Now and then, the slight lateral movement of the building in the surrounding airstream sent a warning ripple across the flat surface of the water, as if in its pelagic deeps an immense creature was stirring in its sleep.
That wasn’t a true dream, but an ancient organic memory millions of years old. The innate releasing mechanisms laid down in your cytoplasm have been awakened. The expanding sun and rising temperatures are driving you back down to the spinal levels into the drowned seas of the lowest layers of your unconscious, into the entirely new zone of the neuronic psyche. This is the lumbar transfer, total psychic recall. We really remember these swamps and lagoons.
In the future, violence would clearly become a valuable form of social cement.
A vicious boredom ruled the world, for the first time in human history, interrupted by meaningless acts of violence.
The staircase was deserted – the higher up the building the more reluctant were the residents to use the stairs, as if this in some way demeaned them.
Their period in the apartment together had been one of almost narcotic domesticity.
It had not occurred to me that sexual games could be played with an unborn child.
For all his youth, he seemed to be willing himself to the edge of an adult despair.
Already it was clear that the lower floors were doomed. Even their insistence on educating their children, the last reflex of any exploited group before it sank into submission, marked the end of their resistance.
When he had first met her, Royal had taken for granted her absolute self-confidence, but in fact the reverse was true – far from being sure of herself, Anne needed constantly to re-establish her position on the top rung of the ladder. By comparison, the professional people around her, who had achieved everything as a result of their own talents, were models of self-assurance.
Representative democracy had been replaced by the surveillance camera and the private police force.
People no longer need enemies – in this millennium their great dream is to become victims. Only their psychopathies can set them free...
Curiously, there are many perfect short stories, but no perfect novels.
This was a place where it was impossible to borrow a book, attend a concert, say a prayer, consult a parish record or give to charity. In short, the town was an end state of consumerism.
But a lottery isn’t meaningless. Someone has to win.
He picked at the thick rims of dirt under his nails. This decline, both of himself and his surroundings, was almost to be welcomed. In a way he was forcing himself down these steepening gradients, like someone descending into a forbidden valley. The dirt on his hands, his stale clothes and declining hygiene, his fading interest in food and drink, all helped to expose a more real version of himself.
His unconscious was rapidly becoming a well-stocked pantheon of tutelary phobias and obsessions, homing onto his already over-burdened psyche like lost telepaths.
Just before dawn, when the pain became unbearable, he took one of the morphine tablets and fell off into a loud, booming sleep, in which the great sun expanded until it filled the entire universe, the stars themselves jolted by each of its beats.
But it held a deeper meaning for me, the sense that reality itself was a stage set that could be dismantled at any moment, and that no matter how magnificent anything appeared, it could be swept aside into the debris of the past.
To the Insane: I owe them everything.