads can easily be detected from the other corner of the room. Only Mr Johnson’s electric signals are in synch.

The only way for me to sustain harmony is to fictionalise everything that I can’t mentally and physically obtain. What’s this blank page for otherwise?

“I’m sorry, I forgot.” Mr Johnson rubs his face, but his eyes brighten up as he looks at me. “Laurie, how about reading your letter?”

“Read?” I suddenly feel uneasy.

He nods with an encouraging smile. I think I can feel Hendrik’s breath stroking my neck. I hope he can’t hear my heartbeat.

I take a deep breath: “Dear Nothing, like every year this particular low point has reached the surface again. I can’t bury something that’s undead. How long can I keep my head above water? The monster of the past is still ever-lurking in my nightmares in which I’d rather chop my hand off than have it hold me. In my dreams I am scared and when I’m awake I feel rage…” I can’t carry on reading.

“I’m sorry. I do not wish to continue.”

“Why not?” Mr Johnson asks.

“I think me fantasising about fist fights and manslaughter is not appropriate.”

People laugh, except Mr Johnson. I feel bad for having disappointed him.

At the end of the session, Mr Johnson gives me an empathetic smile suggesting something fatherly.

“I’m sorry, Mr Johnson.”

“What for?” he laughs.  “Keep up the good work.”

I want to ask him what good work, but I can’t.

As I approach the exit, I see Hendrik lighting a cigarette outside. He sees me and instantly smiles. I take a deep breath. The alternative world can only be found on a blank page on which I build a kingdom; a kingdom over which I rule.

All the trees are in bud already. Father Time has been speeding time up without me realising it. Every time I blink, he seizes his chance to hit the accelerator. I can see him race on the rings of Saturn.

Hendrik offers me a fag. Our faces are close as he lights it for me. Menthol – my favourite.

“There is no point in sharing your anger, you know,” he says.

“Why do you think I interrupted myself?”

We walk through the park. It’s almost dinner time. My favourite time of the day is twilight or at five in the morning (especially during autumn). That’s the sort of darkness that smells best – cold particles mixed with wet leaves.

The sweet smell of spring symbolises a new beginning for which I am not yet ready.

“Can I ask you something?” Hendrik says.

“Sure.”

“Are you here to help or to get help?”

There’s something very attractive about his Swedish accent which sounds slightly American at the same time. Many foreigners, me included, have an American accent, because the first thing European school kids learn about the English language is to emphasise the ‘R’ the way they do in pop songs or Hollywood movies.

“Well, if I can help others – that’s fine by me.”

“Bullshit. Come on, why are you really in the group?”

My pace decelerates, so that I am a few steps behind now. He stops walking and looks at me.

“All right, why are you there?” I ask.

“Same reason as you, except that I’m not in self-denial.”

“Right. What makes you think you know me?”

He flicks his cigarette away and starts walking. “Fancy a drink?” he asks.

As we reach the end of the park, we enter a bar nearby. The good thing is it’s in the middle of the week, which means no juvenile delinquents with fake IDs.

“What would you like?”

“Tap water, please,” I say and he raises an eyebrow.

“I think you need something stronger…”

“Well, tough, I don’t do alcohol.”

He chuckles as he gets his wallet out. “I’m not surprised then…” he mumbles to himself.

I get my notebook out and start to scribble.

“Are you writing what a dick I am?”

I smile as I’m writing this. The blank page is looking to get screwed. If only he knew how he is making me feel right now. Talking to him reminds me of the conversations I have with you.

The barmaid comes to take his order.

“Can I have a Daiquiri please? And a Strawberry Surprise for the lady, alcohol free.”

I instantly put my pen down. Sometimes fiction takes over and you forget you have the upper hand.

“I have this feeling that you look cute when drinking that stuff,” he says.

I roll my eyes in shame. Then he places his lips on my ear and whispers “I can feel your heat, Laurie. It keeps me warm in class, but I think you’re doing yourself no good.”

He turns back to the barmaid who hands him his change. No matter how captivating Hendrik’s aura is, I’m unable to break through his shell.

“I can’t help believing that your naked soul is just as hot” I say with such confidence that even he is surprised.

The barmaid approaches us with our drinks; mine is bright pink decorated with fancy picks, a slice of pineapple and a cherry. His Daiquiri looks just as feminine as mine – a red drink with strawberries attached to the glass.

“I know it looks girly and I wouldn’t order it if you weren’t here. But it tastes so good!”

We both raise our glasses.

“Skål!”

“Prost!”

He watches me suck at the straw and I can’t help feeling like a kid drinking a milkshake.  The Strawberry Surprise is the most delicious drink I’ve ever had. It reminds me of Johannes Brahms’s last words before his death: “Ah that tastes nice. Thank you.”

The day I die is the day I am unable to finish a written sentence. The Olympians will outweigh the Titans and my words will be obsolete.

Hendrik’s still looking at me, now grinning.

He says “I know what it looks like beneath your surface. And sorry, you don’t look cute.”

His compliments are very ambivalent, but it’s not the first time that I experience a man sending out mixed signals. It’s always best not to react to them. Whatever reaction I show, he’ll triumph on the inside.

“Would you show me some of your poetry?” I ask.

“Ha, no.”

My notebook’s still on the table and I carefully move it toward him. He looks at me like he can’t believe his eyes.

“In return I’ll let you find out whether you’re a dick.”

The astonishment in his eyes has turned into a pleasant smile indicating a slight trace of feeling honoured.

Finally he grabs deeply into his pocket and presents his small Moleskine notebook – half the size of mine.  He places it in front of me and says “Pick a random page. Just one page.”

I pick the page where he has placed his string bookmark.

“And I wonder how she touches herself

When the heinous heat in her blood rises

The delicate way it effervesces

If I could taste the wound and wistful wealth

Of her anger she has kept for so late

An effusive eruption

Furthermore

The molten lava – the suspicious core

Watching her straight back and tilting of head

Staring peeping holes through her soft body

She reads a letter of regretful hate”

For the love of Cronos! From the side of my eyes I see him observing me while I’m reading it for the third time.

