The Heights
(An excerpt)
by Garry Stanton
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: This excerpt is taken from my novel The Heights. The book is an exploration of a modern, solitary urban existence. It is an existential examination about who we are as a society and what is important in our arguably random, often passionless, greed-driven twenty-first century. There are no answers, and this is deliberate, but The Heights posits several tacit enquiries to which there can, necessarily, be no solutions.
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Swearwords: None.
Description: This excerpt is taken from my novel The Heights. The book is an exploration of a modern, solitary urban existence. It is an existential examination about who we are as a society and what is important in our arguably random, often passionless, greed-driven twenty-first century. There are no answers, and this is deliberate, but The Heights posits several tacit enquiries to which there can, necessarily, be no solutions.
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What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain knowledge must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. ... I certainly do not deny that I still recognize an imperative of knowledge and that through it one can work upon men, but it must be taken up into my life, and that is what I now recognize as the most important thing.
— Søren Kierkegaard, Letter to Peter Wilhelm Lund dated August 31, 1835
— Søren Kierkegaard, Letter to Peter Wilhelm Lund dated August 31, 1835
You get up. You don’t get up. You lie awake. You close your eyes. You wonder what it might be like to die. Or, to simply be dead. At what precise point does consciousness cease? Does it, in fact, cease, or does death represent merely a different type of consciousness? There is an outside possibility that you may be in that state already. How would you know? Only the stabbing pain in your temples persuades you that you still breathe, still inhabit the place of the living. You put your buzzing, brittle stupid head out of the window in an effort to feel something. You have been attempting to feel throughout your sad, magnificent, pathetic existence. Desiccated drool lies upon your face like dried seaweed on a rough beach. The breeze catches the stiff hairs on your chin, numbing your skin as the aromas from the Chinese take-away downstairs float up and envelop you.
A monster gull, dead-eyed and automatic, with blooded beak drives by in the air, its demon wings pulsing, the bird squealing resentfully at the large plastic bins. This creature’s life is harder now than it was before, in the black bin liner days.
You clench your jaw, flex the muscles in your arms and shoulders, dress yourself. You are not sure why you get dressed: for you, the outside holds no pleasures. The world is cold, unkind. People are distant, remote. You feel you do not belong. Here, there, or anywhere. There are humans out there, entities who may wish to communicate. You even think, somewhere inside you, that this may even be a good thing, with interesting possibilities. It is likely that no-one will, however. Your dead mother or maybe she is not dead in the normal sense, who resides in the mirrors, in every mirror in the universe, in the mirrors of this town, in the mirrors of Hubble, in the unseen glass of Proxima Centauri, tells you not to go out. Do not go out. Do not go out, it will end in tears, she says. Father said yes it may well end in tears but what of it. You pick yourself and wipe your stupid face. Everything would end in tears according to mummy. You sometimes listen to mummy but not today. Sometimes you are not sure if she is dead. Some days she is with you, living on inside you somehow like Alien. If you are lucky, the world will ignore you, as ever. Or give you the look, that one, you know, all disdain, disgust and a unique type of disbelief, the look to which you have long since become accustomed. But you do go out today although often the concept of today can confuse you, when reality swirls and falls and bleeds into other days and your mind is full to brimming and quite befuddled. Unshaven, unwashed, stepping tentatively upon the worn stone stairs of your sad grey tenement where thousands of feet of the dead once trod. You look, and feel, uncharacteristically slovenly. Mother would frown, father would visit violence upon you. No matter. Today you do not feel the need to make yourself presentable. Yes, such a mummy word. You miss her so no you do not hers was a shadow you had to free yourself from. Was it not? Well, you never took steps in that direction. Father, maybe...you cannot recall. Anyway, there is no specific reason for this, your slovenliness - you merely cannot be bothered. A new engine is driving you. The road upon which you walk today, if it is, is silver and wet and long. A strong scent of iron, like blood, or rain, or sperm, pervades the air. The smell suggests a happening, that a thing will occur. The air is full of maybes, perhapses, peradventures and whatever else lurks in thesauri. The headless, wordless, formless possibles are scraping and scratching within the sad black rivulets of your intellect and Self. Possibilities, little demons of despair and imperative, paint tiny pictures of themselves inside your eyes. Neurons awaken and stretch and pour their offered light into and along the minute canals of thought.
