A white horse dies

Vix was standing in a field.
To his left stood a red barn. It looked as if it had just been painted, and was in good shape, even if this kind of barn most definitely must have been built long ago.
The barn was surrounded by green fields as far as he could see, and to his right a horse was drinking out of a wooden trough. The horse was light grey with small black-patches all over and a long ragged mane. He seemed like a kind of working horse rather than a show horse or something fancy.
But he seemed like a good horse, Vix thought.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, a person came riding towards him on a tall black horse.
He was dressed in full plate armour, and was holding a long sword in each hand, and at first Vix didn’t recognize him, but as he came closer he could see that it was his friend from the living prison he’d once been trapped inside.
Vix tried to wave and make himself noticed, but his friend ignored him and instead rode straight towards the white horse and decapitated it in one movement.
As Vix stood speechless, the blood started gushing out of the headless body and into the water-tray and the surrounding ground, as if its life-juices returned to their origin of water and earth.
His friend rode towards him holding the horse’s head by its blood-stained mane, his two swords dripping with blood in the other hand.
"What the hell are you doing?" Vix shouted, with tears in his eyes. "He seemed like a nice horse."
His friend just stared blankly back at him, like his savage actions meant nothing at all – almost as though he hadn't even noticed what he’d just done.
Then, a sense of panic grew inside Vix, and he said to his friend:
"We have to get rid of this head. And you have to clean your bloody swords. Otherwise we'll be in deep trouble when they return."
Vix didn't know why, but he had a strong feeling someone would be returning soon, and that they would be in deep trouble when they eventually did.
"That's fine", his friend said.

Alone, all one

Njoro gently dried the Savage’s face with a warm cloth.
He’d been getting worse and worse during the early morning hours. His temperature was constantly rising and falling, and he seemed either to be delirious or unconscious.
She’d tried everything to restore his balance, but it seemed almost useless at this point.
It was as if the imbalance in him had grown too extreme for repair, and that no-one but himself could reach in to where these things could be set right again.
Maybe it wouldn’t even be possible at all in his present incarnation.
Most things pointed towards that.
She wondered what she would have to face if things turned out that way. She had been too shaken to have any clear vision since the Savage entered her world, and now she was focusing too hard on trying to help heal him to be able to see into her own future at all.
Whatever the outcome she would have to put her trust in Life, as always.
The great force of Life would always reward you for daring to trust in it.

