1.
He comes onto the stage, slow and deliberate. He is full of his thoughts and he does not care whether anyone is going to listen. When he gets to the center of the stage he turns his heels to face the audience. He keeps his eyes on his feet. After a slight sigh, he starts.
Let’s face it. We have nothing new to say. We are a copy of a copy of a copy. Your story can be relayed by a man from Nairobi, Norway, and North Korea and it wouldn’t make any difference. Our lives have been repeated over and over. Maybe we could have claimed originality if we were still in the dark ages. But face it. We are out of originality. And forget about that writer that said everyone is unique in their misfortune. Even that is out of originality too. You are either a drug addict or a hooker. Or you killed your mother because you sniffed too much glue. End of story.
Hell, even my life is not original. I was born so I can continue this human race thing. If I wasn’t born in Japan, I would have been born in USA. I could have been anyone. There really is no such thing as originality. End of story.
So imagine my surprise when one fine Saturday morning as I was having my breakfast my friend told me “No. No. No. And No. There is an original story still to be told in this world.”
I nearly slapped him for saying such non-sense. If it hadn’t been him looking so dead serious, I would have thought he was doing his trademark deadpan humor. But he wasn’t.
And then he said to me “Yes. You are right when you say we have nothing new to say. I’m actually 99.99% of the way with you there. But there is a .01% chance that something new is bound to happen. Why would I think that? Because I believe that we are in the middle of a great meddling of ideas. I believe that we are mingling as one and transform ourselves into a new thing. And that new thing has so many faces we can’t even begin to tell where it came from. It’s bound to happen. Trust me.”
He believed in that bowl of nonsense, so much so that one day I just broke down and asked him why the hell he believed in it so much. Because he was just so adamant in his belief.
“Because I saw a milestone.” Was his answer
“I saw with my eyes what a human being can grow up to.” He said to me. “And it’s interesting to say the least. But at the same time, it almost makes you want to say ‘Duh.’ This should have been a thing already. This should have already happened.”
I asked him what the hell he meant by that, and at the end I had to agree with him. It was something new, but at the same time it should have happened already. And it’s painfully obvious to anyone why this should have been a thing already. And that’s why I’m here to tell you what he told me. Because this should just make you want to say of course, why did it take so long?
So, here it starts. I hope you will bear with me.
2.
When winter rolls around and things start to freeze into their places, he starts thinking about going to the Windmill hill.
He used to think that maybe he doesn’t have to go. He’s only doing this because he believes in the goodness of what he’s doing. That because of him some part of this world is becoming a better place. What part of this world is getting better he can’t tell, but when he sees spring come around and sees life breathing back into nature, he can’t help but think that I made this happen. I made a goddess come out of her cave and bring life back to everything.
And other times he thinks that what he does is a complete mistake. Forget about all of this. Go out to Mexico, Bahamas, Jamaica, go to where the sun shine and enjoy a little. Just go out, get some sun tan for god’s sake. Spring will come around whether you like it or not. Remember, people have been dying way before you were born. And the world kept turning despite that. So just forget about this stupid volunteer thing and just have a vacation.
But wait, chimes in a third thought, then what purpose do you serve in this world if you do nothing and Spring comes anyways? You were always dying for an explanation about why you are alive, and this is the thing that you decided would be your lifework. Your reason for not killing yourself. Don’t you remember that day when you were able to console that dead drunk? Or that day when you played with your dead dog until she was satisfied and licked your face that one last time? Yes, the dead will eventually find their ways and will go off to the netherworld so they may give life, but until then it’s a very lonely world out there for them. Everyday they shriek and scream for your attention, and they never get it. They shake you and you think it’s the wind moving you around. They are confused and they need someone’s help. And you can help them.
Besides that, pasta from that Windmill Hill tastes good. Don’t know what’s going on in that land, but wheat grows good on it. So there’s that, right? All the pasta you can eat and you’re doing good things for the dead.
And so his mind sets itself into going to the Windmill Hill.
