The next morning began as the one before it had, painful and plagued with a hangover that left him feeling like he had something trying to dig out from inside his frontal lobe. He awoke to the smell and sound of the blow dryer as Steph went through her morning ritual. The wide eyed crazy look women have when applying make up to their eyes in the mirror, spray deodorant odour, choking smell of over powering sandalwood and floral notes of gratuitously applied perfume. He rolled over pretending to go back to sleep as she leaned over the bed to kiss him. This regularity in domestic routine made her feel complete, not because of comfort or shared intimacy but simply due to the assurity of ownership it provided. Levi emitted a grunt while pretending to be between asleep and awake in response.
He laid there after hearing the front door close and her steps echo down the stairwell. Once he was sure she was gone he got up and began the ritual as he had the day before but this time omitting any opioids instead doing push ups to beat the hangover back. He would need clarity, and the uncomfortable seventy two hour march of getting at least one depressant drug out of his system had to start. With that done he showered and began to clean the flat in a fashion that wasn’t a normal clean up. He began to look for things he had touched and handled; using all purpose cleaner to wipe away any finger prints and get rid of all traces of himself. Steph had two days off in four days time, and even without Problem showing him he knew that while she was walking to work she would be on the phone to her parents arranging the trip down.
He had to mark in his mind each object and item he would commit never to touch again and if he did to inconspicuously wipe down immediately after. He wasn’t overly concerned about a forensic follow up as he was hoping the death would be chalked up to natural causes. But he refused to rule out the risk or abandon the meticulous habits he had developed when he begun to live his life like this. Certain things would be unavoidable and would be sterilized last minute. But for now cupboards, windows, chest of drawers, stray pubic hair, computer keyboard, spices jars, condiments in the fridge, tissues used post coitus thrown behind the head board, every detail had to be seen to. If he was figured out and a forensics team ended up in the flat he had full intentions of making them work for their pay.
Once he had finished and showered he threw on jeans and a button up shirt and headed out to go buy a coffee and work through in his mind how he would go about the final moments. He was never prone to emotional extremities but he was beginning to feel a sort of morbid excitement. Anger, happiness, sadness, sexual desire, all could be sensed but he never felt them in the way he saw others experiencing them. It wasn’t until he began taking lives that he began to actually feel heightened states of anticipation or satisfaction, but even these weren’t what he saw as happiness. He actually didn’t have a full definition of any of those normal labelled feelings.
Problem had been silent, still brooding in his mind most of the morning but Levi began to sense a returning to normal. As he passed people on the street and made his way to the bus stop he felt Problem beginning to examine those he walked by. Though he was sparing Levi the details he knew Problem was breathing the passer-by’s in through Levi’s eyes and breathing out their experiences and memories. It was a comfortable feeling for Levi as he sensed the thing in his minds disposition in the same way he would sense putting his hand in a bucket of ice or over a hot flame. Problem didn’t bombard him, but rather stayed in that place that Levi could only guess was similar to where he went to hide intentions and thoughts. As Levi walked along he almost felt like skipping in the autumn sun, but instead settled for embracing just feeling content taking in his own simple observations of the busy yet architecturally unsatisfying Winton high street.
It wasn’t that Levi disliked the township. In many ways as a satellite town to Bournemouth it had a distinct and separate identity. It didn’t have the feel that many towns in Britain had. There was no old site of a Roman village, no Norman or Saxon church, no centuries old pubs, no grand Tudor or Georgian structures or even cottages. It was nothing but heathland in the early 19th century and grew up as a place in which the population who were considered low by the more wealthy Victorians to live in Bournemouth. Levi felt many of the townships in this area of Dorset were just intrusions into the open heath and woodlands of the New Forest and in many ways a blight on it.
As Levi walked along Problem would occasionally remove a building from his field of vision and in its place would appear an image of heathland. Dirty people in nineteenth century garb walking, backs laden with planks, a small allotment growing sweetcorn next to a building that Levi couldn’t identify. At a crossing on the main thorough fair a black land rover faintly had an overlay that was transparent of a carriage pulled by one cob horse who looked malnourished with a Victorian dressed coachman screaming with whip in hand at something unseen. Problem did this in a fashion that wasn’t forceful or disorientating to Levi. Unlike other times when it was violent and blindingly vivid, the things problem was placing in Levi’s field of vision had a transparency to them and were fleetingly swift and almost murky. Levi understood that the murkiness to the images was Problem trying to see how far he could reach. There were limitations with Problem that weren’t fully understood by Levi. Problem had shown him Alaric at the gates of Rome, Alexander clumsy pursuit in the suicidal heat of the Bactrian hell bent on destroying Bessus, Roworth with head bent on his running horse once Waterloo was clearly decided. All of this with such clarity then a fading.
