“I asked you to trust me before and I ask you to please, don’t stop now” he said.

  “Can you explain it then? I mean if I don’t get it, if it’s not cruel then paint me a picture” she said.

  Marcos took a breath diminishing his anger; the force of his truth settled his mind.

  “I don’t know honestly. I don’t know anything anymore. I’m tired. I’m trying to change the world and it feels like you’re trying to change my mind” he said.

  “I’m not trying to change anything I just wanna know why I’m bleeding and whether it worked because I don’t get it. I’m not a philosopher; I’m not like you and your buddies. I’m not as smart as you but you know what, it feels wrong and I don’t know why I’m saying this now, but it feels wrong. You can’t do this anymore, not like today” she said, her voice trembling, tears running from her eyes.

  “Honestly I want to, but I don’t understand really what you’re saying. You say it feels wrong. But what does that feel like? How do you know what they feel? It doesn’t make any sense” he said confused.

  “I can’t explain it. It’s just something in my stomach keeps turning and I’m not sure, maybe it’s cancer, maybe it’s a virus, whatever, but you have to believe me, a voice in my head says that this is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong; it’s all wrong. The Loving, the class, The Nest, this world, us…” she said falling desperately into the last word.

  The Woman couldn’t hold back the wave of emotion that pressed against her heart and she let go, falling to her knees, her face buried in her palms, her cry travelling from a soft whimper to hysteria and her lover, without care, looking out into the distance.

  Marcos let her words run past his ears as he always had, paying her sight but not a drop of attention. Instead he ran with the gist of what she said and interpreted it to his necessity hearing only that she doubted his ability to save the world. This was no reason to hate her; he had plenty more of those but it was the fuel he needed to continue with his plight. She was his zero. If they ever found common ground, their story would come to an end.

  “What about the dream scribing? Are the pictures similar? Is there symmetry?” he asked while The Woman quietened her sobbing.

  “Yeah. Sort of” she said.

  “Nothing is sort of. It either is or it isn’t. Pull yourself together. Which is it?” he yelled.

  “Yes… it’s the same!” she said shouting at him in a childish tantrum.

  “Good. The dream is fine then. The problem is somewhere down the line. As long as they all have the same focus then everything is working.”

  “Some of the pictures are different though. It’s exactly like the Tellings but... I mean… some of The Children, they focus more on The Collector than on The Collective. They detail the tower so vividly. It scares me. This is why I question stuff like these psychos from At War this morning. We’re doing this you know; we’re putting this image in their heads. What if it doesn’t work? I mean, what if we’re hurting them? There’s this boy, Donal, I see him play sometimes in the courtyard with the other Children. I was watching him today. He is so unaffected, he worries me” she said.

  “And why is that?” he asked.

  “Because he reminds me of you” she said.

  Marcos remained unaffected. He put no greater thought or connection into her words, simply accepting that she had spoken and allowing her to vent her misdirection.

  A war is only won when it is never fought. To respond to her would be to acknowledge that her insanity or that this highly contagious state of distraction was true and this of course was not the case and more so, it would perpetuate the frustration of unsuccessfully trying to prove her wrong. When it was that she would return to logic then he would join her in discourse. Until then, he would refrain from being At Being with her for the sake of sinking to her level.

  In his conversations he always engaged indirectly with his partner. They never spoke of their lives in terms of relation or wishes, only the work being done and that still to be done. They especially didn’t reflect on their past. The strength of the new way depended on the abandonment of the past and one having no emotional assimilation to events having had once been.

  When Marcos would hold his partner or react to the touching of her hand, it would be almost in the maintenance of a tool; tightening a lid, refitting a glove or oiling a chain. He touched The Woman without touching The Woman and this she felt. Every absence etched a more insoluble fissure in her heart, compounding her repressed discontent and surmounting her volatility.

  Marcos on the other hand felt none of this. He could see her lingering every now and then, taking pause when she thought his sight was elsewhere. He could see it in her writing, how the tail of her letters seemed to flick and drift whimsically. He could hear it in her breath as he closed his eyes to fall asleep, the slight tremours of air that no doubt echoed some unsettling picture she was painting in her mind. He could see it in her doubt that even now, questioned his logic though the voice of fear. He saw this and he said nothing. He saw this and still, he felt nothing.

  The two stared in silence for a while out of the window, watching people shuffle about below them and seeing new fires being lit in the near distance. The Nest they had built from an idea and with their own struggle; although crippling under the weight of its own potential, stood as a testament to continuity, new directions, and a new horizon.

  When they cast their eyes to its foreboding stature; its colossal walls stretching into the heavens and its expanse enveloping the size of a small town, they were overcome with different states; The Woman, lowly pride and for Marcos, dissatisfaction; she, amassing the fortune of her partner’s brilliance, and he, for what it still had not become. Each reserved in the display of their internalisation, unwilling to let the other in.