"Going this year too, huh?" That’s the first thing his stepfather says to him when he calls up.
"Yep. I’m going this year too."
"You know I always told you that it's insane that you are going to the end of the Earth every year."
"I know. But you know, wheat grows real nice in that place."
A pause, then a sigh. He used to be more vocal in his protest about going out to the WIndmill Hill.
“Christ, why do you even bother going there? What, you got a wife in that place?” Then the tone changed to “You know, I think you are insane and need some help. And I don’t mean help with your body but your head. Listen, you are sick in the head.”
And after ten years of going to Windmill Hill, he has given up all his hope. He now accepts that his stepson maybe a little off centered in the head, but he is still his son after all, and what father abandons his son?
"Just keep yourself warm and eat well, alright?"
"I will. Tell mom I said hi."
And that's how it ends.
Then he calls up his girlfriend and she doesn't take this too well.
“Oh god, you are going there again this year?” She says to him.
“Yep.”
“Is there any chance you’d be coming back earlier this time?”
“No. I’m staying there for the whole winter like always. You know, regulation dictates that I stay there for the winter.”
She pauses for a minute like she’s not sure if she can win this conversation.
“Listen, is not going there an option? Maybe we can go somewhere nicer. Me, you, two of us, maybe to Jamaica where it’s nicer and we can drink pina colada from the same glass using that straws that coil into the shape of a heart. And we can go swim and drink and do stupid things together.”
“I’m sorry but I have to go.”
With those simple words she admits that he’s not going to Jamaica.
“Look, I really think it’s ridiculous, this whole thing about going out to that place for the winter. People go to warm places in winter, okay? They go out to warm places and drink themselves silly in winter. Why are you doing this? Is this some kind self discovery thing?” She says after calming her breath.
“No, I told you it’s a volunteer thing for the good of this world.”
“Have you heard yourself say that? Do you really think that going out to middle of nowhere and harvesting wheat is doing good for humanity? You’d be more convincing if you tell me that you are going out there because you are hunting whales!”
“I’m sorry if I don’t sound convincing, but it’s true.”
“No, you are beyond convincing, you sound crazy! You’re not convincing anyone with it!”
Grinding of teeth, angry exhale of breath, rolling of the eyes. He can see it in his head, she is trying to fathom just why he thinks it’s good for humanity to harvest wheat in the winter.
“Look, trust me when I say this to you. Spring comes around because I go there every winter and harvest wheat. You just have to trust me on it.”
“Oh come on!” She screams. Then in a worn out voice she says “Not that again. How many times do you have to say that? Spring will come whether we like it or not, okay? It’s the rotation of this planet. It’s a natural thing to happen. You have nothing to do with it. You are just a man, what makes you think you are that special?”
At that a thought in his voice screams out You see! She’s right you know. And it quickly dies down.
“I just know that I make this happen. I just do. I’m sorry I can’t prove it to you but it’s the truth.”
A pause at the other end of line. She is probably biting her nails like she always does when she is nervous. Nasty habit if you ask him what he thinks of it. “She litters the floor with what she bites off. Real disgusting” he would say to you. But it’s the very chewing of these nails that calms her down, so he holds his breath and says nothing.
“Listen. Sorry about yelling. It’s been a long day and my boss at work was just extra annoying today.”
“It’s alright. I understand.”
“Right. Anyways, go out there do what you want I don’t really think I care too much. You are probably BSing me with that wheat business you are probably running a drug ring. Just come back in spring okay?” She says it all in one breath and she and him know that it’s the end of the conversation.
“Don’t worry, I’ll come back.”
She hangs up the phone quietly. She’s probably heaving a giant sigh right now. She’ll maybe have a drink to calm her nerves. He wonders why she is always so in such high tension, like everything around her is tightening its grip and all the air in her lungs are about to escape her. Always acting like she has to keep juggling with everything. He wishes that what he does can help her. Maybe learn something else to help her too, but all he knows to do is bring spring to the world.
