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Chapter 2
David stopped writing. It had only been a few minutes of scribbling, and then came asudden halt.David took the black ball-point pen that was leaning against his sweaty palm, hoisted itfrom its still and peaceful stance, and held it horizontally with his thumb and indexfinger, with his wrist pointing towards the ceiling. He then separated his two fingers fromthe pen, as if it had caught on fire, and let it fall.The pen dropped silently onto the pad. As David watched it lying there, he felt odd. It hadseemed like he had let go of a puffy feather – not a pen – and that it had
moved 
, just like afeather would, drifting through the wind, moving round and round, up and about, beforeultimately landing on the even surface.For David, the concept of time had now been lost completely. What was real and whatwasn’t suddenly mattered little to him. It had been hours since he had been brought in tothat boxed interrogation room, and the wear and tear of Murphy’s interrogationtechniques had slowly crept deep into David, causing him to experience a light delirium.
 It hasn’t been all bad though - I’m still alive
, he thought. Barely.In that moment of still and uninterrupted delusion (Murphy was keeping his distance andstaring at David like one does with curiously-behaving creatures at the zoo), where allDavid was doing was sitting, he happily embraced the torpid stupor he found himself inand then comfortably detached from his current painful reality once more (he had, after all, done it before he had picked up the pen, what was to stop him from doing it now?).This time however, it was different. This time, his “checking out”, of reality, to ademented state of mind was due to mental fatigue, and not so much a result of his tokenstubbornness.So, after falling into his trance, the thought of debating over whether he was experiencinga dream or not, became irrelevant, when he realized he had in fact, made a real decision:to
 stop writing.
It was this real decision that forced David to contemplate whether he was dead or not.The sensation of not feeling fully awake and aware of where he was, and what he wasdoing there, made him feel foreign to his surroundings, and this was enough to make himthink “
 Am I dead?
” He wasn’t quite sure whether he was fully capable of taking adecision, and his drooping eyelids were manifesting a queer sensation, one that made puthim in a semi-awake mode, in which he drifted in and out of consciousness.He closed his eyes.Stillness.He opened them. He closed them again.
 
There was stillness, with a vague noise in the background. It was clearly audible to him.He opened his eyes, and then he closed, and squeezed tight. The wrinkles around his eyesmultiplied tenfold and he receded into himself, like a prune, bending inwards.Until the rattling sound, that had been building up in the background, sped up into afrenzied commotion, wheezing at his eardrums, then thumping into them like big tribaldrums, did David let out a small whimper. Murphy watched closely, and took two steps back. The other policeman observed the drool falling off David’s lower lip. It was toomuch for David now. He searched and found; he picked up on the troubling commotiongoing on in the back of his head and located the source of discomfort.It was there, like it had been when he bashed the guy’s head in. The feeling of  powerlessness and ultimate betrayal to a principle he couldn’t let go of, and the quietrelease when he so bluntly went against his own beliefs, and decided, to just get rid of therules that were supposed to be followed.When his eyes closed he remembered the damn reason he had fallen into such a mess inthe first place.It had always been the guilt, the damn Meraviglia guilt. It was that burdensome familycredence of “the way things should be” that so heavily plastered his free spirit, causinghim to distance himself from his family and from anything that bore any resemblance tothem. It was this that had transformed him into a lifelong bachelor. Every girl in David’slife had at one time or another made his fetid feelings of guilt resurface, and that wouldsoon cause whatever relationship he had managed to keep, to quickly dissolve. So girls became sex objects. They developed into one night stands, momentary satisfactions and playthings, but never companions.Clara Mint, the girl he had held on to for a year, had been, and still was, the love of hislife. The relationship had survived every insult, irrational action and sardonic commentthat David so bluntly laid on Clara, a lovely girl, who as soon as she would have gladlyleft David for having received such hurtful affronts, always refused to do so, because sheso foolishly loved him. Enamored by the thought of “saving” David, Clara had taken it asher life mission to turn what she saw as a confused, troubled man, into a reformed, lover of life, whose potential was, according to her unwavering faith in him, to yield fantasticthings. It was this false illusion that made the relationship last. The year they lastedtogether then, was Clara’s doing. David only avoided the end of it all by his refusal toquit seeing her, despite his many empty threats to do so. It was Clara’s insistence to keepon seeing him, after all, which made her so attractive in his eyes.Clara’s insistence, and firm belief in him, had been what almost saved him. Almost.She had first found him after his home had burned down, lying between the burnt bricks,in his business suit and ugly spotted tie, limply hanging on to nothing, his legs spread out
 
and his arms flailing against the destructed property. He was there, but not, and that starrynight, he laid bare for the entire world to see, with his soul lost in its own contention. Asvulnerable as he was, she had not permitted her pity for him to take hold of her, andfirmly saw that the man in the ruinous plot of land, where a house had once stood, wasnow grieving, in what she thought was a very valid way. So she came to him, and with nowords exchanged between the two, they embraced, his grip tearing into her clothes (then,clenched into her skin) and as she went forth to further embrace him, she felt not anounce of pain.It was this incredible event that lay the original strength and might that characteristicallymade their relationship a strong one. And there was love, much love. It was the power of that initial encounter, and the clouting resonance of all the significant events during their time together, that had so intoxicated them both, into such a morphed sense of reality, thatonce they had left each other for good, and embarked on their own separate ways, Davidspiraled into a self-destructive absence of mind and by that point Clara was too late to doanything.And now, he was being interrogated by two policemen, and longing for his loving Clara.The transient thought of his loved one vanished as soon as it came; he detached from thedreamland and quickly woke. The realization that everything had been quiet for a whileset in and in a spasm he looked over to his right side, to where Murphy usually was(Murphy liked standing to his right, because it was there where he could best admire hiswork - David’s busted right eye), and was surprised to see that he was now behind him.He turned quickly and saw only two things: a bulging mass of red hair hovering over him, with its crop of split hairs and jagged edges shaking about in different hues of red,and Murphy’s eyes, bulging out of his face, ready to pop out. The rest of the man’s facewas pitch black; darkened completely, and obscured from David’s view.Murphy was producing a thick ominous presence around David. Feeling rather confident,he laid his two hands on David’s shoulders, and pummeled his weight on his prisoner likea putrid set of barbells. The dire situation David was in (to write - or to be tortured),started to crowd in on him, causing him to once again, feel used, and unfairly blackmailed. Then, he sufficed wholly and silently to himself to just not
care
and turned back to the notepad, and as soon as he did, he twisted right back to Murphy, who was stillstaring.
 He’s drilling holes in the back of my skull with all that fucking staring,
thoughtDavid.David had forgotten all about Murphy and his
 shit 
while he had been writing, but hedidn’t want to write anymore, not like this. After all, there was nothing to lose, thingscouldn’t get worse, and by now, David figured, at least he knew he was capable of holding on to the one thing that had gotten him thus far - his stubbornness - and tomaybe use this as a bargaining tool. It had, after all, been hours since he had first been brought in. David then figured that
he
was controlling
them.
So he chose to stay put.
of 00

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03 / 12 / 2011This doucment made it onto the Rising List!
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