Excerpt Seventy-Five:
New Trainers
Part of Kirk wanted to strike out, if not with precision lethality, then with unceremonious social unnicety; a yearning within beckoned and spoke tongues; intimations of authorisation to blurt out nets of vileness to bring down common decency and choke out its last breaths for the sport; for kudos; a kudos felt only from the machomachismomuscularbraincloggedmanfulnessmob.
But there was no corresponding refurbgreenlight for Kirk to be offensive, to stir the shaken cat juice into the feathery pigeon seltzer.
Camping on a ledge of an emotional cliff face Kirk managed to maintain a stance of social unobtrusiveness due to his Refurbishment Orchestrated Cerebral Refuge Centre (ROCRC). It was a Superimaginary Health Centre (SHC); a haven, peopled by his kind of people (the interactive agents therein played by versions of himself).
He waited in the sparsely populated park that surrounded the two-storey building hoping for Platinum with gold trim access to the centre, meaning he was still the Refurb guy. In a time-frame that made sense on paper but lost coherence on any other medium, a man, who he’d never not seen before, clutching a briefcase, a specially designed clutchcase, approached, as always, and, standing in front of Kirk, studiously removed a sheet of paper, folded it and placed it on the bench beside him. Saying something like: ‘I got some new trainers’, he ran away at speed. Kirk was a steady runner, relatively fast, but that guy was olympithropic. Kirk watched him disappear into an area that nominally manifested a bowel-like domain of the park before picking up the sheet of paper and unfolding it.
With a sense of relief, more than anything, Kirk read: Entry Permitted. Access Protocol Open (APO)… ‘New Trainers’…
Kirk entered the bricky, boxy centre, walking through the Mussoliniesque door surround, a nod to some architectural genre or other, and tapped in his appointment code, ‘New Trainers’, into a tickerstation just inside the reception area. He saw himself behind a reception counter across the mock marble flooring; and he saw varying selves queuing in the waiting room and passing through like background actors. He witnessed some subtlety, but also saw a toe-curling over-the-topness that he hoped he’d be learning from…
‘Dr. James will see Mr. James now.’ Heard and read on Tannoy and screen after a wait that could have been either discernibly heavy or light on time.
Kirk made his way to Dr. James’s office, passing a version of himself he had a redlining revulsion of…and several uniformed characters he admired for their personal accrued silverliningstock. Kirk smiled to himself: he was in good hands.
Kirk wondered why, given the reality of the imposed irreality, they made the corridors so long… He eventually arrived sooner than expected. He knocked and a green light shimmered; an unlocking sound clunked and the door relaxed…
‘Ah…Mr. James!’
‘Howdy, Dr. James. How are you, you old fuck?’ Kirk said, uncontrollably, unwittingly exhibiting a symptom for Dr. James to assess, before he’d even sat down.
‘What seems to be the problem Mr. James?’ Dr. James asked.
As if he didn’t know…
‘I have urges that I know contravene the regulations laid out by Refurbishment directives one, six and eleven.’
‘And?’
‘Twelve.’
‘And?’
‘Four…’
‘Four…yes!’ Dr. James said, in a manner that threw the bedside manner out with the bed pan. ‘I see…I’ve seen…’ The sly doctor mused as he looked through notes and missives outflowing with biological intricacies and narrative, nudge-poking.
‘You know…these urges are nothing to be ashamed of…relatively speaking… you do know,’ the astute doctor said, eventually.
‘I think—‘ Kirk began, trying in vain not to line up with the inevitability of a bout of mansplaining; cut off at the pass for his own benefit, ultimately.
‘No, as long as you keep them internalised and don’t communicate them you should have no shame to wallow in. But you will bring a tidal wave of defecative shamesewage upon your pristine beach; browning the white sands, as it were, should you socially disseminate such malodorous declarations.’
Kirk already knew everything the good doctor was telling him, the revelation was hearing it; out loud, face to face, indoctorum prognosiosis. Kirk recalled a training mantra from Refurbishment Orientation Training (ROT) and felt cured.
The agenda was being re-set straight. Clarity buffed up to invisibility plus. If everyone had a Refuge Centre and Doctor with a medical mind-prescription regimen, then Refurbishment wouldn’t be the social and military advantage it was. At this point Kirk realised the cure was in belief only; he was still sick with aimless pointlessness that did not suit his stats a the Refurb guy. You can only become the tools life throws at you.
On his way out a male nurse, Kirk himself, dressed as a female nurse, comical if it we not so personally affectatious, handed him a card, which read:
‘Kirk’s confidence was all upsy-downsy. Post treatment upsy will be in the ascendence.’ It was stark and seemed to reveal little but it spoke a lot; a lot of sense. He knew he was in good hands.
Post health check processing brought up a few odds and trailing legs.
Kirk had found himself unable to mention something that had been on his mind about Judith, the past Judith and the present Judith, it was about the…he couldn’t say. It was not a conceit he could reproduce into a coherent communicative outspurt. An internal super secret of secrets.
It was along the gist ridge route to a false summit: there was a room where the Prof. lay…in a medically arranged bed, off the ward, for terminal and pseudo-terminal cases. Flowers wilting, grapes chewed by wrath…Kirk could not go there; he could not visit the dying Prof. But Kirk could not stop dreaming about a fantasy-procured visit: the Professor turning over to a groan and sighing to thoughts of what might have been and what might not be happening.
Every time Kirk customised thoughts that were lying around in the ideacupboard and dabbled in their emotional reconstruction, the Prof. stirred. He perked up; minimally but detectably, it was as if someone had offered, and was wending up the foothills to a full delineation of a miracle cure. When Kirk dropped the emotional toys and closed them inside the cupboard the Prof. deflated and unconsciousness clouded him into the shade.
But…
Kirk had not left the creepily duplicitous doctor’s consulting room.
He was still there…in the clinic. Kirk, disbelievingly adjusted to the situation…seeking to find adherence to a solidity that resisted the emotional tremors…
Doctor James tapped on a keyboard and read a monitor leaving Kirk to think the thoughts he was trying to keep secret. It was a trap though and Kirk used his own Refurbishment tricks on the Refurbishers; the whole Refurbishment Industry from mad idea to unrestrained application. Unconsciously the James’s battled and locked will’s.
‘I must admit Mr. James. I am worried about the secret communication aspect of the communicative outspurt, report briefing you submitted. I do hope we are not keeping secrets.’
Dr. James knew Kirk was keeping at least one secret, but he couldn’t prove it.
‘No secrets here, Doctor.’
‘There is just one thing I have to ask you…’
Kirk was nervous about the incoming, but it seemed to have moved on from secretiveness this and secretive that…
Then…booom!
‘Are you keeping a secret?’
‘Yes!’
Ouch! Kirk had no defence. ‘Well, yes and no. I mean I believe there is a secret in there somewhere, but I don’t know what it is so technically it can’t be a secret I am keeping myself. If I knew what it was it would be…but then maybe I’d tell you—‘
‘You wouldn’t tell us.’
‘No, I wouldn’t, but that is moot, due to the fact I don’t know what it is.’
Dr. James had tried, but had he succeeded? Kirk was unsure whether he’d passed or failed. Was keeping a secret the object of this challenge or was giving it away the right thing to do?
Dr. James wrote several paragraphs in Kirk’s notes and made his personally perfected exit nosies, but was carrying on with the note making as Kirk slid out the door, his tail, not between his legs, but drooping in post-trepidation metaphoricalness.
Kirk went out and sat in the park. He looked down at his feet and yearned for some new trainers.
