An Image of the Moment

by daniel gothard

just the atmosphere of the sinister. You miss feeling indignant.

  You feel more heat build all over your body. You are sweating and feeling more uncomfortable than you knew you would ever feel.

  You scratch your head on the scalp and run both index fingers across your eyebrows, wiping away a thin film of the new sweat.

  Again you glance out of the window on to the tracks. But there isn't anyone out there. You wonder if you are dreaming and surreptitiously pinch the inner thigh of your right leg. The immediacy of the pain signal to your brain tells you that all of this is real. You long for the sleep of the ignorant.

  The stranger holds the balloon out, his arm stretched to its full length. His thumb and forefinger - holding the neck shut; your eyes fixed upon them - slowly widen.

  A voice emits from the balloon.

  Your voice.

  'You know this is your voice. Take a moment to recognise nothing bad is going to happen to you,' your voice says to you.

  The stranger closes the neck of the balloon again.

  'What are you doing? How did you get my voice in to a ... who are you? What the fuck is this?' you shout at the stranger.

  You stand up. A feeling of anger and resentment is joining the increased body heat. You want to hit the stranger; knock his glasses away from his face, look in to his eyes, and then flip his hat off and unfurl his scarf. But instead you stand still, fists clenched, looking above his head, out of the window and then at the Transactioner.

  You reach in to your coat pocket, pop a Diazepam out of its round spot in your repeat-prescription blister-pack and swallow it without liquid. Then you swallow another, just to be sure of its efficacy.

  Your right eye is twitching a lot now, so you reach back inside your coat and take out a beta-blocker and swallow that - it is larger than the diazepam and feels uncomfortable in your throat, beginning to dissolve quickly and tasting awful. You look down at your seat and find your bottle of water. You gulp down half the contents.

  You sent a message to your followers last week about the various medications you take each day and calculated that you consume one hundred and fifteen pills, on average, each week. The beta-blocker should slow your heart and stop the ocular twitch - you hate feeling as if you have lost control of your body and the twitch is the most pronounced manifestation of your fears.

  The stranger releases the balloon neck again.

  'Sit back down and listen. You know this is supposed to happen. Take a few moments and remember yourself, remember a time before you lost the urge to change the way things are and could be.'

  You drop backwards on to your seat and feel the scrunch of the BLT box and your newspaper under your left buttock.

  You cover your eyes with your hands - it feels fake and too dramatic, but you need time to slow your heart. You take a quick look at the face of the stranger. His features are like wax, lightly shining. And although you have seen him move, you could believe in these moments, that he is a corpse with the remnants of a central nervous system that allows him to move his head, arms and hands.

  But where did your voice come from if not from your mouth, your thoughts?

  'What is it you want?' you say to the balloon, then you look at the stranger because you feel ridiculous talking to a bag of air.

  The neck is released again.

  'You can remember. You feel a void inside, an emptiness that has been building for a long time. You have reached the lowest point in your existence like so many others. You have no place in the world. You pretend to be blind to the erosion of society at large and the lack of passion in your life. You have become what the controlling elements want. You have become a slave to the here and now, the what's best and new, to put most distance between yourself and the rest of humanity. You will start to remember and you will tell yourself everything you need to know. But no matter, that is why you made this happen and developed this technique for communicating with yourself. A method of beginning the process of change.'

  You find yourself laughing out loud; looking at the stranger. You pull a face of pretend-madness in to the reflection of his glasses. You dance around him for a few moments, attempting to extract a reaction. He remains still and silent, clutching the balloon like a statue.

  The balloon voice begins again.

  'You will need to see and hear what you know. Put these items on.'

  You stare at the balloon skin, half-expecting something to burst out from the inflated emptiness. But it is the stranger who provides the next movements. He re-ties the balloon neck, carefully lays it next to his leg - placing a reassuring hand on its top to stop any carriage draught lifting it up and away - and reaches in to his left trouser pocket. You watch his discoloured hands pull out a pair of Raybans and a scarf exactly the same as his.

  He holds them out towards you. You take them. The stranger picks up the balloon again and undoes the neck knot.

  'Put those on now. You will only know the full truth and remember what you need when you can truly hear and truly see,' your balloon voice says.

  You do as you have told yourself to do - remembering many occasions, as a child, talking to yourself in the bathroom mirror; attempting to make sense of the seemingly endless arguments your parents had. You always looked deeply in to your eyes then. You studied them as if they contained answers, an escape. You remember loving your eyes.

  You suddenly decide to test yourself; to test the balloon; the voice inside it.

  This could all be an elaborate prank, you think, this is probably bullshit, just some performance artist with voice recognition software that requires a few keywords spoken and then the magic of fakery. All of this, all the surreal posturing will end with a cliche: 'Ta da!' And perhaps a flash-mob will storm the carriage in the wake of your humiliation and watch you with many faces but one massive eye of judgement. You hate being judged.

  It might transpire that you served this faceless clown in his anachronistic hat in the eye-book store and he has used your voice to create a piece of so-called art. Your voice has become an artificial intelligent form - perhaps this stranger has the speakers inside his hat.

  You take off the glasses and the scarf, lay them down next to your newspaper very slowly - making a show of mocking the stranger, you grin at him, he remains blank. You feel as if you are playing his arty game right back at him. You know best right now, you feel in control of your destiny - the train has stopped almost certainly as a result of power failure - there are power cuts all the time since the National Grid was sold to a private equity group and the empty carriages can only mean that the train is low on passengers today. You haven't left your own carriage and cannot possibly know where the other people on-board are situated. They might have all moved towards the driving hub to find out some information from the customer-service-interface.

  The lapse in your thinking, your meekness, was just moments without true thought processing, a slowdown of your mental acuity - you were reacting, that was it, just something that happens when you find yourself confused by a shift in the everyday. But this nonsense is nothing to change your history or even ruin your day. You are just unlucky to be in a position where some smartass ...

  'You need some proof that you are hearing yourself, that this is real. All right, ask a question about yourself, something very personal, something only you on this entire planet would know about you,' the balloon says, interrupting your thought-sprint and depressing your rise in confidence.

  You think for a few moments, trying not to give anything away to the stranger. You are not sure what you could possibly show through body language that might inform the stranger of your personal secret, but you will be damned if you are going to take any chances. If the stranger really is a performance artist and capable of such advanced magic-mind-control, who knows what he can deduce?

  'You know so much, yes? Tell yourself, as you want this transaction to be thought of
, about when and where you last masturbated and who were you thinking about?'

  You sit back and smile widely at the stranger waiting for him to return the smile and drop his scarf, allow all the air to leave the balloon and slap his thigh like a pantomime actor. You want him to react with a tangible truth. But his only reaction is to allow the neck of the balloon to open and answer your onanistic question.

  'Last night on your bathroom floor as your partner slept, around two o'clock in the morning, and you imagined yourself taking Nicole Kidman from behind in a scene from the Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut which you had watched earlier in the evening. You used toilet paper to wipe yourself and the beige linoleum clean; flushed the toilet twice, as the paper filled with air after the first flush and bobbed about on the small water surface, and you had a thought about the humiliation you would feel if your partner found traces of your psychosexual infidelity on the bathroom floor or around the toilet bowl. Does that convince you?'

  You look down at your face reflected in the sunglasses you are holding - your fingers feel arthritic in their stillness; clenching but not crushing the lenses. Your cheeks look flabby, the rings under your eyes seem accentuated by the curve of the wire-encased dark mirrors, half-moon-shaped skin sags, full of blood and fatigue, standing out and obvious to you, and you presume the rest of the