Rhinoceros 21 (Interlude)
There was a time, perhaps apocryphal, when he had many of the ideals of the world draped around his wiry form. There were, undoubtedly, people who might have danced to his tune. The palm of his hand, an appendage not yet formed into a fist, was greased by the very lubricants of life itself. This was it. Oysters and nutshells. Mountains and silken wallets. All his. And yet it isn't that the present, that interminable now, is anything less than a golden time. Meaning can be invested in any dull day, for even an oppressively low cloud is an event. No, he just did what nearly everyone else does, which is to squander gifts, and play for time, passing back his hopes to the goalkeeper incessantly so that the fight slinked away from the game. Resilient people merely celebrate their decline, as they hand over the grisly results of their enthusiasms to another cynical generation. He had hands in full possession of their opposed digits, on which he was able to count the five regrets of the dying. And this he did, dying in such slow motion that it looked, to the disinterested interloper, like he was staying alive. First, there was living a true life, a phrase lacking a clear meaning. But he could quantify his unfulfilled dreams and experiences to set against whatever a true life was meant to be, and on the basis of the raw data found himself wanting. Second, a wish not to have worked so hard. Substituting the treadmill of work for a life of companionship is a disease of the new world, a world which laughs scornfully at the P45 as a means to freedom. And yet, as a child, he was told that the future would be a time of short working hours, the realisation of ambitions, leisure stacked equally against safe and untaxing work. The machine age made machines of us all. Thirdly, the inexpression of feelings, living a subdued and mediocre existence carefully calibrated not to demonstrate the limbic core of a rational organ. Bitterness and resentment is cited - he knew these old friends well, lived among them every day, yet took few steps away from the safer path of merely existing. Is that it, then? The bacterium, the amoeba live on through all of evolution, fight incredible battles on the rim of undersea volcanoes, simply to prolong and project their DNA, to send enzymes and proteins into the future in a blind and unassailable trajectory, without aim or end. Fourthly, friends. He looked about the peripheries of his life, the void formed by ripples around him, the emptying spaces lacking those people who might - it is possible, after all - might just have given meaning to his existence. What he saw made him shudder, but with little remorse. For are not friends hard work? They demand nurturing, cause interminable setbacks, eat away at time and philosophising, require gifts of mercy and unfolding minds. Hard work indeed, which could instead be channelled into the treadmills of work. Fifth, and last, counted fully on the fattest and strongest digit, he noted how the dying wish they had let themselves be happier. They longed for silliness, for change to overcome fear, for laughter to disperse obssessive habits and traits like worn ruts in the verges of our journeys. He argued with this concept for a while, in his futility of hope that he had, after all, lived a life of commendable reasonableness. Happiness, undefined, garish in the media, quickly turning to mawkishness, to the grimace of a clown, to tears. Happiness, so relative, subject to what comes before and after, distorted by pictures of panoramas and places confidently labelled as beautiful. Happiness. He looked at it as an idea, rather than an emotion, as a fixed co-ordinate, and then, in resignation, he screwed the idea up in disgust and consigned it to a cess-pit in his mind. He knew that the dying were right, because he was already dying in amongst his nuerones and dendrytes. What he would like to articulate, somehow, is some sense of apology. In handing over this blighted world, passing it on like a soiled parcel, with its smell of decay, he wanted to say that he was sorry. Life, his life, encompassing all that he knew and dreamed of - his world - shimmered around his craven body like a mirage. It had the potential to be a fine thing, but just like everyone else he had quickly become bored with it, and ennui, habit and overfamiliarity reduced this world - his world - to a nebulous mass, an object free from dynamics, lacking the spark of originality, the eccentricity of finding meanings in space and time. He felt, in this reflective, albeit comatose, state of mind, that he had fixed the future, secured its destiny, like the grooves in a record; it seemed to him that the tune would play out with the inevitability of a nursery rhyme. All fall down. The courage to be himself, the welcome numbness of hard work, the feelingless trudge and lope through the cycle of days, the fading, mildly disappointed friends, the sharp eye keeping happiness in its frozen place - all this and more he saw, and filed away, with events, detritus, the scum of polluted oceans of time and experience. Yet even now, as he stepped towards another door the same as all the others, he realised that choices were nudging at him, like a soft breeze at the nettles, interfering with his bland momentum. Even as he continued to move forward, perhaps clasping the familiar door handle in endless anticipation of egress, he took brief stock of his current position, between, as it were, the waitress and her table. Briefly, subtly, possibilities arose, like distant lights on the shore, or a widening passageway opening onto a clear bay. He paused long enough only to make a decision.
