The raindrops plunge against my hard, naked skin and recoil into the ground.
Their loud, singular splashes undercut the silence of the surroundings. Darkness tiptoes, sidestepping the narrow and linear stream of the unruffled sky. I stand still beside an empty bench, unwary of the hard-hitting raindrops, my black hair straggling over my eyes like the peak of a coal pile tipped over from its assembly. Everything is blurry—the air, the tiled pavement, the buildings, the trees. The rain intensifies…What was a blur a moment ago is completely nebulous now. Reality departs, as it does every time; my eyes close. I am restrained in my stationary position for my feet no longer stand on concrete, but on an impalpable, grey plane of metaphysical cement, upon which I don’t know how to move.
“Insanity sheds its skin and bleeds chaos.”
A whisper strikes my eardrum. I try to trace its origin with my mind’s eye, but all I can see is a commanding sun that emits rays of darkness instead of light. This peculiar sun has persisted in many of my visions and has rendered my mind sightless every time. The last time I felt or saw something real was when a careening truck ran over my tender bones. After that, I have ventured into many surreal, unrealistic and intangible environments, the likes of which cannot be shaped by the concrete and defined creativity of reality.
Back in the material world, I had an utter distaste for reality.
My mother once took me to a toy shop close to our home. It was a small, congested place, with conjoined glass counters, beyond which rows of porcelain dolls glistened under the mild morning sunlight. She scanned the action figures, colorforms, litebrites, dolls, ponies, pinkies, potato heads, and after an entire hour inquiring and testing the tolerance of the shopkeeper, she finally decided to buy a box of Legos for me. I remained completely uninterested and silent in my own right.
“Avery, I’m going to buy these Legos for you. I’m sure you’ll have a lot of fun with them,” she said.
I maintained my reticence. To compensate for my lack of enthusiasm, I gave her a suppressed smile, which substituted for an affirmation. On our way out of the shop, an ice truck passed by, kindling a cheeriness inside me that, as seconds fled, turned into jumpy desperation.
“Ice cream! Ice cream! Ice cream!”
I pointed towards the ice truck with childish innocence, while jumping on my toes. My mother urged me to remain calm. But she knew that I wasn’t going to until my demands were met. She bought me a conical chocolate-vanilla ice cream, which assumed the appearance of a serpentine skyscraper inside my head. I was a peculiar child. I never ate that ice cream. Instead, I reshaped into a snowball and an inclined slope and a depression at the center of a road. At that moment, I felt like a master manipulator, the destroyer of reality, the wielder of surrealism, the magicians of magicians, for what are magicians but the slayers of reality?
Although Legos could give rise to many different structures, they were way too concrete for my liking. They lacked the structural flexibility an ice cream possessed. If only my mother could understand that.
As that ice cream melted in my hands, a conspicuous smile stretched the corners of my lips to their extremes like the contemptuous grin of a villain, and an utter satisfaction ensued when all of it was reduced to a vanilla-colored stain on the pavement.
In my childhood, I molded reality for fun and pleasure, but in my adolescence, the molding became more of a survival tactic.
While others slept in the comfort of their foam beds, I spent most of my time as an adolescent boy crouched like a cowering cub in the darkness of upholstered furniture. Once, I had my legs splayed like a crawling soldier in the misty gloom of a king-sized bed. I heard approaching steps and loud thuds of smashing doors, similar in effect to the frightening sounds of guns and bombs in a battlefield. Sometimes, the steps would retreat and the palpitations of my heart would muffle themselves into silence. And other times, the steps would edge closer and my heart would race against my chest. Every prey on the planet has had its senses overwrought with the same anxiety I felt at that moment, for what is anxiety but the pacing of an unbridled present into an unpredictably crippling future.
Fear is an omniscient, ubiquitous God. But for me, it took the form of a tall, thick-bearded brother, his steps as heavy and blood-curdling as a giant. He dragged me out of that bed by my overstretched arms, and battered me and battered me with a small steel-rod to his satisfaction. He always needed an absence of reason to reprimand me. No sins or delinquencies were committed. To him, my existence alone was my biggest transgression. Every day I endured the scratching of metal against my skin by teleporting into a world of my own. In my rapturous imagination, the steel rod was a lightsaber, a sword of immaculate power, wielded by the evil Ivan — the quintessential villain — and my skin an impenetrable gateway to a utopia, where children indulged in video games and feasted on mountains of Turkish delight. Any dedicated protector would go to extreme lengths to prevent the forces of evil from infiltrating a joyous world such as this.
