A Story.

This story was written in 3 hours as a by-product of a dream I had. There are some profanities, which are not meant to be offensive. And lastly, it might be a little dark.

I was told by the psychiatrist that I had multiple personality disorder and paranoid schizophrenia. Bullshit.

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I was walking down the linoleum floor. The prime time movie had been so pathetic; I was one of the only three people watching it. A door on a floor overhead opened. Two familiar figures drifted out, entwined. I looked away; I recognized one very well. Too well. Cackles followed them- their passé. They stopped ten feet ahead on my path and started kissing. It was too much for me; I walked on. And I noticed that one of the other two movie-watchers was my old friend S.

“Do you know what they were saying back there?” he asked.

“I didn’t want to pause.”

“One of them shouted ‘Ten Things I Hate About You’!”

“Yeah, okay. That would explain it.”

We were now at the edge of our apartment building’s sidewalk and headed for the common lawn. I could see my school grounds from there. Some freaky rock show or some festival was on at full swing. The whole field had been covered with hedges that would give each audience some privacy to enjoy the show. R had been so eager to go there; I was glad I’d avoided him. I despised his other friends. Turns out, I should have listened to my best friend.

“I’m going to go. I feel sick. See you tomorrow.” I stood up to leave.

“Yeah, take care.” I suddenly remembered how S and I had shared such a wonderful camaraderie so long ago. I almost missed it. Almost.

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I woke up the next evening. Sleeping for long hours was not uncanny ever since I’d been “diagnosed”. The freak show must still be on. I’d better go down to R and make an appearance. I took the 1 mm radius of nitroglycerin balls that would cause the kind of explosion that was seen frequently during Diwali. I coaxed my sister to come along. As I went down the main road with her, I noticed it was absolutely cleared of activity. In one corner, stood 3 policemen, undercover presumably, wearing identical black and red jackets. I hurried onto the road to the school grounds.

‘Hey! Stop! You’re not allowed ahead.”

I panicked. They were following me. They had revolvers. So I did what my defense allowed; I dropped a small ball in their path. All this time, I forgot my sister was there. I just ran away while the small explosion created a diversion. She’d get back home safe. I reached the school grounds. The hedges were gone. People wore white and covered every inch of the pseudo-stadium. I felt conscious in my maroon uniform. I saw M inching toward me.

“What happened in here?”

“There was a terrible fire last night. Some accident. There were so many casualties…thank god you weren’t here earlier. I had to see some of those bodies…”

“Okay. I had some nitroglycerin with me. Here, just take care of them.”

“Okay. You’d better go pay your respects at the memorial we’ve set up. I’m sure you knew some of them.”

I didn’t like that tone. I headed over to a wooden plaque of names that was surrounded by flowers and people. I took one look and heaved.

R, C, Sh.

If only I’d listened to my best friend. Things would never be the same.

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It is so surreal that we have CP playing at this gig! Stupid A…she is missing something amazing. R stood on tiptoe and peered through the hedge. No sign of her.

“RUN!”

What? Suddenly, bright orange flames engulfed the hedge next to R’s. Heh, those crazed juniors and their nitroglycerin. He walked through the arch of leaves to talk to them out of it; to tell them to use the extinguisher correctly. No sooner he’d walked through the arch, it was alight. He was wrong.

If he hadn’t known that the hedge clearing had been occupied by humans, those charred pieces of black would have never convinced him. As much as he wanted to get rid of the nausea and shock, the realization that he was trapped struck him. And it was definitely too late. Save me, A…save me.

When the inferno’s crest reached his skin, he smelled the charring first. He looked down at his arm. His translucent skin had been weak…as it now burned through to sear his blood, and though he could see parts of his muscle and now the Radius, and then the Ulna, pain was the last thing on his mind. It reached his hair and his spine and as he melted, his senses burned away. The fire reached his eyes and he knew he’d be dead shortly. Pain. More pain. It would end soon enough. His screams were oddly silenced by his mind. He was wasted now, beyond repair. He was as good as those blistered, black corpses that had lain before him, oozing fresh blood and exposing bones. He was gone.

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One week later, I headed to school. It had not seemed like a week. My parents had taken me to the psychiatrist again after I’d fallen unconscious in the bathroom thrice in two days. She’s taking a lot of stress. I don’t really know what we can do except let time heal her. Best friend, boy friend, lab partner. All gone. Those Citaloprams were a farce.

I walked into the library headfirst. “Were have you been A? We needed you to write certificates!”

“I need to issue some books.”

“I see. Go ahead.”

A biography of Paul Cohen, Thus Spake Zarathustra, C’s book draft ready for publication and R’s editorial in the school newspaper, and 15 other books on number theory and algebraic geometry. Math and Nietzsche. Maybe I’ll survive after all.

“20 books for issue?! You know we have a policy of at most 5.”

I blinked at her. She signed my card.

As the bell rung, I trudged into class. The vultures descended on me at once.

“Are you going to read all that?!”

“Are you feeling better, A? My mother has been so concerned…”

A singular voice, a deep baritone, cut through the din. “A…A…I need to talk to you about the other night. I told them not to laugh. The kiss was a lie. The whole relationship was a charade to make you jealous. I’m sorry. Now I know what I want. I’m sorry about C…but you have to move on with life. I want to make it up to you. Please forgive me.”

I looked at him through my blank eyes. I was pretty sure my dead face gave nothing away. Not that I had much to, anyway. My eyes took in his perfect Adonis face, his sculpted biceps. The basketball shoes he was wearing.

I walked away.

