Orpheus Still Sings

Every street lamp that I pass

Beats like a fatalistic drum,

And through the spaces of the dark

Midnight shakes the memory

As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

— T. S. Eliot, Rhapsody on a Windy Night.

Nostalgia is a sad man’s morphine; for he holds on to it during perspiring summer nights and bone rattling winters with Time the wonder drug resetting almost every back ache, heartbreak and willful mistakes. It is rather amusing how memories play out differently as at times, one person forgets and another remembers the same things, differently. It is the year, a decade after the great pandemic, series of natural catastrophes, and political mayhem, which had mutilated and exterminated half the populace of the world we once called home. There are no personal calendars, no time-keeping, no record of daily events, no memorabilia. The residents of 654321 simply follow the bell in the square which has a fountain, very Medusa like, tolling every 6 hours for alerting time  and events for the townsfolk. They visit the market twice a week, eat dessert once a week and drink wine on Sundays. There is no God, but the religion of a Sisyphean toil without protest. Every Monday, large vans come with essential supplies and are distributed according to their allotment based on various factors and back history, as decided by the High Order. There are grades- A, B, C and Z. They get allowance as per them and get to list their demands and submit to the messengers and gets (dis)approved by the high order in three days’ time. Class struggles seem to have survived the   apocalypse. They get one monthly check up to negate the prospect of any new diseases, glitches in encryption, psyche evaluation for any irregularities in their system. The townsfolk own nothing, do nothing, say nothing except exchange a few pleasantries as noted in their modules in scheduled weekly walks during dusks. Dusks are still beautiful. At times, some mumble a few incoherent words, share something that are rumored to be ‘stories’ and on rare occasions pleasant hums are heard from people. A droning echo in everyone’s head every night- Memories are obsolete.

Often, Zelda (which we will assume the name to be, for there are no names here) wondered what these ‘memories’ are. She was oddly comfortable here, whatever and wherever it was. Her mind felt as if it were a room, that were emptied without her permission, one furniture at a time until it was empty, with wind whistling through the curtains in the auburn dusk light. She felt empty and spacious and calm but something felt amiss. She wondered often, if there was supposed to be something different about the setting, in the ways she sat alone on the porch and drank tea and went to her cot by herself at night. Did people live together before? What was her age? Judging from her hands and feet that she could see (there were no looking glasses) she couldn’t have been at her physical best but she didn’t feel half bad either. She wasn’t like those who walked almost on fours or couldn’t move around but she wasn’t like those slender ones with taut skin and an increasing paranoia about them. As far as she had construed, the older ones were too comfortable and the younger ones were too jittery, almost hysterical. Hence, she decided she must have been somewhere in between. Procreation was forbidden. The greatest gift of living beings had turned into a dangerous practice that had caused the situation that they were in. They didn’t know what they were dealing with but the knowledge of coitus as an act was primarily included in their ‘necessary information folder’ only to prevent it from happening. As far as they knew, it was only a matter of time and beyond the big gate, it was a vast wasteland for no one to fix – The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying, the board read.

At times, like strange sensations, certain images floated in her head, like disjunctive pictures making no sense, an absurd juxtaposition, swimming in a pool of fluorescent light. Techni-colored, kaleidoscopic, Dreams. Dreams, were obsolete and forbidden as they were not supposed to have a subconscious to begin with. Dreams meant trouble because that meant there was an error, an override in their simulated, rewired mind-scape. These occurrences were of high risk as it meant eviction of the resident from the neighborhood. They never came back again, the ones who were taken away. Once, a woman had come back, catatonic, screeching and screaming all sorts of things and roaring with teeth all out. She was put down. Today was one of those days when Zelda woke up before her scheduled nap duration after having these dream like recurrence that she didn’t identify with. She had seen these light flashes of varied colors and sounds that we know as laughter and songs. Every time during the recurring visions, she felt an unpleasant sensation that spread through her entire self and tears flowed from her eyes and something tugged at her womb and all she could do was to sit down and stare at a point on the wall. She saw sentences strung together on a piece of paper, a slippery surface with people’s faces on it, sometimes with her face on it too, colors and patterns and shapes. She also saw a blurred copy of another face that made her head swim and made her dizzy and filled her with the urgency to run towards the door. She sense being touched, caressed, slid into, hair everywhere. A whirlwind of everything all at once- blood, semen, nails and vulnerability. Shame. She had woken up once, wet all over, extremely thirsty and scared. But every time, the visions became clearer and the faces gained clarity and she became excited with the prospect of remembrance; whatever it means to us. Her reserve of experience that was not supposed to exist, was opening up like a Pandora's box. It was a lucky glitch in the system – the techs had overlooked something while wiping her out, something had run amok and enabled her to gain an advantage and the curse of withstanding knowledge/power. She felt something shift in herself and soon she was gaining momentum with these dreams, reveries, trances and navigating her way through it. It was a maze, maze of memories that she didn’t know she was traversing. She felt at the center of this maze lay something crucial, that was taken from her. Or did she give it away willfully? It did not matter. She felt like she had something close to a purpose that she wasn’t pre-decided for her. Her days were numbered but she wasn’t allowed to put one to it. It was the sadistic nature of her existence that was building a fire inside her. A madness reminiscent of Carnivalesque criminality of Saturnalia.

……

Once a month, a new addition came to the town.  The fact that it was a month was marked by the arrival—The van of the High Order passes through the neighborhood, a full circle of an eagle and stops in front of the newly vacant capsule, letting out a clinically sane individual. The oldest residents welcome the individual and things go on as it is ought to. Communication was prohibited until four clearance tests were taken and the capsule were surveyed of the new resident. But there were a few commonly kept secrets beginning with the fact that every newcomer was required to bring something akin to information that would help the townsfolk make sense of what was going on. They knew it through a mediator, a connector, a mule that took the message to the newest resident just before they went through their final procedure. The flaw in the program was that there were cached memories, residual junk of information lying somewhere inside them that could be accessed in the early days before they completed the four steps of clearance test. And for exceptions like Zelda, these recessive memories surfaced later, like some poetic justice which would twist a Greek tragedy into that of a modern epic. As of today, Zelda had assembled the afterimages and the information it presented like scrambled words a child retains while learning to speak for the first time. The lawns had a real red geranium on the top of a plastic plant sticking out like a scarecrow which was a sign for the monthly arrival. The day before she had an important revelation. She saw an assemblage of body parts in isolation where a pair of eyes, a shade deeper than the cerulean, made her gasp. There was also a sign, on his wrist like it was etched on the skin. Today as she stood by her door, she felt like she was light like the air she breathed, she felt she was a breeze run through a cloud. She felt her throating closing and an erratic beating inside her as if something had woken up and wanted to get out. She surprised herself by whispering If I was bound for hell, let it be hell. No more false heavens. No more damned magic. The van came and circled the town like a bald eagle aiming for its prey. It stopped next to hers. The individual stepped down and looked up while the sky turned rust and grey. Zelda felt a vibration, a surge of relief and fear, a feeling of joy cascading through her entire being. The man looked at her and she saw a serpentine loop on his wrist. She heard the word Scott suddenly. The eyes echoed an ocean wave of the past. Scott, as we would call him, knew a little more than she did. Just like 20 years ago, he had waited longer that she did across the aisle, a parking a lot, on the sidewalk, on the platform. Because as Sexton said once :

‘As it has been said:

Love and a cough

cannot be concealed.

Even a small cough.

Even a small love.’