“Are you done?”

I hand him back his notebook whereas I’m not asking for mine. Instead I finish drinking my sweet drink. Then I place the cherry into my mouth. I realise that our legs are touching and neither of us feel unfamiliar about it.

“Do you want another?” he asks.

I shake my head and slowly start rubbing my cocktail glass. Apparently when a guy sees that, he’ll go all funny inside.

“I think you do…” He calls the barmaid and orders another for me. She takes my empty cocktail glass away. I wonder whether he is Taurean. There is something about Taurus’s stubbornness that draws me to them.

I keep both of my hands busy with a piece of string and bits of paper from a beer mat.

“Do you ever feel alone?” I ask. “I mean really alone? It doesn’t matter how many people are around you or if you’ve just told your best friend how you feel. No one’s ever going to understand you the way you do, because they are not you. Even when lying in bed with someone…the moment you fall asleep you’re alone in your head. You’re alone in your dreams. What you see is what you wish was there.”

Deep in thought, he puts his notebook away into his pocket.

“What has he done to make you feel this way?”

After a long pause I say, “He gave me a rough idea of what love might be.”

My pink drink arrives and this time I eat the cherry first. He slowly moves my notebook toward me and then finishes his drink.

“So you think we all pretend we’re not alone?” he asks.

“How else do we fall in love?”

“So love’s an illusion?”

I suck at the straw while Hendrik is looking at me with nervous eyes. I wonder whether I look cute now or not. Evil would be another option.

“Please don’t take everything I say so seriously,” I say. “Don’t you ever look for alternative exits to reduce cognitive dissonance?”

Finally there is a smile. “You mean like the fox and the grapes?”

I answer with a smile less strong than his. I don’t feel like drinking up that cocktail anymore.

“I joined that group because I needed to see how much I am still in control. And I needed a confirmation of what’s still real.”

Do you see the beauty of fictionalisation? We all know the significance of expressing one’s feelings and only on paper you’ll realise that the beauty and accuracy are in synch; the words succinct and straight to the point.

Escapism is pathetic, but what would we do without it?

After our drinks, Hendrik and I go back to the park where he offers me another menthol cigarette. We sit on the lawn. The darkness still smells alluring and so does the scent of Hendrik’s body. It’s the darkness that gives me the confidence to lay my head on his shoulder. Is this how Hades will make me feel when it’s time?

“Do you still feel alone?”

“It depends,” I say “it depends on whether you’re real or not.”

“You’re strange,” he says and I hear him blow out the smoke.

“It’s the delirium…”

I’m not even sure if I am really holding a cigarette. My head is as hollow as a vacuum; whereas my heart is gradually filling with…I don’t know what. I can’t hold the pen any longer.

I drop the cigarette. There’s someone else with a pen.

“Come back,” I hear him say as he snaps his fingers.

“I’m still here. Are you?”

He laughs and presses me against him. I feel my spine tingle. Liquid gathers in the lacrimal lake, filling the sac and I squeeze the first drops out of my eyes. I’m finally alone with him on a creased page – a lonely island of nothing but puddles of salty water and ugly handwriting.

“Are you all right?”

“It depends,” I say “it depends…”

A kiss – warm and vivid like the retrievable images from last night’s Shakespeare play. The sense of unrequited love, however, is brewing in the core of my entire being, triggering dissociation.

“I have to tell you the truth, Laurie” he says out of the blue.

I shall welcome any truth. Truths that will drag me out of the vicious circle and help me fathom the purpose of the written word. No more secrets and all the thousand pieces of the mystery will come together.

“I’ll be gone once I’ve helped you to open your eyes,” he says.

I release myself from the embrace, becoming clear-headed again. The darkness smells of duck poo. I hear the speeding cars on the streets and the moment Hendrik grabs my hand, I feel a couple of calluses on the tip of his fingers.

“Help me, eh?” I pull my hand back and try to get back on my feet. My first attempt fails as I have pins and needles in my leg. I start hitting myself violently in the leg whilst forcing myself to stand properly.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“…showing you my competence!”

Never will I ever want to be the one who needs help from anyone, especially if they are not here to stay.

I sense negative electrical impulses within myself, but I feel nothing coming from Hendrik like there was a thick piece of glass between us. I fall back on my bum. Where’s my notebook?

No, something else needs to be done first. Short-term happiness is happiness at stake. See Ophelia, see Juliet. Fools.

Now I notice the waxing crescent moon causing this entire madness. I wear a waning crescent moon tattoo on my left shoulder-blade, representing every stupid thing that I do and Cronos’s planet of death and destruction on my right.

“Get up,” he says.

I do and I walk away. The ugly neon street lights hurt my eyes, but it doesn’t stop me from scribbling shit in my notebook.

I hear Hendrik’s footsteps – quiet and delicate like those of Eurydice. Orpheus made the mistake and looked back. Do I really want to end up singing songs to Hades?

As I enter the petrol station I see Jay staring at me from the counter – probably wondering why my phone has been off for months. There are no current customers evident, except for one guy filling up outside. Jay leaves the counter and I count his steps until he’s two metres away from me.

“One step closer,” I say without looking at him.

“Then what?” he says.

My breathing has become irregular since the moment I’ve stepped into the petrol station.

“I miss you” he mutters.

I close my eyes, as I clench both fists. I have trouble breathing, trouble holding back, trouble swallowing this lump in my throat. For the love of Cronos, I can taste the remaining flavour of the Strawberry Surprise intermingling with Hendrik’s Daiquiri. This moment is for real.

I hear Jay take another step and the next thing I feel is my fist against his face. My eyes now wide open, I see him trip over a stack of Cola cans. He falls over and props his body with one hand. I kick him hard in the stomach whilst shouting “How does that smell?”

Then I feel two arms under my armpits curling to hold me back.

“That’s enough” I hear Hendrik say and his voice is reason enough for me to succumb to this cool breeze which I thought I had lost.

Hendrik and I are on the night bus. I put my head on his shoulder again. I feel how our body heat is becoming one.

Where is my pen?

