Blue Heaven Cubicle (2) She drew up in a low web, limbs outstretched from her centre, and after a few minutes lying on top of the unmade lining she sank into sleep…to dream…and wake. Vincent… …7:38am 09 July 2004 The room’s thick air swam along the lines of his neck into the plan surface where his aching chest and arms were lay pinched against the sheets, allowing gentle streams of air to press uncomfortable cold rushes into his skin, fixing them tightly into a waking disposition, outside of all this Vincent woke to the thought that I might not last any span exceeding one or two coming days. He pulled his body upwards against the cushions of the sofa and looked around; everyone else within the walls of the room breathed silently, their pliant features fallen against pillows and coats as they slept like soft children. He thought how comfortable they all looked, all dappled in lilies and silks, intoxicated under the rooms heavy perfume. The awkward fixation of waking in such states drenched the room’s familiar lines in a cool glaze, the collapse against uncomfortable sleep and his stinging head sent him out into the kitchen. Nervous of some unseen apex in the things around him Vincent smoked a cigarette that made him feel sick. A bubble of dry air stuck in his throat and he coughed in absolute disgust at getting himself into such a fragile condition. He drank two glasses of water and stood shaking in the damp light. There was nothing moving in the flat, no sense of the renewed creation of last night’s great prophetic worship of life. All the drugs were gone. Eventually he edged out timidly towards the stairs and went up to Dave’s bedroom door, Vincent knocked observing coyly the blue-tacked photographs that twitched and slipped around in his vision, with an air of transfixion and powerlessness, and with eyes buzzing he opened the door walking inside. His head was still on some mezzanine level of concentration and confused, he followed a smell out of the room and down the hall to the spare bedroom. Vincent was still fucked and running his hands down either side of the hall for support, the colourless hallway looked amorphously merged, just carpet and wall running into each other, he felt a moment of irreverence uncoil in the pale dawn arrest as it diffused in his watery morning eyes. He pushed through the door and inside the room the heavy scent of her hung like gloomy long thoughts across the bed. Her perfect bones lay motionless, soft below the sinew of her face. Watching the lines of her breast rise, defined by the room’s soft shadows her body a landmass and provocateur of inflamed sexual energy. Edging over to her Vincent leant across the bed and pressed his check against her stomach feeling the throb of her warm heartbeat, sending a rush of profound absence through him, making him feel alive, whorls of sensate impulse slamming into his existence. Today we would all die. She stirred, her limp arm raised, her hand holding the nape of Vincent’s neck, fingers in his hair. She muttered; “I love you” her sleepy tongue whispering the loose words up at me with her eyes still closed. She pressed her face back against the pillow, smiling as she curled her slow tired body around him. Vincent was no longer concerned with the girl, she would wake up in a while and he’d be in the corner of the room dead, the mutilated tissues of his brain admonishing any comprehension, she didn’t make sense any more. Vincent moved his face mechanically into a smile pushing up his cheeks as far as they would arch into the framed lines of his face. He held the bag up to his lips where it meet his hot breath, his eyes sunk away and he began to prepare...once he’d fumbled around on the floor cutting up he shot the Ketamine up into his nose; absence racing through his dark blue veins and he slumps back into the shadows. …8:01am 09 July 2004 Arnaud… …sometime around 05 - 06 July 2004 Age and time, a vacant lot. The hotel road board its flaking red letters lit in imaginary light, he could smell sleep on the cornered morning…cuts whistling past to whisper in back rooms, just to find an empty place. The wind yellow, ‘Jesus…’ he thought, ‘…for something clean, just dead stars and shit out here’. The smell of last cigarettes and the heavy sick breath of sour mash whiskey. You see he is on the undesirable list, where a little breeze stirs remote foreign birds from trees…and where a distant hand is lifted; nothing here – a strangers parenthesis…a tropical tramp. Adios to another dead sky. Arnaud began to develop nostalgia for the windy street, its lonely sidings trailing along high stone walls of grey ash felt concrete. Between remote posts, this is not good news. ‘See what I mean?’ He pitches up against a large dilapidated building and watches a black and empty sky stretch out, absolutely immobile. The raw smell of urine heavy in the air and subsequently in the back of his throat where he tastes it in smells. Night passed in with the usual stirs and blue moonlight. Arnaud wakes up with his back to the ruins, the nude wave of morning on the pores of his skin, oxygen, the temperature. He takes a picture in his head; a blur film of the street. He pushes his legs out flat against the slick grey pavement and looks over his yellow hands…a sick spirit out of season…he feels the sky drift away. Eventually Arnaud drifts down into the arcade, where he wanders around looking to reward himself with breakfast but nowhere was serving. ‘What day is this?’ Taking a bag of mushrooms, the wet florist smell and taste making him pull faces he begins to fall off the world…summer mountain skies over him. He skitters away from the pavement and lolls the day away on the street among wild men or ghosts. Arnaud and Victor… …06:15pm 03 July 2004 He sat there staring out over the street through the open window. Ten feet away Arnaud sat, head dropped downwards over the glass coffee table, sniffing and scanning the room. A low warm hum coming in off the street, drifting through the cobwebbed memories, like silent dusty thoughts. He shot up straight in his chair and went off. “The formula escapes me, the idea of brotherhood like long and old dead love…” He took a drag from the cigarette and placed it back in the ashtray, stopping and adjusting its balance on the rim with his thick gentle fingers. “…it all centres itself on the idea of a past, that at any moment under any situation it all falls back into the fact that you love this person, for whatever reason it may have been, regardless of whether you can even remember. It all goes up.” He manifests the words throwing his arms up in the air, ploughing through the smoke with his heavy wave. Then he pauses, looking up. “I love you man…” “I know I love you to…” His eyes intensified and coloured “Even if I find it hard to speak to you, even if I don’t know where you are or what you’re doing, or how you think anymore we always fall back to that one point…” It was obvious he’d already come up and Victor could feel his creeping in on him, then it hit him like a rush of drunkenness, dizzying the scene of his thoughts. He didn’t want any medals, just a space to speak. The room slowed. He watched Arnaud take a kief cigarette from the windowsill and light it. A thick plume of blue smoke goes up over his forehead and runs off across the walls and into the roof, until it defuses too thin to see. Arnaud had made his point and lost interest, then remembering something else he went on. “Let me give you an example. The charge of the only real words you ever speak, after all language is signified and most of the shit that comes out of your mouth is some kind of construction around the idea of power” Victor looks up in ambivalent amazement as the drugs wash over him like a fistic epidemic, the tingling in his spine cutting out everyone else in the room. Arnaud carries on with an air of irrelevant hysteria. “Don’t get delusions of grandeur you’re not the one in control, are you listening?” “What?” “The only power you have over the word is in words like love…” he took another small drag and handed the joint to Victor with an effete frown, he continued to speak, exhaling a thick cloud of smoke with his words “…not in its consisting of four letters amounting to a symbol, one you can never subsequently comprehend”…his body arced up at this point and he drew in a starved breath as he gripped the words that ran out of him…“but in that it lights you up, burns into the essence of what it is to feel, and if feeling is the only thing we can be sure of, in the sense of our relationships with others and things, it bleeds us out…” Having no clear idea of what he was saying Victor added something along the lines of “…turns us over in what we have felt and seen.” Arnaud suddenly felt jolted by something, like an infantile epiphany, a lesson escalating out of infancy, realising the disinternalised nonsense his thoughts must be when put into words. The words used refer to nothing, which was empirically provable. No longer feeling disobliged to speak he went on. “Yes, at the expense or hand in hand with these ghosts of your past…” Victor felt something lift in him and interrupted following the direction of the words. “…Friends, lovers, dead memories, where all your wishes are born, on the edge of a ragged and burnt out ravine that you’ve already half forgotten.” Victor’s head was wired straight in. Arnaud was off, he started shouting. “The power, the energy, of a mind on fire…lifted up through the pressure-streams of a usual concern with shit…drugs and booze are you fooling me?” Victor inserted an excited “Please…” “Or have those old masters of the idea taught me to think like an idiot, like a shit.” They snapped out of it for a second, holding just enough time to recognise each other and communicate a latent ‘what the fuck were you saying?’ look. “Errr…Magazines…worry about the fact you don’t weigh six stone, and does my hair look ok?” “Let’s address some kind of context…” “God…” “…the effects of nuclear weaponry acting on the human body…an excellent choice” The hourglass slowly dissolves. “The shock waves cause pressure waves through the tissues. These waves mostly damage junctions between tissues of different densities, bone and muscle, or the interface between tissue and air. Lungs and the gut, which contain air, are particularly injured, not very nice.” Arnaud performs a theatrical wince and then continues “ The damage forms severe hemorrhage or air embolisms, which can also be experienced as a complication when scuba diving – is there a link?” “I’m not sure.” “Either of which can be rapidly fatal. The overpressure estimated to damage lungs is about 68.9 kPa. Some eardrums would probably rupture around 22 kPa, thats 0.2 atm, and half would rupture between 90 and 130 kPa, that’s 0.9 to 