Remembering an atom time

By Shalini Ajay Singh

The Year 2027

Entra minor

A person who has one secret can have many. A person who does not know the difference between a well-kept secret and a secret everyone knows usually does not have a secret he has kept to himself.

… deluge has been charted as an atom-down. A rainfall of disoriented atoms and ions. The static energy in the air is pulsating. The calamity has been brewing for many years, but now the earth is seeing the kind of rain that cuts through metal, blinding people, burning and diminishing objects, metal, and meat in direct contact with the splurge. It has been raining slowly for many months now in the Southern parts. Wind has picked up recently in the Northern peninsulas. Some people were caught in the central peninsula, where the survivors and savages are. The first few rain showers were less drastic than last month’s rain. The atom-down was so powerful that even sand turned into dust. Dust into atoms. Atom back. That’s what the survivors are calling the deluge aftermath now—atom-math…

… now I am searching for you, my love.

I have to kill you.

“orders”.

… am a detective. I was, at least, when the earth ‘was’. Before we all started losing memories, we had courts, police stations, officers, and the perpetrators. We had a Constitution and sets of procedures and rules. We had technological databases and live repositories. Working devices and an abundant availability of metal. Metal of all kinds. We had justice. We had justice, fairness, and equity, and all that. We had that one thing that was needed for justice to prevail, for a just society to cooperate—the memory of the fact, after and before. We recalled and reviewed faces—the eyes, noses, ears, and lips. The weird thing is that now, in the atom-math, memory is selective.

After the first rain, there was no government left to function. Legit autonomy of the AI, they called it, finally. Because the rain cuts through propagating objects and metal, we no longer have working machinery and electronics. Et al…

… here, when survivors breathe, they usually talk about the memories they think they have been dreaming about since before the time, but also, if the question is “Di che potenza vieni?” I wonder if the answer would be the translation, “From what power dost thou come?”…

… start reading the lists. Names. Places. Animals. Things. Sometimes I read the second place and read the third twice, thrice. Like an unbalanced cargo, my memory fails me. That is why I am always reading. We have these lists with us now. I careen my mind into moth-infested memories. Shelving, sledding, cataloguing. Selvage. Empanelment of an era gone by. I am searching for you…

… now, we have a symphony devised over time. There was a before time, and now there is all but an after time. Before, it was time with hands on a clock without omission, but after, there were omitted hands devoid of even the rising and setting sun, its movement across the hemisphere that never rested amidst a busy atom-down. Imagine specks of dots and collusions flying in no particular direction with zero visibility and a vision imparity that sustains and only increases with distance…

Letting go means remembering. And letting go feels better than not.

… read many things but try to remember what no one cares about, like the Paralympics gold medalist who won something big last year… if she ever received the money she was promised…

… 40-year-old man who changed his name forty times and was almost awarded a Guinness…

… lady who, at ninety-nine, ran a hundred kilometres in the high desert sun of Thar…

… or the goat house burned to the ground—ashes clinging onto death. Yes. We all hear about murders; we remember how many bullets the minister’s minions took in the chest, and the election frauds. But how many of you remember the black goats with the uneven white stripes worth a bundle, left crowded, convulsing with the smoke, homogeneous as any grey, in a burning cinder by an animal hater, the one who painted the goats?

… that person or persons escaped. They escaped alive because human lives don’t matter anymore. The news was that the goats were priceless. A commodity in a land where monetary systems had lost relevance. The people from the fire and safety department are no longer on call. All emergency lines are dead. They have not investigated the fire or the ashes that cover the ground. Nor the wood that lights the fire and the gutters that overflow the only oasis we think is safe. The Prathna oasis…

… thinking about lives and escapes, will we ever stop talking about all of this? Just sit in silence and kiss our shadows?

There is no worth or price for life. If the living don’t matter, why would the dead?

… little hearts drawn across some files, and some envelopes are missing letters. Some letters are in the wrong envelopes. As I am correcting before-time errors, I am also foxed. Many of my files are missing. I am rediscovering failure, and it hurts my heart.

… used to be on a tv show about hoarders that hoarded the most. This was the only show where there were no winners. Everyone who participated was deemed a loser. It was also the only show where the participants were exclusively personalized for an audience that would watch a specific kind of jeering. This was before I started worrying about saving. This was before the remainder of the systemic cysts decided to call on my handwritten databases—lists. All my notes and listicles. Who would have thought my two minutes of fame would land me a job in the afterworld?

Shelving, sledding, catalouging. Selvage. Empanelment of an era gone by. I am searching for you. I am following ‘orders’. Whatever goes, orders remain. Everyone needs a reason to live.

