The day those terrorists spilled blood in the name of religion, everyone that incident, the whole city went outraged, terrified and flamed in the impregnable hatred after the extremists took lives of innocents killing, them in turns; it was novelty and unforgettable-after the shock, some vow vengeance, some cried, some said that they are praying while others woven themselves in front of their TVs to watch the grotesque show of a global phenomenon happening in this city; these all happened in the unison of a larger ground, we all were hooked by the inevitability of our virtual social spheres.
The day it all went wrong was the day we observed the face of the problems: the extreme face of misconception. And we all were there with those who suffered within the reach of our thumbs. The extremists stood like Satan, after the great 'disobedience', sprawling under the Sun. their eyes looked baffled by the sense of emptiness, like a ventriloquist's puppet, the words they spoke were distant, muffled, afflicted by the Gargantua of absolute nothingness. They stood that day with arms wide open, like bands of cowards marching under the solemn bridge between paradise and reality.
There were everything and conjuring apathy of nothing in the air of our city and for the whole nation. It was religion that created that problem, some went on to clarify; some blame the lack of religious affiliation in bare lives. The art of blaming slowly took over like an overwhelming overstretched 'other' perverse events of mass depravity. We slowly forgot the blood and gore that we sanctioned our children to see with fathomless horror and entailment of their own world's sake. We forgot that life has always been a meaningless mass of virtual realities. We are the truth bearers of indefinite simulacrum that are true to their own sense like all beauties have blossomed in the eyes of the beholders. The attack was the beginning of the soaring end of secular living that we have known for thousand years.
"Do not be afraid; our fate
Cannot be taken from us; it is a gift."
? Dante Alighieri, Inferno
"…Oh" was probably the last humanly thing I heard before I rose up to the proposition that I was dead and became the liberated ghost of myself as my body seemed floating like a helium balloon. The moment you are struck with the confinement that free will is an illusion, the moment it all came down to you, hitting hard, with boiled adrenalin rush. I looked at my new-found freedom and saw the sun shined higher than the usual. "The Judgement Day", I thought would do me 'gone astray'. I looked down and saw, Onu was lying lifelessly on the bank of the lake. It all looked psychedelic; conjuring all the luminosity of effeteness, while paradoxically drugged my eyes to the hindered image of life and death projected, people rushed to me. They had looks of widening wonder.
One asked, "…..a..areyou okay?" . That sums it up! Damn! I was alive and 'kickin' and Onu being the privileged dead one lying on the sacred bench of transition from the land of the living to the dead and unheard; firmly relegated to past tense. I tried to breath heavily while the images going back and forth like an oblivion mantra. All I could remember before becoming a self-consuming zombie was that, life was given to us billions of years ago and, oh dear lord, what have we done with it?
The Commencement: "Words, words, words."-Hamlet
Is there always an end to 'end with' that concerns all of us overwhelmingly? I took the liberty to watch from the front row and let my friend die last week fathomlessly and now writing my version of the story: being alive! As Nietzsche would put it, "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how"; that's how I figured, I probably have survived. The last word, before we went to the zero sum was a paradoxical: "God Oh". I didn't remember whether it was Onu or somebody else from an alternate time statute said that like in Space Odyssey, "My god, it's full of stars".
I work in a news agency, the one of kinds you see these days, mushroomed up hither and thither; Onu worked there with me too. Our work place pronounced us as the word slaves, information hounds; the news agency doesn't care what we feel about incidents that affect us. Words murdered him as you will know how when my version of the story is unveiled. I am a pessimist, I view the world from the eye of the vulture; ready to eat the dead as soon as the heart lay off, lungs retire, stomach cuts off making shit and the brain farewell the world of materialistic ornamentation. After Onu's death, I do not see the world as a fair bargain, not because of what has happened to him, but the events that have been running my conscience wild. When I look at my partner's face, I can see love but couldn't replicate it on my own--within me. Let me tell you the story, the 'why' and 'how' it all came down to the utter existence of being.
It started with a story of a road accident, not the one I was involved in. It always seems intriguing to me that, people gets curious when they see folks mangled bodies in accidents. Its within our system of perverseness that make us see the death of others. That morning, I was looking at a news of an accident that killed all the family members except that little baby girl. The necessary 'tisk, tisk' was about to flip through my mouth, then came Onu looking agile and fastidious about the surrounding like a conspirator. The following conversation between me and Onu is a half remembered, blurry and disengaged mostly from my part. Onu was an ever-depressed man, and an amid narcissist; I generally never listened to him that much. Now I realize, I should have listened. I should have given concerned ear to those blurry sentences that came out his mind.
