A Voice from the Void

The drop-off. The period of time that doesn't exist. Except for yours truly. My life exists in this emptiness, this void, the in-between, the "Ah, I was nowhere near there Officer, been fucking here all night ain't I?" and anonymous check-ins to hotel rooms.

Those kinds of voids.

As you can see, my life is full of technicoloured, profanic technicalities. It's always the way when your world is tossed around, like a pocket change in a washing load of drill cotton. But a Nuclear Winter will do that to you. People expect once the sky has fallen, the world will be reimagined into some sort of autocratic, dystopic charade, but let me impart something my 20 years living pre-apocalypse has shown me, lean in-

People are predictable, lazy bastards.

The unlucky 2 percent that has survived are still veritable slaves to the urban grind. Most of them all work, vote, buy shit online, eat processed genetically modified shit that even nuclear missiles couldn't disintegrate, then bunker down in their lead lined rooms, watching the leaders grovel for the corruptive heights they once knew on their TVs. Not me, no sir-ee, I was never built for mundanity, I was made to live on the fringes of society, then, now, forever. I thought a nuclear apocalypse might shake up the status quo, but in reality, it's fucking boring. A blip on the world's historical radar. Sorry political pundits who quested for immortality and new world order through codes, buttons and seismic standoffs, but chaos theory reigns supreme.

Nah, I am not about to have an existential riddled rant at you. Just looking to pass the time. Whole 12 hours of it. Looking at this cesspit of a room, you may be sorely mistaken to think there is not much to do here whilst your life plays out in the world's interim. You could not be more wrong, My Friends. You could not be more wrong. There is a veritable "Corn-u-copia" of activities to occupy oneself, just you wait.

I bet you just read that in a rounded American kind of way. Drop that bullshit right now, I have a delightful Aussie Crawl kind of Drawl. Kindly adopt it when reading this from now on, thank you.

Corn-u-copia. Good word. I stole it from my English teacher, Miss White. Sorry. Ms. She was always emphatic about that. She was full of good words. I remember one day, in Year 12, back when public shaming was a thing in schools, she read out my report comment to the class... allow me to elucidate…

"Alfred," she says to the class as she adjusts her bifocals by sliding them up that rigid, bridge.

“Alfie Two-Cents Miss," I corrected. Note, I relish the intonation there. Miss. She ignored me.

"Alfred Crankstone, to the detriment of his peers, is an unfocused presence in the classroom. He has the unfortunate deficit of attention and whilst he will never to a brain surgeon, he will excel at any manual labour that does not require actual thought or engagement with the English Curriculum."

Wasn't she charming? She's dead now, you know. A nuclear smudge on the concrete. But her farcical sentiment still exists.

Now, back to the room and its cornucopia, tell me, what do you see?

Nah, your description's fucking shite. Allow me.

In front of you, there is a room in a time warp, as if a grainy filter has been placed over your eyes. Yellowing, floral, geometric wallpaper that Wilde would have been fighting a duel to the death with, a litany of dystopic novels ironically stacked next to classics, yellowing in despair of being the last works of the Literature world. A heart-shaped locket sits atop of a Formica table, useless gas masks, Styrofoam food containers and cockroaches create miniature cityscapes across the floor. The smell of bleach and cigarettes coalesce in a toxic fumigation tactic. Everything sags in the room, like the weight of existence is a fucking trek.

If you think that's ok, allow me to tell you a story about where I was when it happened, how I found out I was a 2 Percenter. I call it, Static Cling. Thinking of getting it published when publishers exist again. Think they are pretty low on Maslow's hierarchy of need.

27/04/2100

Static clung to the air today.

I always thought that the detonation would make a ringing noise, a blast perhaps, or a bang. Instead, there was this infernal, feral crackling behind me, a static that laced my heart, cauterising it. In this suddenly silent streetscape a breeze was born, covering my arm hair in a fine, sweet-smelling, ash.

I feared to turn around, but I was like Lot's wife; desperate to turn around to see Sodom burning. Hope ate away at my consciousness.

She was behind me. Was.

Now all I could hear was the silence cracking under the pressure to be loud. A metallic taste filled my mouth. I tried to say her name, but it kept drying on blistering lips. Instead, I grasped at the heart-shaped locket she gave me to replace my broken one. It felt oddly cold to the touch, like it had survival horror.

And so, turning up the volume on my headphones to drown the sound of the frenetic beat of my patented Geiger counter, I took my first steps down the ashen concrete of this Brave New World, towards my first asignment. The last pillars of the 21st Century bearing down on me in the Holocaustic wake.

