December x^th, 202x
8:48 pm
On a different, later night, in an uneventful tide of everyday, I took another afternoon nap. Much to my dismay, the alarm did not wake me up. Neither did the second, backup one. The ambient on my phone has faded out early, maybe thirty minutes or so after I laid my head down the comfort of the pillow. However, when I have finally naturally woken up, I felt guilty, even scared somehow. A minor thing, but punctuality was a point of obsession for me, hence why it’s not surprising that once I opened my eyes and noticed how dark it was outside (or rather, that unlike a natural sunlight, my window had only been blessed by a neon glow from a sign on the opposite building), I raced up, jumping into my jeans and grabbing the rest of my “uniform” on the fly along with my bag, running to the outside and consequently the office building. I was there within minutes, a miraculous result especially for such a tobacco-bent person as myself.

“You’re almost late,” Miranda smirked from behind the monitor, not lifting her eyes up, a fresh cup of coffee standing next to her, “Another ten minutes, and I would have had to write you off as starting your shift late!”

“Twelve, actually,” I corrected her, punctually, handing my touchpad for calibration, “And besides, cut me some slack – I started yesterday an entire hour early. You can ask whatever-his-name-is who was at the desk last week.”

“Gerald, I believe, and it was just for one day,” she finally looked at me, taking my device and smugly parrying my punctuality with her own, “Besides, unfortunately, the company’s policies do not stack up late or early starts: you’re early if you’re early and you’re late if you’re late, the long and short of it.”

“Oh, whatever. I am here now, aren’t I?”

“Well, to paraphrase a certain someone, ‘you started it,’” the grin was by then unsweepable from her face, but she earned it, to which I merely smiled in defeat, as she connected to the device and typed in a few words, “You’ve got three addresses, as usual, but they are quite spread out. Be ready to use your pass a lot tonight,” she handed me the S-Pad, with the display on and the three addresses clearly written on the screen.

“Great,” I sighed, anticipating the long railway journeys. Glancing over it, I figured I could, in theory, make it by foot between the first two, but that last address would certainly have to be delayed, both in my mind and in terms of the journey.

“Don’t be so grumpy, at least you guys in the field get a fully funded underground pass,” she pursed her lips together, pretending as if the fact actually mattered. I decided not to go into an argument about the matter that she did not even need to move anywhere, unlike me, but decided to ultimately leave it and just shrugged, to which she got up to a small inventory room on her left, also behind the desk.

“Out of interest, though, does everyone have the same distance struggle as me, or am I just boss’ favourite?”

“You know perfectly well that we assign orders based on a random algorithm,” she shouted back from the adjacent room, which was not nearly far enough to justify her raising the voice level, “But as a matter of fact, no – Archie has to strictly stick to overground stations if he wants to catch any sleep tonight,” she popped her head out of the room for a moment then, lowering her voice, “Which, as you can imagine, is a huge disappointment to him.”

“Wait, why…” but of course – when was the last time you heard of a revolution – let alone, a protest – brewing in the suburbs? “Ah, no, nevermind, okay, I see.”

“Yeah, probably for the best,” Miranda finally emerged fully from the room, holding three envelopes and a small box in her hands, “Maybe that’ll quell him from spouting that radical shit,” she rolled her eyes as she handed me the packages. I couldn’t help but laugh at that.

“Are you absolutely sure that the algorithm is random, miss _____?” I smirked again, putting the goods in my bag, which could always miraculously house as many of them as was necessarily for the night (unless, of course, I was naturally good at packing).

“That is my official position, yes,” she blew a single hair that fell out of her bun on her forehead saying that, finally picking up my designated touchpad and handing it to me, “Now go, post boy, or I’ll put both ‘delayed start’ and ‘taking up my time with unnecessary bullshit’ on the record.”

“You can be so tyrannical sometimes,” I shook my head, closing my bag, now with both the packages and the touchpad inside, heading to the corridor leading to the backdoor at the back of the lobby and taking out my cigarette pack to formally start my night.

“Take it or leave it, sir – be thankful you’re not on the other side of the Wall,” she threw back at me, returning to the monitor and tapping the keyboard. I had very little doubt she did not turn around to tell me that.

9:01 pm
I was starting to suspect that the lamp above the door to our alleyway at the back was motion-sensitive, if not a little slow. As I stepped out, extracting and lighting the white paper of Myrollboro from a half-full pack, the light above my head came up, just as it did that fateful night – as it did every other night – with a tiny flicking for a couple of seconds in advance. I decided, however, not to tread on it: apart from purely symbolic beginning of the shift, it held no meaningful value.

As the smoke began rising up to the gloomy windows of the first floor, I decided to check my touchpad for the directions and exact addresses, as thankfully, nothing could distract me here, in this damp, dark, dank alley. Miranda wasn’t kidding when she mentioned how spaced out they were, even if as I sit here, writing this, I cannot recall precisely, where each one of these was on that specific night.

The first, and closest one for me, was a ten-minute underground ride to the Old City, which seemed off to me – most buildings there were used for law or commercial offices. You never really anticipate anyone living next to their job (me notwithstanding, I’m talking about people working in places that formal and expensive), so I could only imagine who I’d be visiting there. The second, which I assumed I could make to by foot, was indeed only mere 18 minutes of walking away from the first one, just across the river. I found it quite uplifting – I’d never turn down a good walk around the city at this time of the day (or night, or whatever, you get the idea). The last one, however, as I checked it, made my gut twist. The distance was formidable, with either a few stops and changes on the underground in a beeline within the city limits or with just one continuous and lengthy yet less hectic journey on the overground line. The reason why I did not exactly fancy the prospect was that I despised the overground in its entirety: the trains were not exactly straightforward with their directions; delays were prolonged and unpredictable; and too many stops were entirely disconnected from the rest of the otherwise robust railway system. Maybe, if I had a car, or at the very least, a bicycle like Archie supposedly did (one that he, strangely, used only on certain nights), I wouldn’t have minded as much. But alas, the prospects of my journey tonight seemed bleak at best – at least my phone was charged and earphones ready; at least I wouldn’t be totally alone.

I found it rather odd how empty the stations had become lately. Entering the central line, even on a Monday, one always expected it to be busy. Since the extension of working hours a few years ago, some jobs required people to stay all the way until nine, at times even on the weekends. And yet, standing on the platform, admiring the map in front of me (despite knowing it by heart), I only noticed a group of students slightly more to the far end of the station and a lonely woman sitting on the bench with a few shopping bags next to her. The ad above her head, stretching out on a screen across the entire platform, was bursting with colours of the ocean and the sand-line running parallel to it. Unfortunately, the letters were so spread out from one another that it was hard to say, what they spelled out exactly – I could only see “W”, “O”, “U”, “L”, “D” and “N” in my part of the platform, assumingly spelling out “wouldn’t”-something.

“E-excuse me,” I heard a voice behind me, hitting me with an unpleasant stench. I turned around, to see another man, dressed in ragged, worn-out bland clothes, unwashed and unshaved, limping towards me slowly, “You wouldn’t happen to have some change for me to get a snack from that machine over there? I’m very hungry. Please.”

I stumbled for a moment. I never felt disgusted by the homeless, quite the opposite – I felt bad for them. To me, nothing seemed more destabilising and limiting for a person at the height of their life, in our age, anyway. Illness? That was steadily being pushed back. Disability? Sometimes, but a lot of it was becoming a thing of a past as the government began pushing stem cells use and prosthetic advancements as a matter of policy rather than choice (which, to be honest, always rubbed me the wrong way – a much smarter classmate once said it was ‘literally, not figuratively, eugenics’, and I wholeheartedly believe them, even if I don’t quite grasp the concept myself). But poverty? That was a whole different phenomenon. It combined and maximised all the hardships of any single livelihood, crippling not on a physical, but spiritual and material levels, for a man without money, even the smallest extent of it, by today’s standards was a blight on the face of the society. Reduced, abandoned, forgotten – and the welfare was ever barely enough to elevate it.

“Um, maybe, let me just…” I finally made up my mind, taking my jacket off, when suddenly-

“Sure mate, here,” another voice came from behind of me, with a certain aura of smugness to it. I didn’t have to turn around to know that Archie’s red head was fixed just slightly above mine, as he extended his arm out to the ragged-dressed man “Get yourself something nice, will you,” the homeless gentleman, smiling, extended his own arm out, holding a little receiver machine that touched my red-haired colleague’s wrist. After a split-second that the transaction required, Archie touched my shoulder and led me away from the homeless man, still standing there, checking his machine to se how much money he’s just received. Without even being able to say anything in protest, I was immediately cut short by the whizzing train in front of us, “Guess we’re sharing a ride. Hop in.”

“Actually, I-”

“You’re going to the Old City, if I remember my conversation with Miranda correctly? Go on, I don’t bite.” He smirked at me, somewhat maliciously, getting into the opened doors of the tube. I looked at the homeless man, who in his disappointment sat back down near one of the pillars, his head hung down. Realising the despair of my situation, I sighed and walked into the doors, as the mechanical voice announced the closing of the doors.

As the train began gaining speed, I have finally seen the entirety of the advert, stretching across the station. Almost mockingly, it showed a beautiful beachy seaside scape, with white letters spelling out:

‘Wouldn’t it be nice to run away for a while?’

9:05 pm
The train cart was as deserted as the platform it departed from. It seemed that during my shifts, I started appearing in some sort of a limbo of work hours: late enough for those on the regular 9-5 hours to begin going back home, but early enough for those on the extended (9-11, am-pm) and night shifts (10-6, pm-am) to start pouring in and out. Which, in retrospect, made it all the worse, for now I was stuck in here with Archie, who finally took off his cap and was waving it around due to the heat of the carriage.

“It’s a bit hot in here for December, wouldn’t you agree?” he observed, lazily scanning our surrounding for any eye-catching panels of advertising, but not spending more than a second fixated on any of them, “Could tone it down at least a bit, sheesh.”

“I thought you were only supposed to use the Overground tonight?” I ignored his attempts at small talk. Archie’s attempts at it were never particularly pleasant to me.

“Ah, so you’ve discussed me! I’m flattered, truly,” he grinned, finally putting his cap down, “Well, if you absolutely must know, I figured I’d be better off taking the main line between the two farthest points to cut the distance travelled, and to maybe take in the city feeling, you know? Suburbs, they’re just so… detached, dead even.”

Archie, if nothing else, seemed like a curious personality ever since I started working at the company. Apparently, he joined just before me, despite being fairly wealthy to begin with and thus lacking the need to do any work on the side – especially for a company with our reputation. From the few times I discussed this with Miranda, he allegedly was destined to go to ______, one of the best universities in the whole country – if not the world – but decided to leave after only a term, settling down in the Capital instead. To me, that was just ridiculous to comprehend, and the more I listened to him, the more I became perplexed about his motivations and views on life. That is to say, at least to an extent, I really wanted to punch him sometimes, but never mastering the courage nor the physical strength to do so. Yet now that we were on the tube, having to tolerate each other, I thought I might as well dig into him deeper.

“Take in the city?” now it was my turn to smirk, “And how do you expect to do that, sitting on the tube?”

“Oh, easily, dipshit. You can wipe that grin off your face – I’m getting off in two stops. I have absolutely zero interest to stare at you or these abominations of advertising,” he pointed to many advert screens starting at us, one with night-time university, its symbol being an owl, another one combining a glowing red and black pattern, trying to get people to ‘invest into your future’, and some others, much less eye-catching ones, “Instead, I want to take a little walk and see the protests going on. That’s where the true excitement lies.”

“Wait, there are protests going on now? What happened to just doing them in the afternoon?”

“People don’t sleep nowadays, mate,” he paused as we hit a bump on the railway, causing the entire train to screech a little before swiftly resuming its silent journey, “You may not notice this, but with the extended work shift, many workers like you and me openly abandon their jobs and walk out to the Parliament and to the streets with municipal buildings to voice their displeasure. If you’d ask me, one positive thing that came out of that whole extension, is that the government now has to function 24/7, too, so someone is bound to notice us.”

“Us?” I was baffled by his choice of words, “Surely, that does not include ‘us’, we are still working?”

“Okay, some of ‘us’ don’t have a choice – gotta survive somehow, don’t we? But it does not mean we can’t be with those people in spirit and heart. Besides, I’m going to go and see one of those protests, taking a few hours out of my shift – that will show the boss!”

“I doubt boss would care,” I muttered under my breath, failing to come up with anything more concrete to parry.

“Maybe he won’t, but it’s better than doing nothing?” I blushed slightly. Whilst not feeling particularly guilty, for I honestly did not even consider this perspective before, something about the way he said it made me feel like part of the problem, which was at the very least shameful. “See, you may not realise this, but it is vital that we act now. The entire face of the people, of our whole democracy, is smeared with blood and shit of those fucking lunatics who pulled the stunt back at the festival,” the train stopped for a moment, opening its doors at the first stop, with a familiar, almost reliving voice of the mechanical conductor announcing it. After its short speech, Archie continued, “We have to seize the control of the process again, before it spirals into chaos.”

“Would you support a possible revolution if that’s where the control will be taken to, then?” I decided to channel the discussion into a different stream. There were few things I wished to discuss less than what has happened at the festival.

“I support reform. If all else fails, though, yes, I would support a revolution, in the most controlled way possible. The government evidently can’t accommodate the wishes of the people” the doors closed again; the train began moving faster than before.

“But it’s elected. That’s democracy in action.”

“That’s corporate appeal and lies in action,” his voice began to inherit notes of passion and even anger. His nonchalant posture shifted towards me slightly, but not to the point where open aggression could be claimed, at least I didn’t think so, “What did they tell us when the border vote was happening, and what are we presented with now? Do you not understand that the only reason they wanted it is so the companies have a much easier way to manipulate the workspace and shift hours without the need to consult anyone but themselves? The greed is immeasurable – if they want to, they’ll make us all work 20 hours a day, and that’s a big no-no from me,” at this moment, the train entered the worst part of the tunnel – the wind and clucking of its wheels, combined together, began producing an awful howling sound outside, drowning out any resemblance of a dialogue into vain attempts to communication. The noise seemed piercing to me, and I covered my ears, forgetting about Archie and forgetting about my job, forgetting even that I was on the train. I hated the sound so much, I just wanted to disappear out of the underground or plug in my earphones to try and suppress it. I closed my eyes, shutting my mind away from the horrible noise. As unhealthy as this reaction may have been, this was my only way to get through it for now.

Acknowledging the sound as well, he paused, adjusting himself back in his seat. Throwing a glance around the cart, he took out an electric cigarette, reminiscent of Miranda’s one, but slightly bigger and bulkier, and took a few puffs. Noticing my confused, and probably somewhat frightened, expression, he laughed and mouthed to me, “Stop being such a party-pooper, nobody cares in an empty cart and the fire detectors don’t react to this.” In an instance, we cleared out the screeching part of the tunnel, returning to normal chugging along through the tunnel, allowing me to hear the final part of his sentence clear enough.

“Tell me,” he finally put his device away, “What did you vote, anyway?”

“I didn’t,” I confessed, after a moment of hesitation, “I do not have a full citizenship yet, but I will qualify soon.”

“Ah, well that explains a lot,” he chuckled, somewhat disappointingly rolling his eyes and shifting the gaze away at the station we were arriving at.

“And what is that supposed to mean?” I did not see myself becoming this defensive tonight, yet my own tone betrayed me. Something about his remark made me a little too invested in this whole discussion.

“What I mean is-” he was interrupted suddenly by the automated conductor, announcing the arrival to one of the stations along my way and Archie’s final destination. In turn, he simply shrugged his shoulders, looking at me with a semi-sorry expression without a hint of genuineness, “I guess I’ll have to explain to you some other time,” he got up and stretched out to the most possible extent that he could within the tight confinement of the tube, reminding me once more of just how tall he was, “All I can tell you for now, maybe open your eyes once in a while when on delivery duty. You’ll see a lot of great things happening around you if you just pay enough attention to them. Cheerio!” and with that, he hopped out of the train, moments before the doors began closing. I watched him stride away, in an unmistakable cheerful Archie fashion, having very little doubt that the usual, shit-eating grin on his face was there once again, now that he did not have to deal with me.

I guess, in a sense, we were both relieved that it was only two stops. For a moment, I even began to imagine he might start a fight with me over my political views, not that I had any specific ones I liked to share a lot. Don’t get me wrong, I followed politics, I held beliefs. But political economy made my head hurt enough as it is, and conversations with people such as Archie often only exacerbated the pain – not to mention, legal issues (it was close to a decade now that deportation started being used as a form of punishment for those who stepped out of the line, which by itself kept being redrawn seemingly every year, to reduce allowed political actions). But with Archie, it was mostly annoyance: all he could talk about, it seemed, was politics this and politics that, often in a contradictory sense (this one time I actually tried listening and taking him seriously, yet he jumped between complete anarchy and borderline dictatorship seemingly with no regard for consistency, so I gave up), and in his head, everybody else only wanted to talk about just politics specifically, 24/7, 365 days. It’s kind of like being in university, and never growing up out of your subject, like everything could still revolve around it and only include people sharing your very same passions.

I’d love to have gotten into his head, if only for a minute, to dissect just what was going on there. Unfortunately for me – and for everyone around us – the closest anyone would ever get was trying to sit down and listen to him argue. Not that it was possible to do for more than ten minutes at a time.

9:28 pm
The Old City was eerily quiet. Quieter than usual, even. Whilst legal and commercial jobs did get the privilege of still mostly finishing at normal hours, a certain sense of desertion could not help but creep within me as I went up the stairs of the ___ ____‘s Cathedral station, as a lonely cab cruised right past me silently, humming its electric engine, with its light indicator off after undoubtedly a long day.

As I started walking, I took my music player out, with earphones already plugged in (I am prepared like that, yes) and turned it on, putting the buds into my ears to ease off the quietness. Always hitting shuffle, I rarely found the music entirely fitting to my scenery, but the track it landed on then was weirdly soothing in its brilliance, accompanying the view. A wide street, opening in front of me, was saturated with closed storefronts and dimmed lights of the office buildings’ receptions. Even their neon signs, shining so bright during the day, were turning off, with only about a quarter (I counted) remaining lit. About the only light that could come through consistently were the advertising panels, perhaps not as littered along the streets, still stood tall in particular on the crossroads. Their billboards, wide and intimidating, made one feel almost obliged to at least check out the product they were promoting. I guess that makes a job well-done.

Despite major leaps and reconstructions of architectural landscape of the city, it was Old City that still managed to retain a huge chunk of its character from way, way back when. As I made my way down, towards the bank, I couldn’t help but admire the oldness of certain buildings, sticking out with their pointy roofs, pillars and red-brick walls holding the entire construction together, carrying the gothic and medieval times’ influence all through them. One that always caught my attention was the Court of Justice, not too far from where I got off: its mighty roof, constructed almost as if out of a thousand, molten together spikes, its entry gaslights, operating for a long time on just normal electricity and its intimidating golden sign on iron gates, made it feel like almost as if being stuck out of time, just as the concept of justice was nowadays. And yet, it was comforting to note a certain air of recognition to those buildings despite sticking out as a sore thumb alongside primarily minimalist living blocks. It made me feel content and somehow belonging, as if the world, throughout all these thousands of years that it was around, was merely passing another phase of one continuous history, and that it is, nevertheless, still ours to be claimed.

Yes, that’s probably right. The world was still for us, by us, and despite everything being wrong, all is still mostly right with it.

Few other thoughts and concerns occupied me until I heard my tablet vibrating – it was a cheap old model, without any voiced AI assistant, so if navigation was active (and it always was for the sake of tracking), one had to keep his senses up for the vibrations, announcing the arrival. And – as I expected – the display of it was covered entirely with a message that “you have arrived at destination (1)”, spelling out the address just below. Clicking the green “okay” button, I finally took my eyes off the opposite side of the street, where old buildings were still numerous, to the side on which I was walking, abandoning the more classic architecture. Instead, I finally gazed back at the living complexes. Bland, white and blue, all the same buildings of living complexes, lined in a lengthy row. Expensive, but ultimately, uninspiring.

I sighed, somewhat disappointingly – I guess daydreaming is simply not an option during the night or within urban planning.

9:35 pm
Flat number 24, with an additional note ‘don’t buzz, just knock,’ was located on the top floor of the, as I have made it painfully obvious already, bland, white and blue, same as every other next to it, building, made out of ten floors stacked atop one another the exact same way each. There was no need to buzz, thankfully, as the electronic verification desk quickly cleared my courier ID, neatly tucked into the data stored on my pad, allowing me to use the elevator and stairs. I took the elevator – I was not merely excited enough to be taking the bloody stairs.

