47094: 7 Because People Are Boring When They Band Together She Became Addicted to Being An Outcast
Toby Fisk, who had a high brow and dyed blonde hair, and who was seriously into Jack Keeler who lay over the cushion that had a dog face on it, was hauling on his joint and talking long:
‘Things have harmonics and so long as people stayed true then they’d be there and truthful even if abstract. You might come back a decade later and see it in a completely different way and maybe even see more to it than at first, see all the beautiful textures in an intuitive way that maybe you couldn’t at first, like it was a dust at your feet, red, blue, purple, yellow and green dust sprinkled all over and huge beautiful butterflies flying up out of this dust and then flipping down again, so they didn’t seem quite right but they were there, you saw them, and then for ever afterwards you’re trying to make sense of what you saw, all the beautiful colours and the gigantic insects and their colours too, with the dust clouds and the scary eyes and thin legs, everything, you feel, one day I’ll have it worked out what they were and what it all meant. Of course other days it seems obvious and not saying so just a tactic, as if you’re trying to avoid something, as if you don’t feel there’s anything worth doing with it by now. Which is an inevitable feeling and happens all the time because maybe the serious and great things are all hidden and seem to be far away on another level from the one we get inside of most of the time, like we’re in a building but the top floor or basement is out of bounds, or now we’re looking at two fundamentally different post codes which have different rubbish collections, so there’s no way you’re not going to be both confused and fucked up. There’s so much harm being done because of ‘love of money and power’ over ‘love of humanity and Mother Nature’,’ and he said ‘love of money and power’ and ‘love of humanity and Mother nature’ whilst making quotation mark signs in the air with his fingers.
Routinely people were standing around doing their usual thing but the Rapture event – that’s what they were calling it by now, led by ‘Rapture Event Hash Tag’ and its outlandish but still percolating movement and nefarious, ever-changing leadership clans, made it seem like they were just diverting themselves from what was really going on and so this kind of conversation was, if not common, an underlying gist of the situation.
‘If people are mirrors then we need to make it a deal that everyone smiles.’
That was from a corner of the room, which was packed by the way with a whole bunch of people who felt the stakes were high and not only that, but were their own stakes, which is why they were there, having a few spliffs, drinking some flips of ok wine, less decent beer, and speculating and roughly strategising but without letting anything back up so far as to spoil the nice flow. Someone had collected wood and lit the stove out back, a wide dish so the low flames licked up and held back what was just a little chill, and from time to time individuals would leap up and throw another splinter onto the fire and then back off to watch, eyes blazing wack and it was warming if you were close enough. Also under the big city sky between the rising apartment blocks surrounding the place everything felt beautiful and auspicious and the trees swayed.
Ok, so ‘she’.
She was the slanted figure on the verge. Her posture was reminiscent of a scribe casting frightened sidelong glances to an age shouting itself out. The road top gives us a sight that’s like a hypnotic séance. The colours are woven into everything so that the day seems instantaneous, precious and as immersive as an occupation. Everyone's walking around, with their dogs, their baskets, their hats and running shoes shimmering like fluttering alphabets. Whatever is being said the birds know, with their broad strokes and curves untethered in the transmuting sky. They are writing calligraphics tracing proper and common nouns into an astonishing empty sieve. There is the opposite of fantasy in this. It is dictation, translation, a copyist labour. The child with the doll trails her mum like a vegetable dye on the grey track. Consequently it is not her fault that she can’t hear the algebraic music as vibrantly as living harmony. On the ground our woman knew she must be the hardest thing on earth. Harder than everything else in the world.
What had happened was strange and worked up. The Rapture Event appeared and simultaneously, so that it felt cause not correlation, though how, that was mystery doubled over, she had felt her life being drained in a suspicious way that made her wonder whether she was meeting fate or outwitting it. And not just hers but the worlds. This was a nightime business with a narcoticised face, a descending elevator shaft from the roof to the basement, it was dragging her down to street level in every imaginable metaphor.
‘What am I doing her?’ she’d asked herself with her angry looks.
And she didn’t know where to start. And now the summer had turned as if in seconds from warmth to a gray plating of ice, and snow flakes began to smother her bearings.
‘I think this is what they call a breakdown,’ she replied, cheerful as she took the insight as the best available given the circumstances.
But as she sank into the snow covered ground and stared up to the sky loosening all the snow down she reminded herself she wasn’t a child anymore, and was thrown honestly out on the spinning world not to look for protectedness, intimacy, familiarity or what-not in it. But even though she tried she couldn’t get out of her sunk. And there wasn’t anyone around to profit or help her anywhere in sight. Which struck her first time as sad and then unlikely, given that she did more than most to humanise and familiarize the world. As she lay there sassing on the world and her place she began to realise the strangeness and incongruity of the situation, wrapped as it was in an elementary simplicity and coarseness.
Read 47094 from the beginning here.
Read the complete novel 'The Ecstatic Silence' here.