London 01:24 by Rowan Fraser

CO.2.LDN.20121229

12SS:CO3.1.9

Short Story

The Casio Odes London Rowan Fraser

This short story is part of The Casio Odes collection of short stories, written during the months of the Southeast Asian cool season of 2012.

London 01:24 He feels the weight of Audeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s body as she enters the bed, disturbing the equilibrium of the mattress. For a second the warm skin of her forearm touches his and in that touch he senses their distance. It is only a moment that their bodies touch but it is enough, by its very brevity, to signal their rupture to him. Strange or ironic or whatever, he thinks, to feel separation in that way. But then everything says and does something. When she rolls over he can smell sake from her breath and perfume from her chest. So, they ate Japanese. E-Eko probably with Takeshi. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a Wednesday. They would have sat at the bar and had the mackerel. Aude loves the mackerel. EEko, he murmurs. She says what did you say and he asks her outright if they ate at E-Eko and her long hostile silence answers him.

London 02:24 The sound of nothing is huge. He can’t sleep. The thought of them in E-Eko is consuming him. He realises that it’s not E-Eko in truth that is just a pretext. It is the sense that this was already forecast long ago and that this is the final point towards which they have always been heading. That is what is so hard to bear. The undeniable sense that their failure was programmed from the outset and that, despite their good words at times and their promises, this was the unacknowledged sea towards which the river of their experiences was flowing. Indubitably, irreversibly. Had there been an elephant in the room the whole time? He is unsure. Slowly an incredible tiredness invades him. Like a virus. And he doesn’t know what he will have to do to get beyond this. As he plunges deeper into this destitution he feels a slow sense of despair get to him. He has no desire to get beyond this or to overcome. Just the tiredness weighing him like blocks roped to a sinking corpse. Into his mind swing images of homicide victims thrown from bridges in the still of night, wrapped in canvas and weighted with blocks of concrete. These are the memories of his age. Fast cars along sleek roads, he is the emblem and the logo of demise. He is the tolling bell. What has become life in this world has become only the shadow of death has become their silent abode.

London 03:24 His stomach heaves and turns and he feels it all rise and he lurches further over the edge of the porcelain. There are tears in his eyes. He heaves again. What remains of the evening meal bursts and sprays against the side of the bowl. He’s gripping the edge with his hands. Acrid taste in his mouth and rotten. He’s staring at his face in the mirror and he can see that there is nothing left. He peers into his own eyes like bullet holes in the snow of his white face. He can glimpse the sinking contours of his dreams.

London 04:24 He’s flying around and around the apartment. He has settled on the edge of the fridge. He’s flying through the air under the bright lights of the ceiling lamps. He hits into something hard. There is a shock felt. Fright. But no pain, he thinks, no pain. It is the window. Beyond the

glazing is the city and the city is vast and various and it is full of humans and small animals and food products.

He has settled on the granite bench top. His field of vision is filled with grey.

Beyond the granite, he sees himself sitting in the sofa. Aude appears and she is wearing his face on her face and she is looking at herself and smiling. A vague fixed smile like a mannequin in shop window. There is music suddenly. Silence. A mackerel appears in the air. Silence.

London 05:24 Aude is deep in her slumber. He gets up from the bed and his body is as heavy as concrete under him. Filaments of his dreamscape spasm in his mind as he walks across the floor towards the window. Beyond and below, the thousands of lights of the city glitter. He does not find it beautiful - it is just the way it is. As the ghosts of his dreams belch into his mind, only to disappear as quickly as they arrive, he gets snippets of scenes from his night’s imaginings. He sees the mackerel again. Scenes of destitution and incompetency, scenes of failure. Life is some blind formless impulse that for this second of time between the birthing and the dying is surging forward. He thinks: its not my life its life living me life dreaming itself into the world through me I’m just some ridiculous conduit.

London 06:24 It is still dark. The tower blocks are still there. Nothing has moved, nothing has changed, he’s glaring at the eternal. And yet everything is different, because the finality of it all has been announced. Her face, he can’t erase her face from his mind. Her face and the bright halogen light from the window. His tiredness is immense and insatiable. It is a deep weariness. His body is heavy and full of dust now. Dust of the possibilities which have been presented but which he’s let fall. Dust of the memories of his actions and his thoughts and the knowledge that whatever it could have been it has passed him now and the possibility is no longer possible. He feels the weight of gravity and it is almost too much to bear. His eyeballs sweep the dawn grey streets far below and he can feel the drag of gravity on his vision as if every part of him even his sight, his hearing, all his senses, had been made into solid matter. He has become weight.

