It had been almost a year since I had found the Fat Man’s house. I wondered if I
was better in any real sense, any more prepared for the world that had been
working out full strength this whole time in spite of us, throwing up new apartment
blocks and front lines while we had been in here readying ourselves without a
deadline, playing catch up with a slowly unfolding apocalypse.

The feeling was getting harder to ignore. I felt like a fraud in the corridors, in front
of all those people at the intoxications, following some idea I had, following me
with implicit faith that I knew what I was talking about...

I woke up with a stabbing feeling, a sound I felt, the screeching of braking a train on the tracks. Awake but unable to move I knew that the Fat Man was in the room with me. I could smell the putrid dampness of his skin. After a moment my body suddenly let out all the coiled up tension and I sat up in bed screaming with a dry mouth. On my mattress was a greasy black handprint.

Once awake my mind was full of thoughts. How unprepared we all were, hunter gatherers searching for the migration patterns of a grazing animal in a world dripping in information, sweating patterns. Our brains were primitive calculators overstretched. They had to evolve. Some managed this alone of course, by will and effort, but others required manipulation.

We kept the windows covered so that none of the shadows escaped...

...

It was the great chasm that motivated me. The unassailable gap between the bombed out villages and thriving city centres. That abscess of white noise and polished floors between the churchyards and dirty backrooms, spaces with no greater purpose than to provide a spot in which to try and meet oblivion at a low price. Everything was set up to sparkle and catch our eye. We were magpies and vultures, scared by the shadows - the great fucking ‘what if?’ of death and pain.

My whole idea was to abolish the chasm, destroy the dam and let shopping centres be washed in blood. To break one hallucination and replace it with another. Reconfigure our brains to at least see where the two worlds crossed over; to see the overlaps between comfy Sunday afternoons, hot soup and suburban fences and the spontaneous suicides of smartphone assembly line workers and office block cleaners, tumbling through the air from the great physical heights that they had looked down on their own lives from every day.

Skyscrapers and immense factories; great manifestations of the mythical career ladder, the falling figures rushing towards null, on their way to become one with the cracks in the pavement, the cracks that children hop-scotched over playing their imaginative games and which the grazing homeless scanned for dropped coins and cigarette butts...

...