The doors, unlike the exterior of the place, were quite colourful and full of personality. Three doors, at least on the tenth floor, each had their own distinct material: one was purely metallic, painted burgundy, with a silver knob and a peephole slightly above the average; the second was made, it seemed, clay and cement (how do you even make a door out of that?!), painted in the colour of sunrise, with an engraved silver doorknob and no peephole; the last one, with numbers ‘2’ and ‘4’ at the top, was a classic wooden door, but polished to such a degree that it almost reflected me in itself, with a perfectly normal peephole and a golden-brown doorknob. Remembering not to buzz, I punctually knocked, immediately hearing the ruckus of getting up and rushing up to the door behind it.

“Yes?” a manly voice came through, somewhat muffled, with the person undoubtedly peeking at me through the peephole as he said that.

“Delivery,” I picked up the brown, very light package from my bag and waved it in front of me for effect. Turns out, there was none, however, as no rustling came from behind the door for a few seconds.

“Ah, yes, – just push the door, it should be opened.”

I did, as asked, and to little wonder the door was ajar. The apartment that opened to me was beyond spacious, yet somehow oversaturated at the same time: a large living room, adjacent to the entry hall, was lined with various paintings of modern art, filled with colours and shapes but ultimately remaining ambiguous in their messages to me, and framed movie posters, all of which were about my size big; the bookshelves, rejecting their conventional structure, were extended at random in-between the hanging art, lit by LED light ray, streaming from the very top of the flat celling, only breaking for a large window in the very middle, overlooking the Old City, with the ___ ____‘s darkened dome visible in the distance; and most eye-catching of all, with the background of a creamy-white sofa, stood some sort of a grey rock in the very middle of the room, atop a glass coffee table. Now if you can’t tell, I am definitely not an artist, but there seemed to be very little larger meaning to the “sculpture”, with only a few cracks visible in-between its lines, but otherwise, it really was just a massive piece of rock. The other parts of the apartment were not visible to me, but the lasting corridors, opening to my right as I entered and wiped my shoes on the grey mat, gave the further impression of grandeur in their pitch-black spaces, alluring and worrying at once with whatever further discoveries they promised.

At the centre of it all, on the mentioned cream sofa, was the man himself. You could tell, despite him sitting down, he was tall, probably over six feet, easily. His barely visible, but nonetheless well-kept stubble and concealed circles under his eyes gave him an impression of older age, perhaps in early thirties, just when one’s body begins to actually get a little tired from the weight of the world. His hair, though, bright black and wavy, neatly tucked in a bun behind his head, were bursting with youth – I mean, seriously, who beyond the age of twenty-five would put their hair in a samurai bun? The impression furthered when I realised, he was sitting in trousers and a white shirt with unbuttoned collar, covered by a pink bath robe, which oddly fitted him beyond my comprehension, complimenting his bright green eyes and light brown skin, lit up by the laptop’s screen in front of him, sitting patiently on his lap. It took me a while to realise it, but all this time, in the background, some sort of a podcast was playing. It was, however, too faint and too far from me to understand, just what exactly it was saying. Other that, the room remained in its perfect tranquil of silence, undisturbed by no one, not even me.

“Mr… Stokes? I have your delivery here,” I waved the package in my hand, to which the green-eyed man only looked up at me briskly and shushed.

“Hang on, I’m trying to listen!” he put his eyes back on the screen and ears, undoubtedly, to the faint podcast sound, “Please, just put it down right here an- OH GOD DAMN IT!” the man suddenly burst out, punching the air in frustration. The outburst, to be frank, made me jump slightly and take a step back. After that, though, he simply put one hand on his eyes, covering them in unmistakable frustration of defeat.

“Is everything alright?” I asked out of my annoying compassionate civility, stepping back towards him with, as I hoped, reassurance in my eyes.

“No, of course nothing is alright,” he put his hands behind his head and leaned back, staring at the celling, “the value of Shuffle Coin just went down, plummeted, one even may say, and I was seriously betting on it to NOT do that.”

I held back a chuckle. After seeing the outburst of this man take place just mere seconds prior, I imagined an infinite number of possible reasons for its occurrence. But most certainly, electronic currency was not one of them. By God, how ridiculous is that?

“You trade e-coins?” I asked, still ‘recovering’ my face from the half-chuckle that raced through it a moment ago. The man, thankfully, did not seem to have noticed.

“Evidently,” he said, still not looking at me, “Although, I’m starting to doubt I made a worthy investment. Should’ve gone for inter-dollar instead, it seems…” he paused for a moment, collecting himself, “What, you into trading?”

“No, not really, it’s… not something that appeals to me.”

“Of course it isn’t,” he barely audibly chuckled, pressing his palms against his head, “To each their own, I guess.”

“I guess,” my curiosity was piqued – crypto has not been a major thing for at least half a decade now, so I decided to ask him further, “Why did you get you into it, if you don’t mind me asking?” I decided to bite, however rude his initial comments, notwithstanding. 

“Why?” he kept looking at the celling, “Aren’t you a little nosy for a deliveryman, eh?” he suddenly got up, still refusing to look at me (even though he invited me in himself), and headed towards the kitchen, which was outside of my view on the other end of the room, “Would you like some coffee?”

“No, I’m alright, thank you.”

“Of course you are,” the sound of pouring water followed, breaking the silence and even deafening the sound of the podcast, the source of which, it seemed, was coming from the wireless earpiece that now laid on the sofa next to the laptop, exclaiming words like ‘value,’ ‘invest,’ ‘sale,’ etc., “To answer your question,” he announced after the pouring stopped, “I started because there was good money to be made. Have you seen what the value of Shuffle Coin was two months ago?”

“No.”

“Of course you didn’t,” he walked back out, sipping the steaming liquid out of a perfect-white cup in his right hand, “Simpletons like you don’t do investments, which is why it’s usually so profitable. Well, to your knowledge, it was five thousand per unit. Can you imagine? Five!”

“Five thousand… what?” I asked, slightly confused.

“Oh, you’re absolutely hopeless,” he scoffed, sitting back down, “Five thousand Bit Dollars, obviously. But of course you simply wouldn’t know, how could I blame you?”

“I’m sorry, but-” something in my stomach began turning, making me slightly irritated with the green-eyed man and his repetition of the phrase ‘of course,’ “But how is anything about me is so obvious that you just keep saying ‘of course’?”

“Is it not clear?” he took another sip, typing something on his laptop, “Look at you. You’re a courier. Of course you wouldn’t be able to grasp all the capabilities and nuances of business and investments. And of course, a person who has to be worried about only living day to day, as opposed to those who can truly Live, with a capital ‘L,’” he stressed, “Won’t even be able to consider the possibility of investments, would they? Hence, the ‘of course’ – it’s simply a fact,” he shrugged, before returning his eyes to me.

“What do you even mean by that, ‘Living with a capital L’?”

“Living prosperously and in comfort, of course – a true sort of living, if you’d ask me,” he grinned smugly, taking another sip of his coffee.

There was truth in his words. Living, true – or with a capital L, if I absolutely must – living that is, in a sense always revolved around money one way or another. You would never get to see the beaches in Southern Europe or experience the thrill of flying over the Atlantic, or even attend an opera house, if you simply did not have enough money. To put it simply, some of the greatest experiences in life, all of which could be seen as ‘True Living’, were tightly locked behind price tags, paywalls, and implications of certain sacrifices. And I suppose, in this sense, it was not something that people like me, attempting to make a simple living of going by, could grasp in the entirety of its possibilities, as opposed to those who could afford to Live with a capital ‘L’. It did, however, merely meant that they had enough spare income to spend money on the greater enjoyments of life, and it raised a greater debate – what would one even mean by Living, with a capital ‘L’, and whether it had to necessarily be limited to amounts of money one could blow away on pleasures besides necessities. The implications of the free world, as people around here have always been told from the early age, meant creating our own meaning of living, and thus, deriving our own happiness from it. As long as, of course, you had the possibilities opened to you, which meant having money to chase those possibilities. Naturally, you are encouraged to go and earn it the honest way – your own way. It was an individualistic piece of thought that stood firmly against the collectivism of the Eastern countries, feared by many as a road to serfdom and societal happiness that would contrast with individual misery; in short, it was a building block of one’s consciousness on its own. Yet here we were, on the verge of breaking out into an argument of disparity on the simple matter of living, with or without the capital letter ‘L’ – a man spending his money on, out of all things, crypto, and a man standing in his spacious living room, surrounded by what could be seen as fine art, holding a package for him.

“I’ll go ahead and assume you’re a broker then?” I decided to remain neutral on the matter and pursue the least risky branch of a topic, and only in hindsight realising how dumb it was of me to not just give him the package, do my bloody job, and leave.

“No, actually, I’m an entrepreneur. This,” he waved towards his laptop, “Is just something to do on the side, in my spare time.”

“So, in your spare time, you just trade?” it was becoming perplexing to me, just what exactly this man was doing with his life, and suddenly, I was highly invested in my discovery.

“Well, yeah, otherwise I wouldn’t have enough money to run all my businesses. Besides, I’m at work for the entire day, nine-nine shift, when else would I do it?”

“And how many businesses would that be, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Well, if you absolutely must know, since it interests you that much, it’s six.”

“Six?!” I gasped with exclamation. In my mind, from what I grasped during my economics course and deeper readings, running even one business would be tricky enough, but here was the man who ran six at the same time, “You run six businesses and all turn profit?”

“…Kind of,” he answered after a brief pause, “I mean, otherwise, how would I be able to afford all this artwork?”

“What, like this grey piece of rock in the middle of the room?”

“Hey, how is this any of your business, anyway?” he recoiled, evidently defensive, “Didn’t you come here to make a delivery?”

“Yes, but I’m just curious,” I realised I was crossing the boundaries of my allowed protocol. Perhaps on purpose, perhaps unintentionally, but my mind was clinging so hard to this man in front of me that I simply could not let go, “You claim to want to be Living, with a capital ‘L’, part of which is buying expensive artwork. To do that, you run six businesses, all of which only kind of turn out profit. So in order to sustain them all, you trade e-currencies in your spare time, which adds up in total almost all of your day being taken up by work?”

“Yeah,” he shrugged, somewhat confused, his massive posture being slightly hunched over in disbelief, “Your point exactly?”

“Does it not tire you at all?”

“Of course not!” the man gasped and shook his head, looking at me with slight ridicule in his eyes, “How could it? It’s a simple sacrifice to make if I want to Live, don’t you get it?”

“Not really?”

“Bah, of course you don’t!” he exclaimed, waving his hands in the air, “Let me ask you this: why do you think the Heath Service was scaled back in the last twenty or so years?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because people were getting lazy, and our leaders realised that. They saw that people were abusing the welfare system to prosper and ‘live’ as opposed to ‘Live’ and acted decisively against it. Of course, those affected would hardly see it, but did you know that the number of entrepreneurs in this city alone had multiplied tenfold in the last five years?”

“I’d imagine the Capital is the only place where it increased?”

“Why is that relevant? People come here for the competition, for the Life, and it contributes to the economy, which in turn causes more people to Live, with a capital ‘L’.”

“But didn’t you just say that simpletons like me can’t grasp the complexities of Living?” I attempted to parry.

“Wrong – I said you can’t grasp the complexities of investments, and of course you cannot. E-currency, for example is one of the few things anyone at all can pick up – but to win, you must be competent there, hence why only few, like me, can really prosper. I’ve never said that everyone is going to get to truly Live the Life, just that more people would, and everyone can try to. Some have to lose for others to win, it’s a simple race,” he stopped for a moment, emptying his cup entirely into his mouth – the speech evidently was starting to drag on longer than he anticipated, but he seemed excited to the point of hairs standing up on the back of his neck to explain it to me in full, “But at the same time, you may view it as a partnership – a syndicate, if you’d like, one where… Oh, how did they put it … Ah, right, where ‘everybody’s got a share, and everybody wins’ – the exception is that not everyone wins the same way.” He smiled gleefully, evidently proud of himself. My mind fumbled for a second before realising where that quote came from.

“That quote’s satire – as in, it’s actively making fun of that very mindset. You know that, right?” I sighed, frowning at him as he tilted his head in affirmation.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about; I just like the quote. Besides, I don’t see anything funny or satirical in these words,” he stared at me, dumbfounded in his expression, “And even so, who even cares – the principle works, and all is right in the world.”

“So does winning mean Living?”

“Not necessarily and not for all, of course – come on, catch up already!”

“Would you say to you winning means Living?”

“Look around you, man!” he stretched his arms out, picturing in his wide reach three paintings hanging behind him with the already mentioned rock standing in front of him, “Could you say that you have enough money to get all this fine art for yourself? I’d say that’s a win – but you, evidently, disagree.”

I half-opened my mouth, wanting to argue further, especially regarding the useless piece of rock that stood tall in the very middle of the room, infuriating me, but something in my head clicked at that moment. Within that click, a realisation came to me how profoundly stupid this whole conversation was. There was no reason for me to get into this to begin with, fewer yet for him to get into this topic, and yet I did, knowing full-well I wouldn’t be able to dissuade this man from his views or prove him wrong – he was already deadest on the conclusions he himself drew up, and arguing for the status quo is only a source of entertainment for him. Not to mention, the whole thing was starting to fall apart in its confusion. Most importantly of all, though, all this transpired whilst the clocks ticked further, leaving less and less time for deliveries. It is precisely why I decided not to continue, as the man himself evidently lost interest, putting the earpiece back into his ear and opening his laptop again.

“Either way, Sir, here’s your delivery,” I placed the package on the coffee table, causing him to finally acknowledge it. As soon as he saw it, his eyes lit up brightly, “I’ll need you to sign thi-”

“Oh, of course, yes!” he jumped at it, unwrapping and tearing the brown paper as if it was the Christmas day already, “Why didn’t you say so from the start that it has arrived?!”

“Well, I…” I wanted to remind him that I, in fact, have notified him two times in the past twenty or so minutes of having a delivery for him, but decided not to, “Sorry, I got carried away by your gorgeous apartment. Please, sign here,” I pressed a few pop-up buttons on the display and handed him the pad with an electric pen attached to it, which he grabbed with one hand and signed in a single moment, whilst still unwrapping the package with his other hand. I had no interest in knowing, what the package was (not that we were really allowed to know at all by contract), so I merely turned my back to him and headed for the door, “Good night, Sir, have a good day tomorrow.”

“Oh I certainly will now!” he proclaimed with excitement, as I stepped outside of the door, “Good night!” the last bits of his sentence muffled out, as I closed the door and heard the wirings of an electric lock within it buzz rhythmically, assuring the full closure.

I’ll admit, sometimes I did want to know what it was within those packages. The emotions experienced by the people receiving them ranged from neutral indifference to unusual excitement, with no fine line running between the two. The code of conduct did not allow for that, as I have said – mostly for the couriers’ own safety and plausible deniability should the circumstances imply trouble (legally speaking). That night, though, it was easy for me to assume that whatever was, it would probably be something that would help him trade even more crypto on the e-market for even more e-currency on the e-market, inflating either artificially or not, his wealth in the process, something that would allow him to sustain him his six businesses further and buy even more useless art that represented nothing at all. Frankly, it all got confusing for me by the end, and my head began to hurt. But ultimately, maybe, just maybe, that would be the way for him to win and remain perfectly happy, even content, with his life, living it either with the capital or lowercase ‘l’, however he preferred. And if he chose to have it this way, who am I to judge?

…You know what? No. No, too confusing, too much – this is something only Sam would be able to grasp and understand. I am not Sam, though. So fuck this. Fuck that man. Fuck his crypto and fuck his trading. That is a no way to live, with a lowercase or a capital fucking ‘L’.
If it works for some, good for them. Me? No thanks.

10:17 pm
The bridge to the South bank was the first place along my way where the signs of life became resurfacing once again. One could really tell he was approaching the student territory by the sounds of conversations carried by the wind in-between the spacious opening of the road, the smell of weed and tobacco, burning up into the atmosphere and the taste of youth you could almost feel on your tongue. This taste, full of colour and freshness, like a newly cut lawn just after a rainy day, was bitter with the textures of alcohol and dry snacks, and in all its sharpness, it was magnificent. It was then, as I made my way past one of the many circular glass plazas located on the South bank, throwing the rays of its purple neon signs from the inside onto the street, that a sense of insufferable nostalgia has hit me.

The most notable memory that always stood out to me from my short stay at university was one of the first flat parties that I have attended. I remember that it was fresher’s week, or it must have been at least, since September was very generous with its weather, willingly handing out rays of lush sunshine onto the messily upkept hair of newly enrolled students, me being one amongst them. That day in particular, I found out that Sam miraculously ended up on the same course, which brought me much joy – it’s always easier to face unknown with a friendly face next to you. However, he, being the social butterfly out of us two, had clearly did not share my anxieties, rapidly making friends minutes after moving in. I found him that day, sitting in his room with a couple of flatmates, boxes and suitcases still unpacked, sipping on beer and cracking jokes as I came in. He asked briefly, what was up, to which I explained that my flat was still desolate and lonely, not having anyone but me move in yet. It was then when he suggested that I join him and his newfound mates to have a cold one, after which they planned to move to a flat party in the building opposite of ours. Naturally, I agreed – there was no reason to turn down an opportunity to make acquittances and, as any person my age would be primarily concerned, getting drunk. 

The flat party itself was nothing interesting, or nothing interesting I would remember in great details, anyways. You may imagine, how those parties go – I’m sure, you’ve been to a handful – bright lights, everyone standing cramped primarily in the kitchen, red cups and a variety of cheap-ish alcohol drinks on the wooden tables. But it never was about the logistics or the looks of those parties themselves, as oppose to the people and experiences you’d get to have the pleasure of going through. And that first party, when Sam introduced me left and right to people I’ve never seen and half of whom I’ll never see again, was the one I remember so vividly because I did not have any other party like that again. In the short amount of time I was there, which couldn’t have been more than four hours, I played (and lost) beerpong with the tag-team of physics and maths students, shared a cigarette with a rugby captain (who claimed to have nicotine as his source of oxygen), chatted with an amateur filmmaker, certain of becoming the next Scorsese and rejecting the need to get anything above a B- overall, and even danced a little with a pretty lawyer, claiming that she was an successor to a massive inheritance from a sub-branch of a royal family from some other distant country, the name of which I could not remember now. It was the first and one of the few times when I had very little doubt I knew where I belonged and what kind of people are truly my kind of company, and for all of that I had only Sam to thank.

Now that I think about it properly, I almost always had Sam to thank for those sort of developments in life, be it for better, or for worse.

Passing through an underpass, a car whizzed past me, with a few students peeking out of their windows and hollering something incomprehensible. My train of thought has crashed to a halt. One of them popped a bottle open out of the window, and its cork flew right into my face, hitting me on the cheek. I was about to scream something out in protest, but before I realised it, the car was already gone past the corner further away. Frustrated, I rubbed my cheek, undoubtedly red as all hell from the impact, and carried on walking.

Deciding to break off the suggested navigation path, I swerved off the packed yellow-lit streets into a narrow alleyway, extending to the other side of the street where the needed address was. It was not after a few moments that I realised there was literally no light sources whatsoever here, as the darkness had consumed me whole, like an off-putting missed spot in an oil painting. The situation was made all the worse by the sheer fact that the alley went downhill under an incline, to, what I assumed, the middle of it, since I could not see the other end whatsoever. Somewhat frightened, I nonetheless moved on, minding my feet as to make sure I do not stumble, trying to at the very least to pick on any sounds around me to focus on. Disappointingly, apart from the sound of traffic and distant, undistinguishable conversations of students in pubs, there was little I could pick up to prick my interest.

Until, that is, at almost the halfway point of the way, I began picking up the sounds of music, coming from right in front of me.

Aware and somewhat unnerved, I gripped my bag’s handle slightly firmer. Drawing closer, I began picking up on an array of words uttered by someone, trying to follow the music, which turned out to be some royalty-free trap instrumental, or beat, or whatever. I quickly realised, that the person speaking, was trying to freestyle – and poorly at that – along with it. Mustering the courage, required after all the weird shit I’ve heard about cults and gangs of the city, often hiding in alleyways like this, I began walking faster towards the middle, from which now a faint light could be seen hitting the floor of the alley from somewhere above.

“… Yeah, yeah, and I’m getting them straight A’s,”

“Ooh!”

“Yuh, but tonight, these hunies want to snuggle anyways,” the line continued.

“Ay!” someone adlibbed.

