Senselessness [Parts 1 & 2 of 5]

Mar 08, 2008 - 12:01 PM PST


Preface.
They say a circle is completion, it represents an endless cycle with no clear beginning nor end. The human life is represented by the number nine, as nine is a symbol for the end, it is the last single digit number on a number line. A circle, a nine, this is our life, our unwritten history. The mind in its vast complexity can be divided, boiled down to a simplified idea, the five senses, as our primary source of interaction. A star, bound by a circle, augmented by the number nine. The senses, the cycle, the end.

Jack. The Mute.

Jack, the protagonist, another voiceless cadaver as we see him now. Jack wakes up, he eats, he shits, he sleeps, with other insignificant events raining down in between. This is who Jack is, this is all he is. This was Jack, anyways, but now he is dead. How did Jack die? Well, unfortunately, that lies deeper in this book. That is Jack's nine, his circle remains, but his star disappears. Tragic really. In the morning Jack woke up, no sounds come as warning to anyone around, Jack is alone. Isolation. Despair. Silence. Contempt.

He liked the simple life he led, the seasons changed but he did not. Jack tried to escape the small empty box that is his apartment complex on the 38th floor. He enters the hall, the elevator, the lobby, all boxes. He makes his way to the street, accented by skyscrapers, endlessly high walls that lead only to emptiness.

Down the stairs of the subway entrance, same time, same train, same destination. Jack glides into his place on the public transit moments away from his normal day as was normal for him. He entered the Philip Morris building and took an elevator up to his office in business suite on floor 27. A cubicle, just another box isolating Jack from the rest of the world. Eight o'clock, five o'clock Monday, Friday, no change no alteration, even the menu in the cafeteria and its daily meals fit seamlessly into his schedule. Nothing excited Jack, nothing was sporadic, it was the same thing day by day, week by week, decade by fucking decade. He knew this, his fellow employees knew this, his tie wearing white collar boss knew this, but he didn't care, no one cared. Jack hadn't taken a day off for six years, he feared change.

Communication down, no spoken words for fourteen years, his mode of speaking was inter office email on his inter office network, no words in, no words out. He said nothing and they said nothing, just working eight hours a day, forty hours of each week spent in the dead of quiet. Some people work to get ahead, to amplify their position. The harder they worked the farther up the ladder they climb. And then there is Jack, no promotions, no raises, no bonuses, Just the normal pay for the normal day. Jack, as you may know, feared change. Little did Jack know, that change is inevitable. Ignorance is Bliss as they say.

Jack left his box in one of the metropolis' mile high walls with no goodbyes and returned to his box in a box, resting easy on the assurance that tomorrow is another day. It was four in the morning when he awoke in a daze, he glanced at the clock, it was blinking twelve AM. A power outage, just fucking great. This was not in Jack's schedule, not anywhere. He feels his way around his shit hole apartment, there must be a short in the wiring, or maybe it was the fuse box. It didn't matter he wasn't going to be sleeping anytime soon. Saturdays gave him no joy, the constant cloud cover reveled no sunlight. A perpetual state of darkness, an endless circle of clouds and rain. He feels the pack of Kamel Reds calling his name, stumbling to find a lighter. Sitting on his couch, the smoke filling the empty void of his room, cigarette after cigarette, light after light, the constant inhale, exhale. Clockwork. Perpetual. Repetitive. Contempt.

He opens his fridge, the cold pushes the smoke back away from the sterile area where his food was kept in constant cold. No variable in temperature, no heater, no ac, just cold day and night. Jack resembled his refrigerator, neither in shape or size, but in work, so cold, so unchanging. That night, Jack was restless, insomnia was induced by the constant buzzing of the streets far below him, and the hollowing pain of his loneliness.

He arose from the plain sheets of white that where seemingly harmless to the eye of a sane man. But Jack was not sane, not now, he looked at his life, upset by the emptiness that eerily through him into rage. Ripping the sheets off his mattress, taking them under his arm. Into the kitchen he ran, struck with rage and panic! He tore the mocking refrigerator from the empty white wall, and picking up his cigarettes and lighter as it toppled helplessly to the ground. Thud. He took into hand the alarm clock that awakened him each day and threw it at the sliding glass door that held him imprisoned. Barefooted he walked over the shattered glass. On the balcony he tied the sheet to the aluminum railing, lighting his cigarette he pushed himself back into his cell. He took the lighter in hand, the spark led to flame which he used to inflame the couch. Back onto the balcony he led himself in a flurry of agony.

He reached over the hand railing, tying the sheet around his neck, and flung himself over the railing, then suddenly he began to fall. The force of his mass caused the aluminum railing to follow. Surprised, that was the expression he had as he fell 38 floors. He hit at terminal velocity, splattering at the bottom of a dumpster far below. He laid there lifeless, the blood spatter surrounded him creating some sort of new age art piece, Art Jack-o. Impact, closed in by the aluminum bars of the railing. The box, the bars, his own prison, now a casket. His tomb of solitude. Cold. Painless. Death. Contempt.