London 07:24 He watches the onset of the day’s race beginning on the streets. The people. Scampering down there like mice. He’s watching their dark heads of hair and their clothing, their hands gripping attaché cases and satchels, frantic little legs forging down the pavements. He feels an estrangement and an apathy in the face of this growing activity. Every day begins this way and he’s not opposed to it. Only that he doesn’t care for it, that he’s indifferent. If he could be different to how he is, he’s not sure that he would want it. But he knows that his way has been set. Yet there is something hypnotic in the activity down there. The paths of the commuters along the pavement seem mystical.

London 08:24 With this tiredness he’s unsure of his future and he realises he doesn’t care. Something in him has broken. It happened as he lay sleeping. Something in his dreams broke his. Maybe he was already broken. Maybe his dreams simply revealed his brokenness. Whatever. Today though he has been admitted into a new knowledge of himself and the process by which this happened is unimportant. He realises that what is important is that some form of response is formulated. But this is impossible, it seems, this is beyond him and his capacity. He hears a siren. Crawling along a side street deep in traffic is a police sedan lights flashing. Abreast with the commuters. It’s siren rises the twenty floors to his apartment window and yet, the car itself is scarcely moving.

London 09:24 Inside the bathroom he discovers Aude showering. She hasn’t heard him come in and so he watches her naked body under the shower. The water streams down her skin. Her long hair is wet and sticks to her shoulders and her back. She is soaping herself. When Aude finishes she turns off the shower and the water ceases. As she turns to take the towel from the hook she sees him in the mirror and his presence startles her. She looks at him cruelly and asks what he’s

doing. Watching you he says and she says that its creepy and he says that he knows and she smiles cruelly again as though there is pleasure in that creepiness or as though she is relieved.

London 10:24 He watches the city and the commuters and the traffic, the slow crawl forward, the narrow constraints of the street, the deft fact that each of those cars has some destination and that it is pushing against all the rest of the city to reach it. There is a soft suede couch. He sinks into it. He stares into the midsections of tall condos, they’re just thirty meters away across the road and in their windows he can see men and women walking around and watching TV. Beyond these are more condos and office blocks and beyond these are smaller office blocks and sometimes warehouses and then the smaller rubble of the city which in the distance is hazy and without definition, just a sea of whites and browns and brick reds, parks lined with Arcadian trees and thick nondescript vegetation.

London 11:24 I push my life along, he thinks. Yes. We are all running about living our lives. In his mind he sees people in supermarkets, people in cars, carrot sticks and juicers, Aude, that big knife on the board, whiteboard markers, office ties. He thinks, we plan a day and then we go ahead and live it. Somewhere along the line we stop and realise that with each day life has become and has fallen dead again. With each day I have a day less of life to live. The thought grips him by the throat. Day more of life lived. Day less to live. Consumption. This is consumption. Yes. But in the end no endless tomorrows even if we think so but that is just because that’s how things go. Endless tomorrows and endless todays round and round seamless and continual. He breaks off from his thought because it troubles him and because it seems there is a deep fallacy somewhere. He can sense it lurking and he would like to get to the bottom of it. He’s unsure what this means for him in the long run.

