Emerging From Hell

[Rival]

I am so glad I created the Cyberman alter-ego. It allows me to express my continual internal battle between emotion and logic. Being raised as I was, I came to value the latter a lot more than the former, given what I'd seen the former could do. I still struggle with accepting that feelings have value of themselves and that logic can't be a be all and end all; but by creating this Cyber-ego I've made a way to interact with myself respecting this issue.

At times I still think of feelings as a weakness that needs to be tempered, although not necessarily completely eliminated. I grew with a person who was all about emotion and dramatics, but there is nothing behind the eyes. I knew what a blank smile looks like and how a fake laugh sounds. It has made me more aware of it to such a degree that I'm seeing fakes everywhere; the world of sham smiles, laughs and sympathy is overpopulated. Indeed, I'm good at it myself.

I'm too good at it. I make myself wonder sometimes. I always have though; with the parent I grew with I wondered if I'd learnt to fake my feelings too without realising. Apparently the idea is not to appear emotionless, but to appear so full of feelings to such a degree that no-one could possibly suspect that they weren't really there. At least not to the level affected.

So having a Cyberman side for my logic oriented, cold, self is a brilliant idea. It allows me to express that aspect of myself in a way I can relate to and that makes sense to me, without actually being wholly me.

​

 

[Rival]

Oftentimes I wonder what kind of a person I am in regards to other people's situations. For instance, do I believe that the NHS should cover morbidly obese patients who have made themselves that way and effectively have no excuse? My initial answer is,

No, they made themselves that way. Unlike having an illness through chance or extenuating circumstances, these people appear lazy, gluttonous and lack self-control. Why is their bad lifestyle any of my business and why should their bad choices be repaired using other people's taxes?
​

I then sometimes think again and consider that such an answer may be considered overly harsh. This second thinking occurs to me, however, with the thought only really of what other people think. I don't really care what they think about my opinions though and if they believe the above is harsh and inhuman then that's their opinion on my opinion and really holds no weight. I'm more of a prevention-before-cure type.

I do then wonder that eating food may become an addiction, as it so obviously does, and I have more sympathy for other addicts who become addicted to things like heroin or alcohol. Still, the difference is one doesn't need heroin or alcohol to survive, but one needs food, so it should be imperative that a person learns how to control his intake.

As I see it, people need to learn better ways to cope and give self-therapy; instead of comfort-eating, drug-taking, or drinking, why not write, draw, paint, dance or walk? We know that addictions arise as coping mechanisms for people who have suffered trauma, abuse, neglect, depression and so on. I guess my problem is that, with other, positive alternatives available, why choose the destructive ones? They cost, they fail, they kill. This is now common knowledge.

Is it so hard to pick up a pencil and notebook?
​

 

[Rival]

1​

The machines never stopped. From the surface she could hear the dull whirring, clanging and buzzing that was now background music. She hardly ever wondered anymore what they were doing – fixing the planet, they said, salvaging it however they could with the resources they had. Still, there was talk; women standing outside the shops huddling close and mumbling,

‘They never said nothing about this; they never said nothing whatsoever like this.’ The woman rubbed habitually at a nicotine patch on her arm.​

‘Would they though? I mean that’s just it, Ané, they don’t say nothing and by the time we cottoned on it’s too late to complain; they already done it.’​

‘Eh you two, we’re still alive though aren’t we? What’s to complain about?’ ​

‘Ain’t life supposed to be worth livin’, though, Myla? This ain’t livin’.’​

‘We must survive before we can live.’
​

Nuri played over the fragment in her head, recognising the now too familiar refrain: We, meaning, all of us; Must, imperative, absolutely; Survive, continue to exist, remain alive. That’s what the doctormen had said, too.

She had been off school with breathing difficulties. This wasn’t uncommon now; every child had experienced that at some point; whatever they used to artificially warm the air was good for nobody, and they recognised this, but for the moment it would have to do. Still, the cute pink inhaler they had given her wasn’t helping and she’d been taken back to the Hospital House last week for more tests.

She remembered looking up at their masked faces – everyone here wore white masks, despite what they called sterile air – and felt fear. There were three of them, of which sexes she couldn’t tell, none of whom smiled, laughed, or offered any comfort whatever. The wheels on her bed squealed as she was taken to the x-ray room, explaining her symptoms on the way, down stale corridor after stale corridor at alarming speed. Everything here, she noticed, seemed to happen double-quick, even as it was a Hospital House. Pictures, notices, signs and symptoms went past in a blur as she listened to her bed-wheels screech. She was led into a small room and given her x-ray while still on the bed.
Then she remembered nothing, save a sharpness in her arm and the three doctormen bending over her, singing?

When she woke it was to her mother’s voice down the hallway, high-pitched with panic and rage.

