Never Mind

He writes.

That is all there is to it.

There is nothing else.

There has been nothing since the entire planet closed their doors on the world and hid from the angel of death. No one told him that he had to sacrifice a lamb and mark his door so that the angel would pass them by. He did not know, so he did not act. His ignorance was the angel of death.

Life is a big, dark joke and he is living in the punchline. 

The angel of death played a prank on him. It wasn’t the pandemic that took Leo, his little lion. Not directly anyway. When the angel touched Leo as he slept peacefully in the next room dreaming dreams of dinosaurs, Thor and Pokémon, he left Leo with a secret gift and that gift grew inside of him while they all waited the pandemic out.

By the time the angel’s gift was discovered, it was all too late. They didn’t even get to say goodbye. Leo fell asleep one night and in the morning he didn’t wake up. Three days later he went cold, forever.

Anna lingered for six months after they lost the one thing that bound them. For six long months she was a ghost in this house. He caught glimpses of her every now and then, but always pretended that she did not exist. That’s how scared he was of that particular ghost. He thinks she stayed for Leo’s sake. More possibly, he reminded her of Leo and she needed that. She needed to be reminded of him until she could take the hurt no longer, and then it was over and she was gone.

He closes his eyes and not for the first time he realises that he cannot see her face. His breath catches in his chest as this knowledge grows just like that tumour did inside Leo. He cannot see Leo’s face either, then wonders if he ever did. 

Minds work in differing ways. His is not a particularly visual mind. His mind is filled with words. Most of the words in his head are cruel sharp blades dipped in callous poison. They appear to him unbidden and they add to his burden of pain. A burden that threatens to drag him down into the dark depths and keep him there for eternity.

A parent is not supposed to bury their child. They put Leo in the ground. Out of sight and now he is out of mind, and he is slowly going out of his mind. Those assassin words form ranks, march forth and ask him…

Did Leo ever really exist?

In the end, he thinks, we are but memories. That is all that is left of us. It is for the survivors to ensure that we live on. How many billions of people are now lost? All memory of them evaporated in the mists of time? 

He used to play music as he wrote. Gentle instrumentals to help guide the words to the page. Somewhere along the way he got out of the habit. Life is a series of habits and he dropped most of his when Leo exited stage right. He probably has some new habits now, not that he attends to them. He doesn’t care.

Nothing matters anymore.

The world is empty.

He is empty.

There is nothing here for him anymore and yet he writes. It seems that he is stuck with the hardest habit he ever got into. Perhaps writing is what keeps him moving. He does not look for any meaning in what he writes, the words enter the world uncelebrated by him. There is no hope, only the pain of a loss that he could not even begin to imagine. Not even now, after it has all happened and engulfed his world. Burnt it all away.

And yet here he is.

He didn’t burn away with the rest of it. There is a husk left in the scorched black world and in that husk are the words.

He writes. He writes in an attempt to get some of those words out of his head. The pressure there is getting to be too much, it presses against the back of his eyes and makes his temples throb uncomfortably, and he feels like if it gets any worse he will feel tears of blood oozing from his eyes. Unconsciously he dabs at his right ear as though there is something there. A trickle of imaginary blood as the words press against his skull and something inside of him lets go and bursts.

Today he awoke with the sun, having snatched an hour of exhausted sleep. An hour of sleep is as much as he has had in a long while, and he always gets up at dawn, if not before. His coffee doesn’t last long in its mug. Later he will fetch a large glass of water, a fleeting break from the work of the day.

This day the words flow more freely. He is on the back stretch and when it is like this, when he can see the finish line, he accelerates towards it and doesn’t stop until the race is done. It is almost dark when he finishes up. He does not bother with the lights. What’s the point?

On auto-pilot, he goes to the beer fridge in the attached garage and grabs a bottle of lager. It’s a special version of a lager he used to order when he went out to eat an Indian curry. Something he did in a former life.

The beer is a tradition. He has always celebrated with a good beer when he comes to the end. The break with tradition is him reseating himself at his laptop, taking an absent swig of his beer, barely noticing its taste, and typing a word in the search field that will take him back to the start of the document. Take him back to the beginning.

He stares at the screen.

His intention was to begin reading the book he has written.

He is not reading.

The words on the page are the words from his head, only they have fermented and distilled and they have become more dangerous than they ever were. He cannot remember ever having written them. Not this. Not these words. They pierce right through his eyes and drive into his brain. His eyes swim, but still he sees them. Every word.

YOU ARE NOT REAL!

The words are a mantra, they are a dark spell, and the more they spill back into his mind, the more tied and bound he is to the screen filled with words. He cannot tear himself away from the words as they scroll up from where they have been hiding all this time and bore their way into him.

YOU ARE NOTHING!

Tears fall freely and unheeded from his face. It is the first time he has cried since Leo died, but he is oblivious to anything other than the words that came from him, and yet did not. They are not his words. They were never his words. But now they possess him. They have invaded him and as he sees them and feels them he realises that he does not know who he is anymore, and he cannot remember the person that he was. That person is dead. If he ever existed at all.

YOU ARE PAIN!

Thousands of words crowding in around his eyes to drive home these simple truths. He is lost. He has been lost since Leo left this world, maybe even before then. If he can’t see his own son’s face then is any of this real? Is he real? Even if he is, what value does he have? Is there anything of substance left?

YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN THE WORLD OUTSIDE AND IT HAS FORGOTTEN YOU!

Panic laces his pain then. Is that true? He can’t remember the last time he left the house. He has gone as far as the driveway to put the bins out. He sits in the back garden to write when the weather permits. When was the last time that he did that? If he has not seen the world for an age, then does the world even exist anymore? 

His life has receded until it only exists within him. He hasn’t seen another person in what he thinks is months, but it is years. He gets his food delivered. There is no need for him to leave the house, and so he hasn’t. He hasn’t even muttered a word to himself in all that time. The words are written, not spoken. He doesn’t hear any inner voice as the words invade him. He suffers in silence as they do their work. Filling him completely with an inexorable pain. The words are relentless and he scrolls and scrolls through them as they erase anything that might be left of him.

The words are lies. All of them, but he is too far gone to see the truth of it and they gain access to him so easily, flooding him with despair.

He sits like that, at the screen of his laptop until he comes to the end of the document. He has never been one for writing the end, as the final two words of any of his books. Never felt those words were appropriate. They did not fit. This one comes close though.

YOUR END

He sits silently, staring at those last two words. Inside of him the storm of words rages, the pain and the lies and the despair builds to a crescendo and then, suddenly and completely, it stops.

They do not find his body until the following Summer.