There were times he could sense Problems frustration as he tried not to reach back but rather out. What he was doing now wasn’t frustration or reaching out or around; but rather Problem poking his head out of the hole in Levi’s mind that he disappeared into when he became frenzied or brooded. Often it was where he went when he wanted to hide away from a counter argument to frustrate Levi mid debate. Often these delicate probes and stretches Problem underwent brought him a sense of comfort. It wasn’t the usual mode and mood of violent surging, grotesque quips, or mad cackling while screaming sinister suggestions, and blinding Levi by overriding his field of vision. It was almost gentle and brought about a sense that Levi cradled something small and delicate almost making Problem feel more comfortingly and tangibly human; rather than deranged and close enough to all knowing to be unbearable.
‘Where are we going?’ Problem sent. ‘Coffee at the antique shop in Christchurch. I like the old couple that put it on.’ He replied. ‘Oh, the wild mushroom obsessed old shrink spiritualist guy. You’re obsession with sweet geriatrics and tendency to play the sweetly nauseating grandchild they never had is right up there with married men who go out of town to play drag queen while they tell their wife their away on business. You know you only like hanging around old people because it scratches some deep buried itch that you’ve got due to not being bounced on a knee or told grandfatherly wise tales about the fuck ups of youth poorly lived. Most of them are monsters in truth.’ ‘I’ve thought about that as my reason but that’s not it. And by the way you’ve got aged monsters just like you’ve got young and middle aged monsters. I think it’s something about the moral aspirations of the society they grew up in then as to now. Granted it was pretty much all bullshit and you still had the same philosophy in regards to that generations architects’ ‘What like control and advance for the greater controllers and call it the greater good’ Problem interrupted sending weary cynicism. ‘Yeah, but the normal day to day rank and file didn’t endorse the most corrupt aspects of change in the name of convenience. Entire institutions had to be built around selling it to them and even then it wasn’t an easy sell. It wasn’t until principles were seen as an annoyance and counter progressive in the rebellious generations of the mid to late sixties that it slowly came to evolve to the fuckery it is today.’ ‘Societies fault says the madman with the voice in his head. And hate to break it to you but it was heart breakingly easy once televisions, microwaves and mass communication came along. Had the technology been there like it is today the same jump ship, swipe right for a boner scratched would have occurred at the same speed sans the skinny jeans.’
Levi quickened his pace more in response to balancing the dialogue in his mind with movement weaving past the few crowded shop fronts and occasional junkie or drunk that frequented the area. ‘Fair enough.’ Levi sent as he plonked himself down on the bus stop bench. Seemingly staring off into space though he was aware of every passing car, pedestrian, and the wasp crawling across the plexiglass bus stop advertisement. He was winded from the walk and upon realizing this began rolling a cigarette. ‘I’ll concede that. But it doesn’t change the fact that the vulgarity of desire still wasn’t as socially acceptable. That generation showed restraint that today we aren’t capable of. Yes frenzied racially motivated, religiously motivated, politically motivated bad shit happened just like it does today. But not with the benevolent nod of the greater majority that it receives today or even half the sanctimonious preciousness we currently see applied to the results of query with logic involved. Had extremist Islam presented itself as the hyper misogynistic death cult it is in the fifties here, there would have been extreme measures driven by people like the old folks we’re going to see today to stomp it out. Not this bullshit of we can understand it, wilfully ignore statistics, atrocities, government endorsement of it, simply because the guy who wrote the policy was the first black president or in trend. To get away with the Tuskegee syphilis experiment the government and big pharma had to lie. Today all they have to do is remind us of a less progressive time and throw some emotive music with moving imagery on a YouTube video and boom, Syrian, Yemini, Pakistani kids killed by American drones forgotten. Jihadi Johns propensity to spontaneously combust, snip clitorises, kill fruits, and swear death on anyone who disagrees is forgotten. The new trend is it requires understanding not action. So many are crippled by demanding that they be understood, isolated from the fact that it’s like listening to a million people have conversations with themselves all at once and then demand that the topic of their discussion is the absolute. You must agree otherwise you’re a crazy, unhinged, racist, fascist, or any number of things. It’s like collective fuckin schizophrenia had a baby with cancer and the fruit of that union is eating humanity one bite at a time.’