We just pine for plain things now. Attaching ourselves to the memory of the moment. The before time is a haze. And the after time, no better.

I'll summon snippets of what happened and why.

Letting go means remembering.

… will you tell your parents that you were the one who released the white pigeons? And that they didn't mysteriously disappear from the cage…

… at age nine, your parents assumed you would not know of freedom. At age twenty, men assumed the same. Now, the rain assumes that you do not know about freedom because it is easy to assume…

… won't tell everyone else who admires you that you were the one who asked them to be placed in a cage in the first place. It’s no crime to stop somebody or not. And you weren’t stopped. You tethered. You made freedom look like a fraud. Your mother’s affection for these pigeons was new, stunning, and only yours to look at. Spite. The bitterness of white/the white bitterness… You used to paint about creeks and daisies and stardust in the cosmos, but since then, you have painted cages and ensconced gliders that trapped critters. Then chained cows and goats. Then just goats. You wander humming songs that you have stolen, “a net used by hunters to catch game”, lathered or forced fed in your tonsils, with colonizers’ lyrics…

Letting go means remembering.

… gaslight… Lighthouse… Unhurried in ways, my memory walks and prods. You are one amongst the stones. You are a tale with so many chapters and ends that you are a beginner at the very end.

… Your brooch, the cucumber mist on your wrists, brown wrappers stuffed into your bag, old dog-eared books with missing pages, a Mickey Mouse watch with missing dials, a DVD copy of Thirteen Days, the yellow dal with tadka, the grey polka parka, the new universal remote on the mantel, a Persian rug, a bow ripped out from your diamond studded hair band, the clasp of your faded purple clutch, gathering rust, the gap-toothed witch doll that you so loved…

And now, I must not remember these details because they are useless for the purposes of justice. I fail to remember the colour of your hair, the shape of your eyes… I need concrete details about who you ‘actually’ were… I need to know ‘you’…

… must have added shoe polish to that Malana cream. You must have smoked what you added to show others how true you were. Your breath, hashish. Your words were bloodshot. Your fever worse…

… must have been provoked by how you invented a new dish, but it was just a recipe you read in a book. You should have cooked the recipe thoroughly. The recipe was not to be meddled with. Not a pinch more. Not a pinch less. You added none. You added stale milk to the preparation. You wore gloves the whole while you stirred the thick consistency into further confusion. Your fusion needed to be edible. You didn’t even touch the food with your skin. You joked about cooking your rapists in the broth, the same ones that my deputies have found recently…

… You are lost somewhere here. Somewhere in these lists and notes and papers and clips…

… ate runny eggs with avocado, which you shoplifted. Like how you always do. With some oregano and ketchup, like how you always do. Never bought an avocado. Never bought a single ketchup bottle. That was all you…

Letting go means remembering.

There you were.

… barely knew I could. I hardly knew you. My lists know you, though, somewhere in the piles that extend inside the underground facility entra minor 2 and—

Letting go means finally accepting.

I do not know why I only remember this one thing, though.

… we watched this one episode again and again…

… way you sat down to watch the Pine Barrens with me…

… remember only one consistent memory connection that lasts roughly an hour…

The way you sat down to watch the Pine Barrens with me was evidence of your love for me.

You sat with me through that lone episode that I so loved.

You crackled with laughter when Paulie and Christopher were fucking around with that Russian military guy in the Pines. When the Russian guy cries that he washes his balls with the kind of cold Paulie and Christopher were complaining of, you laughed harder than I did. Every time Christopher pulled Paulie’s legs, I heard you laugh. How gorgeous was your laughter. Every week, in a ritual, we watched, and we laughed. We watched, and you laughed. Laughed and laughed.

But I still cannot remember what my love looked like.

… were lovers before we were strangers, and we remembered this little detail before the rains hit us…

… now I am searching for you, my love.

I have to kill you.

“orders”.

Shalini Singh is a multi-genre writer from India who now lives and creates art forms in the wild prairies of Iowa. A lifelong learner and an inclusive progressive teacher, she is invested in multiple projects, some of which revolve around math and poems, hypnopompia, necro pastorals, cultural explosions, intrusions in space-time, and the art of living. She is a voracious reader who has been reviewing books for the last eight years and binge-watches/eats everything good/interesting in sight, finding a confluence of multimedia and technology-less world of minimalism everywhere she goes. You can find her on instagram @belladonnaoflavender.

Remembering an atom time

By Shalini Ajay Singh

About Singapore Unbound

About
Singapore Unbound