Sorrow Read online

SORROW

  Andrew Wheeler

  Text Copyright © 2012 Andrew Wheeler

  All Rights Reserved

  Williby Django blipped into existence behind his desk in a partitioned cubicle on a large and crowded work floor in an office building.

  "You’re late," said his boss.

  "It’s not a time machine," Williby answered forlornly.

  "Still late. Don’t."

  "Don’t what?"

  "Be."

  "What? Exist? I just got here," Williby protested.

  His boss scowled and slithered away. Williby coughed and shrugged out of his coat and sat down and turned his computer on. He stared mindlessly at the stained keyboard in front of the grey and flickering monitor, unable to bring himself to touch it. He barely knew what he was doing anyway, but was convinced that the pointless, idiot uselessness of doing it was designed and deliberate. It was his punishment. Bound in the misery of his own damnation, he was charged with eking out his forsaken existence entombed in an office cubicle. In Hell. He had sold his soul to the devil, and was now part of the sales team.

  During his short lunch break Williby took an elevator to the top floor and pressed his nose against the thick glass of the observation deck. Piled high in hard city grids, office buildings stood like black coffins, and were lashed by the tempest of a raging storm that hurled sheets of rain through their cold canyons onto the empty streets below. The glass was streaked and bubbled with condensation, and sticky with the smudges of desperate, clasping fingers. When he wiped a spot clear with the arm of his jacket Williby saw that someone had etched, "help me," into the surface. He wondered if it was him, and grabbed the window ledge in despair to steady himself. His palm came away soiled with old vomit. He gulped and stepped back, and cast around for a tissue or something to wipe his hand. The deck was littered with paper cups, crushed cigarettes, and crumpled bits of rubbish. There were bloody tissues and a razor blade on the floor at his feet, and soiled pieces of medical gauze and dark stains in the corner by the lift behind him. He retched in panic and hammered at the elevator call button, scratching desperately at the grey metal until the doors opened and returned him to the bowels of the building.

  When he got home that evening there was a beautiful sunlit holiday postcard in his letterbox, addressed to him and signed Williby. It was a breathless and ecstatic message describing unimaginable tropical delights and so looking forward to seeing him soon. It brought tears of longing to his eyes so sharp that they glittered like crystals on his cheek. They cracked and shattered when he wiped them away, but the promise shone within him like stars.

  Williby sighed and closed his eyes but when he opened them again he was still there. He slouched into the bathroom and undressed, then crawled into the tepid shower and washed himself with the sludge of an old bar of soap. He considered masturbating but couldn’t be bothered. When the water ran out he stood naked and wet in front of the bathroom mirror and dried himself with a damp, stained towel. He moaned in humiliation, his pale and wasted chest gurgling with ragged gasps of shame. He was decrepit and ruined and miserable, and so thoroughly condemned and consumed by his horrible life that it etched its pathetic wretchedness on his emaciated and diseased body. But within him somewhere there shone a tiny jewel of hope, sustained by precious words of deliverance and redemption. He cried with gratitude that it survived despite everything and gave thanks to dear Williby that he existed, and believed in him. Then he cleaned his teeth. His breath was bad and his gums bled. He rinsed and spat and coughed and spluttered, and the turquoise mouthwash drained away down the plughole. It was the colour of the tropical sea in one of his postcards.

  He turned off the lights and crept through the dark apartment in disgrace. He sat down at his computer, and after a long and wretched moment he turned it on and sent himself an email. When he clicked the send button the message disappeared for a few anxious moments, then magically appeared in his Inbox. It sat there shiny and bold-black and new, and with a little red flag on it. He opened it and read carefully. It was strong and encouraging and full of hope and fortitude, commiserating with his difficulties and empathising with his pain, yet positive and determined and uplifting. He sighed and turned off the computer, returned to the glare of the bathroom and went to the toilet. He smiled at himself shyly and rather creepily in the mirror, somewhat consoled and fortified, but the doubt returned and he slept badly in his crumpled sheets, moaning unhappily at the ceiling in the darkness. The interminable poignancy of his hell, the inescapable and deplorable truth, was that only he was responsible. He had made a terrible mistake, once, and been betrayed by his own desperate, grasping and pathetic heart.

  In his cramped cubicle the next morning Williby stared idiotically at the screen and sipped his bitter office canteen coffee. Spidery, meaningless lines of code spluttered across the screen, detestable slivers of drivel declaring the ruination of his life and the condemnation of his soul. Dead men scratched and tapped in cubicles around him like cockroaches. He whimpered.

  "Django!" snapped his boss.

  "I wasn’t," he whined.

  "Don’t do it again."

  "I’ll try not to," he said.

