It's In Your Eyes.

/NEW CHAPTER

From: Dante
To: Neville John
Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2006 1:55 PM
Subject: Berlin 2006

Hi. Sorry I missed you in Chicago. Brutal hospitality, no!

I'm confirmed for Berlin. And Fraunfelder is chairing Ocular Toxicology.

Are you going to be around? Plenty to discuss away from the gaze of echelons.

D


From: Neville John
To: Dante
Snt: Thursday, January 19, 2006 4:57 PM
Subject: Re: Berlin 2006

Chicago was fetid. Yes to Berlin. I will be at the Intercontinental.
Would like to clarify recent Odyssey developments.

NJ


From: Dante
To: Neville John
Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2006 8:55 PM
Subject: Re: Re: Berlin 2006

Intercontinental? You charge too much ;)
Odyssey update would be beneficial for all.

D

/END CHAPTER

[posted on behalf of coercri]

The iconic flashbacks persisted in ways that denied memory, left it hanging there like a vestigial organ. My recovery from the whole eye transplants progressed well, replacing shock and horror with a burning curiosity. The world looked mostly the same, but at the edges of vision there were shadows and sudden movements, unidentfiable to a focused stare. I had to discover whose eyes were adding these subtle distortions of memory, perception and vision to my new life under construction. I knew exactly where to begin, and searched for the number of the transplant surgeon.

Why couldn't the past stay in the past? Every time it looked like it was finally stowed away, something would come up, and all the hard-won progress would be lost. Cambridge, Cambridge....
A state of mind as much as a place, a set of expectations of how the world worked. That was the problem, of course- that the world had it's own rules that had nothing to do with Cambrigian expectations of it. Why had she ever said yes in the first place? To shcock her parents? To confound all of the spotty, mouth-breathing, sweaty-palmed young men (HA! boys, every one) that kept pestering her?
After the first time life was much simpler.

The phone rang. Or, rather, a polyphonic orchestra wheezed its way into the Marriage of Figaro. Sarah waited for the eighth bar then took the call.

‘Uh, hello?’

"Well, good morning to you! Can I speak to Miss Bartleby please?"

Sarah slumped back in the chair. A too-enthusiastic caller for this time of the morning. Must be telemarketing. She could almost see his bobbing Adam's apple and chronic acne. "Actually it's Ms Bartleby. And she’s out’.

"Ah, er, OK! OK!... erm..." Sarah had the feeling that the voice was madly skipping thorugh a script that didn't make contingencies for short-tempered significant others answering the call. "Ahh, it's just that, uh, it's just that I’d like to talk to the homeonwner about….

Like a falcon clawing a dormouse, Sarah struck.

"She doesn’t want double glazing, central heating, a new telephone supplier or an unbuilt timeshare apartment. If you’re calling about the gas bill, we paid it last week. If you’re calling for triple X fun with all services, you’ve got the wrong number... Then again, I could do with cheering up so... hello?"

Sarah realised the caller had hung up. She turned back to the screen and to the travails of the 68t. But she'd lost that train of thought. It was getting there, to say that she'd been working on the story since her Cambridge days. A sneaked paargraph whilst on the loo, a fiendishly technical chapter written on the NY-LON redeye a few years ago. The books and binders, Filofax inserts, Post-It notes, all threaded their way back to Cambridge. And that's where so much of Sarah seemed to start; writing adventurous sci-fi whilst huddled next to a two-bar heater in the coldest rooms above St Catharine's, morning lectures on Eliot, evening courses in Serbo-Croat, lustful afternoons with Jen, a lifetime with the civil service...

Sarah knew she'd never finish the book. She knew she'd never leave Jen. And she knew that all the other things that started in Cambridge would haunt her for the rest of her days and beyond.

"Is that possible? Or is there any hope that 68t had a malfunction, or suffered some injury?"
"It's not supposed to be possible, all those safeguards built in, so the individual can be appropriately monitored. But they just cut out, right before the episode. And injury is the least of it, sir. He seems to believe that he really belongs there. All of our attempts at recall have failed. I guess reality got a bit too real, and he's gone "native".
Eff sighed. Why couldn't something go wrong in a simple, fixable way? Just once?

New chapter: RealLife.org Corporate HQ

23f knew from the expression on 537b’s face that the news would be bad.
‘Okay, spit it out, Bee,’ he snapped.
Bee swallowed hard.
‘It’s...one of our field operatives has been...co-opted. Sir.’
Eff groaned inwardly; it took every iota of his training and experience to keep the panic from his face. He asked a question to which he already knew the answer.
‘It’s 68t, sir. The Underground performance...went wrong.’
‘Went wrong? That sketch was planned for months. *Realtime* months, not just in sim!’
Bee was sweating.
‘We’re not sure, sir, but it looks like they shut down his implants.’