I refused to stop at the suddenly anachronistic Number 21 instead, grasping the smouldering copy of T.S Eliot's Wasteland, my surprise for Georgie, from my back pocket, and as I threw the slim volume unironically on a smoking pile of world, I thought to himself; the world really did end, not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Now, from this, you may be thinking this Alfie Two-Buckets, is quite dissociative. Fancies himself a reader, a writer even, a fucking regular Hunter S Thompson mixed with the style and fortitude of T.S Eliot. His roughened personality was surely drawn from a life of trauma, drugs, and foster care prior to this little radioactive event. The sudden loss of his girlfriend has thrust him into dissociative grief, providing enhancement to his poetic, fatalistic prose.

Nup.

Nada.

No dice.

Your reductive literary criticism sustains me, but I hate to inform you I had two of the most loving parents anyone could want. Always plenty of cash left on the counter, a plethora of electronics to swipe and undying love for their hard-to-conceive only son. I don't deal in particulars but any idiot, no matter their excellence in manual labouring, can see that this created a perfect shitstorm built from their economic excellence and naïve parenting. The perfect coup de grace was achieved when their son developed a taste for, shall we say, certain black market side action pertaining to the altering of said pilfered electronics. One doesn't have to be a wordsmith to make money in the world, one just needs a propensity for pattern recognition. That's all language is, patterns, like code, like chaos.

The trouble is that their perfect dual-income "tick-tac box" in the suburbs kind of life held no appeal for me. I found it… empty… for want of a word.

Now, don't you go psychoanalysing me, trust me, I can't afford the time nor level of transference I could create between you and I. Trust me, I can be a charming Son of a Bitch, when I want to be.

We have 8 hours till drop off.

Need to shave off three hours? You Shit, eat, smoke, count the dead bees on the windowsill (16), re-work part of communist manifesto to the tune of Auld Lang Syne (more difficult than you realise due to syllable placement)

So it's the 5-hour mark and you've already prank called your Girlfriend's mother and told her husband has an outstanding account at the "House of ill Repute" and would she like to put the package with the Divine Destiny on hold.

She hangs up the phone. I tell you; no one appreciates your humour at 23. Well, no one appreciates your humour when 98 per cent of the population is wiped out, it narrows the hilarity scope somewhat.

I listen to music to pass the rest of the time. I like Sheryl Crow. She is a pure poet. My favourite is "A Change Would Do You Good". I strip down to my Y-Front and I belt out lines like "Bottom feeder, insincere, High- fed low- fat pioneer" as I shimmy and shake my money maker whilst sliding along the cracking, stained lino. I feel she gets me.

For the last fifteen minutes, you wind down, sit still, watching the lead door for another sign of life, other than yours.

There is a knock at the door. The uninhabited air in the room suddenly uncoils itself. It's on edge for the first time in 12 hours. Like me. And now you.

The drop off happens. The rusty bell is rung. Its sound is hollow. You wait 5 mins. You pad over to the door, its pallid skin flaking slightly under your fingertips. You pick up the package. It sits with you now.

You open the package, a small lead box that glows with almost an ethereal light. If you believe in a God that routinely kills his creations for free-thinking, you'll be aware of the proverbial blessed meek for they shall inherit the earth.

I am God's quiet chosen one. In front of you, there is a Geiger Counter the size of a phone clicking away. You flip it over and open a small hatch at the back. You have your instructions, delivered by the hundreds of authors strewn around the room. You take the heart-shaped locket from the table, use the pliers to extract a link from the chain and insert it into the mechanism. The hatch shut, the counter whirls to life again, its angry staccato vibrating in your hands, like a heartbeat. 120 links down, 32 left. Filaments of hope, hidden from the world, like a parasite. Until needed. And they will be needed by you. Trust me. Consider it a post-traumatic order, courtesy of Alfie, who always gets his two cents in.

You wait. 5 mins this time. The bell is rung again.

An exchange is made. They don't know you. You don't exist, remember. You don't talk, the tension has strangled your vocal cords. You devour this feeling, every day and never get full. Adrenaline licks your veins.

You close the door and reset the clock. 12 hours ‘til next drop off. Time is finite in this void.

The room relaxes and you find your voice again. The room presses you to make a rollie, to eat the time. The adrenaline becomes a lonely echo, etched in the way your hands tremble slightly as the paper flicks in your fingers.

I can feel your silence. Don't judge me. You don't exist anymore anyway.

Sorry, Ms Georgie White but to paraphrase the bard- I'm just a poor player that struts and frets his hour then is heard no more. This tale has been told by an idiot, remember.

It signifies nothing, in this void