Billy-Mute

Billy wasn’t sensitive, he over-sensed. When others didn’t seem too affected, he was incessantly affected. He trembled like a filled vessel about to fall under the weight of its fluid. He wanted to spill out, everywhere.

You might notice someone like him on your next bus journey – hopelessly absorbing the details of a world that treats him with indifference or hostility. An observer, with a captivating untamed quality to the eyes; alert to every dried up conversation, every repulsive feature, even the stale smell that follows the soul-embers of an elderly man – loosely swaddled in flaccid garments and earwax – off the bus.

An observer inhabits an amplified world.

He was forever being filled up, and perhaps that is portentous of a break. An overflow. He was lucky that life pelted him like that though. And his youthful certainty showed no cracks. His soul was vaginal; a contracting open wound, energy pounding inwards until he shook. For Marsha, it was as if this hole in him was where something divine had pierced and skewered him on its thorny vine. And yet, she didn't express this to him. In his company she often adopted the role of the cynic. She wondered if all relationships sought equilibrium.

Billy had an ugliness that could be bewitching, and his sense of wonder was infective. His pupils were like caverns that lured you with the promise of treasure, and then chased you out by the stirrings and howlings through its chambers. And yet his long lashes repetitively cleansed him with each blink, and even aroused maternal warmth in Marsha. He had a thin frame, which seemed to creep and slink like the shadow of a cat. He was boyish and angled, pale and dark.

Billy and Marsha communicated best when they were in a seperate space of their own. That is why they valued the glass out-house. They would talk about their encounters that day and the war-like nature of social interaction. They would share conclusions from their people-watching, such as how they believed that people approached each other defensively, trying to project out their own image and then would both walk away knowing nothing of the other, having only reaffirmed themselves.

Sometimes their thoughts would be slow, throbbing like a sore. Their shared ideas sometimes seemed weighted, so that they sunk slowly through every domain themselves; Marsha would imagine a dead bird falling through the rotting floorboards of each level of a towerblock. Their talk could also be fast paced, and awakening.

One particularly fierce night,  shadows seemed to invade their dim retreat, leaving only their eager faces illuminated. Their eyes fixed with some incorporeal yet unbreakable tie, they acknowledged the urgency within one another and saw it as a begginning. They were no longer complaining - resentful of the forced social scene at school, and the silence since - they were theorising and there were sparks inside that they knew would turn to action.

“You become scared of the deeper meaning, because the deeper meaning is its negation". Marsha noted that Billy had a peculiar habit of breaking his own extended silence by bolting forward impulsively to relay something significant. She pressed him retrace the thought processes that had led him to this conclusion, that was then ungraspable to her. Slowly, he explained, in brief jolts of awkward whisperings, his fingers meddling and knotting in a way that almost distracted her. “Everything we pursue is destruction, ultimately. An isolated desire for instance, propels us forwards to satiate it, its aim being its own death. The same is true of thinking and understanding. Meaning entices us – beckons us to understand, to know, to cast light upon it. And the light eventually turns it in to translucent nothingness. Over-analysis can kill meaning. Wisdom makes us immune.”

This moment put a dent in their path, and they veered a way they may never have followed if this thought hadn’t been brought in to the air that night.  Marsha asked Billy, “Well, then what do you suggest we do?” and he replied, with grave sincerity, “lose ourselves in experience”.