“Yuh, yuh, aha, yeah, and- OH FUCK!” the freestyle was interrupted abruptly as I emerged from the darkness into the light of the makeshift lamp, stuck to the wall of the building with a piece of tape. In its rays, I saw six boys, no older than eighteen at most, staring at me, eyes wide open. On the neck of one of them, a massive speaker was hanging, all the way down to his stomach, from which a the beat was still coming from. All six were frozen in their place, staring at me in an unquestionably unpleasant surprise. In the hands of a few of them, lit up roll-ups could be seen. One of them was holding a green plastic bottle, half-empty and filled with a dark liquid inside of it. Nobody said anything for a while, including me. I was seriously reconsidering the smartness of choosing my own route tonight.

“Who the fuck’s are you?” the tallest and strongest looking one of all of them finally asked, breaking the silence.

“A courier,” I answered honestly, staring now right at him without breaking eye-contact, “I’m just passing by,” that was not enough to reassure them, as they still looked at me cautiously like a herd of does in the headlights. I glanced at their roll-ups, very obviously reeking of weed, “Oh fucking relax, will you, I am not here to bust you,” I gestured at the rolled up papers in their hands, “I don’t care what you’re smoking there.”

“Oh, right,” they all breathed out, as a few chuckled and increased the volume on their speaker, “Fucking hell bro, you scared the shit out of us”

“Why? Are you expecting someone?” I wondered, but only one of them, the tallest of all, heard me.

“Our principal goes out on night-walks sometimes, we’re worried the old bastard might be onto something,” he replied to me with a strong accent, rolling the r’s and as if leaving an ‘e’ on the end of each word, strongly implying him to be from northern mainland. He stepped to the wall opposite of his friends and took out a pack of cigarettes out of his red bomber’s pocket, “Smoke?”

“Why?” I exclaimed. Such warming courtesy to strangers was not something I was expecting tonight, especially not from a bunch such as this.

“Idk, you don’t seem like a rat and I’m getting bored smoking with the same guys all the time. Ya want one, or what? It’s reds, but I got it laced a bit .”
“No, thank you,” I answered after a moment of hesitation. As appealing as it was to have another cigarette, principles were principles, and I was not about to break them.

“Your loss,” he lit it up with a cheap yellow lighter that he produced out of his right pocket, “How old are you bro?”

“xx,” I replied sincerely, causing the guy to almost drop the cigarette from his lips from a chuckle.

“Holy shit, I’m sorry,” he regained himself, taking a drag of the cigarette, “You sound thirty bro,” the cigarette went out again at that point, causing him to curse under the breath and reach out for his lighter one more time. I did not reply at first, processing his response, unsure if I should be flattered or ashamed.

“Who are you guys, anyway?” I decided to ask him to eliminate the awkwardness that began settling in with the silent pause. Something in my head, insufferably nagging and irritating, simply did not let my legs to just take me away from here.

“We? We the rugby team of a school close here – ___ ___s College, you ever heard of it?”

“No,” I confessed. The name sounded unnecessarily posh and expensive.

“Lucky,” the boy laughed, coughing lightly, “Costs thirty grand a year but is still a piece of shit.”

“Hang on,” the realisation that I have caught literal high-schoolers smoking in a dark alleyway on a weeknight has hit me like a truck, creating a moral dilemma in my head like I’ve never seen before, “how come you are out so late then?”

“Cause we don’t have the time otherwise,” his voice sounded with ridicule, as if I just asked something ridiculously stupid, like that the sun isn’t real or that the milk is racist, “Our fucking school, man, it’s so tough – we study 9 to 4, then train in sports by people who suck at teaching and managing them, and we are forced to bed at 11, no matter if we got shit to do,” the boy took a passionate, almost angry drag of a cigarette. It was clear I set him off on a rant, “And, we are only allowed out three times a week. And, only for two hours! Can you imagine?” he rolled his eyes, irritated with, hopefully, not me, but rather the subject of his story, “It’s honestly like prison bro, you can’t even begin to picture.
“Thankfully, as you can see, we found a loophole, so we sneak out now and then and just enjoy ourselves in town, you get me?” he evidently was very proud of himself, as he ran his hand through the shaved head, from which the hair was only just starting to crop up again.

“Ah, so you going somewhere after this?” I leaned against the same wall, trying to make sure that I was heard and, more importantly, still able to make conversations despite the resumed freestyle in the background.

“Oh no, no – this is our night out. A little bit of weed, maybe some gas from across the Wall, a little bit of young soda and rum, some nice beats – issa holiday.”

‘Gas’ was new, not a drug I had heard of before. Not that I was big on them to begin with – who knows, maybe it’s just some new middle strain of weed, but I couldn’t tell you even if I tried. Powder – _______ – was popular, I heard, as well as ________ (much rarer, harder to get, ever since the prescription laws’ crackdown of 200x) among the lawyers and economists, but also couriers, alike, to keep the edge during long hours of work – the very same ones I told you about earlier.

I gazed across to the group at the back again, as they gave up their desperate attempts at freestyling and simply stood around the makeshift lamp on the brick fence, laughing and talking, whilst effortlessly smoking their hand-rolled cigarettes and joints, chasing them with plastic bottles with sodas mixed with rum and whiskey, clearly without a back thought of what they were doing.

“Is it fun?” I questioned him, “When I was in high school, we’d sneak out into pubs on weekends, when we could get in, anyway, but this?” I looked back at him, somewhat baffled. Despite at most having only a few years between one another, I couldn’t have felt older right now. He only laughed back.

“‘When I was in high school’? Man, you’re old,” there was something strangely uncomfortable about appearing older to these boys, to him in particular, as he rubbed in the already present feeling of alienation I felt, “We can’t go to no pubs, you can’t fake identity chips,” I came to my senses, remembering that it has only been a couple of years since they’ve abandoned ID’s fully, and true – chips were almost impossible to fake as of yet.

“Well surely there are other things – theatre, parks, concerts,” I tried to hide the growing frustration in my voice, having no idea where it even came from to begin with, “There’s politics, there’s public events, there’s all other public shit – there’s plenty, surely, to do in the night-time!”

“So nothing, then?” he chuckled again

“Okay, help me understand,” since I have already appeared way older than I really was, I thought I might as well turn on my paternal instinct full on, “Aren’t these bad for you? I smoke, sure, but not drugs or anything of the sort, so I just can’t grasp the appeal of standing in a dank alleyway on not the warmest night and frying your brain.”

“Aight bro what are you gonna do, call the cops?” I scoffed, but put my eyes down, “Let me say this: of course, they are bad for us,” said he somewhat gleefully, as if expecting me to take the conversation this way, “But, so is schoolwork and stress, at least the way they get us to go to class. So is concussions, but we still play and are pushed to win every week. More so, so is boredom, but we are given as few options to spend our free time as possible, because we are always told to work – Work! Work! Work! – for tomorrow, so that’s okay I guess. But I don’t wanna work for tomorrow, I’d rather have my fun now. Why should I be dragged into this?” despite the darkness, I could tell his face was becoming redder and redder as he spoke, filling with fury and passion of the surprisingly well-articulated words coming out of his mouth, “And I mean I fuck with sports for example, but they don’t tell me to do it professionally – priority is always the academy, and I fucking hate it man, I’m never gonna make it with grades because in the end of it all there is an exam which is not fit for the way I am and which they know I’ll fail – is that not bad for me?” he stopped for a moment, catching his breath in another drag of the cigarette, “All these things are bad for us, boredom especially – there’s nothing’s worse than boredom. We can probably do anything we want, but first there is the timetable, and second, have you seen the prices here? Shit’s mad!” he wasn’t wrong on that – the Capital indeed was an expensive beast to tame, reminding me in its most simple example of cigarettes costing 14.50 per pack if not more, “They are starving us bro, taking our youth and our free time and our dreams, is what’s happening,” he coughed a couple of times, then spit some yellow-ish saliva out of his mouth, “But what’s different with this is that it doesn’t feel like it’s killing us slowly, unlike boredom. And that’s what I like about it, as well as that it just so happens to be the most time and cost-effective option. So, you see, there really isn’t anything else to do but to stay here and just enjoy ourselves. And if we, as you imply, are killing ourselves slowly this way, fine – it’s something to do, and at least I am not bored doing it.”

“Shiiiit, _____ you proper poetic tonight eh?” someone shouted over after the boy was done talking. The group laughed, before returning back to their freestyle.

I felt speechless. On instinct, I raised my finger as if to protest, but quickly lowered it down, looking both dumb and ridiculous at once. There really was nothing I could tell this boy that would convince him of my position. And besides, what is the point? He wasn’t under my care, nor did I know him – he literally only said that I did not look like a rat, and thus, could be trusted with a little chat. Similarly, the extent of hypocrisy on my part became more apparent than ever, recalling my scolding of Miranda earlier. I couldn’t argue with him because I could see his point precisely – not only that, but I could also see myself agreeing with it. It’s just that I was so stubborn, so stern, so unbelievably stupidly zealous, even in my 20s, about my convictions that I would use anything and everything to continue arguing if I got carried away too far.

But I didn’t this time. This time, I realised my own stubbornness soon enough, proceeding to lower my hand, sigh and gently smile instead.

“Okay,” I said, “fine. You win. You clearly know what’s better for you, and I simply don’t got the right to rob you off that. Just remember that simple pleasures aren’t always the best ones.”

“Whatever that means,” he chuckled, throwing his finished cigarette over the wall and extending the other hand to me. I gripped it, him doing the same but more firmly, and gave it a good shake, “But sure, no problem, man, thanks for stopping by. Good luck on your night.”

“Thanks, you too. Stay out of trouble.”

“Never,” he threw back at me, turning over back to his friends as I started to walk in the opposite direction. Yet as I did, I couldn’t help but stop and look back at the group, feeling somewhat drunk. Not in a drowsy way, but rather as a feeling of strange pleasure, of nostalgia-filled reminiscences and carelessness, pulsating of ideas and memories of when life still was simple enough to not worry about it. It felt foreign, to be this way again, and I wondered for a moment if aging was really such a universal concept. Thinking, I chuckled to myself – the possession of these thoughts at a mere age of twenty was definitely something I probably should have been concerned about. And alas, there it was, nevertheless, so maybe it was best to simply let them go and get on with the night and the remaining deliveries – the two things that were slipping through my fingers the longer I spent in this alleyway.

But as I did, walking away on my way, I have suddenly heard someone whisper – loudly –

“IT’S THE PRINCIPAL!”

Immediately, the light behind went out, submerging the entire alley into the darkness, as I heard something hit the floor – boys’ speaker, with the music still blasting out of it. Ducking slightly down, I saw a silhouette with a hat on its head, darkened by the streetlight behind him, slowly walking towards the group in the middle. All of them immediately began walking quickly towards me, as not to alarm the assumed principal, approaching them, and me, from the same end I’ve entered.

“You’ve got nowhere to run, boys,” a calm yet authoritative voice came from the silhouette, sending even my heart to the bottom of the stomach, despite being drowned out by the hurried steps of the group, accelerating up the hill, towards the salvation of the streetlamp on the other end. Without even knowing it, I likewise became one of them on a whim, accelerating as I went, as if my very life was now in danger, feeling the walls to begin closing down on us.

Just as that, when my mind went blank, I could hear the occasional ‘fuck,’ ‘shit’ and ‘god damn it’ being thrown around me, succumbing more and more to the blinding panic of the situation, leaving me to be fixated on the streetlamp in the end – so close, and yet so far.

“Stop right there,” another voice came from right in front of us as I bumped into someone, falling to the cold concrete of the passage. In front of us, another man now stood, blocking the exit. Seeing the whole rugby team stop dead in their tracks in front of him, I’ve realised that it was another teacher, and only then did it hit me how boned everyone really was now.

“Line up by the wall,” the same voice said, sending the boys walking back, “You, on the ground, you too!” he said forcefully, laying his arms on me and dragging me back up. Just like that, somewhere in-between my work and innocent night-time chatter, I have become an accomplice and was now feeling just as bad as the boys I was lined up next to.

“Well, well, well,” the man that was assumed to be the principal said, taking the lamp from one of the boys and turning it on, pointing into our faces, as if we were interrogated, “The finest athletes of my school, here at this time of the day, doing God-knows what!” I couldn’t see his face or even pick up on his age, but I could tell by the movement of the hat’s silhouette that the man wearing, he was not happy, “Empty your pockets, now! Mr Pie, help them out,” I don’t actually think the other man’s name was Pie, but that’s what I think I heard. The said man then started going through the lined up boys, one by one, almost forcefully guiding their hands to turn out every dime of their clothes inside out, whilst the principal pointed the light at me, “And who are you?”

“A courier,” I made the usual confession, squinting my eyes from the bright light of the lamp, turning my head away slightly as to not to get blinded.

“A courier? Right, empty your bag,” he reached out for it, to which I instinctively pulled it back behind me.

“I’m sorry, sir, I can’t let you do that,” I tried to act professionally, at the same time being almost paralysed with fear. There was absolutely nothing about this situation that I found comfortable enough to fight it, but rules were rules – if I can’t see what’s inside the packages, then he most certainly cannot either.

“Show me your license, then!” he demanded, pulling out a small phone-like scanner. That I could do, so I gave in, and after a second of hesitation, began rolling up the sleeve of my right arm.

At that point, one of the lined-up boys, evidently, saw a window open in his luck: probably having held onto it for the duration of the last five minutes, he extended his right arm back with a rolled-up joint in his hand, preparing to throw it over the fence. As it was halfway through, a strongly gripped hand stopped him. The boy gasped, uncertain if with pain or surprise. The principal did not even flinch.

“Drop it!” he shouted, much like a police officer would in those corny tv shows from decades ago. The boy, with his confidence that came naturally from his strong posture evaporated, ‘dropped it’. As the principal let go from his hand to pick up the dropped object, the rest of the group froze in place, unable to move a muscle, “Right, lead them back, Mr Pie, I’ll catch up,” his assistant nodded, turning the group around and signalling them to move. Not one of them even attempted to run, instead following each other in a stride full of despair and surrender. Once they began disappearing by the end of the alleyway, from where I came out, the principal once again turned to look at me, “Let me see your license.”

“Here,” I extended my right arm out, pulling back my wristwatch, revealing a visible imprint under my skin where, under the small bump, the identity chip calmly rested. The man pulled out his phone, unfolding it from a small square, turning on a small scanner on the bottom of it, grabbed my arm and hovered over my wrist. I felt a pricking feeling, as the scanner touched my skin, working its technological magic of literally going under my skin to read the imprint on the code and not leaving a trace at the same time. The man had a strange, mesmerising aura around him, which made me, just like the boys escorted away earlier, simply stand there, unable to do anything at all. After a moment, the screen lit up white, at which he stared with a blank face. I just kept on standing there, feeling the grip of his hand to ease up.

“Ah, well that explains why there is no uniform,” he finally let go off my hand, folding his phone back into his pocket, “You are one of those couriers.”

“I do not know what you mean, si-.”

“Stop that,” he cut me short, angrily, “Everyone knows what you’re doing. It’s just that nobody can do anything about it.”

I said nothing back. There was simply nothing to say.

“You think you’re slick, huh? Okay then, fine,” the man was looking right at me, as if piercing me with his gaze, “Know this, though: if I see you around my school or students again, I’m calling the police,” he stepped back towards the darkness of the alleyway, closer to the middle, still looking at me, “Consider this your lucky night.”

I wasn’t going to.

As the footsteps faded off into the distance, mixing themselves with the hum of cars and night chatter, I breathed out with relief, placing my head against the wall behind me, finally acknowledging that the principal was gone. Last thing I needed tonight was to get mixed up in a situation of which I had no knowledge of or desire to be involved with. I wondered, how I even managed to keep my voice from wobbling this whole time.

Maybe it was my lucky night, after all.

Something began vibrating in my bag, catching me off-guard. I completely forgot about the company-issued phones, so it took me a moment to regain myself. I pulled out an old phone with buttons on it, which were trendy with businessmen twenty or so years ago. The caller ID simply said, ‘Front Desk.’ Miranda.

“Everything okay on your end?” came a soothing, cold voice as I picked up the call, “You’ve been standing still for almost twenty minutes in this weird shortcut on the map.”

“Stalking much?” I tried to sound as calm as possible. My joke landed on deaf ears – not even a pity chuckle followed, “I was just… taking a break, is all.”

“Really? How come your chip just got scanned?”

“Long story,” I confessed, dropping down to a squat, “Don’t worry, not cops. I’m about to keep moving.”

“Alright then,” she paused, almost as if suddenly realising how cold she was, “I’m sorry, there’s a protest happening along Archie’s route and he’s being… difficult, as always. Bit on the edge right now. I’ll tell you in the morning.”

“Sure,” she hung up, as soon as I said that. It was nice hearing her voice, however harsh and cold. It served as a nice friendly reminder, that whatever has or was going to happen tonight, there will still be someone at the end of the night to greet me with a warm embrace, however metaphorical, with the rising dawn of the morning sun.

But until then, there was still work. So, until then, I had to just keep on going.

10:57 pm
Despite the purpose of my job, the first thing I noticed when arriving to the next address was the design of the place, and how poor it was to my eye. Now, I am no interior – let alone, exterior – designer. I know fuck-all there is to know about what kind of couch would go nicely with a Mediterranean style, or how Victorian and Art Deco can be reconciled to produce something meaningful. But when I tell you that the building where the next order took me was lavishly lazy, averagely hideous, and altogether unpleasant in its design, I mean it – and it didn’t take a genius to see that. Just as the rest of the South Bank, it seemed to be as creative and capable as its Northern counterpart, and yet something about its architecture was both painfully normal and irresponsibly unappealing at the same time. Not only that, but the building was a hotel, painted bright blue and having white-coloured doodles on its windows, as if having an existential crisis over whether it should’ve been a nursery or simply a student’s accommodation. Glass walls on the ground floor gave the place a more professional look than it could use yet really, really did not deserve. Staff desk at the lobby? Unstaffed. I am not usually this mean, I promise, but for some reason, I really, really disliked the look of the building. 

I was not there to write an analysis of the architectural designs, though – or rather, I wouldn’t have been paid for it – so I walked through the glass doors into the lobby. An array of colours similar to its exterior plagued the room, with overly bright cushions on sofas and armchairs ripped straight out of a 60s futuristic movie. A low hum of LED lamps, hinged inside the celling, accompanying the madness that ensued from this design. In one end of the hall, vending machines could be seen, as if a supplement for lavish ala-carte dining rooms for poorer students. On the other, a game room, completely barren for but one boy in his late teens at most playing a game of pool with himself. He glanced at me once, but otherwise paid no attention to me from then, as I’m sure one would do when playing a game of pool by yourself. All in all, the entire room was both silent and repulsing in its attempts of trying too hard to be inviting. 

I approached the front desk, somewhat unsure of what exactly am I supposed to do in a situation like this, desperately looking for a human contact. There was no evidence or even suggestion, though, that there was anyone on their way – you usually can tell by a vacant computer; or a book, left closed just about the right way one would do when having to leave it for a moment; or, simplest of all, a phone left charging on the counter – the one evidence of civilisation that was undisputable. None of it was on the counter, except for a smooth black surface of a display, embedded into the surface of a polished bright wooden table. Knowing no better, I touched it.

“Good evening!” a robotic voice came to life, as the screen lit up with a white-and-blue display, “Welcome to ‘__________Hotel! If you would like to check in, please tap the button in the upper right corner. If you wish to use the concierge services, please press the button on the right. If you are here for any other service, please scan your identity chip over the tab in the centre,” the buttons popped up in a light-blue box just where the voice instructed them to. Its white-and-blue pallet reminded me of a clear summer sky. I almost reminisced there for a moment, but these were merely distracting images, having no place on a dark December night. I pressed the middle button, darkening the screen for a box allocated for scanning the identity chips.

I hesitated for a moment. Our job rarely involved revealing ourselves through identity chips – one may say, we were the dying breed of companies still concerned with face-to-face customer service. That, and also, I’ve already had the taste of Miranda’s displeasure, and something told me I should not have tempted fate again tonight.

I looked away from the desk towards the game room again. The boy still played pool, probably scoring his 100th ball by now. To a certain extent, I hated to bother him, but a job is a job, so I headed towards the glass door into the game room.

“Excuse me-” I tried to knock as I entered, but I clearly hit on the door much harder than anticipated, as it recoiled against my “gentle” fist in vibrations that I felt in my own body. The boy startled, looking up at me, but still holding the cue firmly. Despite the casual appearance, I could clearly see the nametag on his chest, radiating with its small screen his name – Joshua, “Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt, but I am here to make a delivery.”

“A delivery?” he raised an eyebrow, “At this hour of the night?”

I shrugged in response. “You can scan my id-chip if you wish to.”

