is like being kicked in the head. It’s a little busier than being dead for the first time. There’s so many things in my head buzzing about like the living grave of a buzzing box of maniacs that there just isn’t room for extra thought – you can’t think how long to cook pasta for or even remember how to turn the stove on. My stove is electric – you just press a button. Seriously, it’s cool. It’s like something off of Star Trek. I’d just play with the stove if I thought that would help – if that’s all that eating (cooking?) involved. You’re too exhausted to eat. Eat? Eat? Eat? I know that word… I used to know how to do it. The busiest part of my brain at the moment is the nerve that runs straight to my fingers as they sluice out bits of oddly ordered suboncsious onto a blank screen. Things that make sense only after I read them hours later. Black words onto white, like scraping something dark into the infinite void.
No.
I haven’t got enough bits of primordial ink in my head to make my own mark on things. I will scratch things from the sky and take it back. I will eat bits of the void and leave a little space, little lines that look like writing, like the words I saw written across the horizon in Skye but wasn’t fast enough to take a picture of. There will be light behind the darkness as I claw crumbs back – white from behind black. Light from emptiness, like a string of LEDs on a battery-exhausted laptop. The interface sleeps, the hard disk unspinning, but the processor still buzzes. It will be my subconscious and the crazy order that lives there at the moment, the emergency power, the autopilot and the answering machine. Hello, I’m afraid Ben’s brain is too busy to process conventional thought at present. Please write yourself a message for him to remind you to sort it out yourself later.
This exhaustion, this is September. This is till the middle of October. This is the state you reach when the straw should buckle the camel and yet the camel carries on. This is what it is to be a vampire? Dead to the real world and everyday things – not remembering how to eat, dressing only through sheer sleepwalking and talking only through cunningly prerecorded pieces of previous conversations spliced together. Whilst all the time your brain devotes more and more of its processing power to working its occult calculations. It’s a jobshare for the conscious mind. My mind has gone into administration. The unseen faceless powerful ones have taken over the day to day workings – calculating and stitching through synapses and adjectives until it is done. Until it is all put together.
I should be dead. Maybe I am. Has any human ever had this little sleep? Eyes close for hours every night but the brain does not rest? The thunderstorm against the glass pounds on my skull looking for its lost little bit of itself. I have a thunderstorm in my head. Has any creature ever had so much in their head – so many different voices and places and sights and sounds like a bus load of blond Japanese tourists instructing each other in backwards German on how to cook Beef Wellington inside out.
The play’s going terribly well.
I find this madness, chaos, so terribly tame and under control.
