Into the Gloam: c/o : Ally CHISHOLM

As I expected the protest was a vile putrid nightmare. A couple of hundred people were gathered not too far from where they used to hang people. Large well decorated banners were held with unimaginative slogans, a testament to art overpowering the message At the gist of it all was an anti drug movement. In a twisted fashion the woman, with or without a grasp of the meaning of her words, was quoting a drug anthem to emphasis her point.
“We stand here today because we know what drugs can do. In song we are told of the dangers, we are warned, of the magic swirling ship that will strip your senses and your grip. Yes, your grip, your very grip on reality will be stripped. You will be left chasing shadows, shadows through all that is left of the smoke rings of your mind.”
The last word is left hanging.
“My son, my son escaped. He escaped everything we gave him. He escaped to a drug induced death. He was escaping on the run and now he’s dead.”
As you think it won’t get any more evangelical it does but as it does a strong arm tugs at my sleeve and jerks me away from the crowd.
“I know you.”
I know him too, from the Hospice club. I had seen him with those Doctor Zimm loving freaks. I don’t struggle as he pulls me away and down into the underpass. I miss the bottom step and stumble but proudly don’t fall. I remember the club crowd, paying members only, recommended by other paying members for their great artistic qualities. They thought they were out there. The height of intellectual weirdness was to write an interview they’d dreamt up with an inanimate abject. Any one can ask an egg for his opinion on global warming or when we can expect the moon to crash into the earth. Strange juxtapositions of serious nonsense are easy to write. They should meet the underworld who are way beneath out there and far beyond the lot of us. They were nuts. The Hospice club were folk singers trying to pass as thrash metal. They thought they were making weird cool sounds but it was all too polished. The rule has always been simple. Writers are poor. If you have to pay your way in then you’re walking through the wrong door.
Although I knew this man from the Hospice club, now looking at him, I wasn’t sure what he was doing here. The Hospice had made no move towards getting involved in anything. He looked like he worked out in expensive gyms, his t-shirt clinging to a well worked body. His short back and sides made him look like hired muscle or club doorman. He wore a cheap green army jacket, the type I’d buy from the market. The Hospice only dealt in expensive clothes made to look poor. This was authentic market product. Who was this guy? Who was I to him?
“Why do I know you?”
“The Hospice, you know me from the Hospice.”
“You’re a writer, aren’t you?”
Now is no time to split hairs. It is useless to tell him that I used to be a writer but I’m now retired and solely practice research that the monkey in my living room writes up for me. Best not to mention that and the fact that I recently turned down the club’s offer to write for them.”
He drew me near.
“They were trying to recruit you weren’t they? You were the one who turned them down. Right?”
He really had been watching that day. And he said they and not we. He isn’t in the club. He was like me, not one of them.
“Who sent you? Are you here for the same reason I am? Did Doctor Zimm send you to stop these people from perverting his name?”
I now fully appreciate that this guy is most likely a literary terrorist and wonder how he sees it best to stop a bunch of dumb middle class yuppie parent anti drug protesters from promoting their cause with a song that every free thinking literati considered a pro drugs hymn revelling in melancholy.
“Doctor Zimm didn’t send me. I’m an independent. I’m here to write.”
He pauses and loosens his grip a little but does not let go.
“Of course the doctor would never double book a job. You’re here to observe. Is that the deal? He sent you, an independent here to observe. He didn’t send one of us, he wanted an impartial.”
Now I’m sure he’s not from the club. Maybe Underworld but I don’t dare tell him how independent I am. I nod.
“You understand this is my job?”
I nod again.
“My job, you don’t get involved. Right? You can observe and that’s it.”
I shake my head. I don’t want to get involved.
He pauses in such a way that worries me. It feels like a deep breath you would take before delving deep under water. The shouting and protesting has not dulled. The irritating noise of the crowd, a polite riot, continues.
“What is wrong with this scum? How can chasing smoke rings and escaping on the run be a bad thing?”
“Yeah, I feel sick too.”
“This is our generation’s ode to a nightingale.”
I try to imagine this man reading poetry and even if I can’t I can feel his anguish and conviction. I tell him we are indeed fucked. We are fucked when no one can see what we see. Our thoughts and memories turned to someone else’s fiction, no longer anyone’s collective idea of truth. If enough people feel it, say it, does it make it true? The truth? A truth? Is this how we shape our reality? Did too many people believe something different? Is that how we got here?
Dragging me with him along the subway footpath he says, “Let’s deal with it.” Somehow I don’t think he means we should deal with it in a coming to terms sense but rather a more drastic course of action.
We rush up the steps out of the underpass and as we hit the air, the Underworld’s hired lover of poetry, rushes toward the crowd. The crowd is now chanting, “No more smoke rings. No more smoke rings.”