“Nah man, I trust you, it’s just…” he put the cue down, turning over to me fully. Even from the short distance between us, I could tell I was at least a head taller than him, “Odd, you know? W-Whatever, who are you looking for?”
I quickly pulled out the delivery pad from my bag, turning the screen on. “Ms. Banks?”

“Ah, right,” the boy suddenly smiled, as if a wave or realisation washed over him, “Then no further questions. Room 104, ground floor, just down this corridor and to the left,” he waved his arm to the right of him. He seemed almost too relaxed out of a sudden, but I decided not to press on it.

“Thanks,” I put the pad back away, “I shall let you get back to your game.”

“Oh, man, it’s not a problem at all – not a lot happens on a night shift, as you can imagine, so can’t complain!” I tried to hide my weirded-out glance as I closed the door behind me. Jesus, if this is what’s considered exciting by his standards, that’s just pathetic. At least my boring night-shift job is not as static as his – that was about all reconciliation to be found as I heard the pool balls hit each other in periphery of my hearing.

As I headed down the hall, the design only continued to make me vomit. Don’t get me wrong, I have no creativity at all – my mum used to do my Art homework for me in middle school. And, I assure you, I perfectly recognise how hard interior design might be. But my God, whose idea was it to add a continuously twisting lime-green line running through the entirety of a navy-blue hall, from the floor, to the walls, to the celling? It’s not surprising that only students and people with no standards stayed here – then again, what really is the difference?

To my relief, the dark-green door with digits 1-0-4 hanging on it did not take long to reach – it was just in the middle of the corridor, just about as I felt a gagging feeling begin rising up inside of me from all this horrible paintjob (I wish pages could convey more than words, but I really cannot stress how horrible I found this corridor to be). Having checked with my pad that the address was indeed right, I immediately knocked, awaiting patiently for a response.

Nothing.

The perpetual hell of the green-blue walls daunted further.

I knocked again, this time a little harder, but retaining the gentleness that a professional such as myself would have.

Still nothing.

I looked around myself, perhaps as if expecting a sudden resolution to appear in front of me.

No, still just the bloody lime-green and navy-blue lines. In front, above, under and around me.

I really could not take it anymore. I banged on the door, putting as much strength into my fist as possible, ready to scream ‘delivery!’ as loud as possible.

“Hang on!” finally, a warm feminine voice came from behind it, just as I was about to open my mouth. I quickly regained myself, fixed my sleeve that managed to go almost all the way up to my elbow, and tried to look as professional as possible.

Fuck, the pad. Get the pad, out now-

The door has finally opened, with the sound of the magnetic lock inside of it being released, just as I started to fumble around my bag for the pad. The doorframe was empty, the only light illuminating from deeper in the hotel room, in a slightly more comforting blue-and-yellow, radiating between the walls and the floor. I froze, somewhat unsure of something – if not everything – at once. The alarm bells in my head went off, reminding me of every movie, every book and every horror story I have ever read, screaming a single thing: not to go in there.

“Oh, please do come in! I got the door from over here,” the voice came again from the further part of the room. I looked back at the lime-green with navy-blue wall behind me once last time, sighing, and deciding once and for all that if I do get murdered tonight, then it would be a fate better than having to see this pattern ever again.

Once I made it past the shut door to the bathroom, I came into a small yet somewhat cosy hotel room. Admittedly, there was barely enough space to include the bed, the wardrobe and the working desk, reminding me of my own university accommodation, yet the space gave off a sort of a calming energy to itself, covered in the white light of the bed-lamp.

But then, after a second, I realised that the light was actually more yellow than white – it’s just that everything else was covered in white: the walls, the celling, the lamp hanging above, even the wooden floorboards under my undoubtedly dirty shoes – it was surprising that the, admittedly, much larger than I expected window at the back of the room was not covered in a white coat. To my disappointment, it seemed that I simply stepped from one interior design insanity to another.

Then, I began to notice the mess all around: the clothes were laid out on the floor in a sporadic fashion, going from shades of green to orange and to black and the already detested white. The bag, not too dissimilar to mine but much nicer, was hanging atop the half-opened wardrobe door. Next to it, a fold-in bed (that was the only way to fit it in, I suppose – that doorway was too narrow) was slightly ajar, with its corner peeking out of the wall, serving as an improvised hanger for a cable of sorts. Atop the mirror to my right, from where I stood, a badge that was not lit enough to see what was written on it, hung, alongside a slim digital camera, barely the size of my pad.

The whole time, there was no sound in the room besides a quiet humming, coming somewhere from the table-side, which was one part of the room I have not explored yet with my eyes properly. At it, with the back turned to me, stood a woman whose voice, I assume, I heard earlier. The chair was tucked away into the corner, unoccupied. All I could see from where I stood were the puffy brown hair and some sort of a semi-headset from which the blue light was coming from, which she was staring at the window with, intensely moving her hands in the process. The blue light that I noticed earlier, on the other hand, was also more noticeably coming from the computer monitor in front of her. Or rather, multiple monitors, arched-out and illuminating all at the same time with a tint of blue to every one of them. On one of them, a video was playing – of people marching in the streets, that could have been taken at legitimately any city in the whole world. On the other, a recording of a speech by some politician – who, again, I couldn’t recognise – addressing what seemed like an empty room. On the third, on the other hand, a still image could be seen – of a simple shot of a square from a birds-eye view, with some sort of numbers on the bottom and the top, indicating things I had no clue about. And yet, only the fourth monitor actually drew me in – not because there was something captivating on it, no; instead, there were no icons visible, nor anything in particular playing on it either. It was just blue, like the ocean depths, sucking you in, ready to swallow you whole, and you wouldn’t even know it.

It took me a couple of seconds to break away from the captivating blue-ness of the screen, having to almost physically shake myself away from it. Having recovered myself back in the room, I decided to announce my presence by coughing a couple of times. She didn’t react at first, so I did it again.

“Oh, excuse me,” she took a second to finally speak again, taking out a couple of earbuds out of her ears, with the light inside the headset dimming, as she took it off, “Had to take care of something,” she gracefully flicked her hand, turning the other lamp of the desk, as she herself turned over to me, supporting herself against the table with one of her hands.

In front of me, just as I’ve assumed, stood a woman, her composure and height being impossible to determine from my angle. Her brown eyes complimenting the dark skin and short hair, were matched by a slightly tan-ish highlighter. She was dressed in pieces of a turquoise suit – vest and trousers – with a short grey wire running from her breast pocket up to something that was hidden behind her ear. A small earring with a green stone in it, the only one she was wearing, off-put me for some reason, just as the pleasant lilac smell coming off her clothes – the scent had not crossed paths me with me in a few years now. One might have assumed that the woman was getting herself ready to go to a party, yet the look on her face – that unmistakeable, easily-recognisable face that I at times see in the mirror whenever I bother looking at it – painted a different story, notably that of sleepless nights, stressful consumption of computer light, and abundance of work lost somewhere on the bottom of a can of an energy drink.

“Can I help you?” she asked, calmly.

“Uhh, I have a delivery for…” I took my pad out, sitting on top of all other shit in my bag, to double-check the name, “Ms Banks?”

“I’m sorry, who- Oh,” at first, she squinted her eyes at me, which quickly got replaced by a slight gasp of realisation. She laughed, exhaustion in her voice, as if it was being pushed out, “Right. Yeah. Ms Banks. Sorry, it’s… I haven’t used your service before. It’s usually A-Z or something a bit more formal rather than… well, you,” she pointed at me, scanning me up and down with her hand. There seemed to be no intent in her gesture – or posture, or eyes – of getting up. I felt my eyebrow rise up, and despite the low lights of the room, she noticed it, “Sorry, that came off rude – been a long day,” she sighed, tilting her head to the monitors, “You look very professional.”

“Uh… Thanks,” I said, trying to sound as sympathetic as possible – which isn’t hard, on a job like mine; you just have to remove any and all trace of emotion out of your tone. A silence grew in the room, as if something was expected of me – so I surrendered to it, partly wishing I would’ve just left the parcel with that lobby-boy, “What do you work as, anyway?” I asked out of politeness rather than genuine interest,

“Isn’t it obvious?” she nodded in the direction of the badge hanging the mirror, “I’m a journalist. Or so I keep calling myself, anyway. I’d tell you my real name, but I think that’s against your company’s policy. Last I checked, though, that policy does not include nametags,” she nodded towards the badge, as if inviting me to glance at it as closely as I could. So, I did, not to disappoint her.

I won’t tell you what the name read – it really does not matter – as it told me absolutely nothing.

“That tells me absolutely nothing,” I confessed to her, shrugging my shoulders.

“Figures,” she shrugged back, defeated, “Journalism is not a glory job nowadays, is it?”

“What do you mean?”

“You didn’t recognise me, did you?”

“No,” I confessed, still unsure what she’s getting at.

“Right. Would you recognise me if I was a TV presenter instead?”

“Maybe?” I haven’t watched TV for almost eight years by this point, so I doubt I would have.

“Case in point,” she swirled her hands together, extending them towards me, “No glory in writing, no fame in investigations.” There was something very odd about her tone. It was not like one people employ when they meet a stranger for the first time – not in a café nor an office even. She could have been drunk (that was my first assumption), but I couldn’t smell – or at the very least, remember smelling – anything except for the lilacs at that point.

“You sound almost disappointed,” I told her, keeping my previous delivery prerogative to scratch at the back of my mind. I had the time, so I could indulge myself in a brief respite with this supposedly famous journalist for a bit.

“Well, as you may – or clearly, not – know, I broke that huge story that kind of removed the Blues out of the government majority and triggered the election – the election that is now indefinitely on hold due to that festival attack,” she reached for the cupboard to her right, extracting a small, white bottle of pills from inside of it, taking one out and putting into her mouth, recoiling slightly as she swallowed it, “Worse yet, you are not the first person to say that. And, hell, it’d be nice to be recognised once in a while” she once again reached out to her cupboard, this time taking a pack of cigarettes out of it with a lighter, “Would you like one?”

“No, thanks,” I politely declined.

“Don’t worry, they don’t care about the whole ‘no-smoking’ policy around here.”

“I don’t smoke,” I lied, as to not complicate this conversation more.

“Good answer,” she nodded her head in approval, taking the first drag, as she reached out for a cup, standing next to her, to be sacrificed as an ashtray. Only silence followed.

You might not think this, but I usually am a relatively easy-going person when it comes to conversations. Not that I speak a lot – even though sometimes I do – but I can sense the flow of words, their tones, their meanings and the general mood fairly well. As such, I can pick up a conversation and keep it moving if I must and – or – want to, and I’m sure so can you. And yet, this once, something was off. The air felt a little tighter than usual. The lack of sound seemed awkward. I couldn’t get the green-and-blue flooring and walls out of my mind, nor could I just hand the parcel out and leave. I felt completely paralysed, stuck between my inability to be openly rude, professional ethics, and that god-awful pattern on the walls outside.

“Well, here’s your parcel, ma’am”, I finally unfroze myself, going through my bag quickly, sporadically flipping through few personal belongings and the remaining parcels, until I unearthed a small brownish envelope from the side, feeling like a _____ __ _____ clipped together out of the bag, extending it over to her along with the pad, “If you could just tap the screen and sign it for me.”

“But of course,” she took it out of my hands, putting the cigarette out in the cup to her right and reaching out to grab her delivery. That’s a waste of a perfectly fine cigarette! “Here you-” she paused, as if the touch of the brownish paper on her hand awoke some sort of a primal feeling inside of her, “Oh, my God,” she uttered, forgetting about the tablet awkwardly sitting in my extended hand and turning away to the table, “This- I can’t believe it!” she quickly unwrapped the paper, revealing a _____ with a sticker reading ‘confidential’ on top of it, in her hands. Even quicker, she put it down, before taking out her phone and scanning it with its camera, before putting the headset back on alongside a white glove which I haven’t noticed previously. Connected with a lengthy wire, it slithered all the way behind the table in its snake-like glory.

As the monitors came back to life, she waved her hand a couple of times near the monitors, before extending her hand towards the folded bed and racing towards it, almost pushing me out of the way (I stepped away in the last second – I wouldn’t have dared to stand in the way of a force of nature like this). Her breathing grew quicker, as she fixed her eyes (or at least, I guessed she did – hard to tell with the visor in place) at the corner of the room where the cable lay. After a moment’s hesitation, she dashed back to the table, typing something out on the keyboard, before moving to the dresser in another end of the room – mesmerised and hypnotised, dancing through the dusk of the room.

“I… It all makes sense,” she exclaimed, restlessly throwing herself to the floor, “All along, this-” she cut herself short, in awe of what she was witnessing, unable to move a single muscle. She, then proceeded to stay in her bliss, sitting on the floor and staring upwards, as if witnessing the coming of God. Yet amidst all this, I was on the outside of it all – to me, this was merely an illusion, a vision from which I was wholly excluded. The world did not reveal itself open to me, nor did the source of excitement was that on display here reach out to touch and intoxicate my head – which, if you’d ask me, sucks to say the least. It was time for me to go.

“Ma’am,” I approached her, gently touching her shoulder, from which she, nonetheless, recoiled, “I really need you to sign here. I still have a job to do.”

“Oh, good God, of course!” she promptly lifted her headset, returning into the grey room. I extracted the tablet from the bag, handing it to her with the signature field open in advance. She swiftly signed it. “There. I’m… I’m sorry, I got taken away slightly.”

“No worries. Have yourself a good night,” I smiled at her, putting the device away into my bag, ready to embrace the corridor outside with its awful colour palette.

“Hold on,” she suddenly exclaimed to me, as if remembering to tell me something vitally important, “Since you are here… I don’t normally do this, not with things of this caliber, but would you care to take a look?” in her un-gloved hand, the headset/visor thing was extended towards me.

I paused for a moment, contemplating the offer. The whole point of our – as in, couriers’ – job was in that we were never allowed to know, what was in the packages we delivered. It offered us enough deniability in case of a criminal investigation, and somehow-somewhere, the boss could blame it on the supplier – we would literally be the middlemen of the ordeal, the messengers not to be shot, and the company continuing to bring up profits by the virtue of appealing to the biggest variety of offered products. To be honest, I think I was okay with that (at this point, anyway) and I understand why you may judge me for that. But then I thought about the way she was sitting there, on the floor, mere moments ago; how mesmerised she looked by her posture alone, implying the hopeful gaze in her eyes; and how seductive the thought was, for once being able to peek behind the curtain of our both mysterious and mundane job for once.

“Sure,” my professional judgement would not prevail that night, for better or for worse. She smiled at me, as if she anticipated this weakness of mine all along.

“Okay, so,” she quickly jumped up, having shaken off the trance entirely at this point, and handed me the headset. Without hesitation, she turned over to her computer and typed something on the keyboard, before turning back to me, “Put it on. I’ve closed all irrelevant tabs for you.”

After a momentary hesitation and messing with the strap on the back of the headset, I managed to put it on me. I instinctively closed my eyes as it came down, much due to the blinding light that was coming from the inside of it, so much to my misfortune the first thing I noticed was how sweaty and hot the inside of it felt, evidently as a consequence of prolonged use by the woman in the room. Yet once the unpleasant sensation ceased, and I finally opened my eyes, a whole other world opened in front of me: the visor perfectly recreated an endless blue room inside of itself, a 3D environment in which my head moved alongside my body. Around me, I could see strangely mesmerising blue lines being traced, as if chem trails from planes in a clear midday sky, appearing and disappearing. Somewhere where I couldn’t see, distant sounds and even voices echoed away. If I didn’t know any better, I’d call this… ‘place’… a perfect recreation of what internet as a physical space would looked like.

Once I got used to the feeling of vertigo, I managed to notice other things around me. Above me hovered a few opened tabs – as if on an internet browser – reinforcing the feeling of a three-dimensional computer desktop that I was already getting from this environment. For some reason, the woman left some very specific tabs opened for me: one was for emails, with one very specific document open in it, a couple of standard text pages listed next to it, alongside a video file, titled “sunrise.mp4”. It all looked confusing, disorientating even, but oddly inviting and alluring at once. In short, I couldn’t take my eyes off of it.

“What… is this?” I asked the obvious question, as I heard the woman get up from the chair.

“It’s the story I was working on for the last 8 months. In-between sorting out meaningless opinion pieces and articles with provocative, click-worthy titles, of course,” whirring sound came from my right, as suddenly a hand appeared there, too. I jumped, ever so slightly, “Oh, you mean this,” the hand slowly moved in the air, as if strung along by an expert puppeteer, “I’m sorry, should’ve given you the heads-up! Don’t worry, this is just my hand – I use it as a cursor, essentially, when I work in this… space,” she lowered her hand. Although I couldn’t see her face, I could tell we were looking at the same distant ‘constellation’, “This is my working space. I go away here for some more hands-on work, like examining objects and documents in greater details,” the hand suddenly disappeared, going up in air and back down again, before readjusting again, “As you can see, it’s still a bit… new. But hey, it works – and that’s not the point. Come check this out,” the hand pulled in the tab with the audio file towards me, as the rest of the background darkened around me. I could tell that we were both staring at the tab now, as if in a twisted imagery of a surgeon and her nurse, preparing to operate on a patient, with tension filling the air and only the sporadic clicking of the wall-clock serving as a distraction. The hand raised itself, like a metaphorical scalpel, above the video file, “I’m sure you’ve heard of the incident at the Firefly Festival – god, how long, ____ _____ _ ____ ago?” the hand hovered above it, as if waiting for my approval. I simply nodded.

She pressed on the tab, starting the footage’s playback. The whole thing seemed to be filmed from chest-level, like one of those sports cameras (or in this case, perhaps more proper, police rig-cameras), of someone who was on stage shortly after the carnage began. I assumed it was someone from the security team, but it really could’ve been anyone. Standing at the base of the stage, the man was kneeling down near that unknown gunman’s body, as screams began rising in the background, making the audio tricky to hear through.

“Is he breathing at all? God *******– ______, for ****’s sake, is he breathing or not?!” read the subtitles at the bottom, accompanying very hard to hear voice from an unidentifiable person close to the camera.

“Faint – got a pulse, but it’s faint – we need an ambulance, fast”, another voice came from the left somewhere, “_____, what about the trigger-happy ****?”

“Dead; he’s- ****, where did he get live rounds?” a closer voice shouted back, probably belonging to the ‘cameraman’, “A-a-and the gun, _______, that’s your ******* gun, isn’t it? What are we gonna tell chief-”

“I’ll worry about this,” the second voice said again, “just get him out of here-”

“BOMB!” someone else entirely shouted from afar, somewhere from the right, I think? To be honest with you, it could have come from anywhere. The camera shifted itself to the side, yet just as I anticipated the explosion, the feed cut off, as the video simply paused, fixed on the blur of the crowd in the square.

For a few seconds, we stood there silently, in the virtual space. The hand did not move, and I could not look away. I was stunned, to be honest with you. This may make sense for you, perhaps, given where you are, but here, in the West, the supposed “bastion of justice and democracy,” this was unfarmable – certainly to me, anyway. The words, ‘this wasn’t meant to happen’, came racing over and over through my head, as the picture became forming. And yet, my mind rejected all of it, just as it did whilst I was still there; that something as terrible, as senseless, as horrifying as what happened that night in the Trafalgar Square could have all been a setup; that they knew all along; none of it I wanted to believe. And still there it was, staring at me, somewhere in-between the constellation that I couldn’t recognise and a semi-visible virtual hand, staring down on me and daring me to accept it.

Yet I couldn’t acknowledge it. Not then, not yet.

After another momentary pause, I took off the headset. The journalist was standing exactly where the hand previously was, looking at me with anticipation.

“Well?”

“Well, what?” I replied, out of confusion more so than out of malice.

“What do you think?”

“Of the video?” she nodded. What a dumb question – what else could she have asked for? I was still somewhat confused by it all, but from the myriad of questions, it seemed to make the most sense to start with an obvious one, “____ ____ ____ ___ __?”

[REMOVED]

 THIS SECTION HAS BEEN MARKED AND INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK BY THE ORDER OF RCC AND THE NATIONAL SECURITY COMMITTEE

There was a brief moment of silence that lingered uncomfortably in the air as I processed what the reporter had just told me. What do you even say to shit like this?

“Do you think I should run this story?” she asked candidly as if my opinion genuinely mattered.

“Why wouldn’t you?” I asked an obvious question, “This is huge, or it would be huge, anyway – I see no reason not to run it!”

“Perhaps,” she tilted her head slightly, “But even you can tell that I could get in trouble for something like this. What you saw,” she gestured towards the wall, where the now invisible display was only moments ago, without turning away, “Is just the tip of the iceberg. That much you can trust me on.”

