London When it Rains

by C. Sean McGee

  “I love Jenga,” screamed The Old Man.

  “Yoga.”

  “What’s that now?”

  “Yoga.”

  “Oh, they have that here?”

  “No. Yoga. Not Jenga. Yoga.”

  “It’s all semantics, isn’t it?. The principle is the same. Should just be called ‘Try not to topple over’. I’ll have some yoghurt, though.”

  “There’s no yoghurt.”

  “It’s finished? Already?”

  “There never was any.”

  “Well, then why did you say there was in the first place?”

  Peering through the lower end of his crotch, The Old Man smiled nefariously. The last of this group – the last dozen or so – they were easy to rile. All it took was a little stubborn ignorance and their tapestry of Zen would wind itself into an infuriated knot. They’d try to breathe their way out of it. Some of them would kiss and hug their magic crystals while others would resort to a bout of induced vomiting or low-intensity exercise which usually just involved going for a stroll and cooling off.

  The more in touch with their inner feelings they were, the more disturbed they eventually became. It wasn’t even that difficult to get under their skin. He could just ask a stupid question and then say ‘Why’ repeatedly to their every response.

  The Old Man likened it to starting an old lawn mower. Sometimes you had to spend half a day kicking and shouting and cursing a lot, just to turn the fucker over, but when you did, you could spend the other half just wandering about aimless, feeling like you’re getting something done.

  Some of these natives were hard to wind up, especially those that had been here for years. The newer ones – those on vacation from the city – they had tougher skin. They were all disconnected from one another as much as they were, disconnected from themselves. You could say anything to them and they wouldn’t so much as bat an eye. They didn’t rile and they didn’t bother or worry – and where was the fun in that?

  The dozen or so natives that hadn’t been killed yet were kept alive only for their thin skins. It was their frustrations and how quickly they could snap that brought The Old Man a great deal of joy. They would go from watery and patient to snapping turtles in an instant. And then, knowing they had broken their sanctity, they would instantly be embroiled in a sea of shame and regret, apologising relentlessly to the very man who caused their uproar. The Old Man didn’t know which reaction he preferred the most – seeing these wafer-like hippies exploding into a comical fury, or watching them fold like wet origami, weeping and snivelling, and begging for forgiveness. The longer he held out, the more self-deprecating they became until either he got bored, or one of them crossed the line in what they were willing to offer to cleanse their wicked ways. It wasn’t a great high. It wasn’t like the blues. But it was sufficient to keep his urges at bay.

  “It’s pronounced Yaw-gah,” said Felipe, who preferred to be called by his forest name – Whistling Wood.

  “I want you to kill me,” said The Girl. “But I don’t want to know about it.”

  The Girl had the same needy look on her face she’d had since they first met in the club. This time, though, it was coupled with a nervous tremor that made her smile even though she wasn’t happy, and it made her hands shake, even though she wasn’t cold. It was the first time she had spoken too, without one hand nursing her belly.

  The Old Man gave her a discerning look.

  “How about Thundering Thistle over there,” he said, pointing to Whistling Wood. “He’s my favourite, but if it’s gonna chirp you up then…”

  “I have to kill my baby. I have to, but I can’t do it myself. I can’t have it.”

  “Kids aren’t all that bad you know. They’re fucked, sure. But they can also be funny and quite loving. And eventually they grow up, move out, and you can shit in peace. I know it’s scary. I had two myself. They were always bickering, driving me bloody bananas. Now they do that for a living. But if you want to kill, I completely understand. But I’m not gonna do what you can do yourself. You know, it’s our mistakes that define us as being human but it’s how we deal with them that defines the type of men that we are – or women, in your case.”

  “Is there a God?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Rationally speaking, there’s no way there could be.”

  “So then there isn’t.”

  “Then why do I feel like this? I don’t want the baby. I want nothing to do with it. But why can’t I kill it? And why do I hate myself whenever the thought enters my mind?”

  “It’s just a feeling. Feelings aren’t supernatural. They’re just part of the mechanism of preservation. Nature wants you to have that baby, irrespective of how that seed got inside you. Nature doesn’t give two shits to how you truly feel about it, that’s why you’ll love I and hate it in the same breath and for the rest of your life, you won’t do a bloody thing about it except feed it, look after it, help it grow until it finds a mate of its own and the cycle bloody continues. You feel terrible now, thinking about killing that foetus, and if you do choose to abort, you will feel a thousand times worse until you don’t anymore, and then, like all sentient beings, you go on doing what everyone does. Buy yourself a TV, clean the carpet, fuck a stranger, take up yoga, or learn an instrument. I tell ya, though; guilt runs a shorter course than resentment.”

  “Do you resent having children?”

  “That’s a tough one. I’d say no because I love them, no matter what strife they get themselves into. But I do resent one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  She was sitting cross-legged in front of The Old Man, hanging on the end of his every word. Though she could just feel the foetus in her womb shifting and lightly kicking, it was easier to ignore now.

  “What is the worst thing that you’ve ever done?”