Full cycle

The ticket for Okinawa lay on his desk, on top of the closed laptop.
It was early October, and Vix had spent all morning preparing his move, like most mornings for quite some time now.
He'd packed everything he could think of as useful to bring into his new future, and had left the rest in selected piles on the floor.
The piles were getting quite big.
Once in a while he would walk over to the desk, pick up the ticket and read the destination out loud to himself:
“Oki-nawa!”
Then he would smile, and investigate the ticket printout a little.
After he had made the decision about moving on that day before the summer, he had started working very systematically on executing his new plan.
The first thing he had done, was to go and pick up the little red box from the top of the shelf.
The box itself was a simple cardboard construction, and wasn’t really all that red anymore. On top of it, written in weak, worn-out marker-pen greenish grey stood the words:
“Secret Stuff”.
Inside, there were various items of varying importance to Vix. There was a torn one dollar note, an old comic-book, a passport, a pile of stained letters from various official instances, a half-empty packet of chewing gum, a playing-card (the Jack of Spades), and a leather wallet.
Inside the wallet were a series of plastic cards. Most of them for various bonus-programs at stores he’d visited once but hadn’t had the nerve to refuse the offer of joining their bonus program when the cashier had asked, in their robotic part-of-the-job tone.
And then there was the ID for his old bank account.
This account had been with him since before he’d left, and like most of the other luggage from back there, he’d left it untouched and un-thought of since his departure.
Finally it was time to face it, and put it to use.
It wasn’t a question of a bottomless supply, but rather like a decent pension if he put it to modest use.
The ticket reflected such modesty.
He would have to fly via Tokyo. It would take time, but that was fine with him.
He owned time, and anyway he’d read somewhere that because of the Earth’s curves or something, the actual route to Tokyo passed over the North Pole, which he found very exciting. He would try to tune in to check if he could sense anything special when they were near the pole point. You’d never know what could happen.
The last few weeks had been filled with lots of dizzying emotions shifting between tranquility and restlessness fighting hard for his sole attention.
The more he had thought of it, the more he realized how these last few years had just been pointlessly dragging out, and sometimes he would feel very sorry for all the time he’d wasted.
Wasted in the wrong way, that was.
By thinking about these things, he had also discovered that he had forgotten all his motivations for coming here in the first place. Not that it had been the wrong move initially, he didn't have anything to stick around for back where he came from.
Not that he really cared about.
It was just that back then it didn't really matter where he set course. All he knew was that there was no 'home' left, and that he had felt a strange kind of magnetism pulling him towards this city.
This time it was different. This time he had an actual feeling of being on the verge of something new. Genuinely new.
Whatever that was.
For the last three days he had even gone through all his vinyl records, even the ones serving as a base for his bed.
He’d done this quite a few times before, of course, but this time he set out with the intent of actually doing something permanent about it, and not just end up playing old classics into the night, and then going to sleep and waking up in a mess of empty sleeves and stray vinyl all over the floor the next day.
No, this time he had actually gone through the whole pile systematically, put the more or less insignificant ones (about seventy percent it turned out) in crates by the door, to take away to the second-hand store the next day (with intent of parting with them forever).
The interesting ones (the remaining thirty percent), he had played through one after the other, side after side, and then thoughtfully decided if they were real essentials, or if they had to end their relationship with Vix from now on.
The essentials had amounted to about ten percent of the whole collection in the end. “Not bad!” he thought, even though he knew it was.
He had then checked every song on every essential against his library of digital music on the laptop harddrive, and if he could find it there he had put that record in his special boxes for bringing to the small storage space he'd rented for the stuff he would keep. Just in case.
If he couldn't find that he already had the track digitally, he had recorded and catalogued it there and then, before filing the record in a box.
All this had of course taken many hours and numerous mugs of tea to pull off, and when the last record was done, he'd celebrated with a loud playing through of an early nineties techno record he thought was long gone.
This had been around 5 AM, and his neighbour had of course gone completely off his trolley and shouted threats of axing through the wall to behead Vix.
But instead of getting nervous, Vix had started giggling and just let him shout until he ran out of steam.
It had felt nice.
It was as if they were just good old friends with the mere habit of addressing eachother in very noisy and rude ways whenever they communicated. Which wasn’t actually often, as his neighbour usually did the shouting and Vix usually was preoccupied with shutting up.
After this, their last communication, he had felt content with the day – and night’s work, and thrown himself across the mattress on the floor to catch some rest.
And when he woke this morning, he had just continued going through his remaining belongings.
There were masses of stuff on the computer that he had forgotten all about.
He decided to get rid of all this digital junk too, it didn’t really matter if things had any physicality about it or not. He wondered whether Buddhist monks had to include their files and folders when it was time to sum up their seven earthly belongings.
Vix owned a total of 1.322.432 files and folders, which he himself concluded was far too un-Zen, and so he had rearranged his folder system in every category, put a lot of stuff in the trashbin, and then backed up his most essential stuff to an online storage service.
He thought of sorting all his notes, but ended up just collecting all the documents in a folder on the desktop to go through later.
Maybe it would be a good pastime for the plane-journey.
He named the folder "ITS_JUST_LIFE".
After a short tea-break, he finally emptied the sack full of his unpaired socks on the floor, picked out seven matching pairs, and put all the remaining socks back in the sack.
He then carried the whole thing outside, and threw it in the dustbin.
This made him feel indescribably satisfied.
Back inside he sat down by the almost empty desk.
He opened the computer and logged into his blog.
Then he wrote down some words he had found on the back of the sleeve of the rave record from last night’s neighbour-tormenting session.
It read:

The interface between physical manifestation and abstract idea.
As a symbol.
Balanced.
What can the human race learn from the realm of physical law?
What function in it?
Stern reality.
Is there nothing left to chance?
How to match free will with unfree order?
Life lives inbetween.
Life suffers when forced into total control.
Reality collapses when raped by total chaos.
This eternal riddle.
Does it help to try to understand?
Does it help to ignore?
Is the key to translate?
Are we the ones who forgot our place?
The Inbetweeners?
Diplomats?
How can mere humans make peace between the two strongest forces in the Universe?
Is love really balance?
Will we ever get it right?
And left?
Are these the right questions?
Can I shut up and dance?