“Then why ask me at all?” I said, indifferently. The woman was perplexing me, awakening some conflicting feelings from within. I didn’t like it when people asked my opinion for no reason.

“I don’t know. Right place, right time?” she smiled, with that guilty grin one has when they are caught red-handed doing something they aren’t supposed to, “I don’t get a lot of second-hand opinions from someone outside the industry, so I thought you could provide a fresh, genuine perspective.”

I took another look across the room. I haven’t realised it before, but by the few things that were unpacked, the setup did not seem like the woman was someone on a simple business trip. The suitcases – there were three of them, to be precise – were trying their best to hide behind the desk, but there was no mistaking a semi-tucked dirty shirt, peeking from the inside of one of them. Come to think of it, the dresser, too, seemed overcrowded by the amount of clothes stacked inside of it, with some items hung on top of each other – not that I could recognise any. To put it bluntly, all pointed to a person who was in-between houses, not simply away from home for a while.

“I’m sorry to ask, but why are you here?” I thought I’d state the question that was hanging on my mind since I arrived at the lobby of the hotel, “In this hotel, I mean? It hardly seems like you are just on a business trip,” she half-opened her mouth, seemingly reflexively, as if this was not the first time she answered this question, but quickly caught herself. Pausing, it was clear to see that she hesitated, a stillborn reply still stuck somewhere in her throat, disappearing back down with her next breath in.

“You ever stop to realise, just how accessible every bit of information we need is?” she sombrely took the headset out of my hands, “In seconds, I can learn about global political movements to depoliticise human rights. In a handful of others, I can find the latest coverage of the civil war in _____. Within an hour, I could even watch some footage from frontline fighting in _______, guts and viscera of it all, completely uncut. So can you, and millions, billions of people like us. Hell, if you dig – not even that deep, mind you – you can probably find live footage being streamed and filmed for an audience of billions as you are searching for it,” she lit another cigarette, massaging her temple with the same hand she held the slim white stick with, “And yet, now, when we see everything in plain sight, we somehow end up remembering none of it. It’s just… noise. A backlog to remember and store away – or a source of annoyance, an inconvenient, uncomfortable thought in the middle of the day, possibly read on a toilet seat, to be discarded by dinner,” she paused for a moment, tightening her grip on the headset, “I learnt a while ago that my kind of journalism is pointless – or, rather, it’s not as effective as we, the professional investigators, like to convince ourselves it is. It’s better to write about what’s hot, and trendy, even when it is serious – and I hate it, I hate it so much,” she finally looked up at me, with wounded eyes, as if she was about to burst into tears, “Truth be told, I am tired. I want it both ways; I want to both be recognisable for my work and earn money. Unfortunately, that second part is much more difficult to attain if someone prides themselves on investigative corporate and political columns,” she extended her gloved hand out, sweeping the room, “This… This is the result of that. Of my inability to swallow my pride and just give people what they want. If I don’t get something big – something that sticks – even this will be gone, and I will be on my way out, somewhere,” she turned back to me, with her face full of regained determination, “There is a lot at stake with this story – for the public, those involved, and for me especially. If it sticks, great – I get to go home and maybe prove that investigative, non-propagandist journalism still matters. If it doesn’t…” she thought not to finish that sentence, “So I ask you, one last time: do you think I should run it?”

I hesitated with my answer. Part of me sympathised with her struggle – I myself, although fairly secure in my living situation, could tell how badly money troubles can hit someone, especially when they are unexpected or going against what one wanted to do for their whole life. But the other part of me, one that I was trying to actively suppress at that moment, was telling me a tale of opportunism and personal glory, gained from the tragedy of which I involuntarily became a part of so very recently. Perhaps that’s the way the world worked, but if in this one moment I could somehow disrupt it, that one part of me, the sceptical, cynical bit that detested anyone for not having the purest of intentions, provided me with no valid arguments as to why I shouldn’t have.

“I don’t know,” I finally told her, “I don’t think I am qualified to say,” silence fell back on the room, heavier than before. The air was becoming hard to breath. I really wished she’d open a window at that moment.

“I see,” she finally said, turning her gaze downwards, “Thank you, anyway. At least… At least someone knows now.”

I stood there, in the middle of the room, for a second longer, slowly breathing and barely breaking the silence of the room. The woman remained motionless, evidently lost in thought. After a little while, I tried finding a few final departing words in my head, like “thank you, have a good night” or at least a company slogan, but nothing came to mind. I decided I was ready to go, so I silently turned around and headed straight for the door, back into the abyss of the green-and-blue corridor, with an awful pattern that runs from the flooring to the celling.

You may think I am a hypocrite for what I have done, and I wouldn’t blame you. In the days that followed, I did feel bad for not giving a more a solid answer to her. Worse yet, I have no idea, whether or not she ended up publishing the story. I never saw her name again, nor did I particularly search for it for the failure of remembering it. But I try to think that, at least partly, I was no worse than her if she did have strictly personal interests in mind, or at least not worse by a large margin if they were pure. For that’s how the world works here, in the West – you have a job to do, and you get paid to do it. Anything else is simple flavouring, with not much in-between. And it may sound crushing to you – and it does at first, but it makes sense as long as you don’t think too much and too hard enough about it. In the end, I prefer to simply tell myself that this was not my place to give an opinion on anything as major as that. Perhaps Sam, or Archie – or, hell, even Miranda, the one person I know with a strictly professional relationship with politics – would have thought differently, but as it shows, the intellectual debate of the events around me in that whirlwind month was to be left for someone else. I, and many others like me, just wanted the world to make sense for a little while longer.

By the time that I possibly could have participated in the discussion, unfortunately, it was already too late. 

12:12 am
It was just after midnight when I have finally boarded the train to the final destination of my shift – a house on the border of the second and third, fastest route to which was the overground, running across the hilly southern outskirts of the central Capital. Funnily enough, this was the best part about travelling to the outskirts – the journey itself, or, I mean, the train, however you prefer to see it. The line extending from the centre of the city to its fading townhouses in the third zone, by the virtue of some sick urban planning genius, wielded itself in a semi-circle (with the other half of the line axed in the ‘Great Privatisation Debate’ of 199X) across the river, extending over the hills and two-story houses of sleeping districts where nothing much ever happened. There isn’t much to tell you about my road to the station – the night was peaceful, and the sound of gatherings on the Southern bank began ceasing, retreating into the apartments and numerous flats instead. The train’s arrival into the station, therefore, was for once just a daily occurrence just as any other – mostly meaningless and expected, but nonetheless assuring.

Setting myself down in a wide train cart – a great relief from the tight confinements of the underground – I felt the train take off, gaining speed almost silently and instantly. I didn’t really pay attention to the rest of the seats, so I wouldn’t be able to recall if there was anybody else there with me, for what attracted me at that moment was the view outside, not inside. I gazed at the distant orange glow of the streetlamps, shining comfortably as the train smoothly pulled itself forward in the blue darkness of the night, wrapping and unwrapping itself in the wind. The hum, barely noticeable even when you tried listening to it, made me feel like I was being taken away somewhere much nicer than this place ever could be – almost to the point where the uncomfortable leather of the seat did not matter. The occasional tree that passed in front of the window, disappearing as fast as it revealed itself, an outline of the park, even an occasional knocked-over rubbish bin – all were deserted and left alone, for the goodness of the world to present itself in an unhindered and undisturbed way. It was on nights like this that I remembered an old quote my father used to say, from a writer who he loved a bit too much for his own good:

The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for.

I think the writer killed himself. I guess, in the end, upholding the fine-ness of it all is too taxing for anyone. I never though of myself as much of a fighter, anyway, so I wouldn’t know.

But maybe, just maybe, he was right. There was a certain comfort to being left alone, one on one with the world, as seemingly the universe itself stared back at me through that window, in an intimate embrace one only feels a couple of times in their life in complete solitude. 

In case you are wondering, I didn’t mind the loneliness of my line of work. When I was still a student, my life constantly revolved around expecting the next big thing. You know, the return of assignment grades, the hunt for work placement, the commitment to career choices and wiser spending of my own free time. Because of that, I rarely really had the opportunity to live in the “now” – I constantly had to be aware of how badly I needed to get out there, in the big adult world of tomorrow, to have a plan, a backup plan, for everything. The reward promised is the connection to the rest of it – to people like you, to things you like, and to purposes tailored just for you. But at some point, it costs you – or so it cost me, at least – a huge piece of your world, one that you will never recover again. Worse yet, for all the plans you make, none of it is guaranteed to stick, and all the platitudes of rewarding work mean nothing. And when I realised, just how deep I was in this state, only to be chewed up and spat out by the university I dearly loved, I simply did not care anymore. If anything, this job gave me purpose – it gave me the “here” and “now” that I was seeking this whole time. It may sound alien to you, maybe, but when one is taught to value individuality, it is only natural to ask, “What do I do?” when that individuality brings you no connection to others. I hope you never get to feel that like I did. And I know this sounds like a very lengthy “woe is me”, and whatnot, but please believe me when I say that my intent here isn’t pity – only connection.

At one point, being lost in thoughts, I noticed a curious pair of eyes staring at me from the other end of the cart. Covered with a flock of black, almost burned-looking hair, the hazel-coloured glaze did not blink – it was clearly studying me, up and down, as the owner of the eyes was half-ducked behind the leather seat. Their wideness betrayed the owner to be a child, and the wonder that could be easily read within them only further reinforced that realisation. I smiled at the eyes, trying to be friendly, before realising that nobody else was sitting next to them. My smile quickly shifted to a more concerned grin, but as soon as I looked back at the eyes, their owner could be seen running off towards the door to the other cart. I didn’t bother to stop him, there and then – even if it was really odd to see a child on a train this late at night (as far as I’m aware, schools still don’t finish later than 5 pm), returning to the open landscape unfolding to the side of the speeding train.

At that point, if you told me that I’d dreamt the child up, I would have honestly believed you. I think you get a pretty good idea of what my mind is like, at this point.

12:43 am
The final address stood before me as I turned the corner away from the train station. The journey took a little longer than expected, as the train stopped due to a “customer incident” at one of the stops earlier in the evening, so the area around the place seemed even more desolated than it did in my mind beforehand (not to be morbid, but likely another _______ attempt – they were on the rise this time of the year). A fairly wide two-story house, laid out of pure red brick and grey wood, beamed across the quiet darkness of the street in an unkept residential district, with all of its lights on and obviously pop music coming out from within the walls. Although the blinds were closed, and half of each window was obscured by the wooden fence standing at the very edge of the unkept garden at the front, you could very easily see people moving about inside.

Somehow, in the midst of all that was going on right now in the city, I stumbled into a party.

The sound of whatever was happening on the inside was so loud, I don’t think they heard me the first time I knocked (there was no buzzer, to my surprise). Nor the second, or the third time. Instead, I had to let myself in by knocking the fourth time, with the door coming ajar under my fist and creaking open, revealing a tight hallway leading inside. There, it was pitch black, and the main commotion was coming somewhere from deeper inside, as dark blue light radiated from under one of the doors on the right. As I stepped in, I shouted something along the lines of “Hello, delivery!”, but no response came from anywhere. I pondered for a moment, whether I should just leave the parcel at the front and go (an appealing option – the place’s been giving me the creeps, if I am entirely honest with you), but then I recalled our company’s policy: hand-to-hand delivery, confirmation of the nickname assigned to the customer (if applicable), proof of agreed beforehand signature. If I was to violate it, I was not just facing a huge fine from the boss, but likewise potentially jeopardising the whole company (don’t ask, how – I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to know). If you recall, I did just that not too long ago – and I wasn’t going to do so again; then, I got off lucky. This time, I wasn’t sure I would. So in I stepped, being as careful and mindful of my surroundings as possible, justifying it all in my head somehow.

Before I could even reach the destination of the room with the blue light, I already managed to trip over myself and almost fall over. Highly unprofessional, sure, but in the darkness of the corridor, I simply did not notice a whole bunch of shoes, scattered around the floor – too many to count or be bothered about in the first place. From that point on, I made it my principle to keep my hand stretched out near the wall as I walked along, much like a child learning his first steps. It made me glad that the lights were off – should someone had seen me there and then, it would probably look quite embarrassing.

Thankfully, the respite of the white door (one out of the three, to be precise, but there’s no point talking about the other two) at the end of the corridor came much sooner than I thought. I did not hesitate to open it and step inside.

I ended up in a living room, with the lights down and a couple of cheap projectors radiating with dark-blue rays upwards from their corners. The first thing that hit you was the smell – it was awful: alcohol, mixed with sweat and cigarette smoke, created such an insufferable odour without an open window that it almost made me vomit. Suppressing my gag reflex, I looked around. Despite the room’s width, it did not feel spacious at all: tucked in one corner of the room, the table, usually used for something as timid as the house’s breakfast, was filled with plastic cups and unfinished alcohol bottles, topped with a tipped over bowl of snacks; the couch, scruffy and unkempt, was pushed against the wall at the far end of the room closer to the window, with a couple of young people lying on top of one another, passed out; the bookshelf, standing underneath a massive world map taped to the wall in the middle, has been entertaining the same plastic cups and a few glasses, half-full and half-empty to a varying degree, stacking and falling on top of one another – the smell of alcohol was the strongest from that area; the stereo-system, kept near the door to the backyard terrace on the other end from the window, stood strong, stoically continuing to blast music. Most important of all, the room felt claustrophobic due to the number of people cluttered together. I already mentioned the couple passed out on the couch – little, though, has been said about a group of about five other people standing around it, chatting away without a care in the world right above them. Fewer yet has been mentioned about the five people in the middle of the room, dancing as if in trance to the song with very slow tempo. Absolutely none has been suggested above about at least seven others, standing at the farthest end of the room, next to an opening in the wall that led to what was, as I assumed, the kitchen, busily arguing over something. A few more that could be seen in the backyard did not deserve a mention in the first place. And those whose steps I could only hear faintly from the second floor, unfortunately, wouldn’t be heard about either. In total, I estimated around 25 to 30 people to be here at that point. I, on the other hand, was not even an observer of this celebration of life – I was a ghost, uninvited and unwanted here, sticking out like a sore thumb, fully dressed and with that silly company cap on my head. Thankfully, no one seemed to mind.

I contemplated who should I ask about the delivery. Everyone around seemed drunk at best and absolutely gone at worst. I knew how these university parties went: once they peak, the climbdown is slow and anything but steady. I didn’t want to waste my nor anybody else’s time, so I scanned the room again for anyone who could provide a solid enough answer to me.

A guy, with fair black hair and an underdeveloped college stubble, sat on the windowsill and smoked an electronic cigarette, much like Miranda’s, his look and disposition inviting me to finally ask him if he knew something, anything at all, about who I was delivering the parcel to. He must’ve just approached the window, for I would have noticed him from the outside (I do have a keen eye for this sort of thing). Somehow, in-between my analysis of the room and its inhabitants, I completely missed him. Yet his serenity, his unbothered despite the nature of the environment outline, all of it provided assurance that I could the answers I wanted from him. And so, doing my best not to bump into anyone else or fall over an accidentally tipped over bottle of gin, I scuffled to him, quietly and without protest.

“Oh, hello,” he said with a warm, friendly tone, taking his eyes off the open window, “Do I know you from somewhere?”

“Uh, no, I don’t think so,” I politely answered, trying to be as loud as possible over the music, “I’m here for a delivery.”

“What?!” he squinted, confused, taking another puff off his device.

“I’m here for a delivery!” I repeated louder, leaning in closer.

“You’re here for a ‘deliverance’?” he leaned back, evidently confused, “Idk what that is man, we only got Solar Dust and weed!”

“No, I’m here for a D-E-L-I-V-E-R-Y!” I tried to emphasise each letter without sounding rude. I don’t think I succeeded, as the man shook his head again and tilted his head towards the terrace, stepping away from the window. For a second, my stomach sank, as I thought that I offended him; but then, much to my relieve, he waved his hand for me to follow. As I passed by the group of people in the kitchen, I overheard the words “revolution” and “cowards” thrown in-between them. I’d like to say it was important – I’m sure you would love to hear that, too, your interest pricked as much as mine at that point. Sadly, in my escape outside, I couldn’t continue listening to them however much they caught my attention, and those two words, to this very day, only carry a promise of being meaningful to me.

0:58 am
The backyard of the house was, as expected, just as wide as its front suggested – albeit rather empty (the majority of it was quite literally a simple concrete plain, even though bags of soil were very visibly peeking out from behind the metallic shed), the space was covered entirely by young people my age, playing beer pong and sitting on the terrace chairs and sofas around a small bonfire pit. There could be no doubt that the party was a celebration of life like no any – as these parties usually are, anyhow.

The boy who called me outside stopped slightly away from me after closing the glass sliding door leading back into the sweaty and dense living room. He huffed and puffed a little, breathing in the night air in, evidently relieved to be out for a little while.

“Phew, dense in there, eh?” he asked me, still with that same friendly tone of his, “Anyway, what was it you said, you wanted some drugs?”

“No,” I sighed, as I really did not feel like repeating myself again, “I said I am here for the delivery.”

“Oh,” the boy gasped, evidently surprised, “Bit late in the day for that, wouldn’t you say?” he extracted his e-cigarette out of the breast pocket of his flannel. I couldn’t tell if he didn’t trust me or if he was simply making conversations.

“Do you want to see my identification?” I began rolling up the sleeve of my jacket, to which he threw his hands up.

“Hey man, you do you, I’m just kidding!” he giggled, whereas his tone shifted even higher than before, making it sound almost childishly. Just how young was he? “Not like I could check it anyway; I am not a cop or anything,” he puffed on his device. A splashing sound came from one of the cups, as the crowd around the outdoor table exploded with wooing, “What are you delivering, anyway?”

“Can’t tell you,” I shook my head, gripping the strap of my bag as if fearing that it might be yanked away any second now. One couldn’t be too careful. A laughter exploded from around the bonfire.

“Oooooh, it’s one of those deliveries! That’s exciting,” I could tell that it was to him. Someone threw up near the shed, falling over it and causing a metallic screech to momentarily fill the backyard, “Alright, can I at least know who it is for?”

“Owner of the house, I’d imagine,” there was no point telling him the name – they were made-up most of the time, anyway.

Someone fell over the shed again – probably helping the other guy to get back up. At this point, I simply hoped for a quick answer.

“Well, there’s three of us, and I can tell you for certain that I didn’t order anything,” he smirked. Shit. The smell of a freshly burnt cigarette covered the backyard like a blanket – my cravings were kicking in. I breathed in, contemplating telling him the nickname – I desperately wanted the night to be over, and looking around the party in-between half-drunk late teens for another, potentially passed out late-teen, was the last thing on my wishlist then.

“Fine,” I caved in, as the boy’s eyes lit up – it was, after all, just a game to him. I reached for my tablet, trying to ignore the sounds of youth around me, “I’m looking for… Mr. Pink?”

“Mr. Pink? Why, there’s no- Oh,” he stopped himself midway through the sentence, as if realising something, “Oh, that must be ______ – it’s from his favourite movie. Do you want me to give it to him later?”

“No,” I replied candidly, “Gotta get his signature. D’you know where he is?” the boy rolled his eyes. Whatever plans he did or did not have for the package, all of them were gone now.

“Ugh, you’re one tough crowd dude. Fine,” the boy looked around himself, scouting the celebration, “He isn’t here, nor is he in the living room, so he must be upstairs? His room is the biggest one, with an ensuite. Go give him the delivery, but after that, you gotta go, man,” his friendly tone disappeared almost instantly. Guess it didn’t take much to offend him.

“I understand. Thanks,” I smiled at him politely, bidding a good rest of the night, as I turned around. As I was sliding the glass door out of the way, I could’ve sworn he said something else to me. Unfortunately, fireworks cut him off, as he was once again drowned out by the cheers from the many people in the backyard.

This time, thankfully, I could tell straight away those were just fireworks.

1:12 am
On my way back into the corridor, the group from the kitchen had already dispersed, replaced by another bunch of kids (why am I feeling so old? I can’t be more than two, maybe three years older than them, surely), all lining up for some tap water at the back. I have once again become a ghost at this feast, slowly creeping in-between who I assumed to be students, unsure if the party bounced back to its peak or continued to come down. I left them to figure it out themselves.

But as I became enveloped by the darkness and muffled noises of the entry corridor once again, something inside my chest tightened. I couldn’t quite place what it was, but something felt off. With every step I took towards the stairway, starting right next to the door outside itself, I was tempted to jolt back onto the street and walk away as fast as I could. Yet I didn’t, and with every step, my gut was twisted harder and my stomach sank deeper. I’d be lying if I said that I gained much clarity by the end of it, or at the very least calmed down – if anything, the silence became more deafening as I put my foot down on the floor.

