Is there consistency? Somewhere out there?
A greater schedule, one that can be observed, felt, be believed? One beyond the cosmos, one that can be noticed, unlike moon and stars upon a sky obscured by clouds and smog and pidgeons behind a window obscured by dust and shutters?
Sometimes unintelligible scatter, sometimes cars crashing into each other - dumb noises nearly unable to find their long way through the thickened air smelling of bolonachi and worse, throughout my aching head and make me realize: it’s still going. The thing I fight so hard to beat and force to retreat. The thing I beat against and all that alters is the wall colour and the shapes of my knuckles.
It’s time. The thing. I barely grasp it.
Piles of empty bottles remind me of it: it’s gnawing.
Then I drift away, into a warm cosiness down there in the depths of me. But the thing will chase me trough. And at one point I would feel uncomfortable enough to brace up, wake and start anew. But what?
I awake. It’s bad. Really bad. The badness starts long before opening eyes, even before smelling something. The first breath is the deepest, brisking air flooding into me, bringing back a hint of what I obviously was about to escape from: life. As the engines ablaze, features of awareness get going unasked as unhandy. The sensors, alarmed but delayed arrange to rather throw than wake up. I stand against it, and as I do, they remind my about the oral disasters still happening in my mouth. First of all the issue of a maliciously poisoned, dehydrated lump I can’t spit out as it happened to appear as my tongue. And then the awkward numbness reaching from my brittle lips all the way down the throat.
That’s when consciousness and dread smell hits me hard and tough. I gasp.
Trying to find my hands somewhere around my limbs and move - nothing.
The once consistent blackness shifts into a throbbing pattern of vivid colours, enveloping me and becoming rampant. The beat is increasing, pumping throughout me and I realize the cycle, the flow happening within. The beat becomes a mind scattering boom, willing to blow me. My head. Here it is.
To make sure my presumptions are right I try to touch it - but as that doesn’t work at all, I’m contented with thinking of it. Even the thought is a total overkill. Boom. Boom.
Stop thinking, stop this awareness will do the trick. It works. Not for long though.
The next breath strikes massively. The boom develops into a blast. I need to gulp. Something that turned out to be, as somehow expected, a harsh and maybe final blow as I failed to avoid it from happening.
Whatever there devastatingly gutters down towards my stomach causing collateral damage down there, leaving a trail of rampage all along the way down.
I decide to act. Proactively.
My ambition peaks with the attempt to open my eyes eventually. An almost logical measure in order to regain control of my limbs and get a better overview about the overall situation.
Also a risky one. Expecting something more agreeable behind the swirling patters on the inside of my eyelids at the outside, I take the effort. Troublesome wrenching the crust glueing down my lids, I face only worse. Neither the grotesque colour, nor the psychedelic patterns disappear, but mix with a ghastly piercing light, impossible to deal with.
But to escape from it would be even more impossible. I’ve gone too far now, there is no return, but maybe a way through.
Soon, I can see beyond this agony, and discover my limbs covered by empty plastic bottles, written bolonachi on them. Locating myself brings up the inevitable question of where the fuck I am. First I’m just guessing, then I get more and more convinced that this entire mess can only take place at my flat. I’m home.
As I lift my humming head while bones and neck are creaking I can merely see but not yet understand the scale of devastation. First of all the smell of liquor. I can almost see the vapour causing it. And through that vapour I spot several unpleasant issues that begin to add up with expectations. No end of the pile of bottles I found myself lying in - it appears as it fades away in the blurriness. I glimpse tons of shards, fragments of demolished furniture and - worst of all - a ray of sunlight paving it’s way through the bruised shutter directly into my defiled face, before the passing-out-process is about to start anew.
Although, I raise my arm firmly and my hand tries to touch my head. The gladness of seeing this working instantly yields to confusion about the unexpected shape recovering there. And a kind of wetness, that makes me feel even more uncomfortable.
The regained control about my arms offers me the opportunity to put up myself. Slowly. Something heavy upon my chest is blocking the action. And the sound of cracking rips knocks out the ambition quite entirely. I decide having a second attempt in looking. There is no rush.
Basically everything inside the flat is very unstable, that’s proved by now.
My table apparently lost so many legs to remain as a cracked board within this mess. The closet is no more. I can spot the place, where the door properly used to be - recognizing that a hole is yet left. The former window is now part of a big pile of shards, blended with parts of the once so whole mirror.
There is but a thing among my belongings, that will probably last forever - rock-hard and stainless, heavy and unhandy. Especially unhandy when it hits you at full tilt right in the face.
The complete destruction around me is making me nervous. Is this normal? I can’t be sure that there was any outside influence causing this complete mess. But I neither can be convinced with the opposite. What happened here? And, most important, where is my typewriter?
I try again to sit up straight. A horrid pain blazes through my chest. As I realize what causes it, I’m relieved. This massive obstacle that prevents me from sitting up, is the missing part of the puzzle. The very familiar letters that say underwood instantly eases my fear and give me a slight confidence. Here you are, my lovely typewriter. But what happened to you? Why is there blood all over your body? Who did this to you? Are you okay?
It remains silent. It sometimes does.
I touch it softly. Seems undamaged. Thanks goodness.
But where does this blood come from? I follow up the track of blood, but it comes to nothing except more blood. Everywhere. One of the mirror-shards is pointing towards me and offers a sight on myself. Terrible! Swollen eyes, dry mouth, the skin-colour presumably somewhere between green, grey and blue, except for the nose, which is more likely within a wide range of reds and violets. For a very short moment I’m just glad, my grandma can’t see me like this. “Your hair”, she would understandably say, “looks terrible!”. As I was thinking about how lucky I am, I spotted the source of the blood all around. It’s my head. I carefully inspect the hole in my head physically. Fortunately, it feels completely numb.
I believe to identify the relief of the letters q, w and a on my forehead. I compare it with the typewriter still lying on my chest. It matched.
There is a picture visualizing in my head. I’m deducing. That’s what I do. It feels good doing that, considering circumstances.
After a while I’m quite sure, what happened. It has to have been like that: I was probably typing something really smart and while doing so, a table leg broke away, the table tilted, the typewriter dashed ̵ right into my face, so I fell off the chair, knocked out. Needless to say, I must have tried to avoid falling backwards, grabbing the closet, which fell down as well, littering all these beautiful bottles all over the place.
Happy about this reasonable deduction, I begin to smile. So my chapped lips ripped eventually. The taste of liquor in my mouth gets a metallic flavour.
But something is perplexing me, still. Why are all the windows broken? And the shutters. And where did the door go? The lack of the door increases the chance of someone being here. But why? Maybe to cause this mess?
I grab the nearest bottle and take a sip to get rid of the blood flavour. It’s disgusting.
But it fuels me enough much to pull down the typewriter and sit up straight. As I move my head, I realize, that I inspected merely half of the chaos - the other half was behind me.
Obviously, the other side of my flat is also completely devastated. Not the kind of devastation that’s easily explainable with simply fall off a chair. But the thing that finally ruined my good mood about a successful deduction, was the fact, that there is written in big and literally bloody letters “we got you by the balls, reinhardt” all over the wall. Nasty!