Chapter 10 – Collapse Under the Bridge
1180 Words
The golden command—[AWAKEN.]—had been a spark in nothing, but nothing was ravenous and vast. It had devoured him not, but illuminated the gulf of his descent before he continued to fall. The days after the laughter of children blended together in a grayscale smear of agony. Starvation was a constant, grinding stone in his stomach, but it had become the normal, almost mundane, suffering, like the persistent hum of the generator. The real wound was to his soul, which was hollowed and left empty, a vacancy where a man used to be.
The sky, which had been so hot, brassy blue, began bruising later in the afternoon. Dark grey-bottomed clouds piled up on the horizon, and the air thickened, swollen with the threat of a storm. The city held its breath. To the house and the safe, it was a minor inconvenience. To Elian, it was a death sentence in action.
He had been walking in a daze, his body a zombie marionette whose strings were cut. He was drawn to the underground area beneath the Third Mainland Bridge, not by volition, but by an atavistic desire to find shelter. It was a world of the forgotten. Shadows wandered in the darker shadows—other corpses huddled against the chilly concrete, their shapes indistinguishable, their backstories as lost as his. The air was sick with wetness, with urine, with hopelessness. It was the antechamber of oblivion.
The rain began not as patter, but as sudden, wild roar. A water wall fell from the sky, so dense that it obliterates the island's skyscrapers, bringing the world to a grey raging insanity. Wind rushed beneath the bridge, pushing spray in, a chilly, level fog that soaked whatever it touched. Elian's position, which had seemed dry, was instantly gone. He was drenched in minutes. His thin, worn clothes built a second, cold skin that drew away the little heat his body could still generate.
He curled up in a ball, his back against the cold, rattling concrete of the bridge pillar. With every rattle from traffic above, it vibrated through the pillar and into his back, reminding him constantly of things moving along without him. Cold was another kind of hunger beast. It was a chameleon. It crept into his muscles, stiffening his joints. It slid into his very core, making his teeth rattle uncontrollably until his jaw ached. The cramps of starvation were now mixed with the agonizing, wild trembling of hypothermia.
And with his body numbing, his mind, chilled and starved, broke out of its leash. It became a hell of a movie, presenting brutal, lurid illusions on the screen of the lashing rain.
He saw Adeshewa. Not the bitter, worn-out woman she had been when she left him, but the girl he had known at uni, laughing freely and broadly, her eyes full of a future they would build together. He pictured her in a yellow frock, dancing in the sunlight, laughing a sound he could almost hear over the storm. The picture flared, remade by the final, clamped mask of her features as she walked out the door. "You are a failure."
He had watched Tobe as a toddler, fat-legged and unsteady, toddling towards him with arms out, shrieking "Daddy!" with total, unassailable certainty. The image blurred into the sneering, derisive face of the teenager. "You can't even keep us safe!"
Zola's small, confused face, the tear smearing a path through the dust, her silent treachery the very worst.
The memories swept, a deluge to match the rain. His father, strict but just teacher, words, "A man's name is all he really owns, Elian. Guard it." Bello's smug face at the desk. Adekunle and Chijioke's chuckles in the kitchen. Uche's celebration, twinkling lights, the glasses filled with toast-multiplying amounts of drink. Deji turned his head away.
A humming of voices, a room of faces, all pointing, all judging, all leaving.
His life, an honesty web, had been unraveled strand by strand, until he alone remained, this tremoring, fractured knot at the end.
A fresh, particularly violent shudder wracked his frame, and a weak, broken sound escaped his mouth. It was not a word, but a query composed of uncut, unmixed agony. He drew it to the howling void, to the hard, senseless concrete, to the God whom he had ever believed would, in the end, recognize his sacrifice.
"Was it worth it?"
The question hung in the damp, chilly air. Was the dignity worth this? Was the clean conscience worth the hollow belly, the numb fingers, the loss of his wife, the contempt of his children, the derision of his friends? Was a noble name worth being a faceless, nameless form under a bridge?
No answer. There was only the relentless thunder of the rain, which sounded like the derision of the entire world.
The strength finally left him. The shaking stopped. It was not a good sign; it was the collapse before the last of the body, reserving its very last dregs of energy for the essential organs. A heavy, leaden immobility dropped into his limbs. It was a strain to even draw breath. His vision, which was already blurred, began to recede at the margins, the world shrinking into a grey tunnel. The storm's rushing and the bridge above him faded away, giving way to a high, ear-piercing ringing in his ears.
This was it. The edge. The fall.
He had fought so long. He had fought through the office, the hunger, the humiliation. But this cold, this final, soggy hug, was one he could not fight. Desperation was not a sensation now; it was a state, heavier even than concrete that he leaned against. He was too exhausted to continue clinging to the cliff. His hands were raw, his determination exhausted.
He remembered Zola once more, one last, wavering thought of her smile, and then he released her.
His body collapsed forward, and he lay entirely on the damp, filthy ground. No theater, no final scream. A silent, pathetic deflation. His face in the cold mud, his back beaten by the rain to a funeral march. Awareness began to slip away, like a boat let loose from its moorings and drifting out to a dark, silent sea.
The world dissolved into sensation without form. The cold. The wet. The dark.
And then, within that clean, enveloping nothingness, a light.
It was not a divine light, nor a gentle one. It was a cold, hard, digital flash in the very fabric of his awareness. Against the rim of his eye, words coalesced, harsh and impossibly razor-sharp, alien and somehow native. The flashing, piecemeal messages were gone. This was a whole, systemic interface, booting up for the first time.
The words hovered in the vacuum, unsaid, but resonating at the heart of his being with the weight of a physical law being written into existence.
[SYSTEM OF MORAL EQUILIBRIUM: ONLINE.]
[USER: ELIAN ATHEN. CONFIRMED.]
[CORE INTEGRITY ASSESSMENT: UNCOMPROMISED. DESPITE SEQUESTRATION TO FULLY SYSTEMIC OPPRESSION.]
[CATALYST THRESHOLD: BREACHED.]
[INITIATING REBIRTH SEQUENCE.]
.
[WELCOME, BEARER.]
-----
- Writer
