Truth

massive strength, not too hard to erase with a targeted spray of truth. A measly conspiracy cannot co-opt millions of honest souls spanning generations.

  “Unfortunately, you’re dead right.” I recalled the slaver of the psychologizers. “Yet that’s what many consensus advocates want you to believe all contrarians think.”

  Joanna glanced my way and in a mere split second I not only perceived pity, I also saw beyond doubt that my wife was not truly in love with me. I guess I’d always known, really. She was a naturally loyal and caring person, and the fairy tale of my life; I was immensely grateful that she was sticking this out, yet for how long would her aura still bless me?

  Recall: home.

  A short interlude of welcome sun finally dried out our lawn, though summer was already tilting into autumn and the evenings were chill. Wettest summer for a century, apparently.

  I’d promised to run errands, though it was damn difficult to drive with striking signatures and creatures of cultural reality obscuring my perception of the merely physical. Cars burned lurid red, reflecting the huge energy and resource profile of their construction. The ugly black mould of corporate greed and mismanagement stained the fronts of banks, despite obvious recent attempts to scrub it off. A huge benign face hovered above the door of a church, threads from his long beard disappearing into the departing congregation. His kindly smile morphed to a snarl as two guys walked by, hand in hand. Youngsters on drugs dragged ghosts of their short future behind them, bowed and wrinkled and coughing.

  Task one was to return Joanna’s library books. While parking I saw that the library building gleamed.

  I stumbled through the glass doors against a kaleidoscopic blizzard of light. It was hard not to raise my hand to shield my eyes. The female assistant at the front desk frowned, maybe thinking I was drunk. Her gothic mask could not hide from me that she was desperately insecure and clung to a boyfriend who abused her. I managed to pull a stiff smile and fished Joanna’s softly glowing books from my bag, handing them over before continuing inwards. The shelves were drenched with radiance of every hue that spilled from the stored works. How to know what the colours meant? A few books sucked in light, and I guessed this was bad. I was drawn to a pure white that was the brightest point within the section I stood. The author was one James Thomson. I flicked through pages to a place where two verses within a poem were so painfully incandescent as to be unreadable. I held the volume towards the wall and slowly translated the blurred mirror image.

  The world rolls round for ever like a mill;

  It grinds out death and life and good and ill;

  It has no purpose, heart or mind or will.

  While air of Space and Time's full river flow

  The mill must blindly whirl unresting so:

  It may be wearing out, but who can know?

  Was this depressing insight truth? No love or loyalty, courage or comfort, not even foe or fear? No purpose? It occurred to me that I wouldn’t survive exposure to truth much longer; it was relentlessly breaking me down. On the way out I gifted brief words to the young gothic girl: ‘Leave him. Someone will love you.’ Really, this was more for my sake than for hers.

  On my return Joanna was out. Overwhelmed by a kind of desperation to know, I gazed in a mirror while willing my perception to well up. I shouldn’t have done that. The top of my skull was missing. Three or four fearsome worms had their jaws sunk deep into the juicy meal of my brain. Several others snapped at each other and took occasional bites of me, fighting for a permanent place at the feast. My face peeled away and showed a mass of raw nerves beneath, my bulging eyes… I woke up on the floor, having fainted, perhaps a safety mechanism.

  I was achingly insignificant and lonely. Just a tiny droplet in the vast flow of the universe, a tiny lump of grist for the universal mill. I’d so earnestly wanted to know truths; now these appalled me. Nothing I’d known was real. I wasn’t really even me; so what was I? A servile cell within the spiral of a dance within dreams, of monstrous social entities that are intertwining machines.

  That night I made love to Joanna until she was way beyond pleasure and into hurt, although still she tried to comfort me. Desperately, I sought identity and proof of being in passion and the prolonged act of union.

  I rose very early, to cast my bible into the fire of dawn and my badge into the hungry dark sea. Delusions flared, then evaporated, liberating. I would never again war abroad. How do heart and mind survive the grinding mill? How does purposeless en-masse make purposed will?

