RANDOM BABBLE - THE DIARY OF AN UNLABELED MAN

DAY ONE

That's strange. I don't feel any different.
When a dog kills a dog, it's nature. When a man kills a man, it's murder.
When a god kills a god, Yahweh knows what that is. I skirted to one side as she appeared from around the corner. Behind me I heard her call, "Hey!" I turned and stared at her, awaiting an explanation.
"There's no need to give me a wide berth just because you think I look like a tramp. "
"Pardon?" I questioned the tramp.
"Just because I'm homeless doesn't mean I'm going to bite you. I'm a person just like you." she barked at me, getting a better grip on her plastic carrier bags.
"I skirted around you because I didn't want to walk into you." I explained.
"I bet you didn't. I'm dirty to you aren't I? You think I'm diseased, don't you?"
"No, I wouldn't want to walk into anyone." I pointed out. This woman was becoming quite irksome. I turned and carried on my way. She began to follow.
"You and your expensive suits," she began to spit, "In your heated apart ment. You don't know what it's..."
I cut her short by shooting her twice in the belly. I hate other people. I live on my own now, it's the only way to keep my head together. It's a heated apart
ment, like my friend said. In fact it has all the mod cons. I would say I'm fairly well off now that the law no longer applies to me.
We are alike, the bag lady and I. The law applies to neither of us. We are outside society, looking in as observers. Like...
I think I now know what it is when a god kills a god.
I lie here now, listening to the sirens fly past outside, wondering if I should take the pills for the stomach cramps. Pain is subjective, like life, and there's no point in having one without the other. I wonder if everyone's mind is as inconsistent as mine. When there is tragedy I react differently.
This morning there was some news on the gogglebox about a passenger scramjet malfunction. It crashed into a mountain at Mach 23, killing eight hundred people.
I seem to remember laughing at that, because I was thinking that although eight hundred had died at that instant, one thousand people had just been born. I laughed then, but I think I would cry if I heard the news again now.
Sometimes I don't know how to feel or how to react and I have to smash something or shoot something to get my mind off the subject. But I think now I just want to sleep. And to take a pill for the stomach cramps.
It seems so strange how things are now. To think it was only a year ago I thought I was so cool, oblivious to the fighting gnawing hidden inside. Back when I was mortal.
Walk, the committed man, in darkness! You're that coldly pathetic, just meters above, inevitably gripping.

DAY TWO

Oh mercy mercy. It's going to happen to me again.
The clock next to my bed reads five minutes past midnight and the alarm is set for eight A.M. but I never sleep in that bed anymore. I'm sitting on top of my wardrobe in the dark dust,
written into the corner of the room. Waiting for my redeemers to tell me who to 'render non-viable'. My body is telling me that I need a woman, but I try to
reply that I'm not part of that crass life anymore. We argue. One day the result of the argument will be blood.
Grey memories flick through my brain like a bad film-noir. I recall the first time I took my body for a walk. In the city, and this was a time when there
were individual cities instead of one huge sprawl, in the city I explored the lookouts and dens and brick tunnels. Starved of real human contact, I did the
stupid thing of falling in love. And when I fall, I really hit the ground hard. Oh mercy. Oh Yahweh, here I am again teetering on the cliff edge. It is practically
parallel with the first time. Oh the first time....

