The display blinked then disappeared. He was alone again. The room around him seemed deeper and darker than before, the endless expanse of the internet having drifted off into the nothingness from which it came.
Michael sat there watching the embers of his hard drive slowly grind to a halt, the orange light flickering until it too was off. He clenched his fingers together, stuck in some faded thought – some half felt memory that washed around his insides. Stretching his back with a few heavy clunks, he moved onto the patio.
Winter had laid a layer of thick frost on everything in sight, freezing the grass in the space between the rear of his house and the garden’s fence. The bay laurel had spread sideways across into the neighbouring garden, towering over their children’s slide. Leaves rustled as a slight breeze caressed the numbed tips of his ears.
All looked on with unflinching gaze at Michael as he stood there. Pulling his coat across his neck he looked to the ground.
I said no more, he thought to himself, pulling a cigarette from his pack of ten Marlboro. Though his words broke with no echo. They thudded against the inside of his skull like a text book on a pupil’s desk, the meaning within lost in a dulled pop.
A watering can peeked shyly from behind the shed’s door, the crumpled blue of his daughter’s paddling pool a shadow strewn backdrop. There too hung his saws, drills and nails and screws, and he thought briefly about cutting back the laurel. Then he stopped thinking about it.
A surging vacuum sucked at his insides and he dragged on his cigarette with a sudden sharp pull. Surrounded by the still quiet he felt a tension rise. Inexplicable, intangible, rising from the absence.
This is the truth, he thought. This meaningless landscape. The light and the dark that shade the world, creating shape from nothing. Creating something. I’m just an observer, here until my lungs collapse and my hair falls out. What I see or do is of no consequence.
His stomach dropped as he revisited the breathless displeasure of uncertainty. Staring down at his tremorous fingers, he examined the orange flecked filter held between his nails. Gripped tight between his whitened skin he rolled it back and forth and was nine years old again.
Mother was out, her stubbed half of a cigarette was hung by delicately her spindly fingers in the ashtray on the kitchen table. Sunshine streamed through the windows in thickening yellow glow, the day painted with custard and sweaty polo shirts.
Dropping his bags off by the door Michael walked into the kitchen. Her soft curled hair lacking, her pretty floral dress nowhere in sight, he was alone. Consumed, as a young mind is, by thoughtless desire, he sat in her chair and folded his legs like she did hers, pulling his shorts up above his knees and tucking the material into his legs. Picking up the half of the cigarette she had left, he gripped it between his fingers and rolled it back and forth.
He felt good. A warmth rising between his thighs and a stirring in his gut. In his mouth he felt his saliva wetting under his tongue, spilling over his small front teeth and onto his bottom lip. Watching the flecked orange spin, the deep red of her lipstick swelled purple. He picked up the lighter. Using two hands he fiddled with the flint, finally producing a flame. Scared, he brought the wavering fire to his face.
Blackening the end of the cigarette, it began to smoulder, blue-grey smoke marching off to the kitchen’s ceiling.
He lets out a coarse laugh in the cold garden.
He didn’t know what to do now. Assuming that somehow it just worked – that there was some mechanism inside that would do the job for him – he sat and stared at the rising clouds and wondered whether mother was happy. Just watching. Placated by the movement of the blue wisps in the cadence of the kitchen’s air.
Then a sound. A crack. Loud and brilliant. He remembers the sound above the sensation. He fell to the floor, the cigarette rolling along the black and white chequered lino, a gush of gloopy blood dropped next to his head.
To his left he saw the worn leather tassel of her shoe. The frilled brown splayed lethargically across the tongue. Loose threads peaking from beneath, the scuffed toes balding and prickled. A thin brown rim curved with years of use. He saw them approaching faster and faster until he saw nothing at all.
Funny, he thought, that I smoke now. Then he threw away the cigarette, the desire to fill his lungs waning.
Looking at the garden again; its fence and its sky and its earth, he struggled to find a difference between this and anything else. To him, it seemed, it was all a procession of light that needed an observer to exist. If not, then there was nothing at all.
Needing anything to break his thoughts, he walked towards the shed.
Opening the creaking door he looked in to see his saws, see his tools, his neglected machines and rusting manhood. He saw his daughter’s paddling pool sat broken in the corner. It had been four years since he’d last seen her. Her wispy strawberry blonde hair and clear, wide blue eyes. Four years. And he walked out of the shed unable to look at the fading blue plastic any longer.
A chill in the air coursed through him and Michael grasped his hands across his chest. Back through the back door he looked around his unlit living room. Alone. In need. He sat in front of the computer, switched it on and calmed as he heard the familiar whirr of the hard drive spinning up.
He watched the orange light flicker on and off, sat back in his chair and pretended that the last ten minutes had never happened.