A time came, however, when the beatings got to me, and the last of human feeling retired to the burial grounds of my heart, leaving a gaping hole. After that, I started to incite him deliberately. Sometimes, I was even reckless enough to egg on his fury. I started getting a kick out of the pain.
Abruptly after that, he lost the appetite to inflict pain. He claimed that he had found faith and religion and that he was on a fast-track to redemption now. But I knew the real reason behind his decision to stop treating me like a punching bag. He no longer felt in control. The palpable sense of powerlessness had taken the fun out of violence. And I understood him. What pleasure can be extracted from pummeling a corpse?
I had to carry the weight of my own living corpse to work and school, and the world’s numerous hostile centers, with a skeletal grace. Sullen eyes and a careworn grimace increased the repulsiveness of my existence. To my utter dismay, this burden had corrupted the fantastical realms of my imagination. Ivan had infiltrated the utopia, the children were massacred, and mountains of Turkish delight spilled into noisome sewers. At times, I felt as if the entire world was a capacious grave, and I was just awaiting the gracious presence of vermin ready to decompose my stinking, living body. Maybe this world was a dumping site, a colossal landfill, where breathing humans were disposed of, to isolate them from the beatific silence that lives in the cosmos. At least, that’s what my brother had me believe.
And then, the day came that is ingrained in my memory like a fresh wound. The sun was at its utmost peak. It glared with a contagious ferocity and malice. Its presence riled me. My face wore the usual contorted grimace as I dragged on with weary legs. I often used to go out on these long walks when my brother was home. He no longer posed a threat, but his mere presence was so disgusting and revolting that, at times, I felt like escaping into the farthest corners of the earth.
On my way, I stumbled across a solitary pine tree encaged inside a steel fence. Its thick stalk ascended into the skies, and its feeble branches were riddled with worn-out leaves suspended downwards as if they were carrying a heavy burden. I stood under its shade, but that wasn’t what interested me. Its stately presence stirred my imagination.
I climbed the fence and propped my back against its thick stalk with outstretched legs and hands resting on my lap, then retreated by means of a gigantic Ferris wheel, which always served as a conduit for my travels, from the real world into the realms of my imagination. This time, the Ferris wheel carried me to a mountain. It was covered in snow and I had nothing on but my white T-shirt embroidered with red roses. It’s ridiculous how in a world so emotionally exerting your body remains numb to the cold, and in the real world, where seasons and scents and swords have such a real presence, your body cries but your emotions slumber.
A narrow pathway between the mountains beckoned me. From it appeared a wolf with bloodshot eyes like red sirens, and misty grey and white fur. It strolled towards me, a daunting haughtiness in his eyes that showed his capacity to drown the spirits of a man who had nothing left to lose. With every step he took in my direction, my fear heightened. Finally, there came a point when I decided that my life had run its rightful course, even in this world, where everything suffers, but nothing dies.
I surrendered. I suppressed my will to live.
The wolf stopped and locked his eyes at me, his teeth drooling with the blood of prey, and his fur emitting the pungent odor of dead men. He stepped backward. He then pounced with quick ferocity. I didn’t flinch. But then everything abruptly vanished and I found myself in the real world, standing in front of a rushing truck.
That truck didn’t honor me with death I deserved. It subjected my mind, the only surviving part of my existence, to a place where I was to bear my remaining days comatose in a metaphysical landscape of indecipherable dimensions. In the end, I traded an intolerable life, reigned over by my brother’s tyrannic stares and physical oppression, from which I had a dim opportunity to escape, for eternal entrapment in my corrupted mind.
But this trade didn’t happen when that truck ran me over. The negotiations commenced years ago under the supervision of my naivety, in the toy shop glistening with porcelain dolls.
Ahsan Yousaf is a writer hailing from the city of rowdy-rickshaws and suffocating, tightly-knit streets—Rawalpindi. He holds a firm conviction that every person has a wealth of natural emotion buried within him, begging to be mined and hauled to the nearest digital typewriter. He is the author of the novel “The Devil’s Hour” which has been endorsed by Dasstan, a publication based in Islamabad—Rawalpindi’s adjoining, wealthier twin. He lives alone, under a self-imposed house sentence that limits his interactions with the outside world to a few hours.
