Blind.Faith 2.0.50. Tomasz Tatum

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СКАЧАТЬ this fashion and pondering these things as well as his own place in the universal order of things for several more minutes, Ch.ase finally succeeded in brushing the covers aside. He crawled out of his bed with a sigh. Shuddering briefly as he stood up, his bare feet absorbed the unholy chill of a cool faux-wooden laminate floor that felt as though its boards were made not of varnished paperboard but of ice or even frozen slabs of meat instead. Without bothering to turn on the light as he went, Ch.ase began making his way toward the bedroom window. As he drew up a sun-bleached paper shade with his left hand, he cast a first cautious glance through the dull pane at the street immediately below his window. It was completely empty, as it usually was at this early hour.

      And, of course, there was no canopy of green leaves to be seen outside.

      In fact, there were no trees at all to be seen outside his window.

      Instead, a closed row of modest brick buildings presented themselves to him on this morning, as monotonous as ever in their stubborn uniformity. Although this street was probably rather unremarkable by anyone’s standards in Libertyville@Esperantia, some of the houses of the neighborhood seemed to hover somewhere in a discernible stage of disrepair bordering on decay. As a whole, though, the ensemble he was viewing in the receding gloom at this moment formed a somber hem that was sewn to the torn and faded fabric of a street as gray and listless as an early northern sky in winter. The windows of the houses opposite to his appeared vacant to him as the city slept.

      They were not unlike the cavities of unseeing eyes, matte and dusty black.

      The drawn shades of his neighbors, almost all of whom continued to be outright strangers to Ch.ase, tellingly underscored the kind of all-encompassing fluid apathy that often permeated the atmosphere of many so-called middle class neighborhoods, here and elsewhere. If one looked closely, everything here seemed to be covered with a fine layer of sand and dust.

      But, what was most disturbing for him personally at this particular moment, was that there was not a single bird to be seen anywhere out there.

      Nothing. Not even a lowly pigeon was visible sitting anywhere in the semi-darkness. Nothing even remotely avian was perched anywhere upon one of the fences, rain gutters or rooftops in Ch.ase’s field of view as he peered through the glass.

      Yet the birds were indisputably back.

      He had just heard them.

      As a matter of fact, lately he could hear them nearly every morning. Sometimes their sound was a melodious singing, as it was this morning.

      At other times, though, it could be a disquieting cacophony.

      In the quiet solitude of such mornings, Ch.ase often fretted about the fact that he thought that he could actually consciously feel himself aging physically. He had been living in this place since he was somewhere around twenty-five, maybe even thirty years of age. He wasn’t exactly sure, though, when exactly this was anymore. This was one of the things that unsettled him most whenever he would pause to think about it. The linear notion of time in reference to biological age in humans had been largely erased by an unprecedented spurt of scientific progress. And, like it or not, he found himself caught up in the swirl of it just like everyone else around him.

      And, of course, the fact that he was living alone didn’t make things any easier for him. If nothing else, it meant that something as relatively simple as counting the time spent together with someone in a bond of companionship was also useless as a datum of reference in his life.

      He knew of course, just as everyone else did, that years came and went regularly. And he was fairly certain that others, too, quite often found themselves at odds with a perception of time that bore little or no relationship to the realities of their existence. He thought that he could sometimes sense this very acutely. But he had never seriously considered how one might perhaps win back control over the flow of time as it related to one’s self. He had simply closed his eyes to this thought, convinced that the correlation of biological and chronological time was something to be borne out on a personal level and not really all that relevant to one’s being. After all, it lay in the power of anyone to steer this process to no small degree. What was worrying to him lately, though, was that, as far as he could tell and though nothing appeared to have changed for the worse in his life, time had somehow become so erratic and unpredictable in its passage to him personally that he dreaded an endless quarter century might suddenly elapse in a single week with no warning.

      Other times, a single day sometimes felt to him like the equivalent of a leap year.

      In earlier times, not even so long ago, it had still been possible to rely upon age as a kind of measure of one’s social identity–even if it wasn’t always one hundred percent accurate. But, given today’s level of scientific progress, chrono.Engineers had succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams in rendering even this crudest of yardsticks invalid.

      As these thoughts flew through his head, Ch.ase stood rubbing his forearms in a futile attempt to make his goose-pimples, brought on by the chill of the cold floor beneath his feet, recede. Accepting that he was unlikely to be successful at this as long as he stood shivering half-naked before the bedroom window, he turned away again and, while edging his way around the foot end of the bed, stubbed the small toe of his left foot for the second time in as many days as he turned the corner with perhaps just a bit too much abandon. Biting his lip and limping slightly as he hoped and waited for the flash of pain to abate, he passed through a small hallway which was the entrance area to the flat before entering the front room of what he called home without any great fondness.

      Both rooms were rectangular-shaped and of more or less equal size, each not quite twenty square meters or so, with bare floors and sober, symmetrical arrangements of windows located on the opposing outer walls. The bedroom, with its two windows facing northward, contained little more than his very austere toe-killer metal frame bed that had the appearance of some surplus military-issue, no-frills hospital fixture sold at auction. Other than the bed, the room’s remaining furnishings consisted of only the nightstand–atop of which throned the formidable but tacky plastic clock with its supreme aura of invincibility–and a fairly large matching hardwood closet to hang his modest wardrobe in.

      Lining the wall to the left of the door stood, among various bags and boxes, an ancient plastic navy blue oyster-shell type suitcase and a stack of square, hard-plastic interlocking boxes that Ch.ase had never bothered to unpack after moving into this place.

      He’d just never taken the time. And, quite honestly, he’d never seen any reason to make the effort.

      As a result, the stack of boxes was simply ignored over the years.

      He was alone, anyhow. So there was certainly no one around who might care or object.

      Ch.ase certainly didn’t care anymore.

      The second room, the one with its windows on the southern side, contained little more than a sort of minimalistic cook-in kitchenette along with the obligatory portable telly.tube, a ragged and visibly old desktop flat screen MindφSet monitor, the non-portable kind of yore, perched atop a wooden table and an ancient leather two-seat sofa, weathered by now but still sporting a surprisingly cheerful yellow color beneath its patina. Ch.ase would occasionally fall asleep on this while slouched before the telly.tube late at night, his legs dangling loosely over one of the arms of the sofa until his feet went numb, signaling to him that it was time to go to bed. He seldom cooked in here since he usually ate at the office or grabbed a MucMucilage at one of the many cheerful high-end take-away places that lined the route from his office back to home. On those rather rare occasions when he did eat his meals at home, these were usually limited to something like Mr. Ed’s All-StarµSurrogateSirloin hyperwavable dinners, packed and sold in shiny tinfoil, which СКАЧАТЬ