Affinity II

In another room he is pacing. He watches her via the surveillance system, sitting as attentively as when the faces first started to flash up on the screen. This had never happened before. It had been four hours. The trawl had been completed three times. First the city, then the state, finally the entire country. Everyone has a match, he thinks. All that was required was change.
He re-enters the room with another man. As they enter the screens turn blank and Miss Delaware turns to them as if her moment had come. Her face was like that of a girl recieving flowers for the first time. Her eyes were large and full of hope. They were a fable realized.
They sit down in front of her with serious faces. Before speaking the unknown man unzips a black bag. This was the moment she had waited for and dreamt about her whole life. Now that it was happening, she expected it to be different.

"We do not have a match for you yet" the Affinity curator says. "What we can offer you is what is contained in this bag."

The world was different when Miss Delaware exits the palm of the Tigris Corporation. On the day that she had expected answers she had been given further doubts and questions. She hails a taxi and demands to be taken to her brother.

Outside the windows of the cab she starts to see things with new eyes. New emotions and thoughts are awoken in her and it feels like a fatal wound. She sees all the cracks in the city where they had been painted over and watches them grow as the taxi continues to the East Side.

A light flashes on her wrist indicating that she had a dozen new messages awaiting her attention but she decides that she cannot face them now. She already knows who they were from and what they would say. She already knows the congratulative expressions and remarks.

She looks down at the black bag that she had been given. The city had a soul and all it needed was to be unzipped. To join it or leave it, that is what they had told her. The decision was hers.

The East side was the roughest part of the city and more affluent parts liked to pretend it didn't exist. She watches the slow societal decay on its approach and contrasts it with the black bag that sat on the seat beside her. In the middle of both contrasting scenes was her brother. She knows that she needed to see him no matter what state he was currently in. He may provide her with some sort of answer or guidance.

She doesn't bother knocking when she reaches his door and instead swipes herself inside. Some days he was lucid and with it, other days he was nothing more than mumbling sloth in. Calling out to him and stepping over empty pizza boxes and an assortment of take out containers she hears the latter.

In the living room she finds him lying on his side with his top arm dangling off the sofa and onto the floor. Slowly he rolls onto his back and slowly addresses his sister.

"He-ey sis.." he manages, his eyes staring past her, bloodshot and vacant.

"Oh Si!" she says compassionately, sitting down and giving him a soft embrace. She places her hand bag and the black bag on the coffee table clearly in his view. As she leans over her to hug him more firmly he starts to reach for it.

"How are you?" she asks her brother. "Have I come at a good time?"

Si does not respond having reached the black bag and taken a firm grip of one of its corners with his fist.

He turns his attention back to his sister. The unbelief on his face heartbreaking. He does not ask what her sister is doing with this black bag. His sister can already read the question on his face.

"I know, I know!" she says. "I mean I don't know! I don't know! Oh, I can't..."

She feels tears well up somewhere behind eyes, as if pumped from an infinite ocean that was bound somewhere deep inside.

"They gave it to me today!" she explains. "Today I was supposed to find Affinity but I didn't have a match. This was all they could give me. They said it was the only way."

Her brother lets the bag go as if extending his arm to reach for it had taken too much effort. As he does this his head collapses backwards onto the arm of the chair, his eyes closed, a deep breath taken, before summoning strength and continuing again.

"Everyone says many things Sis" he says. "Everyone has an opinion about everything. Everyone wants assurances in life. They want answers. They want to know that everything will be okay. We pay for it. We pay for it everyday. They sell us what we want to believe and we buy it! And we will keep buying it. We will buy it until we are broke, until it has taken us over and there is nothing left and then we will be burried in the ground."

He looks seriously at his sister, the one who had always lived a virtuous life, the one who both inspired him and wordlessly criticized him for the way he had lived his life. He pulls out an unused cartridge from his pocket and quickly inspects the label.

BADMINTON MATCH it read and as he reads it, he rolls his eyes and decides that he should no longer buy assorted packs from the Chinese man in the next block no matter how cheap they may seem. He directs his eyes back to his sister and narrows them.

