Stephen
“Stephen, referring to himself in the third person, mostly out of boredom and a sense of curiosity and fear regarding the dichotomy between his thoughts and reality, that is, the thing that went on around him that he felt separate from but able to observe, began describing what was happening to him. Or perhaps he had always been doing it and only just realised, so it seemed like a new thing; a realisation. He was unsure as to why he did this, why he couldn’t live without reciting things in his mind, using words that were more like vague indentations in the blackness of his imagination, which, if it were possible to write them out on paper or type them up on a computer screen, would be completely at odds with the thoughts he had that were composed of words that were not words. He couldn’t rely on words that were words; couldn’t believe in them, for some reason.”
When he had time off from work, Stephen would do something like go on a trip, traveling on planes, buses and trains to a far away place, just to end up at a waterfall, for example, not knowing he’d wanted to see a waterfall, but realising when he saw one that it was his sole purpose for having taken the trip. Once he’d arrived at the waterfall, or something like a waterfall, he’d stand and look at it, listening to the endless gushing as torrents of water pummelled a body of water, thinking the waterfall was a metaphor for something, but not being able to comprehend exactly what was attempting to be expressed by the gushing water, which gushed over rocks into more water, into itself, likewise the people that came from far away to stand near and look at a waterfall, just as he had, with some standing directly beneath it to let the water pummel them. When he stood near and looked at a waterfall, he would try to find out the reason he’d gone to look at and be near one, wondering why he’d felt the urge to do something he had no reason for doing, only realising he didn’t have a reason when he arrived at the thing he’d come to see, a thing that made all the other things he did on the way seem extraneous, and as if they hadn’t happened, so he had to remind himself of them, but since he’d been so absent at the time he experienced them, he wasn’t sure if he was remembering the right things; they seemed to go straight from ‘unknown’ to ‘memory,’ bypassing ‘experience,’ or they seemed to have happened less than the waterfall, because he’d kept thinking about what the waterfall would look like, which made him wonder if the effect the waterfall had on him would have been different had he thought about the things on the way to the waterfall the way he’d thought about the waterfall, or if he hadn’t thought about the waterfall at all. It seemed unfair to give more attention to a certain thing simply because of its reputation. He thought that he could have just thought about waterfalls, or read about them, and it would have had the same effect. The real life waterfall would feel no less real or unreal than one he could have read about, or imagined, a waterfall that, when stared at as hard as he could, would bring him no closer to answering the question of why he felt such a compulsion to look at a real life waterfall, unable to accept that he’d come to see a waterfall for the sake of standing near, listening to and looking at one, but when he tried to read about them, the spaces between words cascaded like a feeble raindrop, or a clear ballbearing schizophrenically bouncing around in a cheap handheld maze game that he used to get sometimes in Christmas crackers, or like a miniature waterfall, making him want to see one in real life. He could—and had—imagined more beautiful waterfalls, that were much more pleasurable and easier and less frustrating to look at, which he could stand nearer to because there weren’t any other people there, where there wouldn’t be such inconveniences as having to find a place to stand, and worrying about sanding in the wrong place, or how much time he should spend looking at the waterfall, or what he was going to eat, or what he was going to do after he ate, or wondering why he was there, alone, standing near a waterfall; all he had to do was think about the sound and appearance of a waterfall against the backdrop of darkness that his imagination lived in. And this applied to anything, not just waterfalls, so why stop at waterfalls? He could imagine anything he wanted to and enhance it, turning it into its best version of itself. He could think of the entire world in this way, shrink it down so that it took on its own shape, or became shapeless, living quite happily in the imperfect circle of his imagination for the rest of his life, making it smaller and smaller until it was like a grain of sand, or a distant dying star flickering in the night sky.
Or he’d go to an art gallery and spend more time looking at blank spaces on the walls, or the upper corners of each room, or the bare expanse of the ceiling itself, or other people looking at and appreciating or trying to appreciate art, or the fire extinguishers that were practically invisible eyesores until there was a fire, which there never was, at least whenever he was there, which made him feel sorry for all the unused fire extinguishers and for the people that made them, or the people that worked at the art gallery who saw the paintings every day and were probably sick of them and couldn’t believe anyone would want to come and see them, no matter how famous or beautiful they were, seeing no difference between a beautiful painting and a fire extinguisher, owing to nothing more than the amount of time they’d spent looking at and being around them both. Walking slowly around an art gallery with his hands holding themselves behind his back—a style of walking he employed only in art galleries, museums and funerals—he would wonder why he’d come to an art gallery just to look at the wall, or the ceiling, or fire extinguishers, or other people. Sometimes he’d look at the art and try to experience a feeling, but the harder he tried he became more and more frustrated and dizzy, so thinking that the onset of dizziness may have been due to his staring at things so intently from point blank range, he would step back and look at a painting from further away, but then he wouldn’t be able to see the details of the painting, making him unsure if he was seeing the painting properly, from a distance that allowed for optimal observation and information gathering, in the same way he sometimes looked at certain things from far away, only to get up close to them to see that they were composed of microscopic cells that, when combined, created the image of the thing he saw when he was far away from them. With people constantly walking through his line of sight between him and the paintings, he would find it impossible to get absorbed by them the way he imagined he could get absorbed in a real life landscape with no one walking in front of him. This would make him think he’d been right before, that the best way was to get so close to the painting that he felt like he was inside it, as if he were looking at a real life landscape and not a painting, but that would make him think why not just go and look at and be absorbed in a landscape in real life, just as the artist who painted this landscape had done. He would get so close to a painting that his nose would touch it, and the details would become fuzzy and unfocused, blurring and doubling, losing his focus but retaining his sense of being in a crowded art gallery failing to look properly at a landscape painting. Stephen also considered that his problem was in focusing at all, no matter the distance. Or maybe his inability to appreciate art, or beauty in general, was down to his prophecy of a premature death, which made him wonder why he should spend time trying to appreciate something that supposedly enriched life when that life was going to end soon.
