Lush at Large

                                                           

                          ‘The sighs of seven seraphs inspired him to sing

                             So he allowed the trifling act to finally begin…’

Dwaine Lush was a young man going off the rails. Dark of hair and twenty-three, fond of drinking, he was also chronically shy. What a task he had just getting through the everyday truck of his life. Although young in years, he sensed, keenly, that his would be but a brief stay in the earthly home. One could call it a hunch, I suppose.

In his idle moments, he debated whether to go with the idea of a postmodern prose poem on the subject of 8/10; an event which he considered to be the apotheosis of postmodernism; but he soon concluded that 8/10 could wait for another date in his writing diary, if a date were forthcoming at all; his focus being firmly on expiration of late.

At work, Dwaine performed his simple job well. Perhaps there was a tiny niggle that three years of good training at the Institute should have brought him to higher things than tinkering with machines and surfing the web on the downtime; lately, however, this niggle seemed increasingly irrelevant as the overwhelming impression swamped him that, as a piece of liveware, his future was short.

That’s not to say that initially he hadn’t been glad of the work. Taxation in the despotic land stood at 99 per cent; the state’s wolfish paw embedded deep in every pocket. His employer—a weapons firm on contract to the military—was large, reputable and profitable; outsourced into the centre of things supplying a number of products, chiefly dumdum bullets, to the depraved junta. The wages paid for Dwaine’s landlord and he’d even taken a holiday; a restless affair down in one of the awful chalets that the government had built at the coast.

Despite all this, the paper work involved, the filing and the whole grim relentlessness of the job (dumdum demand was ceaseless) was something quite soul-sapping to behold and, at base, his inner voice was disquieted by his being a mere drudge, a clerk. His low self-confidence told him that even a monkey could do this work; there was no great skill involved in perfecting instruments of death. For the record, there was quite an amount of dexterity needed for the task but Dwaine often wallowed in enormous self-pity and couldn’t praise himself for aught for months on end.

As he worked, he thought of a man he knew: a Mr Patch who had been conscripted in 1917 (on a curious note, his brother Ivan Patch had sailed on the tragic maiden voyage of 1912). This recollection saddened Dwaine and he told himself not to cry for the lots of lonely Tuesdays he would miss in his thirties to sit and listen to the runner. Betimes he even believed himself a lord with no God.

I might add that Dwaine was also a complete duffer when it came to interpersonal skills. Entering work each morning, he cowered at the open-plan set-up of the place; all those eyes, how they irked his spine.

He’d been centred at this branch of the apparatus, devising remedies for computer breakdowns etcetera, for half a year now. The location was far from an outpost and was, in fact, at the hub of red tape. If officialdom’s dumdums didn’t expand to create large wound channels, Dwaine would spend hours perfecting the matter with his other software sidekicks—a crew, in a sense, of his fellow geeks. His recommendation from college had gotten him a foot in their door. Interfacing with IT professionals—to use the gobbledygook English—and well on his way to becoming a fully-fledged one himself.

That at least had been the plan. Since coming to the post, he’d unfortunately fallen under the cosh of a ferocious bully. Whereas in academe his shyness had been accepted—the professors worked around it to bring out Dwaine’s clear gifts at a console—Dreck Coalface thundered onto the scene with naught but disrelish and aggression in his manner. That’s the Dreck Coalface to those who don’t know him (note to self: am I being libellous?).

I won’t rattle off every incident that Dwaine recorded in his diary (which, as all the experts advise, he’d started keeping immediately the incidents began) save to say that Mr Coalface frequently shouted at him that he was slow whilst he piled him high with files on top of all the computer work that was required.

It’s at moments like these, constant reader, that other stories might be tempted to cut to the chase. Picture the scenario: fateful morning; our hero gets to the office, picks up the phone; it’s his destiny calling.

Dwaine’s development is a little slower, though.

Now, fetched up in the world of work, young Daze (one of his several aliases) was really feeling the pressure and, in point of fact, was in a near suicidal condition. His denouement will not be a matter of just lifting a telephone. His fraught condition of mind was manifesting itself through quite impulsive and jarring behaviour on the 23-year-old’s part.

Some days ago, a’stewing at his workstation, half an hour into a morning shift, he had tried to lighten the general mood with this contribution into the hovering silence:

—“We’re all in this together,” Dwaine said to his co-workers, in a voice, loud and high, on the verge of cracking.

