Dust: (Part I: Sandstorms) (6 page)

In
the end, who can say whether it was a coincidence or not. The story, if you call it that, starts with μ but where it leads and what it all adds up to is another matter. There are apparent links, sure, but do they amount to anything important? Do the various events and connections, described in such detail, form part of a bigger picture?  You could waste a lifetime poring over these sorts of questions, burying your nose in a book, looking for some underlying structure, but these questions are never for the story to answer and, in any case, there are far better ways to spend your time than sitting around reading a novel.

μ had just opened the front door of
his flat and there it was, lying directly in front of him. It struck him as unusual straight away. There was never normally post for him, some bills perhaps, the occasional piece of junk mail, but even that was less now that he had moved flats.

He
turned the envelope over, feeling its weight. The heavy duty manila suggested its contents might be in some way valuable. His name was written on the front in thick black marker pen. Brightly coloured stamps and postmarks crowded the front – wavy lines of red ink. One mark looked like it read: ‘Brasil’ and another: ‘Airmail’.  μ didn’t know anyone in Brazil.

He opened
the inner door, that led to his flat, as he pulled at the thick glue that held the flap of the envelope shut. Inside lay a sheaf of typed sheets. Names and descriptions of locations were interspersed with clips of dialogue, as if someone had been following people, noting down their actions. It made no sense. Had some confidential dossier been sent to him by mistake? He looked more closely.

No, it appeared to be some sort of film script. He didn’t read these sorts of things and he struggled to
grasp the layout. Most of each page was white space, broken only by small regular clumps of text floating in the centre. Why had it been sent to him?

He leafed quickly through
. Page after page was covered in light grey type with a font reminiscent of old-fashioned manual typewriters. He ran his finger over one of the pages but it was smooth and appeared to have been printed rather than hand typed. Who would send him this? He checked the envelope again; it definitely looked like one of the stamps read ‘Brasil’. There was no letter of explanation enclosed.

He threw his bag on the couch and placed the script on the table, orbiting around it. The flat took up half of an old draughty building that had been half-heartedly renovated in order to rent out. The landlord was never there and his flatmates weren’t back by then so he had the place to himself.

He flicked through the first few pages. What a disappointment! Twelve pages in and it was clear that this was no ‘
Catcher in the Rye’.
Instead there was a confused story about a character named Ddunsel, who seemed to be the main suspect in a case involving several abductions, child molestation and murder. In several places graphic descriptions of his crimes were included. He seemed to be some sort of all-powerful psychopath. The action jumped around at random and the dialogue was uniformly poor. Who had sent him this drivel?

The few sections that contained anything approaching a
decent plot were ill thought out and μ felt a dislike for the writing. There was no narrative line, only a haphazard collection of scenes, and it was obviously written by someone with little love of language. Despite this there was an undeniable intention behind the writing and, distantly, some form of malevolent intelligence.

He was
reading a section that described the rape and murder of a young boy by Ddunsel when the sound of the front door distracted him. They would all be returning for dinner. μ put the manuscript down and then, on impulse, covered it with a magazine in case they should ask him some question about what it was or where it came from. It was true he had nothing to hide, but still the tone of some of the passages and the disturbing content about child murder were not what he wanted them to think he usually read.

He was sharing the house with foreigners. They entered, talking amongst themselves, and threw a nod in μ’s direction. He nodded back and they busied themselves preparing their evening meal. There were only three others that actually lived there – Georgi, Ivan and Catarina - but often their friends would come around in the evenings and as many as ten or twelve of them would sit in the shared space eating and talking seriously.

μ had just moved into this place and he was sure his problems were well be
hind him. It was a lot better than the flat where he had stayed before and now he had settled in he found it hard to believe that he had been in that old house for so long.

“All those people living on top of each other, rubbing against each other every day,” he thought. “It’s just as well that I mov
ed out and found this new room.”

The foreigners had funny, dark features but they kept themselves to themselves and were always pleasant. They had an unusual musky smell about them but were quite tidy which made living there that bit easier. He had had no problems with them and would almost have said he liked it there.

The arrival of the script seemed purposefully designed to disrupt his peace of mind. What a shitty present to receive. What
kind of spiteful bastard had sent him this? From the little he had read it did not seem to have been written for simple
entertainment
.

It was possible that it had been sent by some person quite separate from the original author but somehow that seemed unlikely. The writing and subsequent delivery of the package appeared the result of some invisible intellect tangling with a dark, not quite realizable issue. It sent a shiver down his spine.

Georgi, Ivan and Catarina always arrived home at about the same time and prepared a meal in the same communal way, laughing and joking amongst themselves. In their own language they spoke too fast for μ to understand and he would normally just wait until someone addressed him directly or else nod along, pretending he got the gist of what they were saying. When they spoke directly to μ it was in broken, stuttering sentences and μ sensed that he was the one holding them up, even though as foreigners they should really master the language. He tried to imagine what it would be like to be from their country and speak that earthy, dirty language. To be able to walk down the street there and understand what everyone was saying.

It was only the three of them this evening and μ felt relief that there wouldn’t be a huge crowd for dinner. If truth be told μ had something of a crush on Catarina. She was light and elfin with eyes that seemed to permanently flicker with laughter. When, sometimes, μ tried to laugh along to a joke, Georgi and
Ivan always gave a look that somehow suggested he was faking it but something about Catarina made him believe she was sharing a true part of her spirit with him.