Buses and cars and lorries rush by, the wind tearing at your hair, disturbing the angles of the bones of your face. Your life today is an avant garde film in which everything is moving at normal speed apart from you. You feel like the moon in that ancient French film, watching over you all, a lump of stone or cheese or pumice stone. That film, Le Voyage dans la Lune, was made in 1902 by Georges Melies and his brother Gaston and is recognised as the first film made in the genre of science fiction. Old Georges may be one of the most influential men who ever lived. The moon got a rocket, sent by the humans, in his eye for his trouble. For being the moon.
You are a slothful, obscure blur of quasi movement. Despite your curious appearance you are not certain any person can see you. Can they see you? How can you test this? You are moving, yes you are and you are the moon in the film with the rocket stuck in your eye but your involvement is peripheral, the action meaningless. The breeze has grown, risen to a forceful blast of boreal quicksilver straight from the north. You walk into the centre of town, more awake now.
As you do wake your face moves a bit, your eyes noticing things. You see women who are pleasing to your vagabond eye. You see young mothers with children in prams. You see old men and women with shopping bags. You spot a mongrel, a bizarre hybrid of Labrador and some kind of terrier, hovering beside a bus stop, questing for scraps. The creature yaps and puts its oversized head at a questioning angle. An old man with sunken eyes and white stubble stiffly but deliberately throws the dog a morsel. The cur devours the scrap like a piranha. Its ears go up as it approaches the man for more. He swears at it, weakly clapping his veined hands in a futile effort to scare it off. Leaving the tarmac and concrete, you tread onto the yielding November grass: it is dull green but wet and muddy underneath.
There are billions or trillions of leaves on the ground, cruelly thrown off by the trees. The ochre wind blows them up all around your head and the smell of abandoned leaves fills your brain, a potent, erotic aroma of decay, of essential waste. The summer may be the warm, benevolent season, but it does not possess the strength, the copper fortitude of autumn. You feel cursed, a peripatetic, a sufferer from synaesthesia, forever attempting to cope with constant explosions of the senses. A teenage girl with blue hair floats by in a solipsistic fug, shrill drums tisking away on her cheap personal music machine. You sit on a metal bench. The wooden ones are long-gone now, mossy, lichened, graffitied, burnt, out of sight. A group of young men is playing football, noisily, energetically. Their shouts of excitement rise and gleam in the cold air like silver on a backdrop of grey. A player slides across the soft grass and emerges from the tackle covered in mud. You watch them with eyes that burn through that acid dark dying stench. Decay is good. Death is the lifeblood of all things. Yes, death is good, you think, the way out of everything. Especially when it is the only way, you muse, as the footballers become louder. You reflect that the sky is full of it, this hanging waiting hiding death. You wish you were there, in the death place, so you can observe the process, feel the machinery of it. Not in the sky, where there is no heaven or anything else but clouds and deep space and asteroids and cosmonauts and scrap metal, but in the ground where relief will come. It will come to you, you know. Will it be a blessed day, when all falls away, ceasing to be of any importance? Yes. Will you still be awake, in a restless eternal sleep in which you will still know and feel and be, somehow? Will people miss you, will they remark upon your death? Probably not. There is no-one after all and after a certain time, there really is no-one for anyone. Nobody will be remembered. You will simply rejoin the light you already feel deep in your eyes, in your being and your body, the light of which you have always consisted.
You feel your brain working inside your head, feel the uniqueness of it as the points of pain begin to return. When death comes, every human brain, utterly unique in the universe dies too, along with the body. The loss, the eternal loss, of all that knowledge, all the feelings, experiences. No brain in the cosmos can duplicate what was in that singular dead organ of ultimate power, the most phenomenal engine ever developed. You shake your head at the enormity of the concept. You smile and feel sad for all the dead brains, still useful perhaps but lacking a vehicle to fuel. The electrons, the neurons extinct.
You move again across the soft grass, the sounds of the students receding in the dense burnished air. You hear the magpie before you see it as it disturbs some leaves on the ground and then it glides down in front of you, landing, hopping over the wet grass and leaves. You walk past it quickly, offering no salute. It is black and white, naturally, but with a surprisingly vivid blue sitting in amongst the dark plumage. It is soon joined by its partner, and they sweep away together, landing on a low wall. You feel like walking again, so you decide to move to your favourite graveyard. You are something of a graveyard collector. There are many you like but there is one to which you are drawn, over and over. As daylight begins to fall away, and it dies so early at this time of year, you think of all the times you have been here. You tell yourself that you would like to rest there one day, be subsumed among the slick and mottled leaves. You arrive. The bones and the dust are under the ground here, not just under the gravestones and the crypts, but all around, lurking under the grass. Many have died here, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of the plague and the pustules and in the days of cholera and smallpox. All those sad organs of thought: thinking no more.
