Part I Chapter 4

I was back in my childhood home, standing at the door, I could hear my mother inside. She loved to sing, often when she would be baking in the kitchen she would put on her favourite pieces and sing along the entire time. I would crinkle my nose and sigh back then but, I loved every minute of it. It was the only time I ever saw her being herself. She would hop, skip, jump and twirl along with the words and sometimes when I was done going through the work I did for my father, she would dance alongside me. She would always have a hint of cinnamon and vanilla around her, in addition to her own fragrance. Our entire home would feel as if it was alive. But this was a dream because the place looked exactly the same it had the last time I saw it. The last time I was there was to retrieve the files from the garage behind the place. For when my mother had taken off, my father found it impossible to go back.

He was a hard man with a hard life. Not your usual, jolly kind. Barring last night, I couldn’t remember the last time I had talked in length about him. Not that I mind talking about him, its just that no chances presented themselves. It is truly weird how you could live alongside someone for years and make them a part of your everyday life, only to have it all taken away when they leave you.

I had had a hard time, both of the times my parents left. Albeit under different circumstances, the betrayal did not sting any less. Yeah, that is what it felt like, betrayal. It is the 2200s now. If you cared enough about anybody, with resources, you could ensure they never leave you. We never had a choice though. Not me and my dad at least. That’s what we spoke about last night. Over brandy that was about as old both of our ages combined. It came from a collection my father had. Bottles gifted by relatives of the deceased, was it for a job well done or to ease the trauma, we would never know. It burned a little on the way down, but it’s after effects were almost too sudden. I couldn’t see my own face, but I saw hers, tingling and flushed the second she was done. It wasn’t long before her eyes got bloodshot. I asked her if I could make the couch up for her. For a lack of a better space. She kept shaking her head but I knew she couldn’t make her way back to her place. Not at this time, definitely not in this state. We must have downed three fourths of the entire bottle in a matter of a few hours. And it was a bit too much, even for someone who did it quite often.

I remember collapsing on the bed after handing over a blanket to her. I knew my house would be freezing right before the break of dawn. It smelled musty and unwashed, I am surprised I found it in the state I did. I remember sneezing about four times before realising that you can’t make the guest sleep wrapped in a musty old rag, so I think I deceptively made my way across the room with the musty one hanging off my hand behind my back and exchanged it with the one that I used. Not before sniffing it for anything bad. I sneezed twice more before settling in. I remember waking up in a short while to grab her some water. After that, I do not remember how it happened. But when I woke up, she was curled up beside me on my bed. With the clean blanket enveloping us both.

I couldn’t imagine what he would say. Not that he was around to offer his comments anymore. This was unprecedented. I didn’t know the official regulations that governed our professional relationships, but this definitely could not have made it past the stingy admin that would honestly kill all kinds of behaviour, inappropriate or not. Joy thieves. Not that this was joyous right. I was careful not to make any movements. I peeked with one of my eye and found out she was sound asleep. Dreaming away in a slur of brandy and honesty. I couldn’t deduct as to why did I agree to this. Or maybe I didn’t want to.

I hadn’t had a girl in bed since I was sixteen. So about ten years now. Last night was the first time in a long time that I thought about her, Jo. It was a repressed memory from a long time ago, one that had failed to bubble up mostly due to the alcohol I soaked it in. But the moment I opened the vault, it all came gushing out. Like blood from a long cut, when I started talking about her, I couldn’t stop. I grimaced at the thought of sounding like a sappy teenager in love. I was that, once upon a time, but not anymore. And I wore my tag as the heartbroken medium who couldn’t fathom falling in love again. ‘It isn’t meant for us’, as my father would often console me. He wasn’t particularly talking about the girl, I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. I could feel my heart getting louder by the second, for a while back there it sounded loud enough to be knocking on my ribcage, let me out, you fool. But it couldn’t, we, mediums, couldn’t afford the luxury of falling in love and having a family, like the rest of the cursed peopled here. It would evade us even if we thought we had it in our grip. That’s more painful, of course. It is better to have the doors shut at the first blockade. If you let the poor guy run through mazes and actually get a sense of what it feels to be desired, to have that taken away, has the capacity to break anyone. It broke my father, a pillar of strength, he sobbed for days after she left. It wasn’t unusual for her to take rash decisions like this.

But one day when I came back from work, she was gone. Just like that. It was a long drawn out escape that had clearly been in the works for months before the actual date. It just felt crushing to know that we couldn’t even see it coming, even though she hardly made an effort to hide it. She ran off, with the guy who lived a couple of blocks over. His wife had recently been eliminated when he started showing up in every social place. He would sit around the stores, the roads, the bars. Leering at women, looking for someone who would take him. We would mostly ignore his presence like a child crying out of turn. So were most women, but, it all changed when his name was selected for the upgrade draw. He absolutely lost his mind, that’s how delighted he was. Having gotten rid of his wife, his score had risen, exponentially.