‘Why didn’t you tell me you were bringing my daughter here?! I come to collect her from school and she’s not there! Then I have the teachers tell me she’s at the-’

‘There was no time for passing information, madam. We get things done.’

‘Do you know how frantic I’ve been! I-’

‘Next! Next patient! Here, now, now!’​

Nuri was in a daze and she wanted to run to her mother, but found she hadn’t the strength. There was also one of those strange doctormen in the room with her and she daren’t move.

‘What have you done to her?’

‘We have fixed her, for now. She has a pacemaker, but her heart condition is really more serious than that. She has been booked next week for surgery. It would have been sooner but the line is long.’

‘Fixed her? Heart condition? You don’t just fix people! And what is-’​

A voice interrupted from the room over,

‘No more hearts. Commence machine processing from today.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me my daughter had a heart condition?’

‘Because that is the least of her problems. Now please, take her and go home. Next! Next patient!’

‘What? Don’t you care about your patients, if that is-’

‘No, we do not care about them. We fix them.’

Nuri was now off the bed and holding her mother’s hand. After the doctorman had said this, both were roughly pushed out and told again to go home. She knew she had no intention to return to the Hospital House and hoped her pacemaker would hold.

2
​

That night saw Nuri lying in her bed, her room black as pitch, when she heard the buzz of the doorbell; she checked the time. It was twenty-one hundred hours, who would visit now?

‘Hello, may I come in? It’s about Nuri’s hospital visit.’

‘Of course, at least someone’s bothering to tell me something. Now, take your shoes off, just there. Thanks.’
​

The houses were small and Nuri could hear every word. The houses had to be small for they were so tightly packed. The City – what everyone called it now, being the only one there was – was large, but it held every citizen on Mondas. It was beneath the surface of the old city Mondasia, as the planet had become too inhospitable now to live aboveground. Citizens were crowded in apartment-like houses stacked like dominoes, wall to wall.
Nuri listened.

‘The operation went well; the pacemaker should last until her next visit, so we don’t need to talk about that. What I do need to talk to you about, however are Nuri’s...about… What does Nuri do in her free time?’

‘She...well...she collects things. Military things. She’s obsessed with it all. Khaki bags, pretend guns; her alarm is an air-raid siren! She plays soldiers with Arethi.’

‘I see. Being a soldier is what she thinks she should do with herself, I’m to understand?’

‘Yes, she talks often about becoming,’ Nuri’s mother laughed, ‘about becoming a Commander or a General. Girls don’t do that, of course, but I haven’t told her yet that women don’t join the forces. Let her play; she’s 12.’
​

The woman, whose voice sounded somewhat familiar to Nuri, made a tutting sound and said,

‘Not with her body’s problems. But we can fix that.’
​

So she couldn’t make the forces after all; at least not yet, apparently. By the sounds of it, she could be made to be able to enter the military if she wanted. Suddenly the word she’d been hearing so much lately, ‘fix’, had a pleasant ring to it. Nuri wanted to be fixed.

‘She is a very intelligent young woman; she would be very useful if her interests match her intellect. Perhaps she would make a good military leader, if it suits her.’

‘Sure you’re unserious? She can’t do that.’

‘She can in time. Maybe soon, in fact. Why not let her? What else holds her interest?’

‘That propulsion system nonsense all the kids are talking about. She’s completely taken with it. I must admit I thought she had more sense about her than that.’

‘What makes you think it’s nonsense?’

‘Of course it is. You can’t drive a planet!’
​

Nuri knew better; Arethi had told her so. He’d reckoned the calculations; done the hard bits that Nuri struggled with and discovered that such a propulsion system could indeed work.

Thump.

Before she could finish her thought, her heart seemed to slam in her chest and she sat up. She clenched her fist and tightened her whole left arm at the pain in it, shooting down the nerves and seeming to slice at them. Her heart thumped again; she huffed her breaths and put her right hand over her chest. Then just as suddenly as it had come on, it stopped; her heartrate normalised and the pain dulled, though it did not go away.

Once she’d calmed herself she began again to listen to the whirring and hissing aboveground. Her hands relaxed and she lay herself down once more, allowing the cold mechanic lullaby to drive her to sleep.

​

 

[Rival]

I think I have finally reached a sort of insanity. I spend far more time talking to and engaging with the characters in my head than anyone in real life. These people are pretty much always there and while I acknowledge that they do not exist, they might as well do for me. I have come to accept that I am almost alone; I have no real life friends to speak of. I forget things a lot; immediate things. My memory is usually 100% and I am known for this.