  Joanna followed me out. She hunkered down on the edge of the sea wall above me. I sat cross-legged on the gravelly beach. She made her Popeye expression, a habitual means of blowing smoke out of the side of her mouth and hence not into the face of whoever she was talking to, though completely redundant here. The soft white of her legs led to enticing shadow beneath a short purple skirt. Her jet hair was hooked behind her ears. These days she only smoked if drunk or stressed out. There was not another soul in sight.

  “My dad was… troubled, after one of his campaigns. He went to see someone.”

  “I guess I should.” But who could diagnose this? And other than doping me up to the eyeballs, what could be done?

  I tried to see into her but my hyped perception wouldn’t focus down enough. I saw only the generic, the caring feminine, a kind of enfolding mother persona hovering around her; ancient and gentle and still more beautiful than Joanna herself.

  “Our friends will shun us. My own sister…”

  I no longer cared about truths, fashionable or otherwise. I cared about Joanna. I was desperate not to lose her. I’d loved her almost from that first day at the pub. If the act obliterated grotesque veracity, I’d cut out my eyes for her, but something told me that this wouldn’t work.

  “I know, I know.”

  “I couldn’t bear that.”

  So this was it. The deal. To stay together or not.

  Then revelation came. One of the truths was actually useful. Joanna was teetering on true love, because of the caring feminine. Her instinctive need to mend me was deeply engaged. If I could avoid the status of hopeless cause, yet stay enigmatically broken for just long enough, she’d be tipped over the edge. What then though? All would be lost if her strenuous input was not seen to work, if I was not eventually cured, if I could not one day ditch the overwhelming baggage of heavy truths.

  I’d worry about that later.

  “I have to get through this one day at a time. Please, stay with me. Help me.”

  The spiritual fingers of caring feminine reached out to touch my arm.

  “Evelyn means well, you know.”

  “That’s what makes it so sad. Endless Evelyns and their billion followers, betrayed. The NGOs play Oliver; the goddess in green dances Nancy. Fagin knows where all that earnest investment goes, pretty precious little for genuine woes.”

  “Her Gaia stuff is going a bit far, I’ll admit.” My love smiled. We were past danger, for now. “Anyway, Nancy’s dress was red.”

  I smiled back.

  Joanna’s love might hang in the balance, but her loyalty was unquestionable. Like her parents, she was the right stuff. I saw the stiff upper lip assert, even as the life of a colonel’s wife slipped away from her. Oh how I wanted that cutely proud lip to protect me forever!

  I kept backing away from the tipping point.

  “Well Gaia might be bumped off Evelyn’s agenda anyhow. James Lovelock said, and I quote: ‘It just so happens that the green religion is now taking over from the Christian religion. I don't think people have noticed that, but it's got all the sort of terms that religions use. The greens use guilt. You can't win people round by saying they are guilty for putting…’”

  “Okay, I get the gist. No need for a full news bulletin.”

  “He also said that ‘sustainable development’ was ‘meaningless drivel’.”

  “Sustainable is Evelyn’s favourite word. No wonder she took his picture down.”

  “Like noble war, maybe.??
?

  “The phrase means so many things. Only some will be wrong, I suppose.”

  “Or hijacked. I have a feeling evolution’s agenda is not twenty-one.”

  The seventh wave crashed upon the shore. Joanna smirked.

  “Lucky Darwin never read it. Bored me to tears.” She shifted position slightly. Her skirt rode up to reveal snowy knickers.

  “Is there any happy news?”

  Her diversion worked. That agenda kept me safely inside my old bottle, though a different genie began to rise. Flesh hotly recalled a few hours previously.

  “We’re not doomed, stop. I love you, stop.”

  I stood up and approached her. My head was level with her thighs. She glanced swiftly to left and right.

  “Don’t stop, stop.”

  Now: hospital

  Oh the precious memory of that passion! Yet now making eyes was sweet exchange that once only making love achieved. Let her be here! My time was running out. I didn’t want to go uncomforted and unarmed into the void.

  I recalled the time I’d nearly lost her. We made the decision to part for a while until I ‘recovered’. Or rather, she insisted. Except that I had no idea how to recover from truth. I went back to one of the countries I’d soldiered in, this time as a voluntary aid worker. I think I had some kind of kill or cure plan in mind. Yet even in the taxi to the airport I couldn’t resist exercising truth, though more often than not doing so would deconstruct yet another of the assumptions that glued my psyche