'We are here' graphic novel created by Oliver Shuster

a graphic novel Created by oliver shuster

WE ARE HERE

“The Self is a circle, whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”

Carl G. Jung

“The centre leads to love.

Soul opens the creation core.

Hold on to your particular pain.

That too can take you to God.”

Jelaluddin Rumi

Part One

Hugo woke to a tremendous churning nausea.

His clothes were laid out ready for him as always: a complete set for each day. It always seemed such a shame to remove them from their hermetically sealed plastic wrap.

He took 165 millilitres of water from the kettle to make coffee and then dropped a single egg into a pan of water. Food is nutrition.

He would not consume anything with superfluous flavour or too much resemblance to anything living. This necessitated a severe and methodical approach to the problem of food.

Hugo’s table was big enough for a single place which was only ever used for breakfast. He stared directly out of a small window which framed a vista of uneventfully grey early morning sky and waited the remaining thirtyfive seconds for the proteins of the egg to denature before taking his seat.

His attack of nausea rose in the same way every morning: the apprehension of all the flooding faces just beyond his door and the thick scent of people was enough to knot his stomach and douse him in cold sweat.

He gritted his teeth. He disposed of the remains of his meal and deliberately rinsed, washed, rinsed and then dried his cutlery, plate and cup before stacking them neatly in his cupboard.

He focused on the now familiar steps of his graduated exposure therapy as he shunted his hand-held vacuum cleaner over the crumb-bearing table.

He commanded himself to breathe; he did so in shudders, desperately

swallowing down ill-tasting saliva. As he wrapped himself in protective raincoat and donned thick-soled safety shoes he visualised himself safely contained in a ship that rendered him invisible.

Sweat dried and prickled his skin only to be replaced with fresh flushes. He took one last deep breath before plunging into the sea which flooded with menace past his door.

In every face was the pestilence of human stupidity and its stink

wrapped itself around and clung to him. He had long since perfected an algorithm designed to limit his exposure by determining the fastest route to his laboratory. It was dependent on such variables as commuter traffic, weather conditions and the time and day of the week. Today it lead him across a department store lobby, between queuing traffic to cross the road at a 37° angle and then through a restaurant’s fire exit hidden beneath strewn refuse at the end of an alley.

So far his method had saved him approximately 52 hours, 19 minutes and 14 seconds. Even so, his short commute still caused him profound stress driving his eyes to twitch in protest and his eyebrows to gesture wildly. His involuntary and alarming facial gestures only served to attract further unwanted attention.

He arrived gasping for breath at the Institute for Analysis and Study of

Space (ASS). He gave thanks to the cold and lifeless laws of the universe which had again allowed him safe passage through the gauntlet of chaos and meaningless coincidence known by the profane as ‘the outside world’.

He thrust his identity card before him like a talisman to shield him from the polite greeting of the security guard who resolutely welcomed him every morning.

With a secret smile as he reached the elevator, Hugo decided he would (for the second time that week) treat himself to a thirty-two hour work day and spare himself the trauma of the intervening commute.

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FO Y D RA U NALYSIS & ST

Hugo avoided colleagues through an elaborate and well-practised series of evasion techniques: he hid behind doors, beneath tables and in toilet cubicles. He carefully matched the colour of his suits to camouflage him against the corridor walls.

At last he found himself at his laboratory door. His hand-crafted array of signage designed to confuse, deflect and unnerve kept his world blissfully secluded. Because of the disquiet instilled in visitors as they faced his door, piles of messages accrued like sediment just beyond the threshold making his entry gracelessly forceful.

Once inside though, his thoughts were free to unfurl in unimpeded tendrils which grasped for the heavens.

Hugo was directly employed only sporadically, an arrangement which

made life tolerable. A folio outlining some problem with a new piece of project hardware would be stuffed unceremoniously through the tangle of papers occupying his laboratory’s threshold. He pointedly ignored the incursion into his world until his eleven-fifteen tea and biscuit break.

A solution rarely took him much longer than the first few sips of tea. This freed him for almost all of the working day to conduct his own freewheeling, tangential research which he referred to as ‘making sense’.

To the untrained eye, ‘making sense’ would appear to be an anarchic stream of unintelligibly surreal abstractions. This of course did not concern the contented Hugo whose energies were resolutely directed towards the deepest, darkest reaches of space.

It was Hugo’s hope that in some starless patch of the heavens, he

would find a place of profound and absolute emptiness: the end of the universe and the place where reality itself cascaded into an abyss of nothingness. If he could find such an edge then it would finally be possible for the human race to get some kind of perspective on things.

