Guilty pleasure in the modern world

Day 1

With the greatest of inaudible attempt the radio clicked and turned on. And although it was a sound small enough that most would agree it had not occurred, it was enough to snap our man out of his difficult sleep; heart racing and sweaty palmed. An old female voice, broken through years of inhaling smoke, buzzed from the cheap speaker: ‘We slunk around, angry, thirsty. The great pretending culture; these men, these humans, these bastards. All bastards, all mothered cord biting and cursing or tugging our way back in, the word ‘unfair’ dropping heavily from every self invested tongue.’

Sometimes mathematicians went hungry. Our man went hungry a lot, but he deemed it a sufficiently fair sacrifice for the accomplishments there to follow. ‘Suffering always proceeds progress’, he would say to himself quietly but excitedly and quite under the pretences-which no one could truly accept as any kind of truth-that if he said it it must be right. He was partly cheating himself, overcome and quite under the illusion that the country he thought for and fought for would one day be indebted to him; weak as they would be without. He sat at his window again like he liked to. The expression he visualised came as a mass of noise, sand, twisting somewhere between his retina and his half closed eyelids. He grew excited as pieces fit and he slowly twisted his head slightly left and slightly right, mouth gaping wide to the width the skin would let it and the realisation of excellence overwhelmed him. The expression becoming more and more than the sum of its parts, it seemed to draw in the air around it and a heart beat softly somewhere. He imagined the expression being applied to anything, everything, a great flood of uniting knowledge to wash away the unknowns, the problems. Life could finally be given value.

Our man drifts into a light fantasy sleep where men understand the presence of consciousness and become more than the meat, bone and neurons that millions of years made them. They transcend the constraints of evolution and become more like the gods that may or may not have existed and may or may not have created it all. 

Our man wakes to noise-trouble from the pub down the road. It’s dark outside. He opens the window and the voices roll on in louder, carried by a thick warm air. He leans out into it, encouraged by the charm of life dancing and caught between each molecule of the night. A woman stands-drink in hand-cursing, while a drunken man stands-drink in hand-singing: ‘she’s nothing but a crack whore, nothing but a crack whore, nothing but a crack whoooooorrre.’ The woman screams, but the words can’t be distinguished, they are distorted and useless. She makes up for this with volume.
‘Nothing but a crack whore,’ the man continues, laughing and swigging at his glass. The woman lunges to his face, digging those uncut nails in and across.
‘You whore’, he shouts, and this time he means it.
Our man begins to slide out of the window; certain he must get a better look. Fist clenched, the drunken man catches the woman clumsily across the jaw; she falls hard into the wing mirror of a poorly positioned car. Our man creeps a little closer, always touching the wall to his right with: both his arms, fifty percent of his chest or all of his back. It is a slow process. In this method he feels fused with the specks of mortar and crepe that loosen and dribble casually to the ground as he brushes past them. The drunken man hops around wild, foot to foot, left to right like those professional boxers seemed too. He says to the fallen woman: ‘There’s no mistaking your aching, get up if you think you can handle this.’ Our man is close now, his method of sinking into the wall has allowed him to pass unnoticed to a proximity of two meters or so from the scene. He can see and he can see and he can judge and he can love but he just sees, without the gut for anything else. He sees the flashes, the darts of light, of life, from the drunken man's eyes. It comes from the depths, the stomach or somewhere lower, drawn up along systems of nerves and cords and god knows where and god damn it bursts from those sockets as clear as daybreak in the Sahara, like some new super spectrum of light only detectable by those looking and wanting for it. Our man wonders what it takes to feel at such an intensity, what it takes to desperately want every fleeting feeble breath to burn on pleasure, or violence. He was dazzled by those eyes.

Day 2

Our man paced back and forth that little room desperately, awkward of himself, pent up and spent up and not fine, trying desperately to distance his soul from the werewolf catching at his heels. That sly werewolf hidden in a souls clothing, waiting in all men’s stomachs, waiting to force its way to the spine and the nerves and the thoughts and the needs and wants and to destroy his reason and excite him into a frenzy of pure visceral pleasure. Urges that no longer take citizenship in the social order of the day and could never be accepted or understood. He sits at the window again, like he likes to, a clammy hand clutching the steel diamond stalk horse shoe spanner. It needs oil; old and stained. The spanner feels cold, colder than the room and colder then his hands. He examines it a while, turning it in his hand, taunted by its heavy hard construction, which is complimented by a worn, smooth appreciated surface. Starved of oil, the movement is slow, resisting him. He plays until it turns a little. Drenched in sweat and fear for its disobedience, he lets fall a few drops of Calmans best motor oil. It sinks satisfyingly into the twisting mechanism, drawn in angrily and with great thirst. He turns again. It is stiff. He sweats. He turns again and it gives and it gave. It gave him a need for the clumpy tools wrought fast to the ends of his arms, weak though they were from under use, unneeded and not wanted, laziness bore them to jelly. He was the being. He was man; in that tool. It whirled around him, reflecting greatly the stone head, the stick; the hammer. It was a sort of  love a rekindled relationship after its abandonment. ~His abandonment of the most rudimentary abilities for maths and insight.

