Legends tell of a sacred place.
It lies beyond the murky, sunken ruins of Atlantis. It lies all the way down the unkempt road that leads to El Dorado and onwards up the unkempt road that leads away. It lies past the tea shop run by Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, where the scones are grainy and out of focus; past the competing tea shop on the same street run by the crew of the Mary Celeste, where the scones look delicious but there’s no-one there to take your order; past a third tea shop run by Schrodinger’s cat, closed down by safety inspectors after a radioactive substance was found in a pastry, the shutters pulled down so no-one can tell whether the owner is alive or dead. Past every strange and surreal place on the Earth, you have travelled to find it.
It is the place where all the winds of the world converge.
As you stand at this impossible place – and I hope you brought a cagoule because it gets quite chilly – you realise you can hear all the sounds of the world. Each and every one, from the loudest jewellery merchant in Iran’s fading bazaars as he seeks to sell one last trinket, to a tiny splash as the hook of an Inuit’s fishing rod sinks beneath the indigo surface of his ice-fishing hole and into the depths below. Every sound is carried on the wind to converge here, a steady, infinite rhythm that beats, beats, beats against your eardrum, as though you are standing at the core of the world, listening to its very heart.
Yet you did not travel all this way to hear an Eskimo fishing. You travelled at this very specific time, for a very specific purpose, and now you close your eyes and concentrate, in order that you might hear it. For a while, there is nothing. An elephant is giving birth in Africa – to quadruplets, though you don’t know it. A terracotta roof tile, baking hot beneath the fiery sun, falls from a roof in Sicily and shatters on the cobbles below. The Eskimo is whistling, and you are surprised to find that he shares your music taste. And then…
You hear it begin.
It is not the noise you are here for – not yet – but these are the noises that you know to precede it. They arrive on many winds, from many continents. For now they are fragmented, apart. You would not think they had anything to do with each other if you did not already know that they did. Shoes being kicked off at doorways, cups of tea being placed on tables, sofa springs squeaking as tired bodies set themselves down after a wearying day. They seem unconnected, mutually irrelevant… yet you know their fates are entwined, that they can culminate in only one eventuality, because you arrived at this specific time to hear them do so.
Through the swirling fray you gradually pick up on more and more of these sounds. There should not be many – rarely less than twenty, rarely more than forty – yet they are spread across many countries on almost every continent, the winds that bear them peppering you with scarlet sand and powdered snow in equal measure. This sparseness makes it hard to tune into the correct ones – but you strain your ears, for the moment draws near. The sounds are beginning to converge. You hear the tiniest rustles made by the fabrics of pockets as phones are retrieved from them, laptop lids lifted, the clicking of keyboards and the scrolls of mouse wheels. Tiny sounds, yet even as they diminish the tension only grows because you know that this is the moment you have been waiting for, the inevitable outcome of the thing you already knew, the thing they are about to find out…
All the sounds you were listening to stop.
The winds that once were so rich with sounds now bring only silence. Silence, as you knew there would be. Across the world these people, these few, beleaguered people, are squinting at their screens. Their mouths are turning down in surprise, their resolve is hardening as they realise what they have to do. You hold your breath, as the silence builds to a crescendo. And then, each of these people, in their respective chairs, in their respective homes, in their respective countries, in their respective continents, in their respective languages, in their respective incredulity…
…utters one single statement.
Just as you knew they would.
They will never know that what they thought was a singular exclamation born of unique frustration was in fact uttered by many others. They will never know that in that brief moment their free will was ripped away, their actions guided not by themselves but an external, inexorable force that instils such frustration as cannot be surmounted. Nor will they ever know that, as with all things, the winds of their respective continents took up their voices, carrying them across vast ocean and desolate tundra, vibrant jungle and lifeless desert to this legendary place, where they met with all the voices upon all the other winds. Only you will know, because only you were there at this place, at this point – this point that, incidentally, occurred precisely after this blog was posted – and so only you heard those lonely voices converge into one and say in exasperated unison, “Oh god, he’s written another one?”
After that, it’s a bit difficult to make out what they say. The forces of fate subside and the world is returned to its usual singular chaos. You might catch snippets of phrases like “Why doesn’t he just stop?” or “It’s not even about anything, it’s literally just an elaborate setup with no actual information about Italy or anything he’s doing” or “He’s such an idiot, I wish he wasn’t my son”, but it’s pretty windy, so you won’t be able to hear with much clarity. And you might hear one voice, apart from the rest, saying something along the lines of “About bloody time” – but ignore him, he’s deluded, and it’s his fault this got written anyway.
Thanks for stopping by ferraread.
Alex's Inappropriate Adventures 