NIHIL
CHAPTER 1 SQUARE EYES
I feel an injustice the way the body feels a virus, a war rages on inside me staring at that television screen. Legs folded and eyes piercingly focused on the countless channels of dying children here and Reality TV specials there, donate to a decimated village! Watch out for domestic terrorists! Have you found God! If you’re balding we have the solution for you! I don’t exist, I merely watch. Observe. Sitting here everyday on my yellow-stained-grey hand-me-down rug littered with VHS tapes and half-finished crispy chip packets. My little square TV sits in front of me and for every moment I blink, the screen goes blank for a second or two, and each time I am face to face with someone in a reflection that I do not recognise. I turn to peer through my window, facing another copy of a building scattered beyond the eyes can see, there in the window is another me sitting there with eyes fixed and locked. ‘The lights are on but no one is home’, I think to myself, returning my gaze into my own little world as the light of the television reaches out as if trying to pull me in and remind me that the world is much bigger than I can imagine.
PENCIL PUSHER!!! PENCIL PUSHER!!! PENCIL PUSHER!!!
I awake, unable to recall when I started to sleep as time has become distorted when life becomes so, uh, never mind.
I leave the apartment the same way everyday, neatly combed and neatly clothed. I await alongside countless others preparing to enter their own personal doors to a 9 to 5 enriching or encroaching experience, all fumbling and squirming our ways onto the train as its doors slide gently open for us not-so-gentle people of the ‘free world.’ Collective knees touching and shoulders rubbing leaves you feeling a kind of solidarity, if only under better circumstances. Sometimes I become cognisant as we pass onlookers like a huge ant colony. Nothing is stagnate and when they are, it’s usually beggars on the street or a car collision holding back the hoards of vehicles approaching. Accompanying me is my briefcase which holds company information, usually accounting files printed as too much time looking at my screen is starting to affect my eyes. ‘Strained’ I think is the word my doctor liked to use but that’s what will happen when that is what your job asks of you. Eventually the train arrives on time for me to exit. Looking up, I see the concrete jungle canopies looking down at me with such indifference, these colossal mounds of architecture. Then I hear a voice echo from afar as a familiar face enters my field of view, “Just found out we have an incoming workplace safety check today and the boss is stressing.” Gasping for air as the sentence finishes from my co-worker, I respond candidly “Here we go again…”
You remember when your parents would get ready for a family gathering and the importance of the event becomes like a cataclysmic panic attack as a child watching on as the stress oozes from your parents pores into your own, good ol bleeding effect. Well, that is my workplace, but the parent is just our ‘stress free’ manager Tony but everyone calls him ‘Boss’. As I enter the office, I see rows of defeated smiles, hunched backs and soda cans overwhelming the plastic bins integrity. Oh no… I feel it… the eyes like a hawk have locked on and as I thought, looking to my right there is Tony (Boss) with his eyes piercing mine. He comes readily over with the shiny complexion of a man whose pores know no drought. My boss embraces me with an impersonal smile and a firm hand shake; this is how I am rewarded for lifting my spiritless spirits from bed to rearrange myself into his perfect worker, ready to be his perfect tit to drain, lactating profit until I succumb to my eventual uselessness. “I need to see only work, meaning no scribblings at your desk. We have a safety inspection in the hour, okay?” Seeking confirmation, I nod my head to rid him of my vicinity. I collapse into my chair and start the same way everyday, looking through emails and sorting files, this goes on for hours so I won’t bore you with the details.
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The sweet relief of time arrives and everyone congregates towards the exit to clock off, but as I leave my seat I notice no one is in their office spaces. Strange, I hear murmuring from behind me and in the crew room everyone stands staring including Tony, I enter the room with attentiveness. The Television has a news coverage of another one of those eerie protests that have been going on since a few weeks back, what makes it eerie is that all the protestors just stand still, no yelling, no obnoxiously big posters and signs. What makes them even more unsettling is that they all wear newspaper Mache masks revealing only the eyes of the individual and so far all we know is that they call themselves The Spark. “This nuisance of a protest causing disturbance amongst the city as the protestors calling themselves ‘the spark’ seem to be changing in only one way with every appearance… in size. Where are these people coming from and what do they want?” This was the last I heard from the news reporter as I didn’t have time to linger.
Later that day…
I lay staring as I normally do at my ceiling floating through life, never in control, always the observer and thinking to myself why is it that I feel so alone?… I have no impact except for the short while my fertile corpse might serve those bugs who never rear their heads above the ground when I die. I use to be so hopeful, “Get your schooling and go to college” Check that off. “Get a house and make a home.” Yet to be checked, not like I don’t want to but bloodsucking property owners make the standards of living difficult on my salary. Even those of us who can own any business struggle, I watched my Father crumble under the weight of the last market crash placing his business into its grave, you can work all your life and still come out with nothing to show for it. My body coils into a ball dreading the thought that this might be it, this might be my existence to forever be at a desk not knowing what I want to be, but it certainly isn’t this. I can’t get it out of my head, thoughts persist like bullets passing through me, I might just die before I live, You can’t change, There is no plan B. Most nights I either endure this or apathy and to this day I can’t decide which is worse.
