Rohan Non-person leaves his very ordinary home one very ordinary working day. He has begun a lifetime's fitness program these past few hours. Things in his life are changing. This morning he decides to leave his mother's car in his driveway and catch the bus to work. Public servants don't get much exercise. So even when the nearest bustop takes him halfway to his destination, he decides to walk there.
Nothing nameable in the physical world separates this day from any other day in Rohan's mind. Or in any other way that might affect his average life. He was afterall just an average guy living in a street. He thought about this seven times a week. Convincing himself that he had never changed before this.
He had never thought anything of his trivial existence before. He worked like a termite on the eighty eighth floor in the most overpopulated departmental building in the world. Throughout the ordinary day he relaxed like a dog in the public service. He freely indulged in sexual fantasies, however found women in themselves a nuisance. But then something went terribly different.
DO YOU LOVE ME? she asked, her stomach pinching with doubt. Her eyes huge and black. Her voice strained and distant on the winds of his mind.
I SUPPOSE I SHOULDN'T SAY THAT. I DON'T EVEN KNOW, IF YOU KNOW THAT I'M HERE. Her voice was squeaky with fear and doubt. She remembered the time she had been lost as a child. And then she forgot.
She had found Rohan lying on the footpath still in his work clothes, close to the city. His light brown hair shoulder length and wispy. His eyes were vacant and yawning half open. He had tried to get to work sometime in the morning. He hadn't made it. It wasn't normal. She began to feel the normality slip away from her own life.
Was he breathing or dead? She had only come across him a few minutes before, and was already frightened of what she had said. Whirlwinds scooped up the footpath around them and she was nervous. The street was suprisingly deserted for an ordinary day. She stared down at the non-person lying before her. A couple of peacan-eyed youths smiled as they passed. Not sure where they were going or why the buses weren't running.
She looked after them as they went on their way, feeling more unusual than she would have liked to have felt. She searched for her shoes and was pleased to find them. Rohan Non-person was thoughtless and floating. Should she tell him again that she loved him? She dug her heels into the grass where she stood for support. She began to call for help.
Suddenly a freak gust of wind uprooted her being. It carried her away from the city and pushed her at him. She lost her balance easily, not expecting such a strong gust of wind at this time of day. She fell onto him briefly, glimpsing all the other women who had gone the same way.
Rohan walked towards the place where he thought he might be. Rohan walked to work along the city street at the wrong time of day. Rohan walked past strange people of the near distant physical world who were careful not to touch him. Who were even more careful not to notice him. Rohan walked alone.
Rohan doesn't know the time. The right time. The right day to float away. He has never made it back to work nor made it back home. He is stuck in the middle place. He has missed the bus. Will he be missed? No. There is no-one to miss him and no-where to go. Rohan is struck by sand blinding and sticky, although still in the city. There is no-one where he waits. The girl has disapated. He is weak and disappearing. No-one even notices him. No-one will ever find him.
The city street twists into shapes of the desert. Traffic of moving dunes and nests of crawling white wind. He has nowhere to go. Has come from nowhere existing. He grips the bustop sign. But it has flesh and prickles. He losing that part which is still and collected. His eyes are burning. The street is moving. He is turning into the brightest of elements. Then something he has never been exposed to approaches. The air changes.
ARE YOU EMPTY? Her hiss, her flavour. She is in control. She still as yet distant. He is still in the city. She is waiting in the desert.
She-voice on the wind. Will the voice have power over him? Wash into his now wasted world like night and storm. Will he become her voice through no conscious choice of his own? He is empty of course. Suseptable now to negative forces. The air is vibration. The voice is storm. She is moving towards him swiftly - howling her frozen breath into the warmest part of his being.
Rohan non-person of the anti-life society is being put to the test. He is doing his best to be calm, but he is hollow and falling and gasping for breath. He hangs on feebly to his past stillness of mind. She is determined to find her way back into him. Yes - she has been there before, eating away at the core of his soul. She is distant and hungry and bleeding to death.
Losing power in the city - having no control over his own life - the force moves in on him - into him, disapates and dies. Empty for? Me? Yes - he is so empty. Somewhere within his mind now, he sees the mountain to which he must go. The crimson mountain. The mountain of Loam. He is vast and flighty. He is alone and afraid of leaving the city. Once he had almost heard the voice. The empty fearful voice which had almost reached him - before dying away into the nothingness of him.
Rohan realised that he was lighter than usual when he began to blow past buildings, his grey coat billowing around beneath his armpits. His polished shoes dragging and tapping the pavement at intervals. Only in his sexual fantasies and wild night dreams, had he dared to fly above the clothesline, gaging his height by the houses surrounding him.
I AM WIND, Rohan is gasping. I AM WIND, as his feet are lifting from the ground beneath him.