"Don't do it Sis" he says. "You are probably the truest thing there is. You are the truest thing I know. Do not open that bag. Take it back to whoever gave it to you. Otherwise, this is what you get."

He rams the cartridge onto his wrist which stimulates the clamping and injecting mechanism built inside. He writhes in a semi painful looking exstacy before exhaling hard and his body relaxing. Immediately after doing this he reaches into his pocket and finds another cartridge and clamps it down on his wrist and infuses the substance.

This one says THREESOME and he catches a glance of it just as the infusion process starts.

This will be interesting he thinks.

"See you later Sis. Come back and see me next week and tell me that you are not afraid, that you will swim in the ocean no matter how infinite and lonely it may seem."

And with that, his body is overcome again. He contorts on the sofa and then is released with laughter and heavy rapid breathing. Miss Delaware stays for several minutes until her brothers body is lame except for the signs of breath and pulse. He has a semi happy look on his face.


Miss Delaware arrives back at her apartment after nightfall. On the table in the middle of her living space she places the black bag and looks at it. She looks around her to see if anyone is watching but she is entirely alone. On the room function remote control she sets the function to "Oceans" and the walls, ceiling, and floors of her apartment become waves crashing on an undefined shore. She unzips the bag and fumbles through its contents. She reads the labels on the cartridges. KAMA SUTRA, DEER STALKING, COCAINE...
She looks through the bag at all the labels, each one speaking of an experience, some questionable, some desirable, but none that she deemed she wanted to experience artificially. She begins to cry feeling inept in all her lack of experience in some aspects of life, feeling alien when compared to what her friends and work colleagues were doing. In the process of questioning whether it was her that was abandoning her friends or her friends that were abandoning her, she raises the black bag and it's contents and smashes them onto the floor.
"To find your match you need to be more like your match" they had said.
Next she goes around her entire apartment and strips every wire that connected into every socket. She removes the communication device of her wrist and crushes it under her foot. She smashes every screen that fed her any image, every speaker that delivered any sound. She erases her social networking profile then smashes the hard drive as if sawing a body in two to release a soul. When her rampage is over she is so exhausted that she collapses on the floor. Her whole apartment is silent for the first time in as long as she can remember. There is no humming of machines, no clicking of information through electronic devices. No ones and zeros except for those that were jumping across the synapses of neurons in her head. Sick of her apartment and wanting to look elsewhere other than the destruction of her hands she makes her way to her balcony. Around her was a sea of towering buildings and flickering lights stretching as far as her eyes could see.

In the tower she sees him.

This was also the moment that the sky rained paper tigers.

Affinity

The thread of Miss Delaware:

In the moment, embracing the minutes and seconds, she looks down at her unblemished wrists. Out of the window and into the apartments they stare mesmerized by a cable fed kaleidoscope, they smoke away on balconies, consider love in barricaded bedrooms. She looks to a particular room on an adjacent tower. Today he is not there.

Her watch beeps. Rushing to mirror she adds colour and definition to her face. There is no need really, but today promised to be one of those days. It was a day to change all days that would come. It would make sense of the days that served as mere filler between such momentous occasions in life.

Swinging her handbag around her neck she exits her apartment and rides the grav-tube to street level.  She views the messages that her friends had recorded for her and sent that morning, little holograms that sprouted from her wrist.

“Can’t wait to hear about how handsome he is” they say.

“I’m so excited for you.”

“You go girl. Affinity to infinity!”

She hurries out the door and hails a cab.

“Tigris Corporation” she says.

The cab driver looks at her briefly through the rear view and nods.

“Affinity Division” she adds.

The mention of the Affinity Division causes the cab driver to double take. He looks at her with new eyes, intentions different. The very mention of the ‘a’ word was a catalyst for many emotions within people. It separated the haves from the have nots, it spoke of material wealth, hope, a ticket to a better existence - something out of reach for many people. 

She was a modest woman and did not mean to gloat. She already regretted the mention of Affinity to the man. She should have just mentioned “Tigris Corporation” and walked herself to the appropriate sector of the complex. 