I want to write that wishful thinking has nothing to do with invention. It’s playing hide and seek with illusion and reality. If you can’t distinguish the two, you are fucked. Hint: The prettier one is illusion. Sometimes wishful thinking reflects your worst intentions, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just a waving figure in silhouette reminding you of who you are. You can’t escape the dark forebodings looming over you.

The past is a distant memory and not yet over.

What a long day. I blame Father Time. But spring may come.

“Are you the grapes beyond reach?” I whisper deliriously.

“I’m closer than you think.”

-

“Laurie, I hope you are making useful notes on today’s session!” Mr Johnson says.

I twitch and lose my pen.

“Yessir,” I say and look at my notebook. Then I turn around and only see an empty chair.

I realise that a week has passed, as I remember giving a book by Bukoswki to Mr Kirkpatrick in the previous session, and Mr Voglein told us his wife was in hospital after a stroke. He was afraid to go alone, so I went with him last week. The whole class’s aura feels a lot calmer now. Stephen has been smiling at me since the beginning of today’s session. I smile back and feel a breeze touching my neck.

I start packing my stuff together.

“Laurie…you’re going?” Mr Johnson says.

“I have some work to do,” I say and pick up my pen. Judging by Mr Johnson’s smile, he knows I won’t come back. There was even a grumpy smile on Mr Voglein’s face.

As I leave the room, I walk past Mr Johnson’s office. He has forgotten to close the door and there’s something on his desk that catches my attention. I slowly enter the office and kneel before his desk to marvel at his beautiful grape bonsai tree.

Decades ago Dick explained to us: “Reality is that which, when one stops believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

After all, the only thing we care about is our own

p

e

r

c

e

p

t

i

o

n.

–
Fürdenherrnw

by Paula Cheung, February 2011

“Why are you reading this?“ asked Jim, pointing at Graham’s copy of William Tell by Friedrich Schiller. “Have you gone all German?”

Graham stared at him for a second, but ignored the question and carried on reading. He was at the café inside the Student Union with Jim and Neil.

“It’s not even on the reading list!” Jim shook his head hopelessly.

Neil and Jim started talking about Shannon’s leaving do which was the night before. Graham was a strict non-drinker and therefore it was no surprise that he was a complete outsider at parties or any kind of social gatherings. The only advantage the guys drew from Graham’s presence at parties was him driving them home afterwards.

“Anyway”, Jim began, “I did try my luck on Shan last night, since she broke up with Furry Fred the other week…”

Neil chuckled. It was a common thing to laugh at Fred’s nickname. Nonetheless, he was one of the best cricket players on the whole Bristol campus. Girls like Shannon obviously liked confident athletes. Graham licked his finger to turn the page.

“The odd thing about her is that even when she’s drunk, she’s still sober” Jim said.

Neil raised an eyebrow “What do you mean?”

“Well, as soon as I tried it on with her, she knew what I was up to and threw me off the chair. Do you know any girl like that after five shots of tequila? And hell knows how much she’d already drunk before we came!”

“Well, obviously not over The Fur”, Neil presumed.

“Bernard would have nailed her straight away…”

Graham twitched after that comment.

“Well,” Jim continued, “after all she finished the relationship! And I just wanted a memorable goodbye-shag! Well, her loss, I guess.”

Graham closed the book and slammed it down on the table. The noise made the waitress spill the coffee whilst serving a student.

“Gee…” Neil muttered, recovering from the shock.

“Rubbish, I guess?” Jim grinned at Graham “How far did you get?”

“He’s about to hit the apple” Graham answered.

“That’s the only exciting part!”

“I’m saving the best part for later.”

On his way home, Graham stopped at Tesco Express to pick up some coffee and paracetamol. In the queue was a couple arguing about whether crinkle fries or curly fries tasted better; on his right a little girl crying uncontrollably because her mother wouldn’t buy her any Hello Kitty chocolate biscuits. Crowded places hold nothing but nasty human scents, he thought, such as the sharp smelling breath of the person behind him and the awful rustling noises coming from crisp bags and shopping bags.

“Hi.” A voice came out of nowhere.

On his left he saw Shannon, smiling. “Graham, right? You were at my party yesterday.” She was holding a bottle of skimmed milk, a pack of cereal and a pregnancy test.

“Hello.”

She looked hung over; her dark curly hair was worn out and unwashed, the blue of her eyes pale with exhaustion.

“You didn’t have fun last night, did you?” she asked.

“Of course I did. What makes you think I didn’t?”

The queue was moving forward. Graham noticed that the person behind him looked disapproving of Shannon’s presence, as if she was about to jump the queue.

“Come on”, she said, “you were staring at my Francis Bacon posters for hours!”

“I like disfigured faces.”

She narrowed her eyes in slight disgust. “You’re weird” she said.

“Oh, and you’re not? They are your posters after all…”

Graham was next at the till and Shannon immediately handed him her shopping. “I’ll pay you back in a minute.” As she disappeared behind the magazine stand, he could smell the sharp breath of the person behind him even more than before. Graham felt nauseated. The man at the till scrutinized him before scanning the pregnancy test. Graham stared back.

“What are you staring at, young man?” the man asked.

“Your thumb.”

Graham quickly turned to leave just to spare himself witnessing the agony. But already before he reached the magazine stand, he heard the closing of the till, the crunching of bone and a shriek.
Graham was dragging Shannon out of the shop with such force that she had to push him away to release herself.

“What the hell got into you?”

He noticed that the blue in her iris had come back to life again.

“Nothing, just some precog…, oh never mind!”

The startling noise of the sirens on the main road almost sliced his brains in two like a butcher knife. That reminded him of his unfinished coursework on Kafka and he started to walk away from Shannon.

“Precognition? I get that when a forgotten dream comes true.”

He stopped and turned back around. She was one of the few people who wouldn’t confuse precognition with déjà vu, he thought. The sound of the sirens was now far away.

“Do you want to come around my house?” he asked.

“I…I don’t know. I haven’t had breakfast, yet…”

“I have bowls and spoons…”

“I actually have something important to do…”

“I have a toilet as well.”

