If this is indeed a simulation I’d like to ask my programmers for something significantly less shithouse.
Zoe & Ari: Left of Centre
“There are lots of spaces where bullets are not flying. Try and occupy those.”
Ari Nakamura scratched her head as she read the last 4 diary entries, the last 4 days of her father’s life, and she reflected, because of his incapability of speech at the time, that these were very likely the last real communications he had with this world. The mute, final missives of a dying man. An excerpt from the lengthy entry on day 1 of 4 read: “I have filled great stories with experience and the intersectionality of life and what I’m pretty sure is madness till I am now stuck in this flabby corporeal flight -- a building that has no elevator to either its top floor or basement -- like some sort of dry blizzard of middle ground, and all I can do is lie here in this hospital bed with wind-chapped wit, spruiking false serenity, awaiting the next tenant, or a building manager… someone or something to show me the way out, or perhaps take my place.” Ari flipped the page. Took a cursory glance at the next diary entry but decided it was too much to bear right now. She was late for work. She had one pair of what she believed to be clean underwear though they were conspicuously crumpled up on her bedroom floor. She picked them up, took a sniff, thought to herself… hmmph…good enough and began putting them on. A message arrived on her phone. “Tim” flashed across the screen as she fell unbalanced into her knickers. It was from her boyfriend, sending her some esoteric facts about Gaugin. Obsessed as he was at the time. Not even bothering to say good morning, she noted, moving on to make some less than opaque connection between the artist’s Japanese influence and her heritage.
Zoe Tatev began that same day deep in contemplation. She was due to pull a bank job with 3 other characters of similarly ill social standing at 11 am. 11 am on the dot! “My greatest fear,” she thought, “is that we’re all in this shitwagon existence simply to be able to prove our adeptness when being interviewed on a talk show, a Mickey & Mallory type situation, to have all the right answers--or at least the most entertaining ones-- at our beck and call, come off as very winning... At life. Or death. Or something.” Zoe pondered for a moment, pressed paused in that tape-recorder brain of hers. “Or is it that we’ve somehow, somewhere, become more comfortable than uncomfortable with the sound of sirens in the city? That we’ve been wed to the idea that without ordinary emergencies in our lives all things are off-kilter, uneasy for us? I see folks rushing to finish the dishes rather than nonchalantly putting on a record, relax, let that other shit wait. Or rushing in line at the grocery store because of some imagined queue of anxiety bickers loudly behind them, demanding this and that… And, Jesus, I remember a time when I was so very skilled at forgetting all such things.”
With the maelstrom of these thoughts swirling at the substratum of her being Zoe posited that perhaps there was never a better to time to ferry oneself from this side to that. The final crossing. Maybe right now, even. Check your pocket for the correct fare, say your last goodbyes, if indeed there were any to say… As the Toyota HiAce van pulled out of the tunnel and into the sunlight of Sydney’s west, in the background, just left of the centre console, a nickel-plated handgun glinted briefly out of the darkness, caught her eye in the rearview mirror.
--in truth, Zoe said, turning to Jimmy, who was riding shotgun, I could go some Maccas before we pull this thing off.
--are you fucking kidding me? Jimmy exclaimed
--no. no, i’m not.
--we’re not getting any fucking Maccas! Jesus, we’re less than 20mins from go.
“20 mins,” thought Zoe. The difficulty of opioids is in the loss of time and moreover its importance. These days, Zoe melted from one day to the next, barely a slovenly expectation of a sunrise. She was a heroin addict moving west on the M7. The van smelt of gasoline and wet animal pelts, sulphur, and some hints of heartbreak in the faux leather and decaying foam of the upholstery. Zoe’s driving Jimmy’s van. A taxidermist on the legit side of life, Jimmy’s partner had Od’d a few months back. He is now break-neck lost. An unstable element. Memory conflated with everyday function as he propped up dead things in frozen animation, using them either as décor or trophies, to suit whatever it was that existence demanded in any given instant. There was, Zoe thought, an unspoken itchiness about taxidermy. “Much like my vagina right now. These goddamn cheap arse mechanics overalls riding into the unknown!! I’m encased in a skin that’s not of my doing! And what’s more every time I reach above my head I nearly saw my-fucking-self in half!” She fidgeted physically and mentally for a moment or two and then gave way to the majesty of imagination again. But no matter the serenity of imagination or the reciprocal itchiness of the world’s troubles, or her perception of them, still, more than anything, she was overwhelmed by the need for a Double Quarter Pounder Meal.