Where men hide

Here, men walked, under the concrete and metal girders spanning the roof, in their ancient wombs. It'd never been calculated that they would get here, nor was it foreseen as a circumstance substantiated purely by accident. It was the way it was. They waited for the train to arrive in silence, neither each standing alone nor in a few throngs, but they stood speckled on the banks of the tracks. It was the picture of nonchalance. The ocean might as well have been a few meters from their feet, and the water might as well have easily been lashing at their feet with poetic gusto, but they wouldn't care. They just stood there waiting for the train to arrive.

One man looked at his watch; I remember, I was standing right next to him. He pushed the sleeve of his very-old jacket back and looked at the dial of his watch, and when he was satisfied, he pushed the sleeve back down with a jerk of his arm and leaned on his other leg. Not a sigh had been heaved in the hall all this time, not one expression of mild consternation, not even of frustration. Some of them carried grocery bags: the orange bags were unmistakeable under the halogen lamps, the customary thumbnail of a butterfly sewn onto each face that meant they were made of downcycled plastic.

Others were getting back from the football game. The sweat glistened on their skin like the sweat on the foreheads of anxious and drooling devotees come to meet the sage, and He would walk in their midst seeking out the one He could at least trust. They would chant His name and they would pack His purse with coins in return for blessing, and when He taught them, they wouldn't listen. After all, they had purchased a lesson, and he had better give it to them. And I did, and I did. Say what you will, it was a glorious world filled with men, each the nucleus of my fantasies. And that one trustworthy disciple? He would end up in the sewers, curiously.

Finally, in the distance, there was a bright light visible, circular and white, and approaching with intent and steadily toward our platform, the low rumble of the perfunctory horn accompanying its enlarging. The men looked up from their News Todays and the concrete floor, slowly moving forward as if they going to grapple with it like it was a woman they had sighted and now yearned for.

They all yearned for a woman and I knew they no longer cared if she was fat or thin, if she was beautiful or grotesque, or even if she was healthy or carried in her loins a disfiguring fever. By the time the locomotive was a hundred metres away, they were in two barely distinguishable groups, one each for the two doors each compartment would have, and they would hurry to enter it like they did on every night, hurry to enter it, finish first, and discard the weight of loneliness. They would push the woman away and go home to be absolutely lonely. And in the dark confines of that room, their solipsistic hopes would be realized.

The train came closer, and as it did, they huddled closer, their shoulders so close that they almost touched. Nobody wanted to get too far away from the light descending from the office upstairs, its window the only window discernible in this cavern we stood in, the cold and mechanical glow quickly disintegrating within the spaces coveted by corners infested with rodents and disaster-blown fissures.

At the same time, nobody wanted to touch each other because nobody knew what would happen then, because someone might feel something, a strange sensation, and something might happen. They were so scared. So scared! I could laugh with pity.

I jumped in with them, deliberately pushing my shoulders against the brawniest men in the crowd, and they would grimace at the silken touch of my wonderful hands, and they would move away, and I would follow them. Some of the men gave me stern looks, attempting in vain to push me away with their eyes, while some others would look downcast, grunt something under their noses and walk away.

I liked the ones who used their eyes. The men who walked away were men, too, but they were a different kind of men. They were men with fathers who had worked in cities and had owned a small house in the suburbs with a wicket gate, and they were men with mothers who had doted over them when they had been young, and they were men who had never lost a sibling to a stalking paedophile or a psychotic serial killer or a maniac hopped up on acid and convinced he was carving the cross on a piece of bark and not on a baby’s head.

No, these were good men, men who understood decency and so had been cheated on by their former wives and girlfriends, men who believed in the goodness of other men, men who believed in such things as leading by example. I wanted the men who had been emotionally raped by their abusive fathers, who had awakened quickly enough to hit their wives and girlfriends, men who wouldn’t be afraid to be men.

Looking around within the packed compartment, my pity evaporated and into its wake condensed a fatigue that I had hoped would set in much later, a terrible world-weariness that removed from my indulgence, a reminder that I did have other things to do. It was already three years since the Emasculation and these men had no idea they were absolutely lonely in this world in their turmoil.

Should I have told them then? I don’t know. I didn’t know, I wasn’t sure. Anyway, as the train snaked its way through the city, I seemed no longer capable of enjoying the drove of jostling men, as if the night had become more colder – Had it? Someone must have opened the windows – and the airs drier, as if all the moisture had been expunged out of my brain and I seemed to stand in the middle of a large and empty field, the stalks of tall grass dark-blue in the darkness disappearing beneath my feet.