Sleepily, and to fight his sleepy head, he opens the window to gulp in the freshness of the city breeze. He thinks of the world out there while he's stuck in his small room cell. He thinks of escaping, just running anywhere, and he could if he wanted, 'there are no bars on these windows, no locks on these doors and if I wish I shall leave,' he says aloud. But it was said very much in the moment, and that moment scampers away quicker than he expects, leaving him with no where to exist but his little room. A few old ladies would peer in as they walked past-the mothering type-probably concerned for his melancholy look and pale complexion. They would smile at him; the only fleeting chance they have to alleviate his suffering. And they did it well for in that point-something-of-a-second-smile he would smile back at their podgy wrinkled warm faces and feel connected to someone or loved or something. The feeling would last a little and he would think, 'hey, things are probably good'.

He woke some time later, face marked a darker shade of pink by the grain in the wooden window sill. It’s dusk and the sky keeps no detail. ‘Where is it the moon tonight,’ he sings perched on his chair, half in half out of the window frame. Two men are fighting down the street at the pub. One hits the other with a bottle and a great carpet of blood wets the dusty, newspaper blanketed road. Our man's heart leaps and he leans more than half in half out, to get a better look. He thinks how appalling it is for two human beings to treat each other in such a way, something growling in his stomach, pushing a little. The prevailing man kicks the other, who was, by then, whimpering in a ball state-arms wrapped around his knees. Our man leaned a little further still to see past a lamppost, but behind the lamppost was a telephone box and he couldn't reach his desired view. He thought about climbing from his window, knowing the climb back up wasn't a problem but it was the eyes and the judgements of others he feared as they watched a fully grown but lonely man leap into the street with the aim of ogling at terrible acts. All ridiculous he supposed and slipped himself out, dragging his feet down the crepe wall before him until they gently touched the pavement. Our man could see better now; a small dribble of red was wandering down the fallen man's cheek from his nose. The fallen man lay quiet and the prevailing one left, taking with him the small crowd that had gathered and showing them again the purpose of their time there, the drink a lost love they were surprised to find themselves neglecting.

Once the area is almost empty, our man creeps over to see the fallen man slumped against the wall breathing heavily. He wipes the red from his nose and looks up at our man, squinting against the street light. Our man's heart sets off, staring nervously into the fallen man's beautiful but empty eyes, not sure of his reasons for being drawn to the incident. Neither man say anything for a while and then the fallen man says: 'well? What do ya want? Ya fag?' Our man, overwhelmed by the situation and not used to being addressed in such a manner, continues to stare. He stares, sure there is an explanation he can apply to his bewildered nature and an explanation he can give to negate any offence he has caused and any later retribution from the fallen man. 'Well come on!' the fallen man continues, 'show me a good time now I'm down.' A few people come out, interested by the fiery return of the fallen man. Our man feels his pale cheeks filling with heat and a lumbering movement from his stomachs pushing, desperate to break through his chest. He doesn't like the fallen man's face, it's round, ugly and not too dissimilar from his own. He imagined they could have been brothers separated at birth like those coincidental cases he'd seen in the paper. The fallen man continues to talk of grotesque insights and coughs a raspy laugh baring bloody and black teeth. With the pressure of the gathering crowd and the pressure of his overwhelming embarrassment shining like a great inextinguishable fire from his burning cheeks, our man no longer wants to look at the fallen man's rotten mouth, with its huge ghastly tongue wiping across those thick wet red lips. He lifts his boot. And with a small exhale and yelp he digs that wooden heel deep into the protruding nose in front of him. It gives much easier than he expects and he thinks he feels a sting of pain, of sorrow, for the the brittle construction of humans but his stomach is bobbing around merrily as the adrenaline takes hold and he kicks some more. He looks about quickly at those watching, there are a lot but they aren't involved on any great psychological level, passing him disinterested looks and a few unsatisfied ones. A terrible nausea comes with a desperate need to get away, but a shaking grabs him, so tight, and he feels he may simply break apart into enough pieces to fall between the cracks in the flagstones and maybe that would be his best option. But he vomits next to where the fallen man's lying breathing small breaths. Our man wipes his eyes and using the wall, guides himself past the open window, round the corner, round the next corner and in through the small side door he always uses. It seemed a lot quieter in there. He shuts the door and leans against it to slide to the floor. The sweat thoroughly soaked through from his back into his shirt sticks to squeak and squeal down the gloss paint. He continues to shake, he feels weak, but he feels good and alive.