The underworlder lets go of me and I do not want to be around to see him complete his mission. I hope he doesn’t see me turn and run. I imagine him seeing me, cursing me as a coward but too focused, too charged to bother doing anything about me. I run and this time I do fall down the underpass and at the bottom bounce, the way kids do when they fall. I am straight back up and pushing my way through a toilet door. As I stop the other side of the door I hear nothing and will have no memory of hearing anything. Thirty seconds later I hear the explosion.
I enter a cubicle and sit on a toilet seat. I will stay here for a while. I do some of my best thinking on the toilet.
A few moments later another bang startles me off the shitter. What must have been the noise of a door being half kicked off its hinges is followed by scuffling sounds of a group of men dragging a struggling figure. Wet slaps of punches, followed by muffled moans and grunts resonate from not so far away. I open my cubicle door to peaking proportions but see no sign of anyone in the same washroom. I could leave and know nothing more about it. Wherever the noise is coming from it isn’t in my line of vision.
At first I think it must be some fallout from the chaos above. These people have started a war amongst themselves, let them fight it out. I go back to my cubicle, I don’t know why, perhaps to check I’ve left no trace of myself here. Whilst there I notice a small spy hole through to another room. It may once have been a shower room, now muddy white and disused. Without getting any closer I know that this is where my raucous noises came from. I try to view from a distance, to see little pieces of the scene, to only know small pieces of the jigsaw, one at a time. At first I only see shapes moving and then I focus and at the far end of the room I can see a rag doll of a man, slumped in and tied to a cold metal chair. As I see him, I press closer to the wall. All thoughts of hygiene are lost. I press close to the wall, feeling the scent of this place rub off on me. I feel stuck to this spot, seeing clearly and unable to move because of that.
The rag doll man no longer moved. He had a black sack over his head and would have been better off staying that way. As soon as the bag is yanked from his head he’s greeted by a bright light thrust into his eye. This elicits strange mumbling sounds, perhaps a curse or two.
His attackers do not seem like rabble and they do not seem like the organised polite protesters either. They were well dressed and organised. They looked like the Spanish inquisition gone night clubbing. Their captive looked like parts of him had been put in a blender. It looked like someone had stuck a knife into the side of his face and had endeavoured to slice it off but had given up on the notion only to leave a gapping flap of skin. The man shoving the torch into captive eyes seemed to be the ring leader and looked the best dressed of the lot. His jacket was blood splattered but his hair, immaculately sculpted in spiky bed head fashion, remained untouched by it all. He was obsessively well groomed; you didn’t need to see in detail to know. He was clean at fifty yards.
“What the fuck did you think would happen today?”
The ring leader spoke softly and as he did the bloody mess in the chair already looked dead. A kick in the shins was needed to diagnose any signs of life.
“Fuck you,” was the whispered reply as blood spat from his lips.
“No, fuck yourself because you were the one who wanted this. You were the one who walked into Smith’s books and set fire to Smithy’s top ten paperbacks.”
This very memory, in a broken man, ripped to pieces, conjured a chortle from deep within. Whatever happens now he’d have that memory and he’d die with it on his mind.
“Have you seen the sort of shit that gets published and into the charts?”
It must have been such an effort to say it and he must have hoped it would be the last thing he said. He wanted to transform at that point from a human full of words and thought to a bloody mess of beaten meat swimming in a nightmare of pain, in a flurry of violence spiralling to the end.
But he wasn’t there yet. As the ringleader pulled hard on his fingers, dislocating a whole hand full of digits in one pull the screams heard were horrible gurgled sounds. I did not move. I closed my eyes but could not and did not move.
“We would have let you live and overlooked your other discrepancies. We would have sent you to rehab for your other crimes.”
Sounding more official now, “You were caught in possession of illegal banned product X-b-o-x 360 with the intent to make money.”
The dead man said nothing. There was no repenting now.
“You’re a grown man and you play computer games? What the fuck is that about? This shit rots your mind. Are you trying to destroy the human race with this crap? Have you ever even read a book.”
The answer came in a nod.
“If you loved books you wouldn’t want to settle for a lesser form of entertainment, let alone the base worst and criminally sick.”
The answer is a dying man’s conviction. The room is silent in appreciation of the fact. He’s able to slowly and defiantly say, “I do both.”
And as he does the noise, the quick explosion of two bullets punctuates those words, the noise and the ringing in your ears wipes out all other sound, the doubtless wet squelch of bullet through skin and bone lost in the echo.
And I understand. Rooted to my toilet, ready to spew, I understand now that all media sucks, there is nothing left good enough to die for and with these people around soon there will be no good books left to read. This isn’t the gloaming. This is not the creative death of everything. This is way beyond the gloam.