A foreboding beat of realization began to thump in the distance. I could remember my father, the railway engineer, sounding the three-step foghorn to signal danger for inbound trains at the station, I could remember him changing signal lights frantically before anything untoward happened, I could remember no train arriving at all as I looked to the east, and I could remember him collapsing on the bench in tears. I was almost 20 when I realized I was the child of a madman. I wished then that he was standing next to me so I could hold him upright and that we could enjoy this train ride together.

He was a man in his own right, a third kind, an invincible one.

As this and other odd images passed through my head, I stood standing in the train even though more and more seats became empty as we journeyed on, and at one point, I was offered a seat by a man who was getting off – how polite! After another hour, my stop was come, the last on the line, and I alighted, mentally drained from yet another evening of loafing around the city soliciting men who were the same universally but never seemed good enough for me, for my vainglorious body, a ritual that I called an ordeal.

Why did I play it out, then? Because I was hopeful, but don’t ask me what I was hopeful for or hopeful about because I have no idea. As the doors shut behind me with a plastic secularism, I paused for a moment’s wonderment as I always did, looking down at the street in which all the houses were mine, whose windows were all open and through all of which flowed a dull, orange glow of a mob of halogen bulbs, the abundance reeking of decay and death.

I decided I would sleep in the third house on the left tonight, the one I called Jacopo after Jacopo Belbo, poor conflicted Belbo. Then again, it didn’t matter: after the women had died, the men had moved to other parts of the city, slowly but with a steadiness that was both geographic and consistent. When I came across this street, I found all the rooms empty behind all the doors, and decided to stay on here, in these tombs, secretly wishing my increasing fatigue would push me to do something about my plight, an undead man-woman.

Mostly, I wondered what it meant to be anything less than a man in a world without any women. Beyond the walls, womanhood meant conflict simply because it meant a lot of things, and each choice therein was mired in conflicts both social and political. Within the ambit of these walls, on the other hand, it meant some kind of loss to not be a whole, and that oneness of being was lost to me because I was both and neither: I was trapped in the middle of a fight, and the fight was flaking, like a magical fog that was slowly disappearing and my sword was gnashing nothing, my shield blocking nothing, and soon, the enemy had deserted me. I was an unworthy opponent.

All the men were at a loss to understand what was really going on while some of them sincerely believed the aliens were finally here; none of them know that they were completely isolated and destined only to die, not unto any greatness or martyrdom but just death, myself included. They surrendered their will to the city itself, no longer incentivized to initiate anything, their hearts parched of any kind of freedom, and they walked the roads like zombies, as if simply to get from one point to another.

The shops were all shut for business and opened for rationing and all the supplies were tallied and stocked in a warehouse, away from fire and water, guarded by a small group of police officers. At the beginning of each week, queues would form outside the building for the next seven days’ supply of food, beer and chocolate; there were other small establishments that still sold anything, but when money wasn’t going anywhere or coming from anywhere, it ceased to mean anything.

Death, of course, was the greatest nullifier.

When Kap Fynncraft woke up on Tuesday morning.

When Kap Fynncraft woke up on Tuesday morning, neither he nor anyone else knew that it would be different from any of the previous days. He walked to the bathroom, washed his face, brushed his teeth, had a bath, brewed some coffee, toasted some bread, boiled an egg, breakfasted, dressed up and locked the front door behind him. When he reached the last rung of the ladder he had to climb down, he seemed as if he forgot something, and climbed all the way back up. Wedged in the window grill above the first rung was a folded-up white sheet: the newspaper. He stuck it in his mouth and climbed back down. Adjusting his cap, he stood at the bus stop. It was 07.40.

As always, Chip Ramirez stood to his left, and as always, Ark Eiwen stood to Chip's left. They had nothing in particular to speak about, but a decade-old habit of waiting at the bus stop for 10 minutes in each other's presence made the silence anything but discomfiting. At 07.42 precisely, The Man In The Green Helmet would ride by on his scooter. A minute later, The Two Men With Their Briefcases would open the store on the other side of the street. Just as they reordered everything inside the shop and turned the sign to "Open", a red bus could be seen driving up and down the mounding road on the horizon. At 07.50, Kap, Chip and Ark boarded it.

The bus ride to the factory took precisely four minutes everyday because the amount of traffic between 07.50 and 07.54 was the same on any given day. In fact, the amount of traffic at any point of time was the same on any given day. In fact, nothing else about the city had changed in the last 10 years. As he rode the bus to the factory, he also knew nothing would ever change either because the smoke rising from the smelting factory a few miles in the northeast was always of the same hue, density and emotion. Sometimes, he'd look at it and wonder. Sometimes, he wouldn't look any way at all but the paper. Sometimes, he thought what it would be like to jump out of the bus onto the pavement and shatter his head. The telltale jerk brought him out of his reverie on that Tuesday morning, and a minute later, he alighted.

