Chapter 1
Four walls and a bed. Theoretically, all a man needs. Just four padded walls and a foam futon mattress, lying in the centre of the room, adjacent to its bed frame, near the toilet he’d once tried to drown himself in. But that suicide attempt had been half-hearted at best: it’s practically impossible to submerge oneself in a lavatory- as soon as you loose consciousness your head bobs back above the water level.
Iqbal didn’t have the courage to end his own life anyways.
Despite how many times he screamed it to the lady at reception over the intercom, screamed until his voice went hoarse, until it was nothing more than a faint whisper: she remained indifferent. If anything, she found his whispering soothing, like a song she’d heard on the radio. Not that it made her care any more or less whether he finally offed himself. One less pitiful criminal to watch over.
But he couldn’t do it. The blood splattered on the cell door was evidence enough. He had stopped banging his head against it when he realised his skull would cave in long before the door ever did.
Dead man walking, sobbing, crying himself to sleep each night in a pool of self-pity (self-pity: a polite euphemism for urine). He didn’t need a horoscope to predict his fate; the sentence was clearer than the stars, more present than them, too.
The stars. He hadn’t seen them in years. Or had it been a year? He didn’t know. Months, surely, but maybe not.
He had been a star once. Now, look at him, grovelling in filth, waiting for the day he would finally be put out of his misery. No better than swine in a slaughterhouse.
“Iqbal Ahram: singer, song writer, voice of a generation; it seems like you’ve taken this country by storm and looking at the charts there’s no question you are an absolute hit. So tell me, how does it feel to go from a nobody to a national sensation?”
Empty
It’s been really gratifying, honestly, finding out there are so many people out there who want to hear my voice. The feedback has been incredible. What I mean to say is I do it for the fans.
“Wow that’s really something. What really struck me was the earnestly of some of your lyrics and I feel like a lot of people can relate to them on a much deeper level. For instance when you say. ‘I can feel it coming consuming my soul/where is going/ when does it end/I don't sleep because I'm scared I'll dream of you’ what does this mean?”
I think it’s pretty self evident I’m trying to say how much I love my wife
Iqbal spent 15 years in that fishery, canning tuna, cutting them into bitesized chunks, grotesque cubes which neither resembled that which was living nor dead but a third more cataclysmic state of being, transcending their flesh prisons into the Euclidean realm of platonic solids. Occasionally, out of boredom he’d give a fish a name, this humanised them to such an extent that he’d feel genuine pangs of remorse gutting their tiny bodies; to the extent where he began struggling to sleep at night.
“What’s wrong Iqi?”
Its nothing hun, go back to sleep I just need some air
The mind often slips into fantasy when confronted by the banality of absolute reality. Even if that fantasy is that of a genocidal maniac, it beats coming to terms with the truth that you are nothing but a decaying husk, chopping fish for a living in an old factory. A replaceable cog in a crumbling machine.