They cleared the table and μ slipped the script up to his room, unseen behind a magazine. When he returned the food was ready and he helped set out the dishes of fried meat they had prepared. It was good heavy food, fatty and simple, the sort of fare that would fill you up. μ ate in silence preoccupied by the script and who could have sent it to him.

Throughout the course of the dinner Catarina, Georgi and Ivan talked loudly about a rising political figure in their homeland, occasionally stopping to enlighten μ on a particular point or ask his opinion on topics he knew nothing about. As they drank, Georgi became more and more high-spirited, edging closer and closer to Catarina and putting his hands around her as he spoke. μ wasn’t sure he could finish everything on his plate.

After dinner they carried on talking and drinking and μ waited unready to brave the solitude of his room. They talked louder now amongst themselves and more wine flowed. μ was thinking of bidding them good night and finally going up to his room when out of nowhere he blurted:

“Do you know anyone in Brazil?”

They looked at him surprised. Catarina’s eyes twinkled.

“Brazil?”

“It’s nothing,” he
said, suddenly embarrassed to have raised it. “Forget about it, I should get up to bed.”

Awkwardly he lifted himself from the table and shuffled to the door. They smiled back at him and he nodded his head as he ducked out the door. Going up the stairs he heard Georgi pronounce something loudly and they laughed. Catarina loudest of all.

Perhaps things were really getting better.

”How quickly my opinions change,” μ pondered. “Only recently I was convinced that everything was set up to make me miserable and now how stupid that thought seems. It’s clear I was just feeling a bit down in that old place, nothing more than that. I was so certain but now it seems like nothing more than a passing cloud…that is life, I suppose”

It was strange indeed how quickly conv
ictions could be replaced, trodden on, negated. μ thought of Jesus’ disciple Peter. How he must have felt sitting at the Last Supper when Christ told him:

“
Verily I say unto thee, that this night before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice.”

When Peter had heard those words, the wine whipping his thoughts to grander heights, he had refused to believe it could happen. What solid, unshakeable ground he must have felt he was on. His master earnest and
innocent in front of him, he had replied:

"
Though I should die with thee, yet will I not deny thee.”

At that point, there in the presence of his lord, conviction had driven him to tears. The idea that he, Peter, would deny his friend, the holy ghost made flesh, the true manifestation of pure love, that he should deny
all that was sacred, not once but three times, was preposterous.

And yet, a few short hours later, and his conviction was gone. He would curse and rail against those that claimed he was with Christ and publicly denounce his lord. If that - the conviction of the deepest, metaphysical love -could prove to be nothing more than a passing sensation then what after all could be true? If life was no more than a series of sensations linked together by chance then what weight could any of it carry?

Safely in his room, he closed the door, although he might equally have left it open for all the privacy it afforded. Through the floor he could make out the laughs of his flatmates and outside, screaming devils shouted in the school playground across from his window. A constant rabble of children, baying at one another, bashing dissonantly on musical instruments. What were they still doing on the school grounds at this time of night? He found it hard to concentrate.

He decided to make a list.

He wrote:

Find out who sent script

Leaving drinks

Strings

Look for job

He made these
little lists frequently but seldom referred back to them. It might have made sense to tick items off once they were finished or even compare his progress against some timeline but he never did. He only wrote the lists to reassure himself that while some tasks might seem impossible everything could in fact be broken down into smaller components. The whole was just a series of simple steps that could easily be achieved. People talked about the big picture but μ had the feeling that the ‘big picture’, if it were ever to be revealed, would be a terrifying vision.

He started to read the script again but the wine he had drunk with dinner made him woozy and he couldn’t concentrate. It was difficult to keep his attention on the page and something buzzed at the back of his mind.  He needed to find out more about where this had come from. Could there actually be a real-life Ddunsel out there?

Unearthing his battered laptop from a pile of papers he powered it up and waited while it chugged to open the browser.
He couldn’t find anything about any Ddunsel that appeared to be related – the few places the name cropped up were clearly not relevant and there was no obvious connection with Brazil. Instead, he tried searching for some of the phrases in the script but that produced far too many results to make sense of.

Having yawned twice, he decided to continue reading in bed and as he undressed he noticed three small red lumps, close to each other on his upper left arm. He must have been scratching them idly throughout dinner as they looked slightly inflamed.

‘A mosquito’, he thought, ‘or perhaps three mosquitos.’

An image came to his mind of three identical mosquitos, wearing bowler hats, travelling everywhere together like some old-fashioned theatre troupe, leaving these three red marks as a form of symbol. It was a strange kind of symbol, if that was the case.  His arm itched like hell. No, perhaps it was a symptom of something.

Opening another tab he searched for any information about his affliction but the results were ambiguous. Most of the pages he found seemed to suggest that it was just a mosquito bite but then, as he read more, he discovered that it could also be a sign of early stage
Pemphigus vulgaris
. Some of the images of blistered skin were particularly disturbing.  He searched various reference sites and forums feeling slightly nauseous and telling himself it wasn’t productive to look at these sites.