Since the origins of scientific enquiry, humans have looked up and out with telescopes and down and in with microscopes, never considering the order of magnitude of reality itself. Without that crucial calibration, none of their painfully meticulous tests and calculations had any known order of significance.

For the past nine months, Hugo had been excitedly observing the absence of patterns in one particular set of co-ordinates in empty space.

At last he was on to something: here was the peace of utter absence.

After an uninterrupted sixteen hour session of analysis and as the sky began to grow pale, his eyes were drawn to a memo printed on yellow paper that had been pushed under his door.

His eyes glazed over as he scanned the message, ‘...through innovations in scanning resolution technology... thanks in part to your own handiwork... thirty-seven galaxies... SGB 72.53, SGL 25.43... thought you would like to know...’

In an instant, he was drowning. His eyes began to twitch and spasm painfully. He was lost in the oceanic unknown.

This always happened. This was the rhythm that had tattooed his life for as long as he could remember.

He recalled years of research in his youth when he had listened with sustained eager anticipation for the muddy echoes from the dawn of the universe. At that point of origin, where reality nucleated and budded forth, he had hoped to find the source-code to the universe.

A punctuation mark would have sufficed. All he had eventually found with horror were the cacophonous imprints of countless other dimensional realities. He had spent weeks in depressed isolation.

His eyes twitched and his eyebrows spasmed in inane gestures.

Hugo consoled himself with some muesli that he kept

in his left trouser pocket for emergencies. Feelings rose and fell dangerously. They confused him.

He tore down a dusty model of a distant planetary system that hung from his ceiling. He felt better and then he felt even worse. He ate more muesli. His eyes punished him with a further few arrhythmic twitches.

He sighed. Wherever he sought a frontier, he found only more of the same: the limits of human capacity. He went home in a daze and slept deeply and fitfully without removing his shoes.

At some point in the night Tuesday arrived with sickening inevitability. It

was October. With the deliberate intention to cause suffering, Hugo pursued frightened flamingoes over a shoreline disappearing beneath a rising tide.

“Youllgetwetyouwillcomehereandjusttotalk he mumbled with disembodied fervour and wet the bed.

He sat upright, still swimming in dream and his left eye twitched shut. His automatic tea-maid had woken him by malfunctioning and pouring a mixture of milk and tepid water all over his face and pillow. He sat perfectly still for almost an hour and listened to the guttural buzzing of his refrigerator. Then his alarm clock sounded.

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He grimly forced his way through the streets towards the institute with a new

set of coordinates slopping around his head. Relentlessly his eyes palpitated and with such profound discomfort that they began to stream uncontrollably.

He wiped his eyes. They twitched. He felt a wing brush past his ear.

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He could no longer see for the tears streaming from his eyes but he knew he must not allow himself to stop. No matter what, he must not lose momentum and become submerged in this dark sea of people, teeming with their infectious irrationality.

In desperation he covered his stinging eyes. If only he had remained at home in the blissful isolation of a prophylactic sick-day, he could this very moment be performing patient autopsy on his mumbling refrigerator.

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From behind his hands he began to lose his sense of direction. The crowd closed in around him and he collided with them.

As he spiralled from one collision to another, he was unable to avoid their waxy touch and bittersweet smell. Most disturbing of all was that he began to hear their muttered thoughts in an uncontrollable thunder.

His chest heaved with aversion. He must not stop. He must not become lost in the animal scrum of suits and coats and perfumed dresses.

Panic came over him. Grim. Final. An unaccustomed shock of adrenaline rendered him stupid and then, like a spooked animal, he bolted with all his energy clenched in an arbitrary direction.

For sublime moments, he floated on a bed of air as if sleeping, turning

through the space of so many bodies. As he flew, the human smells, sounds and thoughts which had so offended him, left him in peace and quite alone.

From a great enough height...

From a great enough height the city is nothing more than a sedimentary rock formation that will one day fall to numberless grains of sand...

Hugo pushed himself off the tarmac.

He was not hurt but was vaguely disturbed to find himself lacking his characteristic sternness of focus.

For some time he was unable

to see. Then he realised that this was only because his eyes were still tightly closed.

When he opened his eyes he was surprised to find that they no longer twitched.

His broken and bloody lenses slipped from his

nose and fell away to reveal a raw and vivid reality.

He caught snatches of life, its richness and complexity too much to take in.

An errant instinct drove him back toward the point

of impact. Bodies flooded, crashing past him while slipstreams picked him up, encouraging his passage.