He uploaded a picture of a sunny beach with a nuclear explosion in the horizon and posted the track "Earthbeat" by PM in the post.
He loved this track. It had traces of a dubstep beat and pace, but sounded strangely harmonic and frankly quite pompous.
It was the kind of cultural fuck-up he always dreamt the real future would hold when he was a teenager, the kind that would give any sci-fi story the authenticity needed to keep up at least his interest in it.
Future acid dub, it was.
He logged into the dubstep forum and located the thread where he initially found the link to the track, and wrote:

Future acid dub!

Strange thing, this 'future' business.
Come to think of it he'd always loved music he considered to be 'futuristic'. But futuristic in the sense of describing the kind of future that never came - the more promising kind of future.
Maybe he loved it because it was the carrot on a stick he needed to keep up his hopes through the darkness?
From old Jamaican dub to New York disco to Italian electronic pop to Detroit techno to German minimalism to London dubstep - in Vix’ mind all of it was music that pointed towards brighter days - even the darker stuff, with its promises of technological superiority.
The stuff that was supposed to save the world.
His harddrive was full of these things, and it made him happy to think that he could carry them all with him inside such a small piece of gear that his laptop was.
At least he wouldn't be lacking entertainment, if that's what he would call music.
Mr. Friend would not have been pleased.
He thought of the old man, and smiled.
So many things had changed so fast.
But it didn't really matter. He had been going around in circles for a long time now. But the circle was about to end. He could tell.
It had gone full cycle.
But where exactly does a circle end, and another one begin?

Doomed

Mac knew that things weren’t going his way.
Not at all.
Not even slightly.
He was shaking all over, feeling cold as the ice beneath him.
The efforts of the Witch didn’t seem to help much either. She’d been padding him with reindeer skins all around his body and given him hot water with dried peppermint leaves to drink.
It was as if her very gestures warmed him more than the actual hot fluid and furry covers.
He was sometimes delirious, seeing old friends in the cave entrance from time to time. He was happy they would check in on him, but their faces didn’t reassure him very much. They would be smiling when they arrived, but soon adopted gloomy expressions, and some even shook their heads as if to tell him he’d really made things difficult for himself this time, and that there wasn’t much they could do at this point.
All this and more he could read out of their faces, and at no point did he find it strange that he could do so.
It wasn’t until his Grandfather stood in the cave opening that he got a little worried. Worried, not because the old man had been dead for years, but because his presence made him remember so many things from his childhood days.
Emotional memories.
Noise.
His granddad had been living next door where he grew up in the forests just a few hours north of Petrograd, and together they had been hanging out a lot, getting into all kinds of situations.
Sometimes situations involving big trouble.
His granddad had a simple philosophy:
Life, was all about survival.
That, and having fun.
Much fun.
They would spend a lot of time in the outdoors, going on all kind of expeditions in the forest. Mac had learned to face some basic facts of life on these trips. One being that you should always make sure you were on top of things, whenever setting out to challenge the elements.
Not so at this present moment.
He’d also learned that it was either a question of the survival of you, or your prey.
Not necessarily him at this present moment.
This might be a good moment to get seriously worried.
His granddad suddenly interrupted him:
“Why weren’t you listening?” he said.
This confused Mac. There wasn’t another being on this planet that he had listened to more than this old man.
“What do you mean?” he answered, not finding the slightest bit strange that he had gotten his voice back.
“I mean what I say, as I have always done. Why didn’t you listen? Look at the mess you’re in now.”
Mac felt a rush of sadness inside.
A feeling he hadn’t felt since last time he saw this man.
When he died.
“But what do you mean? I owe you everything. All my skills of survival I can thank you for. All my preparations for these challenges were made from your advice. I don’t understand.”
Mac was on the verge of crying, and it almost made him panic – something he never did.
“To think that I spent so much time on you, and all you ever learned you could have learned from the most insignificant, lost fool on Earth.”
The old man looked both defeated and angry at the same time.
“Please, I don’t understand. I listened! I did nothing but listen.” Mac tried to file his protest without bursting into tears. He was suddenly the seven-year-old boy out in the woods again, only he couldn’t ever remember ever being corrected in this way back then.
“Matchek!” the old man said sternly, addressing him as a young boy. “Survivors don’t just barge into situations and act as blind idiots. They don’t close their ears to their surroundings and dilute themselves with their own excellence. Real survivors listen all the way. Didn’t you get this? It was my only message to you. Why did you stop listening?”
“B..but. I listened.” Mac tried to protest.
“No you didn’t. You stopped listening when I was no longer there. Real survivors keep on listening. Listening to themselves.”
Mac couldn’t hold his tears back.
“I listened, I really listened!” he just repeated.
“Then,” his granddad continued, “then maybe you listened to the wrong Self.”
The old man left, and Mac cried himself into a deep sleep, unable to stop shaking.

