He is walking on a street that looks like the one you lived on when you were a small person and the world was as big and round as a perfect orange. The street is long but not long enough that its length becomes itself conspicuous. There are exactly six tall lampposts on the street, each one precisely the same, save the third (this is your favourite) which has stretching along its side the words CRY ME A RIVER in an exciting and distressing green. He walks by the lamppost. No notice.
Man stops for a moment. He is bending down to pick something off of the floor. His keys. He picks them up, ungracefully and with an unsteady hand, and moves on. Upon his face, there is no discernible reaction. His face….How to describe a face? His face is long, his eyes are not empty, but not as full as many other people’s are. His eyes are both waning gibbous things. His hair is a garish blonde as if to upset the rest of his face. His face is surely as hard as a rock. As with many other peoples, he has a look about him that intimates beauty in his youth. The ends of his mouth turn ever so quietly downwards. Stubble. He is older than you, but younger than your father.
Man is drunk; not to say he always is drunk, though this is typical. He is sick on the pavement. Too drunk to be disgusted by his own body, by himself. He is sick again. Four times in total: the first two incidents are contained near the fourth lamppost, the other two happen, unfortunately, as he attempts to cross the road. The sight and smell is everywhere, disgusting. He makes it to the other side, and leaves behind four footprints of his suffering.
II.
Next…is the forest. What he seeks there is unknown even to him. He moves with the purpose of man with knowledge (self-delusion is a force stronger than many other virtues or vices). He is almost at the forest. First, he sees not the trees, but the expanse—the dark, nothingness of grass. A single blade of grass is harmless, yet as a unit, an army, grass becomes a thing of great and ominous density. Man strides through the grass. His walk is their destruction. He is sick another time, right there in the heart of the grass. Man is near the trees. He has seen these breathing things before. You have stood where he is stood.
Forests are places for inside voices and contemplation. There is birdsong and it is beautiful. Man has no faculties for appreciation of such things. He is decaying everywhere, the birds are flying away in indignant flocks. Screaming, he is screaming now. This is the howling of a baby. All things alive in the woods have become fearful of him, the space he is in is retreating from his presence. Soon, he will make the forest his void.
If he had brought fire with him, if he could reach into his pocket and take out a baby flame, you are sure he would burn it all. He does.
Now, a city. From the vantage point of the hill, Man can see his whole life as it stretches out across the blinking lights. His mum gave birth to him right there, in the little grey hospital just down the road from The Angry Crow. His first home. Post office. Cinema. His first love’s house, where he snuck in through the window when Anne and Mark were still asleep, and stayed up all night just talking and laughing and being with her. The second-hand bookstore. School. Supermarket. This is his city. He treats it like Carthage.
A country. His country. In hours…razed.
V.
The world, cauterised.
When there is no longer any danger of the world intruding upon his self, he goes to the only place he has left. A charming cottage in Devon, costing just short of three hundred thousand pounds.
Despite being situated in a seaside town, the cottage is not near enough to the sea to see it…but you can always smell it, that sublime and devastating scent of salt sitting in the air like a ghost. In the small space of grass by her driveway, Grandma had been trying to grow some arum lilies to add some colour to the drab beige of her road. They’re still there. No car: she cycled everywhere when she still could, and then, when she couldn’t, she walked. The cottage exterior was pretty, but the interior was wonderful, glorious, perfected. Man walks in through the front door. It is open.
Man takes off his shoes when he enters. He is still drunk, he staggers into the kitchen. It seems implausible, but the fridge is stocked. He takes out the cheese, and the bread. White bread, good. He turns on the cooker, butter in the pan, then the bread. Two slices of gouda, other slice of bread on top, and…flip. He eats it. It’s disgusting. He throws the plate on the floor and cuts his feet all over. He stomps all over the kitchen in protest. This quickly becomes a bloody ceremony.
Now upstairs—to the bedroom. Not her’s, his. It smells just how you remember it. Looks just how you remember it. He turns his eyes to the corner of the room and sees the horror. Curled up quite asleep, there sits the child in his room.
VII.
This is the Boy.
VIII.
The boy has blonde hair. Certainly no older than five. Full eyes. He is beautiful. Man is enraged. Destroyed everything…boy…still here? What should he do? Man approaches, and the boy is awake now, and terrified and still. What should he do? Man tells him to keep quiet. Hush. Someone will hear. Then remembers. Just the two of us.
What should he do? Man strangles the boy. Hands grip the windpipe with bloody evil, like trying to burst a balloon. Man is no stranger to violence, he has become violence, he thought. But the boy won’t shut up, he won’t disappear. An act of suicide is proving ineffective. He needs a drink.
X.
This is the way things are now. Destroyed everything but himself. So…boring.
So he sobers up. Reads the books Grandma told him he ought to have and then rereads them obsessively. Of the fifteen Dickens novels, she has eight of them in the house. Bleak House quickly becomes his favourite. The boy prefers Copperfield, but of course he would. They make food together, though neither of them are any good, and her old cookbooks are near impossible to follow. They go on long walks, in silence. One wakes up earlier than the other, has a shower, dances to old records in the kitchen, cartwheels, sings. The suffering is lessening, maybe. They enjoy autumn and brave winter. Sometimes they light the fireplace and read ghost stories.
Every once in a while, maybe once a month but he can’t be sure, Man goes to Boy’s room when he’s asleep and tries to kill him, just to see if he can. No luck every time, but he still keeps trying. Usually after this experiment, he goes back to his bed and stares at the pink ceiling absently. He wonders if the boy does the same, if he ever sneaks into Man’s bedroom, tries to slit Man’s throat before he can befall the fate of becoming him. Boy does.
