Episode Fourteen

The compound

 

 

It was three days since Bob and Terry had returned. Life off the road was tedious by comparison, but took no effort as such.

Number 27 was the only room with the door ajar, not that it mattered. Everyone and anyone could be seen at any time on the screens, so nobody with her door shut would think to misbehave, even if misbehavior were waved right in front of her nose, even if she wanted to.

            Bob sat on his perfectly flat single bed, smoking. It didn’t matter. He’d passed optimal breeding age anyway and all his seed had been long-since been collected and utilized. He was indulged as he wished, and he did wish to indulge, with old-fashioned comforts – alcohol in all its strengths and varieties, tobacco, hash, ice, Es and the rest of the quaintly named old mind-altering substances, along with their antidotes when work needed to be done, or when things got out of hand.

All this stuff didn’t make him any different, or change him, as they used to think. There was nothing to change but change itself. The idea that Bob was somehow separate from his changing body or from the sum of the substances that he ingested or inhaled was nonsensical. He was what he was, and he did what he did, and one day when he had served his function, in terms of the general consensus, he would be no more. The end would come gently, humanely, in a way that he could orchestrate for himself, and at a time of his choosing. And there, of course, was the rub, as someone in a famous play of antiquity had once put it. In the end, apart from sensual pleasure, what was there?

He imagined the Great Mother protesting at this point. Women seemed to gain pleasure from community, self-sacrifice and social approbation, which was their prerogative as the privileged majority, and which, he supposed, gave them more of a feeling of connection to a world that they imagined continuing after they had gone. But all that just seemed like a delusion to him. How did they know what was to come in a time of such uncertainty? Did they really think they could control the bigger picture? One asteroid and it would all be over. What did it matter anyway?

The irony of his situation, of all possible situations, did not escape him. Once, when he was younger, he’d spent one or two days buried in what they used to call depression, until the doctor fixed him. 

‘There are more things in heaven and earth…’ she said, and offered Bob a swig from her flask. Bob took a gulp. It burnt all the way down.

‘Keep it,’ the doc had insisted when he went to hand it back. ‘Plenty more where that come from. Now don’t you go worrying your pretty little head about anything.’

She knelt down, took his face in her hands and kissed him soundly, struggled her substantial body back to its feet, and left him with the flask, a refill and a packet of cigarettes to go with the matches that he had already collected.

‘Just don’t spread it around,’ she said as she turned back for one last leer, at the doorway.

            When he was younger, he used to wonder if he was more in a position of privilege, or pressure.  Bob smiled at the memory of his younger self. The question seemed so meaningless now. He couldn’t even remember what was in his mind when he used to think that. He remembered that he used to wonder what it would have been like when humans spread like a plague across the earth and when men and women were more or less conceived and born in equal numbers – back in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries for example. It wasn’t all that long ago – seventy or eighty years – still with everything that had happened in the interim, it could have been eons. He was something of a throwback he guessed. A hundred years or so of assisted evolution hadn’t really done anything to change his fundamentals. They were too cautious, these women, when it came to making change happen.

So here he was, an old-fashioned man not fitting in very well in a new-fashioned society. He should have been born somewhere in the twentieth century. He could have blended in then, maybe had a relationship for a while, like they used to, one-on-one, serial monogamy. There was something pure and honourable about the whole idea of that kind of sexual repression. There was a certain security in those boundaries that allowed for more freedom than the eventual free-for-all that was encouraged now. Still. What he would do with that boundaried freedom, or even what it really signified, he had no idea.