The Wanderings of Cedric Slip

My mind steamrolled back and flattened the last 17 years of my life into a two-dimensional, easy-to-read document.

I spent my days assessing and diagnosing eyes that stared back me. Eight devoted years studying and understanding how this observant organ operated, I knew all about the coagulation of proteins in the lens which would cause opacification of the edges, spreading inward to the space directly behind the pupil. Cataracts and glaucoma were my special friends. Fasciculation, congenital hypermetropia and strabismus, ate with me every night. Disease and malfunction excited me.

But then like an unexplored cave I got trapped at the entrance of my passion and I hid in the shallow shelter of what became just my job. One of the reasons for this was that I had never looked into anyone’s eyes before. But I was not to know this yet. This would be transgressing my personal Ocular Code of Conduct. I thought that I was cleverer than most and was so involved with the physicality of my profession that I forgot that eyes too were the instruments that connected the soul with the corporeal world around them. That the eye could see symphonies of sunsets with ballerinas pirouetting across the sky in cloudy tutus was beyond the borders of my imaginings.

It was ironic that I had chosen to be an ophthalmologist when, looking back I couldn’t even see beyond my own nose.

My blue bus shunted to a stop. Departed, I walked the last block of the plank to work.

At 07h54, Hazell Road morphed into Queens Avenue as it curved under my flat feet. My path marched me past a woman sitting across the road from Teddy’s Newspaper Stand.

Everyday she was in place, perched stoically upon the same metal dustbin as if it was her solid silver throne. Stencilled on the side in gold spray-paint ‘No.2C QUEENS.’ Added beneath in deliberate black marker, ‘but I see you’.

The woman wore a layered, chiffon and kasha kissed dress that could let the sun in but not keep a breeze out. She assumed an edge of surreal displacement. Her clothes tattered but clean; her face worn but neither creased nor bitter.

I had never made direct eye contact with her. It seemed as if she was living in another world with only her body presenting attendance in this one. Her eyes gazed intensely into apparent nothingness, her mouth dressed in a blithe smile. I was unable to see beyond the eccentric crust of a seemingly bewildered woman who had been left balancing on a dustbin, the exposure to each raw minute of her life clearly evident to me. An ambiguous, regal posture held her body in place.

Everyday she asked me the same blind question as I passed her.

Everyday I offered her the same response.

“Good morning?” It was a question not a greeting.

“No" I would scream silently.

But as I walked just out of arms reach of myself this morning, I heard myself mumble the words “I’m lost…” back at her question.

I glanced up at her and saw her lips melt into a smile. Crazy bitch. She was taking her hand out of a seemingly invisible pocket in her dress. Momentary dizziness swallowed my head as my insides tumbled and turned. My eyes rolled open and I saw myself walking past her again in a spliced scene as she sprinkled a handful of sand in my path. The fine granules crunched under my shoes. I tried to jump but my legs gave way instead.

I slipped, held captive in the effervescence of a split second. Suspended, I watched as the world around me dissolved. Buildings crumbled brick by brick, grain for grain under the immense pressure of an unseen force. Slow floating letters of the alphabet hung where the newspaper stand stood only seconds ago. Deliberate t’s and buoyant p’s proposed ideas of illiteracy to spinning m’s, making no sense as they hovered and then tornadoed off into infinity. Pavemented pedestrians, who just seconds ago were whole and real, fragmented into their elemental selves and flickered into the nought. Heavier mass drained downward, plunging through the hourglass of God’s indiscriminate hand down into the centre of the Earth. The world and all of its features were rendered into a dessert of absolute nothingness. The engine room of my brain went into overdrive. Circuits fizzled and smoked as sirens warned the ship of imminent failure and impending self-destruction.

…and then a perfect calm transcended the smoke of uncertainty and what was slow before, now became even slower. The air became thick and supportive. I closed my eyes for what seemed like a dream, feeling Gravity’s breath whisper in my ear and wrap herself around my uncertain body, holding me safely in place.

I stared from this new world back into my own life with disbelief. I was, for the first time in my adult life, astounded that I had never craved more. More than this handful of crumbs. Had I really been satisfied with this mundane, pat smeared life that I had been existing in for the last 35 years? It felt as though I had just ripped a musty ventilator from my lungs. My breathing, assisted mainly by indifference and supported by tedium procured its first deep, clean and vital breath.

And with this I fell into the abyss of sleep.

As I slept I dreamt that I was in a vast desert.

I wasn’t lost. In order to be lost, you had to at least have a reference point for what you have been separated from or the knowledge of where you are going.

I had been swallowed up by my own life, abandoned in the belly of Naught. Desolation absorbed me as my eyes searched their surroundings. There was nothing but sand here. My reality had eroded into a beating hot, granulated world of zilch.

Paralysing minutes blazed by as I searched for someone to blame. My mood tripped and tumbled onto her grazed knees as I realised for the first time that I was responsible for this.

Deformed anger mutated into rage and ignited, tearing through my arid body like a wildfire. Finally, my voice exploded and split the silence of the desert in an atomic scream.

I have to get out of here.

Exposed in the hot, cruel reality of circumstance, my only thought was of escape.

I have to get out of here.

But this was too big to merely ‘get out of’. This was life, and death it seemed, was the only door that would open to my escape route.

Another scream exploded through the sand, rippling time. I crumpled to my knees, completely depleted.

This was the gradual instant of everything that had ever happened in my life.

I lost consciousness again.

I stirred within my own darkness. The fire in my body had burnt itself out as my dreams contained me. Scared to open my eyes, I did not know what to do if that desert that I was dreaming about was in fact real. No one wanted to be there. My heart knocked against the hollow frame of my chest. And then a voice spoke, as gentle and cooling as a sea breeze

“You can open your eyes…” she whispered.

My lids were heavy in my head and all that could move under the weight was a groan as it escaped from my lips into the outside world.

She put her hand on my head. The light pressure of her hand pulled me to safety and I dragged my eyes to shore, spluttering as the ashes turned to water.

“You can do it" she sang.

I opened my eyes and then blinked deliberately. I was sure I was not dreaming anymore but I could not believe what I was seeing.

There she sat as plain as day and as startling as the sun next to my fallen body.

“Do I look more in place now that the illusion of the city has fallen?”

My mind spun.

“Good morning Cedric" It was a greeting this time.

“Why am I here?” I demanded.

“Because you asked to be!” she laughed, but not at me.

“I have watched you walk to work everyday for the past 9 years. Everyday there is a little less of you than the day before. You walk as if you have convinced yourself of your purpose. But you are going nowhere in particular are you?”

“I was going to work!”

“You have become a slave to your own lies! But you asked for help this morning and when you ask, you receive.”

“I asked no such thing!” I was aghast.

“ ‘I’m lost’ was enough.”

“Where am I going?” I asked stubbornly.

“Actually you have arrived at your destination. You are just in time for yourself. This is the space in-between when you fall and when you hit the ground. This is the place you get to decide what you want from your life. Not what others want from you or for you. Only what you want.”

I had absolutely no idea what this beautiful nut was talking about.

To be continued...