  The Girl instantly thought about all the times she had let down her mother and father, and all of the friendships and relationships that she had spoiled or sabotaged in some way. She thought of all the people she had let down in her life – all of the things she had done wrong and had yet to apologise for.

  “I killed God,” said The Old Man. “And here I am killing Krishna and Buddha too.”

  “God isn’t real. You can’t kill what isn’t real.”

  “When my children were young, their mother went mad. She was violent, heard voices in her head, and before she was a danger to herself, she was a real danger to our kids. She was obsessed with the idea of Heaven. She took every word in the bible literally. She became a miserable person and she sought to bring out that character in everyone she met. Eventually, she never left the home so she would just settle for me and the kids. She thought our life was too rich – that we needed to suffer in order for our deaths to having meaning and purpose. And she went about making our lives as miserable as they could be. She hanged herself on Christmas morning – right beside the tree. It was the kids that found her. Poor buggers. And so from that point, I went about helping my kids as best I could so they didn’t end up like her. So I raised them secular. I taught them the best I could on how to be a good, decent person, and at the same time, how not to live with the idea of a purposeless existence and to not freak out.”

  The Girl looked a little shocked like she was witnessing the distant light from the birth of a revolution. She forgot all about her own predicament for a second. She knew he was a serial killer, but she had no idea he was a fucking rock star.

  “You’re tryna tell me you wrote The Secularist Manifesto?”

  “No. That was my daughter. I just planted the seed.”

  “That’s incredible. You must be so proud.”

  Now that he thought about it...

  “I love both my children. And I am proud of who they have become, more than what they have achieved.”

  “You’re The Administrator’s father?”

  “I am.”

  “I don’t get it. Then how the hell did you end up in this mess? Can’t yo
u just call someone?”

  “I’ve been in far worse conditions and had to do far worse to get myself out, things that still haunt me to this day. There’s a lot of reason I can’t sleep right at night, but I still have only regret.”

  “How does killing God matter? You do realise you are the godfather of modern philosophy. Any hope that humanity has is entirely because of your doing. I’m no mathematician but I’m pretty sure something that grand cancels out any moral debt you think you might have.”

  “It’s not God inasmuch as…”

  He hadn’t said this out loud, not to anyone.

  “I miss the blues,” he said.

  “The blues? As in the music?”

  “If you had to ask you wouldn’t get it no matter how simple I tell it. Religion was horrible, it was. I’m not denying that. It’s not something we can ever go back to. There’s no right way to sustain a religion. But the blues… Dear God.”

  He sighed immensely.

  “There was nothing that could – at the same time – warm your blood and chill your bones like a man singing for redemption. That I miss. Yep,” he said, sighing again. I miss the blues.”

  “Will you kill me, though?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  The way she pleaded and the way she begged; that, coupled with how she gently caressed the round of her belly – it was almost like the blues.

  XXXV

  As days ticked over, the camp grew smaller and smaller. By the fifth day of the following week, there were only eight left. This included The Old Man, The Girl, Greg and Hillary, The Hughes, and of course, Charisma. The latter had sunken into a deep and unrelenting depression. With every native that left her camp, she felt the old wounds of her youth rising to the surface once more.

  She had her father’s laugh echoing in her head, and she had mother’s droll tone spinning around and around – the same old blasted verse. She spent every waking second by the lake gently tapping on the water’s surface. Sometimes she would whisper and plead, and sometimes she would hum her favourite songs. What she couldn’t do was go back into camp. Each time she did, whether it was to prepare some soup or to relieve herself, she would notice that another native was missing. And though no-one said anything, the fact that so many had left meant that when her back was turned, all of them had to be talking about her. They had to be judging her. And more than likely they were ridiculing her. They were writing her off, not as a whack job, but as an amateur – as someone who could barely maintain her own equanimity, let alone guide others to their own spiritual plateau. Pretty soon they’d probably start gossiping about her upper lip and the spaces in her teeth, and they’d probably be comparing her to more successful empaths and light workers; ones with more followers, who had already published their first or second books, and who weren’t as flat chested as she was – not that it bothered her, just that she knew that this is what people probably thought.

  So she sat there, day in-day out, tapping on the water’s surface and enticing a mermaid to come to the water’s edge. In truth, she had no idea what she would say to the mermaid. She hadn’t thought it through this far ahead. She assumed they would communicate by some inter-dimensional language. For this reason, she had spent several years while getting her accounting degree, studying and learning the language of dolphins and whales. Though she knew they were different, she assumed that their differences were trivial. Could it be any harder than an Irishman ordering an ice-cream in the south of France? And if she could learn the language of one, then she could communicate – in part – with all the mammals of the ocean, and the noble merpeople who protected them.

  So tap she did, humming lightly at first, and then building to what sounded like a pained wail as the thoughts of inadequacy, ugliness and uselessness speared like thick, black storm clouds in her mind.

  The fact that the natives snuck away was the past that hurt the most. It wasn’t so much that her teaching failed them, for an empath is merely a guide and if one is not prepared to follow then their failure is inevitable. It is, after-all, up to each person to walk their own mile. Sting as it might, their failures were a testament to their commitment. What hurt Charisma the most – apart from the intensity at which she cared – was that nobody had the decency to tell her to her face.

