An Image of the Moment.
By Daniel David Gothard.
Chaos and order. Order and chaos. All around you, all the time. You take the concepts for granted. Only those with an interest in astrophysics bother to seek out the link; the causal impact of the two main drivers of life as we know it. You know order. You know chaos. But for most of the time, you don't give a damn about either of them.
You reach an age when the concepts of chaos and order become apparent as the strongest forces surrounding us; from the smallest details in your own existence through to the most life-changing experiences on the planet – everything from defrosting your freezer to the melting of the polar ice-caps. But you still don't really care; why should you - chaos and order are as old as time itself; maybe older. Things will work out; someone, somewhere always comes up with the necessary solutions.
Even if you are fully open to the theory of the everyday involving chaos and order, or at the very least you have an awareness that moments can and do shift between the sweet to the plain nasty, and when life around you; everyone you know and love, and indeed every thing in your country changes incrementally, you don’t necessarily do anything to question what’s really going on.
Chaos and order becomes individual indifference. And indifference is the most malign of all forces. When you are indifferent, those around you, those who seek to profit from the indifference they see and know how to manipulate it, will fuck you and everyone else around you so slowly, with such a graceful smile, that you won't feel a thing until it's too late to fight back. They can simply get on with the job of winning.
You sometimes think about all of the above and you tell your subconscious, usually in the darkness of your bedroom as your partner twitches and snores next to you: remember chaos and order - watch out for the bumps and don't let the smooth rides fool you. But then, like most everyone else, you fall back in to sleep.
You find yourself alone, in a rail carriage, on your five-day-a-week journey between Reading and Oxford. You work in Oxford, in an eye-book store, but you can’t afford to live in the city with the Dreaming Spires. You haven’t bothered to do the maths relating to the money you might save without rail fares – the trains always run on time, the journey relaxes you and gives you space to think and read. These days the trains, signals and tracks are automatically controlled from a single Central Station in London. Ticket sales and collection are controlled on each train by automated-Transactioners – the machines that roll up and down the aisles like toys. They recharge on solar energy between stops. You agree that the service is better without the human factor, but there is a part of you that misses hearing, ‘All tickets, please.’
You are eating a sandwich and reading a newspaper. The story above the fold is a left-wing warning about how your beloved National Health Service is being sold off to the private sector bit by bit: cleaning contracts, catering suppliers. The smallest details, remember?
You aren’t that concerned about hospital cleaners or food and you haven’t even been in to an Accident and Emergency unit or a ward of any sort for years. And then suddenly you read the meaty part of the article, the words which the journalist must have taken the greatest care over – checking and re-checking his or her facts. Doctors are being told to implement ‘some additional charges’ which might be expected from patients with apparently self-inflicted injuries and illnesses: attempted suicide cases, domestic cuts and scrapes to a particular depth through the surface of the skin, obesity, asthma made worse from smoking, in fact all smoking-related cases.
This is the beginning of chaos, but when you read it all so quickly, in between bites of your BLT sandwich and breathing in the acrid smell of the chemical toilet in the carriage, you don’t really take in any of the meaning.
So what if Joe Public has to pay a small fee for cutting his bread roll too vigorously – six or seven quick stitches for a tenner is all right, isn’t it? And what about Josephine Public, the ones who have watched too many reality shows on their sunken armchairs while stuffing their gobs with crisps and chocolate. Why should you pay for them to have stomach banding surgery? It seems only fair that the greatest institution in the land should have enough money to care for all of us. Those people who are too careless to avoid accidents and the decay of their bodies can and should pay the extra. Sounds right, eh?
That’s not what you really think or want, but the change; the invasive procedures of your malevolent government – like a nasty surgical mishap – are so gradual and couched in such soft and reassuring language and promises that – even though you don’t believe them – you still can’t help yourself; you don’t finish the main article, but instead turn the page of your newspaper and take more interest in the workings of the Cannes Film Festival or something equally ephemeral and pointless.
You have finished your sandwich and your newspaper has begun to bore you. You fold it carefully – broadsheets always make you feel incompetent when you try to rearrange their original straight edges, but you would feel educationally deficient if you were seen reading a tabloid and you can’t get a signal for your Smarterphone or Pocket Tablet – you look out of the window at the landscape. You think of everything and nothing as the pass-by of trees, hay bales and distant farm houses feel everywhere and nowhere. Then the carriage door swishes open. You don’t look up to acknowledge the passenger who sits across the aisle from you. Why should you? They are insignificant, just another meaningless face on a short journey. Even if you could be bothered to study their eyes, nose and mouth; their hair colour and style, you would still forget them within ten minutes of leaving the station. This is your familiar journey. A boring necessity in a life that is full to bursting with boring necessities – to the point where you cannot remember the last time you did something just because it felt physically good and pure, like diving off a high rock in to a green-blue sea and swimming as hard as you can, until your arms and legs ache.
You saw some online footage of that and it looked like fun.
Even sex with your partner has become a bi-weekly box to tick, in case she realises you don’t have any real feeling for the same old positions, grunts of pleasure and fake, sexy face-pulling. Your body and soul left the relationship a long time ago, but fear of being alone has kept you together, meandering through the days on auto-pilot. You wonder how many other people live like this?
You have so many more important things to think about: you must regularly update your societal median status – without new characters every twenty-four hours your account will be taken down, that is the rule. If that happens, you have to renew the whole thing; attract new followers. And there are endless proof copy eye-books to read behind the special contact-lenses you bought. You must review the books within forty-eight hours and share the reviews, you have a schedule.
You share everything with the followers you have never met: recorded footage of your comedy and tragedy, thoughts that come and go nowhere, but always make one of your followers react in some way. It is the best part of your day, better than fucking your partner. But you could never tell her this. You can easily relieve your desires online and you don’t need to wonder about what any other person is thinking.
You know your partner knows all of this and one day soon she will wake up, look at you; really study you for a few moments; feeling the disgust for your existence rise from her guts; the aching pain she has held down for such a long time. And she will next feel a wave of orgasmic recognition that she doesn’t have to live in this fashion, and then she will leave you.
You have no familial ‘glue’ to bind you together. You haven’t asked her to marry you and you have no children to talk to or about. If you are honest with yourself, you rea
lly don’t care.
The just-arrived passenger coughs a few times. You look up momentarily, take a very quick look at him or her. You discern the other passenger is a he.
He is wearing a black fedora and black Raybans. He is also wearing a lily-white shirt with the top button done up. The collar looks too tight, his neck is pinched, he looks as if the collar is slowly choking him. He has a scarf high above his ears, neck and across his mouth – as if he is afraid of saying something outrageous. He is holding a purple balloon; waving it side-to-side. Such a simple act in the hands of an adult annoys you. If it were a child it would be a normality and you know you would probably smile at the child and remember doing something similar when you were young. But when an adult waves a balloon about, you assume you are in close proximity to a lunatic.
You look away, there is an undiluted strangeness to this stranger. You smile to yourself at the obvious nature of such a bland statement. All strangers are strange until you engage with them. He might be taking the balloon home to his child as a gift. He might have an eye infection and/or a virus, hence the scarf. These days there are enormous amounts of
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