Sunday, January 01, 2006

37 :

“This wasn’t supposed to happen, you know.” said a voice a few feet away from me.

I ignored it. The last thing you need, at anytime, is someone talking to you. Especially in a city like this. Especially after a night like mine.

We’re brought up scared. We’re brought up in fear. We’re brought up paranoid. Everyone you pass on every street could be a killer. Every man. Every woman. Everyone white. Everyone black. All of us could be a killer. A thug. Even our bodies are against us : in these veins sits cancer.

Evil is banal. It sleeps in the same beds as we do. It eats the same food. Walks the same streets. But it sees a world very different from us. It sees a world full of opportunities to be taken, exploited. A world full of potential victims.

Much like the salespeople flooding our streets, selling us Closed Circuit Television. Preying on our fears and our insecurities.

But fear is a gift.

One day you will meet the last face you see. It might be a lover. A doctor. Someone whose name you don’t know. It might be mine. I might be the killer. I might tick your name off a list, writing the words “Natural Causes” into a box and there the story ends.

The definition of agood day for a doctor is simple : No one dies.

That’s why I don’t like talking to strangers. My mother taught me well. Divide and conquer was Hitlers motto. There is no such thing as society. So when people try to start conversations with you, you ignore them. Safety first. Fear is the invisible ruler.

Especially on a cold concrete train platform waiting for the first train. When your breath should freeze in front of your face. And there’s no one else here.

“Hey man. I’m talking to you. Things shouldnt’ve happened like this.”

Oh, please do fuck off.

I step back a little. I try to move away from him slowly. His voice is deep, assured, lively. It sounds friendly. But when someone I’ve never met before starts a conversation with me I get the fear.

Unless she’s young and pretty. And that was a lifetime ago. When I was single. When I got a fear that was altogether different, and much more terrifying. And he’s neither young or pretty.

He stood in front of me. A black man, about an inch taller than me. His black eyes swallowed the light and his face belonged to an old, kind, weary man. A man who looked, more than anything else, fed up, and hopeless. Exhausted.

A sigh. “Look, I’m talking to you. I know you.”

When you’re surprised you freeze. You don’t do anything. You just stand still analysing the situation, trying to polite, or your instincts kick in an instant and you move. Move like the devil himself is biting at your ankles.

The ghost under the stairs always thinks of a suitable response – miles away from the moment of terror.

“Look. You don’t know who I am. I don’t know who you are. You don’t know me. So piss off.” My voice was trembling. The way it was when you’re scared. My heart was pacing, beating like a fucked clock.

“Look, I’m late, and I’m busy. I know who you are, so lets not fuck about any longer.” I tried not to look at him and missed. He held my glance and held it long. The force of his gaze was as if everyone else in the world had ceased to exist. Everyone else on the platform, the tired commuters in their scattered groups, yawning and clinging to plastic coffee cups fell out of focus in the distance.

“Look mate, I’m – I’m really not in the mood.” I was looking at the beret on his head. I couldn’t meet those eyes.

I shouldn’t’ve said anything. I don’t want to talk to him. I don’t want dialogue of any kind at all. If you ask a question you get answers. And I didn’t want answers off him. He held my gaze.

“Nobody ever is. You were born thirty three years ago in St. Mary’s Hospital at 5.33am on July the 12th. Your name is Jack Simon Wilding, but you tell people your first name is Simon. Your parents chose your name because it was the most popular boys name the year before you were born. You have a mole on your right knee and a scar on your left from playing football when you were 12. You’ve just been in a hit and run.”

We have just lost cabin pressure. I have just been punched in the gut seven times. Seven things I have never told anybody.

And. How. The. Fuck. Did. He. Know?

I was growing weaker and he was growing stronger. My breath left me. What was going on?

He sighed.

“Time for introductions. I’m Samuel.”

He held his hand out. Nervously I shook it. It felt cold. He was wearing leather gloves.

“I’m-” I started.

“Hey kid, I don’t need to know your name. I know your inside leg measurement. And we’ve never met. So pay attention. I‘ve got an hour so listen carefully.”

Talk about no bullshit.

I really should’ve asked how come he only had an hour. But I didn’t. We all think the strangest way when we’re confronted with the information. I’m told I’m not standing on a train platform. That I’m not here. That nobody else can see me. And then when either of us talk our lips don’t move.

“How do you know this? How do I know I can’t just start talking to anyone else on this platform?”

The air was cold around me. Time seemed to have ceased.

Samuel put his hands over his eyes and rested them there for a second. He muttered something. Something like jeez, I hate this. He leant his hand forward and placed it on my shoulder.