Picking out the only bottle in the only cupboard he takes one good gulp and sits down to let his weight against the door again. The rest of the night continues in this fashion, one more good swig after another, each better than the last, and then a momentary worry for the trouble he may have gotten himself into and the trouble he most certainly caused the fallen man. Then another good go on the bottle to worry less. At one point, dancing, he puts on his favourite 78, a nice classic his mother would always play. The record player decides to give him some attitude-no sound is produced. He stares at it a while running the necessary workings of the machine through his head, confident he is focused and  thinking as clearly as in any state of mind, he checks the possibilities systematically. Still no sound. A good gulp to calm nerves and recheck. No sound. Quite contrary to his nature and against his better sober judgement, he pulls the player off the desk. The power chord snags the back of the desk to stop the player. It dangles clumsily, unscathed, with only a corner lightly touching the floor. He thinks: 'if I'm going to to lose it I may as well loose it now.' He does little about loosing it. He thinks his motor skills must be going more than he can tell as there is a definite haze to his surroundings, a loose connection somewhere between the light stroking the back of the retina and  the neuron's flickering in his brain. He thinks others could probably understand him if they looked but would be unwilling to dare think about any possibilities of problematic states of mind. He thinks he's probably really clever and that other people weren't which he finds really delightful and also upsetting.

Day 3

It started as a low thud and wandering up from whatever dark abyss he'd unwillingly or subconsciously drifted down too he could hear the sound growing in density somewhere above. He continued to grasp up and climb until he found himself unexpectedly horizontal and flat on the floor. His skin prickles against the worn dirt infested carpet and his muscles and joints ache against the hard stubborn concrete, buffered only by that prickly carpet. His right arm seemed to have disappeared entirely but he manages to sneak his left under his chest and slowly, slowly, flip himself over. The knocking continues from the door. His right arm hung-non functioning-blood stolen or left somewhere at the bottom of that warm abyss. He wouldn't be going back down there. He opens the door marginally to see who knocked,  feeling it best not to expose himself as he had woken naked, wearing only some string beads and dream catcher necklaces he didn't recognise. He knows the face wedging its cheeks between the door and the frame. Dr Hella, an economics professor at the local university. 'Dr hella,' says our man in a gargle, clearing his throat immediately.
'Yes,' Dr hella says, 'I would like it very much if we could talk of your theories concerning relative inputs for self sustaining civilizations. Very fascinating I assure you.'
'Ah, well. Thank you doctor, I would be more than interested but I presently find myself involved otherwise. The doctor laughs, 'come, maybe just a quick word. Would you agree?' and puts his weight into the door.
'Now is not my best time, ' our man says, pushing back.
'Maybe just one or two minutes. Would you agree?' the doctor says, forcing his way in, for which our man-especially in his current state-had no strength co counteract and so falls back in a tumble to land on his back fully exposed to the entering doctor. The doctor momentarily surveys the situation: the spread eagled naked man and unkempt apartment, which is in fact the remaining noise of the one loud and delirious night before. 'I'll get you a towel,' the doctor says. And he does. With our man towel clad and sat down, the doctor sets about filling the silence left by our drink sick man. 'Do you think this life is productive for our line of work?' the doctor asks. Our man looks down at the broken glass protruding from a red stain near his feet feeling a definite undermining 
vibe to the situation. 'This stuff,' the doctor says, holding up a bottle, 'will only destroy not improve.' He places the bottle gentle on the table and exhales, 'I mean, by god, a man was nearly kicked to death outside here last night. Did you know that?' Our man makes a word but his throat is thick with something and the words catch. 'What?' says the doctor.'
Our man coughs and says: 'I said: “it was me”.'
The doctor bore down on him with heavy squinting eyes, eventually saying: 'Oh William.' Unable to draw any conclusion that would satisfy the doctor or even himself our man, William, begins to weep but with a sort of cough and not proper; with no tears to cleanse, leaving him feeling cheated out of any letting go of emotion. Flashes of the night before and the fallen man get at him and through his spluttering, he tries to tell the the doctor of it: '...feeling of power...unwanted pleasure of the moment...'
Not wanting to witness such a mind bent and broken to a blubbering wreck, the doctor decides it best to return later or maybe just phone. He says: 'I think I'll return later, or maybe best I phone.' and with that he left, thinking: 'So sad. Brilliant minds are so fragile.'