You look at some gravestones. Many you have seen before, of course...the crypt with the life-size stone figure standing at the back wall, the man with the chipped nose; the expensive tombstones, big and wide and covered with skeletons and Latin; and the small ones, all greened over and tragic and almost into the ground. There are a few you see with iron covers, bars over the graves to stop the resurrectionists from stealing you before you were even cold, to sell you to the doctor on the hill, the doctor who knew nothing.
You walk around some more, as the vapour in your breath becomes clearer and colder against the encroaching blue night. There is a moon, a gargantuan albino moon, in front of you, low in the sky, illuminating all. You see the crypt of the MacKenzie, that bloody one who is a ghost here now with no head or something. Some believe that Bloody MacKenzie walks this place at night, gouging and scratching if he does not like the look of you, or if your foreign modern breath offends him. You feel that the bloodthirsty spectre would be unhappy at the drinks cans, crisp bags and other detritus lying around. As you walk round the graveyard at night you hear the winos and the jakies before you see them.
During the day you see them there on the benches, drinking, sleeping, frightening the Japanese or American tourists away. You wonder if they have jakies in Japan. You know they have them in America, but they are not called jakies. The winos, they insist on grunting and moaning and laughing at things that are not at all, not remotely humorous. Their minds have gone or are in the process of melting away. They drool and splutter and gaze vacantly upwards at imaginary voices. They congratulate one another on various perceived tiny achievements: another giro, another free drink. They scurry around here at night like blundering slow rats, with their cheap tonic wine or that strong cider they often favour. They sleep in dank, barely- covered holes in the ground that were crypts one day when history was good and society was better, and drink that stuff and eat crisps they have stolen from a supermarket or found in a bin or been given by gullible tourists.
The winos, they look at you as you turn that dark corner. Well, the corner is dark, the night is dark and that little hole they live in like hobbits is so dark. It reeks of earth and old stone and stale piss. They have a torch some nights. You hate them because they hate you, fear you, would like to kill you maybe but everybody knows winos are not violent, all their energy focused on drinking themselves to death. You are lucky this night when you see one in that dark hole with the bars closed, the gate with the missing bars closed. You close your eyes and rub your hands together as if in anticipation of a fine meal, or a particularly fine port. You do not know it, not consciously, but you drool. Even more than normal.
There is only one wino tonight, when there is normally four or five of them. The others will be out somewhere, begging or killing themselves slowly. You stand motionless outside his little warren and scrutinize him and you can see that his eyes, his eyes are gleaming like those of a wild animal as he drinks greedily without awareness or thought. A baby. He slurps it down as though there were no tomorrow. He burps, passes wind and laughs to himself. You are under the cover of darkness of course and the ground is soft and you take care not to rustle the leaves because that will give you away. He has a torch on tonight in his cave, no it’s a match he has lit, batteries cost money, and you see his stupid flat purple face just like my father’s when he was alive and hanging onto existence and you go deep in, far into the maw, the lair of the undead and you decide that the decision whether he dies or lives shall be yours. Yours, and no-one else’s. You are not Daniel or someone entering the den of a lion. He clearly has no right to live and you feel powerful in a way that seldom happens in your life and then your decision is made. You know now that a thing is going to happen. The wino shakes and drops the bottle he cuddles. He looks at you like a little lost child but says nothing. The bottle breaks against a forgotten stone jutting slightly from the earth but nobody hears. The sound of breaking glass reverberates around the crypt but there are no ears to recognise the sound. The cogs of the city grind on a few yards away but no-one is close enough to hear or to care. You wonder if anyone cares and if they ever did. The wheels will always turn, assisted by the oiled cogs, and the sound they make together will forever conceal what should not be heard. Or what should be heard. You frown at the conundrum. You smile, then. You smile quite pleasantly and you feel calm and explosively, gleefully mad at the same time and hit him in the face, hard, precisely, but with finesse, with a half-brick that is lying in the muck. Maybe the brick, one fashioned by a mason centuries ago, had helped to cover some plague body, a bubonic cadaver back in the old times when times were better, but now it gives the wino a bloody face. You like it. You love the power: you feel like a powerful human being. It has been so long. You hit him again and he sort of squeals comically like in a cartoon or something and his head flies back and hits off the solid wall and you, you are smiling a lot. It feels like an ugly smile on your face instead of a nice one but even though mummy would remonstrate you ignore her. There are no mirrors in a crypt and even Hubble cannot stretch this far. You think about the great telescope with its awesome mirrors. You imagine that it has turned around to defy its alignment, its orbit to face you, to find you, to delineate you in front of the entire human race. You can see the CIA or something, with long black coats and long skinny black vehicles, mobilised from the nearest embassy. You are mad, you suppose, and madder than even you are able to articulate, but you are aware that the CIA or the FBI are not coming. Hubble is great and Hubble is good but it sees only the black and the glints of goodness, the diamonds in the black.