  Outside those walls, in The City below, the remnants of a forgotten age clung to their primitive emotional devices. For the most part, they were unattainable; beyond repair and out of Collective influence; so far down the spiral were they that one would have to lose themselves just to find themself low enough to wind them back up.

  Marcos chose to live in these remnants, high above the flux of stillness that commanded this other existence. He made his bed in their abode and nursed his reason in their insanity. He couldn’t explain it within simple logic, but he needed to be in the midst of this lost tribe.

  The Woman dared not question his reason or input underpinnings to his logic. She attended, without condition, the direction Marcos had mapped and bore acceptance of their destination, come what may.

  Her need of him grew like an unattended tumour, but she willed her restraint so as not to contravene the ideals and conscious control to which Marcos adhered. The tyranny she dictated upon her own heart at first by command and then by choice; strengthened nothing of her resolve, in fact, the continuity of such weakened her position and engorged her emotional reserve; leaving her perpetually on the verge of something prodigious. Still; for him, she would tear out her own tongue if it was that her silence would bring him closer to birthing his vision. So devoted was she unto him, as he, obsessed unto an idea.

  Marcos stood in the failing light, pencil in hand, deep in figurative thought, sketching on a scrap piece of paper. He looked longingly into the distance, into the orange hue pulling over the horizon above the weary city and when it became that his sight had filled with enough colour, shade, form and idea, he turned to the paper and continued to sketch, laxing his fingers and wrist, then scratching away with intensity.

  When he was done, he folded the drawing placing it neatly into his pocket. He turned his gaze to The Woman who was boiling some water over an open fire in the adjoining room; the iron pot sitting upon a rusted grate and below it, wood and paper scraps, kindling. Under the reflection of light, shadows swam across the shape of her body and invited him to misdirection.

  Before him now, through the play of light and umbrage he saw The Woman, younger, as she had been, at a time he knew she beckoned to return; when at night, the veil of darkness was just the grander setting for a far greater luminescence, when the exuberant colours of The City brought life to the people, awoken from the drudgery of whites and greys that commanded their days; marching about in expectative succession, acquiring imaginary distance from themselves and the monotony of their tireless pursuit of defining purpose and self-worth in a tirade of imaginary titles, pacified idealism and concurrent introspection. A time when the cerebral senses were overwhelmed with the magic of light and sound and how these two vices in the hands of man, could attain so much wonder. In a world of imaginary ideals, of conscious binds, one could be anything.

  In his sight now, The Woman; pristine, turned to his direction, her black hair swishing in front of her hazel eyes and her chimerical smile drawing him to his knees. She rushed from where she stood; perched over the bathroom sink, and jumped into his arms. She squeezed so tightly that he thought for a moment that either one of them would break in two and that what he thought to be true; what for so long, he had wanted, to be true, was now palpably real.

  The two fell down backwards onto the sofa, she straddling him, her hands holding back his forwardness, restraining his immediate desire; forcing his shoulders to an arch taking away his balance and force; burying her weight unto his, pinning him to the cushion, lilac lighting his eyes as her hair moved about and her face pendulated tantalisingly close to his; their lips, not quite touching, but close enough to steal a portion of his breath and to leave a mark of her own.

  Seduction superseded her state of joy as she fell headstrong into passion; giving herself to him, releasing unto the air; from the touch of her hand, a thin strip of paper and on the floor it lay as their naked bodies intertwined amongst the fading light.

  Overcome was he in that moment; so involuntarily, now though, of self-control, attainable reason, drawing upon a cold sharp breath, he iced his thoughts, whitened out the expanse of colour in his cerebral eye, unfastened his emotional devices and rationalised his immediacy, abandoning the lunacy of inward travel and memorial divulgences. The lock upon his emotional reserve turned once more.

  Liberated from the repression of his emotional debauchery, he put momentum in his self, parting from the balcony and returning to a more residentially practical state of being; At Peace. He moved to The Woman and cut some vegetables and heated some meat scraps as she prepared a tea for their supper.

  The blanket of night drew in and the shadows that danced in daylight, uniforming once again, took refuge in the atramentous filling of space. Above The City, in the open night, a million stars lit the sky; the souls of the dead looking down upon the living.

  They had taught unto their Children that in the birth of the sun in each new day, the fabric of night was ripped to shreds; spooked into hiding, and clung vehemently to the feet of mankind and that in every eve, at the end of each day, the sun would burst into a billion pieces and scatter into brilliant magnificent forms as the shadows came together to once again dress the night. Every dead sun would be born again in the morn.

  The night adorned The City and the streets vanished under its veil; here or there, small fires burned and people continued to be, settling into whatever hope nestled in their unconscious sleep.

