Abide Abode Read online

  Abide Abode

  Abide Abode

  Midpoint

  ABIDE ABODE

  ABIDE ABODE

  Episode 1

  After All

  ∆

  Words By Noah Silverman

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  ABIDE ABODE

  A babies arm reaches out into empty space.

  ‘I always wanted to be born’ whispers out amongst infinity.

  PRELUDE: A dream in the future.

  ALEJO

  A great glowing orb of fire hangs in the sky illuminating vast idyllic surroundings, beating light through my sunglasses, creating a warming Spanish summer that kisses my skin highlighting the hillside for miles, my farmland, my home. Connected to a child-‐like focus and a meditative serenity I kick a ball against a barn wall, it hits, bumps to the floor and back again on repeat 1, 2, 3. It’s a cycle of repetitive action, reaction and consequence that brings with it a peace, like music to my ears, that I never could feel as an adult. I’m relaxed and fully focused. All I have right now is me and this blue ball bouncing, one, two, three, like a heart beat, I would never will myself to lose this peace nor let daily trivialization take it away. I long you to try these things, as you would have a child.

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  One, Two, Three, foot, wall, floor, action, reaction, consequence. Hills roll down to the left, hills roll up to the right. There’s something’s odd on the hill... a congregation of people up in a nearby field. Unusual. Town’s people and farmers grouped together; as this is a no drinking affair it seems an odd occurrence for familiar people to be huddled like penguins in an unfamiliar location about 800ft away from me on farmland. They look at each other as if deep in conversation without speaking a word. Twenty or so of them. What are they doing?

  I remove my sunglasses for a better look but end up placing my hand above my forehead casting a shadow to my face to adjust my vision for a better look. One, Two… The ball!!! The meditative repetition of the ball has been broken. 1, 2, 3, Foot, Wall, Floor. No more, 1, 2, 3, just Floor, Floor, Floor. The ball rolls away starting a journey down hill. I’ve dropped the ball. As always in life if you look away from the ball, if only for a second, you’ll turn back to find life making its own way. Making its consequence. You can’t let go of anything. Nothing is static. Is this my adult mind thinking? I pull my attention from the ominous gathering as the ball picks up pace. I teeter after it breaking into a run down the cobbled stones down towards the lower farms. The ball, watched and chased is taking up speed with the afforded velocity of the down ward slope. Knowing my road curves at the bottom I expect to get it easy, it bumps up the curve

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  inevitably, unexpectedly nestling into the sleeping armpit of a body.

  My neighbour Mr. Cobo lays face down on the grass, his hair gently swaying in the breeze. This is unnatural, Mr Cobo, is not the type of gentleman to laze on the floor, he is a gentleman, a hard worker. I find this natural scene unnatural, but to my young eyes it seems only curious. Spying a stick I pick it up wanting to prod my neighbor and wake him. I know he is dead but I don’t seem to have realized. I hold out the stick and near it to Mr Cobos face.

  ‘ALEJO’

  My name! Screamed out. A quake in the voice. echoing from my house; my house, my name, my brother Osil calling me. I recognize this type of scream, desperate loss. I turn back to the body. The stick edging closer to the sleeping, if not dead, turned up neighbourly cheek of Cobo. Closer,

  Closer, Closer.

  ‘ALEJO’ comes the pent up call again, shrill and shouted to the sky, I know these calls too well. An impulse hits me to run to the house, I feel fearand its inevitable adrenalin.

  I’ve let go of the stick, spun and am running home, up the garden path and into the darkness of my open front door. A small light shines at the end of the hallway flickering for a silent minute. My body obscures the light becoming a silhouette running to the end of time unable to get there quick enough. The living room has its own deathly silence, it’s not jubilant, and it’s not a living room anymore.

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  Osil, my eight year, smarter, taller brother, sits on the floor staring morbidly at his hands, thick black hair covering his eyes. Our father Samile! I fight for breath, he, like Mr Cobo lays as if sleeping on the floor. His breath, his breath is silent! His eyes, open and unmoving. Pain wraps around me like a cold blanket, as I stand stilled behind Osil. Please let me take back what I’ve seen, emotions rack through me and I realize as an adult I should be prepared to understand these things but I don’t. Samile is dead, Papa is dead.

  ‘Papa!’ I CRY. Distressed youth leaking from me. ‘They’ves gone away’ speaks Osil in our native Spanish

  tongue.