1.2 atm.” Victor eyes his reflection in the mirror disgustedly “no-one lusts for peace or love in the way a mass floods the shop floors of a pavilion or shopping center, buying themselves for only 9.99, buy one get one free, the worlds on fire you fuck…are you gonna rush to the mirror when every atom of everything you love is torn to pieces by a thermo-nuclear rush?” “Everything burning up through the façade, with naked primitive notions of nothingness held club in hand. Love the greatest germination of thought ever made, a Christ that we can all push our fingers into.” The hourglass had now dissolved. He could feel the muzzle of a come-down closing up around the tight dips in between his neck and jaw. They smoked the melting grey delight away over on the roof. The blind delicate spill shattering in an iridescent burnout. The death of the cerebral gift now an anonymous event slung naked over the shoulder to be nostalgias, fragmentary breaks. The catatonic red glow humming bloodless in his ears. Jon and Aisha… …10:46am 09 July 2004 Jon sat there with the feeling he had understood the whole world, Aisha’s eyes turning glassy. Out of the car window solemn lawns falling away from view into darkness. The morning air buzzed with the light spray and night, everything rolling over in the street lamps flickering dark. Once they moved out of the town the view opens up into the void bowels of night, rolling off into dark dull silence. Long sad empty roads, blue in the soft morning dream. Light dimly shining through the window screen into his lap, sat there dumb under another ominous dawn. Listen, I think I’ve fallen in love with the idea of Christ. I can’t get it out of my head, what do you think?” She turned her gaze up from under her eyes knowingly. “Everyone does sooner or later” she reasoned. Jon listened, thinking of old business. “I think I owe him at least some effort” he mumbled. “Freedom would do nicely, think of the Christian notion of retribution; do what ever you want, but fuck with what I say is right and your going to burn in hell…gun to your head kind of freedom…I think we can leave it there.” “But what if love is freedom, if you encounter everything with love then how can you be wrong?” “You can’t, but try explaining that to the bastard who’s nailing you to a cross.” “That’s not the point.” “That is the point” She looked up again with the most lamentable inspection, flesh overlooking the inlets of his eyes “…any self image based on Christ will wind up killing you, you dumb shit.” In a blur of movement she opens up her meandering a little more. “Self-defecting, that’s all God is to you, some suicidal exposure, a vital spot you can pin down too.” Jon gives himself a minute trying to organise the sentence in my head, errr…the process of making sense of an abstract feeling always troubled him…“The flesh…” the brain scrambles, edits, makes sense of… “only half of the world is intelligible.” She looks up at him and starts to listen again. “What do you mean?” “…flesh, teeth…then the spirit…the essence of man.” “He is still pilfering out of His empty grandeur, leave Him only, God has nothing to do with you anymore.” A blow-out collapses the front near-side tyre. Head acceleration, three directions from the centre of gravity. The car slides under a high tension fence and impacts at the root of a tree. Aisha is killed when the high acceleration of the crash causes head impact against hard structures with relatively small areas of contact, such as may occur when the back of Aisha’s head hits the B-pillar or when her face contacts the steering wheel through the deflating airbag. Actually, there are numerous explanations for why Aisha dies. Axial force, anterior-posterior force and anterior-posterior bending movement acting at the connections between the head and neck. thoracic spine acceleration, in three directions. Sternum compression. Femur axial force, each leg. Tibia-femur displacement, each leg. Tibia transverse bending moments, upper and lower, each leg. Tibia axial force, each leg. Foot acceleration, two directions, each foot. Jon sat and watched the dull metal of the car, its ruptured geometry that seemed/s to absorb the light. The index finger of each hand pushed into the holes in either side of his rib cage, stemming the flow of blood. Dead leaves falling, catching for moments in Jon’s ruffled brown hair. The huge spotlight of the moon on the leather upholstery in the rear seats. This vast artefact intertwined the dead body of Aisha, crushed, writhing and gasping in an agony of suffocated pain. Steam pouring from the crushed bonnet, the fractured windshield, dashboard and door frames reflecting the movement, always at the same speed. …10:59am 09 July 2004 …moving slowly around in the room, and in fact this is what we see now, light grey, the pencil marks you’ve made, sliding to the corner of the room to watch. Any further on in and we start to smell shit in the grass. He looks up at the paramedics face watching over him. “Don’t get too respectable…you’ll end up making rich heroes out of fools…forgetting what it means to feel those old emotions that no one wants any more…hidden under a refined canopy, perspiring oil of Olay.” Absent from their faces are the smiles of midnight, replaced by the blank, vacant stare of sleepless dreams.
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Copyright © 2004 David Lloyd |