no room to move… this immobility deprived of death… pressed in between unyielding walls of pain… a helpless powerless subhuman overcome by Pain… your cruel Master…

impossible to move a limb when having none at all… all your possessions stripped away… replaced by just this feel of pain…

you’re nothing but a captive… a slave… a crushed plaything of your excruciating Master…you are immersed… engulfed and squashed by the immeasurable pressure in the unfathomable abyss of pain…

eeeee… how it pains… eeeeeee…

* * *

6

There was no chewing gum in the blue wrapper which V picked up from the table in the Uncle Tom’s Cabin before Sally brought meal for him and 2ic taken away already.

Only back home V got it what namely his companion was texting about by flailing his eye-lashes the moment before he was arrested. Even conveyed in an unknown code, the message clearly indicated the dropped stick of chewing gum. Which wasn’t there. The wrinkled wrapper contained a little flat lamina of memory card.

V checked it with File Manager in his Debian system to find just 2 files in that 2TB card. A .txt file that 2ic, presumably, referred to as “ transcript” and a folder which, technically, is also a file containing further files. This one was filled with an endless mess of audios in Vorbis format.

A couple of them clicked at random played back thru the black speakers one and the same impersonal flat drawl of artificial reader, unnaturally distanced and sexless voice-over. V didn’t bother to tweak the pitch or tempo in robotic diction, or choose a dialect from the long list of options, he just left it as is. Moreover, the statements—the stuff was too haphazard for a story—were hardly keen on disclosing who they belonged to: a male? a woman? a snotty kid?

Yeah, at times there sure happened telling cues. A macho wouldn’t complain of a too tight bra sillily donned in the morning. Or wouldn’t he? Smack bang midst heated struggle for self-awareness, and militant tolerance activists you never can tell. Anyway, life is a supreme bitch at surpassing the weirdest sitcoms, the guy could have his reasons for wearing a bra. Besides, since some time there appeared a personal feeling by V of belonging to sexual minority of those previously called ‘straights’ whose section diminished so precipitately. Damn priests! They had started this avalanche by their ardent canvassing for missionary position when having intercourse. Way back folks just didn’t give a fuck about hows-and-whys in these matters before the clergy brought it up.

With a sigh V switched over to the thoughts_004.txt file. The endless stream of poorly punctuated lines of 174,326 words, 973,160 characters. It seemed, 2ic was right in calling it a transcript and, very possibly, the text presented same thing as the audio files from the neighbor folder. Hard to say though, who in their tandem originated the hen-egg dilemma.

Still, it didn’t look anything like a super story readied to make V a glamorous lighthouse above the choppy sway in the pulp fiction ocean. It looked like mumbling to oneself in Leo Bloom manner responding to the hallmarks in his long and winding journey on June 16, 1904.

It surely seemed a transcript of thoughts but of how many contributors? Were they in any way interconnected? Who thought what? At times you did felt like being carried by the same, say, thought-floe before you slipped over to another fragment of different vocabulary, mood, subject. Common to them all though was elusive sincerity, and lack of coherent description of actions in progress. Some fucking terseness. Instead of “my interlocutor plunged into lengthy exposition of his current plans and expectations” it would just say “will the asshole shut up? Ever?!”

But still and yet, some passages did hook you, however strange, and queer, and stuff… V resented the untimely nature of 2ic’s arrest. Arrest? Yeah, 2Bsure. By all the canons of the genre. However, V once again tapped 2ic’s number in his phone, just in case. A mellow female voice once again announced the number was unreachable. V ruled out another conference with answering machine at 2ic’s den.

He switched off his PC, sat inactive for a minute, then crossed the room to the catty-corner. From a black casket-like small box in the desk’s right upper drawer, V elicited a tiny SIM card and substituted it for the one in his phone. Now he had another subscriber identity and number. Just in case…

* * *

7

V never was alone. Never. Even in a crowd of complete strangers did he have someone to get encouragement from, share impressions with, someone who understood him from half a word. Better than any companion was that someone because that was V. Also? Too? As well? Whatever. It was just V. At times they could disagree on some point or another, those 2 V's, even argue, yet in the end a kinda consensus was always reached. V did not give too much thought as to why it was so. He just got used and was quite comfortable with it. Anyway, even the most sincere, painstakingly all-embracing answer to a why-question will merely scratch the surface of the Everest of reasons if at all.

Right now they both were unanimous, Vs, the two in one, and their mutual jaw dropped in bewilderment. They were…(Damn! It grows too entangled and complicated, grammatically, so – back to the orthodox grammar)… His stare stuck to the Philips monitor addressing him:

'Well, V, whenever some smart Alec pops up to blare our that God is dead, the best policy would be to check if the announcer was a certified coroner.'

Some quicksand situation it was aggravated by the fact that V knew his response without scrolling down. It surely was the thought he had some time back, a snippet of the endless yarn