CHANGE…. CHANGE…. CHANGE….
“Shots have been fired and sources claim the shots were fired from the group called ‘the Spark’ onto police, two officers are in critical condition whilst there are no current arrests.” My eyes open wide to see the news, realising I have fallen asleep on the couch has become so typical of me at this point I might as well leave a blanket out here. I become entranced in the images of these masked protestors and before now I thought nothing of it but something is different now. The news treats this group so much more different than any others and now things are only escalating with cops being shot. I must know more.
Luckily I didn’t have work until a few more hours, I begin scrolling the web to find out more about these silent protestors and there wasn’t even a website to advertise their message, can we even call them protestors at this point? Maybe this is some Avant Gard theatrical thing? I MUST KNOW MORE. My fingers itch into a frenzy as I type and scroll fixated on understanding these protestors, my eyes glisten with delight as this search stimulates me more than work has for the past 7 years but time passes and unfortunately nothing, all I could find is a history of the same thing, Silent mass of masked newspaper Mache people standing in the public eye. Work is in an hour so I comb my hair, work clothes on and out I go.
Drones on phones, never glow always slow, feeling high say goodbye, drones on phones… I write this on and on as if I fell into a loop or maybe I’m asleep. “Hello, hello, hello?” I rear my head back violently with a heavy gasp, as the train approaches the next stop with a sudden thud. “I think you might want to see this.” The person next to me points towards the front of the train, as I peer down the spine of this train standing there are a dozen people all wearing newspaper masks with fists raised, the protestors! All eyes are gazed upon these enigmatic people with mouths dropped and silence in the air, no one says a thing. As the doors of the train open slowly one by one the protestors open their fists leaving pieces of paper with scribblings on them “White collars are our new chains.” “Be ready for the next revolt.” As they leave the train very angelic like as they gracefully walk out, I’d of thought nothing could get more strange. As the last one is leaving the train I find myself feeling conflicted, on one hand I can return to normality in my 9 to 5 or follow these strangers of the public eye, but my impulse kicks in as the last protestor exits so I follow suit. Everything is moving fast because as soon as I leave the train the masked ones begin to spread out sprinting, my legs begin pumping blood at a rate that I hadn’t felt since high school. All these years behind a desk has made this monkey weak and I actually have sweat glands that work to my surprise as I pick up my pace I pass street block after block locked onto one of them.
Panting heavily I push on like a dog chasing a car, no idea what I’ll do once I get to where they are going but I’m more afraid of doing the same thing I’ve been doing since I left home, finish school, get a job, buy a house and die. But I can’t die until I’ve lived and I feel more alive now then I have in a long time. As my legs are about to give out I find I have been led to an old warehouse with a rusted tin roof and broken wired fences scattered around like an aged fort. The masked stranger disappears into the building and as I approach entering this place, the sound of a latch closes and my curiosity hijacks any form of fear I once had. The cold air and dead webs covering the open spaces makes me think this place has been left for the dumps for a long time and as my thoughts start to intensify I find the latch, the closer I get a murmuring sound amplifies and as my anxiously shaking hands begin opening the latch I lose balance falling into this underground opening.
As I pick myself off the ground I am met with at least twenty to thirty people all staring at me(describe the setting of this underground location), I start trembling trying to walk back towards the exit I fell through but more of the people surround me. “You, who are you?” one of the strangers amidst the crowd calmy asks. “I am no one, sorry I will be on my way.” I exclaim stuttering with nervousness. “What do you do?” He asks as he emerges from within the crowd with a dark green jacket on and a calm demeanour. His presence for some reason instantly unnerves me as lends me his hand, as I am pulled back to my feet I reply “I work in an office… are you.” The man interrupts “The Spark?” “Yeah?” I notice everyone begins to relax as the tension starts to cool down. “We all serve someone, like you we must also work.” I reply “What is the spark? What are you all protesting about?” For a moment he stares into my eyes breathing slowly, he begins to walk around me with such an authority that makes me shiver. “Selling ourselves, selling our time, selling our mind. This is our destiny, not the high rise of a building overlooking shady apartment blocks whilst watching the stock market with glee, we are the ones in the shady apartment blocks… I thought for a while I was radical but how radical is one who wants others to be fed, for others to have a home, for others to not suffer. We have suffered for too long at the hands of these so called benevolent rulers who ‘give’ us jobs and watch us as if we are simply a statistic and a variable to consider in a cost/benefit analysis. This gross exploitation is developing a pain and this pain is growing with each day I clock in and one day I may just finally clock out. This is the sentiment of The Spark, this is why we gather and organise ourselves because we only have each other.”
