The Ringing Sound

Entry 1 of The Event-Collection (Dedicated to Alyssa)

  The ringing sound.

  

  She is alone in the ruins of an abandoned city - desolate and dark. The sound of the phone ringing shatters the silence that had settled over the place long ago, like a thick layer of dust. Responding to the sound she startles. The sudden change in her features is almost unnerving to watch. Her body jerks forward, out of the chair she was bundled up in. Think of a car jolting forward, a car at the mercy of a learner driver. Blankets fall off her of. She has shed her skin. 

  A blackness inhabits the room (situated on the fifth storey of the Marz Building - an old hotel she'd visited before the event). The blackness seems to be involved in a life-and-death struggle with a wax candle which breathes futile flames into the cold air. You can barely believe your eyes. Look at the abundant ruin. The rug of the room is caked in dirt. The paint is pulling away from the walls in great chunks that are eager to finally plummet to the floor, death. Little shards of glass. Corners with elaborate cobwebs. A grand, opulent room rife with ruin. 

  This has happened before, she reminds herself - a couple of years ago now - the wailing ring of the phone causing her heart to erupt, a flurry of emotions, a spasm of activity. "I want so desperately not to be alone." You can't really make out the colour of her hair. It's a kind of earthy, wheat field blonde. A wheat field at dusk. Yes, her hair is an unkempt, tangled, blonde mess, sliding down her shoulders. Everywhere. But in it there is potential beauty. 

  Composure is absent. She paces, strides across the room. In this cavern/abyss (world within a world) something is calling out to her, something from beyond the confines of this broken, dilapidated shelter. Has she forgotten how to speak? How to make audible, human sounds? The thought terrifies her. Am I a beast without language?

  "What am I?" She spits the words out in desperation as if to prove something, to prove she can still communicate. 

  What if they're not calling to talk to her? What if she bores them? Agitates them? She can hear the cold, mechanical clunk of someone putting down the phone. Abandoning her. She'd been abandoned just a little too often. The event. It started with looting, riots. It burst into hot, open rage. Fires consuming everything. This was exodus number one. But she had chosen to stay. A group of defiant individuals elected to stay with her, at first. The vast, faceless community of the city had vanished but a new, intimate, real community formed in its place. 

  As the situation became more dire... as the canned food stocks vanished so did those survivors. Exodus two. 

  A moment of calm. She is still. Standing there in her oversized top, her black sweatpants, she is very conscious of the fact that she had ceased to think, well, ceased to worry. Reaching for the phone, her hand makes contact and she shudders, just a little. She picks it up.

  Her trembling voice, soft, vulnerable, begins to fill the room. "Hello?" The line is poor and she is immediately disheartened - you can tell from her body language. Viscious, biting, crackling sounds. Her head droops forward and you think of melting plastic. If you were artistically inclined you'd be in a mad dash. Quick, somebody get the paint, the canvas... because this figure, standing morose, among the cobwebs and old furnishings, hunched over, connected to a phone yet connected to nothing, it's human misery, raw, naked and ready to be painted. 

  

  Still, in the misery, there is an incomprehensible kind of resilience. You can almost feel it in the room. The girl is not putting down the phone, her grip on it seems to strengthen. I will not die. I will not disappear. No, I won't be feasted on by this oblivion, consigned to live as a human relic, a testament to something that was. Her posture straightens. The Eiffel Tower, sturdy, yet elegant, in its way. Once more.

  "Hello." 

  "H-hello?" 

  Two human lives are instantaneously interwoven. The magical bond of words and technology. 

  "Do you have a name?" It's a male voice, definitely. It's not deep, husky or authoritative but it is warm, soft and probing. She pictures a person equally as vulnerable as her, a fragile being, alone in some wild, uncaring universe... a myriad of concerns, fears and neuroses defining their existence, moment to moment. His question lingers in her mind. She was no longer accustomed to thinking of herself as a being with a name - a name is a label and labels are only useful when you have to differentiate something from something else. She was the only human for miles around. 

  "Leah." It's not her name. But it sounds right, feels right. Right now she is a cautious mass of mammalian flesh, twitchy and on edge. She gets down on her knees; this changes her appearance. Now she has the look of someone hoping for deliverance. A hopeful, longing child in need of rescue. Just waiting for the guidance and strength of some benevolent, omniscient force. Is this "salvation"? A whispered word drowning in the dark room. 

  "Leah, can I let you in on a little secret?"  

  Her heart starts racing. He wants to tell me a secret? 

  "When I was younger me and my parents would vacation up in your part of the country and we frequented the Marz building quite a lot. My father, God bless his soul, was an one of these entrepreneurial types, you see. Suits. Cars. He was that sort of man. He was a man's man too actually, kind of the archetypal man's man. Drank his beer cold. Strong, box like body. Smoked his cigars. Leah, he wasn't the easiest father to have... 

  I'm tangentializing (kind of my own word) - I'm going off on a tangent is what I mean to say - let's get back on track, eh? Well, my father had his preferences, his whims. He was proud of his money because he worked for it. So he loved indulging his little whims and fancies as a way of projecting his power. I'll take that table at your restaurant and here's this money in exchange, that kind of reasoning. I can make this table, area, mine. 

  Well, when we stayed at the Marz building there was a certain room my father always had to have, room 505. Oh what a room it was! The sheer vastness of the room with it's high ceiling. The walls an immaculate kind of white. Old wooden furnishings with a dark finish, big, bulky and solid, clashing with the angelic, crisp white texture... an odd kind of antagonistic interplay creating this indescribable harmony - chessboard reality. 

  But the fondest memories of my youth, my fondest memories of room 505, they're from when night would fall upon the room - summer evenings in room 505. The blackness wouldn't sneak in, creep in, no. It would just manifest. It swallowed up the room as though a huge, godlike creature had ripped the Marz building from its foundations and swallowed it whole. Room 505 in the belly of something divine. My father, the imposing figure that he was, would sit me on his lap. There was only one source of light in the room, a golden lamp. His tremendous heart would beat in his chest and he would begin to read to me - wild, fantastical stories about heroes felling menacing dragons and rescuing damsels. 

  Those words captivated me. It was almost a religious experience. Words can take up a room and occupy physical space, build an image... furthermore a world. They set things in motion. Evoke feelings. They are just as tangible as anything else, aren't they? They don't disappear or die, just because they cease to be audible. They imprint themselves on the very fabric of who we are. Transformative experiences metamorphosing into memories."

  She is sobbing, quietly, not with sadness... it's something else. Love. The thought of a hard, stoic man and a young boy sat on his lap. It was a subtle, but deep and profound love - the kind of love that causes people to jump in front of bullets, lift cars, work, work, work endlessly and without pause. And through his words, this love is inhabiting the room with her.  

  "See, ever since I heard about the event my mind has been on this place. I've been preoccupied with room 505. The thought of the room in an enhanced state of entropy saddens me. You Leah, you're my connection to something pure, unspoilt. No matter how wretched the room you find yourself in now may be, you are living among memories innocent and uncorrupted." 

                                        - Marz Building, The Event-Collection, Dedicated to Alyssa -