@quickbeats liked for a starter! | SARAH ROBERTS
But wasn’t it tiring. This day-to-day ritual. It was all ritual now. “Rituals” should be rewarding, should be productive — should come to something, and be understood and be enjoyable. There should be feeling to a ritual. Jack didn’t feel anything. It was rite more than ritual, someone’s twisted initiation, cultlike, and expelled the next day to take part again. If it were cultlike then it must have been the cult of the industry. That, and nothing more. He shouldn’t have expected otherwise. There was no such thing as a happy musician, and, on the off-chance that there were, their life would be so far removed from Jack’s that he couldn’t picture it. Creativity is freedom, that’s what they say. Bollocks. May as well say freedom is slavery.
He should leave. He had to. One day, someday. He knew where the door was. Heaven knows he’d been shown it. It was pride that kept him like this, obedient and dancing to his own dirge. Fear too, but that, for now, was a lesser worry. If the sprawl of authority kicked him over then he’d be happier to hide than to fight. Commercial suicide. Legal, indeed. Someone like Jack didn’t need to invent a scandal. He’d had a clean break handed to him on a plate. Snap, and he’d have been gone. The last platform shoes he’d ever need to wear. Oh, he had to laugh.
It was a farce in the first place. He was living a joke more than a lie. Pity that no one found it funny. The government would have found it a scream had they a single funny bone in their myriad collective bodies. He wasn’t going to leave his bed today. Sunglasses indoors, in bed. Comedown uniform. “Uney”, they said. They said “uney” now, they wouldn’t use the full word, they wouldn’t admit it. Compulsory soon to wear some form of “uney”. Jack’s was clothes and shoes and sunglasses in bed, and that was that. If he’d fallen asleep like that then he could wake up like that and what-the-fuck-mattered.
The curtains were drawn. The door was locked, bolted twice and chained. Still he didn’t feel alone. Did anyone now? Not that Jack could imagine. You’d have to be stupid to feel alone. The same screeching blather through the wall. He’d have to get up at some point, turn the television off. Nothing worth watching. Couldn’t stand to listen to that. Far too close now, even if he tried to close his eyes. He was afraid to, anyway. Better to stare at the ceiling through security-glass shades and entertain the hope of liberty. Right in his fucking ear, damn it. He’d turned the television off days before. He could mistake anything for chatter, seeing how inured to it he was! And nothing else, never. He’d have to pick up the phone. That was all it was, just the phone. “Hello, yes. Yes, Mr. Orwell. Yes.” It did come as a relief, that he’d mistaken that ringing for speech, but difficult still to face picking the fucker up. “I don’t remember. I think I did. Yes.” He’d lowered his glasses, as though he were speaking in person, but he knew Dr. Roberts had seen worse. He knew too that he could back out of this appointment, as easy as the impulse to make it, but the energy was lost to him. That was Jack Orwell. A man who’d forgotten energy.