  ‘Where? Where’s he gone?!’ I panic demanding information I do not want to know.

  ‘He won't wake up, gone to the dead place’ flounders Osil grasping his hands together looking closely atour open eyed father.

  ‘The one with fire or wind?’ I respond relative to a story my mother once told me. My mother! ‘Where’s mama?’ I cry.

  Osil’s eyes slowly lift to mine, broken and bare, flitting them over my shoulder as tears break down his cheeks and meet the made pathways of their recently cried brothers. Behind me is my mother, beautiful and sleeping too, slumped in her favorite chair. My childhood is over. No breath.

  She’s gone away too’ he croaks. ‘Sleeping.’

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  I’d not been bothered that people have been dropping like flies recently, and what an expression, dropping like flies, the idiom pertaining to the transitory and fragile nature of an insect’s life. People are dying and falling asleep. Ruber was the first to go, he fell asleep, heart attack maybe, then Jose, then Kiti, then Bernado. It hadn't seemed so suspect when it were those over 70 suddenly giving up their day for the rest of days and dying, now suddenly the whole town was at it; dropping like flies. The newspapers had been talking about it for months, spreading with the speed of gossip and nothing travels faster. Somewhere in England this had started and somehow it was spreading, a wave of people turning off. I had cared little then, why should I when it didn’t affect me, or life on the farm?

  ‘But who’s going to read us the stories?I ask Osil. A tragic silence echoes between these walls after. I try to speak more, but these are my only words murmuring with pain and inexperience.

  ‘There are no more stories, Alejo’ Osil answers.

  ‘But Mama said there are stories everywhere -‐ the world's made of stories’

  ‘It's not the same world anymore.’ Osil pauses ‘We're the parents now.’ He drops his head and lifts it heavily back up to see me, gesturing for a hug. We hold each other in the living room that used to be filled with, well I wouldn’t say laughter but it was warm. It strikes on me how mama and papa had both asked us to look after each other last night. How they had told us everything happens for its reasons. I

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  paid little attention then and yet now the look in their eyes when they had haunts me with a whole new meaning.

  ‘We'll make our own stories.’ I straighten. I‘ want to know why all the people are sleeping Osil?’

  ‘I don’t know because they don’t know how to wake up?’ ‘Maybe is thems that woke up? ‘ I say. Maybe it is them

  who have woken up! I hug harder to Osil’s hunched body, my face next to his. ‘Please don’t leave me Osil, never leave me without saying goodbye. ‘

  ‘There are no goodbyes Osil, only good journeys that’s what mama said last night.’

  We hold each other for a time but after it b
ecomes apparent that something needs to be done. I see my father, the light removed from his eyes now and reach my hand out to his face, ‘Good journey’ I say, moving to lower Pa’s eye lids with a half hope he is still awake and will shout me for disturbing him. Please make this some horrible mistake. As my hand touches his open eyed face a judder runs through me. I can’t move, transfixed in a skin bond. I feel a magnetic connection made to him, like strings moving coldly through my fingers, I can’t tell whether they are coming from him or from me. I can not pull away, a link, it’s as if I’m falling into a heavy cold stream, waves of energy pouring out of me into him as warm intensity courses back. An electric shock ripples through me; I go with it. Unable to move, my eyes slam shut.

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  EPISODE ONE.

  after all.

  Earth from Space with far enough distance will appear only as a dot against infinity.

  .

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  Changes of distance alternate your perception of any given object or idea.

  -Triangle Walk Excerpt –

  NOAH

  Aged 28. Me. I’m in my trailer out the back of my ma’s house in Peacehaven. I’ve just had a dream of Alejo, a dream wired from the future, he’s being born today but in six years, well, his parents die. I share the dreams of others. I contemplate this and how it came to be that I gave up on the things I loved by caring about one thing too much. I lost my constant and when I did screamed so loud I cracked the sky, ripped a trench across ocean floor, and inside me, a mark appeared. Noah, the one who eventually sank ships not engineered one to save two of each species. I’m on that boat alone, the one I sink.

