SUNSTROKE

For though I am free from all men, I made myself a servant to all, that I might win the more. (1 Corinthians 9:19)

And let no man question the why or wherefore of your judgment. This he must not do, for he is only a man. (St. Augustine, Confessions)

'You are all Gods' (Conversations with God)

Forward

Encroaching insanity bleeds the reason from rational, political man. It happens incrementally like the phases of the moon, the ebb and flood of tides, like notches on a belt girdling an expanding waistline, a feeding leach, thick, black, slimy. One moment he's here, then the next finds him standing in the rain, lost among a sea of passing strangers. Alone, his insanity flickers annoyingly, like a fluorescent light on the blink. This particular light flickers dangerously high above, the only light at the top of the stairs. And up here (there on the last landing) is a door. One hand grips the banister, eyes focused against the rhythmic dousing into blackness, into cold, flat light, the other hand trembles as it reaches out for the knob. The cool brass knob is locked. Minutes pass … days, hours … and even if you could find the key, you'd have to find the right keyhole. This will be a problem. For before your eyes, made jittery in the pulsing extremes from pinholes to saucers, countless slots, holes and grooved cracks orbit like accelerated planets around the dark abyss of a single, vacant spy hole. Easy? Then again, it would be easier if you recognized the door … if you knew where you were … if you knew who waited for you on the other side.

And funny enough you do know who's on the other side.

But now there are white glass shells scattered all around your feet. Blood trickles down your bare arm; not that you see it in the darkness, but rather feel its sensuously thickening passage from warm to cool. The light is out. Beyond the fuses clutching jagged ends of the missing tube, stars wink from the skylight. Steam rises from your breath when only a moment ago you were warm. You are standing in the dark watching a disturbing showcase of smiles on the surface of the door, behind which, promises and false secrets are muttered. Terse grins bear stained teeth in amused scorn. Keyholes stretch like provocative lips. Thoughts tempt. Words tease. Deeds fascinate. You know the lock is open.

'Why?' you ask yourself glancing back down the stairwell. The stairs disappear in intensifying degrees of blackness. Beyond the walls, traffic is muted and distant. Then the unspoken answer draws you closer to the door. Routine shatters. Abstract hands whirl around measuring the pointlessness of time. Irrelevancy blooms gold and fragile under an ethereal summer storm. Mountain peaks, valley floors, birth, death and a moment's lethal contrition on an empty train platform. It's all there as your hand brushes the door. Truly, it is the inherited legacy of rational political man to know who waits with infinite patience and a warm embrace beyond the door. Nothing random or unexplained sends that prickling itch racing across your scalp. Teeth clench. Breath staggers. With a nervous sigh, Hope is on the wing after her bedfellows have already flown.

'Who turned off the damned lights!?' Your leather footstep crunches. Glass pressed into wood. Light. Eyes. Chill. Nonsense. Practicality lands like a lifeline slapping rising seas. Wearily, you eye the keyholes snapping like predatory hounds in the diffuse starlight and turn to descend the stairs into the dark.

Crunch!

Rational man?

Crunch!

Or is he not a madman in the hooded djbella of antique hysteria …

Crunch!

Wrapped against the biting sands of reason and the chill of false tranquility.

Crunch!

One, lone, simpering fool loving life with perplexing courage.

Crunch!

This is the man who finds himself standing before the door …

Crunch!

There, before a bedazzling surf,

Crunch!

With madness erupting around his fortified walls,

Crunch!

Hammering,

Crunch!

Eroding,

Crunch!

Day after day,

Crunch!

Year after year,

Crunch!

Generation after generation,

Crunch!

Threatening at every second …

Crunch!

To sweep him out onto a grey and foreboding sea,

Crunch!

Trapping him in solitude aboard a gilded junk that has no name.

1 NOODLES OF DESTINY

"Sorry I'm late."

"It's okay. You haven't missed a thing."

"The guard told me he's been up there for almost ten minutes and hasn't said a word."

"True, true. It's really a sorry sight. I don't know why they bothered to call him up ... torturing that poor soul." The other man casts his tall and ascetic colleague an honest, but theatrical look of confusion.

"Maybe because he's the only one who can tell us the truth?"

"You think so?" whispers the portly, ruddy faced man, ignoring his friend's hollow, sarcastic tone, "But the accused is guilty? They've shown everything except live footage … why then must we suffer this circus?"