  Maybe they thought she couldn’t handle it. Maybe they thought she would break down and cry and cut herself with the end of scissors or take a handful of pills from the medicine cabinet – enough to warrant a week off of school. Either way, it’s the fact that it all occurred behind her back which made it so difficult to bear.

  She knew, as well, that right now the other seven natives were probably discussing who would go next. They were probably rolling dice or picking straws. But if they didn’t like her, and if she wasn’t pretty or cool enough, then why didn’t they just all leave at once? That would hurt, sure, but not as much as this. The Fact that every day they were talking about it, and every day one of them left, that’s the part that stung the most. They acted like they cared. They acted like she mattered; but really, they were all just manifesting meanness. And they were all cowards, each and every one of them. None of them had the courage to tell her how they felt right to her face. Instead, she had to imagine what they said, and she had to be the one who delivered the message because they were too gutless.

  Stupid people.

  Wish they didn’t leave.

  In the camp, The Hughes’ were busy teaching their young boy about shapes and numbers. On a sheet of paper, The Father drew a circle and then a square and then a circle again.

  “What comes next?” he asked.

  As The Son started to draw a square, The Father slapped him in the back of the head. It wasn’t terribly strong, but enough to make the boy wince, and for his square to turn into a rectangle.

  “Again,” he said.

  This time, he drew a blue house followed by a red house, a blue house, and another red house. “What colour house comes next?” he asked.

  The Son was nervous. He knew the answer. Every fibre in his being knew the answer. It was a straightforward sequence. Blue, red, blue, red, blue, red. Not even a monkey could get this wrong. Still, as he lifted the blue marker, he felt this sudden urge to run. The urge could have also been solved with any other spontaneous action. He could iron some clothes, make an omelette, write a sonnet, or do some cardio work out in the sun. He could do anything except draw a blue house.

  And as he did, The Father slapped him once more on the back of the head. The Son put down the blue marker even though it defied all tangible logic. He picked up a green crayon instead and drew the best part of every traffic light.

  “Good lad,” said The Father.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” asked The Old Man, interrupting.

  The Father whispered to his son. “You keep going on these exercises by yourself. Pinch yourself if you have to.”

  “Can I ask about your method?”

  The Father looked as if he might punch The Old Man.

  “I’m not judging. Not at all. I’m very interested in fact.”

  By the looks of him, very rarely had he been allowed the opportunity to explain his learning methods as opposed to defending them.

  “What is the point of slapping the boy?”

  He didn’t at all sound judging.

  “To stop him from forming patterns.”

  “What’s wrong with patterns?”

  “Patterns are the precursor to existential dread. And so we, as a family, do our best to avoid routine so as not to have our consciousness overwhelmed by the reality of a godless and meaningless existence.”

  “Does it work?”

  “Honey, how do you feel?”

  On the other side of the hut, The Mother was doing one handed push-ups. She had never tried them before, but the fact that her success or failure was impossible to predict, she did them as if they were her favourite thing to do in the world. Her arms wobbled. She had already fallen fifty times and h
er chin was a little bloody and bruised. Sill, though, she gave it one more shot.

  “Spectacular, honey bear. How do you feel?”

  A minute later she was sweeping and naming all the animals she had ever seen that lived inside of cages. She swept only as long as she managed to keep distracted from the thoughts of being, the horrific meaningless attributed to it. And as she did this, The Son continued his exercises, pinching and scratching himself – and even going as far as slapping the back of his own head – whenever he felt the urge to continue a pattern.

  “We try to learn new things constantly. Their sheer frustration of being a beginner of anything is pure bliss. It gives no space for self-awareness and self-evaluation. Consciousness is a curse that we do our best to disengage from. We keep ourselves busy and we do so randomly.”

  He showed The Old Man one of many spinning wheels that The Hughes’ carried. This one had a list of chores and physical activities.

  “All my brothers killed themselves. And most of my friends from school too. We all grew up together. But right after college, they started dropping one after the other. Every day I have to think of a reason not to kill myself. And so do they,” he said, pointing at his wife and child. “That’s all there is to existence. It’s either cancer, a pile up on the M-10, or a noose. Years ago it was easier. You could gas yourself in your car or stick your head in the oven, but now you can’t. God damn energy efficient clean society – made it so no gas can kill you, only make you a retard. It’s pattern forming that does it. Doesn’t matter how much you do, or how busy you keep yourself, if its regular, consistent and pattern forming, eventually you don’t have to think about anything anymore, and so you start to think about life and purpose and the fact that you’re slowly dying; that and you’re getting less attractive and you can’t fuck like you used to - and even when you could, you weren’t getting any. But if you keep yourself busy, then these thoughts don’t surface. You can deal with the fact that you’re gonna die, and you’re gonna die alone. You can deal with the fact that at some point you’re never gonna exist. You can even deal with the fact that in five billion years, the sun will quit, and none of this will exist – none of it.”