London 12:24 He’s sitting on the stool at the kitchen bar, his elbows on the wooden surface of the bar and his eyes drilling into the cereal box. He reads the nutritional value of the cereal, two, three, four times. Sodium. Iron. Fats. Sugars. When Aude left the door closed behind her and for fortyfive minutes he’s sat at the kitchen bar and thought about nothing. His mind has drifted empty as the air. Scenes and memories have appeared and dissolved again. There is a soft grey light falling through the windows from the clouded sky. He prowls about the apartment. In their bedroom he examines the photo of them in the Maldives when Aude was with her agency gainfully employed. She has on a sarong and a straw hat. Behind them is the aqua sea. There is a stiff palm tree on the left, beside the edge of a hotel. Aude has a soft happiness in her face. Impossible to say where exactly, but its just there in her face, this radiant happiness. It doesn’t matter how it started, he thinks again. It matters only that it happened. And I knew it would. Some part of me waited and waited for it. Expected it. Johnson was too much. And we all knew it. She knew it. He had watched Aude and Johnson become something while she was still his. Although he never saw Johnson but he saw what Aude was becoming and so he knew by proxy. Above all Aude let herself go and maybe what made her sad and resentful and cruel was that he didn’t try to stop her. It was like a scene of television he watched as she fucked it all up and she watched herself as she did the same and both of them were removed from it as though it were happening on screen and yet both of them were their own victims. But they could do nothing. And Johnson smuggled their happiness into his fist where he crushed it. Aude let him. The man let him. Maybe I should have fought, he thinks. He had thought that Aude wanted it at times. But she also wanted to sabotage them. To pull them to pieces and Johnson was her excuse for this because he would do it. And yet because the man had seen her truly suffer because of Johnson he had come to the conclusion that she was also in some ways a masochist. Because she did nothing and the pain continued and then. Then they both brake but he can’t feel her braking because he is overwhelmed by the feeling of his own breaking. He is overwhelmed by his own. Overwhelmed and also confused. He doesn’t understand how they are doing this to themselves. This is the life that we have made for ourselves. Out of all the endless possibilities we have chosen this. Out of the plethora, the abundance of options. This. And yet he can’t help feeling like he’s had no choice in this. Like all his decisions were made for him and like life is beyond him and out of reach. He feels like he’s without options and without the desire for change as well. He knows that he dislikes this but he cannot find an adequate

reason to consider an alternative. He’s overwhelmed by a sense of futility. Such a futility that to envisage other options seems both foolish and even more seems impossible. Possible alternatives have been erased. This is his time zone. It is the age of erasure. And it makes him so tired that all he can do is stare at the cereal box and the photos in their room as the grey light falls against his skin and the wooden floor and the glazing of the tower block and the city and the globe. This grey light. Drowning in it.

London 13:24 He lies on the bed and watches the ceiling. There have been alternatives. There were options once. But somehow they’ve all been reduced to one overwhelming consensus. And in their place he has been given endless pseudo-options. In his mind he sees the product range. He thinks about the box of cereal. That was my only choice last week. A whole week and the only exercise of my options came in choosing that. It took him half an hour. That product. There were so many other boxes and they all looked like they contained cereal that was equally good to eat. He’s horrified at himself and then immediately the horror is replaced by indifference. Each time some flicker of indignation flares it dies immediately. Johnson has done this perhaps. Or the man did it himself. Or Aude. It doesn’t matter surely. Only that. In his heart he no longer cares.

London 14:24 It is the crush of the inexorable. As though every thing in the world, every outcome, every action, every word has become inevitable. He can remember a time when he thought there were no limits here. When the world was a fluid constellation of alternatives and options. Where nothing was fixed. But now. He’s come to see the stiff machinations of existence as they slowly rub to dust all conception of alternative. We have become too old. We have become only shadows and shells. Possible has become impossible and the only thing that he can feel is the inevitability of all things.

London 15:24 In the afternoon when Aude is home again from the gym she showers again and he listens to the sound of water. She asks him if he’s left the apartment today and he tells her that he hasn’t. She doesn’t ask what’s wrong she just looks at him and he can see condemnation in her eyes as though he were a vagrant. This is love right here, he thinks. When Aude says that Johnson is coming and that they’ll get dinner tonight the man understands that it is finished. And yet. He doesn’t want to know anything about it, he doesn’t want to hear a word more. But she speaks and he lets her because. It is all too late and the damage is done. She tells him how it started. He’s staring at the cityscape, the tower blocks and the streets. He sees the million windows on the facades of the condos and the high-rise hotels, the corporate head quarters, the government towers. This city of theirs. And all the million faces sitting at tables or desks staring back through the reflective glazing. All of us, staring with obtuse indifference into the void spaces of the city, into each other’s tower blocks. She asks if he’s listening and then she puts her hand on his hand and asks what has happened. What is going on, baby, she says, over and over again as though he’s a child. Her voice is soft and it’s the first time that her voice is like this, first time in months. It doesn’t matter whose fault it is, it never does. What matters is that things are said and done and all our effort amounts to nothing in the long run.

London 16:24 There is a fly in the apartment. Its buzzes round and round and then settles somewhere and its buzz dies. A peace swamps him and he tries to forget. And then just as he’s forgetting the fly begins again. He can’t see it. Only hear it. Behind him in the kitchen area. Damn fly. Silence. Goldenness. Peace. And then! And every time it starts again a rage swells in him as though the fly is doing him some grave injustice. It is contravening his will and his wishes only for silence here. Its is defiant. And suddenly he grasps the fly’s independence from him and this realisation is joined with a seizure of horror and terror. The fly settles to silence. Minutes pass. He recalls Aude leaving again and the sound of the door closing behind her and the spread of silence that rippled through the apartment after she left. And which the fly is breaking again now.