She looked slightly irritated and probably felt uncomfortable with his persistence but finally gave in.

He was watching her walk around in his apartment, which looked extraordinarily neat. The air held a fragrance that recalled the liveliest notes of a midsummer morning. Her previous insecurity about entering a student apartment had suddenly vanished. Down the corridor were two bedrooms, one on each side. One of the doors was open.

“Is that your room?” she pointed at the one with the open door.

“Find out” he said whilst preparing her breakfast. The midsummer smell had fused with Shannon’s sweetly-scented water lily deodorant.

“Oh my God! I can’t believe you live with Jim.” She must have seen Jim’s party pictures on his pin wall; one showing him and Bernard dancing naked at the union, or she had simply smelt his terrible Jean Paul perfume.  “You could have warned me that you live with this dirty guy!”

Suddenly he heard her opening the door to his room and spilled the milk. “Hey!” The moment he stormed into his room, he saw her standing there stiffly; staring at his myriad H. R. Giger posters showing biomechanoids, aliens, necronoms and Debbie Harry – all twisted works painted with dark acrylic colours in shades of metal. To Shannon, they probably looked like ominous eel-like creatures with heads resembling either men’s glans or women’s buttocks, and numerous naked female reptilian humanoids intertwined and penetrating each other. His room still smelt of the black coffee he had in the morning.

“Speaking of dirty…iew” she said.

It sounded like “eel”. He was still standing behind her stiff back, and then he watched her carefully tilt her head as though examining the Anima Mia poster in greater depth. The rigidity in her posture loosened up. She put both of her hands on her hips and they slowly moved towards her bum.  Graham licked up the tasteless skimmed milk from his hand before it dripped onto the carpet.

“You lost weight since last term” he muttered after guessing that she was comparing her bum with the eel’s head. She turned around with a questioning face indicating perplexity and curiosity. She quickly looked to her left where the bed was; as if she had missed something and then she looked to her right. Her curls seemed revitalized; they were dangling like tinsel. She had had a shower after all.

“Are you religious?” She pointed at the cross above his bed.

“I guess. Why?”

She looked on her right again, scrutinizing his favourite piece of art by Giger Satan I which portrays Satan using Jesus as a bow. The background shows a vast wasteland of piled up, decayed human remains.  Jesus’ pose is exactly like on the cross, except that on the picture there is no cross, just a string threaded through the wounds of his hands to form a bow. Satan’s hand is tightly clasped around Jesus’ lower body. His gaze and the gaze of his demons are fixed firmly at the viewer, but the most unnerving facet of that picture arises from the arrow, which is a nail, also aimed at the viewer. Every time Graham looked at it, he saw Satan in his comfortable stance, drawing the arrow back to the anchor point and…

“How do you sleep at night?”

“What?”

“How the hell do you sleep at night?” she repeated “Every time you sit up in bed, you have the devil playing William Tell with you! In fact, it doesn’t even matter where you are in the room.”

He could feel a grin developing at the corner of his mouth and hoped it was an innocent one. “Your breakfast is in the kitchen.”

“You’re weird.”

“I’m not having breakfast at 1pm!”

Awkward silence hung in the air while both were sitting on the sofa, staring at the empty TV screen. There was an ashtray on the table with a No Smoking symbol in the middle of it.

“So uhm, who do you think might have impregnated you?”

She almost choked on the milk and he saw milk coming out of her nose. After a round of coughing and wiping her lower face, she threw a fierce glance at him.

“That was beyond impertinence!”

“As far as I’m concerned, I paid for the pregnancy test…”

She shook her head numerous times and carried on eating her cereal. His leg started shaking.

“Since you’re so straightforward and direct, let me ask you something.”

“Anything.” His voice sounded nervously high all of a sudden, but she hadn’t noticed.

“I’m not convinced that you believe in God.”

His leg stood still again. She continued “You use Him as the apple on your head…”

He lowered his head and felt how everything around him was turning black. His head had started to ache.

“I didn’t put it up there. My mother did”, he said finally.

“So…you don’t believe in God?” she carefully put the empty bowl on the table.

“I do”, he muttered and swallowed a paracetamol. “It’s just – everything was so much easier when I didn’t…”

As she approached him, she said “But nobody’s telling you what to believe in?”

“I have to.”

“Why?”

“Because of what I did.”

It was almost 5 o’ clock. Whilst walking around in the living room, he could hear her in the bathroom. She had told him that if the test was positive, she would not drop out of university and leave Bristol but would make Fred marry her after the final term.

They were both sitting on the sofa again, close to each other like a nervous couple, staring at the strip, which was in Jim’s glass – the one he used for mouth wash each morning.

“I can’t believe it took us two and a half years to become friends, Gray.”

He remained quiet.

She continued “That’s what you get when no one makes a move. Or it’s simply fate.”

“You made the first move today.”

“Yeah…that was because I had no money on me”, she smiled. “Other than that I always thought you were a weirdo.”

“And that says a girl who likes Francis Bacon.” He smiled a genuine smile for the first time in her presence.

“You’re weirder.”

A minute had passed and there were still no coloured bands visible.

“I told you, I never used to be like that”, he said. “It’s my new perception on life. I feel no guilt towards what I did. It’s only my mother who says I should.  And yet, I pray to her God to go away.”

“Don’t make yourself paranoid. I don’t approve of what you did, but ultimately it was not your…”

Finally one color band appeared on the control region, but no band showed on the test region. She had completely lost her flow of mind and looked fairly mystified. Maybe she was double-checking that there was truly no band appearing on the test region. None appeared.

-

When Graham’s archery lesson began, he felt alone like never before. Even though he had numerous people around him carrying bows just like him, he couldn’t remember what fellowship felt like or what the significance of it was. Their instructor always spoke with a dull tone of voice, where people failed to listen carefully:

“Safety and responsibility always come first! Watch your companions and make sure you don’t endanger anyone! And don’t ever shoot bent or broken arrows – self-explanatory…”

Graham noticed some people getting impatient. One of the guys started fidgeting with his arrow.

