John C.P. Warner

His eyes dimmed long before the first building came down, so he never saw the empty spaces that represented his city’s losing battle with the sky. All around him, as he walked his daily, unchanging route, appeared tall rectangles of blue and white and grey, that bruised from the struggle as evening fell and the blanket of night draped itself across the ruins of defeated buildings.

 

His hearing failed before the cars came, before the roar of traffic, before the grinding metallic battle cries of demolition machinery. He heard only the steady beat of hoof falls that had accompanied him for as long as he could remember. He lived, now, in a city existing only in his head, beneath his feet, a city mapped, drawn daily like an ochre cave painting, by the click-click-scratch of a foldable white cane.

Bricks and mortar had come and gone, yet the psychic landscape through which he walked remained, unchanged, still bordered by the same smoke-blackened facades, peopled by the shades of long dead men and women.

 

If he tried he could feel the cobbles through the worn soles of his shoes, cobbles that had been torn up over four decades ago. He stopped beside long-gone grass verges to inhale the memory of wet grass and daisies. In one place he would pause and turn his sightless eyes upon a churchyard that had, twenty years since, prematurely given up its dead. This house of God, the church in which he had been married, had crumbled and been torn down after a section of roof beam had killed some poor boy, one of a group  hiding or seeking in the husk of a building. He had not seen this reported, nor realised that the stone face of the Madonna he reached out to touch at these moments lay, with other memorials and the bodies they marked, some fifteen miles away, on different sacred ground.

 

He had tried, at first, to follow the changes. He had mourned the passing of the chestnut-brown dray horse that had spelled the end of his business and usefulness. Yet he went on, outliving first his wife, then his eldest son – he and his wife had lost a second child shortly after birth, leaving her infertile and imbued with sadness that neither he nor their son could ever conquer and to which she finally gave herself one evening, after he had fallen asleep. After the death of his eldest child, he had unmoored himself from the present and allowed himself, and the city in which he lived, to drift silently back into the past.

 

The nurses that visited him mostly didn’t notice when he called them by his wife’s name and those that noticed didn’t care, they made him his meals and allowed the burbling susurrus of his old man’s voice to wash over them, occasionally watching as, misty eyed, their charge relived some long passed domestic scene.

The route he walked to the corner shop had remained the same, the shop-keeper would help him to count the change for his cigarettes and wish him well as he left the premises. As he left the shop he would smile at the whinny of his dray and take up reins in forgetful hands as they returned home.

 

Occasionally he would cry as memory, with hateful persistence, forced itself upon him and he suffered his losses over again. At these times he would cradle his crucified saviour – the one his wife had worn on their wedding day, which he had removed before they buried her, unable to bear seeing it, too, disappear beneath the cold earth. He would stroke the mournful face, whisper to it, accusations, pleas, laments. At times when the physical pain of loss grew greater than the pain of age he would clutch it so tightly that its edges would open up wounds in his own palms.

 

Soon enough, however, he would recede into the cool waters of forgetfulness and with very different tears in his eyes, would whisper long lost love to the cold side of his bed.

 

He could not hear the car. He could not see the car.

 

He opened his eyes, squinting – it had been so long since he had experienced light that even the dim twilight was overpowering. He rolled onto his stomach then rose painfully to his feet, patting the thick dust from his clothes. The scenery was unfamiliar. Miles upon miles of barren ground stretched out in all directions, lit only by a pale blue light which suffused both ground and sky. He slowly became aware of a presence. Instinctively he reached behind him, taking up the reins of his dray which moved forward along an ill-defined track in the dust.

 

Mile piled high upon mile. Time frozen in the pale-blue half-light, yet he was content, walking with the familiar sound of hoof falls beating out staccato rhythms which layered themselves upon the drag and step of his arthritic gait.

 

There were no animals here but his, no life at all, just ground and sky and light.

 

His dray stopped, lying down in the dust. Seeing no reason not to, he joined it on the ground, stretching in the dust, joints creaking, muscle popping and cracking as he writhed like an aged cat, smiling at the luminescent sky.

 

Time stretched out indefinitely.

 

The horse – he had never named it – gave a whinny when ready to resume.

 

A light appeared in the distance and grew as they walked, becoming many distinct lights, becoming the windows of buildings, becoming a distant, walled city of unreal architecture.

 

It continued to grow, denying him the ability to comprehend its scale or distance.

 

As the magnitude of the city became apparent, its walls hundreds of feet tall yet dwarfed by taller buildings of obscure proportions, a mass of humanity became visible around the walls.

From distance it appeared like an undulating sea of flesh.

           

Curiously, hesitantly, he followed the gentle tug of the reins, drawing closer and closer to the cyclopean city, to the writhing mass surrounding it. He felt his muscles loosen as he approached; the drag and step that had made him feel so old, so useless for so long diminished in severity with the miles, his footsteps in the endless dust becoming crisper, more defined with each step, as though the heavy burden of years were being lifted from him.

           

The sound of children crying.

           

The sound of babies crying.