The leader asked "are you ready to do a job for us? Your family will appreciate your assisting our cause." Never a hint of irony or sarcasm, just total belief in his methods and their necessity.
Yes." was all I said. With my family's lives as currency I was an eager whore. The next day, though, after the shock had begun to wear off, I resolved that these men would die, even if I died also. Taking me for their puposes was one thing, threatening my family moved them byond the pale.

They timed it to perfection. I had reached all my limits - exhaustion, hunger, coldness, anxiety, fear, patience even.They timed it to perfection then 6 masked men arrived to confront me.
Each held a photograph: my father, my mother, my wife Saskia, my babies Petr, Nina and Jana. These were recent photographs, portraits, and in each one a pistol intruded to press against their foreheads.
Each masked man produced a handgun, made a half turn, and shot through the forehead of the portrait they held. My family. The message was clear. They owned me body soul and eyes.

I began by biting my fingernails- it was the only way to keep them short. Not too short, though-I need the ability to scrape my scalp. With very limited baths I was more than ripe and my head felt like it was crawling. Maybe it was, all I know was that scratching my head was about the only pure pleasure I had left. Couldn't day-dream, all I saw was carnage. Couldn't sleep, with next to no exercise and no change of view the mind unhinges from a circadian rhythm. And after a chapter or two the story I was telling myself about my ordeal got lost in sidebars and footnotes.

I tried not thinking. Occasionally realised that was their idea.

But I was in a monochrome world. Black nights, eyes closed, I still saw mortar rounds rip into villages. Bright days, wash-white walls, a canvas for technicolour flashbacks.

Couldn't even count the bricks or the bullet holes; an emulsive pall was all I had.

And what really annoyed me?

They wouldn't cut my nails.

I would kill to get out of here.

That was their idea, too.

BREAK...on becoming a suicide bomber.iwannatellyouastory

BREAK...on becoming a suicide bomber.

I was chained to a radiator. For three months they had me, naked and chained to plumbing, in a cold , empty modern box type house. (Plumbing is necessary, as Croatia gets gets cold in winter, and the heating was not switched on.)
23 and a half hours a day alone, shitting and pissing into a bucket: then "Zorro" would arrive to feed me and empty the bucket.
Once a week "the committee" would show up to convince me of what I needed to do, to committ to, to save my family, my parents, my sisters, my children, my wife.
My eyes bled tears...let me not do this thing...I am a baker, not a butcher.

Taking the mug full of almost-but-not-entirely-undrinkable tea with me I got up and went down the hall. At the toilet I let myself sigh with relief as I peed. Then I planned out my day: Brekkie, then a spot of video-games, then lunch. Maybe a stroll in the PM, then make some dinner. When Jen came home there would be time for a cuddle and then the questions
"How was your day?" "No, how was YOUR day?" "Get any further?" "Any exploding buses I should have heard about?" Neither of us really answering, neither of us really saying anything. I wish it felt safe to tell Jen-after all she shares my bed, my house, my life, but I can't make myself.
"I rembered the hand again. And this time- I remembered it still attached to an arm." Nope, just can't say it.

“…finish it?”

“Mmm?” I turned over in bed and looked up. Jen’s hand, holding a mug.

“Tea. I’ve only had a slurp. Got to go or I’ll be late.”

I scrubbed at my forehead with a knuckle as I sat up and reached for the mug.

“If you’d get the tube you could have another half hour in bed, you know.”

“Con-fined spa-ces” she said.

“You’re confined in a bus.”

“How can you argue before you’re even awake?”

“All I’m saying - ”

“Ah! No time. Goodbye.”

And she was gone. I grinned and gulped the tea.

“Agh, shit.”

Sugar.

My family and friends have been great, very comforting and tolerant with me. I've been visiting a therapist to cope with the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but nobody can help with the icons and images in my head. I don't know where to start.

The severed hand I thought was a memory from the bomb blast, it was one of the least gruesome of things I'd seen in the carnage of that day, but something in my head tells me it is unrelated.

I really don't know where to start, but I know I have to finish it.

It seemed an ordinary enough day, and I was an ordinary enough person-and now I'm not. I survived. The long long ride down the escalator, then finding a place to stntd crammed in the niche of a poster, an advert for aftershave. Then the roar. I managed to close my eyes, but the flash went straight through me anyhow. I fell over, or was push or blown by the concussion of the "device", and when the rescue people found me that's where I was-blinded, deafened and quivering under a pile of other broken people. I'm still broken.

That bomb in the tube station three months ago changed my life beyond all recognition. How little I now recognise and understand of this world as being the same as my pre-survivor days.

And now this...

ICON; a severed hand.
ICON; a knotted rope.
ICON; a cracked window.
ICON; a locked door.
ICON; four blurred figures hunched around a table.

Flash backs from the life of another: my burning, stinging, eye watering need to discover more.

You know when you screw your eyes up and you see twinkling white lights? Well, I see flashbacks, icons of an unhappy and gruesome life.

Except they're not from my life.

So whose eyes have I got? Whose life am I living?

Who knows?