Sometimes I feel useless because I don't work and think maybe I'd have more friends and so on; then I look at situations where I have been around other people for long periods and the result is the same. I am just as lonely and friendless as before. Not to mention still just as meaningless. No-one befriends me on a deep level and even the few who have over the years have called me cold and distant. I took this as no compliment. I was actually rather horrified. It appears that my attempts to seem warm and friendly are met with suspicion and disgust, as I then manage to come across as invasive as I want to talk about personal interests and so on, where most people discuss what I take to be pop culture, which I know little about. Those who do come into my life for long periods, however, describe me as a force to be reckoned with, for good or bad. No matter how close I appear to be to a person, though, I don't tend to care about losing them. It is inevitable. But more loneliness. More fictional characters following me around. More conversations with them. More slipping out of reality briefly.

Without fail each night, I, even if briefly but always at some moment, fantasise about being killed. I have reached the point where I feel disconnected from myself and before I realise I even thought about doing something I've done it. I have forgotten how to exist in reality. I've noticed that when I bring myself to the consciousness that I am walking anywhere, it scares me so much that I immediately return back to my fantasy or whatever else I was thinking of to avoid the pain of knowing I exist and that I have no idea what to do with that. I often marvel that I had a life before the present moment. The idea that I have been here 23 years and had experiences and conversations seems almost completely unbelievable to me, literally, unbelievable. I feel so disconnected from that person, and really from myself as a whole, that even the concept of my own existence baffles me. That I'm living, moving, breathing, literal flesh and blood and bone. Scares. Me.

When I was a child I used to have the fear that the me in the mirror would step out of the mirror, kill me and replace me. I feel like that has actually happened.

 

[Rival]

I still can't do emotions. I reach a point where I think I've conquered myself and then I found myself listening to Rockabye, a song about a single mother insistent that her child will not have the upbringing she had; that he will be loved and happy. This should please me, since it's a meaningful topic and I am one to complain about shallow pop. It doesn't. It makes me feel sick. I'm disgusted by it. I listen to the song because I like the rhythm, not the lyrics. It strikes me as sentimentalist, gross and...'ughh', meaningless utterances of disgust come from my mouth. I've experienced this with such media a lot and I thought it was many people's response, but I must be wrong since these songs, programs &c. are so popular.

It makes me angry, actually. These kind of lyrics make me angry.

 

[Rival]

I am about ready to start serious work on my latest novel. I have a good basic idea now of how I want to structure it (this took me a while; I started and stopped a lot) and who the main and secondary characters are. If I complete this to the standard I expect of myself, it will be a sort of Magnum Opus for me. It is one that still requires research and dedication, but I'm halfway there already.

Given the overall nature of the novel being less of a plot driven tale and more character drama driven, I've decided not to be too constrained by things like chapter length &c. If I can put across the action, the meaning behind the action, the reasons why the characters do what they do, then that's what it's all about. Fundamentally, it's about human nature, sociocultural politics and a whole host of unlikeable characters.

That Naftali Is A Jerk may require footnotes is inevitable, but hopefully not too intrusive.

I may give this novel its own little progress thread.

@Sunstone

 

[Rival]

This novel may probably end up being my longest and my first non-smut one. As it includes absurdism and doesn't follow traditional novel rules, it will be all the more fun to pen. I hope it ends up being everything I hope it is, especially given that modern audiences seem to think a novel is always plot based, when they can be driven by character too.

But the hardest part is always the beginning.

 

[Rival]

Finally happy with my introduction.


NAFTALI IS A JERK


PART 1: MON PRECIEUX


0


It wasn’t quite a minyan – they had already left. They didn’t want shul; they wanted their electric fires that had been timed to come on at 10 in the morning. Some had stayed to talk, most had left, and now even those who’d remained were conveying out the door and muttering about the weather, the sermon or the hard seats. Standing forefront, by the bimah, was a short young man wearing a frown and looking down at an open book. Brown peyos were pinned back by a pair of rimless glasses, but the rest of his hair fell over his face before being very delicately tucked behind his ears. The grimace only grew worse in his silent reading.

Closer to the door two people stood talking in English, every word unheard by the young man at the lectern. They were chatting like old friends, and an untrained eye would perceive a lifetime of communication where a trained one would see the young woman’s gaze switch anxiously every so often to the man at the bimah, her hands tensing and easing at her sides.

Apart from their chatter and a muffled hum outside, the room was quiet; fragile fingers turned pages like a breeze; not as if the volume were too sacred to be touched, but too profane. The man at the lectern gasped.

Finally, his hand clutched around the book and dropped it without ceremony to the floor.

The Rabbi raised his head, said nothing, as he looked from the book to the man. Without pause he approached him while the young woman remained where she was, view trained on the door. A fierce set of light brown eyes gazed on Dathan as he advanced towards the bimah, ugly in their contempt.

The Rabbi halted barely a foot away.