  Williby would have run screaming from the building and thrown himself into the nearest furnace, if he’d been courageous, but his pitiful mind could only grasp at scraps, at sun drenched postcards and heroic emails. It made his tongue sting with bitterness.

  "Sales are shit, Django."

  "It’s a shit product," Williby pointed out miserably. "Makes sense."

  "Inappropriate."

  "Inappropriate that it makes sense?"

  His boss stared hopelessly at him. Williby felt that some further clarification was required so he said something pithy that was also inappropriate, which earned him a visit to the office of Human Resources, and the department manager. The coffee had turned his bowels to a churning, cramped mess and he desperately needed to go to the bathroom. He wiped snot from his nose and winced in pain.

  "You’re not much of a human resource," she opinioned, looking over the rim of her glasses at him in disgust.

  "I’ve got to use the toilet," he moaned, but her dark venom made him feel suddenly dangerously exposed and afraid. Her long sharp talons drummed the surface of the desk, and on top of a thin stack of files in front of her Williby saw a crumpled and torn holiday postcard.

  "Ah," she hissed, "and you are?"

  "Williby Django. Sales," he whimpered.

  "Contracts."

  "Yes."

  "Seen yours?"

  At which point he figured he was screwed.

  Williby suddenly found himself beneath an incandescent blue sky on a beach at the edge of a rain forest. He fell to his knees in the hot golden sand and was violently ill, retching and spluttering until he vomited up a large grey slug that squirmed in the sand and turned into a butterfly and flew away. He gasped for breath, then staggered into the shallow surf and stripped off his jacket and kicked away his shoes. There were a few people in the distance paddling happily in the waves or sitting under the palm trees, and a path that meandered into the forest to a bar and terrace, from where Williby could hear soft calypso music, the chink of glasses, and easy laughter.

  "This is terrible," he said to himself, and splashed around childishly. When he was thoroughly soaked he struggled into his shoes and squelched up the path to the bar. He was met by a golden maiden with two drinks in her hand, who engaged him in happy and flirtatious conversation then took him by the hand and led him to one of the secluded bungalows overlooking the sea. She made passionate love to him that day and the next. She paused only to feed him grapes and ice cream and champagne in bed, and to sleep curled up in his arms before rousing him again with her urgent caresses. In the blessed days that followed, s
he led him gently and lovingly down to the beach and into the waves, and on lazy walks along the sand and through the forest. One afternoon he scrawled a cheap postcard and dropped it into the red post box that stood by the entrance to the bar, and wrote an inspiring email to Williby Django at hell dot com on the computer that sat on a desk in the corner of the living room. Every evening they ate sumptuously on the cool terrace by candlelight and then danced slow, twirling circles under the moon, before returning to the bungalow and fresh sheets. One night she even brought her sister.

  What was he to do? He was intoxicated, profoundly disoriented, and utterly beguiled. He panted in desperation and confusion every time she briefly left him alone to attend to something, yet manfully attempted to satisfy her insatiable lust when she returned. She spoke little except for words of encouragement or endearment, and he was concentrating too hard to start a conversation, and devouring every moment of the experience with bewildered gratitude.

  "God, please stop," Williby pleaded one evening when she tried to mount him again. She laughed and teased him, but he was calling out to the heavens. They lay in each other’s arms and stared at the bright moon and the jewelled night sky above the sea until she fell asleep beside him. Then he rose and succumbed to the anxiety. The map of the constellation mirrored the glittering stars of hope in his heart, but he found no solace in them, only the deep and wide gulf between what he felt he could have aspired to and what he dreaded he deserved. The terrible fear and trepidation washed over him again, and he had no idea where he was or what where was, only the conviction that he was fixed in the blackness of his powerless and worthless existence like the palest, weakest point of light in the shimmering night sky. He felt utterly desolate and alone, and sat sobbing in front of the blank computer screen with a broken pen in his hand until he woke up in the mess of his bed in his apartment.

  When he realised where he was, Williby tumbled off the mattress to his knees and clung desperately at the rough weave of the carpet. Anguish exploded inside him and his poor ruined lungs heaved and struggled, wracked by a strangled moan that peeled the wallpaper from the walls in slow, fluttering strips as the room shuddered and buckled. When the nausea and pain passed Williby rose and staggered to the bathroom, and washed the fresh salt air and the sweat of the lovemaking from his body. His soul drained away down the plughole. Then he sat by the window, shivering naked in the darkness. He was on an opaque planet at the edge of the universe, and the stars in the sky were embedded in a twinkling sheet of black glass. But when he looked closely he realised that they were set in a perfect mirror image of the stars he had seen from the window of the bungalow at the beach, and understood suddenly that his sad and empty paradise was on the other side of that glittering constellation. And so was he, still, tethered by a taut cord of misery to himself at opposite ends of a universe of sorrow.