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  My skin, the abode I abide changed forever when I met Anna Mason on a dark tumultuous night. I’ll tell you how I got to her. I was drunk, as I had been for a long time. Drunk to keep me sociable, to keep me open to others. Anna first introduced me to a book called ‘The Triangle Walk’ and since reading it I’ve been able to get inside people’s memories, dreams and bodies. Be careful what you wish for. After meeting Anna I would drink with the sole purpose of keeping people out of my head, the dreams, the Alejos. It’s not that I can control the people I inhabit, no, it’s that I watch through their eyes and know their innermost thoughts. Drinking helped me from entering other skins, your skins, it quieted the voices and helped me to escape the reality of what was happening. I would tell myself these are not my memories, they are yours, they are hers, they are his! Now I see them as mine, they are ours, they are us, memories and experiences of the abodes we abide, bodies collected in one mind. Since I’ve come to see that there’s no such thing as time. Life may come to us in a linear fashion but when you’re receiving incongruous worldly memories out of context it does wonders to eradicate a concept of time. There is no time any more. Only now, only all of time living concurrently. When all time exists as one and you see all the atrocities and virtues of man together in circular patterns and formations; and I need to break the cycle.

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  I do not use alcohol anymore to escape what is happening. It’s happening and after reading ‘Triangle Walk’ and resisting its truth I’ve come to find that there are those intended on destroying its secrets; there is power in secrets and some will do anything to keep them for themselves; secrets are what keeps the magician magic.

  Alcohol was my crutch to ignore purpose, as much as it was stop me slipping into memories. Who wants to have the memory of a child half way around the world losing his parents six years from now?

  If you are reading this please assume I am most probably dead. There is nothing like choosing to give up alcohol when A - there are people trying to kill you and B – you’re killing the ones you love, parts of them anyway.

  If I have any words of advice for you it’s put down your poisons, get strong. We are amongst a spiritual war and the poisonings are a distraction. Get Strong. I can’t say it enough. Get strong or go home. Bitch you’re going to need it. Bitch, you gotta get smart.

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  I live in a trailer, in my ma’s yard on a piece of aptly named land called ‘Peacehaven.’ My skin an aptly named piece of land named Noah. My name, a noise that had no relevance to me until I started sinking ships, the irony does not escape me. I can’t bring myself to do that again, to scream a scream that loud that it tears the fabric of the universe, the scream does not go away, it is in the universe now. Incongruous pain echoing for eternity. Nothing ever really dies, it is energy, energy living internity within the polar whole ( everything always. )

  This is my written attempt to put back out there the laws I learnt of the polar whole, the circular cycle of all life. I picked it up from ‘The Triangle Walk’ book that Anna bought with her, it has disappeared and it is unlikely to come back. The book taught that circular paths are made without direction. If you are lost in the desert walking on forever naturally you will sway in one direction, try to walk in a straight line eventually you will find yourself back where you started. Water whirling down the plug hole, for instance, will swirl to the left or the right because of the planets hemispheric magnetic pull on it, never straight down. In space water with gravity will fall but outside of gravity it will but float contained in and of itself. Likewise you will walk in a straight line in the

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  desert if you have a direction point a point of horizon. The triangle is the direction point, it is the signpost, the purpose, gravity and gravitas. As a united whole humanity’s next stage of evolution is to find its purpose, our next step. Humanity has no need to evolve physically anymore, we have conquered our environment and being no longer controlled by survival it is not our environment shaping us but us controlling and manipulating our environment to suit ourselves. Evolution no longer is physical but a metaphysical journey; we have by rights conquered the physical world. Without a united purpose humanity is in the desert without a sign post. Parents the products of their parents and you the product of them. Circles of information passed genetically down. A Russian doll inside a Russian doll, blood memory after blood memory passed back to an infinitesimal infinity, the polar whole. Until you take ownership and responsibility for your own life, until you/we find that purpose, the circle will be our destination. The Triangle Walk speaks different. It tells us a possible future, and when you know it shows us all futures.

  ∆

  I had a dream not so long ago… Not a Martin Luthur King dream, a ridiculous dream, one where I asked the world for purpose and the world answered.

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  I shake a magic 8 ball.

  I propose the question.

  The answers rattle inside. Thunderous whiling as water displaces for plastic answers coming to meet

  the surface.

  I imagine myself inside the ball with the answer rushing up towards me, what would it be like to live in

  here - inside the magic 8 ball? I may well have been living in a Magic 8 ball for the time before I found a united purpose, small, drowning, looking for answers in a tight space. Waiting for answers to reach the surface and save me.

  I imagine thirsty apocalypse survivors splitting magic 8 balls open for nourishment.

  The answer comes to the magical watery surface. Focusing, focusing. Boom - Answer in view!

  You're a cunt.