Hold Me While I'm Gone

It was eight o’clock in the morning, sometime in June, I think, when he stopped being affected by everything. It might have been an interesting sensation had he still the capacity to be affected by things, which he didn’t.

The fun things he noticed first. Their absence. Taste, smell, sight. They weren’t gone, no; just muted. He’d never been a good listener before, often too occupied by his own thoughts. So, losing the consequences of sound wasn’t so startling as all that. And he was a loner. The sort of touch that elicits any intriguing response had always been rare. The absence of it engendered only fleeting, incidental results.

Beyond sensual impacts, he was delighted to discover that unkind words bounced off him as though his soul were a racquetball court. A youth rocketing past on a speeder flicked a cigarette in his direction with a taunt - ‘Ya Fat Cocksucker!’ The jab fell on a deaf soul. Yet, a kindly nod, the sort of thing of which he had hitherto rarely taken heed, had maintained an almost comparable lack of impact.

The departure of age, naturally, would take some time to fully appreciate. It would be an appreciation he would remain entirely unaffected by.

He paused. As a means of comparing altered states, he pondered the drugs he’d tried over the years. Weed, here and there, pills, a bit of coke. He’d even given a dose of LCD a go once. But of course, drugs constitutionally belong to the realm of cause and effect, so that was no good, now, was it?

All in all, he noted with a palpable lack of glee – and by this time it was surely almost ten o’clock – the downsides were emphatically outweighed by a plethora of benefits. What a time to be alive! He had taken his first few steps into a life he could confidently conclude would remain utterly unaffected by any sort of event. One might say, he reflected, that he didn’t truly know himself until right now.

Maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter so much.

Effect. A product of affect. Both lost to him. Cause, alone, his method of operating. But there was something exceedingly pleasant about this new comfort blanket, this screen behind which he might now navigate himself and his life with a real sense of security.

Casting his gaze across Victoria Street, Richmond, Melbourne he tried to spot others like him. This was useless. He was as unaffected by the demeanour of those around him as any of the potential “others” would have been by everything, thus making possible their detection unfeasible. He gave up the pursuit.

It was now just going on eleven o’clock and he was neither surprised nor unruffled to discover that he had been standing there in the street for some three hours and somewhere during that time it had started raining.

I think it was about then that he put on his coat, out of habit rather than from any real desire for warmth or to keep the wet from his white, collared shirt. He felt a heaviness in his side right pocket. Oh yes, that’s right, he registered, fishing the heart-shaped locket from where he had angrily stuffed it not four hours ago, plopped amongst a receipt for the meditation joint around the corner from his apartment, a crumpled Banh Mi wrapper and half a handful of collected lint.

Gazing at the locket in his hand, rapidly accumulating rain on its shiny surface, he was more aware of the cordate geometry of the thing than he had ever been before, and noticed for the first time, dully, the thin line of silver plating running around its circumference. The coruscating combination of the rain, the neon from all the overhead signs and the metal of the locket was pretty, but the loveliness was lost on him.

Flicking the locket open, he found himself looking at two familiar faces, one enclosed behind each thin sheet of glass on either side of the trinket; the faces the catalyst for the one, final, lasting consequence. He had felt something for each of them, he recalls. Though the emotion was a near memory, he registered it with unexpected vagueness.

I think that it was around now he decided to walk home. With a nonchalance that might have appalled him at seven o’clock in the AM, he tossed the locket into the gutter and set off. He absorbed his surroundings with his newfound lack of everything, feeling unexpectedly more at home than he ever did before. Noticing that he was by no means the only person that the rain had not deterred, he wondered whether most people are “others”, and if so: how had he not noticed this before?

The passing faces, which regarded him with as little curiosity as he did them, explained nothing. A man in an expensive-looking business suit brushed past, connecting with his shoulder as though it weren’t there. The man moved on without a look or a word. A passing schoolgirl laughed a humourless laugh at whatever was on her pocket screen. A loitering junkie offered to sell him smack, which he entertained briefly before declining. What would be the point? The junkie nodded vacantly at the rejection.

Arriving home, he had lost all urge to press ‘Send’ on that message that was still sitting idly on his screen. Snippets such as “don’t appreciate”, “in the future” and “my point of view” stuck out for no real reason, and he endeavoured for a moment to remember why it was he had ever felt so much venom towards that particular colleague…

He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror and had the brief thought that it might have been nice to have been in better shape before losing the ability to be affected by anything but as soon as the thought came it was replaced with the handy realisation that he no longer felt shame at the way his gut stuck out or that slight fatness around his neck that had always bothered him so. Before, whatever women wanted, he didn’t have. Now, he didn’t want anything, and what women wanted was suddenly seeming quite immaterial…

At about three o’clock, his mind drifted back to the locket. This he couldn’t explain. The issue, as he saw it, had been fully resolved with the throwing away of the locket into the gutter. It must be a coincidence. Robbed of the capacity to be affected by anything his mind now haphazardly trawled through information with no rhyme or reason. By chance he found himself occupied by this recent incident. The locket disposal. Curiosity, a hobby of the past, didn’t get the better of him so he was the equivalent of satisfied with his own explanation.

To pursue the line of thought, he dismissed the unsent message on his screen with a flick of his fingers and pulled up the photos that had been in the locket. He had forgotten to delete the digital copies. The images, the faces, looked up at him expectantly. One, blue eyed, light brown hair, female. The other, male, brown hair, eyes indistinct in the photo…but he knew that they were blue. He remembered the colour. Blue had been his favourite colour.

Flashes initially, before more concrete images and finally entire scenes and vivid memories bleed through his mind, as though they were the then and there present. And he had thought that every memory would be waiting for him in the future. He sees these two faces, though they are not the same. He plays guitar and sings with the face on the left, the female. He is at a cinema, watching Yasujirô Ozu’s ‘Late Spring’ with the face on the right, the male, although that wasn’t right. It had been Bergman’s ‘Winter Light’ that they had watched together at the Phoenix that one time. Emerging out of this strange memory land, he says their names aloud, but it all feels a little bit like semantic satiation.

It is naturally quite a strange sensation, to not be affected by anything, though it is also a sensation that does not register in those experiencing it. Thus, I think it took some time for the enormity of his situation to dawn on him. When it did, which must have been at about five o’clock, he was wholly incapable of experiencing the required alarm and dread to do anything about it.

“Well…fuck.” He thought, but only out of habit.

The End