“Do you really want to talk to anyone else on this platform? What would you want to say to any of them about anything?” He shut his eyes for a second longer than he needed to, the type of insomniac blink that gives you enough information to get by for another few seconds. A minute at a time. “Another ultra mocha frauppucino?”


“Look at them. You’re just another face in the crowd to them. “

He muttered. “This isn’t going to be easy.” He walked me forward to the bench. I looked at the time on the station billboard, in yellow fluorescence. 5.14am. Fuck. I was tired. First train of the day wasn’t even here yet.

“See this? All of this? It’s not real. It’s perception. Its just sensory input. It’s just electrical signals firing through your brain. It’s just what we believe is real.”

A pause. I got the feeling he did this a lot. I don’t know what it is, but it sounded like someone reading off a script. With talk like that he could be in a bad Sci-Fi film.

Maybe I was in a bad Sci-Fi film.

“Ever had a disagreement with someone?”

I do not want this. I want to go home. Someone get me out of this.

“You can’t go home anymore, Jack.”

How the fuck did he know what I was thinking?

I don’t want to know where this is going. And it scared me.

“When you disagree with someone, its because we can never feel the same way someone else does. Say you’re in a car accident. You both saw the same event happen. But you didn’t see the same thing.” He was gesticulating with his index finger. “Even if you both saw the exact same event, your line of sight could never be identical. You could never see the exact same thing.”

His hand came out to span the whole of my line of sight.

“None of this is real. Its just signals in your head. Microns and synapses buzzing. It’s just electricity. You can’t see it. You can’t touch it. This only exists in your head.”

Well, I’m going to unimagine you, fuckhead. I don’t know what he’s selling but I don’t want it. When I get chance I’m going to look under his arm to see a stack of Bibles he wants to sell me. If I wanted Bibles I’d go to a hotel and get them for free, placed there by the Gideons, from Gidea.

I snapped. “I’m going.” I stood up, walked away. I took three steps before he spoke and changed my life. His voice was deep and had a ringing air of profoundness I hadn’t heard in anyone’s voice since I was a child. It resonated the way a voice does when you’re being told off by your parents for Doing A Very Bad Thing. For once I was being decisive. Step by step I walked away from my life, whatever this was.

“Bullshit. You’re not going anywhere.” Man, this guy was almost in as much of a bad mood as I was. I carried on walking. One foot after another. “You’re Dead, Simon.”

If someone could stop me with a bullet, they couldn’t stop me quicker. I paused, turned round, unwilling to accept the latest bit of bullshit from this space cadet. Fuck him, fuck the horse he rode in on, fuck the fucking fuckers, fuck all of this.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I said. I didn’t need this bullshit. I’d had a gun pointed at me. I’d been run over. I hadn’t slept. I was probably bruised and battered and Helen was wondering where the fuck I was.

“Why aren’t our lips moving when we talk, Jack?”

And he was right. His lips had stopped moving. How the fuck did he do that? Nobody calls me Jack anymore. Not even my mother. It was a rhetorical question. No need to wait for answer.

“We don’t need to. We haven’t got vocal chords. This is telepathy - this is how we communicate. “

My mind formed a sceptics response. “Bullshit.” Though it did seem a little odd. And his voice did sound strange. It didn’t sound natural, but it sounded different. In the way that listening to a recording of your own voice never sounds quite right. That’s how it sounded.

“Lift your shirt. I want to show you something.” He stared at me in a way that was compelling. I didn’t want to look. But something kept my eyes glued to him.

“This isn’t funny.” I was scared. My heart was beating faster. In my mouth, the dry taste of fear and exhaustion.

“It’s not meant to be funny. Just lift your goddamn shirt.”

“Why?”

Fighting a losing battle. I wanted to lift the shirt. I had no choice - in the same reluctant yet compelled way that when you’ve drunk too much, and you know you shouldn’t drink more, a little voice keeps making you drink more.

I felt as if he was hypnotising me. Using the slow, gentle power of persuasion to get me to do whatever he wanted me to.

“You’ve been involved in a hit and run. Your ribs are broken in six places. Your arm is fractured. Your neck was broken when you fell on your head onto the concrete after the car hit you at 30 miles per hour. You can’t feel it because you’re dead. You’ve got internal bleeding and severe bruising. Now,” and with this he gave a deep exhale of breath that failed to show in the cold, “Samuel says, lift your shirt.”

I opened my coat, lifted my jumper and unbuttoned my shirt. I didn’t feel the cold. I should’ve done but I didn’t.

That was funny.

When my hand reached inside the shirt to undo the first button my skin brushed something cold and hard. Pulling my hand away I noticed it was covered in something thin and sticky. Something black, like tar. Blood.