There were five doors in total, leading to various sections of the house. You don’t have to worry about the first two – I’ll tell you right now, they bear no importance.

The third door was ajar, leading into a moderately-sized room with a dim light of a bedside lamp warmly spilling out onto the floor. The only thing I really remember about it beside of this is that in it, two girls laid in bed together. They talked, staring at the celling, without a care in the world, and in the midst of their conversation, they didn’t even notice me. I was half-tempted to ask them if either was the mysterious Mr Pink, but something in my gut told me to simply let them be. Of course, I could’ve been wrong; but no, I wasn’t.

The fourth led into nowhere – and by nowhere, I mean an empty, dark room, almost too small to house anyone within it, yet somehow having enough space for an entire bed and a wardrobe. To my relief, it was empty.

The last door was, then, the one I needed. As I opened it, I was greeted, just as the boy said, by the biggest room in the house, which made the liminal decorations inside all the more perplexing. Trying to describe the space itself with words beyond this would be fruitless, I am nowhere near good enough of a storyteller for that. I’ll give it this much, the room radiated cosiness: the bed in the middle was carefully made, with a warm plaid blanket covering the bedsheets; the desk in the far corner was laid out in a careful, non-oppressively clean way; the posters on the wall, although ultimately irrelevant, were well-picked and spaced out, adding to the character of both the room and its owner; and the whole thing was finalised with a long string of fairly-lights that someone left on as the only light source, using the ceiling fan and the curtain beam and the wardrobe as its primary support structure. Despite that, there was also an eery silence to it all; even the sounds from the living room downstairs, no matter how hard they tried, seemed to have failed to reach this part of the house. It was a desolate island in the sea of joy – not sad, nor depressing, but separated and independent. A comfortable solitude, in the midst of sociable chaos.

And yet, there was no one in here.

In fact, it didn’t seem like any of the guests even made it here once. The whole thing just seemed still – too still – and even the door to the personal bathroom looked untouched, with the light inside definitely off.

And then I saw it – God, I wish I never did, but I saw it. On the edge of the bed, an envelope. Haphazardly closed, unsealed, but not for long. My mind began racing again, letting my imagination get the best of me. A memory sprang to my mind, and I began praying that I was wrong that I was simply a trespasser who didn’t know any better.

I picked up the envelope, my curiosity getting the better of me. My hands shacking, I tore off the top, extracting a piece of paper. A note.

To whoever finds this,
______________________________________.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________.
Dear reader: please, if you somehow decided to read this for whatever reason and are thinking similar thoughts, call your loved ones and tell them how you feel. If that is not an option, here are prevention/Samaritan hotlines:
UK: 116 123
Canada: 1.833.456.4566, 5147234000 (Montreal); 18662773553 (outside Montreal)
USA: 1-800-273-8255
and others: https://ibpf.org/resource/list-international-suicide-hotlines
Whatever you are planning to do is never an option. It will never be.
You are loved. You are strong. You are not alone.
Goodbye. I am sorry.

– ______

I rushed to the closed bathroom door immediately. The note, dropped on the floor, got trampled briefly under my shoes – I only remember this because the rustling it made echoed terrifyingly loud in my head.

It’s all a bit blurry after that. And even the clear parts, I’m sorry, I just can’t tell you.

1:34 am
Funny: the most distinct memory I have at this point is the feeling of my hands shaking, even as I firmly gripped the brick wall of the house on the corner of the street. I just couldn’t stop them. It was always like that – my dad once told me it’s pathological, as we both had long, ‘built for piano’ fingers. Didn’t stop boys in high school casually calling me ‘Victor Parkinstein’, but that’s a distant memory now. I simply accepted that adrenaline flooded me every so often, and that was that.

Yet and still, it was this trembling – or rather, me noticing it – that snapped me back to reality.

Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t run away – the ambulance just came quickly. In my line of work, it’s not good to make yourself known to authorities during instances like these – they would certainly question me, maybe not on the spot but as the carriage was loaded in. Still, I was too under-equipped to deal with something like this on my own; then again, if I was the one who called it, it’s not as if there would be any time for such caution. All that mattered was that I was outside, slightly more down the street, peeking out as they loaded the boy from upstairs into the back of the green and yellow car to the glamour and worried looks of the crowd of students, quickly sobering up. I couldn’t hear, what they were saying (the siren was surprisingly quiet, but I was far down the road to hear through the murmur), nor did I want to hear it – all I needed to know, I already knew. There was no point in waiting around any longer.

As I turned away to the renewed sound of sirens leaving in the opposite direction, I breathed out. The shift was over, sure, but I felt no relief from it. Not because I now needed to circle over to the station to avoid unwanted attention, but rather because somewhere in between the mess of all that happened in the last twenty minutes, I dropped the package in the house. No hand-to-hand contact, no signature, no confirmation of the nickname – all three boxes were left unchecked. I knew Miranda was going to give me hell in the morning, but at that point, I just wanted to get back home, as quickly as I could.The street that I ended up on had no particularly outstanding features, yet plenty of background noise – a dog barking there, an exhaust pipe producing its primal noise here, the usual – for me to get distracted for a second without feeling any guilt from it. I thought, there and then, as I often do lately, of Sam.

See, me and him, we had a run in with death once before. It happened two or so years back, when I was still in uni; a distant friend of mine texted me one day whilst I was at a lecture. He sounded concerned, almost hysteric, saying all kinds of suggestive things with some dark undertones to them. I remember, selfishly and shamefully, hating him for it later – for putting me on the spot like that, where one’s own life and death hangs in balance of carefully chosen words over bloody text, of all things, and potentially nothing more – but at that particular point, nothing except for a feverish drive to help him plagued me, as I rushed out of the hall into my dorm. But midway through, as cowardly as it sounds, I realised I had no idea, what to tell him beyond “calm down” and “it’s gonna be okay” or how could I be of any help. So, I went to someone who I knew for a fact would – Sam, living only a few metaphorical steps away from me. As soon as I told him what was happening, he dashed off the chair and grabbed his jacket, nodding for me to follow him, as we rushed on a bus to my friend’s place. On the way there, Sam took the phone from me, calling him and keeping him on the line all the way until we finally reached his flat half an hour or so later.

His doorman monitor, in a what probably seemed tragically funny to him at that moment, displayed a green “come in!”. The poor guy sat on the floor of his studio-flat, by rather spacious window overlooking the street, surrounded by bottles on top of bottles of pills on the floor, bandages peeking under his bleak grey t-shirt around his chest and stomach. “Surgery complications,” he told us when we sat him down on the sofa. “4-to-5-figure bills for the family”, “indefinite number of visits to the hospital for the next three years”, and “____ left last week, said she couldn’t be the one to help me through it all”, was all that he said to us. All this time, he was not hysterical – just trembling and full of uncertainty, as his voice rang hollow against the oncoming traffic outside, indifferent. We stayed with him for the rest of the afternoon, calling up his folks and consulting – all three of us, at the same time – on the best course of action. We didn’t mention the word “_______” once, but the tension that hung around us, suffocating and drowning out the words, may have given away that we were fearing the worst a few times. In the end, his uncle, who was fortunately in the area, came around, assuring us that he will take it from here.

I never followed up on what happened to him, and it’s been some time since we last spoke. Not for personal animosity or anything nasty like that. My own life simply got in the way. What I still do recall is Sam having a chat with me about it, somewhat sombrely, the same evening, as we were trying to process the events of the day. And at one point, one thing leading to another, he just said:

“The moment you are faced with your mortality, when it hits you like a truck, that thought – ‘Am I going to die?’ –  you don’t think of anything else but of what your own mind tells you to do. Only after it, with some assistance, can you begin to realise what really is at stake for you and those around you.”

I hope he’s doing better now.

The night shook me awake from my recollections, sweeping a gust of cold wind across my back, crawling through the leather of my jacket. I didn’t even realise, but I was at the stations’ entrance, barred shut with a metallic gate. I took a second to comprehend what was in front of me, yet still, sillily, grabbed the shutter and gave it a good shake, as if my mind was refusing to conform to the possibility of missing the last train out even as the fact of the matter stared me in the face.

“It’s a weekday, amico,” a raspy yet smooth voice came somewhere from behind me, “The station doesn’t run this late, I’m afraid.”

I turned around to the sound of the voice, being greeted by a man in his late 30s, if I was to guess. The rough exterior of his dress, composed of a dirty white shirt, smart yet patched up black trousers, weathered running shoes and a ragged black coat, as well as a hand-knitted scarf, gave away that he was likely living on the street for a while. Despite that conclusion, his hair was very carefully upkept, on a level of professionalism that even Archie (fuck him, but good hair is good hair) did not quite have.

“Well, fuck,” I sighed in frustration, my head immediately jumping to attempts at figuring out the quickest way to get back home, looking around aimlessly and half-tempted to call an auto-cab, expensive as it may have been.

“Ah, do not worry – there is a late-night bus running from here over to downtown area, usually around 2:30 for its last call. You should be able to get wherever you’re going from there,” the man pulled out a crudely rolled cigarette out from the inner breast pocket of his coat, “D’you got a light, by any chance?” I jumbled through the pockets of my jacket, pulling out my 1-euro-lighter.

“How could you tell that I need to go downtown?” I asked with curiosity.

“The way you’re dressed. If I was to pen you down for one area, I’d say it’d be downtown East,” he smirked, looking up into the midnight sky, “All your East-enders – the giovane ones, anyway – I see you from a mile away,” I wasn’t sure if I was to take that as an insult or a compliment. Just in case, I quickly glanced down at my clothes, thinking that I did not look all that East-end-y.

The man turned back to me, his cigarette a third of the way gone.

“Listen, a bit of an, uh, non convenzionale question: since you’ve got time, can I interest you in a haircut? Don’t be deceived by my appearance, I am very much a trained barber – and I keep my tools clean and ready.”

I was, for a second, taken aback by his proposal. Maybe this is common for you, but people on the street around here don’t usually just casually offer you a haircut, at 1:45 am, at least not on a weeknight.

“Why not,” I finally said, having pondered about it for a second, “But where would we do it?”

“Follow me. Don’t worry, a pair of scissors is the only sharp object I have on me.”

1:48 am
As we moved across the road to the left of the station, we pushed through decaying bushes and a collapsing chain fence to a flat open field where an abandoned railroad track ran, curving through the underpass leading away, towards the city’s lights off in the distance. Quietly it laid there, taking in the night, no longer bothered by the rummaging steel of overground trains. Equally silent, slightly further off to the side, stood an old warehouse, the underpass’ eternal companion, creaking under the weight of its steel beams and roof. As we passed through the overgrown rails that once carried the life and blood of the entire city upon them, I could tell that we both felt like the city itself was watching us – staring us down, judgingly, writing a narrative of its own about us, for seemingly no other reason than because no one else would otherwise.

It was there, in that open, “urban quarry” of Zone 2, that the noise of the party finally subsided proper in my head. I was, of course, still alarmed – how often do you go with strangers offering to give you a haircut in the middle of the night? – so I kept the only weapon I had, my bag, tightly clasped around my hand, just in case. Yet, besides that, I finally felt at peace.

Promptly, we arrived at the barber’s humble abode – it was just to the side of the warehouse, it so happened, inside an old shed that, if I was to guess, was used to store equipment years, if not decades, ago, now revamped to resemble something of a liveable quarter. In the corner was the “bed” – a bunch of cardboard stacked under a dirty mattress and a blanket; just by it, the only piece of technology – a cracked touch-screen monitor, slid in-between a makeshift bookshelf with ruggedly assembled tomes and a last-century produced lamp; and all around, similar instances of things you’d expect in a normal apartment – just with an added flair of falling apart or barely being held together. Whilst you may be abhorred by the conditions, wondering how anyone could live like this, it was not that far off from my flat – the only differences between us being that I had a stable employment and paid rent.

“Please, do give me a second to retrieve the tools,” he spoke, ever so politely, with a voice as warm as tea with honey. As he did, he ducked in the corner of the room, feeling around the walls of the room for an opening with his hands, forgetting where he himself made it. Finally, after a bit of rummaging, he paused, smirked quietly, and pulled back the sheet, promptly taking out a beautiful, polished box made of oakwood, alongside a ceramic basin with an ornamental pattern laced across it.

Without saying a word, he put the box to rest on a rusty shelf above him, before retreating further down the room to grab some water from a thermos that was stashed just under the bedding, pouring it all out into the basin. Hot steam immediately raced up from it, filling the room with a heavy yet alluring sensation.

“Va bene, over here, sir,” he pointed out the door, back into the blue night of the outside, walking gently with both the box and the basin in his hands. As I followed him, I finally realised what was is it about his voice – his accent betrayed him as someone with heritage in the Southern mainland, probably _______. Couldn’t say for certain – languages were never my strongest suite – but I was fairly certain that was it. His darkened skin – admittedly, much paler now from the terminal case of ‘no sun’ that was omnipresent both in the Capital and in the country as a whole for eight months of the year – supported that conclusion. Not that this information changed anything, though – as someone with an accent myself (yes, really, even after almost a decade, I can’t shake off the hints of _______), I just like noticing these things.

“Interesting choice of location,” I tried to nonchalantly quip, “Was that always in the business-plan?”

“Believe it or not, no – but it’s incredible, isn’t it? No rent, minimal business expenses, and a great source of anecdotes!” the barber parried, light-heartedly. He walked behind the shed, where, as I followed him, a well-stacked shop assembly waited: a rusty yet well-polished seat, finished with red leather and an adjustable height pedal; a couple of makeshift shelves, stacked to the brim with cleaning blue alcohol, unwrappable tool-kits and aerosol cans; and, completing the picture, only a light-blue tarp wrapped around the pole to the side of the shack; notably, though, there was no mirror to be seen, “Please, have a seat.”

It wasn’t until I sat down and properly saw the view unfold in front of me that I realised why there was no mirror there: as you got yourself into the chair, the city skyline – still whitened out from below – laid bare in all its glory before your eyes; the lack of streetlights in the immediate vicinity, contrasted with the terrible whitewashing of the ones downtown, glimmering in the distance, allowed you to identify the constellations by where a particular star shined (or I think it would, anyhow – I have no idea how you identify those things); and this breath-taking vista, one that I did not think possible at place like the Capital, made any and all requests for a mirror null and, frankly, completely redundant.

“Wow,” was all I could say.

“’Wow’ is right,” I could hear the barber smile as he put a worn cloth around my shoulders, “On nights like these, I like to dress in my nice clothes – makes it easier to talk to people, some even think it’s a fashion statement. Kids today call it ‘poverty-core,’ if I remember right,” he chuckled, rummaging through his instruments, “But, you know, also good for business, scarce as it is.”

“Do you actually get customers regularly? I’ll be honest, it’s… well…”

“Unorthodox?” his accent thickened on that word, as if he never quite learnt to make it sound convincingly English, “I know. But these college kids, they like to save money – and there’s so many in the neighbourhood. Now, how would you like your cut?”

“Just a slight trim at the top would do,” I raised my hand up to my hair, taking a single strand and measuring it with my fingers. God, they felt messy – how long did I go without a haircut then? “But how do you get the word out there? I mean, you don’t exactly have the high street presence.”

“Usually,” the barber began replying, putting a few pumps into the pedal to raise it up, “Word of mouth – I mean, where else would you find a hairdresser looking this stylish just walking around the neighbourhood?” he started spraying my hair with water, as the tingling sensation on my scalp hit me, “But mostly, just some social media PR. I sometimes buy ads, or like to ask my friends in the industry to shout me out – you know, calling old favours, and whatnot,” his hand gently touched my hair, following the strand I held up as reference earlier, “This much feels about right?”

“Yes, thank you,” I responded, as the barber made the first cut, “So you were an actu- a fully employed barber, at some point?” I hoped he didn’t hear my slip up.

“Of course!” if he did, he didn’t care. His scissors were busily at work, “Worked right there,” I felt him nod his head forward, “In the financial district, giving prime cuts to all the chisele-jawed Johns and Janes in their fancy suits late for their 9 am meetings. Pretty good at it too – the tips were especially generous. The societá boys and girls, they just love throwing money around. But I am not complaining! It was good money, and I did what I loved,” he paused, last note of his sentence hanging sombrely in the air for a few seconds, even as the hands continued to work, gently and meticulously, “But of course, you can tell, it did not last.
“As you can tell, I am not exactly from this part of the world – shocking as that may be because I am such a natural English gentleman. I came here maybe ten years ago, to make some money, honing my stylistic craft and all that. But then, it was around, I want to say, six-seven years ago? When they had that first, dumb vote on immigration, what was it called? No matter, I thought – how bad could it be? This place was a democracy, like in the rest of Europe – so I get called a rat sometimes, big fucking deal; I get money, they don’t. But then, every year, they chipped more and more at my visa. First, they laid me off because of some new computer thing that cuts hair. The machine, they said, ‘can do everything you do but does not ask for sick leave or overtime pay.’ That was bad, especially because my visa was sponsored by that barbershop, but I thought, ‘Va bene, I can survive on unemployment for a bit.’ But you see, – aha! – because of that stupid immigration vote, the job centre lady said nationals get priority now, so they turned me down for benefits,” he rotated the chair slightly, moving the sides, “Anything over here?”

“Same as the top, just a small trim,” I answered blankly, enthralled by his story. He nodded, returned to work, and kept talking.

“So I decided to figure this out. I started looking up this immigration stuff, what they changed, how they changed, and what it meant for me. Turns out, as part of it, they changed the rules on benefits: anyone from Union area who does not have… uh, what was it… ‘Indefinite Leave to Return?’ I don’t know, basically the best visa you can have – anyone without it now could not use the unemployment scheme. So, no money. I tried scrapping what I could for a ticket, but then, after, three months or so, they took my apartment because they were “fed up” with me taking so long with my paperwork – even though I was doing everything they told me to do in their bureaucracy!” he rotated the chair around, working now on the other side, “So here I am – stuck,,” the barber pulled away for a second, trying to get a better angle on my haircut, “Being a hairdresser is all I’ve known my whole life. I was so, so certain that it would be the one job that automatization would avoid, and that, no matter what, my passport would be secure,” he chuckled sombrely, snipping the last few bits of hair, “Clearly, that belief’s finito now.”

“Can’t you go to a shelter, maybe ask them to contact the embassy for you?” I felt stupid for asking – of course he did?

“Si, of course! That’s what I did. But a shelter can only do so much,” he pulled away, looking at his work from side to side, “Especially when they get tens, hundreds, if not thousands of claims every day. They’re still operating in the same system that forced me on the street in the first place, except that their budget is around 50% donations. Which isn’t to say they didn’t help – they did – but, for a lack of a better comparison, it’s like treating a, uh, malatia terminale with painkillers: you ease the pain, but it never really go away, no matter how effective the drugs are,” he put his tools down, dropping some into the disinfector and wiping others with cloth. Out of nowhere, he picked up a handheld mirror that was lying flat on one of the shelves until then, “How’s this for a trim?”

“It’s perfect,” I always said that, either out of politeness or concern for how much more time (and money!) a redo might take if I said anything else, but his cut was actually perfect, even if fundamentally, my hair seemed only a little different than usual, “I’m sorry for questioning your abilities.”

“Not at all!” he laughed wholeheartedly, “Not every day you meet a homeless barbiera, let alone one that actually knows how to cut hair as good as I do.”

“How much do I owe you?”

“Oh, please, don’t be ridiculous. I offered.”

“No, really,” I took the cloth off from me, wrapping my sleeve with intent to not be a freeloader this one time, “Do you have a chip?”

“Chip?” he looked at my now naked arm, with a little bump by the wrist, “Oh, those things! No, I went homeless before they introduced those. If you absolutely insist,” he exhaled heavily, clearly not comfortable taking the payment, “I can only do cash.”

“Oh. I don’t have any…” wait, didn’t I get cash recently?

“What a shame!” he said, tongue-in-cheek,

“No! Wait! I do!” I shouted triumphantly, sensing notes in my pocket – the delivery at the back of the restaurant, they tipped me with cash, and I haven’t touched it since! The barber smiled in earnest, putting his gaze away, shaking his head comically in disapproval. 50 Eurodollars came out of the pocket, rustling between my fingers, “How much?”

“I’ll give you a special night-time discount, so 20 altogether.”