The teacher didn’t say anything. I knew all his stupid single variable calculus lectures anyway. He had tested me when I’d contested his lectures. I walked away.

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“It was not an accident, you know, A, the fire. It was in the papers today. A terrorist attack. What kind of sadist bastards would attack a school?”

“The competition is at 4, dad.”

The car swung across the hairpin U-turn to school. I carried my identification card, a blue water bottle I’d stolen from the refrigerator, a thick book of about 3000 pages. As I stepped in through the wrought iron gates, a voice stopped me.

“A? You have been running behind on your social work project. You have time left for the competition. Why don’t you volunteer to fill some water bottles for the ration distribution? It’ll help your grade.”

I didn’t really give a damn to my grade. I just wanted to be out of her fucking presence.

“Sure.”

“Okay, then. Fill those blue bottles with lukewarm water till the three-quarters mark. Then fill the rest with ice.”

I was now engaged in filling water bottles following the rules of ratio and proportion for the benefit of happy-to-help student volunteers at some random godforsaken slum. Sometimes, it was good to be paranormal.

My arms were spent. I slipped my own blue bottle along with the rest. And then stalked away.

The amphitheatre was covered with chairs. The kind that are covered with white cloth to hide the ripping leather and broken sponge, the kind that are usually there by the grace of the corner caterer. Debate will help you open up, I was told. I had smirked. I knew I was a replacement for R.

R. Suddenly, years of phone calls rushed into my head. We’d had a rare connection…

I shrugged. It was unlike me to feel emotional. I smirked again. How many times had C complained about that?

I slapped myself.

Three people walked toward the group of competitors. One of them was a woman dressed in a black corporate suit and her two cronies donned identical Armani. I tried to get over the Wall Street-ness of it all. “Welcome everyone!” The lady smiled more widely than necessary. Dumb and Dumber kept whispering behind her back. Then she said something that I missed because I was sick of looking at her. I made a model of a more stable amphitheatre in my head. Two minutes later, when I snapped out of my reverie, I was alone with the other three. The others had been instructed to go inside the building.

They seemed to be oblivious to my presence, or even if they were aware, they were comfortable with it. I felt disconcerted.

“Q will be coming to the debate as a judge. You have orders. Is everything in place?”

“Yes ma’am.”

Then several things happened at once that I had to think back through to recapture. Dumb’s phone rang, the lady took out an automatic and pointed it at him. Dumber grinned. Then the lady pulled the trigger eight times, making a rectangle of bullets on Dumb’s chest. The gun had a silencer, which made me happy. Ringing ears are not good for paranoid schizophrenia, you know. Dumb fell. And three seconds later, so did Dumber.

“Come on, darling. We have Q to meet.”

“He was a Paki, wasn’t he?”

“So I thought too.”

I walked with her.

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The Bentley stopped at the corner of the west wing of the school. The only way to return to the main gate would be after taking a huge roundabout and a U-turn at the end of the road. Mr. F was a busy man. He didn’t quite know why he had been invited as a judge to a debate of schoolchildren. He told his driver to pick him up in exactly an hour; it was beneath him to stay for the whole function. He stepped out of the car.

A flashbulb went off in his face.

“You fuckers…leave me alone for two minutes, will ya?”

I instructed my deputy to take out the video camera. The act had to be perfect. I whipped out a microphone.

“Mr. F, what brings a man of your stature to a national debate? Do you think that your company will be benefited much by being a sponsor?”

I did not wait for his response. I looked right. And signaled. The glass window had a microscopic hole in it about half a second later. The .3mm missed F’s temple by inches. I cursed. Sighing, I reached for my automatic in my maroon blazer and before he had enough time to react, life belied him. I turned around and chugged two bullets into my deputy’s head. The road had been cleared; that had been taken care of. The bodies would be cleared too. Who would clear my pristine white shirt of their sick blood, though? I did not like to dirty my uniform. Perhaps the blazer would cover it.

I stepped into the Bentley, put on my seat belt and grimaced at the driver.

“It was not an accident, you know, A, the fire. It was in the papers today. A terrorist attack. What kind of sadist bastards would attack a school?”

“The competition is at 4, dad.”

“Okay kiddo. Hold the steering wheel for me for one second. I want to make sure I have ammo.”

“And don’t ever call me a sadist bastard.”

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It was exactly 4 PM. It was too early.

“Say A; let’s take this baby for a spin across the city, eh?”

My father, the megalomaniac.

We took a longer route and all the time I didn’t say a word. I don’t like speaking to people much. By the time we were in the periphery of the building again, it was 5:20PM. Safe.

I entered the school. Again, as some people would have put at. Some people like my psychiatrist. I stifled a laugh. Something was really wrong today-I was rarely amused.

I entered the hall. The students had already been given a topic to prepare their debates on. I pitied them. They murmured, obviously aware that something was wrong. Poor lambs.

I noticed the Gucci woman had given them identical pens. The ends covered with a skin-tinted coat.

“Where did you disappear to, A? Do you have any effing clue how long it has taken to break the goddamn code?”

“It’s a URL, woman. How tough can it be?”

I eased the A4 out of her hand and looked at it. What was our organization coming to? Hiring such lesser mortals!

“You need to rotate it by a 90 and look through the pattern.”

“Oh.”

I was glad to have nitroglycerin in the hollow of the enormous book I carried. Nitroglycerin comforted me. Fireworks enthralled me.

I thought about R, C and Sh. I would miss them. And this was the best way I could avenge them. I sighed.

Now to wait for Q.

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