London 17:24 From the fridge he takes the milk. He pours it generously over a mound of cereal and then he takes the bowl and sits on the edge of the sofa and watches the city lights blinking in the falling dusk.

London 18:24 The judges are discussing something in hushed tones and then they announce a verdict and the camera swoops down over the audience and there they are clapping and clapping and some of them are crying or laughing it’s hard to say and perhaps it doesn’t matter. Cut to the singer and she is looking mortified with happiness crying her eyes out the tears streaking her cheeks and setting her mascara running and she raises her hands to her mouth and then covers her face with her hands and then brings them away and steps towards the presenter who takes her by the shoulder and leans in and kisses her on the cheek. The man watches them exchange inaudible words of probable congratulations under the noise of the applause and then cut to a scene of the Serengeti.

London 19:24 On the screen is a set of immaculate teeth. The teeth open and a rainbow comes out and the screen bleaches all white and is replaced by a perfect tube of toothpaste.

London 20:24 He’s lying in bed trying to dream. He imagines dreams that he would like to have. These involve the standard array of foreign locales. He returns incessantly to a question: If this is all so obvious why didn’t I see this coming? This question rolls round and round in his head like the marble on the roulette table. He jumps and changes between thinking that he knew all along but that he didn’t care and thinking that he had no idea and that this is a total surprise. He guesses it is

because it was both. Its possible to choose to be blind. Maybe that was his only choice in this. The choice, at some fundamental level, of being blind. Easier that way. Less to deal with. The blind are the free, he thinks.

London 21:24 He showers and then clips his nails and shaves a second time. This is in an effort to drag himself from his stupor. When this is done he puts on a shirt and takes the elevator to the ground floor. On the street the air is cool. It blows through him and he tries to let it.

London 22:24 From a park bench at the edge of a path in Green Park he watches the darkness and the pools of bright light from the street lamps over the path. Soon they will close the park and they’ll all be forced to leave. The darkness brings him a certain pleasure, it seems to appease him and lets him dissolve. The darkness and the sense of eternity welling there. Of escape. Of endlessness. The blackness is a balm which sooths him and lets him break with less pain. Like an anaesthetic it doesn’t stop the damage it just lets it happen without him feeling as much of it. He longs for that silence that must exist in the darkness of deep space, that vacuum, that emptiness. He longs for the black. He’s tired of his mind and its examinations, he’s bored of it. He doesn’t want to think, or to learn or know anything new, he just wants that stiff black void of deep space to come and collect him and ferry him away into the desert. Instead, what he has are these petty thoughts and this constant trail of joggers in lycra clothing with heavy breathing as they appear at intervals out of the night, drenched for long jogging seconds in the pools of overhead lamp light.

London 23:24 The woman brings over his kebab and he sets about eating it. He realises that he’s extremely hungry and that he’s not eaten. The food is warm but has too much salt. Towards the end a pocket of sauce breaks through the pita bread and runs down between his fingers. He stares at the little pile of napkins with which he has wiped his hands and mouth and the empty place on his

tray where the food had been. He orders a beer. She brings it over. He drinks it. And he stares at the empty plastic cup that held the beer and he’s somewhat confused by the fact that so much can exist and then be consumed by his body through his mouth to slide down his throat and disappear into the darkness of his metabolic system. I’m consuming this world and with every breath, he thinks, with every breath and he sighs and he thinks he can see the CO2 as it spews from his lungs out into the air of the kebab shop.

London 00:24 Across the street a woman and a man are walking hand in hand. With a detached resignation he sees that it’s Aude. She is just there. So this is Johnson, he thinks. Johnson has an odd face, angular and narrow. The man follow them with his eyes from across the street. She puts her head back and laughs. At the corner of the street they stop in front of a MacDonald’s store and the lights from inside illuminate their faces and the mans realises that its not Aude but that it might as well be. He leaves the kebab shop and walks through the night street. At the corner with Green Park he turns towards his apartment building. He rides the elevator, keys the lock, undresses and gets into bed. Taste of kebab still in his mouth. He waits. Soon Aude will be home, soon the sound of her footsteps will come. He decides that he’ll ask. He’ll ask her straight out and see what she says.