“Can you give me 20 back as change for this?” I waived the note around, as non-bragging as humanely possible. The barber nodded, smiling at the tip I was leaving, reaching into his back pocket and producing a worn-out brown wallet. Amidst old business cards and weathered notes, a simple photo could be seen, stuck to the inner side. Despite wear and tear, you could still recognize a happy family of four – two men, a boy and a girl – standing, smiling and hugging, in front of a mesmerising evening seaside. It was hard to tell when the photo was taken, but one of the men – I assume, the barber – looked younger by at least a decade, with his face cleanly shaven, and his eyes radiating in a way that only the eyes of a young parent’s or a grad school student’s during orientation do before the reality of the world properly sets in, and the sleepless nights accumulate, the weight of it all dimming them, if not fully, then at least partially.

“Good photo, no?” I didn’t even realise how blatantly I fixated my stare on the picture, “It’s alright, I know I don’t look so young anymore.”

“Your husband and kids, I’m guessing?” he nodded, himself getting distracted by the picture now, smiling widely.

“The three corners of my own little world – sadly, back in ______; I just came here to make some extra money and set up our moving situation before committing us all. Much good that’s done. What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that,” he laughed with that earnest, roaring in his throat sound, again, “As in, not the ‘go back where you came from’ kind of way; still, you’re not from around here yourself, are you?”

“What gave me away?” it was my turn to chuckle.

“The accent.”

“The accent?!” all those hours practicing, to waste!

“Yeah. It’s too mainland-like – I cannot quite place it, but it’s not local. Also, you are far too kind to be a local – people here are rich, but ah, also so unkind to strangers,” my experience could have suggested either way, admittedly, but I could see where he was coming from, “Anyway, my dear émigré friend – where’s your family these days?”

“Oh, all over, we…” I paused.

No. Too soon. Not yet. Let’s just pretend that question didn’t happen.

“…When was the last time you saw them?” I asked him after a brief pause. He looked back at the photo.

“Close to three years, I think – had to start saving money at some point. Haven’t called them for a bit, too, now that they’ve moved and I don’t have my phone anymore, but we are working towards getting me out somehow – I told them to send me mail to this one shelter on the other end of the city, they were the only one kind enough to keep a permanent post-box open for me for free, so I make a trip every month. Sometimes they send something, other times they don’t, but I always look forward to it,” he shook his head with a sombre sigh, “The legal process keeps getting more difficult – they changed the rules at least five times since I started working on my documents. But I am hopeful that hug my kids soon. Else…” he paused, staring down into the photo, before finally closing the wallet and looking up at me, producing the change, “Else, what’s the point?” he checked his cracked watch that I haven’t paid much attention to, strapped to his right wrist, “Here’s your change.”

“I can’t take this,” I felt something swell up in my throat, standing there, frozen up. The barber, however, opened my palm – gently yet forcefully – and put the change in it.

“And I cannot keep it,” he smiled, with his big, elegant hands clasping my palm, “Don’t worry, I’ll be okay. Business will start booming any day now,” he winked at me, pulling away. Uncharacteristically (you probably think I’m a blabbermouth at this point), I found myself short for words.

“I hope you can go back home soon,” was all I could muster.

“I hope we all can, my friend,” he extended his hand out to me, either in recognition of my accent as also not being from around here, or just the basic shared humanity we both held in benevolence to the powers that be, “Amato.”

“___,” I accepted his connection, shaking the firm hand extended to me.

“Pleasure meeting you, ___. Thank you for letting me cut your hair and complain about life. May we meet another day as men unbothered by the walls the world puts up, free to cross any bridge we want.”

“I’d like that,” was all I said, smiling awkwardly to his sudden burst of poeticism, pulling away. Amato had no intention of following me, as he started cleaning his tools at the back, clearly unbothered. There wasn’t much else to do but step out from behind the shed back onto the path to the station.

Before I did, however, I turned back to look at the stars, one last time. Their shimmering glow, familiar yet so distant, stared back indifferently at me. And yet, cold as it was, for the first time in a really long time, it felt almost undisturbed and untouched by the all-polluting streetlamps from below. And in that moment, I finally let the overwhelming feelings at the pit of my stomach to rise, as I felt grief and sadness, shared between the Amatos of the world twice over, to firmly grip me too, and I felt the walls that keep us apart to be unscalable, and the stars above, unreachable. But overbearing as that feeling was, as badly as it held me at my throat, a small part of me was content with the fact that, no matter how many more barriers will be put up, at least there will always be people like Amato, hopeful of one day finally crossing them over, undisturbed, no matter the odds against them. It was intoxicating, but only for a moment – one wonderful, fleeting moment, as I wanted to run back to the barber, hug him, tell him that it will be okay and that he’ll see his family soon, and this terrible heartbreak he feels will pass, just as everything does on Earth.

But then, the reality, that terrible gravitational pull, kicked in all over again, and I couldn’t move myself to do that. In the end, I didn’t know if this was the truth. I was always, at best, a cautious optimist – as my mum said, even before we came here, you hope for the best and prepare for the worst, and that’s the spirit that carried me this far. But how do you prepare – or indeed, stay optimistic – when the worst has already happened? Truth be told, I just didn’t know what else to do or say. I wish there was something more I could contribute, but I just felt so powerless, so overwhelmed with this terrible feeling of separation from it all, that few words of optimism could rise out of the bottomless pit inside my vocal cords.

I’d like to say that Amato got out eventually, but truth be told, as much as I rooted for him, I never heard or saw him again. I searched the web over, looking for any mentions of a homeless barber living not far from West Ham station, but found nothing. For all I know, he is still out there. Or maybe, I’m losing my mind and I simply dreamt all of this up. 

That night, however, there was nothing else to do but leave, so I pulled my bag up firmly to my shoulder, wiped my face, and headed back the way I came. As I walked, a train hurled somewhere in the distant. A siren pierced the night. And in the quietness of it all, the stars shined on, indifferent and undisturbed as they were hours before and days after my arrival.

The beauty of the world, there as always, again laid just out of reach.

3:28 am
If you must know, the trip back was uneventful once I – miraculously – made the delayed 2:30 bus. I made it home in one piece, making sure that I went ‘off shift,’ undressed, and went to bed. It was a quiet end to an unquiet evening, as all the emotions I felt swelled up and dropped themselves like a stone to the bottom of my stomach, again, where they belonged.

I do want to say, though, that this experience got me thinking back to this one late afternoon a few months back. The summer was over, but the heat wouldn’t let up, and it was the first day we got some rain in months – in fact, it actually made things really, really cold out of nowhere. On a rather uncharacteristic weekday, I found myself in my room with nothing to do. It’s a rarity, by all accounts, given that I usually can fall asleep quite easily for a little four-to-six-hour nap before my shift begins again. And yet, despite the rain, my room was still struck by impossible heat that kept me awake. That’s part of the reason why I’m talking about this moment so vaguely – I simply cannot remember because I was that bored.

One thing I do remember is that the window has been left open. The cold had begun settling in, and the rain outside had been going on since the night before. As soothing and nice as it was for the first few minutes, lounging by the window with a cigarette, I decided it was high time that I closed the window before I caught a cold – getting ill was the last thing I needed then, and I had a habit of not dressing up warm enough for the weather as is.

Just before I had the chance, though, a knock came from my front door.

I paused for a moment, like a deer in the headlights. Could it be a visit from the police? What for? Or maybe it’s Miranda? Granted, she did not visit me often, but still – she did have my address. What if something happened? Oh, God, what if something happened at the office? What if-

My stream of thought was interrupted by another knock, much harder this time.

“Coming,” I shouted, completely forgetting about the window and moving towards the entry to unlock it for my unwarranted visitor. As I slowly opened the door, however, the mystery became much more of a boring normality.

“Hello there, Beetle,” the girl on the other end of the frame jumped at me with arms wide open, startling me for a moment. After a moment of hesitation, though, I gently hugged her back. As she leaned away from me, her fair hair – this time, in a stylish bob – coupled with blue eyes that she somehow scored in the genetic lottery revealed an old familiar face of my sister.

“Didn’t know you were in town, Margo,” I said, half-seriously – I’m sure you would be somewhat annoyed if someone would have showed up to your place unannounced, too, however close they may be.

“Well, I was just passing by ______, as one does traveling the world, and thought I’d pay you a visit. Can I come in?” she smiled as gently and innocently as she used to when were still kids, even though the signs of very much adult tiredness were starting to creep up very evidently on her face – the slight darkness around the eyes’ corners, the barely noticeable fade around the dimples when the smile materialised, the paleness around the cheekbones.

“Sure,” I shrugged, stepping aside and letting her come in, “Excuse the mess, wasn’t expecting any visitors,” she laughed, earnestly, as if I said something genuinely amusing.

“Don’t worry – I don’t exactly live in a maid-cleaned mansion myself,” she dropped her carrier sport bag near my wardrobe, before proceeding into the room itself, “Jesus, it’s freezing in here – mind if I close the window?”

“Go for it, but if you want to smoke, we’ll have to re-open it.”

“It’s either that or catching a cold – oh, also, I quit!”

“Congrats!” I did not believe her for a second. My sister ‘quit’ probably close to four times over her life, in less than thirty years that she’d spent on the god’s green earth, on track to rival our dad (probably around ten or so times I heard him try) If anything, I was dead sure that before the end of the visit, she’ll ask for a cigarette.

“Thanks!” she shut the window unnecessarily forcefully. The sound of rain became a distant hollow thumping on the glass. I put the kettle on, “So, how’s my little brother doing?”

“Same old, same old. Still no diploma, but still breathing. Thankfully, the job actually pays this time around,” I looked at her with condolence, without really knowing what else to say to that. She took off her slim wool jacket, extracting a round pair of glasses from the inside pocket. It is only now that I’ve noticed that she was dressed like she belonged at derby of a late-Victorian court on a hot summer day, “What’s with the outfit?”

“What, this?” she chuckled, “Come on, I always dress like that.”

“Like a retired old-money professor?” I thought the comparison was funny, “No the fuck you don’t – or didn’t last I saw you, anyway.”

“Eh, I prefer to believe it’s mostly the bags under my eyes – courtesy of my PhD advisor – that give off this look rather than my fashion sense. If you don’t mind, can we just entertain that fantasy for a bit?” she parried, tonelessly, fixing a flock of hair behind the ear. A barely noticeable, but acutely self-evident, streak of grey hair revealed itself close to her left temple. I couldn’t tell if she was actually hurt by my comments or just sarcastic. My sister was difficult to read sometimes.

At that moment, the water at the kettle stopped boiling. It was time for tea.

“You still take yours the same way, right?” I turned around as I stood up, rummaging through my half-empty cupboards.

“Yup, green with milk, please.”

“First of all, gross. Second, I don’t have green.”

“God damn it ___, why would you ask then? Fucking asshole,” she mumbled as quietly as she could so I wouldn’t hear. Of course, I did, “Then Earl Grey, no milk, please.” I swiftly served just that, “Thank you,” I sat back down with my own cup of simple breakfast tea, no milk either. I never understood, just how people have the nerve – the audacity even – to add it to their drink. She sat there, pensive, gripping her cup, until suddenly asking, “You mind if we open the window?”

“Ah-a! So much for quitting – you do want to smoke!” I exclaimed triumphantly. It was good to know that I was right there for a moment at least. She rolled her eyes, as I stood up to open up the window, “Oh come on, just pulling your leg. You want one?” I tilted my head at my own pack, resting on the table.

“Thanks, but I brought my own,” she smiled cunningly, extracting a white-and-blue pack out of the pocket of her jacket. It didn’t hit me at first, but then I looked closer to it. Is that…

“You got Senate?” I couldn’t hold back the gasp that escaped my throat.

“What?” she paused, looking at me surprised, “Oh, shit, no, sorry. That’s a different brand, quite popular in _______,” she lit it up, taking a long first drag, “You’re still searching?”

“Continental Blockade is hard to bypass, and somehow, the last ever batch got stuck in ______, what can I say,” I answered somewhat bitterly, getting my cigarette out. Myrollboro had to suffice.

“Eh, I’m sure they’ll sort something out eventually. Capitalists, they always do,” she smiled, with a bleak shade of cautious optimism in her voice, “You talk to mum at all lately?”

“Is that why you’re here?” I lit my own cigarette, leaning against the wall, standing across from her – the absence of a second chair made it difficult to sit at the table, “To investigate if I’ve been a good son or not?”

“Oh, my God, I forgot what a defensive little bitch you are!” she was about to throw some ash off her cigarette, so she looked up at me, somewhat lost, looking for an ashtray. I served her one of the cups inside the sink, much to an evident disdain in her eyes, nonetheless smothered by the relief of a newly found ashtray, “No, ___, I am just making conversations. Don’t be a dick.”

“Well, as a matter of fact,” I paused for a moment, letting the smoke build up in my lungs, “No, I haven’t in a bit, to be perfectly honest.”

“You should, you know?” Margo looked at me with compassion, holding her cigarette in a very specific way – between her thumb, middle and ring finger, with her pointing and pinky fingers perked up, as if she was holding a teacup at a formal dinner.

“Why, did something happen?” I asked out of genuine curiosity rather than any possible malice.

“___, you-” she gasped, momentarily regaining herself. I could tell she wanted to throw her hands up at that moment, “Do you hear yourself sometimes? You don’t need a reason to call her! I’m seven hours ahead most days, and even I call her whenever I can.”

“Don’t give me that,” I took the opportunity to use the makeshift ashtray myself, “You know damn well why I don’t call her.”

“Admittedly, I do, yes,” she tilted her head slightly, breathing in the fumes, “But you, of all people, should know how it feels like starting out in a new city all by yourself. She gets lonely, man.”

I hesitated to answer.

“Maybe,” I shrugged, “Maybe, I don’t know. It’s just… it’s still awkward, you know? No one was more excited than her that I was going to follow in her footsteps.”

“I know. But she’s the only mum we’ve got,” Margaret was relishing in her victory at that moment, I could tell, even if she was not showing it. The slightest dent in my rhetoric, however minuscule, was enough to always bring out that victorious, barely noticeable grin on the left fringes of her lips, “No one knows how long she or dad will be around for.”

“How is he, by the way?” I took the opportunity to switch the topic entirely. I did not want to drone on about mum at that point.

“Managing, I’d say. I saw him the other day, after getting on this side of the Wall. Stays in the old country-house, back on the continent, trying to get some resemblance of an old network together, from what I heard. Oh, still saving for that vineyard, too – like you can grow anything resembling good wine since the soil crisis, but hey, the man misses his alcohol,” she paused, “Truth be told, I don’t talk to him as much as I do to mum,” she shrugged, leaning back in her chair as far as she could to start balancing on it, “But, he’s alive and managing, detesting the sheer promise of retirement.”

“Who wouldn’t,” I smiled timidly, “Retirement is hell in this economy.”

“Nah, it’s just dad,” she shook her head gently, with a silent chuckle escaping her throat, “Do you remember that time you had a geography coursework in middle school? The one you got me and dad to help you out with?”

“Oh, don’t even get me started on that one.”

“No, no, seriously,” she leaned over the table closer to me, with the chair standing on its four legs once again, “It’s like the perfect anecdote I tell people to explain what dad is like. Didn’t he make your basic five-page long essay into a thirty-plus pages report on the complexities of Eastern European relationship after the failed attempt to bring the Wall down?”

“He even asked uncle ____ for help,” I smiled, “Still pissed I only got a C, though,” nostalgia was one hell of a feeling, and both of us, at this point, were drunk on the shared history that suspended itself in the air of the room.

“That’s cause our teacher was a bitch, a real old no-good-hag. What did she call that Jewish boy you studied with, the one that had a dual citizenship? ‘Foreign agent’? Fucking Christ, what teacher does that? And then she got him in trouble with the principal for skipping class once! I mean, come on – she’s a class traitor. Literally!” she was the first to laugh at this point, after letting the pause take hold after her comment. I followed suite – I couldn’t resist at this point.

“Man, where did the time go,” she shook her head, lightly yet solemnly, exhaling smoke, “You ever just pause and think, just how long ago all of this was?”

“Sometimes. I don’t really get much time to dwell on the past nowadays.”

“You can say that again. Gotta swim if you don’t wanna drown, etc etc etc,” she shook the ash off the cigarette into the cup, souring her face from another realisation of using a perfectly fine cup as an ashtray, “Enough about that. How’s the rest of your ‘now’, then?”

“Honestly?” I asked semi-rhetorically after a brief pause, contemplating if I should speak of it all, “Weird. Just really… I don’t know, not entirely here, I guess.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, it’s… Ever since the incident l_____________________________. anymore. The one ________________________. ____. And I… I don’t know if I trust myself and my own judgment to be able to just rely on these things, to know these things, how to live.”

[REMOVED]

 THIS SECTION HAS BEEN MARKED AND INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK BY THE ORDER OF RCC AND THE NATIONAL SECURITY COMMITTEE

“I guess I just wonder sometimes, why does everyone I love… okay, no, ‘care about,’ ‘like,’ less dramatic; why they all seem to leave,” I shrugged, leaning back to the wall and taking another drag, “Or, on the other hand, even when they stay, why do I push them away.”

Margo sat in silence for a few brief moments. The smoke from her cigarette began building above the ceiling, forming some sort of a twisted not-quite-halo far above where her hair stood. The whole time, her gaze turned glassy, staring downward into the cold wood of my kitchen table.

“Interesting,” she finally said, taking a drag, looking up at me, “Before I say anything else, have you considered not doing that last part, pushing away and all?”

“Har-har,” my sister was not funny, “But seriously, even when I try not to, it seems to fall apart. I don’t know, it just feels like I don’t have a tie to… anything, or anyone, anymore, at least not here, and whatever I try, I just can’t rebuild it,” I felt stupid saying all this out loud, like the situation would become ridiculous only if I speak it into existence (which I did, stupidly), “Have you ever gotten melancholy over the last couple days of school before summer break, where it’s becoming pointless to make plans or make new friends because you’ll all be gone for quite a while?”

“Sure, I’m not heartless,” Margo rerolled one of her sleeves, pensively, as she always did when thinking of a clever way to respond, “But that’s the nice part about school, you always come back to those people and you always get a chance to try again, no?”

“Yeah,” I pulled on my cigarette for a little while longer than usual, “How do you deal with it? You’re the one living in a completely foreign land, between us two.”

“Ha!” she pulled herself back to the table, both elbows sprung on top of it, waving the almost exhausted cigarette around before settling on pointing a finger at me, “Bold of you to say that you don’t live in a completely foreign land, Mr. ‘I-Don’t-Feel-Connected-To-Anything’!” I rolled my eyes, looking away – she wasn’t wrong, but she also knew exactly what I meant, “My point stands, though, in this, now that I think about it, not great school analogy: why don’t you just go back, either to mum or dad? They called it quits when they figured it wasn’t for them, and they are dealing with it? If it’s that rough over here, that would make more sense to me, at least – better deal with the devil you know, and all that. I might return soon enough myself; it’ll be almost like the good old days.”

“I could ask you the same thing – you know you are going grey, right?”

“Oh no you didn’t, that’s different!” Margaret pouted at me, “That’s the price you pay for academic recognition-slash-validation. You, my dear little beetle, are just suffering.”

Those last words hung in the air for a brief moment, only broken up by the rain outside. Nothing really came to mind as a counter-argument – maybe there wasn’t a need for one?

“I can’t go back,” I finally exclaimed, “I’ve left too much behind for this not to count. I can’t just throw in the towel now, after everything invested into me, after all the hours I spent here, after all the friends I’ve left behind. It’s easy for you to return – you’ve actually accomplished something! – but me, that’s just-”

“___, your fucking cigarette!”

My fucking cigarette! It was almost out, and the burnt end was touching my fingers. I winced as if remembering what a stable person is supposed to do in such a situation. 
“Sorry, got carried away,” I threw the butt into the cup, turning on the tap above the sink. I didn’t burn myself, not really, my fingers just stung a tiny bit, “But the point stands. I need… Fuck, Marge, I don’t know – I want to feel good about what I’m doing, and I just don’t right now. So, while that lasts, I cannot go back to the life I already left behind. Otherwise… Otherwise, none of this would have mattered.”

“But what if you never feel good about any of this?” she put her cigarette out, throwing it right behind mine into the cup, “What if this feeling you are looking for, this goal you are looking for, what if it just won’t ever come?”

“Then I guess I’ll just never go back.”

Silence hung in the air. What else was there to say?