“Stop it or you’ll poke yourself in the eye”, Graham said to him with a serious stare.  The guy stopped fidgeting and simply stared back.

“Quiet!” the instructor said “Now, an archer, who intends to hit the bull’s eye, must not directly aim at it, but slightly to the side…”

Graham shuddered. There was no wind.

“…Ok, get ready then. First put on your finger and arm protection, then check your bow, the strings and your arrow!”

The blinding sun was decreasing Graham’s attention span. At least there were clouds approaching.

“So. Now get into your comfortable stance and don’t forget you draw the arrow back to the same anchor point on your cheeks!”

Every student had drawn his arrow and was aiming at his target intensely. Graham felt that his target was not 20 yards away, but a lot further. After closing his eyes for two seconds, he opened them again and recognised a man about 25 yards ahead of him with the target painted on his body. It looked like Bernard. There was an arrogant smile forming at the corner of the man’s mouth. Graham couldn’t see it, but he knew it. His hands started to shake and sweat was running down his head.
He bent his right knee a little, drew the arrow back tightly and shot it slantwise up into the sky. The arrow faded to a dot that became lost amongst the sea of white gathering overhead.

“Oh my God!” the instructor shouted.

Everyone was staring at the sky. Suddenly Graham felt his cheekbone lifting up to a smile which then evolved into laughter.

“We’ll evacuate this place right now!” the instructor shouted, but everyone was already running. He grabbed Graham tightly by the arm and dragged him off the lawn. It was getting windy.

“I won’t tolerate this! You are in trouble. What were you thinking?”

“William Tell”, Graham answered, still laughing.

As soon as they reached the sports hall, the instructor grabbed Graham by the collar and hissed “Stop fooling around, buddy! If anybody gets hurt, you’ll be responsible!”

“Sir, do you think I’d have done that if I had known somebody would get hurt?”

“You’re out of the team!” He finally let go of Graham, who was still grinning from ear to ear. “And listen to yourself when you speak. You’re absurd!” The instructor turned around and was about to walk into his office.

“Watch your foot…” Graham murmured.

“What are you mumbling?” As he turned his head back to Graham whilst still walking, he failed to notice the janitor coming along from his right with the cleaning trolley. A heavy groan followed, and Graham was out through the door. His grin had faded into indifference and he felt how a dark shadow was casting upon his entire face.
He headed back to the empty field even though a voice had just spoken through the loud speakers telling people to steer clear of the field or anywhere near it due to the danger of an arrow. The sun was behind the clouds now and it was still slightly windy. Further down the field was a small millpond where Bernard’s accident took place. Nobody had dared going near the old oak tree ever since. He remembered that it used to be a place where many used to sit and have their lunch.

The arrow had landed near the water, head first. As he tried to pull it out of the ground, he got startled by a grass snake which first, before he even noticed, had looked like a pile of deer dropping.

He fell on his behind.  “Joe-fucking-Strummer…”

He watched the snake move back smoothly into its hole. For a second he had to think of Shannon and biomechanoids. Then the snake slithered back out and disappeared quietly into the water.

He remained sitting and simply stared at the still water. Ever since Shannon left the city, he had been feeling more detached from the world than before. Every now and then she would text him, but he hardly ever replied.  She asked whether he had known that her heart would be in pain and she would also text him when she encountered people going through pain, because they reminded her of him. She wrote that if he had been there with her to foretell others’ painful moments, they’d both have lots of fun together. He looked at his phone and there was a new message: “You should come visit me in Devon! I kinda miss our conversations…”

He was trying to remember the last time he was at the millpond and it was indeed two summers ago.

-

Graham was taking care of the campfire whilst Jim, Neil and Bernard were drunk and stoned, laughing on the grass. If the fire went out, it would be utterly dark, since it was new moon.

“If I had a bow and an arrow now, I would shoot right up into the sky” Bernard muttered and the rest carried on laughing, except Graham. Then Bernard continued “William Tell never misses anything. He could even shoot God down.”

Graham smoked the rest of the joint without feeling anything, yet. Nonetheless he could still taste the remaining bitterness of the absinthe on his tongue. Bernard had brought some real Czech absinthe from Prague to test out the hallucinations myth. Graham was not a good drinker and was still sipping at his first glass whereas the others were already preparing their second.

“Come on, Gray, drink up!” Bernard shouted, and he did.

The flickering noise of the fire sounded like cracks in a brick wall and their laughter was just behind it. His head was spinning, his heart racing. He felt nauseated, every part of him started to work slowly as if he had just awoken from anaesthesia. Then his vision blurred and all he could hear was under-water-talk. Suddenly an uncanny feeling surrounded him when he noticed Bernard’s figure rising. Bernard was mumbling something to him, but all Graham heard now was the flicker of the fire or were those cracking noises? All he saw was a blurred, disfigured outline of Bernard’s body.

“Hey” Graham mumbled as Bernard walked away, “Wait…”

Through his blurry vision he could see that he stopped for a while to listen, but then he carried on walking towards the oak tree. He heard the cracking noises repeatedly in his head and tried intensively to concentrate on Bernard. Now he could also hear fractions of Neil’s and Jim’s laughter.

“Bern…!” He wasn’t sure whether he had said it or only imagined it. Through his hazy vision he saw Bernard’s leg disappear underneath the dark branches of the oak tree. That was when Graham began to vomit feverishly into the fire. Now the only clear cracking noises he heard were bones and neck – followed by a splash in the millpond. The laughter had died and the fire had gone out.

-

The water was still peaceful; the grass snake hadn’t come back, yet.

Graham remembered the day his mother started praying for him desperately, saying that he should never interfere with God’s will. Bernard’s death was God’s will. The guilt will go if you have trust in God, she had told him. Ever since then his mentality, not to mention his cognition, had been under surveillance by something he didn’t even believe in, and yet his mother thought her son was a prophet of pain and was destined to suffer torture twice – except she was wrong. He looked at his mobile phone, uncertain about whether to write to Shannon or not.

The area did not change much except that the oak tree was looking more fragile than it did two years ago. For some reason he felt he and the tree had something major in common.