Okinawa

The winter months had felt lonelier than ever before.
Since the disappearance of Mr. Friend Vix had just fallen into a new kind of psychic coma. The days blurred together and nothing seemed to be important enough to even think about doing.
He knew that this couldn’t go on for much longer.
He’d lost interest in most of the things he used to care about, and the blurry window to the world that was his computer screen gradually lost its transparency as the days passed. Now he could spot his own reflection in the glossy screen more often than he would get transported through it and out into the vast world of digitized information.
The only bookmark he had added during the last few months read: ‘Okinawa’.
It all started when he stumbled upon a travel site by chance, and found himself clicking around on different holiday pictures of scenic views and clear, green waters.
Instantly he had thought of the usual disasters lurking behind such poisoned eye-candy: tsunamis, typhoons, earthquakes and the like.
But then he had found one picture, all these thoughts had disappeared, and he found himself strangely at ease just looking at the picture.
Above it, bright red letters spelled out: ‘Okinawa’.
Soon the word would become a magical mantra for Vix.
At any time he felt uneasy, which wasn’t really that often anymore, as he was too indifferent to even feel uneasy at most times. Maybe the feeling was more restlessness than unease when he came to think of it. But anyway, when this feeling of unease turned into restlessness crept in, he would simply say the word ‘Okinawa’, and everything would be OK again.
Although it had become a way out of his waves of restlessness, the magic of saying ‘Okinawa’ only transported him back to the grey, muddy soup that was his daily life, and somehow this wasn’t enough.
He almost missed the fear and panic attacks from the time before that day when he let it all rip and let so much of the fear out of his system.
He didn’t really miss it that much, though.
Around him, it had become summer again without him taking further notice. It only gave him a feeling it wasn’t the first time this had happened to him, and that this wasn’t a particularly good realization. Next thing he would know, the winter would do the same, and then he would be really screwed. He knew he couldn’t stand yet another winter in this place.
He had to do something about his situation.
Some major changes had to be made.
And he was up for it.
There was nothing more to lose anymore.
The more he contemplated on this thought, the more euphoric he felt, like a rush building from pure thought and entering his bloodstream.
He got out of his chair and stood in the middle of the room.
Then he said: “Either you follow the rules, or you break the rules.”
He straightened out his back as if to hold a public speech – his first ever - and added: “Or you make the rules!”
Then he went over to the washing basin on the wall, and stood facing the dirty mirror above it.
It was there, in front of the dusty blur of his own reflection, that Vix made up his mind that, before the end of the summer, he would be moving on.
“I am Salmon”, he said out loud to the mirror.
And in that very instant, Vix decided to change his life forever.

