Excerpt Five:

ATOLL NOW!

There is no night and day now. The time-marking return of sunlight, taking over from its shady opposite, after journeying around the globe; that concept, nurtured from habit and superstitious meanderings, was falling apart, succumbing to entropy. 

As the late and lauded Marcus Godstrand once said, ‘…and…like under artificial light, when in reality it is dark, technology has perverted nature and created a new dimension.’ Proving, at least, to Atoll, nothing really makes any sense; pester any potential conundrum with intellectual incursions and get a faceful of delicious bullshit-flavoured nonsense. Leaving things alone was Atoll’s new ‘doing stuff’. He’d vacated his memory slots and, to him, ‘fine’ was, as ‘fine’ did, but memory itself was straining to do its job under impossible circumstances. 

Memory and its associates, appear from the crackling, like a weak radio signal from a station where life is being lived; congas danced, with stupid hats and stupid people and stupid life; bold, great, stupid life; promising just about everything…but delivering just a crackle.

Atoll’s past is like a forgotten invention waiting to be rediscovered. His future, although solid in theoretical planning stage, could betray itself at any moment and slip beneath the roiling sea of expectation.

The voice came first; distinctly feminine. 

He’d been trumpeting his own uninspiring inner thoughts high up into the vacant auditorium. Interrupting his remarkably trivial outburst she said, ‘You could clean up your act. Why do you settle for this crumby bedsit?’

He considered answering, (in defence of crumblessness), continuing to throw his voice as far as it could go…but what was this new voice? An ally…a way out…a way in;  slithering around like a snake, forked-tongues of potential? On examination, though, crumbs were evident; there was no credible crumblessness defence. He hadn’t realised the crumby bedsit had transferred itself to the West End. The scene setters had done a marvellous job. 

The intuition he was feeling, leant towards merely repeating what her voice had just said in order not to forget it. Then he forgot; hopefully anticipating repetition. 

Then words came to him and he saw them leave the nest and fly out into the world, but whether they were connected to the question was not certain.

‘This is it for me…’ he said, feeling a flutter in his heart region; a wave goodbye, ‘…now.’

‘No, no, no, no…,’ she said, introducing an unwelcome negativity into the bedsit, stage and auditorium. ‘Her voice echoed from the auditorium, or there were more of her repeating what this one had said. He looked up and no one was visible there either, in the dark.

‘Anthill, why are your eyes bleeding?’

Were they? Were they eyes…or cameras?

‘I…Atoll…’

‘Your eyes aren’t bleeding, Artall. It was just a joke; lighten up. It is our duty to be a pervasive swathe of bright sunlight, not a cloud peeking excuse for a moonbeam.’

She had disarmed him. Her voice had. The timbre and intonation, and ups and downs and ins and outs, of her speech entered and filled his needing parts and helped themselves to his stuff.

‘I don’t even know why I am here; I can pretend, but not know.’ It wasn’t what he thought he would say but it was what he said and he had to exert foundational trust in something. He was running with it.

She had him like a rag doll, and immobility seemed like the only defence. At least that was one story unfolding.

‘What do you want?’

‘I can’t tell you, Armhole.’

‘Anthill, Atoll.’

‘I am going to make you pretty pleased I’ve ruined your auto-performantial, soliliquial, membranous…’

She seemed to run out of made up words as though wherever they were being fabricated could not produce them quickly enough.

‘…Jerk-off,’ she concluded.

Every time she stopped talking she appeared to disappear, even though she had never appeared in the first place. Atoll, assuming she’d gone; hoping she’d gone and hoping she hadn’t gone for various reasons, felt a rising panic. 

Then…

Curiosity enters stage left on a charger. It plugs the charging lead into the charger, which actuates a series of bewildering lights that must signify something, if only the sequence and flash-rate could be deciphered. All encompassing and uncharted at once; this could be everything and all one could ever need to keep one entertained; if it were not for extraneous factors; extraneous factors, curiosity wants to sell you like an illegal substance; getting to know the extent of your allegiance; generating a code to break the ice and escape the fiord of dead dreams. Was any of this making sense? Could it, even, ever?

There is a timid knock on the door, which Atoll knows rather than gets audio of; he goes to see who it is without thinking. He’d never even seen the door. But as he was opening the hatch, revealing a familiar and frightening, at first, intimately, chillingly familiar and frighteningly, chilling intimate figure, he remembers the door’s planned concept: a barrier; he didn’t want an unknown self barging in and asserting itself as though the outside world was a platform from which to dominate and oppress the actuators of real control, in the real control room of existence. He had to tread carefully, preserve his current nowness from attack. There were two base threats, despoilers: fear and yourself, to Atoll’s mind. Marcus represented both. All Atoll really had was his supply of controlling narrative to check any insinuative incursions; poisons, viruses, potions, spilling innocuously into his world of now.

‘What is it?’ she’d asked, as he’d travelled the stage into a backstage area out of her voice’s control. ‘Are there others?’ 

He realised she could not follow him, at least, to there. The rest of his space had been invaded, but here was sanctuary. He’d tell her everything that went on in the conversation, of course, but on his terms—he felt a kick of egocentric adulthood the like of which he’d never encountered; game on, he muttered liplessly, as he negotiated the door situation.

‘Atoll, I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you.’

‘Likewise.’

Silence.

Her muffled voice calls, ‘What are up to, Athos? You are worrying me. This is not supposed to be,’ betraying her descent into a fearful state.