The memory receded as the night wore on and yet still sleep eluded him. The sirens continued, always moving towards the Flats. Adam wondered just what was going down over there. There as something in the air, he had felt it earlier. A charge. Nights like these tended to being out the worst sides to people. Incited violence where there would only be the hint of it on any other evening. Adam reckoned that if you were able to correlate times of mass upheaval, revolution, the instigation of war, with these unseen and hidden charges in the atmosphere, then you would find almost perfect synchronicity. Was it the moon, or something more? The entire cosmos, aligned with the earth, tilted at a specific pontoon it’s axis, at a specific moment on it’s journey around the sun, and you had this energy. A hidden instigator of rebellion. Or was it something else? From deep within the bowels of the planet. Adam couldn’t pretend to understand these things. He knew briefly of the global atmospheric electrical current, the cause of thunderstorms. The movement of charge between the earth’s surface, the atmosphere and the ionosphere. This wasn’t that. This was something else. It wasn’t the pressures of the weather, the humidity. Something more. Much more. He felt it all around him. In him.
This was why he couldn’t sleep. This was why the nightmare recurred. It was on nights like these.
Finally, stubbornly, it came. The sirens were the lullaby and he finally felt his eyelids becoming heavy. It was his own fault, he shouldn’t have slept earlier. He should have done more. Been more productive with his day, hauled himself from this slump in which he laboured under the misapprehension that he deserved nothing better. The cycle of night and day meant less the more time passed. All routine behind him. This was the new existence. His chrysalis had broken just after the phone call and the next incarnation of Adam Campion had emerged. One that cared little for the frivolities of the Routine. The Routine, as fas as he was concerned, could fall into the seventh circle of hell and remain there.
Was it a wonder then, that he struggled at night to sleep, still only attempting it because he felt he should. Nonetheless, here it was, the shroud pulled gently and evenly across him, forcing him under.
A brief dalliance with his unconscious is all he was given, for no sooner had his mind distanced itself from his broken body, than it was returned with brute force, a sudden thump from beyond the wall above his head had hauled him above the surface of the river that he had allowed himself to fall in to.
He thought: the dream
He thought: I’m not awake
Only, he was awake. This was no dream but his reality. He sat up and swung his legs out of bed, and no appendages appeared from under the duvet. If this was his dream, they would be there. His pale shins, the freckles and pale hairs, his thick ankles and the familiar sight of his toes. All now memories that were only presented to him when he was no longer here.
He fancied he imagined it nonetheless. A remnant from before, although he was no longer convinced that he hadn’t imagined that one either. It was all merging together. Becoming one in his past. He supposed hat made sense. After all, this was the past, was it not? The present was fleeting to he extent that it was nothing more than a whisper. Intangible. By the time he reached out to grasp hold of it, it had already gone. The present is a ghost, the future the mere suggestion of the ghost. Only the past was tangible. He could recount the past. He could relive the past. His missing limbs could be remembered, and because of that, he always would be able to walk, to see them, to feel them. In his dreams. Was that enough?
It would have to be.
The thump again. Plaster behind the walls. Behind his head then over to the side. Another. This wall was also partitioned between his flat and that of Denys and Yana. What were they doing in there?
Adam grabbed his chair and then pushed it to one side, instead reaching down to the floor for his prosthetics. He pulled them to him and strapped them into place. They were good prosthetics, the result of his insurance and what he had of his savings. There was a time, he constantly reminded himself, when he did not want for money. When monthly property rental wasn’t an issue. When a mortgage wasn’t an issue. When bills didn’t register with him. He had never attained Trent’s level of income, but he had done well. Amber was also no slouch in the contributions department, although even the thought of her name and a dry lump formed in his throat that took a while to dislodge. So after the accident, in consultation with the private clinic he was part of, and an arrangement with a leading light in prosthetics, he was able to afford the things that he kept very carefully stored in a heap on his floor, normally under a pile of discarded clothing. There were sockets on his legs that they bolted into before he strapped them in. The limbs themselves were composed of carbon fibre, and contained microchips, hydraulics and all sorts of alien technology that meant he could almost pass for a full human once he wore a pair of trousers, and fastened his favourite pair of trainers over the artificial feet. Walking was never completely natural (not to mention the fact that it required a bloody good deal more energy, resulting in him going slower than he ever had done when he possessed legs that weren’t manufactured by machine), and he suffered from a gait he considered conspicuous and worthy of comment or a satire, despite the fact that nobody ever did. That was in part due to the fact that he never gave anyone the opportunity. He had stopped going outside, perhaps permanently. His groceries were delivered by courier, and he had a treadmill setup int he corner of his living room for exercise, not that he used it these days.
But all that was another story, for another time.
He had become distracted once gain, as he was prone to do.
There was something more urgent that required his attention. The fucking banging.
The clock was somewhere, he could hear it ticking. Under another pile of clothes perhaps. He could look for it, see what time it was. His phone was still in the living room.
Who cares. It’s dark. There’s banging. I have no idea what that crazy bastard is doing but I’m going to find out.
He stood, shakily. He had been using his chair too much. He wasn’t used to these…things. He plodded slowly to the bedroom door, not bothering to put a light on. The light from outside was more than enough, despite here being no hint of sunrise. White light shone through the open bedroom door from the living room, although he hadn’t yet crossed half the distance before another almighty thud, this one louder than ever before, reverberated across the wall. The violence of the impact as well as the volume threw Adam off balance, although he managed to steady himself on on the wooden bedpost. He stopped there, feeling beads of perspiration already forming on his brow from the exertion of movement, and now having to steady himself.
Silence followed, punctuated solely by the sound of his own breathing. He moved closer to the wall, abandoning all thought of going out his apartment into the hallway, up to Denys’s door. If this is what he felt like after crossing half the length of his bedroom, then there was no chance. More sounds, against the wall, but nothing like before. Smaller taps, beginning at the ceiling and working their way down towards the midpoint roughly, and then across the wall. Light staccato drumming. Something else, something more. Behind it. Beyond the tapping there was a more organic noise. Almost a soft cooing sound. As though a young mother was soothing a baby. He moved closer still, until he was kneeling in his bed - an act that brought it’s own unique type of pain - with his ear against the wall, his hand cupped around it, having to make do without his glass. Definitely cooing and aching noises. Female. Just behind the wall.
Did Denys and Yana have another child? They were too old to be new parents, surely, although it was hardly unheard of. Yet Denys would have sure mentioned that in the brief time he and Adam had spoken, seeing as how he was so willing to discuss the two grown up sons that had been taken by the conflict.
A grandchild perhaps or some other relation that they were looking after? There was no one over with them. It was conceivable that Denys hadn’t told him everything, or perhaps this was something that had happened recently. Despite all that, it was really none of Adam’s business.
Except when it was like this, and it kept him awake.
He sat there for another ten or fifteen minutes, until the pain in his though forced him to shift position. The cooing sounds continued, but at least the banging had stopped.
Adam lay on his back and began to pull the prosthetics off until he realised that he didn’t have the energy.
Sleep took him again. Despite everything.
Or perhaps, because of everything.
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