He became aware of the texture of skin and the

delicacy of hairs moving in the morning air. Faces passed him, wrinkled with worry. Stoney eyes gazed through circles of fatigue and like the sound of distant rain drifted the rumblings of thought.

The scent of life reached him and for the first time did not meet with resistance. He shuffled forward and blood dripped down his face, through his beard to spot his shirt.

Part Two

My name is Sophia Brown. I am an illustrated reportage journalist

originally from Gloucestershire. Throughout my relatively brief career I have been drawn to stories surrounding the ‘open wound of humanity’. I travelled to war zones, covered famines, refugee crises, natural disasters and environmental catastrophes as well as some of the quieter social maladies from the Congo to Iraq and from Somalia to Palestine.

I have been kidnapped twice and shot through the shoulder.

My articles have been published online and in ‘The New Yorker’, ‘Time Magazine’ and ‘The Guardian’.

For obvious reasons, I have never written autobiography. As I

now feel I must, in the first piece I have written in over a year, I must offer first a brief explanation and a polite request that you please bear with me: I am going somewhere with this.

I have watched as people who were so thirsty, died of bad water. I took photographs from several angles as a baby suckled on her dead mother. I have watched lives washed away in disasters of unimaginable scale that could have relatively easily been avoided.

Around two years ago I had a sudden revelation. I finally realised that humanity had lost any sense of meaning to me. I had lost my ability to feel.

An idealism that, despite the cynical advice of my contemporaries, had been slow to die in me, finally ran aground. It was that same idealism that had led me on for so many years to tell stories of a crippled, diseased and dying world. I think I thought that would be useful. I imagined humans somehow coming to terms with themselves.

My story begins in the unfashionable depths of depression and chronic anxiety many months after my realisation.

A stuttering flame struggled against its obliteration. It seemed to hang, levitating feebly over a small island of light in otherwise impenetrable darkness. The sound of my breathing reached me from outside myself, unsettled and intense.

For months, the marks had spiralled up one arm and then down the other. It was a very quiet and personal kind of penance that somehow enabled me to hold on to myself. A rage and grief that were only partly mine writhed like a wild tiger in the walls of that room as we slowly came to accept one another.

Before me the candle slowly melted into the floor, throwing my

shadow around the room and trailing its molten rivulets along the grain of the timber. An angular section of my right hand was illuminated momentarily as it balanced a knife over the heat.

The blade began to emit its own sustained dirty glow like the hum of a chime.

My hand holding the blade was already patterned with intricate symbols of pale flesh that to this day spell out a story whose meaning has been lost.

I squinted as I measured my mark

My brow contorted.

and I held my breath.

in familiar anticipation.

My body clenched

with a burning cold My skin was pierced

and a familiar acrid smell filled the air.

My eyes watered and my mouth opened silently.

My body shivered in fever sweat and errant hairs sent cracks over my face.

My body crumpled into a foetal ball against the worn floor.

My breaths returned in shudders and I cradled my left arm to my chest and rocked it as though comforting a baby.

The throbbing scarifications glowed in the half-light and I could no longer bear to see them. The relief of having done what I needed to do again, never again- this irrational and shameful thing, was overwhelming, ecstatic even.

I draped a sweater over myself and listened to my heart beat gradually slow until I was calm and my mind was clear and quiet. Before long all I have described felt like a dream and it had already started to fade.

As a child,

the border of skin had once connected me to everything else in a great embrace of touch.

It was how I first knew my mother’s touch, how I first knew grass and sunlight and water.

And then it learned to protect: separating I

from Thou.

If it was grazed, it healed.

It toughened after barefoot summers.

‘Thick skin’ is how we protect what is fragile within us from the harshnesses there are in the world.

Through unending rehearsal, through exposure to

horrors and despair, skin learned to hold inside apart from outside in a great divide of terrible and towering isolation. It formed a numb callous that held me in a stupor of profound insensitivity.

Until I tore it open.

I carried a thermos flask filled with tea through the small window

that leads out onto a flat roof. Night air flooded over me carrying the suggestion of unseen flowers and the freshness of faraway rain. I trailed my fragile, newly bandaged left arm like a tail behind me and made my way over the roof towards my favourite spot to sit and contemplate, to be on my own amongst so many people.

I imagined my figure, wrapped in a blanket, cutting an almost unnoticeable silhouette against the nocturnal city scape. A city of doll’s houses with doll’s house windows and chimneys stretching to the horizon. A city of people I will never know: a perpetually playing rear-window puppet show. This is my secret solace whenever I am back in the city.