She doesn’t want to make further case with the man but as she sits the holograms project out wildly in her face. Advertisements of holiday getaways on private islands, wedding dresses, sex parties and toothpaste. She was sick of all of the images and they were almost unavoidable, the world seemed to rotate around them.

“Can you switch them off please?” she says to the cab driver.

“But if off, your fare more. If on, your fare cheaper” he says.

“I don’t care” she says. “I want to live without being told how to live. I want a life that cannot be bought.”

The taxi driver laughs. “Yet you go for Affinity” he says. He flicks off the advertisement projection system angrily and rues lost commission and ambassador credits.

She notices a smudge on the driver’s wrist as he switches off the advertising system. She can tell that he was a user. It wasn’t the wrists however that gave it away. It was in his eyes, a slight and occasional vacancy. Her brother was the same. He had started at first recreationally, but now he was hooked. Rubbing out had become his only form of solace. The more he had, the more he needed. Soon he found more meaning in rubbing out than living life. There was little left. He went from one fix to another, the severity in coming down necessitating the next hit.

Along the western corridor traffic was slow. They slowed as they passed paramedics attending to a few collapsed pedestrians. One had collapsed at the bottom of an overpass escalator and his shirt had got stuck in the machine. The other had collapsed on the footpath outside a Mass Transit Shuttle stop. They were both young.

The cab driver shakes his head. “Aye-argh” he laments, his words sorrowful but also fearful and angry. “This is problem.” 

He flashes one arm around and gestures at the world outside the cab.

No one knew why more and more young people were falling dead seemingly without reason. Drug use was speculated but there was no direct correlation found. Some had a history of heavy drug use, others were mostly clean. Coroners reported that cause of death was by unexplained neurogenic failure to the heart. Their hearts had simply ceased to beat. 

She clutches her hand bag tightly as traffic returns to its normal pace. It was a straight run now and she was at once nervous and excited.

The Tigris corporation complex took up a large section of the downtown area with five sky scrapers arising from its base in the shape of a hand reaching out from the ground. Inside the Affinity Division she welcomed by a man in a tuxedo and a woman in a scarlet dress. They escort her to a private lounge where they pour her a glass of champagne. 

“This is for you on your special day” the woman says. She places the glass of champagne on the table beside where Miss Delaware is sat. 

They stand together with loose embrace and smile down at Miss Delaware on the couch.

“As you know Miss Delaware, we already have your details on our database.” 

Miss Delaware looks around for the voice that is speaking to her. The voice comes from behind her. She turns her head and notices another man in a suit, but this man seeming more official. He has just come through the door. He keeps speaking as he walks, his words as if known by verbatim.

“We know your activities, hobbies, likes, dislikes, humour, religious beliefs, moral outlook. We know your favourite books, foods, music and drinks. We know your friends, relatives and the people you avoid. We know your sleep patterns, your sexual preferences and appetite. We can even assess your propensity to change given common variables in life such as stress, time restraints, societal fads, movements and political climates. Our system is the most comprehensive on the planet. Just about everyone is linked to our social network. We have over six billion subscribers worldwide and five million alone in this city.”

He sits on the couch directly opposite her and looks into her eyes.

“Affinity awaits you. We will find your match. All I need first is the payment.”

She hands him her card. Fifteen years of hard work and saving since the age of eighteen. The payment is processed and he puts the computers into action and starts the trawl.

The man tells her to sit back and relax but she is mesmerized by the colours and flashes of faces upon the screens. She can’t help but think about all the people that she had never met in life because she had worked so hard. All of the people that she would never meet in life because that was the way of life in modern times. The faces flash up on the screen for only a split second each but in a strange way, she was knowing them all, everything about them, analyzed and critiqued, computed and permutated, vicariously through a system of machines. She sits there for hours. Face after face. Frame by frame.

My Dear, This is a Prelude

AS THE GLOWING orange ball slowly spluttered its way up through the Mumbai fog past India gate, I found a gang of locals slowly form a circle about me. They stretched their hands to the sky and exhaled, then started to stretch their torsos, loosened their necks. They stared at me as they went about their business. All of them. They inhaled and exhaled and proceeded to jump on the spot. A spritely elderly man yelled something in Hindi and they began to march clockwise with raised knees.