—“In what together?” one or two asked, in tones that hinted that they couldn’t care less.

—“Wednesday,” Dwaine chortled, to a complete lack of glee.

The tumbleweed rolled by and the week’s third day got off to a sour start.

Dwaine was a nice fellow but had an intense side which took hold of him too often. For instance, in company, to compensate for his shyness, he would sometimes adopt the persona of a total cineaste and could be a real bore on that stuff when he got going. In fact, before the whole Coalface business blew up, he’d held court on the subject many times to the dismay of his new workmates.

He also had deeply (or so he thought) important things to say during these spurts of confidence: here, a vow-list to self will give an indication of how he came across to others: ‘no more drinking, no more denying the problem, quench the fire of your addiction, that burning knot.’

Then there was his frequent quoting of the Bible; his fav of late: ‘Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites: you are like to whited sepulchres, which outwardly appear to men beautiful but within are full of dead men’s bones and all filthiness.’

The closest he came to having a woman in his life was a comely girl, whom he got the courage to talk to sometimes when en route to buy alcohol. They had exchanged cell numbers.

She was all soul too and soft and convivial, this lass who sometimes hung by his side; part of her human conditioning told her that life had granted her a role in something beyond third dimensional; Daze Lush, all the while, composed a long song of disrespect from son to father.

Since last week’s ill-received flash of faux-jocularity on Daze’s part, he had stayed silent, getting on with the only thing he was good at: his work. All contact with colleagues he kept to a bare minimum and, if forced to talk, was cheeseparing with his words.

Not that many colleagues spoke to Dwaine—and especially not at length. Even his fellow geeks had started to shun him since kingpin Coalface had upped a gear. In fact, the odium in which Dwaine was held was dizzying in its strength. The young man beavered away, thinking all the while to turn his scattered energy into creative, enthusiastic vitality—tapping the keys and slowly unlocking the secrets of the future: the design of the perfect weapon—it was, at this point, his only way to function. And, on the other hand, he was reduced, constantly, to a desolate and dispiriting state, bereft and woebegone, by Coalface’s vituperative verbosity.

To add to Dwaine’s woes, ‘a’roaming in his cranium’, a far wilder and more beastly man held sway. Not an alter-ego, though it may look so, but, rather, an invader—an immense scavenger who’d bounced in, heedless of the scarecrow.

This wretched fellow was now throwing his weight about with gusto.

Dwaine thought of death and the pleasures it might hold.

I must mention that Dwaine has long harboured a wish to die; that is to say, he has harboured a desire to expire for a veritable age whilst also savouring the thought of being dead for eternity (cumbersomeness or just plain-speaking? I ask myself).

His cousin Todd Valentine Lush ran a TV repair shop. He was so regular in his routines that he always left for lunch at one p.m. Todd Valentine kept a small efficacious gun under the counter to bolster shop security. There’d been some wackos with blades trying it on in the neighbourhood lately. The existence of said gun was known only to a select few of whom Dwaine/Daze was one; now Dwaine had only gone and gotten it! His modus: swung by, said hi and salted the gun into his sky rocket.

A curate’s egg was cooked across the road from a flower shop.

Before taking a tram back to the office to kill Dreck, Dwaine had one other purchase to make: some strong drink. Entering an off-licence and hearing the door chime sound, he was moved to hum an old ditty as he headed for the spirit shelves: ‘When his bell contraption rings, And a customer comes in, Vatif is thinking of the ringing, Of his till still to be.’

Dwaine had composed it at nineteen as an ode to greed. He saluted hail-fellow-well-met the man at the counter and made his purchase of a half bottle of single malt whiskey. He was then out the door and on public transport with the gun transferred to his man-bag.

Getting a gun in through the apparatus was easy. Such an air of terror pervaded the land that nobody ever dared carry contraband, so the authorities, to save money, left every camera and metal-detector switched off—an enormous hoodwink on their part.

Working in this milieu, Dwaine woke most mornings filled with a ragbag of negative emotions, chief among which was oiliness. He wore a jacket more suited to a Sunday black mass. He remembered with a shudder how five days earlier he had gone through a savage bout of trembling madness. He wore the jacket today less bothered by huge motorcycles coming to run him over. Lawless souls too—nothing new there—also sought him out exhorting him to intone. He was having none of it and spent his prayer time alone. He’d come out of the fever feeling like he’d shaken a leviathan from off o’ his tail. So, he awoke feeling oily, still hearing whispers, which tore at the rupture he endured for her.

