Apocrypha, Part I

NOTE::

The characters or the theme bear absolutely no resemblance to my friends/family/acquaintances. The following story is entirely a part of my imagination. Please excuse the profanity.
Thanks.


The changing colors of the television screen reflected off the polished metal-and-glass display case and caught her eye more often than the television screen itself. Her eyes defocused often behind her glasses as she drifted in and out of the reality in her apartment on the 9th floor. The glazed look the defocusing lent her face often made her friends and family suspect she was on drugs and they often secretly discussed how to get her off them. She was slightly surprised when her brother hinted strongly about the inadvisability of drugs at such a vulnerable age, and assumed he was soliloquizing. She suggested a good rehab center and advised him not to tell their parents he was on drugs. He’d stared at her blankly. Too far gone to be helped, she’d shrugged, and had walked away leaving him confused and scratching his head.


A woman in a pink salwar-kameez was shrieking about the current cold wave killing hundreds in North India and she focused on the television screen, giving credence to the fact that the woman may actually know what she was talking about. Most people around her didn’t know what they were talking about, or doing. It seemed to be the latest fad, doing things blindly on impulse, without thinking, leaving the brain in cold storage to be used by generations to come. Maybe they were compensating the children of the future for the gas deficiency by leaving them their unused brains. She really couldn’t account for the fact that most of the people she came in contact with had had lobotomies with magnificently concealed stitches, otherwise. The woman in pink, for example- she looked like a normal person, quite warm, with a pink Cashmere sweater and silk scarf to match- without severe cerebral paralysis or some other such obscure mental disorder, and yet she continued forming words with no meaning while the cameraman zoomed into a shot of a shivering, waist-upwards naked pre-teen boy who had probably been dragged out of the comparative warmth of his hut to stand in the biting cold winds to provide the real-time TV effect for the millions of viewers huddled up in blankets with warm coffee.


Suddenly the woman in pink metamorphosed into an impossibly round, fat-bottomed, tragic little politician who was made fatter if such a thing were possible by the multiple sweaters and shawls that looked expensively warm, who spoke in a high, pathetic little whine about how his hands were tied and how much he was trying to do for the people who were suffering from the cold. She nodded firmly. His hands were tied inexorably to the woolen gloves that held a steaming cup of coffee. The phone rang somewhere in the vicinity and she reached out to pick it up.

“Yes.”
“Hello? We’re stuck in the rain. We’ll be an hour late. I just called to tell you so you wouldn’t get worried.” Her mother said.
“Thank you.”
“What? Oh. Yes, Yes, I suppose. We’ll bring dinner.” her mom said, a little disconcerted.
“Thank you.” She hung up.


‘She gets stranger day by day.’ her mother would be telling her father who had stopped listening to anything his family said about fifteen years ago. Not because nothing they said had any intellectual relevance any more, but because he had more or less lost the ability to comprehend anything beyond his opinion. Her brother was the universally accepted angel in the family, the boy wonder who had a smile and a kind word for everyone… everyone that mattered. He had been born with the unnatural capacity to identify people and things that were of consequence to him and his material future. She, closer to his age and able to see things her parents turned a blind eye to, knew that ‘universally accepted angel’ was a misnomer and ‘unacknowledged ass’ would be a better description.


And herself? The Strange. Always sarcastic, critical, smart-ass, uncaring, selfish. She smiled to herself when she realized how hollow the words sounded in her head. They often had no meaning any more- sentences were rarely much more than words strung together, and words had never been too much more than letters combined to sound good. Of course, there were exceptions. Just as the words fuck off sounded so perfectly rhythmic, in resonance with the emotion that the word generated, poodle was such a silly-sounding word, and she felt, even had a derogatory connotation to the dog in question. Of course, she’d come to lose any feelings generated with describing herself that way. It was just how others described her, and given the amount of intelligence she credited others with, it was probably pointless to take their description. Until a while ago, she rather felt happy about being categorized cynical, critical and uncaring. It rather distinguished her from the other positive, encouraging and altruistic personalities that her immediate social circle seemed to be made up of.
But again, once she realized they had no idea what they were talking about, she realized she probably wasn’t critical or cynical at all. After all, they were just tossing words around probably because substituting ‘effing bitch’ in place of all the adjectives above would be politically incorrect. She didn’t like being called selfish, though. Even though it seemed to others to fit well in with her character, she thought selfishness characteristic of a degenerate organism. Parasitic behavior was inexcusable in a higher evolved body like man, and every action that was selfish was one step closer to unmasking oneself to reveal the unicellular organism within the human exterior. Of course, that was debatable. Man was taking definitive steps towards de-evolving back into an animal.


She reflected with a grin that the docile sheep was the preferred morph. And not all men were becoming simple sheep, but often wolves in sheep’s clothing. Ha. At least the sheep had the guts to be its brainless fluffy self. Was intelligence and being one thought quicker than the next person the most critical thing in the world? Couldn’t simple redneck values or emotions exist that weren’t classified by supercilious neo-Freudians into belonging to the id, ego and superego?


She turned the television off and headed directly to the terrace. It was dark and wet as expected, and was extremely windy. She blew air out steadily and watched the raindrops distort her white, cold breath. The feeling of standing eighteen floors elevated above the road traffic and watching her breath-dissolved drops fall down into eternity below was exhilarating. She leaned back slightly into the open sky and watched the dark rain clouds as the drops hit her face and hair heavily and streamed down her body, drenching her slowly but to the bone. The wind was strong and blew her wet hair away from her face and body, fanning her cold breath out into a mist above. She blew out again and stood submissively against the wind, her arms at her sides, her knees slightly bent, her face tilted back to feel the cold rain sting her, drench her body completely so wet that she could no longer feel her clothes on her skin. Her lips formed the golden words up to the sky above.

Fuck You.