PUZZEL-EYE

There would be no more self-inflicted wounds, no more hesitation, no more blind allegiance to rules made by human beings as imperfect as himself. He would survive anything that got in his way, because he knew he could. (J.D. Vinge)

1

The national anthem will shortly blare unheard again.

"... rain from the west, which can be expected to last for the next couple of days. These showers will linger until the weekend, when a high pressure system moving across the British Isles will clear the skies, leaving most regions with partial cloudiness and cooler temperatures. Along the coast, however, pockets of sunshine can be expected, bringing day temperatures for seaside vacationers up to 25 in some places."

Accompanied by all the pomp and circumstance of full military honours, the flag will toss elegantly as it sweeps down the mast before an empty room – the proverbial, tree falling in the woods with no one to hear it.

"Thanks Tom. And remember, ladies and gentlemen, if you are going out in that sun, arm yourself against unnecessary cancer with the advised protection factor … and keep the little ones in the shade at all times. That’s all from us here at Channel Five on this Tuesday, the ninth of August."

The stiff song and patriotic colours will shortly signal the end.

"Goodnight and God bless."

The re-run nationalism is swiftly followed by the Tone, the angry, piercing siren meant to alert, or in this case, to rouse a body from drunken stupour, to nudge a hand fallen asleep in the fatty chip bag or nestled down in the warmth of the crotch, shoes off, feet up, top button of the pant’s undone for easy access. The little banshee drones on and on, as it has for five consecutive nights now. No neighbour wonders at this. No one smells the stale air of the locked room, a room reeking of flat Diet Pepsi, body odor, cedar chips and hamster urine. No one calls. If anyone had bothered, all that could be seen from down on the street is the intense blue light that radiates through the drawn drapes all night long – the shrine of a couch potato.

The calm violence of off-the-air television illuminates this shrine in its even blue-white cast, lighting the aged black-light disco posters, the ceramic beasties prancing, sitting or squatting on two Swiss knick-knack shelves, random stacks of books, piles of dog-eared magazines, a hand-hooked rug portraying a Jesus who looks remarkably like Elvis (or the other way around) and a huge women’s bare belly rising above the dark waves of a formless couch. Slick and smooth, like a true oceanographic prize wrapped in a too small, faded mauve track suit, the lily white mound hangs exposed and glistening with chip grease and sweat in the jittery light.

For five days and nights, Vivian has been in flight. Her slack mouth hangs agape on the grey velour cushion, dribbling spit like an ancient fountain not entirely dried up -- if one bothered to look close enough, the dark pool by her mouth has in fact, already turned green. A similar dark, pungent patch colours the track pants between her legs. Somewhere under the formless mass of breasts, stomach and upper thighs, her chest rises and falls with an irregular, shallow breath. While critically shallow, her breathing is probably just strong enough that an alert paramedic might realize that she is not dead before he zips the black bag closed.

* * *

"Fuck you, you idle, vain, middle-class, day-tripping bastards," he mutters under his breath, "I hope it pours on your fucking picnics! May the sun god brush all your pearly white hides with his aubergine, cancerous kiss! Damn you, you self-righteous bastards!"

In the parking garage, his heels pound heavily over the concrete floor to his bashed up Fiat Panda. In the cold fluorescent light he suddenly stops to shake his head with bestial fury, fists tight, lips pulled back in a snarl, as he is struck again by the pressures of a job he loathes. ‘So they think this car isn’t suited to one of their employees,’ his mind boils to the familiar tune, ‘They expect me, their token dark skinned, Freeblood lackey to run out with my own money and buy a new one? Participate in the global economy … global pollution … global ruin? Fuck 'em all!’ he wants to shout, craving to hear the amplified echo of his rage thunder through the empty parking garage. Instead, he climbs into the ancient box and slams the door; he hears something break in the hinge.

"Shit!" he shouts harder, thumping the steering wheel with therapeutic aggression. ‘Shit!’ he shouts thrice more, thumps thrice more, now safe in his rusted cocoon. Fire springs from his lighter even before the keys reach the ignition. He pulls heavily on a tight, pre-rolled joint. Fuck’em, he recites a moment later from the edge of lucidity, sinking back against the protruding springs in the worn, Italian seat. After the right dosage, he guns the hydrogen engine, squeals the polymer tires and races home.