"Of course he knows the truth. Why else would this tribunal sit waiting for that dear fool to open his mouth. Why else take a risk like this, unless they think that something can be gained. This circus is not about one man's guilt, brother. Ten minutes, you say? Do you know how much this is costing?!" he hisses, buckling his long body to sit on the packed bench. He ignors the punitive glances of his colleagues and continues in a hurried whisper, "By conservative estimates, at least a hundred million viewers are watching now, each with a fifteen second attention span, their fingers poised on the remote control, scanning for a car chase, guns, fire, flesh or a scandalized star as the clock ticks on advertising fortunes … the CEO's must be shitting ripe fury! Whoever thought that this broadcast could save New Law Live is going to get it right up the arse …" His anger is false. It is concern that slips through.

"Isn't it obvious who's going to get it? Why else use brother S like this?" murmurs the other man distractedly, his attention still focused on the similarly clad colleague seated in the box before the judges. Not a word is spoken. From every side, hard, agitated faces glare at the witness. In his own mounting agitation, the round brother ticks his ear to the seat beside him. Silence too, he notes with surprise. Turning, he sees the late-comer kneeling in silent prayer.

* * *

A single ray of sunlight streaks across the room. In that staccato, symphonic shaft, the air is thick with beads of deep-fried fat and the swirling acrid dust of tobacco smoke. The jellied slick that coats the windows explodes with dusk's fire, until, seconds later, the sun drops another degree and dumps the room back into a sooty twilight. Outside, cars wait for a green light. Boisterous children on the warpath dance recklessly between dog shit and bike racks. The new leaves gracing the skinny whips of elms look vibrant enough to eat; the only colour that breathes here. So many pigeons and people and dogs sharing the street, crowding the street, soiling the street … he lets his vision roll back through the glass into the shelter of the small room.

Only the high ceiling makes this Chinese restaurant sufferable. Up there, a frescoed cloud, once rose white and now nicotine brown, hovers blandly above tasseled paper lamps netted with ancient cobwebs. Shocking wallpaper in gold and deep red meets the worn, shag carpet. Vernacular window frames and back-lighted works of oriental art advertise exotic platitudes to the eye, all against the incongruous hissing of Top Ten radio from some unseen speaker. Like the windowsills crammed with a dense mat of potted plants and pot-bellied ceramic Buddhas-of-the-good-life, the room is crammed with many, many white clothed tables. Two spice pots, salt, pepper, thick black liquids in unmarked bottles and individually wrapped toothpicks grace each table. All the seats are empty, except one. Only one guest honours the sweet and sour ancestors of these old world immigrants. Over there. He is sitting at the corner table with his back to the room.

But he might just as well be just another skittering cockroach for all the attention he gets from the sleepy staff. He is here everyday, looking out the window with his back to the room, a room which is never really busy, or noisy, or eventful. He appreciates this fact. The Crux of the Fulcrum, he calls this oriental palace wedged into a tenement block; the real name escapes him. In fact, it is irrelevant. Dutch beer and Shanghai noodles await him each evening. No one talks to him. Even hospitable smiles or nods of welcome are thin; the teenaged daughter of the owner calls him the Stray Dog in her second-hand Cantonese. When she calls the young, disheveled patron by this dishonorable name her parents frown, but say nothing.

For below the ubiquitous surfaces of red, sooty brick and glass, under the red ceramic eves of mock bamboo, between the squatting, gold, paper-machéd guardian temple dogs, past the take-away counter and Chinese calendar dated four years ago, here in this temple of gastronomic delights soaked in oil and sodium nitrates, this living, breathing and paying patron is going insane. Slowly. By degrees. Each day ticking another notch or two from the shell of his sanity. Years ago he feared this assault. Later, he resigned himself to the natural process of erosion. Now he relishes the advancing madness, like a chess player who knows he is losing but has decided to savour his defeat and play it out to the very end. Even while he watches his cigarette smoke rise up to the chipped clouds of this spiritual sanctum, his moods wax and wane with tidal regularity. Alone, he asks himself again and again what will become of him when sanity is no longer his. What will he do when he realizes the game is over … call it a day, or call it a dawn? He wonders, too, if he were to slip down under the table, if anyone would ever find him; certainly they never cleaned down there, and neither would anyone smell him. And so exiled from reality, what then? A life of meditation? Suicide? Or will he get so pissed off that he'll decide to punish the monsters that drove him to madness with their selfish lies and soulless ambition? Revolution? Crusade? Or, he thinks with a bitter, grim smile, will his intimate knowledge of God force him to teach those who will listen … to follow the signposts along the road of their shared existence, to help them avoid the path he took, lead them like a piper, though not from Hamelin … no, rather, to the barren desert that glows pure in austere radiance.