The rest of that day went pretty average: me and Margo went to lunch, stumbled around rainy streets for a bit, and made plans for the weekend (I did, after all, still have work in the evening). And yet, throughout it all and until she departed for the next stop along her journey, I could trace both concern and immeasurable sadness in her eyes, even if we never revisited that conversation again. Just as, I’m sure, it stuck with her, it stuck with me to this day. I’d like to say that I sat with it afterward, processed what I said – and exactly what I meant – but I didn’t; these words just became another thought that still bothers me from time to time, and another reminder of how, despite holding it all in the palm of my hands so recently, it was too late for me. I was no Amato – he had a goal in mind to return to, a Northern Star to look upon when lost, something to fight for to the bitter end. But I knew that it wouldn’t make me any happier, going back – both moves were a zero-sum dilemma, a real ‘damn if you, damn if you don’t,’ if you will.

I don’t know why I’m telling you any of this. It’s stupid – stupid and terribly selfish, you can’t even respond to these ramblings because there is no return address on the package. But maybe, if I had to hold out hope for anything these days, it’s that if I put these thoughts down for someone else to dissect, to witness, to acknowledge, they’d attain meaning beyond making me upset, and confused, and homesick all at once.

But I’ll let you be the judge of that. If you somehow find a way to respond, don’t – I think I’ll sleep better not knowing.

The Morning After
The following day began, uncharacteristically, with another unexpected knock at the door. I was just finishing up my morning routine (brush teeth, wash face, put on tea, cigarette, drink tea, have another cigarette) before heading out to catch up with Miranda.

“Who’s there?” I asked, slightly alarmed. No answer came, except for another polite but forceful knock on the door. I thought of my sister (could she have been back so soon?), but the reality was not as pleasant this time around.

I checked the peephole: two men, dressed in plain winter clothes yet finely distinct dark coats. One with a messy patchwork of wheat-coloured hair, the other furnishing a buzzcut, with a small, barely noticeable scar traced above his temple. The two looked nonchalant enough, patiently waiting for an answer, yet that alone was enough to send a shiver down my spine.

“Who’s there?” I repeated the question, slightly louder this time.

“Police,” calmly responded the blonde, without even looking at the door.

My heart sank.

Could it have been from yesterday? Did they trace the hospitalised kid back to me, somehow? Did they ask people at the party? Fuck, could it have been that guy that I spoke to?  

I glanced around the apartment. Not only have I already answered from the inside, but there really was nowhere to run – the windows, although opening all the way, were simply too high above the street. Even if I didn’t break any limbs, I wouldn’t get far. And where would I go, anyway?

I looked through the peephole again. The duo stood quietly outside, completely unmoved by me taking my time with answering their calls. Against my better judgement, I unlocked the door and peeped out from behind it at my two guests.

“Mr ________?” I nodded at my surname, “My name is Detective _____ (I am assuming this gets censored, so let’s just call him the Blonde (unless this also gets censored; in that case, I give up)) this is my colleague, Detective _____ (as follows, I shall call this one the Buzzcut),”the blonde officer pulled out his identification badge, his colleague followed, “Sorry to disturb you so early on a weekday. We’re investigating the December ^xxth Attacks and believe you can answer some questions for us. May we come in?”

“Do you have a warrant?” a cliché line from one of my coursemates back at uni sprung up, without me even having a chance to think it through – and thank God for that: despite all the power the government had invested into the police over the last few decades, civil rights – although on the defensive – were still acknowledged as long as you knew them. The Blonde, unfazed, pulled out a touchpad from his coat’s pocket. With a couple of swift, calculated touches, he pulled the screen in front of me. The digital warrant displayed my name, photo, full address, and a sentence in bold saying “Person of Interest in Connection to December ^xxthAttacks; Request for a Home Visit”. A big red stamp, with a simple APPROVED, stood solemnly at the bottom, “Sure, come in.”

“Much obliged,” the Blonde put the touchpad away, stepping inside with his colleague after I opened the door fully, “Nice place you’ve got. Cosy, quiet.”

“Thank you,” I walked in after them, shutting the door. The Buzzcut, ever quiet, leaned against the sink, while the Blonde approached my table. I traced his gaze from my makeshift ashtray (an old cup from university days), to my actual cup that I used for drinking, still sitting there.

“May we sit down for a chat?” he asked without making anything out of the table. I obliged, sitting on one of the two chairs within range (Margo’s visit made me realise I needed another chair). I overheard the Buzzcut getting something out of his coat – a notebook (surprisingly still used) and a pen, “I promise this won’t take long, Mr ________ – can I call you ______?”

“That’s fine,” I replied blankly.

“Thank you. ______, that’s an unusual name, very ‘other-side-of-the-wall.’ Where are you from, ______? The Baltics?

“______,” I confessed. They probable knew, anyhow, with my visa number being in the system and all.

“The belly of the beast, huh? My dad went a couple of times to _________, back in the 80s. Lovely city – long way from home for you, certainly,” he followed his colleague’s example, pulling out a little leather-bound notebook and a pencil. I didn’t realise it before, but this whole time, the Buzzcut was jotting something down just behind me. I didn’t date to turn around and check, “Regardless, Mr. ________, we’ll be brief – I’d hate to take up more of your day than I already had. You work as a courier for ______ Express, Limited, correct?”

“I do, yes,” I gulped. The official policy said nothing about confirming nor denying affiliation with the company – just that we should avoid doing so whenever possible (at that moment, obviously, it wasn’t possible). Yes, we were a registered, trademarked name; yes, we had ad space on billboards, in newspapers, and online; and yes, we technically were operating within the permits of the law. In fact, if anything, I of all people had plausible deniability insofar as my knowledge (or lack thereof) of what is inside the packages went. And yet, I couldn’t help but feel my stomach drop at the mere prospect of being questioned. The Blonde did not immediately communicate if he noticed my nervousness, but I did hear the Buzzcut strike his pencil a few extra times.

“Are you nervous?” I didn’t realise it until this moment, but he sounded young. Couldn’t have been half-a-decade, maybe just about, older than me. And yet, his shapeless form, obscured by the dark coat and icy gaze, made him appear non-human, like we had nothing in common with one another.

“No,” I replied as candidly as I could, “I do deliveries for them, yes.”

“Excellent. Did you, by any chance, deliver any packages on the night of the attacks?”

“Are you accusing me of something?” I wanted to ask for a lawyer so badly at that moment. I wonder if I still had that guy’s number from uni. Maybe he could have put me in touch with the right kind of people. 

“Do you feel like you are being accused of something?” the Blonde wasn’t even looking at me, just flipping through his notebook, with that icy, piercing gaze in his light-grey eyes. I paused, deciding to move past the question.

“I delivered three parcels that night. One to dorms in _____ ____, one to a private residency at __________, and one to a business near _________.”

“You were in __________?” shit, I said too much, “May I ask who was the delivery for?”

“I’m sorry, I am not allowed to disclose this,” that much I knew the company policy to be – strict courier-client privilege, unless the company itself is asked to unseal the information.

“Shame,” the Blonde shrugged, tearing a page out of his notebook and putting into his coat, “But I digress. Let’s talk about that last address – do you recognise this woman?” the fair-haired detective pulled out his touchpad again, with the face of ‘Ms. Salt’, the girl from behind the restaurant, on it. The photo clearly was a mugshot of unidentifiable date; she looked exhausted, more matured there, somehow, even if I could pretty comfortably say that we were the same age. I squinted my eyes, pausing for posterity, trying to think of what to say – if I shot them down again, they might get agitated. If I answered honestly, I could implicate myself.

“Maybe. We deliver to a lot of people, and many of those at night – it’s difficult to keep track of everyone.”

“But you have to get a signature from the client, don’t you? We know for a fact this woman was at that address that night. Was she the one who collected the parcel?”

“I really can’t say. I am sorry.”

“Right,” the Blonde was, surprisingly, satisfied with my answer – or at least, he sounded like he was satisfied, “Look, Mr. Kornilov,” he put his notebook aside, finally looking up at me with those piercing, dimmed eyes of his, “I’ve read your company’s policy. I know you have strict privacy requirements. I know you couriers aren’t allowed to look inside the parcels. And I know, whatever my personal opinion on the matter, the kind of business you are running isn’t illegal by the charter of the law. But you must understand that this is a matter of national security. As far as our job goes, we are seeking not the what – believe me, we already have enough of that – but the how. So, off the record, I would like to ask you to answer this next question to the best of your ability for me,” the Buzzcut stopped jotting down in his notebook behind me. I could feel his gaze piercing through the back of my head. I was at a crossfire, with nowhere to run, “Have you, at any point before or since xx/12, had a concern regarding any of your deliveries? Not anything concrete, maybe, just a hunch – that something was off about any of them or the people they were delivered to?”

The question stunned me. I could tell where he was going with this: if I said yes, that would give him the mandate to pursue his leads regarding the company, on record or not. That is guaranteed to open me to further questioning – hell, it is guaranteed to open the company to further questioning. Saying no seems like the safe option, but what if they know that they are letting me on? What if they alreadyhave all the proof they need, and this is a test? Surveillance isn’t exactly taboo nowadays; they could have tapped my phone if they wanted to; they could send a surveillance drone after me; and they can track my movements both through my identity biochip or just good old-fashioned CCTV. Put simply, every answer seemed to have paved a new road to hell; there was no right thing to say.

“I cannot possibly comment,” was the best that I could come up with, “I just deliver packages where I am told to deliver them,” a silence hung in the room for a brief moment. A car alarm went off a few blocks over, loud enough to creep in through the closed windows. Finally, the Blonde looked away from me, tapping his leg with his pen.

“I understand. Well, thank you for your time, Mr. ________,” I heard the Buzzcut lean off my sink, with his foot firmly slamming on the wooden floor, “Given the urgency and importance of this investigation, I must ask you to remain in the capital for the foreseeable future. If something comes up, please give our names at the nearest precinct, they will connect you with us. Until then,” he adjusted his coat, moving swiftly towards the door, “We will be in touch. Cheerio.”

“And to you,” the lump in my throat swelled up tightly, gripping me from the inside.

“Hang on,” the Buzzcut suddenly stopped. His voice was almost hoarse and had a sandpaper quality to it. Is that why he was so quiet the entire time? “What’s this?”

The Buzzcut stopped near the bathroom door, staring at the wall opposite of it. Before him stood a painted-over doorway, tightly shut.

“Just an old room. It was here before me, I never was given the key for it – you’d have to contact the landlord for questions,” that was a stupid thing to say, and they knew that. The Buzzcut glanced at me, then back at the door, as if processing what I’ve just said. His colleague eyed him peacefully from near the exit. After giving the door a gentle rattle, to ensure that I was really telling the truth, the Buzzcut joined his colleague at the door. The Blonde gave me one last nod, after which they’ve spared no time leaving out of the door, as quietly and swiftly as they arrived.

I suppose you might have some questions about the room, just as the two detectives did. I meant it when I said it was there before me, and I really haven’t used it for a considerable amount of time. The full truth of it, however, is not for me to tell just yet.

You know, before coming to this country, my dad used to say that the innocent have nothing to fear in a proper “free” country. Unless guilty, the iron hand of the law rarely – if ever – made mistakes in whom it chooses to pursue. Now, with just over a decade here, I was old enough to know that my father was a blinded idealist who wanted to believe that the grass really was greener on the other side. The reality, as it oftentimes tends to be, was disappointing.

1:10 pm
The walk to the office for my usual afternoon check-in was uneventful, despite the sudden terrible wind that was settling in on the Capital, chilling you to the bones with every step you tried to make. Finally finding respite in the heated lobby around just after the time I tended to make it in, I was briefly stunned: it was completely empty. It must have been occupied only some moments ago (the place where I’d normally see Miranda’s head was completely blocked off by paper coffee cups, the cheap leather couch by the wall had a dent in the middle where someone clearly sat, the radio was on – you get the picture), so I decided to check the one other place where Miranda could have been: the alleyway, however rude it was of her to have a smoke break without me.

The door to the boss’ office, ever shut, stood intimidatingly by as I passed it on my way back out.

1:15 pm
“…And that’s how ‘the sausage is made,’ so to speak,” his coarse, smug voice could be heard even through the metal backdoor. As I emerged outside, I found its source – Archie – leaning against the wall, gripping his cigarette with all five of his left hand’s fingers. Miranda, in her grey parka that strangely matched her eyes, stood by the side, looking at him with a mixture of both contempt and pure indifference, puffing lazily on her e-cig that she still held as if it was a cigarette, with her middle and index finger, “Oh, there you are! We actually were just discussing you.”

“No, we weren’t,” Miranda rolled her eyes, looking over at me, “You’re later than usual.”

“By 10 minutes!” I exclaimed, pulling out my pack of Myrollboros. I was down to the last five, “Didn’t realise we were on a tight schedule even in daytime.”

“Some are – I just sent off three of our couriers to the suburbs.”

“God help them,” Archie muttered, under his breath, puffing on his cigarette. I guess he was one of those people who just used both regulars and electronics.

“Anyway,” Miranda took another puff, turning fully to me, “Everything okay last night?”

“Yeah, uneventful,” I lit my cigarette, nicotine rushing to my brain.

“What was that whole thing down South, then?” her voice sounded unnaturally mechanical, like it wasn’t Miranda my friend I spoke to, but Miranda my handler, the relentless, surgical businesswoman she could be.

“Ran into some schoolkids smoking in the alleyway along my route. They got busted – by their principal. They thought I had something to do with them-”

“Did you?” Archie barged in, grinning. I dismissed him.

“They scanned my chip and went away. That’s it,” I stopped, examining Miranda’s face, trying to read what was on her mind, but absolutely nothing came through – it was as if her face was a mask, not a single muscle betraying whatever was on her mind.

“Okay. I’m sure it’s not a problem,” she concluded, and I felt the tension around my stomach cease, “Not as much as our favourite revolutionary over here, certainly.”

“Hey now, you said it, not me,” Archie was still grinning, but there was an ever so slight blush coming out of his cheeks.

“You want me to tell him?” Miranda has directed her business-ey, icy ire towards the redhead. I could feel the streams switch in the air.

“No, it’s quite alright,” Archie finally looked up at me properly, clearing his throat, “I did go to that protest after we parted ways. Before you ask, it was marvellous – great scenes all around, flying banners, power to the people, so on. But, as you can imagine, the pigs still surrounded us, even though the demonstration was perfectly legal and sanctioned with the mayor’s office in advance. Anyway, I wasn’t even part of it – I just came to spectate and be present in spirit! – but one of the officers begged to differ, so I got into a,” he looked down again, kicking a can and slurring the words together, “Minor altercation with the police.”

“Minor-FUCKING-altercation my ass!” Miranda exclaimed, “He punched a cop!”

“He punched me first!” Archie retaliated, looking up again, “And I did not ‘punch’ anyone, I just gave him a quick shove and ran!”

At that point, I couldn’t hold back laughter. It was difficult to picture Archie, who, had he stayed at school, would’ve been sitting at a wine tasting club’s fortnight meeting, punching a cop. And not just over a minor misdemeanour, at a protest at that, even if, by his own admission, not even as a political dogma – he was just punched first. Miranda clearly didn’t share my amusement, but Archie, weirdly enough, was smiling just as much, even though his eyes were still pointing to the ground. It was strange, as I felt a certain sense of comradery with him there, like we were siblings, explaining ourselves to our mother after doing something we weren’t supposed to.

“Thank fuck you’ve got quick legs,” Miranda shook her head, taking a lengthy puff from her device, “Let’s pray they don’t track you down to us now. Have you thought about that? How many cameras were there, how many drones? You really could’ve fucked us with your antics last night!”

“Oh, don’t worry so much,” he looked up again, regaining his composure and taking another drag, his smugness returning as if in real time, “If they wanted to arrest me, I’d be behind bars already. Believe it or not, that’s not my first rodeo.”

“Somehow I find that hard to believe,” she put her device away, sighing and relaxing her shoulders, “No more attending the riots, okay?”

“Protests,” Archie corrected her, throwing his cigarette down as it burnt down to just before the filter, “I will do my best,” Miranda rolled her eyes again, “If the police comes for me, I’ll be in the breakroom,” he looked at me for a second as he turned to the door, “You should come next time – punching cops probably looks better on the police record than selling drugs to schoolkids,” and with that, his punchable face disappeared behind the iron door, leaving me with Miranda in the middle of a still silence, broken up by the shuffle of the wind and occasional murmurs of the street.

“He’s right, you know,” I broke the silence fully, taking another drag, “If they wanted him, he’d be in custody already.”

“I know,” it was Miranda’s turn to lean against the wall, “He’s just an ass. It’ll kill him someday.”

“At least he’ll die doing what he loves,” I quipped.

“Delivering packages?”

“I was gonna say punching cops to prove that he is one with the people, but that also works,” she laughed, tired and earnest at once, “Something else happened.”

“Oh?” she pulled her e-cigarette out again, her ears perking up, likely assuming that, since we were alone, I was about to share something of more personal character – I almost hated disappointing her with the truth.

“Police came by my place today,” her eyes widened, “Two detectives, said they were looking into the xx/12 Attacks. I said nothing.”

“Oh, fuck,” she exclaimed, dropping her device but catching it mid-air. Her body switched itself upright, almost as if regaining control back from relaxed aloofness she switched to a few moments ago, “What did they ask?”

“Just general questions about my activities that night. They know we- I, I delivered a package that night to this girl, ‘Ms. Salt’ I think was the pseudonym, they asked about it.”

“Did you tell them anything?”

“No, obviously,” I frowned, half-offended she had to ask, but her face was unmoved, “No, I cited the confidentiality requirements. They got nothing out of me.”

“That’s good,” Miranda flicked her hair away from her eyes, pacing in-between the walls, “Did they press you further?”

“No, they left, but they asked me to not leave the city and that they’ll be in touch.”

“That’s less good. A movement restriction is never good,” she said, more so to herself than to me, “But they didn’t charge you with anything, did they?”

“No. I don’t think they have anything, but I am almost certain they’ll be keeping an eye on the company,” I took a few quick drags, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she looked up at me, as if breaking out of her thoughts, “You said exactly what you should say in these situations. It’d be weird if you said less or, God forbid, more,” she looked back down, stopping by one of the walls, “Okay. Here’s what we do,” she raised her head, putting away the e-cigarette, “I’ll check our records and prepare something in case they come asking the company questions. I’ll also obviously brief the boss about this. You, stay out of trouble – if you see something, no you didn’t; if a policeman asks you something on the street, no they didn’t; if there’s a demonstration, or anything political happening next to you, you avoid it like the plague. Got it?”

“Got it,” the cigarette has burnt itself out, but I held on to the filter as if my life depended on it.

“Good,” she breathed out, deeply, massaging her temples, “Don’t worry about it too much, nothing bad happened – nothing bad will happen,” she stepped towards the door back inside, pausing to look up at me, finally holding her gaze rather than daring it away, “Thank you for telling me. I know we only glanced over this in training way back when, but you did good, really.”

“Mhm,” I nodded, quietly contemplating.

“You coming in?” Miranda smiled, opening the door.

“No, I’ll have another one. Do you want my S-Pad?”

“That’s alright, I’ll just work through Archie’s – drop it off when you’re ready, kay?”

“Of course,” I smiled back politely, as she firmly yet perfectly silently shut the door to our building, disappearing into its warm embrace.

As I unpacked another cigarette from the pack, thinking of how I needed to get another one soon, I let my thoughts carry back through the night before. I thought of the man running his six businesses and obsessing over his e-currencies; of the journalist, pondering the story of a lifetime in a hotel room that reeked of alienation and bad décor; of the poor kid who got taken away by the ambulance and all his friends at the party who would’ve by now had to return to class for a final week of school despite his absence; and of Amato, cleaning his tools and contemplating where to get his next monetary fix to keep him going just awhile longer to reach his family back home. The thoughts of the two detectives, so vividly alive and scary only minutes ago, seemingly dissipated and vanished, even if I had sense enough to tell that I should have remained vigilant, if not worried, about them. At the time, I couldn’t tell where any of this would lead; a part of me wanted to do what Sam did and just run, while there was still time to do so, despite the worries of the law’s long arm. Maybe I could even call my parents and see if I could heed my sister’s advice and go back somewhere I could truly feel safe, somewhere I could feel less cold and exposed to a place that was beginning to stir with its rejection of me.
But for better or for worse, that part of me was drowned out by the nicotine and by the noise – the terrible, enveloping noise of it all, carried through alleyways that morphed, almost accidentally, into backyards; twists and turns of various cafes and shops bursting with colours; theatres I couldn’t afford and bars atop white marble buildings; gardens and parks, blooming and living next to the cold steel and glass of skyscrapers; bridges and tunnels, connecting them all; money and poverty; dirt and sublimity; all those things contributing to an ever-beating heart of the Capital – terrifying, beautiful, uncaring, welcoming – luring me further down towards it.

And I obliged, plunging right back in.