Darkness approaching the whiteness

Mac was sweating.
Shaking.
Freezing cold.
Weak.
He could see the House Witch sitting beside him on the cave floor. She was holding his hand.
He tried to rush to his feet, but his body wasn’t able to move an inch. He tried to shout at her, but there was barely a whisper coming from his mouth.
She watched him. Calmly. With empathetic eyes.
She didn’t look very hostile to him, being his captive and all. Something must have gone very, very wrong.
“What have you done to me?” he whispered.
She didn’t reply, she just kept stroking his hand, then lifted his head gently up and gave him some water. He couldn’t believe the rush she must have gotten from seeing him this humiliated and knocked out by her fucked-up witchcraft. Obviously there was no end to the evil ways of these primitive people.
Only her appearance and actions confused him.
Why didn’t she just finish him off? There was no way he could give her any resistance in his present state.
Or maybe he had been totally wrong about her? She didn’t really look like someone capable of hurting anyone at all.
The more he looked at her while lying here in this terrible shape, the more he thought she rather had some otherworldly beauty about her.
Of course! That was part of her spell. After all she was the one who had put him in this state to begin with.
He had never before experienced anything like this before, to lose his power like this. It was like his body didn’t belong to himself anymore. It had just turned into this large, cold heap of flesh and bones attached to the back of his mind somehow.
“You must relax”, the Witch said, and gently laid his head back down.
He tried to reply, but couldn’t fill his lungs with enough air to speak. He closed his eyes. They felt so heavy.
Then all went quiet.

Seeing an old friend off

It had been one of those really strange days in the city.
The traffic had jammed to a complete standstill, even though it was Sunday and Vix had been caught on the top deck of a bus for more than ninety minutes, slowly freezing in the still, confined air.
Everything went slower than usual today, but the people he observed outside the bus window had seemed more relaxed and easy-minded, even happier than usual, and Vix had - like many times before - wondered whether it was really true that it was down to all the simple things in life to make it safely through the day.
It certainly seemed a hell of a lot more agreeable than being bombarded with the whirlwinds of information and those wild and sometimes quite scary, experiences that seemed to fill his own days.
Maybe it was this information in itself that kept him from experiencing such carefree days as others seemed to enjoy today?
Then again, he couldn't be sure that all his insecurities and all this weirdness didn't fill everyone's life, but that some were better built to handle it than others? Or at least hide their internal noise more successfully.
He finally made it to the station, escaped the claustrophobic bus, and got on the train.
There were no paranoid, stern-looking old ladies clutching their handbags on the train today. And no agro-looking blokes trying to stare him down or forcing him to turn his attention in the direction of the train window, where he would desperately try to stay fixed on his own reflection in the window or the dancing cables on the tunnel wall outside.
No. Today, the world seemed almost to smile at him.
At least it had stopped screaming at him just for a moment.
But, in all this positivity, something had been bothering him ever since he got up that morning.
Now that he was on his way out to the Village it surfaced again.
It was a strange mix. A feeling of melancholy mixed with a feeling of relief of some sort. Not that he wasn't used to strange mixes when it came to emotions, but this one was different from the usual chaotic turmoil of fear, desperation, anger and a dozen other - usually quite contradictory - feelings.
This special mixture felt more real, even like something he imagined other people could have felt. People who had no trouble with telling one feeling from another. Real people.
Anyway, he didn't want to go too far into it, especially on a day like today, when he felt so much at ease with the world around him.
He got off at the station and started walking down Mortal Road.
He thought about how much he liked this road. It was such an easy road for him to relate to, with all its to-the-point little shops and buildings. There was nothing unnecessary here, and that felt like such a great relief.
He got to the coffee shop, walked over to the counter and ordered his usual. Then he walked over to the window table and sat down. Surely Mr. Friend would be here any minute now.
More often than not it would be the other way around, that Vix would be the one to enter last, only to get a tiny sarcastic remark about timing.
He didn't really bother. It somehow felt right that Mr. Friend as the older, and far more sharply dressed gentleman of the two should give him a little heat for being late.
But not today.
He drank his coffee while looking out the window, just letting his thoughts wander. There had been some great Sundays during this time. It was as though he couldn't remember exactly how his life had been before Mr. Friend showed up in it.
Still, their friendship had changed somehow over the last few months. Or had it been years? Not that he cared that much for time anymore with all the new weirdness taking place concerning reality going all wobbly on him and Vix being hurled through freaky tunnels and all.
But he couldn't help but think that although Mr. Friend had started out seeming a very wise old man, someone with a lot of answers, and Vix' obvious superior when it came down to general wisdom - the more Vix got to know him, the more he felt like challenging his opinions.
Of course he would never admit to any feeling of inferiority to Mr. Friend's face from the start, but still, all his recent protests to Mr. Friend's matter-of-fact explanations of history had become less straining. It was almost like before he had to file his protests to Mr. Friend's opinions and at the same time convince himself of the validity of his own protests, but that recently he had just opened his mouth and 'talked back' with whatever he felt like saying, simply expressing his own beliefs and opinions as he got them.
This made him feel good. Even thinking about it made him feel good.
Of course Vix had already forgotten how their last conversation ended.
He couldn’t get away from the notion that talking to Mr. Friend was almost as if he had really been talking to himself, but that he had badly needed to say it all out loud instead of keeping this dialogue inside.
This is how well they knew eachother.
“What a great thing to have happened to me, meeting Mr. Friend”, he thought, as he sipped the remains of lukewarm coffee in the cup.
He realized he'd been sitting here for quite a while already.
Strange. This was very unlike Mr. Friend.
He ordered another cup of coffee.
"Whatever", he thought "it’ll give me more time to figure out what to hit the old bastard with when he eventually shows up."
He reckoned he should tell Mr. Friend about the 'weather photoblog' he stumbled across the other night. It was a project initiated by some artists where they'd invited people to take photos related to the weather at whatever spot they lived on the planet.
They had been set up in couples, where each had to post one photo a day over a period of a few weeks. This meant that they could only communicate through pictures - pictures of the weather. This would make for great conversation with Mr. Friend. Him, with his preoccupation with the weather.
Then maybe this would please him and make him feel all right about himself and go all 'what did I tell you' on Vix?
The smug fool.
And then Vix would hit him and tear him down again with some bland celebrity-news, or some new statistics on the global rise of entertainment-consumption.
This would surely make the old man go mad and get all agitated about the world again.
Only he would have to show up first.
Vix could feel the hollow sensation from earlier swell up in his chest. If someone would've asked him to guess, he'd say it was some kind of sorrow.
Not that he was an expert.

