Nod

by Adrian Barnes

I’m of the opinion that while things are bad now, they really weren’t much better before. All that’s different here in Nod is that the molten planetary core of pain that used to roil away behind our placid smiles has now blurped out into open air. How we used to fetishize and differentiate our feelings. Rage! Hatred! Hunger! Pride! Jealousy! Ambition! Lust! We had a name for everything. But that colourful cavalcade of emotions was just a sham. It was all pain—all of it—all along. Rage was pain, hate was pain, pride was pain, lust was pain. All that’s different now is that where pain used to have the luxury of being a bit of a drama queen and playing dress up, now it stands out there on the corner of Birchin Lane, quivering and naked.

A cursory look at the latest appeal from sub-Saharan Africa should have told us that our privileged world was a pretty slapdash affair, always smouldering at the edges.

In sleep we all die, every one of us, every day. Why wasn’t that fact noted more often? When we doze off each night there’s never the slightest guarantee that we’ll wake the next morning. Every little cat nap is a potential game-ender. So why fear death when we’re happy and even eager to make that leap of faith each and every night of our lives?

What was happening was just a fact. And we weren’t a species interested in facts, as such. We were more into evading or spinning them.

How does stillness become motion? It’s the Paradox of Xeno: to move an inch, you need to first move a half an inch. But to move that half inch you first need to move a quarter inch. But first an eighth, a sixteenth and so on until we learn that motion is, in fact, impossible.

During my time in Nod, I came to believe that if something can be imagined it must be possible. Want proof? We imagined space flight, then it happened for real. We imagined holograms and they happened too. We imagined teleportation and just a couple of summers ago I read how some Australian scientists teleported a beam of light an inch or two. So is a Rice Christian or a Blemmye or a burning ice cube or a green sun or a widowed scarecrow just some meaningless assemblage of sounds and letters? Or, in some way, are they all real? Wow, I’m really babbling here in Babylon, holed up in my tower of words.