"Hay man", an almost whisper came out of his mouth.
I was busy looking at that news. Think about it, the only life lived in the puddle of blood was that innocent soul, incompatible to appreciate or reject the gravity of that event. The baby, as I was looking at the picture was crying, without knowing what really happened to her.
"Hay N", that's my name, Onu whimpered this time.
"Uh…A-ha", I replied showing complete lack of attention.
"LISTEN BUDDY", he put more emphasis into the attempting whispering. "We need to pull the lunch break trick again", he said in a haste.
"Sure thing, but the boss won't fall for it again", I said, looking at an article for business startups for new entrepreneurs.
"Let me handle him this time. He is going fall for it this time and every time. Just say yes", he said in an overtly determined look on his face. That was my first hint for giving him a rejection nod. That was my mistake, not to say no to him. Instead of that, I said "Hell yeah. Go afar. We need break".
"you will remember….", Something he said, that I skipped with the equal enthusiasm he dazzled himself with. From the corners of my eyes, he was gone, gone with the suffocated wind trapped inside our office. Human interactions with my buddy Onu was always abhorring; he kept hiking in the streets like an ostrich on the loose, failed to appreciate what to do after what and how to begin something.
He became my friend because before we knew each other, before we became friends; we were at the same time in love with the same girl and got ditched. Due to our common embarrassment, he proposed me a toast; he offered me a cigarette. While we puffed, our sort of brotherhood started. He has an annoying personality combining of: a racist, an anti-feminist, a judgmental personality and most of all he hates people who have money. He thinks that, all the money is the world are somehow connected to their family prosperity and significant loss over lack of judgments made by his father and his uncles.
The lunch break was one of our way outs from the office. Sometimes we all need escapes from our reluctant workaholic spaces. The hideous business of making profit is too much for simple people like me. Our work at the news agency is hectic; you really have to meet the deadlines all the time. There are a lot of writing, reading, re-writing, partial reading, then writing again, researching, interviewing, organizing and most annoyingly sitting around in the cold news room, beating the invisible satanic clock which ticks like the hell bell.
Nietzsche once said, "That which does not kill us, makes us stronger", in a partial sense he was right about the modern world but here we live in an ardent world of the informatics. Techs killed us not long before the first Terminator movie was released. The naivety of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland is a nevermore reality we don't believe in. Who cares what poets write. So, we invented a passage of destruction by announcing Onu as a cancer patient. Our boss was quite dependent to us. He has developed the habit of living on the credit of other people. We seldom took the chance to make ways for Onu's regular checkups. Here was I again, in the front row.
The reason why I am talking too much about Onu as you know is the necessity relation to the central core of this story: his death. There is one final thing about Onu. Before his death, he killed a life in front of my eyes; his own clone. I was again in the front row watching that murder happened. We were given the will to roam, and what have we done with it? It will always burn like charcoal in my heart, like inside a devoid soul's bosom-
"Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns."
The Halfway point: "We live as we dream--alone...."
?Heart of Darkness
Since I last put my pen into paper, some terrible things happened. Initially it was my office that called me to join. The work in the office was hectic. Everything seemed blurred. The news headlines missed a few 'W's. The day we took the lunch break, the day Onu died-lived inside my memory. When he came to me, the news of our "lunch break", it never seemed unusual; it was morbidly peaceful and normal. Onu never told me his plans of murdering the clone.
He acted alone until that "supposed day", after-noon he told me to take him to the hospital as he was not feeling well. We went to the section coordinator for an early leave, he hesitatingly accepted because in a news agency if you lose two of your best reporters at the midst of the day, and you have developed the habit of sloth, then you found yourself in the hand of misery. But we were through and precise while making the excuse. We said, we were merely taking the lunch break.
A thought came to me while we were on the way to the old part of the city. A thought So vehement that it could rip off the millions of inhabitants of this old city. A state of ramification between the old and the new thought of politics. Last week we covered a news which shows that there are some underground movements against the city authority. The city is being bruising itself towards an eminent end. So as the people of sort. Onu interrupted me in the midst of thought.
(2nd part of the article will appear in the next issue)
The writer is a literary contributor