I really need to learn how to break it to her gently, he thinks to himself. Maybe I should have sex with her before telling her. Maybe in the fatigue of vigorous sex she’ll just let things slide. I should try that next year. But whatever. It’s getting colder outside and he has to hurry. Already he can hear the shrieking of the dead and if he listens close enough he can hear their pleas.
While on the way to the airport, he sees many things. A Kebab shop, corner store, bus, cab, bikes. People walking to places, people with determination on their faces. People walking holding hands, people walking with a cigarette in their hands. He sees them and a fleeting thought comes to him. What if I was born like everyone else in this world? Not able to hear what the dead scream about and not going to the Windmill Hill every winter.
Simple, a thought whispers to him. Somebody else will be born with your talent and you will live like every faceless crowd in the world. You will have no special responsibility to bear, and you will never be held accountable for anything. You may die of a freak accident one day, but aside from that you will live until you are old and soiling your diaper.
But as all fleeting thought goes, it disappears and he continues his train ride to Heathrow airport in silence.
At the check in counter a lady in white shirt sporting a dark blue jacket greets him.
“Hey there again. Going this year too huh?”
“Yep.”
“Every year like clockwork.”
“Yep, like clockwork every year.”
She smiles and hands him a ticket. He smiles and takes the ticket.
The trip to Windmill Hill is simple enough, a flight to the edge of the country, and before he finishes the snacks he bought for himself at the airport, he is dumped off at a check out counter. And when he finishes his snack while changing busses and taking a walk up a hill, a giant windmill greets him. It’s almost comical how obvious this place was named.
As far as he can remember, the scenery of Windmill Hill in the winter has never changed. Grey sky, wind that howls and rips the Earth, and a small patch of golden wheat swaying in the breeze. For all the wind that blows through all winter, wheat somehow always grows strong and healthy, and this year is no exception. Everything inside the windmill is just as he left it. Giant gears stand still like a beast asleep, cold has killed all scent in the mill and frozen everything in its place. But when he releases the brake gears start to creak and dust jumps out and it’s as if he never left at all. And even as he stands around he can hear the howling of those gone from this world. He listens to them for a second and get back to clearing the layer of dust that settle on every piece of furniture.
While he scrubs and mops the floor, while he dust off the shelves and cleans the sink, a fleeting but serious thought passes through him. Why bother being born when this is what it all comes down to? Is what you are doing really that important? Is your life really worth doing that? You are all dead. You are goner a nothing an ex-human. You are not important to anyone. But the dead doesn’t care about that. All they care about is being heard.
3.
Once at Windmill Hill, the sky is always grey. No TV so you are practically cut off from society, and no internet because who bothers extending a phone line to this end of Earth?
So you settle in really quickly.
Once settled, the only thing to do all day is look after the wheat, water it, pick out the bugs, maybe harvest some of it. Strange thing though is this feeling that he gets sometimes that he is harvesting souls. He feels that blood is shooting out of the wheat when it is separated from the Earth with his hand sickle. But he shrugs it off.
Sometimes he tills the land out of boredom. He clears the land of excess weeds, clears it of rubble and slowly (to spend his day away) drives a hoe into the ground. Once the land is ready, he puts in wheat seeds into the soft ground with his hand. Slightly bent over, he pokes the ground in, places the seed and gently covers it with earth. He does this until his body aches and his mind is filled with the screaming of the dead.
Dragging his body back to the windmill, he gets out of his soiled clothes and takes a bath. As fatigue and the warmth of the bath overwhelms him, he starts to doze off a little, even amidst the screaming. And as his mind nears the unconsciousness of sleep, a voice whispers to him.
It says to him “What happened to my daughter? She was supposed to be born already?”, or it would say to him “I should have told him I love him”, “I should have been there for her”, and the voices go on and on.
At first he jumps a bit, but he gets used to it quick and dozes off again.
Out of the bath and in fresh clothing, clean and reinvigorated he gets to making pasta.