I must repeat: she was all soul too and soft and convivial.

What began as a subtle presence, in the dawn’s light, as he was reading over coffee—a vague feeling that he must go somewhere with someone—became, in a very short time, a trespassing tormentor inside Dwaine’s mind; a tormentor bent on war.

All that Dwaine could do was project his timidity to the world and wait for the keg to explode; he thought of the line of the poet—‘for every summer there comes a sabre-rattler’—and found himself gradually taken over by this maniac.

Now the fiend was gearing up for battle. It was bruited about the water cooler and elsewhere that Dreck held Dwaine fully responsible for a recent chronic malfunction on a new weapon the firm had been perfecting. The lavish unveiling event that was organised had flopped with forlorn finality—embarrassing Coalface dreadfully in front of some of the ‘board of directors’ who had attended.

Word was that Dreck was about to make Dwaine’s life more hellish than ever.

The enemy in the whole business was Coalface. Dreck ran the unit. It was Dreck’s fiefdom. It was his ‘realm of rottenness’. Coalface had been bullying Dwaine consistently for the past six months; the harrying of the young Lush had caused his ranking in the workplace to sink to a tragic low. Daze consoled himself with the thought that, as poor Mrs Koch’s boy, who failed the entrance exam, put it: ‘The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self.’

Dwaine thought of Dreck: ‘You tie up heavy bundles for people to bear, and do not lift a finger to help them.’

The simple fact was that most of Dwaine’s colleagues were too concerned with advancing their careers to afford him any compassion or sympathy. In fact, many were openly hostile. It was a punishing routine for the young introvert; but it had an outcome.

Let me cast some light on Dwaine up to now:

He was formerly a poor fucker, lost in the wine; but he’d managed to work a few things out; and despite his spirit-crushing reserve he also managed to keep an ear out most nights—listening to it all, the pain and the lackey.

After a brace of ZZ meetings he’d attended, he felt that their fundamentalism was characterised by rigidity, domination and exclusion. His source for such thoughts was L Gordy.

Dwaine went on with the fragmentary prose ode.

He was in his flat, aghast, by the visual vomit coming off the screen on the wall.

You are not a 21-year-old man anymore, he told himself, and your light will barely last till your quarter century.

Who cares?

Gabriel carries his trumpet in a case. He could be beside you on the tram writing his Big Book on Bach. It’s his apotheosis; his magnum opus.

(There’s that word again, apotheosis. It suits his divine status.)

As the tram trundled on, Dwaine had his deft piece in the man-bag across his lap.

—‘You’re gas, Kay. I do enjoy ya.’

—“So are you, Jen.”

(This from two chits o’ the flats to give them their due, filling his ears on his thoughtful and fateful commute. Jen must’ve said it ten times. Dwaine wondered if her father was a crazed onanist who’d found a site of respite in her mother.)

His thoughts went back to the night’s sleep he’d just had; stemming from it, a new set of circumstances had developed to beset him. The boundary between dream and reality was now blurred. He’d lain on his bed. The clock’s light said it was five a.m. He’d just awoken from his fifth vivid dream of the night since bedding down at twelve; ‘on the hour, every hour’, they’d come; he’d counted each one in an effort to catalogue and garner meaning from their bolts of electricity. This latest:

I am in the wardrobe behind the vestments that are hanging there; the angels have stopped talking to themselves for a while.

The one prior: ‘Is God not some fantastical construct created in the minds of people to counter the terror of existence?’—a question repeated over and over again.

Thirdly: A lake of cyan. So blindingly beautiful it’s impossible to be true. Alas, only in dreams such things.

He wakes.

Return to the ante-room after eleven years. There’s a tumour theme there that is piteous to hear.

He had noticed of late how the people move through the city cautiously. Fed a diet of crime stories, they look in fear at every passing stranger, if they look at all.

Dwaine’s mother had told him that his father was a sick bastard, completely flawed as a man.

