Ordinary Sun
Excerpts: Chapter 1
The pathway is dark. In the empty forest the sound of residual rain drops falling onto the earth echoes among the unseen trees. Dead leaves rustle underneath the falling water quietly, like forgotten clothing moving on a washing line, flags in a listless wind. There is no other sound. The forest feels dense. There is a sense of disease in the foliage and the physical closeness of the trunks and low hanging overgrowth is uneasy.
He stands at the forest’s edge overlooking the path. Wet black branches hang over the edge of the road dripping water onto his shoulder. The darkness is un-pierced. He is in a place where vision and mere perception mingle, where hearing and imagination are indistinct. He shuffles out from the under the trees onto the track. The barely audible babble of ocean comes and goes as he steps into the open space of the road as if it is released and withdrawn by a force on the seashore. The barely visible path disappears ahead into the forest.
Armisson himself is invisible, he treads lightly on the muddy gravel of the decrepit highway, he yearns for the shelter of the trees and the calmness and coolness he felt there. His heart beats faster in his ears and in his fingers, but his feet maintain a slow and steady pace, his footfall silent. His eyes are alert in the darkness
— — _____ HN cycle 2x 45 =============== UJIRE.b
1.
Annum Post War 00214
i.
Okura, APW 214
The pathway is dark. In the empty forest the sound of residual rain drops falling onto the earth echoes among the unseen trees. Dead leaves rustle underneath the falling water quietly, like forgotten clothing moving on a washing line, flags in a listless wind. There is no other sound. The forest feels dense. There is a sense of disease in the foliage and the physical closeness of the trunks and low hanging overgrowth is uneasy.
He stands at the forest’s edge overlooking the path. Wet black branches hang over the edge of the road dripping water onto his shoulder. The darkness is un-pierced. He is in a place where vision and mere perception mingle, where hearing and imagination are indistinct. He shuffles out from the under the trees onto the track. The barely audible babble of ocean comes and goes as he steps into the open space of the road as if it is released and withdrawn by a force on the seashore. The barely visible path disappears ahead into the forest.
Armisson himself is invisible, he treads lightly on the muddy gravel of the decrepit highway, he yearns for the shelter of the trees and the calmness and coolness he felt there. His heart beats faster in his ears and in his fingers, but his feet maintain a slow and steady pace, his footfall silent. His eyes are alert in the darkness, they are transfixed on the one thing he can see; a bend in the road where it slides around an outstretched paw of mountain range — it is bare and there is a textural difference between the surrounding forest and the conspicuously flat path. It is a perceived horizon. His body is tuned to the movement of his legs; his effort is directed as much to silencing the contact of his slippers on the stones as to moving itself. He makes good time. His ears are straining, desperate to re-establish the distance between imagination and real sound. The rustle of his hood is close and persistent, like an idea of why he is here which has crept into his hazy and distracted mind. It takes time for his ears to focus on his own movements, his own sounds. They are regular and predictable.
As he moves he is focused on danger. His sense of urgency drives him on though he cannot quite reach cognisance of its source. He is afraid and somewhere inside he knows that he has to move faster, but his confusion holds him back. Around him he can see no cause for alarm, but in the darkness he can feel something, there is something ominous in the air. He cannot resolve it.
The coarse, low sound of the sea becomes stronger and more consistent as he approaches the headland though it registers only as a tidal white noise. The sound is billowing up the steep hillside and following the road to his ears. The sound itself is like a current. Grass has sprung up in the clearing where the wind has spent century tearing the tops from exposed tree and then tearing off dying branches and ripping trunks from the dying soil. The trees have only survived where they were close-knit, tightly-woven to the very roots. This is how it was for people. Communities were isolated and became self sufficient. Those on the periphery were treated with suspicion or contempt — no one remembers which — and outsiders were expelled to wander the dark pathways.
Armisson can hear the clearing as he approaches; the absence of forest hastens the momentum of the wind and it howls forth carrying the roaring of the ocean. This wind is uneasy. Over open land it swoops and gathers speed and seems to gain intent. It obscures sound with its whining and forces his eyes closed. Before the knuckle of the mountain’s claw Armisson diverts down the low side of the road, into the wind and the soft grass. The grass clings to his leather slippers and woollen overalls. He takes care to find his footing as he walks downhill in the visual cover of the forest. He is on the elbow of the mountain, deforested, resistant matter eaten away by the wind. The wind bites strongly at him but his clothing is sufficient. He walks down through the grass until the road is high above him. The rhythm of the sea and the wind combine into a tense overture. He walks across the open elbow with his eyes on the road, now annotated by a smooth crescent above him.
He remembers stories from his grandfather of stories from his grandfather’s grandfather of an ocean on a bright day, when he had visited his Aunt on his birthday. In this uncanny, ridden darkness he cannot transpose his grandfather’s word into imagination. It was blue, and the light sparkled on the crests of waves and ripples. People were swimming in the shadow of Lion Rock. The sand was black with white veins as if ripples of pale gold had floated up the beach and settled. He remembers stories from his grandfather of stories from his grandfather’s father the dead stagnation of the world after the war. The dry stench of the long-passed war’s decay.
Armisson reaches into one of the pouches inside his overalls and pulls out a pair of sunglasses and puts them on. He pulls the scarf up to his nose as he exposes himself to the wind which, on this, the far side of the ridge, is strong enough to dry your lips till they bleed. His grandfather told him about climbing in the cliffs above the sea, clay rocks crumbling underneath bare feet and the youthful bodies falling down onto warm sand dunes, running down into the water shouting, the sound of his aunty echoing; telling him to watch his cousins as he ran passed. But that historic pose is now juxtaposed from a sweet reminiscence to complete darkness, a vicious ridge in mountains that see no sunlight, above a sandless beach and a once benign sea which is now cancerous, empty of everything but monsters and fear, and devoid of warmth. A grandson running through darkness.
You could look upon him in this moment with reminiscence; a wave of fondness could flood over you because in this moment he does not look unlike a young climber who first conquered the tallest mountain, first to reach the South Pole. Now obscured in history like all things, simply another man who achieved something too soon to be outdone. He has seen him in ancient pictures, leaning forward into the wind, pick-axe in hand, scarf over the mouth, layers of woollen clothes. Now it is him, cheeks red and stinging. Adversity.
ii.
He looks around and can still see nothing but the smooth outer edge of the road above him. He tunes in to the sounds beneath the gale and above the seashore. He can suddenly smell the water like an echo of his grandfather’s shout; there is a sour and vile undertow but the current is salt, like his grandfather said.