Oddly Familiar

In this short story the main character finds himself living a lonely life haunted by familiar faces while he contemplates who he is through Buddhism and the surprising meaning of enlightenment.

So often I walk past someone and think they look terribly familiar. The moment of recognition is counterbalanced by a tinge of doubt that makes me delay saying something while I hope to catch their eye.  Then if they do happen to make eye contact there’s that split second pregnant pause when I look for a sign of recognition on their side.  More often than not there is nothing, just another passing glance.  But the suspicion stays with me. I catch myself wondering whether they were also incapacitated by a split second of doubt. It happened again today on my way to the conference.

 

I can’t help feeling that we have lost something, a connection that makes us more human. I see people rushing to and from work without taking the time to stop, reflect, or talk to others. We seem to spend our lives rushing around only to find that time and youth are slipping away. 

 

While I am sitting waiting for the conference proceeding to begin I catch myself thinking about the meaning of life again.  It isn’t just a passing curiosity; it’s a deep probing, stare-into-my-soul and demand an honest answer that makes sense, kind of thinking.  I am reflecting on how meaningless all this rushing around and busyness is in the greater context of the miracle of our very existence.    

 

Slowly it dawns on me again. I reach out in search of the familiar release from the mind shackles of logic, reason and dogma to that place where nothing exists.  Emptiness as a substitute for busyness; as a cure. An aesthetic for the mind. The Zen Buddhistic state of neutral mindedness that simply accepts that sometimes there are no answers to our probing questions; or that sometimes the questions are focussing on the wrong issues.  Right and Wrong. There it is again. I laugh to myself. However, the one question that never seems to go away is the Buddhists answer to question about the meaning of life: enlightenment.  Exactly what is enlightenment, I wonder? The first session at the conference passes without me even getting out of my own internal world.

 

As a Buddhist I find a way to accept that the smallest changes can have a profound influence on how things turn out.  There is so little design in what we do.  We make so many tiny decisions each day that takes us in different directions.  It’s a bit like today when I met Frank.  In my attempt to avoid congestion at teatime I chose to stand on the other side of the room and bumped into Frank.  Had I stayed where I was I would have spoken to someone very different.  If I had waited two or three minutes before I went to the other side of the room I would have missed him because he may have gone to the loo and I would have stood next to someone else and spoken to them instead.  Frank reminds me of Greg, a guy I used to work with back in the Petrochemical days.  He is the splitting image of Greg but his accent is quite different and sufficiently different for me to believe that he couldn’t possibly be Greg.  It’s strange how often I see someone who looks familiar but I am in a different city or country and I have to accept that it can’t possibly be the same person.  It happens so often that I can only conclude that my memory for faces is nearly as bad as my memory for names, which isn’t good at the best of times.

 

Frank is telling me how he had wanted to get into the financial industry to make a quick buck and then retire early to focus on fishing, which is his true passion. However, here he is, the CEO of a military aerospace company working sixteen-hour days and trying to keep his organisation with its twenty odd thousand employees from going bankrupt.  He hasn’t earned enough to be able to pay off his house and maintain his current standard of living for the rest of the time he expects to be able to live with the longevity treatments we have become accustomed to.

 

“In my next life,” Frank tells me, “I want to inherit a small enough fortune to avoid having to work so that I can catch trout in the Lochs.”

 

“So you believe in reincarnation?” I ask him.

 

“Absolutely,” he says, “which is why I can tolerate my current circumstances without doing something silly like resigning and trying to live in a tent eating trout and nothing else every day.”

 

“Yeah, it’s quite ironic how expecting to live a longer life makes us more cautious and less willing to be more spontaneous or adventurous.  It’s almost as if it takes more life away from us.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“Well, if we lived a shorter life we might be tempted to throw caution to the wind, saying we won’t live forever and do what we want to do and not worry about the consequences so much because they won’t last for too long.”

 

“Now there’s a thought,” Frank replies with a sardonic smile.

 

We head back into the conference. I drift subconsciously and find myself sitting in the same chair I was sitting in before the break.  I absent-mindedly wonder how I managed to get back to the same chair without even thinking about it.  The presenter is talking about the link between the velocity of money and deflation and it’s devastating effect on investment in new technology development.  I am trying to pay attention but find the technical jargon contrived and the man’s voice soporific.  Maybe it’s the sugar in the biscuits I had during the break that’s clouding my thoughts.  I find myself distracted by the woman two rows in front of me wearing large circular earrings.  She reminds me of a girl I used to like at school. There’s something about her mannerisms that reminds me of her. The mannerisms are so subtle that I can’t decide if it is just my imagination fuelled on by wishful thinking or remarkably acute observations being processed by the unfathomable complexity of my brain.  Maybe it’s because I had a crush on her.  I catch myself smiling. ‘Yeah, yeah, her and twenty other girls who simply weren’t interested’ I tell myself.

