Apocalypse of Jude

A sheet-bare mattress lies on a wood-square floor of a large, empty room. On it, Gary tosses in the shallowness of but a few hours sleep. Beneath the current of his consciousness he has become a whale swimming out of his depth among the coral, where as a whale he knows he should not be. He is much surprised at being here, but accepts it, going immediately to look for food. Then he finds himself beached and his dying flesh about to be hacked apart by men gathered around him. At this point sleep bears him no more.

In the mezzanine between waking and sleeping, Gary cannot place where he is. His eyes open to a glossy white ceiling after which the rest of the world comes flooding in. Mae looms in his head, placing him on the uncomfortable perimeter of a pain that has never had a sounding in his mind before. To shake loose of it, he rises and goes padding off down a cream-coloured passage to the toilet.

/did we really say goodbye last night mae/ /is all this for real/ /three years worth of effort gone and life just carries on/ /im not damaged/ /ill manage without you/

Leaving the bathroom, he passes into the lounging area, a mess of papers on its sixties mustard carpet. He walks over them through to the veranda, spacious, oblong, slate paved and littered with dry leaves and cigarette butts. He draws a cigarette from a box stashed in his shirt pocket, but can find no light with his digging hands. He re-enters the house, picks up a scattered lighter from an arm of a chair and lights up while crossing the lintel back into the early, blue morning sun too warm for its season.

He steps his expansive frame up onto the veranda wall. From the lower spine of the lone mountain where the house stands, he surveys the view, lolling his body around one of the poles which supports an uncovered pergola. His mind, feeling the intensity of everything now being different, takes in greedily the distant, frayed edges of the bay carving out a hazy peninsula filled with the far, unreal city under a brown smog. Then there are the sandy flats, squatted upon by the Moor’s people, that lie between the city and this protected basin with its luxury seashore highrises backing up into industria, then malls and business districts to schools and residential houses which lie nestled in the hand-like slopes of the lone mountain.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 23