  Marcos and The Woman lay on their dusted mattress; he on his side, his face turned to the open window, unconscious and dreaming, and she, listening to his light breathing, on her back, her left hand outstretched, but still not enough to reach his distant body. In her thoughts she travelled not in time; her conscious theatre re-enacted no past betterment, but instead she shifted her head to its side and gazed upon her sleeping man’s body.

  Her desire and lust magnetised the contours of his muscular shape and her conscious mind filled his cold vacancy with kindness and an adoration of self that gave to the form that now; before her eyes, confounded her.

  Her conscious eye infused a time that was into a moment that is; indulging her-self in an orgiastic emotionally drunken revelry of, what could be. She wanted so much to feel like a woman again, for him to extend beyond the expected and ubiquitous pleasantries of ‘I love you’, ‘you’re beautiful’, ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘it’ll never happen again’.

  She wanted to feel special, to feel sexual, and to feel wanted. She wanted him inside her. She wanted to be pinned to the floor, to be subjugated; by his passion, by his aching desire for her womanly sex, not for his usual casual cold abandon.

  She looked at her lover twitch on the bed realising him still awake, his eyes closed insinuating unconsciousness, obviously to demand solace, but his breath too light for him to be asleep. She reached her hand over to his body and caressed from his neck down to his lower back, running her hand down along the length of his leg and back up his inner thigh until her fingers rubbed against his genitals. She pulled her body closer to his as her warm breath fell on his neck and her fingers; massaging his genitals, woke him into arousal.

  “Do you think I will ever be a mother? I want to have a baby. Make the world better so I can have a baby” she said masturbating her lover.

  As she leaned in to kiss his ear gently and erotically, Marcos pulled her hand from his groin and rested it on her thigh.

  “Why would you want to kill another infant? What would it serve you to know you’re wrong?” he said as coldness swept over her and she pulled herself away from him.

  Feeling unwanted and disgusting, she pulled away the blanket to cover her naked body and sat at the end of the bed, weeping. Marcos said nothing. He returned to his assumed slumber and let The Woman alone in the dark feeling the hurt of his love.

  At a time unbeknownst to her, long after an entire city nestled into slumber, The Woman succumbed to exhaustion and the anguish of her partner vanished from her waking thought.

  0011000100111001

  The Children all lay in slumber as darkness fell over The Nest, the sun moving backwards towards zero. The choral of heavy breathing and snoring filled the complex.

  At Peace, in the grand dormitories there slept nine Children together on a mattress on the floor circled about a Mother sleeping at their centre.

  Mother and Child always stayed close for warmth and comfort while at the entrance to the complex, under a veil of arcane darkness, stood The Teller, waiting for all to reach the depths of their unconscious where all lay in absolute influence unaffected by their waking distraction, open to suggestion; a blank canvas in the mind of every Mother, Father, Son and Child waiting for the delicate brush of their Teller.

  The Teller had no face and it was as without form as it was without sex. It was simply a voice that spoke through the dark and into The Collective sleep; never seen; not in the day and most certainly not at night when from out of nowhere, from behind the forbidden room that divided At Peace, it came like the onset of a virus; slow but strangling.

  The Teller only appeared when The Collective had submitted to their slumber and connected wholly to their unconscious states. Then, in the hours of influence, The Teller told its tale.

  The Teller first introduced the image viewed from above as the eye of a god looking down upon its creation. There it told of narrow streets moving through a web of immense concrete structures where through the smoky glass, things were still as they had been only now an eerie emptiness filled the rooms.

  While The Collective slept, a mood was being set in their subconscious, the trickles of fear falling faster and harder into their subconscious until horror and panic directed their theatre.

  The Teller then demented its voice; curling words over one another, droplets of saliva falling to the floor as it instilled vile terror in their sleep. It directed their sight to a greasy window in the distance. It was far, but its occupant was terrifyingly visible.

  There, looking into them was The Collector.

  The Teller contorted its formless self and though invisible, its strangeness could be seen in the sound of its voice. It pulled its arms close to its body and twisted its fingers, rolling them over one another, occasionally picking at the skin in its palm and dragging air through its mouth in a low gruff. The Collective all twitched in their unconscious states as fear resounded in the foundation of their subliminal theatre.

  When its voice again turned kind, The Collective were taken from the silently prosing Collector and guided to the orange hue of the Forever New Dawn where assurance warmed up to their subliminal states and embraced them with certainty. Their eyes flickered lightly and their lips parted to an unconscious smile as the strain in their bodies slackened.

  The Mother in the centre of the bed glowed as The Children about her moved their closed eyes to her direction, pulling themselves in sleep closer to her warm body. The Children rolled over one another, connected like the links in a chain.

  The Teller spoke, ranging from a soft whisper to a deep and gentle like hoarseness by the end of the dream. It told this story unchanging, a thousand times in every sleep and in every sleep; The Collective was learned of fear and love; but in this sleep, in the final tell, a different tale was told.

  0011001000110000