I have watched illicit love affairs,

arguments punctuated by flying crockery, feasts and celebrations, but mostly, the many shades of loneliness: an elderly lady who I never saw move from the seat in her living room where she basked in television flickers. A couple who prepared the evening meal, did the washing up and then sat quietly before bed without ever exchanging eye contact. The several singleserving, grey-skinned fast-food patrons.

The post-party stumbling and silent shaking shoulders.

... .

I took a gulp of tea which lit a reassuring fire in my chest. I stared out over all this and my mind was utterly quiet; I watched and there were no thoughts, no analysis, no judgement. I closed my eyes and for an unknown period I was sustained by peace.

Then, like the horizon appearing through lifting fog, an inclination dawned on me. Without thinking I reached under my blanket and retrieved my phone from a pocket. I turned it on and dialled automatically, feeling my way across the keys.

As I listened to the ringing, I reflected that it must have been three or four years since I’d spoken with him.

When he answered, I was foolishly caught off guard. A tangle of thoughts forced their way into my head and rendered me infantile and strangely anxious.

“Who’s there?”

“Hello. Is that James? It’s Sophie. Do you have a moment?”

“It’s late, isn’t it?”

Despite my confusion of thoughts, I was able to recognise that this was a strange thing for me to be doing. It was very strange behaviour indeed.

“I’m sorry... Do you have a moment?” I asked, wincing. A moment for what? I really hadn’t thought this through.

“What kind of question is that?” he coughed. “I’ve been forgetting the nose off my face, you know. I haven’t heard a peep out of you for bloody years! There’s no chance I’d even recognise you.”

I listened as he opened a creaking door and then I saw a spectre of my grandfather moving into his garden and sitting at the creaking chair by the worn garden table which stood on uneven flagstones impregnated with a jungle of mosses and lichens.

I watched him load his pipe with giant fingers. A match struck and the tobacco crackled and I heard him suck, puffing until the rosewood was alive with heat and the smell’s taste was on my palette. And then I realised that I was watching all this from the eye level of my twelve-year-old self.

“Are you there?” he asked impatiently with teeth clenched

around the pipe, “All this talk without talking makes me feel like I’m having a funny turn. What’s on your mind girl?”

“Yes, I’m here,” I said, helpless, any hopes of some great improvisation on my part having fled.

My grandfather sighed deeply in mock irritation. “Not much of a social call this, my dear... How’s that nice young man what’s-his-name?”

I hung up in a panic, dropped the phone and hugged my legs. I was inconsolably, helplessly stupid and behaving like a fourteen-year-old. I hope at some time it happens to us all.

My phone rang. I answered it without saying anything. “Sophie?

Sophia would you get yourself over here. I can’t be doing with this bloody nonsense. I haven’t seen you in years...”

“We got disconnected...” I said in an incoherent daze.

“I’ll see you tomorrow after lunch. At two. Meet me at the end of the line. You know the place?”

I stared dumbly out over the pixels of city. The lights started to swim over my eyes in a liquid haze. I blinked and blinked, trying to summon my composure and still I said nothing.

“Sophie! I’ll see you there right?”

“But I have to work” I managed.

“Bullshit, my dear. Tomorrow you’ll tell them you’ve got the runs. If they give you any bloody nonsense, I’ll write them a note from the doctor.”

Part Three

I flew slowly, spinning in some dance I had forgotten I was dancing. I

remember reflecting in those long moments how improbable a collision must be with such an enormous amount of space between everything. I watched myself spin and was calm because my body remembered what to do.

I had opened my eyes with a rush of urgency that morning. I knew I was late before I could remember what my appointment was. It was a Tuesday. Strange dreams pursued me as I rushed along the streets through the crowds of commuters.

And then I found myself on the pavement, unsure of where I was, and in pain. I was winded and dizzy. I became lazily aware of oblivious stampeding feet moving around me. I found after some tender testing that I was able to balance on my hands and knees.

My belongings were scattered around and even while I was being buffeted and suffocated by the headless knees and shoes and swinging limbs, something drove me to fumble after worthless odds and ends.

My bandaged hands ineffectually grasped at a hairbrush only to knock it further afield through the legs who kicked it further still.

Hugo circled, bent double, diving after the woman’s possessions as he

showered drips of blood. The surging crowd heaved around him so that he became submerged for some moments, before surfacing again, spluttering.

The man who I had collided with, eventually stood before me awkwardly, as if self-consciously failing an inspection drill. He swayed slightly, his face slick with blood.

