litlinks 2018

The Cage

by George Line, Mt Stromlo High School

It was outside on Nevsky Prospekt, as two pairs of eyes stepped out, travelling horizontally and comfortably, that a cage was to be seen, hanging in the air, not above a rowdy street, but above an unmowed meadow of almost ethereal visibility. The depth of the Uranian sky was comparable to a photo, snapped several feet below the ocean surface on a clear day when no marine life is present and mysteriously nothing could exist below the imaginary point through which a balanced film of blue is viewed. The cage was theoretically flawless and was of wrought iron, floating in the air but not conveying the impression that it was somehow defying any prescribed laws of physics – its shimmering simplicity and uncurviness attracted the eyes but only one pair was engaged currently. A shadow lighter than the material which cast it was the bread, and any semi-viscous substance was the pair of feet. No Sun, at least no Sun whose rays reach Earth and seduce newcomers into glaring at it and receiving sunburns on a beachy beach, could be discerned. This would continue to perplex any man or woman who would deign their time as though it was jewellery and travel to this mythical place, a surreal fetish carved for lovers of physically velvety processes – slicing butter and then dicing batter.

Figures in bell bottoms, industrial work boots and French-Fries-coloured hard hats, whose race, sex, age, or which species they belonged to was impossible to identify, were mimicking earlier primates and treating the wrought-iron cage material as a monkey-bar set and commuting from point A to around point B on the cube, all with synchronized gentleness, a rate of speed that no primate was intelligent enough to move at. But the impression on this pair of eyes was not one to force a chuckle sooner or later; no, it was surreally disturbing yet vapidly dry, as if this was something for various pairs of eyes to admire at, and all scattered infinitely abroad. This acted in the opposite vein of many predecessors and descendants of television, mobile phones, curved UHD screens, then morphing-holographic screens whose raison-d’etre was – sleep, work, sleep – that is to reassure. Instead, one sees that despite the slowness of it all, there is a poignant immediacy to the dream in which nothing can happen for days when one is all conscious, but that everything is fine and carries along when one has lost that consciousness and so the perception of time.

The aforementioned pair of eyes was not offered an exemption from suffering, but the nausea was remolded and reorganized very meticulously into a higher degree of nausea, sort of like walking into a grocery store and experiencing agoraphobia for maybe what is but really isn’t the first time. One is told to fish in these situations. But the pair of eyes cannot do it, has lost the capacity for breaking out and churning the milk into butter and instead drowns under increasing degrees of nausea until, finally, a wall is reached, the Sloan Great Wall of dreams. At this point the visual representation acquires a quality that only things that move ever do. Nothing was changed and nothing has changed. The moment was swum out of, swum back in, and that moment was something only after a year could even begin to be thought of to somewhere occur. There, a year passed. There, a quintillion years passed. And lo, the cage remains in the same place (fifty or so feet above the ground?) without any translatable rejoinder to the single most obvious question posed about: was gravity a concept that was erased in dreams, or was it given no purpose in a world of higher dimension than the one this pair of eyes is used to?

Simian figures, fully clothed from head to toe, were impassively hanging from the bottom of the cage and travelling from point A to point B, despite there being no discernible entrance or exit from the point of view of the pair of eyes. They did not look as if they committed anything to their minds: their motions were stationary, circumscribed, alien to the brisk maid of age below twenty who shuns any approaching beggar and crosses streets of vast lengths, and the indefatigably slow gentleman whose derby shields emotions and whose arms stagger along faster than the legs, causing prominent lacerations in the groin and calves.

The pair of eyes rotated to the left and right camerically, apparently with self-conscious identification and a restoration of emotion to objects, however inappropriate that sounded. In this surreal, layered landscape, one could not determine if the pair of eyes was attached to anything – as in, was it pendant like the cage or was there no doubt that turning not to the left and right as per custom but instead to the bottom or upside-down or any of those rare motions that the kingdom of mammals finds itself squandering time to eat, masturbate and defecate, to consummate, would not only somehow fling the pair of eyes off-balance but dismantle its chassis and primary source of optical, ultra-HD focus and render it impotent, aborted from the reality which was reality’s own brain, render it pendant, but in a ghastly, unbearable way that was way worse than all the foibles combined of homeless monsters who claimed that their subway kingdom was bigger if the platform was an inch wider than their rival’s. Of course, this was just an escape route for the pair of eyes and there was no official relief from subjection to forced surreality. One did not lose their wits here, one saw them unsuitable, as if being witty made one even more unsatisfied with the endless-loop of diurnal looking-left-right-up-at-cage routine, like brushing one’s teeth with the right hand but told that you could not imagine the pain that would ensue were you to suddenly decide that the right was entitled to its measured-in-seconds slumber and neither of the remaining three limbs were in operation; so what could be viewed by a pair of eyes but that one would start to lose one’s wits, one would misuse all of one’s wits on resenting his restriction to the usage of only one limb instead of what at least one millionth of the population are sadly obliged to go through, since they have either misplaced their three limbs or are stuck for the rest of their lives on an identically tiny treadmill, atrophying because the placebo effect was given to some depraved, lonely sadist.

This dream continued on and on until no-one was there to warn the pair of eyes from a fatal drop into one of the largest untended potholes on the Nevsky Prospekt. Except, of course, a scraggly man, clean-shaven, and with a trace of vodka on a furry overcoat took that position and became the unwilling heir to disingenuous exclamations of gratitude and unnecessary offers to take this man to his home, which offers disheartened the man.

“You’re trying to mock me, sir. I have no home,” this was uttered through a moist beard, the type of moistness which spreads unevenly if the hair is wispy and ends up like a rectangle of toilet paper: half soaked, half dry. The pair of eyes laughed the man’s rudeness off himself, as if he was the one being ridiculed, and reiterated his proposal, this time making explicit that he would take the man to his house, warm him, feed him, and lay his mattress out, all free of charge. He did not expect the man’s response: a tadpole of spittle landed on his face before he had time to say a brothel was near his house, just in case sleeping alone was inadequate for his needs. With this unspoken insult, the man disappeared. Not swiftly, not as a man who had taken umbrage would have vanished, but in a magically unpretentious way, leaving the pair of eyes blind to the applause of the pedestrians on the street, who were naturally also taken aback by the homeless man’s abnormal attitude, assuring the pair of eyes that he had as yet nothing to be worried about. This was to be expected of men who had seen cages pendant in the air, casting long shadows despite there being clearly no Sun.

Nevertheless, the pair of eyes did not heed his body, did not agree to a quick inspection of the sky, of the drear sky, for if there was a cage, he should be deeply forlorn that no escape route would work, and he would have to again walk to the butcher’s, shoot some customers out of irritation, and head back to his flat with a wistful yearning for the bald head of his pretty neighbour, Elena Sidorova. He charged straight ahead of himself and did not ponder on the meaning of life, or about who Elena really was, and what business was it of his whether she was bald or not.