She

Kolya was on his way out when he caught a glimpse of the Man. It wasn’t his lavish attire, bespoke and tailored with taste which caught Kolya’s attention. Nor was it his good looks, bordered by a sharp, angular jaw and topped with an entropic quiff.

What attracted Kolya to this Man in particular was the way he drank. He was sitting next to Bob, whose acrimonious divorce from both wife and job had redefined his life as one of drink and drunkenness. Whilst it was the drink that made Bob drink, cyclically drowning his guilt with glut, the Man drank with purpose. He would stare at the shot in front of him, his expression stern with restrained anger. In one swift, directed motion he would scoop the shot with his fist and pour it down his throat. This ritual would be repeated with each successive drink poured by the bartender, whose pitiful whimpers did nothing to stem the flow of alcohol.

“Hi”, said Kolya, dragging a stool and seating himself by his target. The Man slowly turned to Kolya, the creases along his face accentuated by an expression belying a proud curiosity. Kolya instantly regretted engaging with the Man. The absurdity of the situation had silenced him into ineptitude. He looked anxiously to the bartender, who raised his eyebrows in silent support.

“So you want to know why I’m drinking myself to a stupor?” said the Man, his baritone delivering the words slowly, giving each syllable value. His eyes were fixed on Kolya’s who could see his own reflection swallowed in the empty pupils. Kolya looked away in bewilderment; the intensity of the Man was overwhelming. He hungrily downed another shot before turning to Kolya and began his soliloquy.

“I was sitting by the jukebox over there with my business partners celebrating.” The Man had raised a pointed finger, aiming at a retro-jukebox glowing in the corner. “Our recent success was the reason for our celebration… but it was I who they were toasting. They thought I was a genius, a phenomenon of the business world. With each drink they raised their voices with praise and then indulged their envy with more praise. They satiated their absolute hatred of me with these theatrics, and they revelled in their collective hypocrisy. I absorbed the attention, fuelling an ego I imagined actually existed. We were all guilty of this charade of dishonesty and spite, and our lives defined by it.”     

The Man paused. His staring eyes were now burning with feeling, his emotions volatile with drink. Kolya was taken aback by the Man’s flamboyancy. It was almost like a theatrical performance and it seemed like the alcohol had sharpened it.  He had another swig before continuing.

“I justified a life constructed on lies, apathy and plain boredom. I rejected morality, ethics and even God for this depravity and I flourished in it.” Kolya saw that one corner of the Man’s mouth had twisted into a content nostalgia. His eyes glistened as he lowered his voice to a whisper.

“There comes a moment in every man’s life that defines his existence. The days leading to it are all in preparation... and the days that follow are remnants of its glory. In the midst of our debauchery, ‘She’ walked in. Her awkwardly adorned frame swayed apologetically, as if embarrassed by its own frailty. Her face… although plain… had betrayed a sense of tried and tired innocence, exhausted by the burden of unappreciated purity. There seemed to be an intensity in her eyes… they shone in the depth of her greyscale silhouette as she stood in front of the lights.”

“I don’t know why, but seeing her as I did… it shook me to the core. This façade… this outer shell I had so carefully moulded over the years instantly melted away. I felt exposed and overwhelmed by …shame. I was embarrassed of who I was, what I represented. I was a victim of my own ego’s delusions; I truly believed I was worth something…but underneath the lies…”

His voice trailed off into silence. He was staring ahead into a mirror behind the bar and in a monotone said, “I don’t recognise the man in the mirror. He’s wearing my clothes, but that isn’t me. Why is it that I’ve spent my whole life aspiring to be my own imposter?”

Kolya didn’t know how to react. He slowly looked at his own face in the mirror, the Man’s words echoing in his mind. He developed a sudden revulsion for the reflection. He recognised it as his own, and it was this familiarity that terrified him. He wanted to distance himself from himself, and realised the futility of it all. Those hollow eyes, the gaunt face encasing them were his forever. He panicked… why had it only taken till now to gain insight? Who was the face in the mirror?

The Man smiled as he noticed Kolya’s perturbation. He nodded at the bartender, who proceeded to pour Kolya a drink. Kolya glared at the Man, then at his reflection… then proceeded to gulp the shot in front of him...

(Below is a poem I wrote a while ago along a similar theme)

Chimeric in both Mind and Soul
I sit, my head a mess
Another battle, Mind and Soul commence
My eyes are deafened by darkness
And ears are singing total silence

I sit alone and contemplate
As my heart pumps lead
There is no sound left to hate
Except the voices in my head

I sit, a mere prisoner
Of a war without a goal
But I can't escape my masters
The voices of Mind and Soul

I sit, I listen as the war grinds
To a halt, and so does the pain
Soul triumphs over Mind
As one Waxes, the other Wanes

I sit, a sigh of relief
That it ended this way
But I know that Mind
Will kill Soul someday

The Abyss

Meursault opened his eyes. The sky above was hollow, its infinite blue stained only by the sun. His body was numb, the heat of the desert throbbed below him. He closed his right hand into a fist, gripping the hot, fluid sand that made his bed. His mind was fogged; he couldn’t understand why or where he was. As the minutes passed, his sluggish consciousness attempted to make sense of it all.