First one button, then two, then three. I still wasn’t feeling the cold.

My chest was a black tapestry of bruises, cuts, and scabs. Dried blood lay around the punctured skin just to the left of my belly button where my ribs had snapped and broken through with the force of impact. I could see thin white powder on the skin. My bone had disintegrated after the force of impact and had broken the skin. I dimly remember this happening. In the midst of about ten million things happening at the precise same moment.

And I felt fine. I felt healthy. I felt as if nothing was wrong. It didn’t hurt when I touched it. I didn’t wince in agony and collapse as my nerves did their vicious work.

I looked up at Samuel.

Either I’m alive and in deep shit, or I’m dead, and these wounds are psychomatic, psychopathic, psychosomething. Am I dreaming?

He looked at me cold and hard and long. His voice never rose above a tired monotone.

“You died this morning at 1.44am. You were unconscious for 28 minutes after the accident. A mixture of internal bleeding, severe injuries and extreme cold killed you.“

There was frost on the concrete of the platform around me. I never thought about it, but I should have been able to see my own breath in the air. I should have been able to feel something, anything. Cold. Tired.

I haven’t yawned since rising from my coma in the shadow of the power station.

My brain told me that all this was wrong, that my body could not move, with the blood flowing, but it moved, I talked. Just like before.

“How do you know I’m dead?” I asked. This didn’t seem right.

Samuel sighed. Rolled his eyes.

“I’m a suicide. A self-murder. I threw myself under a train four years ago, right months and twelve days ago. This is my penance. I walk the earth, every day, every hour, every fucking second, and my job is to tell people like you you’re dead.” He sounded tired, exhausted.

That was definitely a question he’d been asked before, because he rattled off the answer the way a teacher tells a child something Really Fucking Obvious. But it still wasn’t right. How could I be dead? Seriously. How?

He must have a moment like this with everyone he meets. Some awful realisation. He started undoing his shirt. The muscle beneath the skin I could hear.

OK, so I’m Dead. Fuck no. I can’t be.

“Prove it.”

He opened his shirt. Instead of a stomach he had a gaping hole. I could see the back of his shirt - dark blue - through it. Across his chest, from his crotch to his right nipple in two thick diagonal slashes lay the trackmarks of standard 56.5 inch gauge railway wheels. I could see yellow, rancid flesh, I could see his internal organs, rearranged poetically as if he were a Rubik’s Cube and the doctors had to put him back together, I could see –

I could see too much.

His flesh underneath looked as if it had been mowed. Raw, exposed, brittle. Soildified upon exposure to oxygen, the way a wound crusts and hardens.

And the wheels cut several inches deep. If I had a body, I would’ve puked. I felt the bile rise in my throat, then hover at the edge of my mouth, as if I couldn’t complete it. Not because he was dead, no, but because I was dead. I gagged on empty air.

But no smell.

The second trackmark ran from his armpit up the back of his neck. I hadn’t seen that before.

He was silent.

“Do you believe me now? Or do I have to take off my hat?”

The air hung heavy and cold. I didn’t know how much of a head he had.

I didn’t want to know.

“Jesus Samuel. I’m sorry.”

He scratched his face, out of habit. He couldn’t feel anything. A nervous twitch. Excess energy.

“You can touch it if you don’t believe me.”

My hand reached out slowly. What I thought was a heart was beating too fast.
he reached out his hand, black gloved leather and stopped me just before I contacted the skin tissue with my shaking, numb fingers.

“You can feel my skin because I’m dead too. You can feel everything dead or inanimate. You can pick up a pen, switch lights on and off, open doors. Because they’re inanimate objects. They have no free will. No life force.“

“The same rules still apply. Doors open when you push them when you expect them to open. The more time you spend here, the easier it‘ll get. You‘ll learn the normal rules do not apply. Watch.”

He let go of my hand. And walked through the pillar holding up the roof of the station as if it didn’t exist.

When he came out the other side, he beamed.

“See, that’s my magic trick. It took me years to do that. When I believed that I could walk through things, I did. If there’s the slightest aspect of doubt in your mind. You can’t. Your mind still perceives it as real. You’ve got to forget everything you’ve ever known.”

It’s not what’s actually real. Its what we perceive to be real. Maybe I’m not really -

“Dead? Yes you are. But it wasn’t your time. You’re not due to die yet. Something went wrong. There’s unfinished business. Your soul is not at peace. I can see into it. Before you become free, you must finish the business you have. “

He glanced at his watch.

“Times almost up. I’ve got to meet someone. Come for a walk if you like.”

And with that he started out of the station. I had to find out what the fuck was going on with my life. I had to find out what the fuck was going on with my death.

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