“Hey, sorry I’m late” someone said behind his back.

He got up, turned around and saw Bernard who was wearing a t-shirt with a target on it. The bull’s eye was not red, but black. As they were walking along the field, the colour of the sky had changed to magenta, but neither of them were interested in the peculiarity of the sky.

“It’s been a while, huh? How have you been?” Bernard asked.

“Crap, what else?”

“So as usual then…what’s new?”

Bernard’s enthusiasm and sleaziness revealed something slightly unsettling, especially in association with his entire appearance in that uncanny atmosphere. But yet, it all seemed so ordinary at the same time.

“Nothing.”

“Any girls?”

“There is someone, but…” Graham stuttered.

“What? Are you being a coward again?” Bernard asked, sounding disappointed.

They walked past a beautiful female ballet dancer practicing in an alley of white spruces. Her curly hair dangled like tinsel. Then the disappointment on Bernard’s face had vanished and changed into something familiar and honest.

“You want this madness to stop, don’t you? You just want to accept the past.”

They were now walking past a tree feller felling an oak tree with an axe. Each hit on the tree equaled the sound of a thunder.

“Bernard, I tried…” Graham said, unable to finish.

“I know”, he interrupted.

“I could’ve prevented it.”

The magenta sky was darkening to burgundy and the trees which they were now approaching were losing more and more leaves. It smelled like autumn.

“It’s ok”, he repeated and continued “It wasn’t your fault.”

That was the ultimate key phrase which had almost brought Graham to tears.

“But I still…”

“No” Bernard interrupted again and there was blood gushing out of the bull’s eye of his t-shirt, but he felt no pain and indicated no kind of alarm. All Bernard did then was smile and held Graham in his arms with the blood still flowing. Graham could feel his friend’s broken ribs pressing against his body.

“I’m sorry” Graham’s voice trembled.

“No, don’t be. Don’t carry around a burden that was never yours.”

As Graham woke up in the middle of the night, he saw the bright moonlight stalking his room like a madman. He grabbed for his mobile to write a text message to Shannon, saying

“How about next weekend?”

Then he sat up on his bed and looked straight ahead. He saw that the hand was gradually drawing back the arrow. William Tell never misses anything.

–

Paula Cheung, October/November 2010

or: The archer’s crisis

„Why are you reading this?“ asked Jim and pointed at Graham’s book by Dostoyevsky. “Have you committed moral suicide or what?”

Graham stared at him for a second, but ignored the question and carried on reading. Jim and Neil started talking about Shannon’s leaving do which was the night before. Graham was a non-drinker and therefore it was no surprise that he was a complete outsider at parties or any kind of social gatherings. The only advantage the guys had from Graham’s presence at parties was him driving them home safely afterwards.

“Anyway” Jim said “I did try my luck on her last night, since she broke up with Furry Fred last week…”

Neil chuckled. It was a common thing to laugh at Fred’s nickname. Nonetheless he was one of the best Cricket players on the whole campus in Bristol. Girls like Shannon obviously liked confident ‘athletes’. Graham licked his middle finger to turn the page.

“The odd thing about her is that despite of being drunk, she’s still sober” Jim said.

Neil raised an eyebrow “What do you mean?”

“Well, as soon as I approached her, she seemed to know what I was up to and immediately threw me off the chair. Do you know any girl like that after five shots of tequila? And hell knows how much she’d already drunk before we came!”

“Well, obviously she’s not over Mr Fur.”

“Well after all she finished the relationship! And I just wanted a memorable goodbye-shag! Well, her loss, I guess!”

Graham closed the book and slammed it loudly down on the table. The noise made the waitress spill the coffee whilst serving a customer.

“Gee…” Neil muttered, recovering from the shock.

“Rubbish, isn’t?” Jim grinned at Graham “Whereabouts are you?”

“He’s about to pull the axe” Graham answered.

“That’s the best part!”

“I’m saving the best part for later.”

On his way home, Graham stopped at the off-license to pick up some coffee, mints and paracetamol. In the queue was a couple arguing about whether crinkle fries or curly fries tasted better, on his right was a little girl crying and sobbing uncontrollably because her mother wouldn’t buy her any Hello Kitty chocolate biscuits. Crowded places hold nothing but nasty human scents, he thought, such as the sharp smelling breath of the person behind him and the awful rustling noises coming from crisp bags and shopping bags.

“Hi.” That voice sounded like an arrow through his heart.

On his left he saw Shannon, smiling. “You are Graham, right? You were at my party yesterday.” She was holding a bottle of skimmed milk, a pack of cereal and a pregnancy test, which she attempted to hide.

“Hello.”

She looked hung over; her dark curly hair was worn out and unwashed, the blue of her eyes pale and enwrapped in exhaustion.

“You didn’t have fun last night, did you?” she asked.

“Of course I did. What makes you think I didn’t?”

The queue was moving forward. Graham noticed that the person behind him looked disapproving of Shannon’s presence, as if she was about to jump the queue.

“Come on” she said “you were staring at my Francis Bacon posters for hours!”

“I like disfigured faces.”

She narrowed her eyes in slight disgust, whereas he began to smile. “You’re weird” she said.

“Oh and you’re not? They are your posters after all…” he stated.

When Graham was next at the till, Shannon immediately handed him her shopping. “I’ll pay you back in a minute.” As she disappeared behind the magazine stand, he could smell the sharp breath of the person behind him even stronger than before. He felt nauseated. The man at the cashier scrutinized him before scanning the pregnancy test. Graham stared back at him.

“What are you staring at, young man?” the man asked.

“Your thumb!”

As Graham turned around to leave, he heard the closing of the till and a shriek.

Graham was dragging Shannon out of the shop with such force that she had to push him away to release herself.

“What the hell got into you?”

He noticed that the blue in her iris had come back to life again all thanks to him grabbing her arm and overflowing her with confusion and a little bit of his frenzy¬.

“Nothing, just some precog…, oh nevermind!”