At the Plaza Of Dreams, in Gemorrah, I had a friend. A term I used when I was naive and coldly naive. We drank and laughed in the plaza, blinded by
neon, deafened with the talk of thousands.
"Have more, have another." he sung.
"No more, or my heart will explode." I grinned.
We were shouting because everyone else was shouting. It seemed a shame to just speak your words and see them vanish in the sea of retrothrash. We
were retrothrashing because it was a Saturday. Bodycount day.
"Well if its moody blues you want, we go in here." he gurgled, and we pushed through the writhing crowd into a pit. I think the music was either
desert-ambient or body-ambient, and everyone was lying around. I paid my easy earned money. My friend and I. He went over to a quiet corner to pop his
tablets, a solitary downer. I preferred company and slumped next to some hlaefdigan.
"Are you with him?" she said to me. I rolled to one side to see that sand beach voice. How remarkable, her hair was the same as mine. And she wore
no make-up, and her only jewelry were her eyes. She stood out from all the other girls around me by not wearing fishnet and leather. In fact her whole
body was wrapped in loose black cloth, but the very denial of the sight of her flesh made her all the more seductive.
"Yes, I'm with him." I answered. I couldn't resist her conversation.
"Stay away from him. He's a heartgaze." she put simply and turned her head away. Was that it? The end of our chat?
"What's that?", I demanded. God, I was so naive then. She turned her head back.
"A hardcase. He's into hard drugs. Stay away from him or he'll drag you down
with him. "
"Hard...?"
"You really don't know do you? Hard drugs, not like these pills we pop every night. Hard is metabolically addictive. It will eat your soul away. You will kill to get your next fix. Stay away, my my. "
"But he's my friend... "
"He's some poor git who isn't worth you bothering over. "
That seemed to be the end of it, but even as she finished my friend was standing over us.
"You talk too loud, bitch." he spat.
"You got a problem with that, chum?" she retorted. She sat upright, the cloth sliding over her slim form. Only I could spy the hilt of a pistol at her hip, her
gloved fingers dancing millimeters away. I... kept... quiet... Why?
"You lie about me to my pal, and you are ugly. You don't deserve to live." my friend said. He always said 'You don't deserve to live' to people we were about
to assassinate, to convince himself that it was all worth it. Except this was a killing I couldn't bear to see. As he threw back his fist and let the blades slide
from his knuckles, I flowed like a river, pulling the knife from my pocket and leaping up and putting the point to his Adam's apple and telling him to back off back off.
"Amateur!" he screamed, and deftly sliced off my right hand in a microsecond. At first I hardly felt a thing. Funny that. I hit the floor, my red stuff glooping
about everywhere. He may have advanced on me I don't know. People who weren't too pilled out were stampeding out of the pit to get away and I sus
pected that bouncers were having trouble getting close. Then the pain hit me.
Through the white-out, I saw her go bang bang bang with the pistol and my friend was dead just like that. Was she protecting me? Or defending herself?
The pistol slid back under her folds. Don't go, my brain tried to make my mouth say. It came out as a distorted "Help me."
"Pff, " she hissed, " It's time for me to leave. " her face turned this way and that scanning for exits. My mouth opened and I nearly said 'I love you' but that
would have been stupid. You cannot fall in love with someone who you didn't know forty seconds ago.
"I'd like to ask you to dinner tomorrow night. " I said faintly, clasping my wrist, futilely trying to stop my life flowing away. Her head cocked to one side.
Her mouth wasn't smiling, but she was, I could tell. Some men were getting close. They were big and hard and quite prepared to take the law into their
own hands.
"Okay." she said. "It's a date." and then she was gone from my sight as I fumbled with my consciousness.
Anyway, that's how we met. She came and looked for me in the city out-patients dump. I was very surprised to see her again. She helped my shop
for a new hand. Her name was Himsa Numen and she was a freelance consultant. I told her my name (for I had one then), and told her that I was a florist. I don't think she believed me.
Oh mercy, they have called. It is time for me to go. I will write more if I return. I must record for posterity my frenzied drivel.

DAY THREE

I live another day, thus increasing the probability that I am immortal. But anyway, I was writing about the events leading up to my death. Himsa Nu
men.
Himsa Numen. Himsa Numen saw me whenever she could, usually when I was between jobs. I knew she only loved me because I loved her and so contributing to the world's pool of useless and futile emotions.
In retrospect maybe it didn't feel as bad as I felt at the time. We both liked watching cartoons in the big department warehouses. Then I started to think
about her too much. I began to live my life like a film, acting like the cool butch hero quite subconsciously, as if trying to impress Himsa as her spirit watched
over me. My jobs became sloppy unprofessional affairs, but I didn't care, I was infatuated with my love. My employers noted my undue care and attention.
One day they decided to test my loyalty and ordered me to terminate Himsa Numen. It felt like someone had swung a girder into my chest.
My devotion to the corporation was utter.
My love for Himsa felt greater that anything.
I took the easy, cheap way out. That night I felt for the throb in my neck and scratched away with my fingernails. Scratched until the blood that should have
gone to my brain was spraypainting the wall.
Funny how probabilities can swing like that.
Like in all the good comedic tragedies, Himsa couldn't bear my loss and shot herself through the roof of her mouth with the very same pistol she had
saved my life with.
They have told me not to perch on top the wardrobe again. I can only presume that this is because they cannot see me with the hidden camera they inserted into the wardrobe's handle.