You do not smile much in this life even when you try but you are smiling now, all right, all right, you say to him, and to yourself. You keep a nice sharp knife on your person, in your pocket. It is small and nasty and you have used it to slice carpets and other things. You have a bayonet you keep in a secret place but use this on emphatically special occasions. It came from a real war like in Africa or such and you have it on good authority that it was used to maim and kill and this makes you try to smile. You feel force and power and the blood surging around your flawed being. You carve the wino open with your carpet slicing blade which is quite new and very sharp and he is alive and not enjoying it. But you are. He tries to shout and to hit something off the metal bars so someone will hear, the wino cavalry or something but nobody comes. Nobody ever comes, do they? Almost never. The thought of the wino cavalry makes you chuckle involuntarily, inappropriately. You know that laughing makes you even more ugly than normal, certainly more physically objectionable, but you cannot stop yourself and the wino you are in the process of terminating is unlikely to notice your unpleasant mirth. He finds an old drinks can or something and hits the bars with it, weakly, hardly making a sound. He is suddenly sober for the first time in maybe forty years. A short silly laugh issues from your nose. His nose has been pulped by your initial attack, a gentle attack relatively speaking. Nobody will hear this assault and you are getting into the drama now as if you are in a seedy seventies film with lots of whores and tough undercover cops and oversized handguns although the film you are in is kind of more of a comedy and you are smiling a lot and laughing. You are aware that you should hate yourself but this you find difficult at this moment. It is only during these activities when you can learn to love yourself. You are more whole, more purposeful, enriched by destiny and righteousness.
You step out of the hole in the earth that is a crypt for a moment to make sure before you can be free to really start to enjoy yourself. There is no-one, just an owl half way up a large bare elm. The old owl, yes owls are always old, is wise, righteous, like you and hoots in appreciation of you and your tasks. A white cat with a short tail flashes past a gravestone near the wall on the other side. You hear the sounds of the city, only fifty yards away, a different galaxy.
You hear taxi brakes, a bus squealing to a halt, a few students laughing as they leave the pub near where the statue of the little dog sits, and even the sound of a plane overhead. You decide to take the wino’s veined nose as a trophy but change your mind. Because you can. The carpet ripper is up to it. You will do what you want. You have heard of people, of righteous killers, justified removers, taking trophies from bodies they have killed, but not you. Not tonight. And then, you cut one of his eyes out and put it, stuff it, in the wino’s mouth. Why do you do these things? In the final analysis, there is no way of knowing. When he is finally dead, and you make sure, you can relax. In truth, when it becomes clear that you will indeed kill him, you become a little bored by the idea, and by him. You wonder if this is how a cat might feel, if they can think in such an abstract way. You doubt it. They simply act as cats will act and you are no different. No-one can see blood in the dark, on that long road home. You will keep to the back roads, the roads through the parks. Before you leave, you lie back, enjoying your new power. The wino gurgles and you wonder if he may still be living. You put your ear to his mouth but hear nothing, no breathing just a slight oozing of blood from his mouth and ears. No life, merely a shutting down. It is then you see the glass, thin silvered glass standing crookedly against the wall at the back of the crypt. Not a mirror, more two or three thin pieces of glass. Not a mirror, please. But then yes you see her you should have known she would come, even here, even where the space mirrors cannot detect you. But she can, always. She does not speak but the expression on her lined face leaves you in little doubt as to her feelings. She says nothing but her look says it all: bad boy, no ice cream tonight, no visits to the children’s farm, no petting the lambs’ woolly little heads, no visits to the museum or the pictures but you wanted to see that new film what was it called? The punishments, her punishments are always too great, too serious, too inhibiting. John Wayne, that one with John Wayne. You cry, softly, as you realise that John Wayne is dead, long dead.
About the Author
Born in Edinburgh and now living in Fife, Garry Stanton is a musician to trade, as well as a teacher in training. His debut album, Indigo Flats, was released online in 2010.
Garry also writes, having completed several short stories, his first novel and a lot of poetry, some of which has been published in the Edinburgh-based poetry magazine, Harlequin.
Garry also writes, having completed several short stories, his first novel and a lot of poetry, some of which has been published in the Edinburgh-based poetry magazine, Harlequin.