He could hear the raging fire. The smell of kerosene fumes masked that of charred meat. It annoyed him, how unsurprising this all seemed to him. The acid taste of this inferno laced his mouth, finally forcing him to sit up.

In front of him lay the mangled carcass of the Airbus A330, alight in a triangular inferno. Trailing the fuselage was a long and straight trench, the result of the airplane’s journey as it hit the ground. It was alight throughout, the kerosene trail a blazing scar in the desert landscape. Smoke billowed from the scene, a top-heavy tower of black leaning with the breeze.  

    

Meursault slowly stood up, his bare feet swallowed by the sand. “Where are my shoes?” he asked himself, shifting his feet in and out of the ground. He remembered taking them off before take-off. The man beside him had praised their brand, said they were ‘durable’. He cursed his luck in losing the shoes, his eyes unblinking at the fire ahead.

Then it hit him.

That man! What happened to him? What about the other passengers?! He looked around, his eyes frantically scanning his surroundings. His stiff legs cycled as he tried to run through the sand, circling the fuselage. His heart was racing and continued to do so when he completed a lap and realised, to his horror, that he was alone.

The adrenaline seared through his body. He began to piece together the events leading to this nightmare. He was overwhelmed. Where? How? Why?!

His flight had taken-off. He had placed his shoes under the seat in front of him. He was watching ’Singin’ in the Rain’. The movie had just begun, and was interrupted when the captain’s voice was suddenly broadcast within the cabin; a high pitched, panicked voice instructing everyone to ‘adopt crash positions’. Without warning the airplane plummeted from a height of 30,000 feet. The movie continued to play.

How long did this descent last? Meursault stared into the line of burning kerosene cut through the dunes. It had felt like an hour, like he was in suspended animation. Gravity had ceased to exist. Passengers were planted to their seats by seatbelts, their arms flailing in the air, snatching at the swinging oxygen masks. Screams drowned out the occasional sob and the rattling chassis responded with creaks and groans, the engines roaring. The man next to Meursault was still. His eyes were clamped shut and his hands gripped the armrests, his knuckles white. He was reciting a prayer to himself. The lady behind him shrieked with every rattle, lamenting the premature end to it all.

As for Meursault, he was silent. He couldn’t explain this lackadaisical sense of apathy. It was almost like he didn’t care for his approaching death. The more he tried to search for some form of emotion, or feeling, he was greeted with emptiness. He looked at the horrified faces of the other passengers, hoping to empathise but without success. He felt there was a void, an abyss which he was standing on the edge of. It felt familiar, like he was balancing on this very precipice his whole life. He would have never dreamt of making the leap before. Now it seemed like the most natural thing to do. Why had such a convoluted sense of liberty appeared now? Why had he accepted his potential non-existence with such ease?

He realised he was a coward. He had lived his whole life in perpetual despair, unsure of his value in the world. He felt like his life was without purpose; a sequence of irrelevant days at the office, the culmination of poor choices. It was an absurd and meaningless existence, yet he persevered. He always hoped life would adopt him for what he was meant to be. This impending doom had suddenly made the choice for him, and as things stood in his life he didn’t seem to mind.   

Meursault’s thoughts were interrupted by a laugh. In amongst the chaos, he had not paid attention to the lady sitting across the aisle from him. She was middle aged, brown haired and wore a smart grey suit. She held a hand over her face, partially covering a smile. She wore headphones and was concentrating on the screen in front of her. She was also watching ‘Singin in the Rain’, and giggled for a second time. It was a dainty laugh, one that would have been infectious in a different setting.

The man next to her was hysterical but she didn’t flinch. Meursault couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The woman must have felt his eyes on her because she slowly turned around and looked at him, a remnant of her laugh still traced on her face. Their eyes locked, and he saw in the infinite darkness of her pupils that very same abyss. His surroundings dissolved around him. It was just the two of them, floating in silent darkness.

Slowly, her smile expanded, her white teeth showing. To Meursault’s horror, she began to laugh. It was a syllabic laugh, each intonation a note in a tremulous cadence. Her dimples were contoured with wrinkles, her eyes gleaming with fire. Terror gripped his heart, and he wanted nothing more than to get away from it all.

The last thing Meursault remembered was that he had unbuckled his seatbelt. He guessed that this was probably what had saved him from the crash and thrown him safely away from the inferno. Was he grateful that he survived? He couldn’t tell. He felt that fate had pulled him out of the abyss and back onto the precipice again. Will he ever have that freedom from responsibility, humanity and most importantly life itself to face his mortality again?   

Mersault was answered by the distant sound of a helicopter. He looked up and saw its incoming silhouette on the horizon. It looked like a fly, floating on a mirage. He felt a tear roll down his cheek as he realised he was to be saved. His irrelevant past washed away, its absurdity replaced with hope for a justified, fruitful future.  Life in its inevitability would always give him a chance, whilst death was a journey of no return. He shuddered at the thought of the laughing woman who had chosen the latter. He walked towards his future, leaving the precipice behind with the memory of that laughter burning in the fuselage.