Thursday. The word looms significantly in the mind of the cable news weatherman, who is now peacefully stoned and watching the traffic lights drift by. Weekend just around the corner, he hums like a magical incantation. The thought of two days free buoys his anticipation for another flight. Unlike any drug, it is the flight that will heal his mood – and his mood definitely needs some attention. Even recreational drugs no longer calm him, if indeed, they don't make him edgier.

Since leaving school, he has quit three jobs; at the back of his mind, he knows this will be his fourth. Why the weather? Meteorology is the next best thing to real astrology – like the space agencies require for even the lowest janitorial position. The weather, plain and simple … and not the astrology of those fucking card shuffling, number counting, tea reading witches. Shit, he scoffs, shaking his head at the bank of lurid red neon on the side of the road. Vacancy. No vacancy. Sex boats bobbing on their moorings. Another drag. Still, weather news is perfect for someone who can’t handle the requisite mathematics and physics. Tea reading witches ... too late … a face springs to mind. Now he grits his teeth as his mother’s image bobs on her mooring in his lazy, flickering mind. ‘Hi darling, did you have a nice day?’ Her warm soprano and kooky accent. He doesn't need her tricks, her poverty or her scandalous life. With a bleary smile cutting through the drug, he listens to his mother remind him that he could have done the physics if he had put his mind to it. At the time, there were so many other distractions to pursue! There still are! He coughs loudly, punching out the illegal cigarette and tossing the butt out the window, which he leaves open until arriving home.

Tom parks clumsily and makes his way to the door of his flat. Moving slowly and carefully, he is sure to close and lock everything properly. Mistakes have been made before while high, and now he forces himself to be extra wary. Once inside, however, he lets his head fly as his clothes quickly find their way over the back of a chair. At last, standing naked in the dark, a hastily made cheese sandwich is devoured and a liter of water drained as if someone else’s craving has been satisfied. While chewing and gulping, his eyes remain locked on the stars flickering outside his window. His body momentarily satisfied, he stretches his arms out, relishing the taut pressure of his own muscles, his own body, letting any stress he still feels drain away. With a little regret and a great deal of impatience, the meteorologist realizes he isn’t at all tired this day-before-the-weekend night. A pounding, excited heart and the air's coolness bathing his unblinking eyes tells him the time is ripe if he so choses.

Resist, a little voice cries out, an echoed warning.

Then a debate rages in cerebral silence. The Weatherman listens as an outsider. Again, he is a little boy at home, listening to the ranting and raving of his lunatic mother arguing violently with some faceless dick in the other room.

And why not slip into the sea? Tom asks himself in a sudden flash of anger. Everyone is entitled to after-work recreation. Some drink themselves into a stupour. Others train their bodies with feigned grunts and groans into picture perfect copies of real athletes. Others hit the meat markets and cruise until late in the night, sometimes needing sex three or four times before they can sleep like innocent babes. He has done it all too, but it left a bitter taste in his mouth, like the hangovers, like the rejection, like the loneliness in another’s arms, like the callous aggression wrapped in self-loathing and lust and called love. Life is too short for addictions, he always says. Now he only smokes a bit. Not often … only when he is stressed and in need of a distraction … in need of escape.

Like tonight.

Like almost every night this last month ... is flight just recreation? he wonders at his own hypocrisy, easing his naked body down onto the Bedouin rug spread out in the centre of his room. He chuckles, suddenly amused by the idea of recreational flight. Since this weatherman first discovered how to rise, then float, and then travel away from his body, it has become as addictive as any drug, only it is much, much better.

He stretches every limb out to its fullest, savoring the tension wracking every muscle, then relaxes. He lets his body retract on its own accord as he focuses on the rise. The first steps are like climbing a ladder; only you have to find the ladder and want to climb it. Slowly he lifts until he can see his own body at rest on the blue and red patterned knots of virgin wool. Abstractly, he surveys the landscape that humanity recognizes as Tom Rijnholen. He is happy with what he sees, good height, clear skin, nice physique, handsome face and ample dick. But the awkwardness of it, the clinking, clanking, clunking heaviness of all bodies never fails to bring him sorrow while on the rise. 'Landlocked slugs,' he always thinks while drifting up into the night air, 'Feeding on the decay of a vibrant world.'

Then he is gone.