The echo of a teacher, or a book, or a subway poster suddenly declares Happiness! A well-fitting bra, or fabric softener, sunny vacations, theme parks, pension funds … he doesn't remember. Ruminating on the word, he knows it is his soul, reminding him of eternal joy and the fair weather happiness of man's Earth-bound life, and having done so, God need give no more … for what love could be greater? Old Testaments, Gospels, Qurans, he ponders these dubious truths with the caution a man demonstrates before eating raw jellyfish; the same forkload of noodles slips back onto his plate for the third time. 'We have to fill in the gaps of our own scripts', the vision's echo flares, 'and if you're not out there creating new life to pass your time, then you're out there giving life meaning and value for others, which amounts to the same thing in the long run'. Out among people, letting others know what a joy life really is. Basking in love ... an eruption shakes him from this meditation.

The ancient Chinese waitress-mom screams out to her husband, hoping that the shear volume of her voice will penetrate the small kitchen window through which a constant cloud of hissing, prawn-reeking steam billows. Gibberish … he returns to his food. When he folded the menu and ordered Noodle Entree No.7 (the Shanghai Special), he had no idea when the next wave of madness would take him. Actually, he had given himself until he finished this ritual plate before the maw of the lamprey spiraled up out of the Abyss to finally consume him. Approximately 30 minutes if he ate slowly. However, each mouthful comes slower and slower. Do I hope to forestall my adventure, he wonders with chagrin. Didn't he weeks ago accept that whatever knocked at his door should be welcomed with open arms and not treated like an unwanted visitor? Welcomed with charity. Welcomed like family. Then why am I eating so hesitantly? Why haven't I touched my drink? he wonders, now burning with perplexing annoyance. Didn't I swear an oath on my life to let this insanity sweep through me like the howling wind, throwing the doors and windows wide open to the desert's splendid gift of utter solitude? One plate of noodles separates him from a new life … thirty-five or so mouthfuls from the fathomless terror of extinction.

But it isn't time yet.

He adds more chili and stirs the gluey mixture while eyeing the now overcast sky. A feverish glance to his wristwatch steadies his plummeting guts. Wednesday? Of course it's Wednesday! Why should he worry about that? There must still be time, he considers, suddenly apathetic, reaching over to the dirty glass and sipping his warm beer. Swirling tan elm seeds fill the hollow of the brick and glass canyon. These paper ovals rush along the pavement, heaping up against the tires of parked cars. How many others shoot their load of seed over the sterile desert of the city, hoping that just one of their offspring might gain a better toehold than a turd or the foul mess that clogs the gutters? Do they care? 'Do they care?', he repeats silently, discovering with the next mouthful that he has rendered his heavily spiced noodles inedible.

He sighs, cleansing his mouth with another gulp of beer. Ordinarily he would call this a bad day, only the frequency of bad days has been rising. 'If you had paid attention to your statistics lectures, you might now be able to better plot these trends,' he reprimands himself, remembering the first visitation of chaos' shadow. Madness stole into his house like a stray cat wandering in off the balcony, sniffing around, rolling on the carpet and departing as if it had more important things to do; but the small beast had marked him. His perception started to change upon his return from a vacation, a holiday in the sun, an alternative destination without resorts or partying countrymen, with lots of fresh air, exotic foods, an awkward tongue, a barren land. It was to be a real adventure -- just what he thought his stagnant life had needed. Reason slipped. There were distractions. Who was laughing now?

Panicked, he thinks he might not survive the final assault when it comes. God knows what he might do as lunacy permeates him, pulling on his tendons, making him dance like a marionette, limbs bouncing, eyes fixed wide open, taking his every breath and casting sermons out over his tongue, in his own voice. In his sudden discomfort, he fills his mouth with a clot of hard, fatty noodles and just as quickly spits them out as unbefitting human consumption. 'Human,' he whispers softly through greasy, burning lips; he might as well be speaking Chinese. While the women are busy shouting at the men shut away from public view, he wonders if sliding down under the table now might ease the dose of embarrassment that will surely come like a garish pink ribbon tacked upon the rump of an ass that wears the mask of his own, personal madness. He feels the soles of his shoes stuck to the rug. Tugging, he sighs.

end of chapter one