Babbling Brook (4)

He was being put out to seed. The knacker’s yard loomed. He saw himself become glue to be sniffed by a homeless youth in Merchant’s Arch. It wasn’t all bad news. In a sense, he had achieved immortality. He would live on in the fleeting inebriation of an urchin.

He arrived to work wearing a head-mounted display unit, a HMDU. The phrase Christianity is Art flickered before his eyes. A stranger on the bus had asked him: “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”

It was actually a relief to be at work. Several days earlier he had found himself in a piss-stinking tunnel in a parallel universe.

It was raining rats and frogs. She was worried about the starlings in her attic. A man looked at her in the street. He had the face of an unhappy dog.

A meeting was called and he found himself in a room full of cyborgs speaking in hashtags.

She had vivid dreams about Thoor Ballylee Castle although she had never been there. At breakfast she read: “Some of the most pious and righteous are the most gifted in deception.”

As the meeting dragged on, it occurred to him that Jesus was no saint.

She picked up a second hand deed poll in a car boot sale and changed her name to Claire Dark.

The screen flashed up Godhead College where he would never go. He’d be forty-five in July, oh me, oh my!

She walked through that part of Truth not impacted by Lie, experiencing the pleasure of apricity and reflecting on all the great songs never written because of Winston’s murder.

The screen changed to a dowager in a boat saying: “Isn’t this a beautiful day?” Then: a loud blast.

The national symbol of Runway Four was a bag of empty beer cans lying beside a litter bin.

Within the walls of the world his dissociative brainwaves pushed him in the oddest directions.

She felt a powerful urge to escape herself and took great solace in the Universal Spiritual Law of Cause and Effect.

One of the cyborgs began to talk about life assurance: “If you died tomorrow,” it said.

Purity Dalrymple appeared on the screen. She was one of his favourite angels.

From his chair he sent his hologram uptown. To the room he begged, most respectfully, to announce that some days he wasn’t able for them at all: other people.

She never saw Truth again except on Google Street View.

© Brian Ahern 2015