The Individual

THE INDIVIDUAL

The boy discovers the word in the sand, revealed by waves. It aims a jagged edge at the sun. At first he thinks it’s just another piece of flotsam floated from the past to the island. He pulls it struggling from the grasp of the beach. The boy sits with his back to the heat and feels the rusty surface, smiling at the rough story of the metal. The reddening silver glints with pleasure at seeing the daylight. But as he draws his fingertips back and forwards he becomes aware of raised parts of the metal. He grows excited – these seem more than random bumps from a harsh life. He starts again from one end, the straighter end at the left, and traces a line going from bottom to top. The line then slopes at an angle down then a mirror reflection back up only to drop again. ‘M’. The line breaks into space. He feels for the next ridge’s starting point. This time it falls from the top before sweeping round in a curve like the moon’s crescent slipped. ‘U’. He lets his hand ride this shape for several minutes recalling the rockslide by the waterfall. Then the journey continues with double excitement – two slides locked together like a grass snake mid-writhe. ‘S’. He is a little sad at the return of straight lines without the relief of curves or slopes. ‘E’. Like the prongs of metal his fathers thrust into soil to get beneath the surface. This trident seems threatening, on guard, especially as it faces a spitting edge with twisted fangs.

The boy scratches away the rust from the characters so he can see as well as feel. ‘MUSE’. It looks like the images he’d been shown, brought back from the dream journeys. He was always confined within the circle of fire with the other children while the mothers and fathers connected with the deaths of the past. These strange symbols danced over the pictures of destruction, seemed to draw out the blood from their ancestors. He looks now at the solid, ancient object, feels the rough history of its surface. A thrill courses his spine to his head. He sees people smiling, moving their lips, opening their mouths. The shock forces his own mouth open, air breaks out. He shuts it quickly as if a mother is standing over him. There is more to this object than rust. There is more to this symbol than death.

.

Phil pauses at an intersection of coloured words. The neon images run into each other in the rain and stain the night. She crosses between a flickering gap in traffic and is swept up in a gush of stressed bodies, glad of the push through metal air. Each breath coats the insides with lead, encasing the past. A million fractured thoughts electrically charged converge upon her. Before, she could cope. When Jacob was born she felt her chaos emerge from her belly, bloody and wailing but a seed to grow. Then he was taken and blood and tears hung on her skin leaving the chaos inside.

The screams of her boy are still in her head as she is forced from the rush. She almost breaks the glass of a shop window. She tastes the salt as two kinds of moisture run over the pane. Through the haze, a wall of TV screens each show one of three programmes. A man kicks a pregnant woman; a boy in tears is carried from his hysterical mother; a tragic young woman is engulfed in flames. The pictures are silent except for the soundtrack in Phil’s mind. Her drowning head slides along the glass to a doorway. Frantically she thumps on the door, it opens and she falls through. The images cling to her body for a moment before dropping off like stunned butterflies.

Phil! You poor thing…you’re soaked through. Let’s get you dry and warm. We’ve got a few minutes before the ceremony begins.

Tessa instantly snuggles Phil into folds of comforting flesh and nurses her up the narrow stairs to the tiny kitchen. The coven kitchen glows with the aroma of spices and brewing herbs. Phil feels the hot infusion flowing within her as Tessa’s warm words hug her limp body. The dripping rags are removed and the ceremonial robe is donned. Phil forces the agony into a tight cluster deep inside.

I need a few minutes to gather myself Tessa

The other woman nods and busies herself in the kitchen. Phil walks to the landing and starts up the ladder to the skylight. It takes three pushes to open, as it always does. She is out again into the night but this time above everyone. The electric ether still pervades the air but she is an antenna, a lightening conductor for the words that lattice the sky. She walks to the middle of the roof and holds her arms to the sky. Some different goddess comes to her through the night-glow spectre of other people’s words.

She is always seeking his name. She doesn’t believe anymore that he can be found in the nature her religion has worshipped. He is lost like the words forever sent floating above the world they try to master. Her vision of him grows on without flesh. She wants to capture the word that names him and gives him body. She wants to hold the name to her and feel its heart beat.

