Excerpt Four:
MARCUS GODSTRAND
Marcus Godstrand was not included in the logical actuality of what was happening. Perhaps he was a midwinter bear disturbed from hibernation, or maybe he was a chick, far from fledging, distant from his nest.
A sense of alarm came first from sources outside his own cellular conglomeration; rushing around the makeshift office spaces, fumbling speedily with dire matters; destroying computer drives, shredding documents, ending stuff.
Then the misty muddle of first awakening cleared a little and his own hurricane sea of alarm rose, in an engulfing, gargantuan swell.
The end-of-days activity of an Armageddon movie with a genre bending cop show thrown in…
Was this a fly on the wall drama set in a country house hotel spa, an English country house hotel spa, spa hotel?
With reassembled conversational data he ascertained that it was everyone’s last day on the job.
‘Too many speeches unspoken and too many futures bleak and broken,’ he repeated; it would make a catchy song; with some work. He’d set it to music if he were musical. In the future, people will be able to become musical despite innate amusicality. The future held some kind of super-massive, indecipherable excitement for Marcus: a great pleasure waiting, in fluffy ambush, down the line.
A voice presented itself from within the soundscape of the busy terminus buzz; an auditory focus tuned in.
‘Atoll Goodmanson, sir, are you ready for your debrief now, we have to go soon.’
‘Go, where?’
Who is entering my space? Marcus wondered. Is this guy threatening you? Questions naturally arrive, that he lets pass…meditation techniques; auto-mind discipline: Marcus, Marcus, Marcus. The fact they think, guessed, he’s Atoll Goodmanson makes him feel a specific queasy on top of the general queasiness.
‘Good question, don’t ask…I’ll give you a few more minutes there, bud.’
What was the question? He’d forgotten.
‘No, I’m ready.’ He wasn’t ready, he was outstretching a hand for a lift up out of the barren hole he’d just be born into, up onto the platform, the stage—he had a vital performance of great importance to undertake…He had to stand up and be counted: …One!
As Marcus shifted, it became clear the human body was something one had to get used to. He had spent so many years without one; muscle memory had waned into a vague reminiscence.
Was he identifying in himself an unexpected fear of the magnificence of the all-imbuing potential? A whole outer world, marvellous and limitless. The freedom and privilege made him feel that it was too good to be true. He stood, metaphorically, in a demonstration of whatever; outside prison gates, restrictive cages behind him, and in front, the inhibiting cage of unorganised chaos: the magical world of potential: a punch, a kiss, the wheel of fortune spinning wildly. Anyway, whatever he meant it stank of fear: Fear. Encompassing, encircling battalions of Fear, encamped entrenched. How did this situation arise? And how can he make it unarise?
‘I can tell you…that I am here to save you…save you all,’ he shouted, except he was beginning to mistrust his own certainty. Was he being pranked by his own certainty? Uncertainty hiding its true identity in the dark; posing as her opposite.
He needed his head back, but where it was going to come from was anybody’s guess. He put the invitation out there with a whine and laboured breath. ‘Give me back my fucking mind you callous bastards,’ he screamed to begin, but tapered off as he realised that what he was saying was off; inappropriate.
Incoming!
An individual person, a leader, swept in. All the energy in the room zoned in on him, stood to attention.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, my gratitude goes out to you, but we have little time. Disperse. Orientate. Organise. Resist. Good luck to you all. Godspeed! And may we meet again, one day, as victors. And with that Dame Vera Lynn of a mouth-out, the signal to abandon ship sounded. The room emptied like bathwater, until the space was filled only with Marcus’s ever more suspect impotent seed of potential. Had the future just been cancelled?
Your experience of your own mind is a law unto itself. Sub-normal or super-normal, you have no relative comparability. Your mind just keeps an even keel, whether you are adrift in the doldrums or being tossed on to rocks by a monstrous sea. You are the only normality you know.
Marcus has too many memories for one mind to cope with; they joust for the colours of truth; there’s outside interference inside his mind.
Marcus stares at the dust on the surface of the desk in front of him. He imagines dusting; he imagines Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill in Colorado, although it’s probably a mountain, out there, in the wilderness. He is alone; he needs to be alone. This eventuality is so perfect there must be some benevolent force behind it.
His batteries are charging; there’s forward motion, however miniscule…
He is not concerned with who he is or why he’s here because of a certainty that some playbook etched in stone is being stored in some great hub of intention somewhere. This certainty radiates warmly amid the ambiently cold intellectual seed-bed he is sprouting from.
In one perfect moment the sky lightens and the horizon moves ominously, distant, shimmering; like an unbreakable promise. Then clouds over as the moment passes.
Waves of memories roll in, rising, falling, spilling on to the shoreline, continuing out to sea in law-abiding, wave-like order; information deposited; heading back for more…
The jigsaw puzzle revealed its form…
Atoll Goodmanson, Marcus Godstrand; he was neither of those two. Two out of three of him were imposters…
Suddenly, and with a thunderous shudder, the sea stops lapping the sandy shoreline. Everything stops…
‘Charlton Fucking Heston!’ he blurts out, startling the silence, ‘They did it! Cerebral fucking Real Estate.
Excerpt Four (b):
Marcus notices an envelope pinned to his belly area and switches back and forth between it and a food stain. Hunger and curiosity mingled, talking across each other. He couldn’t make sense of what they were saying until hunger wandered off to the buffet, and curiosity led him, with a curling finger and a seductive gait.
He opened the envelope.
‘Mr. Goodmanson/Prof. Godstrand,’ it read, ‘Go to the manager’s office.’
His first thought was that he had done something wrong. A key card slipped out, landing on the floor. As he went to pick it up, fog fuddled his head, he crouched a while to recover. When he stood up, dizziness necessitated the support of a desk.
The manager’s office, to which he could not gain access until he remembered the card he held in his hand, contained a laptop on a desk. Another note instructed him to play the clip that awoke from hibernation when he hit the desk with the chair as he sat down. He assumed it was for him and gave it his maximum attention.
It was not for him. It was intended to be, but the originator was making way-off assertions regarding his identity. He’d happily adopt the personage attributed to him, just to find some refuge from the feeling of being outcast, but it just wasn’t him. His resistance came from naturally-spawned actuality; his acting skills were not up to being a professor of anything.
‘I hope you recognise me,’ the clip said, ‘…Mary, Mary Goodmanson. By now you will be settling in to a new role, which is your old role buffed up, supercharged, perhaps… I can’t constrain the excitement I feel at the place we have arrived at, if indeed we do arrive here, with our objectives intact.’
The recorded upbeat figure, who he had never seen before, gave him the sense she was motherly and trustworthy. An incoming call was signified and he answered it, or curiosity did. And she was replaced by a live version of herself, older, grim-faced…her objectives presumably in tatters. She looks into the camera and then puts her hand over it and the call ends. The younger version of her, paused, full of hope that’s not going to pan out, frozen on a high.
Curiosity pulls up in a monster truck and shouts through a sound system for him to climb aboard, but as he does, the monster truck turns into a child’s toy, and it ain’t going nowhere; maybe the end of the drive. What drive? That imaginary one?
He wanted to sleep. He didn’t see what all of this had to do with him. She was looking for someone else, some person who did not exist. He thinks that maybe, due to the stress of whatever shit he’s been mangled through, that he is being squashed by the gentle g-force of a disobedient gravity.
He tries to Google ‘gravity and G-force’, but the internet is not connected, things had to be way, way past dire.