Sometimes Stephen thought of himself as a metaphor, that he was being used as a metaphor and that that was part of the mission, and that the metaphor had its own life that he was largely detached from, which caused him to get into situations in real life that he might not have gotten into if he were fully focused and engaged in life, if he didn’t have to negotiate, leverage and pivot from a distant place where his decisions seemed to be made, allowing him a vague amount of control over his actions, such as getting lost and finding a waterfall accidentally on purpose. But such was the extent of his lack of investment in what happened to him, he did nothing to address these issues when they arose, instead he liked to bury them deep within himself, possibly even finding enjoyment in doing so, like a child burying boxes full of secret things in his back garden; or else he simply watched them, trusting he would eventually find his way again, knowing that to be lost was a relative term, since he didn’t know where he was in the first place, which was similar to the way he felt when saying goodbye, since he never felt like he was anywhere, except possibly when he was at home, just because of the amount of time he spent there, and the force it contained that made it hard to leave, and drew him back whenever he did, as if it couldn’t live without him. He didn’t care where he was, and even if he was bored in a certain place he was interested in that boredom, feeling an opposing force of excitement that came about precisely because of that boredom, as if his boredom had defeated excitement, or perhaps because he felt an ownership of boredom that he didn’t feel with excitement, which always felt like something he was borrowing. Sometimes he craved to be truly bored in the same way he craved the feeling of truly loving something. Perhaps if he could truly love his boredom both problems could have been solved. Maybe he knew where this place, this perch from where he viewed his getting lost and his inability to feel true boredom was, and it was a place that was asleep, if a place could be asleep, like a sleepy seaside town as opposed to a city that never slept, and in that place he would be incapable of getting lost, and he would be truly, utterly bored there.
When he found himself trapped in a situation in which he felt he was in the wrong place, and was aware of it, like a misplaced word that makes a sentence not make sense, he considered that the scenario could be saying something by using the wrong metaphor, in this case Stephen, while not knowing but trying to comprehend for whom and for what reason this metaphor was being used, while simultaneously being assimilated by others in a different way because of the positions of the words in the sentence. Most of the time he couldn’t endure such scenarios, so he removed himself from them. But that couldn’t be done without time, without gradual movement towards the exit of a situation, in whatever form that movement took. He couldn’t just obliterate himself, or seamlessly teleport to another place, or spontaneously combust, or come alive, or eject himself from a situation like a pilot from an aeroplane. He had to teleport slowly, without a gap, without a disconnection, dragging himself through time like baggage through an airport; he had to endure the travel that teleportation takes out of the equation, watching and feeling himself travel to another place, where he had wanted to be when he was in a place he didn’t want to be, the act of traveling making him want to have not wanted to be in another place, so that when he found himself in that new place, he’d feel like he hadn’t moved at all. All of which made him realise what he could choose to do and what he couldn’t, and what that meant about choice in general. Choices could be made, but they were luxuries that could only be used once, and it made him nervous to think he might waste a choice by using it at the wrong place and time, like a metaphor he was saving for just the right time so that it had maximum effect, not knowing who he was producing the effect for nor what effect it would have. So he resigned himself to enduring the task of traveling, of movement as travel, as if he were setting a table that kept going for miles and miles, into the horizon, and that it would always take too long for him to be removed from a situation. Even after he was removed, having felt as if he’d had no part in his removal, and would feel a stickiness, a residue of the place he’d been removed from, as if it were trailing behind him, like part of a fence stuck in the bottom of a car, incapable as he was to incinerate the memories of a place and time he was no longer a part of, except with the inflammable abrasiveness of a similar situation, each one containing something that made them feel identical even if the environment was different, so that there seemed to be an inexhaustible amount of such situations. The only thing he could do to not become overwhelmed by them was to mentally pulverise them until they were so disfigured that he wouldn’t be able to recognise them as things that he had experienced.
