Maelstrom

I can feel the swirling energies from others tugging at me and folding into spirals around me. Plucking upward, like a curlicue of naked wire about my head. This is the touch, this is the power and manifestation that gnaws at my being. Of course I feel it. I will feel it every time, whether it is full of teardrops spattering against my forehead, the world bemoaning its own existence and expressing it in hot rain, or whether it is the dry chafe of lightning, leaping across the sky, raging for that moment, that insistent spark of clarity. There is a storm, and it is in your cells, bones, and blood. It courses through you, though you cannot feel it. But it is there for me, always.

For a while, they said I was agoraphobic. They were wrong.

Feel me. Hear me. See me, though I stand apart.

Shopping is a chore. Going to the post office is a chore. Sitting in the dentist’s waiting room simply fills me with dread, as a look across at the old woman with her angst roiling inside, threatening to spill out like an over-filled kettle.

One day, perhaps, I will not be alone. My private rooms, my private space. The windows that I stand at and watch the world outside float past. This my sanctuary. In a way, the Nautilus, the submarine, the glass like a thick-tinted porthole slightly green, casting a strange hue to those fleshly beings wandering past.

Speaking on the telephone is okay. Mostly. Though telecommunications have their own energies.

“You are such a sensitive boy,” said Mother.

She really didn’t know the half of it.

I suppose that was when those first traces emerged. The first hints of what I was to become. In those early days, I had hints, but nothing so powerful. Mostly, they expressed themselves in my nervousness, in the walking around with nerves like strung wire. I was easily startled then.

Later, it got worse.

It took time before I could concentrate enough through the noise, hear the things I had come to hear despite the roar of humanity around me.

People are the problem, not the open spaces.

Thank god for deliveries, for online shopping, for ordering.

Thank god that I’m an artist, a painter, a studio dweller and that I have some success. This allows me to remain sequestered, have enough of an income to sustain and maintain me. It’s all I need.

He’s shy and reclusive, you know. Doesn’t like to be seen out in public much. If there’s an opening, and sometimes they happen, I can be distracted, a glass of wine in hand, staring into the middle distance and barely registering the words being spoken to me. These things are hard.

I killed a man once. But that’s something else.

I try not to think about it too much. I don’t want to talk about it.

Sometimes, I have joy. I can walk within the countryside and observe, feeling the blood coursing through the channels in my body, through the chambers in my heart. To observe, to feel the world around me in solitude. That is my dream. I have a car. It is parked now underground in that private garage away from everything. Sometimes I clamber aboard and slip out into the night, navigating the slick and empty streets, feeling the peace of it. I can go far away, but not so far that I cannot return by morning.

There are risks. Traffic. The mindless slow crawl, bumper to bumper amongst commuting drones, feeling them every one. That I cannot be permitted to take part. There lies danger. Not only for me, but for others, I think. I do not know.

But here, now, the way is perilous. It is something I would avoid if I really could.

I suppose, in a way, I am the very definition of a high-functioning addict.

For though I avoid that contact, that noise, I crave it too.

There, there, truly lies my dilemma, for it takes all the effort of will not to drink those energies dry, to step amongst you and feel the power surging through my limbs, like a wave of music, white horses singing at its crest hovering at the peak and waiting to crash me into the ground.

My lawyer called me this morning. She has to discuss something. Needs me to sign something. It has to be in their offices. She does not make house calls. I am not that wealthy yet. I do not keep the documents. That is up to her. I cannot sign electronically. It has to be in blood, as it were. No, merely the ink flowing out of a pen. But my lifeblood, nonetheless. It cannot be done by courier. For some reason she needs to witness me signing in person. It would be easy enough to fake it, surely? From whence comes the integrity of those fundamentally immoral. It’s hard to say.

I called. She had a slot at 1:00 p.m. I asked for an alternative. Some time that was perhaps early or late, after the crush. So close to lunch for many, as the people file out of offices to bathe in the sunlight denied them, especially on a day like today, cloudless and bright.

She is a partner at a prestigious firm, and a prestigious firm requires a prestigious office building, right in the city’s center and across Brunel Square, that broad paved space where people gather to chat and sit at cafés or occupy benches to consume what they have foraged from the nearby stores. So many people. So much energy.

So much to fear.

As I reach the edge of the square, I take a breath. It is the only way.

All I have to do is cross and then it’s done.

All I have to do is cross.

I clamp my jaw tight as I take my first step, trying not to see what lies before me.

Already I can feel it.