His body, his shell, lies together with the rest of the sleeping suburb. Like a dream, he soars up into the sky. Below lie his city like a fungus spreading over the surface of a forgotten cheese, floating islands on reinforced polymer rafts linked by flexible concrete bridges and causeways. Since water levels rose some twenty years ago, inundating the entire Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt deltas of the European west coast with salt water, the Dutch had been quick to adapt technologically. While Tom floats on ether, what is left of their seaside nation now floats on modern plastics and concrete. But that is earthbound. In this astral state, the ponderous lives below hold as much fascination as the colour of a breeze or the taste of morning mist to mortal senses. Higher and higher, his spirit swims up to meet the stars.

His eyes dance. It is a star he seeks. One image still irks him, still gives him pressure. With some annoyance, he realizes that he is looking for the white portal. When the glowing spatial fissure first appeared a couple years ago, Tom had been over the dry creek that is the river Rhine. He had been soaring above the ancient castles, vineyards and huge water retention lakes on a night just like tonight. The fairy-like empires of light shining from the monolithic water mills and refineries always delight him, like a moth to a flame. After the rise of the seas and the subsequent population depletion along global coasts, the great Western powers for that both coal and nuclear power became impossibly dangerous fuels to sustain. So during the years of rebuilding, governments invested in solar and hydroelectric power for small, localized markets. Survival had no longer been a national issue of security or chauvinism, but a local matter. Millions died. Anarchy became a way of life, though the high and dry powers denied it. And after those first years of the nightmare, eventually those local communities who could survive, leveled out. People were re-housed and fed. Whole communities, nations, a continent, indeed, the whole world, adapted. They dubbed the ‘temporary’ solutions that restored order as the dawn of the high-tech middle-ages, because economic ruin, including energy production and transport costs, kept people tied to local nodes of power. Virtually overnight the tribal bickering changed hands. Old wars came to a standstill. And a new generation of feudal lords from the high-ground middle-class set up shop once again.

Sure, information was now global (orbiting satellites didn’t give a damn about high water levels), but people still walked on two feet, or needed cars to travel more than fifty kilometers. Cars, even with hydrogen fuel, were a luxury, although the necessity to travel declined with the disappearance of roads and railway lines. Electronic communication with locally sustainable markets shattered all economic theories. Imported oranges and olives became too expensive in Northern Europe; the greenhouse culture provided a tasteless, hydroponic substitute. All balance had been lost in just a few weeks of volcanic activity along several continental plates. Global temperatures rose, the sleeping ice caps were disturbed and the dreams and arrogance of a wasteful, neglectful and selfish mankind had been punished.

Through the heretical history taught by his drunken mother, Tom recalled the Season of Pointed Fingers, when blame was hurled from industrialists and multinationals, to governments and back to specific, wasteful, opulent cultures. Who had triggered the seismic chaos? Wars resulted, adding blood to the salt water that ate up coastal and inland river civilizations as far as three hundred kilometers up-stream. This is our only world! This is our Paradise! had been the cry. The Greens won the day, like it or not. Horses were in, thick winter sweaters were in, chemical free, micro-agriculture was in, and clean power generating became the order of the day. High speed trains ran again, but not everywhere, as the costs of new bridges and foundations in the flooded areas were initially too high. Federated states cut loose those provinces that wanted independence; the reasons were now irrelevant. People sat at home, or chatted with their immediate neighbours in their own tongue (most were unable to pay the cost of satellite phone bills … Besides, who would they call?).

As Tom soars higher through the ether like the ghost of Christmas present, he laughs, "Now the lazy, racist fuckers walk, while I travel the world!". He had been soaring too, when the white line appeared against the black heavens above him, glowing like a fiery vagina surrounded by stars. An astronomical marvel of this world, or an astral trick projected from his mind, curiosity killed the cat, he reminded himself, even as he sped towards it. Sweeping up towards the stellar phenomena to get a closer look, he suddenly became aware of a strong pull. Tom always had control of his flight, but now something drew him towards the light. There was also a noise. A sucking or tearing in the vacuum that had filled him with withering panic. He made to dip back down to the North Sea dunes, to the glitzy lights of the busy hotels and casinos, but he couldn't break away. Forced to move towards the hole, the young man gaped in astonishment as the fissure opened wider, presenting him with a view into a realm beyond. The closer he drifted, the more he could see of other stars. A confusing pattern, he wondered, knowing full well that no system like that could be seen from Earth, the moon or any of the orbiting space labs. While terror gripped him, the astralnaut (as he liked to call himself) couldn’t help but be enticed by what he now beheld. Closer and closer, he drew towards the light and the voluminous hiss.