Neon clusters, words tumble. Millions of conversations, dialogue, arguments, long radio diatribes and abrupt text and digitalised characters. She feels them all rushing through her. The alphabet flickers like an ever-changing tattoo across her skin. She is sure she will find him here, one day. She needs more power to find the words to bring him back. The particles glisten inside her. She is ready for the next ceremony. She swivels and drops back through the light, down to the landing. Her stride lengthens with purpose; she seems to grow inches as her back stiffens.

Oh, hi Phil. Are we ready to start? She jerks at the words like a rottweiler attacked by a terrier. She sees an undefined man with hair sprouting in numerous directions.

Er, it’s Paul, Phil. You remember you agreed to me observing a ceremony – for my book…

She groans. Yes, yes. She is already turning away from him, lengthening her stride. If she moves quickly and doesn’t look at him, maybe he’ll disappear as abruptly as he appeared. You won’t copy down any of the words?

All he catches is …words? He goes to open his mouth but nothing comes out. She is still speaking he thinks, pushing the air ahead of her into the next room. He doesn’t hear …in the mouths of the ignorant these words can kill.

In his mind he absorbs the flow of her body. Words fail him again. I just want some magic in the heart of the city…I typed that as my title…it sits on a blank screen.

~ 2 ~

The boy runs breathless to the village. Sand falls from his feet as grass strokes his soles. As colours change, trees appear as if sentries, guardians of the settlement. Everything seems different. A tree stands apart from the forest. He stumbles. Has it moved? He never really saw it before. Must have always been there, a tree doesn’t grow in a day.

Trees give way to people: a man digging, a woman chasing a small girl. The girl feels the boy’s exuberant thought first and stops abruptly in front of the woman. The woman feels the thought and looks to the girl; the excitement carries the bluntness of a child. Now she receives an image, garbled in the emotion, of a part of the beach. The man glances briefly but then shakes the image from his head as he sees the boy rushing past. He has more important things to do than run after a child with its imagination escaping into the world.

Now the boy passes the first huts. He goes straight to the mother who gave him milk. Not because she was the best but because she was the first. The thrill of his discovery breaks across his face and escapes from his mouth – Ungh! The mother flashes a controlling annoyance at this. He stops short and reddens. He is still inclined to use his mouth when his thoughts and emotions run away. He holds out the rusty object like a guilty dog with a bone. Puzzled, she takes it slightly distastefully. Another piece of flotsam for his collection. Cluttering the floor. He senses her thought and shoots out indignantly an image from a dream journey.

Aagh! she drops it to the floor then puts her hand to her mouth in shame as well as disgust. The word sits looking up at the sky.

Everybody gathers round - mothers, fathers and children peeking from between legs. A hierarchy shuffles into place naturally, the younger adults tasked with nurturing the young move to the boy first.

Then they sense a greater presence from deeper in the village and step back. The elder ones, whose nurturing spreads to the whole village, are given prominence and move forward. The rest of the village breathe a little deeper. As if they were one mind, the elders send the boy a jarring negativity, crashing through his mind, soaking his muscles into the earth.

Then sunlight glints on metal at his feet, illuminating lines. He picks up the found object and holds MUSE in front of him like a shield.

Waves of emotion ripple and foam through the villagers. There are no clear signals assembled in one mind to pass to another; just shock, fear, nausea...excitement. In moments, the tumbled feelings manifest hauntings of past horrors. The villagers’ bodies shake as they recall dream journeys where strange people from other worlds fight and die amid flashes of light and shattering sounds. The time when people opened their mouths to send messages, blunted meanings ripped bodies apart. Symbols marked against a barren background dance with death. The piece of metal in the boy’s hands, dug from time past, opens a darker world. They have seen the twisting symbols, heard the voices’ terrible music, but it was all cave paintings and white noise. In the dream journeys they collectively searched the past from their minds, seeing men and women who looked like them shamelessly sending sounds in others’ faces. They sense that these must be their ancestors but they seem to be an alien race. And their anger at one another seems connected always to the collections of symbols, like those brought now from the beach. This object is tangible fear, looking at them from their earth. The violence of the past cracks the ordered peace of their world. The message went out from the elders that they must journey there again. To view the fear in a dream, so it doesn’t become their reality.