 

I feel my mood shift one gear back towards sombre.  If I am honest with myself it’s the story of my life: me looking for someone special and not finding her. I’ve lost count of the number of times I have greeted an attractive passerby in the street with a warm smile and a friendly ‘hello’ only to be ignored completely as if I didn’t exist.  They don’t even make eye contact.  I started believing that it was because of my looks.  I started believing that I am not attractive enough to peak their interest.  Rotten luck having unbecoming genes but I have done a lot of personal development work in this area and have gained a new understanding about why girls don’t look.  If they don’t make eye contact it’s because they are already taken and aren’t interested in anyone, regardless of what they look like.  I’ve sometimes toyed with the idea of finding a guy instead but then they don’t look either; at least not in that way.  I don’t think I would mind one so much but I know my preference is for a woman.

 

If I spend too much time reflecting on this area in my life I risk dwelling on another problem I have and that is that I don’t have many friends.  As I get older in life and move from job to job, and from city to city, I find that I can count the number of friends that I have managed to stay in contact with over the years on the fingers on one hand.   That is such a sad reflection on my life that it is almost depressing.  I nip the thought in the bud and focus intently on the presentation screen ahead of me.  There is an elaborate formula impressed in dark print with a border around it as if to give it ancient royal Egyptian importance.  I used to be quite good at mathematics but the lack of necessity to use it over the years has left my mind soft and I have cultivated a disdainful apathy towards it and don’t find it interesting anymore.  I check the programme and notice that this is the last speaker before the final discussion session and decide to make an early retreat.  My interest in the conference has subsided to the point that I think I am wasting precious time here.  There are small pleasures to be traded like sipping a drink on a balcony with a view of the distant horizon and watching the sun set while the full moon rises on the opposite side of the sky.  I avoid making eye contact with the presenter so as not to incur a scornful reprising look of displeasure at my disrespectful exit.  The woman with the large earrings looks back at me with a look that is neither disdainful nor engaging but rather unfathomable.

 

As I leave the conference venue I get that strange feeling I get every time I walk around in Milton Keynes.  I can’t quite put my finger on it but something just doesn’t feel right in this town.  There is so much space and I would expect it to be packed with commuters heading back home, but it isn’t.  It is incongruously sparsely populated and I wonder how it maintains the economic welfare to remain as well kept as it seems to be.  The people are also a bit strange and in some cases oddly familiar.  I sometimes hypothesise that I am caught up in a Truman show but unlike poor old Truman I have travelled beyond the gilded cage of a single city so it couldn’t possibly be true and even if it were true who would implant a Truman show into my reality to make me wonder whether it may be true?  The mind plays tricks on you if you let it.  It’s easy to start thinking that that would be the best way to disguise the fact that it was true.  A bit of double jeopardy mixed in with reverse psychology.  It might explain the bewildering manifestation of so many CCTV cameras over the past few years.  But I know it’s not true.  No one could possibly have the resources or the time to pull off a stunt on this scale.  The planet is too big.  The logistics alone would be monumental.  Almost astronomical.  The scientist in me knows that there are too many variables, too many standard deviations under the normal distribution curve, and too much complexity to attempt to control.  The Buddhist in me knows that regardless of what happens, life is nothing more than a learning curve as we chip away at our imperfections and get closer to enlightenment with every life that we live.  We walk a random path through an infinite number of hair-trigger balanced decision points that lead to an infinite number of random encounters resulting in an infinite number of random outcomes.

 

I leave the conference venue and as I get to the pedestrian crossing I look right and then left, subconsciously judge the distance of the cars, the speed they are travelling at and instinctively step into the road knowing it is safe to nip across despite the fact that the traffic light is red and I am required to wait.  A screech of tires snaps my head instinctively towards the noise and I see a car hurtling around the corner straight through their own red light.  The adrenalin pulse saves the day and I manage to jump clear of the felonious car while I curse blindly at the driver, whose eye I catch for nothing more than a split second.

 

The car screeches to a halt. I hear gears grating as the driver slams the car into reverse and backs up all the way to the where I am standing shaking my head in disbelief.  The driver’s window opens and I see him level a gun at me.  My face is just dropping in shocked disbelief when I see a flash and feel my head crack back with a splinter of pain that only lasts for a hundredth of a disbelieving second and then there is nothing.

 

- 000 -

 

I am told that the man was never caught.  No one knows what the reason was.  Eyewitnesses say they think it was just a man linked to an organised crime network with a chip on his shoulder who took exception to what I had said in the heat of the moment.  It was impulsive revenge they guessed.  Surprisingly not even Frank knows.

