See the man. Cold and furtive on his bed, rising up and hunching down; a rigmarole prison. Hair is messy and malformed. Eyes small and vacant. It’s another day and the man has been hauled to this other context. No scream or hysterics. Hands grope about, flail for a pivot to rise up. Hunching back down, there he lies for forty minutes, wide awake, eyes blistering with some real heat, body still cold and leaden.
It’s not fair, he thinks. He was so fully formed, so round and curvaceous only eight years ago. The descent has been so steep, that rip so noisy. The earth is so hostile now, he has gone too far, too far to come back to anything. It’s strange, he thinks. There were no alarms, no forest beacon-lights, nothing to alert him. The complete loss of conception, the total breakdown of his compass, and nothing in its stead. These years have rolled by. The pattern is so destructive but there’s no chance to break it. An imposition from an outsider never came. The auxiliary angel never showed up on time.
There are many problems with it. Many problems with this slothful rejection of formula. Nothing revolutionary about it, nothing holds it together, so he goes on, without knowing why he does. This morning he was feeling different. Norman Yeshuv is thirty-six and is waking for the last time, he believes. There is a special claustrophobia hanging in his room. Something suffocating his residual optimism and closing down remaining strength. Nothing summoned.
Thirty-four minutes. He starts to think, the imagination springs into action, builds from the bottom. The bottom is the idea. The idea is to bring a synthetic end to life. The building is the mode of synthetic death. The gamut is so lengthy and horrendous he looks away at the beginning. Overdose would tend to cleave towards the more moderate patch of the apocalyptic dial. Lowering yourself from a bridge at breakneck speed would swing back towards the more destructive and obscene end. Something in between, something in the vital center, which borrows from each of these different endgames, that synthesizes the best, spurns the superfluous. That’s where he arrived at thirty-seven minutes.
There hadn’t been a high for eight years, just a low emotional hum – a low sickening din – that had just eaten into any remaining humanity Norman had survived. He wanted it back no matter how fleeting, no matter how quickly it would run away from him and leave him with even more of the same, maybe worse. This was what is often called a calculated risk. A risk that has neither rationality nor foresight is a risk, one containing both is a calculation.
This fleeting injection of optimism had to arrive from somewhere exterior to Norman’s head, because that organ had beaten itself over many times and never arrived at anything approaching what he now desired. The chemicals needed are readily available. He wanted every colour, something blue, something green, a red, and then a yellow. Every hue of senseless nihilism was to be taken in and spread around his stomach in an effort to lift this burden, this fearful rejection of happiness, this plague.
In his bathroom, Norman had a bath, a sink and a toilet. It was a standard arrangement and he kept it in immaculate condition. It wasn’t built of the best materials and didn’t stand out as a great feat of architectural ingenuity, but it looked like no one had ever used it. Only with a toothbrush could you garner the levels of hygiene that had been blessed on the room. Every corner glistening with a virginal purity, every surface wiped down with levels of friction that must have nearly stripped down the actual appliance.
It was strange. His room was nothing like this. It was not only disorganized, it was remarkably messy. Clothes were strewn at angles around the floor, the desk and the bed on which rested. The flickering television was antiquated and had two long, thin arials puncturing out into the lukewarm air that clasped on to every object and organism in the enclosure. It was playing BBC News 24, the rolling news channel that provided a stability amongst the desperate feeling that there was no God. No omniscience.
It was a small room, about 20 by 20 feet, but it had the wear of a disturbed mind, the extended phenotype of a disturbed mind. Built in the image, built in the pained image. So things had a controlled anarchy to them, things had a random formation to the untrained eye, but to Norman it looked like binary code, things were clear in his head, they just played out a random aesthetic. Outside of the morass of controlled anarchy there was nothing to contemplate, everything was here, everything was now. Norman had no prospects, he hadn’t for eight years, so he lived truly in the moment, in the moment of this room, in the moment of his five-minute walk to buy food. There was no other moment, so the claustrophobia stuck to him and he was accepting. It was everything he knew, so it was his home, and so he couldn’t imagine his orbit shunting from it.
Today he would shunt, however. Prometheus had arrived, he would break the lattice-structure, turn the taut lines into floppy string and discard the lot behind his back. He would do it today. Today was the new moment, the new paradigm. He sat on the bed for all of fifteen minutes, running it through his head, how this operation would play out, how it would become a reality. The movement from the mind to reality had often betrayed Norman. Somewhere along that vexed canal there appeared glitches for Mr. Yeshuv. Now was different. Now was the new.
So the ideas kept going, kept on spinning, kept on turning, and he found it. He found the way forward, the perfect asterix to his idea, the immaculate methodology, the spiritual apex, the moral equanimity. He was going to descend slowly from the Matloff Bridge on the edge of town, descend ever-so-slowly and touch sensually on the pavement below, caress the pavement with his body and release his soul like putty out into the night air that was growing chilly in this November season.
It was going to be tonight, there was no delay, there was only drugs now to complete, only the multi-coloured ticket to spiritual bliss he needs. But how was he going to get hold? He wants to wander the streets, he wants to go into the hive and become immersed in the static of pavement politics. There were plenty of dealers on his block and it was only a matter of identifying them and then the approach. This was problematic for many reasons but the basis of this expedition was of such grand importance these small foibles disintegrated under the weight of the premise.
Out he went, descending the steps, out into the cold, out into the inhospitable, out into the people, out into the words, out into the eyes, out into everything he had missed. This was human what he was doing, he had not been human for a long time. This was the first step to the denoument of everything he had suffered. The walls were compressing, time was growing thin, his breath was shorter. There is a release on the pavement, a different feeling, a lack of yearning, a focus for once. And he moves on.
“I wanted something,” he whispers to someone.
The person turns away.
“I just wanted something, something to make me feel better,” he repeats.
He is shoved aside.
On the walk goes, on he goes with the walk. Past the tall buildings that house hundreds of different lives in a claustrophobic test tube. Lights turning on, off, two worlds living next to each other, a family of souls bought together randomly. This enforced comradeship never afflicted Norman, and he pushed past with only a flicker of thought. Never would he be suborned into any such arrangement. He is on a mission, a mission it taken him a long time to arrive at, or maybe he has been on it for eight years, finally home seems in another place.
The tears are starting at this point. There is no emotional analogue, this is a purely visual reflex to some unexpressed neural anxiety. Norman is completely serene, but the eyes build up, red and wet. He is gushing on the pavement, pellets of water dropping all over, randomly, painfully for the others around, and inexplicably. The faucets are open and will not let up.
“Are you alright mister?” asks a man prostrate on the street.
He nods.
“Come with me.”
Norman cedes his volition to his new compatriot and follows with no serious compunction. On again, on again. Closer now, closer than ever. He is led to a old house. A wooden door which is composed of stapled scraps stand between the couple and the red, warm interior viewable through a cracked pane.
Two shadows lie in chairs near a fire, there is not much else. Some cutlery on the floor with brown encrustation, no movement this night.
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