It was winter. The westward wind was strong and cold, unrelenting against his thin woollen shawl. He drew it tighter around himself, although it had never been of any help. But he'd had nothing else to complain about all year, and something like this was all that he had to keep himself from thinking of different ways to kill himself. He signed elaborately in the register, and as always the clerk looked up at him queerly. Before he went to his seat near the drill, he looked at the calendar. It was March 17, 2144. The celebrations were exactly a week away. Exactly 10 years ago, on March 24, 2134, the country officially declared it had nothing significant left to achieve. The standard of living was appreciable, nobody was poor, no wars seemed possible, diplomatic relations presented no challenges, research output had been steadied, diseases had been eradicated, consumption was regulated, the surplus was sold at fixed rates, the weather was shielded against, and state-sponsored festivals provided distraction from the melancholy.

Kap Fynncraft had been a journalist. When The Threshold was breached, he was reporting a story on a woman giving birth to quadruplets at the capital's government hospital. A few days later, he had been promoted to sub-editorship with the newspaper. A week later, there was nothing to go by except a repeated declaration of the government's accomplishments. A month later, the paper had shut down and he was forced to find work in one of the factories. A year later, in 2135, his wife died when she slipped on the ladder outside his door. He had tried to instigate a revolt in the factory: when they asked him what the problem was, he had said something about wages. The next day, he was arrested by the police. A few days later, he was forced to admit there was nothing he could do about it, and when he did admit it, he was released. When he went back to work,  he found they'd also increased his wages. When he tried to look intimidating, they reminded him of his wife. "This is for you to spend as you wish, Mr. Fynncraft. We've a feeling you loved your wife very much."

At 16.00, he lined up near Gate 2. The queue for the bus was two labourers long, and he joined it as he always did as the third man. At 16.06, the bus started on its six-minute journey. On that Tuesday, it took more than an hour: just as they passed the Presidential Boulevard, they were stopped behind a few other buses, some cars, many cyclists, and what looked like an upside-down truck, its underside charred and smoking. Kap Fynncraft, somehow, had sunk back into a reverie. He would be home late today, dinner would be late, he'd have to eat as he watched the game tonight. He smiled. Maybe he'd annoy that old woman downstairs by walking around at 22.00. Maybe he'd miss the bus in the morning and hitch a ride. Maybe-

Before he knew it, the bus was on its way again. He could no longer see the plumes of smoke on the southwest, the inky blue of the late-evening sky had swallowed it in its entirety. The streetlamps were lighting themselves one by one, as if they knew Kap Fynncraft was coming, as if they knew he'd want to alight and, somehow, not want to break his head on the pavement on a night that involved a postponed dinner and an angry old woman. A moist film of water had condensed on the windows of the bus, and he waited by the door lest he missed his stop. Under the bright white glare of the streetlights, he could see the patterned tiling on the pavement whip by in the oblong shadow of the vehicle. He knew they were somewhere near his house, he remembered the hexagonal patterns from a terrible day when he had reached the bus stop early one morning and had decided to look down.

Black, white, black, white, black, white, black... the lines between the colours trapped his eyes, and he could feel himself moving through the Universe one coloured tile at a time.

The Persistence Of Vision

There was once a little man, a man of short stature and quick to temper, who lived somewhere in the suburbs of London, weathering cold weather or a hot summer without smile or frown. He had a quick and crisp moustache so fiendishly red that it frightened away the children who wandered into his wide front-yard, and they would run and they would run lest he spot them trampling his leaves. The neighbours did not know much about him nor did they have any complaint, and the little man kept his house and his nose quite clean. While he wished they would only leave him alone and not suffer the pains of company, he would decline tea and biscuits completely politely.

Once it so happened that, returning from the grocer an evening, an old man walking the other way tipped his hat at him, and the little man was overcome by a sudden but freakish curiosity, and so stepped up to enquire: "Good evening, sir!", quoth he, "The sun is too high in the sky although August is nigh gone. When is winter to come?" In reply said the old man: "Good evening, sir, to you! The chap on the radio said winter would be here, quite strong and bleak, before the week after is done!" The little man thanked and set off once more, thinking of the weather to himself when the old man called: "Have a day as wonderful as you are, sir!" The little man, now, he was swift to anger, and turning back, he called in reply: "Why, sir, why! What have I said to earn that curse? What have I spoken to deserve something as terse?" The old man knew not what dragon he had poked and stood so still as to surprise winter before it arrived. In receiving only silence, the little man finished: "As wonderful as I am, you say to me, but the town knows, oh, the world knows, I am no wonderful man but as devilish as they come to be! Lest you fear anything, sir, let us have it clear. Speak not to me again for a madness is here. My madness of your futile attempts at persistence is here."

[caption id="attachment_785" align="aligncenter" width="277" caption="All those who wander are not lost"][/caption]