           

He struggled, at first, to place the sound. Despite the diminishing distances it was faint, barely audible, yet from the memory which had so often failed him he dredged the red-faced screaming of his first son, six months old, teething, then the blue-skinned screaming of his second son, hours old, dying. Tears sprung to his eyes, halting his progress toward the city and the bodies and the sound.

           

With the reins still tugging at his wrist he wept disconsolately.

           

There were forms in the press of bodies, though he could not tell where one ended and another began, so coated in dust, so close together they appeared woven from skin and dirt.

 

The pull of the reins grew more urgent, dragging him into the thick soup of sound where he could hear the mournful moans of adults, the tidal roar of an ocean over which wheeled the shrill, birdlike ululation of infant laments.

 

The pain, constant for so long, further relinquished its hold with each reluctant step, yet the life he felt coursing through him, the renewed strength, even his sight now seemed small consolation for the journey. He stumbled on, the horse, persistent, insistent, threatening to pull him off balance if he slowed, until he could make out individuals, until he could not fail to see the soiled, pathetic shapes of people, their eyes all on him, pleading, weeping and moaning their terrible, wordless entreaties.

 

The crowd parted as he moved close enough to see the shape of a tall gate in the wall.

 

The horse continued its steady progress.

 

All around him the innumerable faces of bodies stacked hundreds high followed him as he walked, one, blackened by fire, skin crisp and blistered, staring into him with empty sockets, a few steps further and half a female face leered out from between the human folds, her skin, peeled from scalp to chin, dangling beneath her face, swinging wetly with the undulation of the bodies, further, a young boy, his skull almost entirely destroyed by a roof beam, thrust out a hand in which he held his one intact eye, as though to better witness his passing, further and, as he was about to pass through the gates, a small blue baby caught his eye, bobbing upon the fleshy waves.

 

The horse pulled him, still weeping, through the gates and in to the bright city beyond. The gates clattered closed yet, despite their bulk, did little to drown out the sound.

 

The air was a balm upon his skin, cool but not unpleasant, raising goose-bumps on his forearms. Somewhere, almost silenced by the moaning beyond the wall, he could hear the soft sibilance of running water.

A man stood before him, smiling broadly. ‘Welcome,’ he said, his voice warm.

 

‘Wh-wh,’ his voice grated, as though unused for years, he swallowed. ‘Where am I?’

 

‘The Kingdom,’ replied the man with an expansive gesture.

           

‘Who are those…?’

           

‘You cannot help them,’ said the man, turning and walking off along one of the broad, tree-lined boulevards that bordered the insensible architecture.

           

‘But…’ he fell into step, his horse following now.

           

‘They are unsaved and, so, un-saveable.’

           

‘You live here, listening to that,’ words failed him, he gestured around, ‘that noise?’

           

‘After a time, you hardly notice it,’ a dismissive wave.

           

‘Living so close to such… such… suffering?’

           

‘You always have. We all have. Cheek to jowl with the suffering of others, yet untouched by all but our own. We learn to live with the suffering of others. We are saved, our own suffering left behind.’

           

The two men walked on in silence, along a boulevard which swarmed with smiling, happy looking people, yet, between games he noticed that the children would swap knowing looks, glancing up, nervously, at the towering wall – as though only they could hear the torment without.

           

‘You will be happy here,’ said his guide eventually. ‘We have everything you could ever need. You are saved.’

           

‘My wife?’

 

Silence

           

‘My sons?’

 

Silence

           

‘Where are my family?’ he asked, growing angry with the implacable quiet.

           

‘Only you are saved.’

           

‘Why? Why only me?

           

‘I will leave you here. There is everything you need,’ and with that, the man walked away without a backward glance, leaving him staring dumbly at his retreating back.

           

Having watched the man consumed by distance, he took up his reins and walked. All around him men and women wore fixed smiles, drank from the crystal clear river – a river which had no source in the desert beyond – entered and exited the eye-watering buildings, appeared and disappeared from their windows, sat beneath spreading palms, each smiling, each, even in a crowd, seemingly alone.

 

He walked.

 

Faster and faster, on and on he walked through endless streets, the gargantuan walls small barrier to the torment of the interminable moans from beyond. With tear blurred vision he regarded the paradise that appeared to him submerged, drowned by the oceanic misery pouring in over the walls, feeling hollow.

           

Another gate loomed before him, around it a furtive crowd.

           

No smiles here.

           

All gathered looked through the gate in to the limitless darkness beyond, each man and woman seeming trapped, rapt by the quiet abyss.

           

He walked.

 

Walking so long in darkness should have made this bright interlude a joy.

 

Having walked so long in silence he was conscious of his ingratitude, desiring to rid himself of sound.

He understood that there could be no return from that darkness beyond, from the silence, but knew also that he could not stay in this place, a paradise surrounded by torment. He had lived his life within stumbling distance of both highest joy and lowest misery and would not have it continue here.

 

‘Such misery,’ he found himself saying, his voice still that of an old man, rasping, pained. ‘Such a lot of misery, so close to happiness, on Earth as it is...’

 

He stepped from the light into the darkness, the quiet, forgetful darkness beyond.