End[1 of 5]

Jane. The Blind.

Jane, a girl like any other. She liked jewelry and shinny things, the meaningless, mundane and material. Jane loved to look good, there were those who adored her, and those who ignored her. Obsession is a deadly vice, and that, as we will see, was her downfall.

Jane would wake up every morning and stumble restlessly to the bathroom that sat perpendicular to her bed. It is there she would stay for what each morning felt like an eternity. She would shower, perm and apply. She would put up the mask that she flaunted elegantly to the masses. She would leave the house every morning, already fifteen minutes late for work. The drive there she would stare endlessly into her rear view mirror, check her fake lips, her fake skin tone, her fake eyes, her fake hair. She would wear earrings of monstrous size, augmented by large jewels, precious stones, and rare metals.

Jane worked as a model for high paying lingerie companies. She had never experienced ugliness. Her whole life she surrounded herself with beautiful people, casting the ugly ones aside. She felt it necessary to make it quite obvious that she was far more prissy, pretty, and perfect than all those she surrounded herself with. Her husband was a high paid executive for some multi-billion dollar company. He paid for his wife to stay that way.

She loved her job, her life, her world. All of these things from an outsiders view were, too, as perfect as she saw them. She would distract herself from the ugliness of reality by buying high fashion, the richness of a capitalist society. Her life was not full of the complexities that many face, she was born beautiful, and all she had to do was stay that way. She didn’t want life to change, all she could handle as far as change goes was changing her clothes her hair herself. No matter the alteration she still had everything. This, she thought, is what the world owed her.

At work, just like the rest of her life, she was all about the glamorous, the fabulous, the excessive worth of the logically worthless. She would sit there, half naked, taking in all the awe that she induced. When you are paid for nothing, money loses its worth. When an actor who entertains is paid twice what a doctor does for a year, for a single film, you can look at everything and realize that maybe society is a little fucked up. But, it is, as it seems, the workings of our world. But the world can get fed up with the bullshit just as easily as anyone.

It was a Monday, she was all pampered and pressed, ready for another day of being paid to be pretty. The car ride to work, however, would cause her world, the fame, the fortune, the beauty, to come crashing down like fires from a mountain, flowing lava of vengeance unto the world. There she sat in her half million dollar car, looking deeply into the eyes of herself, or at least, into the eyes of the person she flaunted around under the guise of her make-up, jewelries, and perms. Then it happened, her world met an apocalyptic end at the hands of her own self obsession. With her mind distracted by her own beauty, she failed to notice that she had ran a red light, sliding into high speed traffic. Herself, her car, both once beautiful, now sat as mangled mass in the center of a four way intersection.

It took two weeks of recovery before she was up and moving again. Once the bandages fell, she looked horrified into a mirror, what was this scared, disgusting thing looking back at her? Was this the same person who two weeks earlier was at the top of the beautiful world? She looked at herself, and now saw what two weeks prior only existed in her heart, ugliness.

The pain of her injuries had subsided, and that pain was replaced with a new hurt, one that burned deeper, a pain only experienced by those that had everything, only to be reduced to nothing. Her husband abandoned her, her work abandoned her, she was alone, ugly, poor, and very, very pissed off.

She took the little money she had and got a room in a dead end motel. The smell of mold piled out as she swung open the door to her room. She immediately rushed to the bathroom with her make-up kit, the remains of her past life. She looked at the mirror, in the past it was a dear friend, now it served as a constant reminder of her mangled deformity. She opened her bag and applied cover up, layer, after layer, after fucking layer. She looked back to the mirror and noticed that her eye liner was running, she was now crying, as she sat in her agonizing pain she took into her hand the expensive hand bag of make-up that had previously augmented her beauty and threw it at the mirror.

She sat for what to her was an eternity, crying, surrounded by a mosaic of broken glass . She looked down and saw the deformed mass that was once a face, only this time, the shards of mirror each served as individual reminders of her own hideousness. She reached out for a broken shard of the mirror, taking it in her hand, admiring the edges, studying its shape, its sharpness. She held it tightly, and with the steady grace of a surgeon attempted to cut away the hideous mess that was her face as it is now. The blood dripped slowly from her cheeks, mixed with tears. Her hands were now shaking in intense agony, she felt so alone, so ugly, so tired. She thought to herself that the world was now as ugly as her room, so she took the glass to the bottom of her eyelid and with two swift slices, her eyes would be made to never open again. The world, to her, was already over, she was abandoned, sad, and lonely. She was dead inside, now she would make her body match her heart, first with ugliness, and after one last slice, in death.

A picture of her found in a news paper two weeks later inspired a painter to draw the scene of her in the bathroom, bloodied and lifeless. This painting was sold for the exact amount that she, as a model, had made. Her whole life all she had to do was be pretty, now in death she was praised for her ugliness.

Senselessness [Parts 1 & 2 of 5]


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Mar 08, 2008 - 20:27 PM

devonair on