The is always the first word, isn’t it. The first word to enter the consciousness when the tips of the fingers, poised like a pianists, brush, ever so lightly, across the tops of the gray old clunky keys of the halfdecadeold computer’s keyboard. The preposition is a proposition, a suggestion that something should be typed. That something should be typed about. Of course there is never any warning about what WILL be typed about – and sometimes there should be. And sometimes there shouldn’t be. And sometimes there should be simply because it has decided to be unbearably, consciousness-defying dull. So that the head slips onto the coffetable on which the decadeoldcomputer is perched and ever so softly and imperceptibly through the glass, cutting slowly through the eyes, until only the interior of the mind, of the skull that is, of the brain itself, is left, unglassed, within the box, bnever ever to be outside the box, encased and imprisoned and thinking while the blood ebbs slowly away. For the man in the bath will be luxuriating there for some time, so he says, an explorer of the regions of froth and foam, bath and coffe, and sinking into the warmth of it away from the too-natural warmth of the thundering air. And so she slips through the no longer illuminated glass – has, indeed, slipped. And what to think while she is there, dying, knowing that she is dying, and wishing she had consumed that last cup of coffee a little quicker, allowing its caffeine to rush into her brain, the caffienechemicals fizzling along the slumbering synapses – synapses, that is a word she will miss – so that she would not now be dying – thus. However. With that last hour. What will she think? The possibilities stagnate her even more than she is already stagnated in the increasingly congealing little pool of her own blood. Well, let me bleed – less blood, less blood to the brain, less blood to the brain, less thought, less choices, less choices, less wastage of time, in this overgrown jungle of dyspraxicbrain, stormed like athe doodle of a child with a biro on a magnolia coloured wall. She imagines herself typing. She imagines the quickness of the fingers she will never see again. Lasments the loss of movement. Wonders if this loss of movement will be lamented when fingers become pointless things we lose like fins, things superceded by directly-connnected computerisation, heads in vats, like hers, but not, hopefully, bleeding quite so much. She stifles a laugh. It hurts. The movement and the idea. Physically and emotionally. Can anything hurt intellectually. Probably not. The realm of the intellectual is an inviolate mountain peopled by Greek gods and autists (who after all transcend quite a couple of the ordinary human weaknesses).As do flautists. Such as lack of breath. Lack of breath being a thing she had gasped at often and humiliatingly. Like someone by Jane Austin. Blushing, gasping, fainting fool. The future was what she was losing. Not the past – that (sometimes unfortunately) is not something that can be lost. Not the present, any more than people are always losing the present. The future. The thing we are stretching our arms out to, or recoiling from, but ignoring (like Super Mario on a moving screen) at our peril. She wondered, listening to the radio drifting in from the kitchen, how much of what people claim to think and to feel is posturing. Whether, actually, she was just as clever as the people on the radio – only didn’t frame it in the same frames. She wondered if that had to do with class. The endless question of class. The distasteful question of class. Something inescapable given the past but unthinkable given the present, unless one wishes to find oneself bloodsmattered on a barricade. Of course, if was a little late for the flinging of oneself onto barricades. Considering she had already flung herself through a computerscreen. Stories of love as though most people really love other people. Anyhow she had been happy. She would no longer be happy and… She could not think of that and if she did she would cry and she would be electrocuted, her head being, as it was, in an electrical appliance. The awfulness of people, hundreds of years ago, not being able to see each other because of the awfulness of society. The awfulness of anyone allowing that to happen when society no longer has that power, in any concrete sense. Concreate sense? Perhaps it never did. But it is only now, perhaps, that anyone realises that, can imagine that, things only becoming imagineable when they are on the verge of being possible. Someone spoke of a composer who, as a woman, “bore comparison” with those of her contemporaries who were compsers and men. The horrificness of this made her heart pump a little harder once. To think that this could possibly be thought to make a difference is awful. To die away from a world like that might not be so bad… So bad as what? The delicacies of language run away from time. The blackness in there, the blackness in the fatal square of plastic, was the last thing she would ever see. A series of pictures marched past, tableux after tableaux, possessions – because, that is the thing, isn’t it, that the thing we really possess, more perhaps than ever the body, is the mind. It is a truism, but a true one. A true truism. A truetruism. The wave, like something by Rapheal (was it really Raphael? She wasn’t sure) or his hair. Like an angel, anyway, one of those beautiful pouting angels people paint. The strange difficultness of jazz, weaving in and out of patterns, never really coming to rest anywhere unless the ear zooms out, like the eye can. That word again. The. She would never be married now. She wasn’t sure if that was good or not. “A lot of people get married without wishing to at the time.” How awful! To imagine running away, screaming, wishing one had not weaved oneself in to a spiderweb. The awfulness of the confusion of marriage and reproduction. The sickening awfulness at the base of the subject. Of, indeed, the stomach. Which is, presumably, the subject. The container. The idiocy of the idea of having children and then not wanting to do anything for them. WHY NOT JUST NOT HAVE CHILDREN? That came out in capitals. As, I suppose, children do. Death would save her from that. Though death might be a step too far away from reproduction. How about balancing out the scales between addonehumanbeing and subtractonehumanbeing. “It’s finding the magic in the day-to-day.” Yes. Perhaps. Feeling wrong thinking about that – when dying, particularly. The awfulness of the cynicism. The thumbsup. The fakesmile. The awfulness. The vortex of the inane. Why make statements? “We live in a witness culture.” How horrible. The darkness was delightful. The envelopingness of the darkness. Wrapped in unseeableness. Although, of course, the rest of her was visible. Would have been visible. Had anyone been there. Of course – they might have been. But had they been they would have been watching her bleeding to death. Which would have been rather horrible of them, surely? No more coffee. No more, indeed, anything. Apart from, perhaps, Nothingness with a Capital N. Drifting bodylessly through Space – “Out of SPACE, Out of TIME”, Poe knowing everything, of course, and going mad because of it (or too sane, far too sane for comfort, comfort being a Pragmatism of the highest order – or possibly not, not too sane for comfort, too insane for comfort – how can one possibly know until one is floating through the Nothingness or not). Or a flickingthrough of radiostations. Zooming along airways. Not like White Noise one hopes. No point in wondering, really. You’ll find out soon enough. OR NOT. If the notfindingout is the findingout. The idea of politicians teasing each other. The extreme silliness of it all. The extreme silliness out of which she was drifting into what one could only assume would be a drifting towards the solemnity of the deathmoment (to go all German linguistically). One is only the outer tip of a pencil, pressed onto the paper of time, gotten out of the way for the next lot. One has to stay legible. One has to avoid delirium, dementia, unconsciousness for very much more than 8 hours… But all that is over, or will be, soon… The darkness was thickening, Drifting in through the nostrils like treacle (if ever she had experienced treacle drifting into her nostrils – which is unlikely). Through the mouth. Pushing out the air. Pushing out the blood. All very grisly. DEATH speaks in CAPITALS – certain writers know that. So the darkness pushed its way in, a last violation it would be written were this a vampire story, but it is neither a vampire nor a story nor a vampire story, so it won’t be hereafter, erotic as the image of a woman bleeding to death with her head thrust through a computerscreen is no doubt to the vast majority of you (no?) – it filled her lungs and the air didn’t. And so she died. THE END.
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