DAY FOUR

No fellow gods today, just halted once by a melanky alleywayman with a stab of metal. I remember the nights when they asked you to 'hand over your
wallet now!' before slaughtering you. No nostalgia this time. His metal slid straight between my shoulder blades before I even heard him. Of course in
stinct caused me to turn before he could twist. It was ballet, short and sweet. As I span I broke his yellow neck with my arm. Splash.
It's impossible to pull out a knife that is embedded in your upper back. I can just touch it with my fingernails. I can't even take off my raincoat, it just swings
from my back.
And I had better tie a string around my thoughts here or I risk loosing an other finger. I was telling you about the shattering of my first love.
After those days, I became a singularity existing only in the future. Observing, unable to involve myself. I wondered lonely as a raindrop, trickling down
the razor-dazzled streets. My skin turned grey, hunger dragged away with my willpower, flesh and mind only existing for the sheer perversity of it. Bits of me
vanished one by one as the city-human complex grew. It was like I was being absorbed by the slick layer of waste and people that filmed the streets. One
year my arms vanished from my mind, hanging useless from my shoulders.
The next year my eyes went, and one wall merged into the next, merging into the men merging into the next man, merging into the city merging into the
next, until everything was a wall. I was living in a wall, the ultimate claustrophobia. I was only a me left, a senseless mind.
Apparently they found me down at the old dock, eating the arms and eyes of dead derelicts, my face a mess of self-inflicted slashes. That's what they said
at the time. That's what they said at the time but I knew I had died and they had brought me back and they would never convince me I had mearly entered
a hallucinatory depression. There were give-aways.

DAY FIVE

It's becoming increasingly difficult to write about this. If I think it I must write it, otherwise I think a little more and start questioning action. Action hates
being questioned. Action tends to jump in, peeling skin from my hands, or my hands from my arms, breaking things, or inflicting wounds so deep I have to
take pills forever. Yesterday I wrote about string. Now I'm not sure what to tie down. Thoughts fragmenting? Maybe because of Himsa and because of
what's happening now. If they read this and I tell them, or if I don't write this and action tells her, maybe thoughts would clear as she is cleared.
I was told that, because of my condition, I no longer produce endorphins. I told them I needed the pain. I wish I could bury my decaying heart, under the
deepest ocean where the light no longer reaches. The blackness and the pressure, oh how would that feel?
I feel I have to write her name. It's obligatory. This emotion is an entoparasite, paradoxical, repercussive. I am a hive in a garden, filled with dead in
sects, this emotion feeding on the putrescent liquid seeping from down ground channel. Pushing, self-defeating and woefully enjoyable.
It's like dying for a second time.

DAY SIX

Community action, derived from sheer desperation. Last ditch attempts to create a binding force between citizens. Desperation. Were humans not so
destructive at heart, we would not have the need.
I don't want her to like me.
The need for these pathetic community action pamphlets that are forced into my hands. The young man tries to start a conversation as I hand over my
coins. So what do you do for a living? I'm unemployed, I evade. So looking for a job? Yes, I evade. So you want technical work? Maybe start your own busi
ness? Yes, I evade, I'm going to go into the assassination industry. I'm going to slaughter potential messiahs and send their families as raw materials to the bio-vats.
She likes me and she's alive, not a ghost. I thought I could only love ghosts, it's been so long.
I want the man to say 'You're mad', or at least look at me oddly, but he just laughs. I sneer at him contemptuously. Were humans not so destructive at heart...
And through Blacky's eyes, something new. And love, six years old, and dead. What she doing now? Himsa, being dust.
Blacky, it's three twenty seven a.m., and she will be living her personal nightmare, and being Death for a little while.
Love, she is still in her ivory obsidian triangle of vacuum, brick and bodyguards. Who will fall first, her or I?
I feel I have to write her name, it's obligatory. Maybe tomorrow. This emotion is an entoparasite, feeding on insomnia and aura. Pamphlets nor jobs will change that.
It is they. I can't sleep, my heart won't slow down anymore. The pills, so sweet, saturated my blood. Last time I had dissolved into the city.
This time I am focused so sharply for the world to cope. The city sucks in around me, like a sweaty shirt around a bloody gunshot wound.
It's been a crazy week.