~

Phil moves through the curtain that leads to the ceremonial circle. The curtain is dense enough to absorb the world outside and forbid it entry. A red darker than black imprisons light, losing it in the pattern weaved so far back in time it resists sight. Paul moves into the room, seen by no-one. The smell is sweet, perverted but natural. He looks at the candles glowing low in quiet opposition to the dark.  The flickering battle of flame with wax as the wick hugs its precious reward.

On the outer edges of the meagre glow, Paul counts thirteen women arranged evenly around the walls. He stops just inside the door as someone closes it behind him. He passes his eyes around the women. The gloom crowds features, merging hair, dress, skin. Some have necklaces low under their faces, rising and falling. He tries to focus on whether they are just wooden or plastic beads or gem stones but the light keeps the secret. His imagination wanders slightly, romantic fairy-tales tell him they are fine gems, holding mysterious powers. Some of the women flick their eyes at him, he senses curiosity but mainly distaste. He has heard nothing said but the air – what’s left – still reverberates with harsh criticism of the outsider’s entry. He tries to convince himself that it’s just his paranoia. It’s all in his head. But then, so is everything.

Phil strides out to the centre of the room. Paul follows her with his eyes, trying to copy her with his mind not paint her with his dreams. He lets his eyes drop to her feet, quickly in case he is seen to linger too long. He lets his vision follow a white line which Phil crosses. Two lines part company, taking their own path, then clatter into a third line which crashes through them. Three lines multiply and point in different directions, fragmented. Paul tries to split his vision five ways, all leading away from Phil. However much he tries to focus elsewhere, she demands the centre. The other women move around the points, closing the circle that excludes Paul.

He looks over shoulders as the women begin chanting words that merge in a rhythm more musical than meaningful. Phil’s prohibition against writing the words is needless, Paul feels another world drifting up outside him. Nothing here translates to anywhere before. He watches the willowy woman, like a flame now. Untouchable, she consumes the light.

Phil merges with the pentacle as the room drops from her. She melts away to another place. Hope.

~ 3 ~

The boy who found the word watches as the bonfire is lit in the centre of the village. The children are ushered around it, assuming the position they have adopted many times before, lying on their backs and staring at the stars. They are layered in circles, youngest closest to the bonfire. Now, a series of smaller fires are lit around all the children, the flames spitting across from one fire to the other, crossing the gaps till a continuous circle of fire holds them inside. A protection from the forest while the adults are journeying the past, it is also to protect the children from the past. The minds of the children are considered too raw for exposure to the violence of the mouths. The finder of the object throws out a tantrum that ripples the air. It is his and he should be able to go on the journey. The elders send him a feeling of fear and a glimpse of his body lying mindless. The searchers will bring back images. An indignant picture pops from his head of him as a man – an image which sends a condescending laughter of consciousness through the adult minds. The boy reddens again and hides his mind as he turns his back.  

The collective conscious reconvenes outside the circle. The bodies are arranged like the petals of a flower. Within, the tiny seeds cluster, waiting for the day when they can float. The mind of the village is slipping through the spaces within atoms, the revolving doors of worlds and times. The boy lies still but his mind pulses. In his head he holds the image of ‘MUSE’. He doesn’t want it as a lump of metal. He can sense there is something within it. He wants to be between those lines that he felt with his fingers…inside…inside…

He closes his eyes as the others do. But his mind won’t be held like the other children, ordered with the oldest closest to the outer circle of fire, closest to joining the ritual of the communal mind. Now he opens a crack in one eye, checks the other children are lying silent, motionless.

His eye opens fully. His best, perhaps only friend lays a few feet from him, two other children between them. She is his age, he assumes. She was alongside him in the hut with his first memories, as the nurturers held hands to their mouths and guided their minds from inside. The boy had followed the adult minds as they led him through the possibilities in his own. How he could frame an emotion as a thought and then send it to someone else. To begin with, the emotion flashed out so that anyone close, or even on the edge of the village, would catch a glimpse of it. Gradually the boy learnt, as they all did, to refine the thought, to concentrate it in one direction, to a specific person, in a channel, a frequency, that only the intended receiver would perceive. The channels were always stronger, less prone to seeping away into unintended minds, if you were sending to someone you knew. In those early years, it was those who played together who had the strongest mental connection. Most would form a bond, often with a nurturer, one who had been with them the most time in the hut, but only a damaged child would have no bond with one fellow child. The boy knew that some children, for whatever reason, made their bonds with friends who didn’t really exist. At least, they didn’t exist here in this village. But if you touched minds with those damaged boys and girls, the imaginary friend would be there, as solid as any in the hut.