‘Collective schizophrenia? Again I point out this is coming from the man with the voice in his head’ problem sent with amusement as Levi’s bus pulled up and he took one more greedy drag on his smoke before flicking it away. ‘Then go the fuck away.’ ‘You’d miss me.’ ‘Probably not. But the point is that what we now call law isn’t the law. That generation had a belief that stemmed at least from an aspiration based in shared morality or at least a sense of it. Not some sort of collective consent on aggression towards anything that could be different than current trend.’ He felt Problems combination of amusement, frustration, and exasperation building. ‘You’re in danger of sounding like a bad country song with your love of the rapidly decaying relics from the days of yore. Let me stop this semi intelligent lubed Toby Keith inspired hand job in its tracks though.’
With that Problem sent images of things that made Levi wished he hadn’t even engaged him. Two grinning German soldiers stripped out of their shirts, one holding a blood stained knife in butter yellow sunlight with a man hung by his legs from a branch; partially skinned muscle tissue and pearl tendon exposed with the yellow fat of the top of his buttocks running with rivulets of red blood. A group of well dressed people with beige trousers, white shirts; with women in summer dresses sat down in chairs under the shade of a tree. On a stage in front of them a small naked woman with dwarfism standing next to another woman in a hospital gown with rickets was being explained with quiet clinical gestures from a man pointing at genitalia and breast, her expression empty and almost docile. The banner read in large letters “Eugenics and Health Exhibit”. Then a woman screaming in her restraints as a doctor inserted a large hypodermic into the lower part of her abdomen above her uterus sterilizing her. A Vietnamese woman being beaten and raped by a soldier while others looked on half undressed awaiting their turn; then the man who was raping the woman aged, hair grey in a kitchen lovingly holding his wife. Groups of National guardsmen opening fire on a group of union protesters. An Argentinian child stepping on a land mine and the detonation occurring as delicate tissue separated and took flight, head and skull splitting slowly in the vision as Problem drew it out as if to make a final point.
The sending was mere seconds but Levi had to lean forward where he was in the front of the bus squeezing his eyes shut. To any other person it would have seemed he was coping with a stomach ache. This was his natural response to tangents of this nature from Problem. It wasn’t that he was overpowered by any specific emotion as much as the sensation was chaotic and similar to the feeling he got when he first rode a roller coaster and it went into a fast plummet. ‘They all attacked what wasn’t the trend dumb ass in a much more outward way than we do today.’ Problem sent ‘The body count was high as it always is despite the methods being more ham fisted. Today people on one side say traditional is good and safe with pure intention, the other side says that repetition is bad and strain themselves to find the repetition of history in action and convince themselves their progressing past it while both sides are ensuring the repetition will continue simply by their continued existence and stance. Any time Utopian easy access causes combine with religious zeal and sincerity in any of your societies, suffering and a high body count are the result. You only speculate on humanities short comings for the same reason the rest of the idiots do. You’re trying to make the time you’re bored seem meaningful and you end up sounding like all the other ass klaxons you bitch about. In truth it's wearying and fucking annoying.’
Problem had started the sending with a feel of an adult talking to a child but swiftly degraded into irritation. Levi sat up and stared blankly out at the passing cars and buildings having regained his composure. There was an elderly woman at the back of the bus but she was daydreaming out of the window and was paying him no attention. Without word Problem sent him the repeat images of Steph’s Parents house, the hallway, floor, kitchen, then the cupboard, Tupperware container, cereal. Then children on a bus in sweltering heat packed with a man going up and down the bus in motion leaning in sometimes speaking or offering assurance through a shoulder pat. Then a hospital in Kano Nigeria, a long row of beds in a seemingly modern facility with young bodies faces racked with pain or laying lifeless, their faces flashing clear individually. Then Steph’s father sitting in an office in front of a computer with the screen writing “Patients from control group 2345ax infected with the augmented varicella zoster were non responsive to retroviral trial 2 of the Z Track Vaccine. 16 deceased due to respiratory failure, 5 due to MenB, 4 survived with complete loss of vision and impaired neurological functions.” Then the bodies being stacked bloating in black bags as the children were shipped north again. Four sitting at the front as the bus rocked forth staring blankly with the same man offering assurances. Then her father in front of a small audience in what seemed to be a crowded room with a small award on a podium, tuxedoed delivering a speech with a kind smile and gracious green eyes.
‘Remember why we are here’ Problem sent just as the bus came to a stop at the top of Christchurch high street.
As he stood up he had the combination of head rush and nausea slammed into him simultaneously, as so often occurred when Problem overwhelmed him in this fashion. In the two steps to the bus door it began to clear and by the time his feet hit the pavement he was re-centered. He knew problem was right and though he wanted to be angry he struggled to muster the emotion and gave up. He knew it was going to be a hard week but for now he was going to enjoy life and have a beautiful day.
End Part 3