The sirens on the main road felt like a butcher knife slicing his brains in two. He started walking away from Shannon, who was terribly insulted and chased after him:

“It’s precognition! Do you think I’m stupid?”

He stopped and turned back around. She was one of the few girls who wouldn’t confuse precognition with déjà vu, he thought. The sound of the sirens was now far away.

“Do you want to come around my house?” he asked.

“I…I don’t know. I need breakfast…”

“I have bowls and spoons…”

“I actually have something important to do…”

“I have a toilet as well.”

She looked slightly irritated but finally gave in.

He was watching her walk around in his apartment, which looked extraordinarily neat and smelt as fresh as a midsummer morning. Her previous insecurity about entering his apartment had suddenly vanished, as she was overwhelmed by how tidy guys could be. Down the corridor were two bedroom doors on each side, one open, the other one closed.

“Is that your room?” she pointed at the one with the door open.

“Find out”, he said whilst preparing her breakfast. The fresh midsummer smell had combined with the smell of Shannon’s sweetly-scented water lily deodorant.

“Oh my God! I can’t believe you live with Jim.” She sounded almost aghast like a little girl who had just realized she wasn’t looking at a ladybird but a firebug. She must have surely seen his party pictures on his pin wall or smelt his terrible Jean Paul perfume.  “You could have warned me that you live with this dirty guy!”

Suddenly he heard her opening the door to his room and spilled the milk. “Hey!” The moment he stormed into his room, he saw her standing there stiffly; staring at his myriad H. R. Giger posters showing biomechanoids, aliens, necronoms and Debbie Harry which are all fascinating masterpieces painted with dark acrylic colours resembling the shades of metal. But what Shannon saw were probably ominous eel-like creatures with either a man’s glans or a woman’s buttocks as heads and numerous naked female reptilian humanoids intertwined and penetrating each other. His room still smelt of the black coffee he had in the morning.

“Speaking of dirty…iew” she said.

It sounded like “eel” to him. He was still standing behind her stiff back, and then he watched her carefully tilt her head as though examining the Anima Mia poster in greater depth. The rigidity in her posture loosened up. She put both of her hands on her hips and they slowly moved towards her bum.  Graham immediately licked up the tasteless milk from his hand before it dripped onto the carpet.

“You lost weight since last semester” he muttered after guessing that she was comparing her bum with the eel’s head. She turned around with a questioning face somewhat indicating perplexity and curiosity simultaneously. She quickly looked on her left (where the bed was), as if she had missed something and then she looked on her right. Her curls seemed revitalized; they were dangling like tinsel on a Christmas tree. She had had a shower after all.

“Are you religious?” She pointed at the cross above his bed.

“I guess. Why?”

She looked on her right again, scrutinizing his favourite piece of art by Giger Satan I. That poster illustrated Satan using Jesus as a bow. Jesus’ pose was exactly like on the cross, except that on the picture there was no cross, but a string attached to both of his hands, which ultimately formed a bow. Satan’s hand was tightly clasped around Jesus’ lower body. He and his demons were staring right at the viewer. The most unnerving facet of that picture arose from the arrow which was also aimed at the viewer. Every time Graham looked at it, he saw Satan in his comfortable stance, drawing the arrow back to the anchor point and…

“How do you sleep at night?”

“What?”

“How the hell do you sleep at night?” she repeated “Every time you sit up in bed, you have the devil playing Wilhelm Tell with you!”

He could feel a grin developing at the corner of his mouth and hoped it was an innocent one. “Your breakfast is in the kitchen.”

“You’re weird.”

“I’m not having breakfast at 1pm!”

Awkward silence was hanging in the air while both were sitting on the sofa, staring at the empty screen of the television. There was an ashtray on the table with a No Smoking symbol in the middle of it.

“So uhm, who do you think might have impregnated you?”

She almost choked on the milk and he was certain that milk was coming out of her nose. After a round of coughing and wiping her lower face, she threw a fierce glance at him.

“That was beyond impertinence!”

“As far as I’m concerned, I paid for the pregnancy test…”

She shook her head numerous times and carried on eating her cereal. He looked at his watch and couldn’t overlook the fact that it was time for lunch and not breakfast. His leg started shaking.

“Since you’re so straightforward and direct, let me ask you something.”

“Anything.” His voice sounded nervously high all of a sudden, but she hadn’t noticed.

“I’m not convinced that you believe in God.”

His leg stood still again. She continued “You use Him as the apple on your head…”

He lowered his head and felt how everything around him was turning black. His head had started to ache and he was tired. “I didn’t put it up there. My mother did” he finally said.

“So…you don’t believe in God?” she carefully put the empty bowl on the table.

“I do” he muttered and swallowed a paracetamol. “It’s just – everything was so much easier when I didn’t…”

As she approached him, she said “But nobody’s telling you what to believe in?”

“I have to.”

“Why?”

“Because of what I did.”

He carefully leaned his ear against the bathroom door whilst she was inside, urinating. She had told him that if the test was going to turn out to be positive, she would not drop out and leave Bristol but instead would make Fred marry her after finishing the last semester.

They were both sitting on the sofa again, close to each other like a nervous couple, staring at the strip, which was in Jim’s glass – the one he used for mouth wash each morning.

“I can’t believe it took us two and a half years to become friends, Graham.”

He remained quiet.

She continued “Sometimes things end sadly when no one makes a move. Or it’s simply fate.”

“You made the first move today.”

“Yeah…that was because I had no money on me” she smiled “Other than that I thought you were a weirdo.”

He smiled a genuine smile for the first time in her presence. A minute had passed and there were still no coloured bands visible. Suddenly he felt numb and nauseated again.

“I told you, I never used to be like that” he said “It’s my new perception on life. And yet, I feel no guilt towards what I did; it’s only my mother who says I should. After all it’s her God who is either too weak or spiteful to eradicate evil. And yet, I pray to him to go away.”

“There seems to be a lot of paradox going on in your life. Your own introspection is making you paranoid. I don’t approve of what you did, but…”

Finally one color band appeared on the control region, but there was no apparent band on the test region. She had completely lost thread and looked somewhat confused, as if not knowing whether to be happy or disappointed or as if double-checking that there was really no band appearing on the test region. None.