“Shit! Are you alright?” I asked stupidly, and tried to take hold of his shoulder as he winced in pain. The crowd flowed around us as we held on to each other like sailors overboard.

“I’m sorry I bumped you.” the man said, seemingly surprised to find himself talking, and visibly confused. His eyes were fixed on his hands bearing my possessions, spattered and smeared with his blood. He looked up and his eyes fixed on me, wide and wild.

“I’ve spilled blood on your things. I’m so sorry. Do you still want them?”

“Yes. Here,” I said quickly, relieving him and then absently dropping the tangled objects back on to the ground.

“Are you alright?” I asked again, concerned to think of what injury the mask of blood might hide, “Let me see you.”

I held my scarf under his chin and emptied a bottle of water over his face. He made no reaction. The blood continued to ooze and he gazed into my eyes as if he didn’t recognise what he was seeing.

Hugo had quite accidentally side-stepped his characteristic dislocation.

His heart beat hard and fast, his nostrils flared as the sensations poured in to him and his eyes darted around and about like those of a new born giraffe. Then he very nearly crumpled to the ground.

The woman’s face was suddenly very close to his and he could smell her faintly. He could hear her talking but was distracted by the all pervasive rhythm of his blood circulating.

He heard her voice but listened only to its song and could not extract any meaning from it.

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Behind the woman’s music, he still heard the song of the city which sounded like the sea he had never visited. Her eyes came up level to his and he felt his pupils dilate and his heart murmur, raised from its sleep.

He saw stars reflected in the depths of her pupils and lost himself there. After a timeless eternity Hugo drew himself back from that precipice, from the edge that he had spent his lifetime searching for in the most distant faraway places.

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I grabbed him by the jacket as he slid heavily to the ground and managed to save him a second head injury. I had seen the wonder of a child in his eyes. It made me want to laugh and cry at the same time. And I felt it in myself: the desire to play, to explore, to be reckless, to look on the world with new eyes for the first time: to be new again, without all these scars.

I crouched as I talked gently to him, as though soothing an injured animal and for some time he was totally unresponsive. My professional obligation to steadfastly remain a passive observer began to crumple and care flooded my defences. To my relief, he eventually came to and scrambled unsteadily to his feet and then stood, pale-faced at the edge of the river of bodies staring out over the waves, lost without a clue.

I realised that he needed help urgently and that I couldn’t be of much use.

My phone had also received a rather nasty knock on the head and was behaving erratically. I decided to brave the swell and leave in search of help.

Hugo had found a piece of everything, a piece of starless eternal peace. He had found it in the eyes of a stranger. On a Tuesday.

His eyes filled with tears as he soaked up the incredible intimacy of what he had known so surely to expect in the unimaginable coldness of terrible emptiness.

He mumbled his thanks fitfully, tearfully, emphatically and at length until long after she had left his side.

I didn’t have to go far before I found a phone box plastered with

advertisements for sex. I called an ambulance for the man whose name I had forgotten to ask. The operator asked if I had left someone with the man with a probable serious head injury. I lied, feeling like an idiot, hung up and hurried back, cold sweats telling me I’d done this all wrong.

Hugo rediscovered himself standing alone, swaying in the sea.

He heard its roar like never before

and listened with intense curiosity.

It boomed with the primal thunder of all the voices.

He discovered that by gently concentrating

he could draw any voice from the symphony

and listen to its part in isolation.

He made tremendous efforts to mentally note his findings

and hold them from dissolving like a dream on waking.

I eventually found my way back to the place of our collision. The man had

disappeared. I was devastated, and not only because of a genuine worry for his safety. My tangle of odds and ends were nowhere to be seen, leaving only a sticky hairbrush and blood splatter to show that he had been there at all.

I searched for any trace of him at length, growing desperate. I couldn’t accept the disappearance of this man. He had entered my life so directly, yet so fleetingly, somehow reminding me of something long-lost and so precious.

After much time wasted, I grew fearful of the imminent arrival of the ambulance I had called. I reluctantly conceded to resort to plan A, and felt an ache. I felt an ache, and for a fraction of a moment I was alive again.

I hurried off to catch my train.

A mask of gore stood quite still. Hugo

fixated on the appearance and dexterity of his strange, animalistic hands.

Presently he noticed that the woman had left her bag and pile of things. He gathered them up and paddled to the banks of the crashing waters. He continued to where an alley sunk into half-light, gratefully slumping into piles of rubbish which lay in tangled heaps at its edge.

He mumbled absently and his eyes fell open to the sky.

The border, it is here...

and the centre... is everywhere.