A thought struck the boy now: those imaginary but solid children, could they be children from the past? In the world that the adults were visiting now? He tried to push his mind into the outer circle, to enter the dreams of the past, to find an imaginary friend who lived amid the lines of ‘MUSE’ and could take him to the meaning.

But the village mind was a dam, holding back seas of memories and imaginings, holding him outside. Frustrated, he retreats back into his own mind. Both of his eyes are open now, but he is bored with the world he can see. Then he looks again at the girl. He frames an image of them both together, exploring a dream journey, but as a game, both safe looking in at the chaos. He sends this with a deep longing for her to join him, together maybe they can break through the dam.

The girl’s mind is unresponsive. She has fallen into the trance that the adults cast over the children, soporific dreams to hold them. Safe. Why is he not asleep like the others? The image of the metal ‘MUSE’ from eons past, from the time the adults are exploring a few feet away, remains in his mind. A shield perhaps. Or a gateway...

He needs to get closer to them. He starts to wriggle against the ground, edging through spaces in the lines of older children, closer to the journey. Closer to the flames. He stops as the heat burns his head. He can feel it warming his mind, closer than any child has been. The flames seem to be melting through his skull, opening. A desire floods through him; if he can escape his body then his mind will be free. He will become like the imaginary children...crossing worlds.

It feels like a dream, as if he is already absent from this world. In the dream he rolls back, through the fire. Molten pollen. The outer circle is away in the past as he joins them. The flames are feeding ecstatically at his body as his mind is taken out. Rising with the smoke. The body is a flame-like thing, drawing energy from other bodies, other things. Transient atoms, the debris of stars.

As the body gives its energy to the earth and sky, consciousness is free. The grains of sand are shifting on the beach. The essence of boy is here in the spaces. The infinite space within atoms. He reassembles and hovers just beneath the ceiling of a tiny room. Below him he sees the body of a boy that could be him smashed limp against a wall. A man drags him across the floor with the disdain of a child for its broken doll. The tiny figure is stuffed out of sight into a dark hole. The mind dissembles again to another space. Looking for meaning between the lines.

~

The blue darkens around Phil. A screech from the distance behind her. A murder of crows consumes the light. She struggles in terror to fly faster, terrible screams from beaks cutting Phil’s ears before they pierce flesh. Savage talons slice her. The world is red and black as she crashes to earth. Then the earth melts and she seems to plummet down the deepest well yet she’s no longer moving. Falling into herself everything collapses beyond light.

Suddenly, at the moment of extinction a young boy is hurled into the abyss.

Jacob!

The boy without language solidifies from dreams into the name. Love becomes hard and dense under the pressure of time; the empty space Jacob left is compressed into matter. His name assumes the weight of loss...

Jacob, Jacob. My son. The Goddess has brought you back. I thought I was lost too…

The chanting has stopped, the women silent as a presence enters the room. The women from the coven used to mutter the name amongst themselves when Phil was out of the room. It hung like the blade of an axe on the point of their unfinished sentences as she walked in. Now, the name uttered secretly over the last seven years seems to be wrapped in Phil’s arms as she lies in the middle of the pentacle.

"Jacob, Jacob, I love you so much…’

Each. Painful. Word. Beat. His. Open. Brain. Stabbing between the boy’s ears. He stares wide-eyed at the woman with a glistening face. The sounds formed from the blatantly opening mouth cut into his life, everything that he has learned. Tears break from his eyes as Phil pulls him even tighter, wiping his tears with hers.

Paul watches through the bobbing heads and shoulders. He’d nudged forward as Phil collapsed to the floor and out of his sight. He couldn’t at first make out the extra body, his heart was leaping for the seemingly distressed woman lying on the floor. He tries to move towards her but the women in front of him block his way. He goes to shout out, ‘Someone help her!’, but the silence steals his words again. He feels an urge to strike the bodies in front of