Upgrades are mostly a single ticket out of here, but he pulled some strings and convinced the admin that given his age, if he didn’t take a companion along, he wouldn’t have any chances of finding one there. So they made an exception, more as a joke, than anything, if he were able to get a poor woman’s approval on spending the left over time she had, with him, they would, as a special case allow them. On the condition that, under no circumstances can either of them walk out on this arrangement, unless one of them dies.

Talk about until death do us part, right? Imagine living your entire life scoffing at someone, believing in your heart and mind that everyone deserves your respect and civil behaviour, except for this one man, who later ends up convincing your mother the she would be better off with him.

We always knew, of course, that she was not happy here. My parents met when they were barely adults. Not that anyone here treats children any differently. It just basically sucks for everyone, no matter what age they are. And at the time, my father didn’t feel the need to lead with the ultimate covenant on his life. He just didn’t think it made a difference. He obviously never told me any of this, I got to know most of their story through their relatives, the problems however, were yelled at each other during the course of nights. It took me quite some time to piece together the entire line of offence and defence in their respective cases, but I could never really figure out the clear winner. The judge had a different take all together though, during the divorce proceedings, all of the trauma that I had had to unfortunately live through was made public knowledge and debated upon in an open court for weeks. I couldn’t not go, of course. I was one of the party of interest and they needed my testimony for the bits. It was then that I realised I had become an involuntary witness to the death of my parent’s love. She went on to win the trial, and she left soon after.

I was around ten when this happened and I felt quite overwhelmed as the judge dictated the order. I knew it would be unseemly for me to just stomp my foot down now and ask them to stop the nonsense. No one would take a ten year old seriously. I remember thinking if maybe I clung on to her and did not let her go, that she would stay then. But she didn’t. The saddest part is no one brought up who I would go with, until the very last minute. It felt as if they had forgotten entirely that there was another life that stood there amongst the ruins of their marriage. Deluged by the effect of having trusted only these two people and now one of them was just off the hook. When it did come to it, when the judge asked, who would I want to live with, my father shot up from his seat faster than I had ever seen him be and tell the judge that our line of work mandated a heir to take over, and since my training had already started, in a matter of speaking, that I should stay with him. He went on for about half an hour while the judge just kept nodding along. I don’t remember hearing much of it, it’s a little blurry but not once did my mother try to interject and put across a case of why, along with her, even I deserved a better life.

Life was never the same after that, my father was distraught. Everyone around us spoke exclusively about our family. Wherever we would go we would hear the voices in the air that would hush up precisely for the seconds we would pass them. It got out of our hands, there was nothing that we could do anymore anyway. So he kept his head down and asked me to do the same. I did the best I could but one day I couldn’t take it. A bunch of older boys from around our house wouldn’t stop picking on me. They kept on teasing me, running after me, calling me indescribable names and I remember running into a dark alley way a little away from our neighbourhood and just stopping. I must have caught them by surprise because at least two of them ended up bumping into me. They circled around me and kept on jeering away. I asked them to stop and when they wouldn’t stop calling my mother names that I couldn’t for the life of me remember, I ended up punching the oldest one in his mouth. I remember how my entire body wouldn’t stop trembling for a while after that. The punch barely grazed the skin of the other guy but it hurt my hand like I had just punched a wall. I hadn’t done anything like that before. They were dumbfounded for a second there, while they scrambled around to ask him if he was all right, I took off. I didn’t look back until the moment I got home and locked the front door. My father was away that night so I slept right beside it. I was scared they would come down to take their revenge and there were no tricks up my sleeve anymore.

I saw the boys a couple of times after that, they would sneer and leer, but always from a distance. I think the older one did try and catch me once I was returning home from the store but there were too many people around us so he didn’t do anything. It became increasingly difficult to live like that.

But over a period of time, people forgot. All they did remember is that my father, in utmost respect for his professional duties had stopped me from going. Most of these kids’ parents still required my father’s assistance in executing the order of the downgrade so they did not have a choice but to move on. They stopped talking about it, but I never stopped living with the truth. It stared at me every morning, evening and night. Every time, I would instinctively call out my mother to tell her something exciting I had read about. It would cause a pain so intense in my body that punching a wall sounded like a reward.

I knew there was no recourse of any kind. There was no way she was coming back, I would never be allowed to leave. Most importantly, integral decisions had already taken place, with or without my consultation, so now all there was left was to live with it.

