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.

The big cats have decided to leave

Vix stood at the bank of a wide river.
The slow waters passed by the sandy landscape in soundless, swirly patterns.
Countless big cats of every variety flanked him on the riverbank; tigers, panthers, lions, leopards, lynxes and cougars - every feline he could name seemed to be represented, and even some he didn't know the names for.
A big black cat turned to him and spoke in a booming voice, with unmoving lips:
"We have decided to leave now."
Vix didn't have a clue about what the cat was saying, but answered:
"That's very sad. I would have loved for you to stay."
"I'm sorry", the black cat said, "but there is nothing for us here anymore. There's simply no other way."
Vix felt the sadness grow inside as he heard the great black cat utter these words. He didn’t know why, but quietly replied:
"Ok then. I guess I won't be seeing you."
"No", the cat said.
One by one, the cats walked out into the river. As they entered the water, the elder cats laid their paws on the heads of the younger ones and pushed them beneath the surface. Then they forced them down until they could breathe no more.
There were some terrible sights. Some of the young ones were fighting and panicking under the weight of the elders, shuddering and flailing their paws under the water, struggling for air with their final strength of their will to live.
But one by one they ceased fighting, and as the movement of yet another animal faded, the stillness of the slow stream of the river became the only movement left.
Then the older cats then swam out into the middle of the river, and as they reached it he saw them giving up to the silent undertow one by one.
Vix stood on the riverbank watching the last big cat die.
He was crying.
Cats can't cry.