When Graham’s archery lesson began, he felt alone like never before. Even though he had numerous people around him carrying bows just like him, he couldn’t remember what fellowship felt like or what the significance of it was. Their instructor always spoke with a kind of manner, where people failed to listen carefully:

“Safety and responsibility always come first! Watch your companions and make sure you don’t endanger anyone! And don’t ever shoot bent or broken arrows – self-explanatory…”

Graham noticed some people getting impatient. “As if we were kids with no common sense!”

“Now” the instructor said “an archer, who intends to hit the bull’s eye, must not directly aim at it, but slightly to the side…”

Graham shuddered. There was no wind.

“…Ok, get ready then. First put on your finger and arm protection, then check your bow, the strings and your arrow!”

The blinding sun was decreasing Graham’s attention span. At least there are clouds approaching.

“So. Now get into your comfortable stance and don’t forget you draw the arrow back to the same anchor point on your rosy cheeks!”

Every student had drawn his arrow and was aiming at his target intensively. Graham felt that his target was not 20 yards away, but a lot further. After closing his eyes for two seconds, he opened them again and recognized a man about 25 yards ahead of him with the target painted on the lower part of his body. There was an arrogant smile forming at the corner of the man’s mouth. Graham couldn’t see it, but he knew it. His hands started to shake and sweat was running down his head.
He bent his right knee a little, drew the arrow back tightly and shot it up into the sky. The arrow disappeared in the clouds.

“Oh my God!” the instructor shouted “What are you doing?”

Everyone was staring at the sky, as if their feet were glued onto the ground; all looking frightened and uncertain about whether to run or not. Suddenly Graham felt his cheekbone lifting up to a smile which then evolved into laughter.

“We’ll evacuate this place right now!” the instructor shouted after which everyone started running away from the field. He grabbed Graham tightly by the arm and dragged him off the lawn.

“I won’t tolerate this! You are in such a mess. What were you thinking?”

“About Twilight Zone” Graham answered, still laughing.

As soon as they reached the sports hall, the instructor grabbed Graham by the collar and hissed “Stop fooling around, buddy! I think you’re in for trouble, aren’t you? If anybody gets hurt, you’ll be responsible!”

“Sir, do you think I’d have done that if I had known somebody would get hurt?”

“You’re out of the team!” He finally let go off Graham, who was still grinning with a fierce radiance in his eyes. “And listen to yourself when you speak. You’re absurd!” The instructor turned around and was about to walk into his office.

“Watch your foot…” Graham murmured.

“What’re you mumbling?”  As he turned his head back to Graham whilst still walking, he failed to notice the janitor coming along from his right with the cleaning trolley. A heavy groan followed, but Graham was already out through the door. The ghastly grin had faded into indifference which ultimately cast a dark shadow upon his entire face.
He headed back to the empty field even though a voice had just spoken through the loud speakers telling people to steer clear of the field or anywhere near it due to the danger of an arrow. The sun was behind the clouds now and the wind had returned. Further down the field was a small millpond where someone had committed suicide before and therefore it was a spot which everyone avoided. He remembered that it used to be a place where many used to sit and have their lunch at. The arrow had landed nearby the water, head first. As he tried to pull it out of the ground, he got startled by a hissing grass snake which first, before he even noticed, had looked like a piece of deer dropping.

He fell on his behind.  “Joe fucking Strummer!” He watched the snake crawl back smoothly into its hole. For a second he had to think of Shannon and biomechanoids. Then the snake crawled back out and disappeared quietly in the water.

***

The area did not change much even though he was certain that at that particular spot was no tree. It was impossible that a tree had grown that high after only two and half years. And who would even care planting a tree there?

“Hey, you’re late” someone said behind his back.

He turned around and saw his old friend Bernard. They’d been friends since the early years of High School. Bernard was wearing a t-shirt with a target on it where the bull’s eye was not red, but black. They were walking through the colourful park; though the colour of the sky was not clear, as it was changing from pink to magenta, but none of them was interested in the peculiarity of the sky.

“It’s been a while, huh? I didn’t expect that you were still talking to me” Bernard said.

“Why wouldn’t I? Well, I’ve been busy.”

“So what’s new?”

Bernard’s enthusiasm and sleaziness revealed something slightly unsettling, especially in association with his entire appearance in that rather uncanny atmosphere. But yet, it all seemed so ordinary at the same time.

“Nothing.”

“Any girls?”

“Found the one, but I can’t have.”

“Your life seems miserable…” Bernard said, sounding disappointed. He looked like he was trying to come up with a resolution. There was a beautiful female ballet dancer in the park practicing the Swan Lake. Suddenly the disappointment on his face faded like ice on fire and then changed into a familiar sinister look.

“You want this madness to stop, don’t you? You just want to be who you were.” Bernard’s facial expression had become stern and threatening as he was saying that.
They were now walking past a tree feller, who was killing a tree in the old fashioned way – with an axe. Each hit on the tree equaled the sound of a thunder. The sky had now turned burgundy.

“It’s not easy to believe that there is anything good…”

“Not even the good will?” Bernard interrupted.

“That’s mere illusion. We are still spiteful.”

“Who is ‘we’?” Bernard grinned and it turned out he was only joking. The burgundy sky was darkening and the trees which they were now approaching were losing more and more leaves.

“What is free will if He knew from the beginning how I was going to decide anyway?”

“That’s all I needed to hear, my friend” said Bernard and there was blood gushing out of the bull’s eye of his t-shirt, but he felt no pain and indicated no kind of alarm. All Bernard did then was smile and held his friend in his arms with the blood still flowing:

“Now that we’ve come to an agreement, let me tell you something: I want you. I promise you can be you again.”

***

As Graham woke up in the middle of the night, he saw the bright moonlight stalking his room like an obsessive madman. He sat up on his bed and looked straight ahead. The hand was gradually drawing back the arrow. “Do it”, he whispered with a smile evolving on both sides of his mouth.

–
by Paula Cheung, 2010