I was in the process of leaving the circle when a short wiry fellow, bones thatched together with twine, hit me and indicated that I should march too.

There was no reason for me to be in India, and such was the logic of my arrival - logical abandonment. I looked at the man seriously and raised a leg. We marched several laps and then changed direction, everyone a bizarre collection of swinging arms and onomatopoeic rhythm of stamping steps. Was this what I had actually come to expect of India? 

Perhaps.

The leader shouted something else and everyone stopped. They took deep breaths and then broke out into laughter. Were these people serious? I was thinking. And so started a series of breathing exercises; deep breaths and then slow exhalations of laughter outwards, shaking different body parts in the process.

The wiry Indian man beside me gave me a nudge and indicated that I should be doing the same as everyone else as I was also part of the circle.

And so I took a deep breath in. "Hahahahaha" I exhaled holding my right arm out in front of me, shaking it. I looked to the wiry man beside me as I did this and he nodded in approval.

"Okay" said the leader. He was serious. A man on a mission, but there was also a glint in his eye. Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked to him.

The leader proceeded to clap three times with his hand above his head and then broke out into a fit of laughter such that he started to double over and had to brace his hands on his knees to remain upright.

I watched as the circle began to follow suit. First the overhead clapping, then the hysterical laughter. Some were faking it, some were completely out of control.

I looked around me and noticed that we had some on-lookers. The wiry man beside me noticed me doing this and shook his head. He reached skyward, clapped, then looked back at me before giving an exaggerated laugh. "HA! HA! HA! HA!" he said.

I nodded and reconfigured my stance as if to postulate that I now meant business. I raised my hands above my head and clapped, then let out a laugh: "Ha? Ha? Ha? Ha?" I said.

The wiry man was disappointed. He shook his head.

He inhaled deeply and clapped again. "HA! HA! HA! HA!" he explained, with extra emphasis on each 'HA'.

I performed the exercise again. "HA. HA. HA. HA" I said.

I looked to the wiry man for approval. He scrunched his lips together and bobbed his head from side to side as if indicating that I had shown some improvement.

We performed the exercise again, but this time together.

"HA! HA! HA! HA! HA!" we let out in unison until we were both hunched forwards.

The wiry man straightened up and looked at me seriously. He nodded as he took his next breath and proceeded to clap. I did the same.

"HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA!"

I started to understand the exercise. We looked at each other and smiled, then inhaled and clapped again. I learnt that laughter was better in unison, laughter was about letting yourself go. This time i decided to go for maximum volume. My lungs were bigger than his. I would destroy him with my laughter.

"HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA!!!!" My laugh was a giant's and his was an ant's, only this time I did not stop laughing as I had intended to and neither did he. We both continued laughing uncontrollably, involuntarily. We laughed at each other and at ourselves. We laughed at the ridiculous exercise in which we were participating.

The Indian man smiled and petted me on the back. He indicated that I had now understood. I had been released. Self consciousness had departed.

I laughed as he laughed. We laughed together. We fanned each other's laughter flames. Soon the whole circle was engulfed in laughter, each one a catalyst for the other. I did not know these people but we were sharing one of the most amazing things there was and no words needed to be spoken.

Soon we were jumping around like kangaroos on the spot. "Australia!" said the guru. We laughed and jumped around like drunken idiots.

Next thing we were roaring at each other like lions and showing our claws. "Africa!" said the guru. "Raaarrr! Raaaarrrr!"

We followed the gurus lead as he squatted down to the ground and then frog leaped into the air. "Ribbit!" He said. "Frog!"

I was dying now. My lungs and chest were in pain. I wanted it to stop but I also wanted it to go on forever. I looked to the wiry man beside me, the old lady next to him, the guru, everyone else in the circle. When was the last time I had felt this much joy? I looked at their smiling faces and they looked at mine. I was welcome. We were one. Was it ridiculous? The fact that we had not spoken but had communicated more than could have ever been said?

The guy on the left had been my guru that day, my first in India.