 

It’s the bright white light that barges its way in through my vacant consciousness.  I am confused and disorientated.  Something is scratching inside my head.  I smell the acrid waft of acid etching vapour and solder fumes.  Out of the corner of my eye I see Frank looking down at me with a smile on his face.

 

“Hello, buddy”, he says to me. “We thought we almost lost you there.”

 

“What happened”, I ask with complete amnesia.

 

“You got shot,” he says candidly.

 

“That should just about do it,” I hear a woman’s voice say.

 

I turn my head to look in her direction and notice it’s the woman with the large circular earrings.  She pushes down hard on something inside my head; it clicks into place and suddenly memories flood back into my mind.  I remember the bullet.

 

“My God,” I gasp, did I actually survive that?”

 

“Not a hope in hell,” she says.

 

“No,” says Frank slowly, “Angel’s right, that’s about as fatal as it gets.”

 

“You were a bit unlucky,” says Angel, “it was a lucky shot and they managed to f**k up your Hippocampian cortex simulator.”

 

I turn to Frank and frown.  He just smiles his warm, stupid, all knowing smile back at me.

 

“I’ve recaptured what I can and have embedded it into your secondary processors.  We just need to check how much of that is left now.”

 

Angel picks up a dull glowing instrument of sorts from the work surface next to my head and inserts it through my ear.  I feel it morph into a different shape and flow deep into my ear like warm liquid.  I feel an almost imperceptible hum and then start to remember things.  Snatches of things.  I was assembled at our production facility in Kettering, but most of my DNA was coded on Cortex and my meta-physical thinksource was harvested from the stars and spliced into my cerebellum in the quantum tinker farms of Cellozephyre.  I am in the second phase of my training to understand the human race.  I look like them but I am not one of them.  I am part machine, part organic life form and masterfully crafted into a human hybrid with parts of their brain spliced into mine and some of their DNA retro-engineered into my flesh.  My purpose… is not entirely clear. There are snatches of images, some feelings, and a collection of familiar faces, some of which are part of our team.

 

We came to this planet just over two hundred and fifty solar revolutions ago rejoicing in our discovery of intelligent life only to discover that they weren’t ready to meet us yet.  Those of us in phase three of our training have only just managed to integrate seamlessly into their society without raising any suspicions.  We use the satellite towns like Milton Keynes, Northampton and Cambridge as our training ground.  I was half way through my phase two training when I was murdered by a human.  Although I had just started recognising facial expressions, it wasn’t enough to save me from my fate at the hands of one of them.  They are violent and emotionally complex.  We are trying to understand whether their basic animal instincts can ever be mastered and honed into the benevolent characters they have the potential to become so that they can be integrated into intergalactic society.  Until then, as far as they know, they are completely alone in the universe.

 

“So this is reincarnation,” I joke.

 

Angel says, “When you reach enlightenment, your real work will start.  Then we can get you fully integrated into human society.  But we need to get you through phase two and three of your training first”.

 

Frank pats me on the shoulder as Angel slams my cranium back together and withdraws her liquid morph tool from my ear.  I feel a bit disorientated and can’t remember anything about the past few hours anymore.

 

I find myself standing at the exit to the conference venue. The sun is shining dimly on the horizon.  I stand for a second trying to gather my thoughts.  My short-term memory is firing blanks.  I must be getting old I think.  What was it I wanting to do again?  Oh, yes, the drink on the balcony at the pub overlooking the eastern horizon, where I’ll be able to watch the full moon rising.  I start walking in the direction of the pub.

 

“Excuse me Sir,” I hear a woman’s voice behind me.

 

I turn around to see it’s the woman with the large circular earrings.  She looks oddly familiar.

 

“You left your bag”, she says to me handing me my leather sling bag with my laptop and notes in it.  She smiles.

 

I pluck up the courage and ask her, “Do you want to join me for a drink?”

 

She shakes her head, taps her watch and says,” No, thanks, time to go home.” And with that she turns back and disappears back into the conference venue.

 

I shake my head pensively, and turn to resume my way to the pub.  As I walk along the sidewalk with the golden sunshine reflecting into my eyes off the glass windows of the surrounding buildings I get this strange feeling that I get every time I walk around in Milton Keynes.  I can’t quite put my finger on it but something just doesn’t feel right in this town.  Some of the people look oddly familiar too.

 

I feel a twinge of frustration as I pick up the pace along the road.  The Buddhist in me feels that there is more to life than the mundane job I have and the paucity of friendships I seem to have collected since I moved to Milton Keynes.  There must be something more important out there.  Surely my life has more meaning than this?