Mr. Friend

Every Sunday Vix got up at around eleven, caught a bus to the train station, and got on a train that took him out of town to see Mr. Friend.
Today, it was Sunday.
Mr. Friend was a man who must have reached his sixties by now.
He had a slim figure with white hair surrounding a quite handsome face, centered by a well-kept white moustache below a straight nose, and clear, green eyes.
Mr. Friend was a sharp dresser, although he always made sure he looked like a man his own age.
The word elegant sprang to mind whenever Vix found himself in situations where he had to explain to other people what Mr. Friend looked like. Which was never, when he came to think of it.
Vix got to know Mr. Friend quite some months ago now, but it was like their friendship had started even before that.
It was like it had started the moment he ended up in the Village for the first time.

He couldn’t remember the exact details, but it had been one of his really bad days, when he desperately needed to get away from the all-too-many signs and background noises that surrounded his life in the city.
He had suddenly found himself on a train speeding out of the big smoke.
When green, open fields and clustered lines of trees had started flying past the train window, he slowly realised that he could breathe again. And when he’d enjoyed this feeling until he decided it was good enough, he had stepped out at the next station, and just started walking.
He had no idea of what his new surroundings were called, or the exact whereabouts of them, but he instantly felt that he had made the right choice in coming here.
Here was a small village, full of the stuff that small villages usually contain… which was not much at all. Still, nothing essential was missing.
It was as though the village contained the minimum of buildings and roads it needed to contain in order to feel that it existed as a village. And that every morning when it rose, it probably felt like a naked man that awakes, counts his limbs and fingers, and then utters a contented sigh, before getting on with doing whatever it is he usually does with all his limbs and fingers intact.
That first day it seemed the village was busy doing what it usually did, only from that day onwards it also had to add the new task of having Vix walking about in it from time to time (which by now had become a repeated occurence on every Sunday).
After he had wandered around for a bit and gotten to know the streets a little, he had stumbled over a cosy little coffee-shop next to an old closed-down office of some kind that had an old red sign that read ”...ging” above the bolted door.
The coffee-shop was full of old junk and some really bad paintings that had been thoroughly dusted off and then quite randomly mounted over all the walls.
It was as if it had all been done in order to make you feel comfortable, and that in here everything was just fine. Even if you should happen to be one of the lousy artists responsible for one of the lousy paintings on the walls that probably nobody liked.
Vix thought this unlikely to happen, as the paintings seemed older than most of the people in the room. Then he had thought ”what a nice place”, and ordered some coffee.
That was the first day the village had Vix in it.

After some time had passed, he found himself repeating this journey to the little village.
He had ended up at the coffee-shop again the second time he was in the village, and then on every single occasion following the first two visits.
After a while he couldn’t help but notice a man who seemed to share his own appreciation for the combination of good coffee and bad art.
As they kept on bumping into eachother this way (which was far from the rather stressful city kind of way of bumping into eachother), in the end they sort of both decided that they might as well become acquainted.
So after a few head-nods of recognition that soon turned into brief exchanges of words that gradually grew into full sentences, they eventually began sharing a table, and slowly became people who knew eachother.
It turned out Mr. Friend had retired from whatever it was he had been doing most of his life, but Vix believed that he must have had something of a fascinating job (although Mr. Friend would never tell exactly what it was he had been doing).
Whatever it was, it was probably because of that fascinating job - and probably for a couple of certain other reasons, too - that Mr. Friend was full of stories.
Actually he himself preferred to be viewed as someone full of facts rather than someone full of stories, but nevertheless he was a great source of information, information that usually propelled them into great conversations.
Today, many months later than when they first started talking to eachother, was one of those days that Vix and Mr. Friend were in the middle of one of these conversations:

”Wealth...”, Vix said, with the stamina of someone who couldn't wait to have somebody else try to tear their rock-solid statement to pieces in the next moment; ”Wealth is the real problem. Money lies behind all this misery.”
”Well, yes, blaming the wealthy is a solution that effortlessly springs to mind. And an easy solution is often what we’re looking for? Isn't it, my young friend?”, Mr. Friend replied.
They were walking along a nice little path along the small river that divided the village, just a few minutes walk from the coffee-shop.
They had acquired the habit of going for these little walks, when they decided they had had enough coffee and needed some fresh air, something that usually took about a couple of hours or more at the coffee-shop, all depending on whether they got lost in conversation or not.
”I’d appreciate it if you lost that patronising tone right away." Vix said with slight irritation in his voice. "You might claim that a man of your age will have the benefit of experience, but that kind of benefit doesn’t seem to have helped us all that much in the light of history - if history should happen to have been written by men of similar experience.”
Without stopping to enjoy his triumph he continued: ”If wealthy people didn’t cling onto their unrightfully attained property we’d be able to abolish the whole hierarcic structures of the distribution of goods in this world, and move towards a more sensible global system of sharing our resources.”
”Yes, yes. That’s all good and very sensible indeed, but are you really sure it is the vice of the wealthy and the wealthy only to hold on to one’s every possession? To hang on to one’s often painstakingly acquired slice of personal power?” Mr. Friend stared calmly into the autumn air as he spoke. ”My experience - the very same you seem so eager to write off as mere old folly - more than suggests that it’s quite irrelevant whether you’re good for billions of dollars and control thousands of destinies, or if you have no more personal belongings than you can carry in a dirty plastic bag and the personal power to dictate nothing but the destiny of your scruffy old dog.”
Vix said nothing.
Mr. Friend continued: ”Go ask a poor family of your choice if they’re willing to give up anything at all. Anything! Like a spare tin-pan or some other item that poor people might possess in doubles. Something they could do without. Chances are they’re not going to sacrifice anything at all, even if the ground is burning and their next-door neighbours have been dragged away by men in uniforms. People won’t give up something for nothing, whether they’re stinking rich or just a poor stinker, and that’s the real core of the issue.”
Vix wondered if he should interrupt Mr. Friend with a comment on how this was such a bad excuse for the ruling classes to keep the struggling classes struggling, but somehow Mr. Friend’s point hit him deeply – which in his opinion was happening far too often during these conversations.
Still he felt his anger slowly building up at the arrogant tone that always crept into Mr. Friend’s voice when he was commenting on ”the poor”. It seemed that he – in spite of his insight into many important issues – must have led quite a privileged life without too much eye-to-eye contact with people outside his own social circle, Vix thought to himself.
”Rich kids don’t have to join the army and die for oil.”, Vix said.
”That doesn’t seem to stop poor people from driving cars.”, Mr. Friend replied.
They walked quietly for a bit, watching the autumn leaves slowly fall to the ground through the crisp air.
Then they talked some more about rich and poor people, about whether experience was a good thing or not, and about it getting late and how traffic was becoming a really big problem - even on Sundays.
They eventually said goodbye, and Vix left to catch a train.

This, more or less, was the way Vix would spend most of his Sundays. In the village together with Mr. Friend.
A nice pattern, he thought.
At least one day in the week would be faintly predictable, and the fear would disappear for a while and give him the space he needed to re-shuffle his mind into some kind of orderly chaos.
It wasn’t so much a question of getting his feet back on the ground, than a question of getting his whole being back into orbit. Yet such days still felt like a great relief compared to the days when the raging spirits kept him alert at every waking (and sleeping) moment.

The train journey back usually let him prepare for his default modus operandi.
This particular night, when Vix got back, he opened the three locks at the front door of his squat, quickly got in, and threw his coat over the pink inflatable chair in the corner.
He opened his laptop, letting it roam for a free network for a few seconds.
Then he opened the music player and double-clicked on the first track of his ”Head Dubs vol. 1” playlist - a list he had thoroughly put together the other night to try to make sure no darkness snuck into his mind while writing.
He put the kettle on and logged in to his ”Enemy of the State” blog (that he had rather uncunningly abbreviated to ”E.O.T.S.” in an attempt to avoid spilling it all and make it far too easy for the spooks he knew scanned his every move on the web to hit on him).

Then he wrote:

Last night I dreamt of:

1. An old and battered, but fully functional Xerox-machine.
2. A gorilla.
3. Two shapeshifting aliens.
4. A walnut.

In my dream all the above items were interconnected and made perfect sense, but more about that later.

Then he posted a link to ”Cabito” – a piece of music he considered one of the most impressive offerings from balearic disco collective Bakantaar, whom he reckoned he’d read somewhere originated from Estonia or one of the Baltic states.
No trace of the group could be found to this day, except for a few blurry pieces of information and a handful of recordings circulating the music blogs from time to time, but this music always put Vix in a much lighter mood, which was not an easy task.
He decided he was more than willing to share such an uplifting gem with the rest of the world.
Then he opened his private log file, and noted down the events of the day, with a quick resumé of his conversation with Mr. Friend. This was a habit he’d learned was of great importance, as he could retrace everything if the storms inside him became too heavy, and everything seemed to be lost.
Above his desk, mounted in a dusty old frame, his favourite proverb stared back at him with sharp, black letters on white paper:

Those who do not remember the past
- are condemned to repeat it.

He logged off, and closed his laptop.
As he sipped his tea, he thought about how this had been a great day.
He felt that he could fall asleep any second, and as he didn’t fancy another night sleeping uncomfortably on the chair in front of his desk, he pulled himself up, got undressed, and dragged his heavy limbs onto the mattress he had placed on top of some of his beer-crates filled with vinyl records.
Bad vinyl records, that is – records that he knew he had to get rid off one day. Ones that didn’t deserve a space in one of his numerous racks where all the good stuff was piled up.
They were in record Limbo, he thought, waiting to cross the river Styx to where the second hand store was waiting to judge them.
They would have to function as a base for his mattress for the time being, though.
Then Vix drifted off, on his bed of unwanted music.