After the fourth cup of coffee and the dusk creeping in outside the window, Vix got up and decided to leave the coffee-shop.
He felt very sad now.
At least he was sure about that now.
He walked slowly along Mortal Road, across the bridge and down to the river.
The evening sky had the most wonderful colours all across.
At the river bank he sat down on a bench.
He was alone, and everything around him was beautiful.
Vix started crying.
He couldn't remember the last time he had cried. It must have been when he was still a child. The salty taste in his mouth made him feel real, and inside himself.
It was endlessly sad, but in a strange way also kind of warming. He tried to smile through his tears, but was overcome by another wave of grief.
Something had ended today - something that had made him very happy as it went on. He knew this now.
He had been left alone once again.

The moon shone when he walked back from the bus stop.
He got inside, didn't bother to take his coat off but walked straight over to his desk, opened the computer and logged in to the blog.
Then he wrote:

Today I may have lost a friend that I cared more for than I ever knew. It makes me very sad.

Then he posted the track "Tunglskin" by Mental Overdrive.
He googled the foreign-sounding track title, and found that it was Icelandic for 'Moonshine'. Then he found a picture of the full moon and put it in the post.
This felt appropriate.
He continued staring blankly at the screen when he was done.
His eyes were sore from crying and he badly needed some sleep, but he didn't want to lie down and get overcome with these emotions in the dark.
When he had googled the song, he had also found this competition by the artist’s label. They announced that anyone who managed to decode a 'backwards' message hidden on one of the tracks from the same artist's new album would be granted a lifetime free subscription to the label's output in the future.
He thought this was a nice gesture more than a good deal; of course, he could just download all their tracks for free from one of the torrent services if he wanted to.
But he gave them points for trying to engage him, though, and he badly needed something to steer his brain into more logical waters this evening.
He downloaded the whole album in question and opened every single track in his free audio editor. Then he reversed all of them, and put them in a playlist from the first till the last track.
After more than one hour listening to backwards music on headphones, he suddenly spotted a pitched-down voice deep in the mix on the last track of the album.
The tune was called "End", and the voice repeated:

Nude mosaic.

Fist evil.

No way.

It was a very strange message, or combination of messages, he thought. But then listening to a whole album backwards wasn't exactly mainstream culture either.
He quickly wrote an email to the label with his answer to the competition, then he downloaded the album artwork, inverted and flipped it in Photoshop, and uploaded it to the blog.
Usually he didn't like double posts, but today he decided he didn't really care much about such silly details or stubborn principles.
Then Vix fell asleep in the chair.
With his coat still on.
And one less friend in the world.