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There is no pain. No pain. I have not felt pain in a decade or a century or more. I have felt no pain since I woke. For however long I have been here. The only thing I ever feel is a quiet guilt. Prowling thoughts and inescapable mirrors. I feel it all the time. It is vague and murky but it is always here. My existence is overflowing with this bubbling guilt, shot through with despair and empty anger and flashes of brown-green flecks bubbling in some darker liquid.
This place has a personality. I feel a lacerating hatred. Disgust spewing deep from the soul of the place. No light here. Not enough air. There is not enough air here. I feel I’m living wrapped in plastic, attached to a life-support machine, suffocating slowly. All external sensations distant. Clear, faraway. The only thing to focus on my polite guilt. That hollow inside where it’s waiting for me.
And still the screens haunt me, the images plague me. This serrated paranoia. A claustrophobic venom that terrifies me. Here is a place of the dead. A cemetery; the same atmosphere hangs here as it hangs over places of the dead. This is a place of isolation. Of perfect loneliness.
And still the inscription above the door. Aloof, arrogant, silent as the raven. I look again at the words. Nessun maggior dolore, che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria. Involuntarily my mind drifts back to my wedding day, to the birth of my son, and my son’s marriage. I can feel fissures in my soul. I burst into tears, weighed down by the hollow guilt inside.
A lecture hall, years ago. Full. Two hundred seats taken up by two hundred people who wanted to be in bed. Occasionally somebody would begin the pretence of taking notes, but after a minute or so their pen would slow and stop, and they’d slide back to staring through space. Willing the time to pass.
Third row, two seats in from the left. Curly brown hair. Six-two, maybe. He wore a black shirt open over a brown t-shirt. The notepad in front of him had the date written in the top left corner and the words “MacIntyre - Introduction” in the top right, underlined seven or eight times. Nothing else. He rolled the pen between his fingers. Rubbed at his eyes, pushed his hair back. Now and then a quick swig from a bottle of water. The label had long since fallen off.
Grey around his eyes, teeth the colour of week-old milk. The gentle remains of alcohol spinning through his bloodstream. Last night’s crumpled cigarette pack in his jeans, next to a tiny mobile phone.