Excerpt Thirty

Snorkelling for Truth in Pools of Mendacity

The truth has a certain pure, unblemished quality. It stands alone, testament to its own greatness. Monolithic. Its permanent solidity surrounded, in horticulturally primped borders, by downright stones of shadowy intent, delivered from the environs of hell by pre-dawn eruption; a panoply of lies; part lies, dull greying lies, wet lies, dry lies; little liettinos, corpulent bulging lies with existential implications…an endless infinity pool and horizon hugging sea of lies, lies, and damned lies.

Despite the peer-shovelled pressure from the lies and the liars and their enablers and suppliers, The Truth must be honoured… venerated.

Must it?

Absolutely!

Kirk James and Atoll Goodmanson were on a mission so secret that they weren’t fully aware of it themselves. Conscious cognisance was grasped at but never clutched. With each other they were familiar strangers dwelling in discrete frames. There was something between them that they were too metaphorically fingerless to tacitly connect with.

Kirk, Kirk assumed, had been brought up under military auspices, his father a colonel in the Army, but this was a lie because there was no child Kirk, Kirk had been Dave as a child and Dave had no father and his mother was, seemingly, a simmering narcissist who tried her best to minimise Dave’s intrusion and airbrush out Dave’s biological sperm donor. It was Dave’s isolation within the community that enabled the NMBS corporation to award young Dave, an army barmy cadet, a training trip to an unnameable destination for works experience; to plant seeds and massage genes that would lead the troubled Dave towards being a military super-asset. That was Kirk. Dave, on the other hand, deep in the forest of trauma the absentee Kirk had led him through holding his hand, clasping it to an automatic weapon, was empty of potential and positivity. But Judith and Atticus provided succour and he sucked it up in vast drafts and the emptiness wained and Dave grew; not back, but into new lands of intent. His paranoiac fortress had open house days; proposing a new viewpoint that painted vistas mankind had never before achieved except in fantasy and fiction. Kirk, the prospect of Kirk, turned from rock to sponge as Dave became his own man.

Dave never knew where he’d been for two months in his early teens; ice cream… stomach pains…ice cream, headaches…ice cream, ice cream, I scream… Time shared with a boy of similar age, the son of the people in charge of the manically secure facility, Mary Goodmanson and Marcus Godstrand. His name was Atoll. 

Kirk performs a last hair pamper and strides with conviction through the door, down the stairs and on to the street, as though less oomph would not achieve functional perambulation under the current ambient laws. An approach carrying a certain weight of truth. At street level he was Maxitrillion Sweatpatch, the Man Who Echoes Silence. Kirk had vacated, Dave was long lost and what was now was now…and the now was wow…so to speak, in the ambient parlance.

He almost bumps into Atoll as he spills out into the street, ejected by the edifice they’d egressed simultaneously. Maybe they do connect in minute degrees of space and time… A fleeting glimpse of the Atollesque dies; seamlessly giving way to his comrade in silence, General Private Masquerade.

‘Mask!’

‘Max…’

Well, they’re here now… so… onward to work.

They didn’t like to talk a lot, being silent musicians; sound meant pain, but there was unsaid stuff; rich veins down in the mine, waiting to be tapped… tapping away, extracting encrypted data that culminated in corrupted data; machinery churning and thumping miles underground in shaftless caverns.

Kirk, no Max, was thinking hard and fast… their soulless, silent, metronomic steps had beat them nearly to work. What could he say, a word or a phrase, to let the Atoll (he suspected dwelt within Mask) know what Max didn’t even properly know, without alerting the system.

Atoll, but more likely Mask, was doing likewise, shovelling salty sea from the rickety doldrum possessed boat, vainly sensing the gold-laden wrecked-galleon below.

There was, undoubtedly, something they both had in common; an unawardable great prize wrapped in layers of frustration, exasperation and tease; hidden in plain sight, locked in an open-proof cabinet.

What it, life, felt like to Atoll and Kirk, underneath the presence of Mask and Max, was that they’d been marooned on a desert island and decades had passed almost unnoticed and in that time an island state had grown and flourished and now they had to apply for visas to leave the place, but there was an unfathomable bureaucratic impasse. The same types of who tormented Franz Kafka had now moved on to them.

‘Are we on the mission? Is this it, or are we still sleepers?’ Kirk said to himself, hoping to include Atoll. But wait, who is Atoll, he is Mask, and who is Kirk, if not Max? And what mission?

They could see the outline of the club through the dense fog, they had arrived. Madam S. would not be kept waiting. Punctuality was woven into the fabric of this existence, if ever any reason should occur as to why they couldn’t make it on time, time itself could slide up and down to meet them, guaranteeing the vital function of punctuality.

They were musicians, demonically genius in the silent music genre, it took all they had to give to maintain that facade; they approached it like athletes, they left their hearts on the pitch. Their primary existence reason was to play, and play was work, and work funnelled them into the space from which they resonated with the universe… in silence.

Max went his way down the steps into his office, bar, lounge, container, rehearsal space and Mask went next door to his. Both were met with representations of the system running the show. Madam S. fluctuated to meet the vagaries of both individuals. A new day; a new repetition…

The aim of all this, an invisible, deadly current, ripping around in the undertow, was deletion. The Pause overrode the deletion conclusion. The omnipresent/absent, omnipotent/inactive Pause sat atop the high table, drowsy yet smiling, causing mayhem via the instrument of nothingness.