There, out there, were stars, new stars, and bands of colours that filled him with longing. No man had gazed upon these things -- I am the first, he thought wanting to reach out and touch the new universe with his trembling hand. But still he held back. Who knew what would happen to him once he passed through this rent in the fabric of space and time -- torn apart, lost, or worse still, separated from his body and left lying on his living room floor for one of his idiot neighbours to discover! He scoffed at the fear of embarrassment. So too, it might just be some sort of flux or pocket acting like a mirror, like a bubble trapped in the strange field through which he traveled. He called his state 'astral', but what it really was, he couldn’t be sure. That he had discovered how to project himself, the Weatherman had told no one. Rent or flux, he grimaced still trying to pull away, it might also be a clot in his own drug-filled brain poised on the brink of rupture, or ... he suddenly caught his breath ... had something already happened to my body?! Panic seized him.

And still he was drawn relentlessly closer.

Suddenly, in front of his face, a long arm curled out from around behind the band of light, reaching out for him. With bovine astuteness, he counted four joints in the arm as it crooked out of the void into his universe. He watched a huge hand bloom numerous, glinting icicle fingers. The whole was sheathed in mackerel skin that glinted bronze from numerous suns. And while captivated by this fantastic lure, in one swift motion, the bodiless claw snatched at his incorporeal body -- with a certainty that sent shock waves through his mind, just as he might grab an apple to bring to his watering mouth, the Weatherman knew the thing wanted him.

Jerking back, he found to his surprise that the hypnotic pull had weakened. In the place where his stomach had just been, the crystal talons clattered in frustration. Hard armour, coating the hideous arm like the exoskeleton of an insect, winked metallically in the intense light of the sun. It snatched at Tom again as he fought the power that drew him back.

Once, twice, it thrust forward, restrained by something, a cat at a mouse hole, raking the vacuum furiously, but then finally ten, maybe fifteen fingers, human fingers wearing translucent talons, closed around his kicking leg. But my leg is at home on the carpet! he screamed in confusion, slamming his free foot down on the fragile looking arm. The unexpected impact exploded in his kicked leg with fiery pain, as though he had driven his heel down on a bar of iron. Still, he drove it down again. Willing himself to return, he fought the limb that now drew him back … near hysterical, he fought against the owner who still hid beyond the rim of the white blazing gate.

The arm continued drawing its prize back into the now shrinking hole; the pulsing fissure had begun to shrink! The gate hissed as if the very night sky was on fire. Yet, he felt his furious resistance slow the strong pull of the arm. Again and again he tried to will himself back down into his body. Tearing his eyes from the hideous arm and the blinding gate, he suddenly saw the glistening silver line, a fairy’s thread, winding through the cloud from the earth below to … to him?!

Then he was free.

Shooting back down to the surface of his world with reckless speed, he watched as the slit sealed up, almost taking the long arm off with it. The hand, or paw, or whatever it had been, zipped through just as the light snapped shut against a backdrop of Orion and Cassiopeia’s bright Caph. He could only watch. The fall of his ethereal self paralyzed him. He needed to breath, even without lungs, and couldn’t. The youth wondered if he had been thrown from the pan into the fire.

He slammed into his body with a force that almost killed him. Tom lay stretched out for hours, only just able to breath. He couldn’t see, but his hands curled around the edge of the rug in delicious, corporeal pain. While his breath slowly returned, he remained gasping and blind for several hours, and even days later he couldn't walk properly. He told everyone at the office he had tripped down the stairs while drinking on his rooftop terrace. Never again, he swore.

But like all children, the thrill of the unknown draws him back, hence during each subsequent flight, the wary eye for any strange band of light burning against the firmament … hence the gnawing curiosity that infects his restless mind with questions. What lies beyond that gate? What unknown universe had once beckoned with a demon’s grip? What paradise had he lost?

A demon’s grip? Tom considers up among the stars, pondering for the millionth time the sinister hand that had successfully grabbed his spectral foot. But for that one minor detail in his extraordinary view into a universe beyond his own, the youth who know everything still has no answers.

end of chapter one