‘After having been so good all morning,’ he said with a hint of happiness, ‘I knew I should have expected it. Come on. What’s wrong?’

‘It quotes forbidden literature.’

Dathan picked up the book and set it on a nearby chair. Naftali looked at the volume, then raised his faze suspiciously to the Rabbi,

‘Don’t leave that in the shul.’

‘I thought you couldn’t read English?’

‘Carmen is...needs me to write things in English. And I may have a new job. But tell me why it quotes from those books.’

‘Which books did you take exception to?

Naftali cried irritably and growled,

‘I do not need to explain this to you! Just because it has been Chanukah is no reason you can quote those books! It said… It even said the Christians use those books and you are going to read it in shul?’

‘I did not read it as scripture, Natti, I-’

‘You read it. You read it like Carmen reads her nonsense that I told her not to read.’

At this point, Carmen had buttoned her jacket and was about ready to approach her husband to leave the synagogue. She made it as close to Naftali as she could before he made her stop and come no closer without a word or glance, but a raised hand. The Rabbi paid her no mind.

‘And what did you do with the nonsense?’

‘I burned it.’

At this, Dathan turned to Carmen, who ignored his look and peered down at her feet with her fingers still wringing her skirt. The Rabbi turned again to her husband.

‘Did you tell her you did that?’

‘No.’

At these words the door opened and another young man came in, far more casual looking than the Rabbi with his top two shirt buttons and cufflinks undone. The scene before him did not stop him and before anyone could approach, he’d begun,

‘You haven’t seen Miriam today have you?’ He spoke to the Rabbi, but he looked at Naftali.

‘I know five. I saw three today.’

‘Oh I mean, you know who I mean. Was she at shul?’

‘No, but Lemuel was. Why?’

‘I suppose you really don’t know then.’

Naftali wasted no time in forgetting the book,

‘What is it? Tell me.’

‘I’m surprised your father didn’t tell you, Tali,’ the Rav smiled.

‘Lemuel tells me nothing.’ Naftali’s foot kicked aimlessly at the carpet at this, scowling.

Eliezer hesitated a while, choosing his words. Rocking back on his feet a few times, he managed to say,

‘She’s pregnant. She isn’t very well.’

Silence. No-one looked at anyone. The Rav twirled his curls and eventually the Rabbi spoke a dry, formal,

‘Mazel tov. We should be happy about that.’

Naftali echoed the first sentiment in a whisper, more to himself than anything.

‘She has been pregnant for the past month, apparently.’

‘And she told no-one?’

‘Well, for a woman who was told that she would never have any kids and took nearly six years to do it the first time, there’s some… You know, there’s some scepticism.’

Giving Naftali a clear side-eye, the Rabbi said,

‘There’s scepticism alright.’ Then faced Natti fully, ‘So how many books did you burn?’

Eliezer’s face crumpled into confusion.

‘Nine.’

‘Nine! You burned nine of her own books? And how many had she brought?’

‘Twelve. First I hid them but she took them back. I told her not to have them anymore, but she didn’t listen. So I destroyed them.’

‘Then you owe her nine new books.’

‘I will-’

‘And let her choose them.’

Naftali narrowed his eyebrows.

‘She could not choose a teabag.’

‘I don’t care if she couldn’t choose a damn thing. You buy her those books.’

At this the Rabbi turned away and began walking towards Eliezer, who was still standing in astonishment unable to interject.

‘I th-’

Naftali’s right foot hit the stone flooring with a hard thud.

‘I will not!’

‘Natti-’

He cut his wife off. Dathan paused, closed his eyes, but did not look back at Naftali as he sighed.

‘I know what’s best for her to read! I know what she should study! No-one here would just as long as she stays quiet. She can’t even read Hebrew without some transliteration and you think she should choose her own books? That is wrong! She is Jewish because she was born that and for no other reason. She is like someone who you ask for a siddur, and he brings you a plate with herbs. She is useless!’

The Rabbi turned around and at long last, Carmen spoke,

‘Rabbi...” hesitant for a moment, she briefly looked at her husband, ‘Rabbi, Nafi is right. You know he’ll buy them; I don’t worry about that. Perhaps you should look at his choices before he gives me them.’

‘Well,’ Dathan exhaled again and held up his hand somewhat, ‘I have no doubt that Naftali’s decision in this matter will be best for you, but what he did was wretched and you had every right to demand a recompense.’

Carmen nodded.

‘But she has some sense,’ Naftali barely hid a happy smirk.

‘In the meantime, you have just been told that your mother is going to have a baby. You could have been over with your parents now, wishing them well; instead, you’re here insulting your wife about her literature choices. I think it’s about time you left and saw them.’

‘You are right!’ Natti chirruped and clutched his wife’s arm, scampering out.