We never spoke about it. I think he felt too embarrassed by it, or too sad. He didn’t come home until after I had slept and didn’t even as much as try to even talk to anyone else. He would get home, sit in front of the screen, munch on whatever was the cheapest ready made dish and drink. Every night. Sometimes I would hear him mumbling to himself, but I never asked.

There was an unspoken rule amongst us, on the way back home, he sat me down in the car. He didn’t say anything for a while. I was at a particular loss of words. I mean, we had made it to the court room, all three of us. A unit of family. Having lived at least a decade in each other’s company and somehow only two of us were supposed to go back. She didn’t ride home with us. I don’t know for whose benefit that was. I wanted to ask her if even that was in the decree. I was boiling up with a rage I hadn’t felt before in my entire existence. He didn’t look at me. He kept on staring ahead at the way. I knew he wanted to get back in time, the car wasn’t ours. It was an sorry old thing that one of our neighbours owned. He stopped the car on the side of a deserted road and shut off the ignition. I remember it was freezing back then, every little sigh of ours was exponentially exaggerated on its way out.

He took his head in his hands and stayed quiet for longer. I didn’t know what to do, I knew his heart was breaking in a million pieces, because I knew he thought the judge wouldn’t rule in her favour. He thought, just like me, a ten year old, that people could somehow be dictated by how they felt. I knew that because on our way there, he was fine. As we left our house, he came into my room and told me there was nothing to worry about, that he had it all under control. And I saw that belief of his break almost at the same time as mine, when the judge stated that such a union would only provide more pain and that there seemed to be an irrevocable breakdown of sorts. Irrevocable.

That’s how that day felt too, irrevocably tainted. It bled so bad that all days afterwards got the sadness seeping into them. It was a deluge. We kept it in ourselves, trying to best avoid the existence of such an unnatural phenomenon that we forgot to cope with it. He had his ways, I had mine.

As we sat there with our mouths ajar, our breaths leaving clouds of smoke and dust in their wake, he turned to me, ‘We can’t let this affect us, you know. It doesn’t matter if she didn’t want us. I want you and I think that should be enough. We’ll make do, you know.’

He kept on going for a while back there, I don’t remember much of his actual words, I don’t remember feeling like it would be okay. I got enraged that their actions had led us down this road. I was annoyed with them but I couldn’t let it affect me. It wouldn’t be beneficial. It would have meant kneeling down before the tower of sadness that loomed above us and apparently, we were not supposed to do that. Instead, he suggested we pretend as if nothing had changed and went on living our lives the way we were before any of this happened.

She stirred in her sleep so I laid there more still. I didn’t know what to say to her. I have no idea how I ended up in another situation where words were rendered useless, somehow. I was ashamed that I had let her know this much. I could have stopped somewhere, it is not as if it would have been an inadequate place to stop. Last night, under the influence of the open bottle, the free flowing drink, I really let a lot slip past me. The worst thing is, I couldn’t remember if she told me anything. I just remember talking a lot, talking about everything. I remember speaking until my head throbbed. I didn’t remember listening with the same intensity. I tensed up a little bit, just thinking about this. I closed my eyes and tried to pass my time.

It would be moronic to get up right now, I don’t even know how this particular sleeping arrangement came into being. What if I suggested it? What if all this was my own doing. I grimaced at the thought. I would be letting down my entire line of forefather, tutting away from their place in the after life. If there was any such thing, I did find solace in the fact that no one else knew about my stupidity. I was still safe, until anyone else knows, you can still save your face.

I was embarrassed that the events transpired. I wanted to run away. If only I could get out of my own house, leaving her behind and just run out. I peered out of my one eye and saw her sleeping contently on her side. With her side of the blanket wrapped around her lithe body.

This was a huge deal, I knew that. I think, she knew it too. If she had any recollection of the night, although, going by her peaceful demeanour, I would be surprised that she knows.

I drifted off to sleep thinking about the things I over shared, and that I hadn’t taken a chance to listen. When I woke up she was gone. There was just the empty space with her contours in the blanket to show for it. If it hadn’t been for that, I would have honestly had a hard time believing she was even here. I was so blown away by the inappropriateness  of it all, I couldn’t do anything. I finally ended up leaving my bed sometime around noon. The weather was shit outside. Not that it had been any better in the recent past, but it was leaning towards the shittier side of the scale these days. The visibility was close to zero, anyone without a pair of those infrared glasses fitted into their headgear was as good as dead outside. The streets were filled with smoke clouds, walking along side you.

The air quality index was dropping off the charts, everyone everywhere could only talk about this. My mind felt hazier than the environment, but I believe that has to be taken care of another day.