of its repetitions, and forget who I am.
I picked up the first record from the pile of records left out for me and put it on the turnstyle. Sibelius quartets. After the steady, slow confirmation of needle and shellac a perfect quartet gradually formed. At first one viola cutting through a space set up for melody, acutely and angularly it created one wall of sound. A violin giddily sprung from underneath this first wall, in a gap between the floorboards, or on the floor I myself was sitting on. It began to say something but then it wasn’t sure, and began to partly form another wall. Then a cello resounded as if it were already in the room/song but waiting its turn. It became the soil and then the floorboards, and finally a third wall. I looked out upon my father’s garden from inside the garage, through the garage door I had left open. Finally a single violin soared within these three walls-“the shrill of this violin was me” I thought to myself. As quickly as it had affirmed its place within the room it suddenly transformed into a police siren, one closer than ever before. The quartet had lured me into the security of song (like how a scared child sings to itself in the woods to keep itself company). I got up and headed towards what felt like a giant hole filled with sunlight and nature. I stood there, on the threshold of the garage door, painfully (I had no shoes on and the threshold dug into the soles of my feet). I stood completely upright and spread my arms out as if I were composing Sibelius’ quartet. Siren upon siren proliferated, each glimmer of the sun cascading and reflecting off all objects from the ground up, showing that they were part of everything, welcoming everything. And the police? What did it matter now? Every part of nature expressed an immanent force equal to the power of the police-expressing a similar law. Everything was perpetual incandescence, I could not see where one started or began. Rising and falling, contracting and retracting, accumulating and dispersing through one unitary rhythm. Every reflective surface, whether window, tarmac, vase, drop of dew, collided together and resembled the rear-view mirrors of police cars. And within such windows-reflections of reflections-lay cool policemen and policewoman made up of complete prosthesis; simulated in uniform, mediated by walki-talkies, covered in hats and chiselled features like terrifying cartoons, and in one breath-like any great composer-I changed the universe.
Standing still upon this threshold, with bruised soles, I took a deep breath, and much of the world came in with me;
A woman in high heels walking down a boulevard, a butcher cutting meat, a skateboard leaning against a concrete pillar, a cat falling asleep, a couple walking into a cinema, an old man undressing, a clown in repose, a teacher walking towards his car after a long day at work, the sound of a family of sparrows in-between the footsteps of an angry teenager crying, a stainless steel water fountain, a child kicking a football, a man upon a step ladder . . .
When I finally exhaled I had forgotten how long I had been standing there, whether it was the true exhalation to the first inhalation, or whether I had been breathing steadily for some time. Everything had changed, only Sibelius had stayed the same. The women’s high heels cracked and broke apart, she fell, and the beads on her handbag scattered everywhere conceivable, forever irretrievable. The butcher had cut his thumb off and a fountain of plum coloured blood sprung out and covered bits of meat. The skateboard suddenly began to lose grip of the column, dropped and caressed the pillar before rolling away. The cat yawned and started licking itself. The cinema-goers stopped still before the automatic doors, which appeared broken. The old man heard a scream from across the road. The clown thought about his mother and why he called her Diana and not mother. The teacher got a sudden erection. The family of sparrows transported to another neighborhood as if they had entered some crack in the fabric of space-time. The teenager crying saw a girl in yellow laughing. The water fountain was vandalized abruptly but articulately. A kid in phoenix scored his first goal. The stepladder fell.
Everything balanced on a moment, as if time were a series of edges that one fell from. It stopped being a problem which side you fell, as long as it were downward.
I was mid-way through eating an apple when I had first thought there to be a police car outside. I stood on ‘that’ threshold for a few moments and then returned to the record player to put on Benjamin Britten’s Nocturne. When I continued to chew the apple it tasted differently from the one I was eating before.
III
I leave at around five o’clock, before my father returns home from work. I walk back the same way, across the common. It is evening now, the sun has set. I walk as if I were slushing through the paint of Wheatfield with Crows. I cannot return to the garage (that is-my garage). ‘It’ is in there. Red chalk and dust is still in the air from when it happened. And only one lock has been fastened. It would only take a homeless man or a drunk to stumble by, see that it is only half locked, prize it open . . . I couldn’t even bare the thought of seeing his reaction-Christ Almighty! It is really only a small lock, no better than a cheap bike lock. And drunk men always sleep in the lots opposite mine. Well where should I go?! What should I do?! I cannot even go to the university, the fashion department. I spent too many nights up in that room, brooding, and it’s all on camera! If men cannot master their own thoughts then these cameras will! I tell you, it is ironic and absurd. Yesterday I was walking down Steep Hill and I became aware of the many cameras attached to the corners of buildings that were surveying me. My free and easy movements were re-oriented by the realization of these looming eyes. I was darting from one side of the road to the other, pathetically pirouetting down the hill. These cameras, from wanting to survey my every move, in-fact determined them! “How has this game helped anyone?” I shout to one of the cameras, looking upward as if I were talking to a Diplodocus. It was only then, with this visceral address, that the camera face turned away. Did I beat it, did I stare it down, or, did it reject me? They do not know my sin. They do not even know what blood is. They just turn their heads about like children or dogs in perennial distraction. However, in the end there is no innate difference between things. In death we are all revealed as the same-nothing.
I dare not even speak to anyone, for danger that I might suddenly spill the whole truth out. But what a wonderful truth it is! A truth that could heal others. But one must hide miracles for fear of being burnt at the stake, crucified. Men have invested too much of their time moulding the world into edible chunks for me to go and ruin such banality with the impossible! For it is true that, the more deeply a man expresses himself and his predicament, the more unreadable he becomes, the more misunderstood he is, the more bizarre he seems, the more reason he should be ‘dealt with’. Truth has a funny way of attaching itself to a person (for fear of being abused and mocked by the masses) and I will stay faithful to its secret. Yes, truths have secrets just like lies. Do not forget that there is always a universe of consequences surrounding the event of a truth. A truth hard to swallow, a truth that cannot be monopolized upon. What an unthinkable amount of consequences for this little beauty of a truth I have stumbled upon.
Like Job before me, I know that in my torment there is a sovereign virtue. I simply must not blurt it out like a child who thinks he is a comedian. So I cannot go anywhere. I cannot go home (to my garage . . . where ‘it’ lies), nor the university (where there is ample tables and chairs for studying, free water and electric heating) because they have their eyes on me. I am stranded because of this truth. All of a sudden I felt drowsy and irritable. It was still hot out even though the sun had settled amongst the trees bordering the golf course in the distance. I decided to continue what I was doing before I arrived at my fathers, and so entered the nearest pub.
I could not think of ever being redeemed for my actions. I could not see where one goes after such a crime either. There was some solace in accepting this however. I may have to sink into a new life, push myself to the bottom like an anchor, settle here in this strange world beyond good and evil, beyond aspiration and ego, beyond the living. But this is the place where most of us dwell on a day to day basis.
I looked at the bar lady and tapped one of the beer bumps with my forefinger. I took too long to collect the precise change and instead decided to give her what I had, covered in sweat, turning my wallet inside out, looking for more coins. I heard a final coin drop from out of my wallet onto the bar. It was a small key that unlocked one of the padlocks to the garage. I felt immediately cautious. I was ready to kill her if she were to so much as glance at it for more than a few seconds. I placed it quickly back in my wallet and noticed she had left a pile of change