Excerpt Eleven:
Life Takes it’s Atoll
In Atoll’s Theatre of Life; in the space-time selected by a Greater Power for his continued conscious experiential encounters; with the Sun dethroned as the sole trader of light, Atoll was trapped, trapped by freedom: freed up and down and sideways, lubriciously slip-sliding with freedoms; bounded only by the limitations of freedom; trapped by relentless Freedom and her officious minions.
Things (AKA stuff) came and went, bored or aroused, in Atoll’s bedsit and the surrounding environs. The bedsit itself was now more of an exhibit of how he used to exist; a historical tribute to the survival acts he performed while his extinction was the Puppet-Masters’ intention. He’d slipped through the cracks of the gunfire from the executioner’s bolt-gun.
He rarely slept there anyway and wasn’t sure if he actually needed sleep; suspected it was an old habit that was choking on its own vomit, but still managing to transact oxygen from Mother Air in some kind of side deal.
Now Atoll had several areas he could visit, spend time and earn it back, drench his ego in the flux of his forward progress from society-formed patsy-clown to supreme soul of his own collective existence…
It all had the feel of a game; albeit a game done till death. Final, unless death itself turns out to be another level in the game, you know, which it could…conceivably.
The whole Sybil thing had started with a whisper and grown into a creative construction site that enabled Atoll to entertain thoughts otherwise restricted from his awareness.
She wasn’t real real, not yet anyway…
Although from one pinpoint of voice she now saturated everything Atoll regarded.
Atoll would frequently make a foray out into the deep heights of the auditorium and sit in isolation, trying to imagine imaginary auditors with whom to engage in existential discourse, richly and colourfully.
The theatre itself had become extensive and housed many disparate spaces, but it was the doors, that sealed the parameters of the edifice, unmovable and reinforced with curiosity, that Atoll could not rid from centre stage. The soliloquy of the dead door, unhinged; commiserating the loss of never being able even to be ajar.
The question was always, where is Sybil, and the answers were always, everywhere… and, nowhere. Atoll had one state in which Sybil was a concept, and if not continually remembered, she started dripping away with entropy. In another, let’s call it sleep, although that cannot be what it is, she was there with him, more than with, much closer, more an over-involved other half.
Through intuitional, quasi-conversation he’d arrived at a list of things to tell (the once Atoll, then Marcus, and now…) Atticus. Their last visit was all about Atticus getting animated about his burgeoning and clarifying identity. A mere renaming had been taken as rebranding and a shit-load of muck-spreading bullshit rained on his pastures. Nutrition for his wannagrow new self.
Atoll had possessed questions then, but a feeling decided to save it for the next visitation, which was now due, and Atoll was honing the sentences he was going to unravel to gain some meaningful control of Atticus’s yet unformed ambitions.
Sybil was still in line for a communication elevating her from quarantined bystander to queen of modification of the global societal narrative. All she knew was that, as things stood, life as we know it, and as dictionaries currently define it, was going to be mashed up and fed in choo-choo trains to Oblivion and her pack of ravenous oblivioneers, industrial grim-reapers and sadistic assassins.
