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06 May 2008
58. Kidman’s Gift – Part Five
I don’t know when, but at some point I’m sure that a white light ghosted by on the other side of the window behind me.
Who does it seek out, this dead, dropped presence? And what does it want from what it seeks? Do other similar dead presences haunt this world, haunting the night skies above our heads? When we’re not fully aware of this world and when our senses are dulled? That sheen of light that we sense behind us as we walk in the dark – is it a streetlight, a headlight, a light from a window? Or is it a dead aura, a hanging presence in the sky above, just glimpsed between those buildings, momentarily glimpsed between those trees, vaguely detected far off in the distance just to one side of that church’s steeple? And there, on the opposite side of the sky from where the sun is setting, suspended above that roof? Or there, just above that hill? Could that be a human form, shining white, but with a black face that reveals no form, no detail, no soul? And why does it just hang there? Is it looking at you? Could it be looking at you? What does it want? Is it moving? Did it move just then?
As I sat there on the floor, I could see such dead apparitions all across the world, everywhere drawn to emptiness. Smelling it out and hanging above it in the night, staring coldly and blankly, and drawing it all into itself. The cash machine mugging with its vicious threats and its drawn weapons. The gang consuming pills and booze on the street as they watch with avarice the women walking by. The man sitting in his flat, hands rung-out and brow tight, staring at the names of all the people who have wronged him. The bombers pulling their ingredients together in-between prayers to the elevated image of their own reflected hatred. The family friend manipulating language and action to sexually destroy another’s soul. The one car speeding through its second red light, the one driver intent on suicide, empty of any thought for others: “I am all that matters,” he thinks, “I am all that matters”. The woman thinking of that moment and that day and how to fill them up, how to enact something physical within them, while the future lies dead at her feet, and while everything inside echoes dull and hollow. The buying and selling and hoarding, the buying and selling and returning and exchanging, the buying and selling and throwing away and buying again. The knowledge of things, of bits, of stuff, of nonsense. The gun. The invasion. The rhetoric. The locked door. The overflowing bin. The acerbic lie. The empty fatness and the empty thinness. The empty muscle. The empty face. The dead hands. All of it. All of it the dead ghost-men hang over and feast on, ingesting ever more deadness.
What do they want, these dead, dropped presences? What we all want. Approval for how empty and lifeless we all are.
At some point it became morning. Morning! Delicious morning! The universe saw a spark and it blew on it. James lay asleep on my bed like an empty cave, and I lay there beside him. Round my room I felt that there were bits of me scattered everywhere, but everything looked the same. Of course! Of course it all looked the same! The bits of me wouldn’t be there: the dead, dropped presences would have eaten them up in the night. Somewhere up in space, in the bleak void, parts of my soul floated in their natural and lifeless home, finally having found the approval they craved.
Want to read more? Read the whole story by clicking on the first blog called Prelude and start clicking forwards using the tabs above the title.
21:10 Posted in Part Two: Getting Some Answers | Permalink | Comments (1) | Email this | Tags: haunted house, ghost story, horror story, astronaut, space, nicole kidman, journal