First, pour wheat grains into the mill. Collect the ground flour. When enough is collected, shape the flour into a mound with a well in the middle. Crack eggs over the well, careful not to break the mound. While doing so muttering of the dead will intensify, but pay no mind to them
Carefully mix flour with eggs, slowly add water into the mix. Knead the mix until it’s soft and elastic. The mumbling will be unbearable by now, but keep paying no mind to them and knead the mix. Flatten the mix to your liking, use the humming as a tool to keep up the tempo while rolling and flattening the mix. Cut the thoroughly flattened dough to any shapes desired. Let it rest and boil water.
Watch the sky as the water comes to a boil. Watch the clouds as the wind carries them around. Watch them change shapes, watch them take shapes. Some look like horses, some look like cats, and some look like humans flailing their arms about trying to catch his attention. He can almost hear their pleas. Look at me, look at me, look at me! But he simply looks on.
And before he snaps out of whatever trance he is in, water is boiling and he is slowly and carefully drowning the pasta into the boiling water.
As he stirs the pasta around he watches water bubble up and pop at the surface. The dead now whisper to him as bubbles pop at the surface.
“I loved him”, pop, “I want to see him”, pop, “I want to kiss her again”, pop. He watches the bubbles pop and listens to the whispers. And finally coming out of the trance, he strains the boiled noodle into a saucepan and mixes in a can of pasta sauce. He mixes pasta and sauce for maybe a minute and unloads it onto a plate.
After that it’s bring the plate to the dining table, sit down and just eat.
As he eats, he watches the glass bottles of pasta sauce lining the shelf. All of them without labels, all of them probably handmade. He watches the variety that is on the shelf, and thinks to himself, who prepared those? Really, who comes around here and prepare all those bottles of pasta sauce? Or could those bottles be multiplying? Could they be mating and giving birth to little bottle of pasta sauce, which grows up to be a full bottle of pasta sauce and is then eaten by him? But that’s a crazy thought and he erases that thought out of his head.
And he eats in silence as the world fills with screams. He finishes his pasta in silence, and with almost a dignified air like a government official finished with an important project, he cleans the plate and wipes it dry.
After that it’s just a matter of spending the hours away until it’s time to sleep. Usually he brings books that he hasn’t bothered to read. Of course none of the words he reads go into his head. All he does is just run his eyes over the words and turn the page, hoping that his brain is picking up on the words. Sometimes he goes outside and watches the night sky, convinced that the clouds are still there flailing about and yelling at him to look at them. The night chill brings the whispers to a more tangible quality. Like you can almost touch them, he thinks to himself. And sometimes when he is out at night he can feel something rubbing up on him, snuggling to his legs, stroking his thighs. “Look at us”, voice tells him, “you can hear us, don’t ignore us”, another voice demands to him. He ignores them and goes back inside.
After taking another hot bath and bundling himself in warm pyjamas, he heads off to bed. Underneath the thick blanket he looks up to the wooden ceiling. He just stares up, not moving a muscle. As he looks on, the patterns on the ceiling start to move. What almost looked like a face is now staring back at him and flapping its lips about like what it says needs to be heard. He looks at the mouthing face, wondering if it would make any sound. But even if it did, the collective mumbling of the dead have drowned it away and it can not do anything but flap its lips.
He watches the face on the wooden ceiling trying to talk to him until he feels his eyelids come down, and amidst the screams that batter his ears he goes into a silent sleep.
In his sleep he talks to people. People that he’s never seen before and can’t figure out for the life of him why he is seeing them. None of them look the same. They come from all over. Blacks, whites, browns, yellows, everyone comes to him to talk about their lives.
“No, really. I’m not angry at him. Remember, I was in my twenties and I was out of the house and all, and you know, I think twenty something is that age group when you can’t really be angry about a thing like my father going away, right? And besides, mom was so calm and she wasn’t talking bad about him, it just seemed like I would be wrong to feel any anger towards him. It’s just that I just wish that I could say to him that I still loved him no matter what happened. That’s the only thing that kills me.” One man says to him. He is sitting to the left of him.