Secondly he’d dreamt: The plane was an easy one. I botched it; came in wrong. Fucked up the landing. Got killed. The showman side is false. Touche! I don’t want to go to that room yet. It’s too full of brilliant ideas. Like glaring through the glass some years on. Flies within, rain without. Dear God, what’s become of us?

Two days ago, he’d looked in the mirror and called himself a dead, pasty face. The fact remained that he was still alive.

He gave her his response from the back of his mind:

                                       

                                     ‘When on my hand without a sound

                                  The butterfly skipped around and round.’

Listening to AW won’t solve anything. He crawled back to the console determined to unjumble; knowing that Dreck must shortly die.

Dwaine now has the gun nestled and at the beck of his wrist.

He is moved to exclaim mentally how: ‘The trumpet of the seventh angel consummates the immortality of God.’

Cripes, writing was work; he was thoroughly fagged out; though block was infinitely worse.

He was returning now to do the killing.

Lunchtime, just the right time of day to bump someone off. To distract himself he scoured a property page. Here’s what he saw: ‘Imagine summer/autumn evenings walking _______ beach before returning home for a glass of wine in a professionally landscaped garden.’

It all seemed a little too forced.

He put the whiskey to his lips.

                                                            ***                             

In the heart of the apparatus, Dreck Coalface was sitting on his leather swivel chair chatting on speakerphone to a Ms Bleau from Londinium regarding a weighty job in which she was engaged. Unmarried, attractive and in her forties, Bleau was wedded to her work. The crumbs of Dreck’s lunch were all around and a wedge of Devil’s food cake lay waiting to be gorged. The confection rested, glumly, by Coalface’s tub of indigestion tablets.

Ms Bleau’s client wanted to apologise for stealing from, in her words, “your vast mines, Mr Coalface.”

Dreck was only vaguely knowledgeable about the case but feigned great mastery nonetheless.

Ms Bleau continued “Perhaps something holy and cherished was turned on its head. After all, millennial renewal comes round but each millennium. Should my punishment, therefore, be death?”

Dreck chin-wagged and eyed the food cake. “Yes, yes, Ms Bleau.”

He was emotionally ruptured, of that he knew.

Dwaine’s first dream: I foresaw how merciless I would be when he asked for pity. The flames were awaiting, yes, the burning terror. A powerful demon will arise but I, an ambassador in bonds, will be able to defend myself.

She has me ensnared. The lake of her beauty is far from horrific. I see us rising at dawn like I have always known her. Something new, something old. 

Dwaine’s hand was beginning to tire of the gun sitting in his man-bag. He’d have the weapon back to the TV repair shop neatly by tea time. The full magnitude of what he was proposing to embark upon was hitting home to him: mephitic murder! He decided it was out of the question; he would have to call it off.

Dwaine reached his stop and made the two-minute walk to the building where the apparatus ticked over in its monstrous manner; its tentacles ever spreading, its sway supreme. Let me tell you, without a word of a lie, that the place contained a plenitude of Winstons. He proceeded serenely towards the lift and rose to Dreck’s floor. The comely girl phoned him as the lift was rising and told him to meet her Tuesday at the Lollipop Café. He was delighted with this piece of news though he didn’t show it as he flashed a scowl that petrified the young PA at the outer desk and thereby gained entry to Dreck’s sanctorum. The Bleau phone call had terminated moments earlier and the Devil’s food cake was halfway down Dreck’s throat.

When Dreck looked up he didn’t recognise a person called Dwaine Lush, instead he saw a low-ranking gormless baboon (whom he’d never liked). The selfsame halfwit en fait who’d caused that recent malfunction which could have seen Dreck’s feet boiled away by General Hant H Wes himself.

Calmly, Dreck removed the cake from his lips, sipped some coffee and asked with a growl:

—‘Yes?’

Dwaine Lush smiled at his padrone. He knew he could have the gun out in a second and blow the bastard’s brains all over the desk where he sat, jabbering and eating, day after relentless day. Instead, listening intently to one of the seven seraphs, he said:

—“I’m handing in my notice, Mr Coalface.”

Dreck tried a smile back of his own which quickly morphed to an eldritch grin.

—“Good luck.”

—“Thank you.”

Within a week Dwaine was gone. He would try his hand as a knight-errant. Some co-workers even helped him to clear out his desk. The future was not so short after all and he was glad to have moved on.                                                                  

© Brian Ahern 2010