“I don’t want to sound selfish, but I was thinking more about her than my son when she was going into labor. Selfish of me I know but she bled out so much last time that I just didn’t know if she could give birth this time. But she insisted that she give birth. Result? They both died.” A man to the right of him says.
“When I held him in my arms for the first time, he reached for my breast. I saw his tiny, fragile, pudgy fingers reach out to my breast and realized that he needed me. He needed me so he could live. I never felt more joy at that moment than the whole of my life. That moment when a creature said I need you and nothing else, god if I could live that moment again.” A woman sitting opposite of him say to him.
“So I asked him like, you mean you had an affair, right? And he was like no no no, I may never have been home, but I never cheated on her, he said to me. And I was like hey, that’s cool. Whatever you want to say man, she’s gone anyways. And we were like just drinking and not saying shit, right? And we just kind of drifted off and I never saw him again. I suppose I should have stopped him and kicked the shit out of him for walking out on us. Because that’s what he did. I don’t care what anyone says.” A man who is sitting behind him says.
“I should have asked her if she was happy there. Really. She was getting into that weird ass religion shit that I couldn’t understand about. She was praying all the time. She didn’t even care about her health anymore. All day long she prayed and prayed. She wasted her life away praying.” A man sitting somewhere near him says.
“What I regret is that I told my son It was more a sense of duty than maternal feeling. I told him that I felt like I owed it to him to be a fatherly figure. Because face it, I just didn’t think that a child growing up without a father can be anything. He moved out of the house the next day and I never saw him again. Me and my mouth.” A man somewhere nearby says.
“I should have taken more vacations. All those years of taking care of her. Watching her shrivel away, looking like she was sucking herself in until all that’s left was this tiny wrinkly prune. I should have taken a pause and went out somewhere nice. I was by her side until she died. And her last words were ‘Thank you for staying by me stranger. You have a heart of gold’. That old bitch couldn’t even remember her son’s face” A man sitting somewhere somewhat close to him said.
Kids run around him playing with each other. They laugh and scream, they chase each other and sometimes they all come up to him a in giant wave and cover him with their bodies. Some just lay by his feet and go to sleep.
And in the midst of all this, he listens and does not stir. He just listens until all the sounds blend into each other and cover him like a slow rising tide of paint. He sees the sound rise up to his feet, to his knees, to his stomach, chest, up to the top of his head and he can no longer hear anything. He feels them on his skin. Voices bump against him like waves. He feels awashed in the sea of voices. So he gets up and starts to swim. And everyone follows him while they all talk about what they should have done. They all want him to hear it because he is the only one who can hear it.
They all swim after him saying to him things that they should have said in their lives. He leads them all through the sea of their voices, voices that wished for someone to listen to them and here he is.
He leads them to somewhere. Where, not even he is aware of. And as he swims away, a simple thought comes to him. He questions himself, if I swim out of this dream, who’s going to wake up? But no one is going to answer because he is the only one in this dream. Everyone else swam away to somewhere with him. He’s all alone. How is he going to wake up? Really, who’s going to wake him up?
He looks around, but like said before, no one is around.
So he sits around, looks about him. He doesn’t know what to do, he doesn’t know how to wake him up. And he hears it coming from the horizon. At first it’s a slow hum, like an electric current shaking the air. Then he hears it coming closer to him. The ground, or whatever he is standing on in this dream shakes and the slow hum gains intensity as it comes closer to him. And soon he is engulfed in the screams of the dead. He is awashed in the current of them. They are screaming into his ear what they wanted to say. Their screams rupture his eardrums and he screams out in pain but he can’t hear anything because the screams of the dead are so loud.
Without any climax, he wakes up. It’s morning and he is sweating. In his sleep he kicked the blanket over and his skin is frigid. He takes a shower so his limbs can move and pours himself a coffee.
He looks out a window and sees the never ending grey sky. Screams that filled his head is now just a mass of mumbling again. Clouds in the sky are dancing around to get his attention, and the golden wheat is dancing around left and right in the wind. He thinks to himself, another morning is here.
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