High Violence

By M D Curzon

'High Violence' is a compelling cycle of interrelated stories by M D Curzon, author of the philosophical novel ‘Anticipation’, the short story anthology ‘Imaginary Friends’ and the poetry collection ‘Introverse’. Each of the eleven stories in 'High Violence' stands alone as a tightly drawn vignette, but also relays meaning to an overarching narrative as the tension builds inexorably towards a climax that challenges our complicity in the violence of the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: M D Curzon
• Release date: Jan 27, 2021

M D Curzon

I have always written poetry, lyrics and prose. My first publications were a compilation of poems, entitled 'Introverse', and an anthology of short stories under the title 'Imaginary Friends'. 'Imaginary Friends' includes the title story and a dozen others, from the experimental juvenilia of 'Space Stations and Weather Balloons' through to the refined 'One Thing in Light of Another'.'Anticipation' was my first completed novel and is, I hope, an accessible work of literary fiction. My protagonist is a young woman in search of her place in the world. Having fallen in love and been rejected, K's story draws on a number of spiritual and aesthetic dispositions in a journey that is fundamentally one of optimism and self-determination.I have ghostwritten Marie McCreadie's extraordinary memoir 'Voiceless', and have most recently completed my 'High Violence' cycle - www.highviolence.com. Each of the eleven stories in 'High Violence' stands alone as a tightly drawn vignette, but also relays meaning to an overarching narrative as the tension builds inexorably towards a climax that challenges our complicity in the violence of the world.Please feel free to visit my Amazon author page at http://www.amazon.com/author/mdcurzon or contact me through my website at http://www.mdcurzon.com

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HIGH VIOLENCE

(for lowercase grace)

Copyright © 2020 M D Curzon

Cover photograph by Evgenii Baranov

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Hyperthymesia

(2016)

I remember it vividly. All of it.

Some part of me was aware that my body was lying in the gutter, aware of the smell of jasmine and blood. But the rest of me was elsewhere, pursuing other thoughts. Thoughts without time or place. Thoughts that don’t make much sense if I try to relay them now. How do you hold eternity in an hour? How can you describe the ocean in a single drop? I wish I knew.

Perhaps I should start by saying it was different to dreaming. Completely different. Yes, I was unconscious but I was also awake. And I was somehow aware of myself as being beyond the body. I know it might sound contradictory but it was a profound experience.

The processes that took place between the moment I lost consciousness and the moment I woke up don’t really fit into a narrative framework. Philosophers might use the Latin phrase a priori to describe them. We might call them ‘realisations’ or even visions. But whatever they were, what I’m left with is a sense or a feeling, rather than an understanding. In the outside world I was in a coma for six weeks, but inside time didn’t really exist. Cause and effect were one and the same. Everything made sense. I don’t know if I was still what we call ‘here’, in a physical dimension, or if I was actually somewhere else.

There’s a science fiction novel from the early 1970s called ‘Roadside Picnic’. It’s about how aliens have visited Earth. No one witnessed their arrival or departure, and human beings have no real understanding of what their intentions were, but the ‘zones’ that they visited strangely affect us. It’s like a family have stopped for a picnic in the country. Local creatures might recognise that things are different after the family has left, but they have no way of comprehending the meaning of the traces that are left behind – all that is discarded or forgotten. In the novel, the zones seem to cause physical and psychological phenomena but it’s impossible to predict how or when these phenomena will occur.

What I’m trying to say is that I was present to an experience that affected me in a profound but unquantifiable way. You could call it an epiphany, perhaps, or a revelation, but these words don’t really convey the experience itself. The experience was something else.

I’m from a working class and deeply religious background in Bangalore. My father worked in the same factory for 35 years before he retired, and he has always given everything he had to his family. I grew up sharing a single room with any number of relatives, and I guess I began to want more than just faith in my life. I wanted my own place in the world.

My parents worried about me, but I didn’t share the certainty that they had about my future. Having decided against becoming a priest I completed a degree in project management and worked for an international agency in India. Before coming to Australia I’d already had several months experience remotely managing an oil rig off the coast of Newcastle, so I’d learned a little about New South Wales and was eager to further my studies in Sydney when the opportunity arose. Maybe in some way it was an excuse to escape home and the expectations my parents had of me.

I had only been here a month or so when it happened. I’d started studying at UTS – the University of Technology, and I was staying with my cousin Anishya and her husband Prakash, out in the western suburbs. Sydney is one of the biggest cities in the world by land area; the trip to school took an hour and a half each way.

I enjoyed being in a new country, where I could be whoever I wanted to be, and I was out celebrating a friend’s birthday that night. I’d had classes until 9pm, so after a couple of drinks I caught the ten o’clock bus back to Anishya’s house. I called my mum sometime during the trip, and, as usual, she did most of the talking. It didn’t take her long to get onto her pet subject - the dangers of moral corruption, living in a western country. I was still listening to her with my earphones on when I got off the bus at the Bella Vista T-way.

While I was walking I thought I heard someone call out ‘hey’ or ‘hello’ or something, but I ignored it because I didn’t know anyone. I figured they must be addressing someone else. But a few seconds later I heard the same voice call out again so I took out one of my earphones and looked around. That’s when I saw them running up to me - a group of teenagers. A couple of them were on BMX bikes and one of them had what looked like a metal rod or blackjack in his hands. The one who was closest to me stepped up and said ‘you’ve got two options’.

It was surreal. It wasn’t déjà vu but I had the feeling that I already knew what would happen next. It wasn’t so much as if I’d been there before - it was more like I had always been there. The smell of recent rain clung to the ground in a way that reminded me of something just out of reach of my mind. A hint of jasmine drifted over the petrichor, just as I expected. Even the statement ‘you’ve got two options’ sounded somehow familiar. It was like I already knew what he was going to say, even though I didn’t know what he meant. I looked around. One of the teenagers on the BMXs looked back. When our eyes met, I was sure we had seen each other before. There was something more than familiar about everything. I saw an eye of providence logo printed on the front of the teenager’s hoodie, exactly where I expected it. Like I already knew it was there.

Even though the situation seemed so predestined, I was still trying to process what was actually happening. One of the teenagers, the guy with the blackjack, was grinning at me but there was no warmth in his eyes. He looked so intimidating that I wondered what I must have said or done to upset him so much? For a moment I was lost in my thoughts, just standing there, trying to comprehend what was going on. Then I came to my senses and I said ‘no thanks, I’m not interested.’ I turned around and ran.

It was a ‘shock and awe’ sort of a moment. Something like this might be more common back in India, but here in Australia? I was literally taken by surprise. My feet pounded against the deep grey ground. They felt cold and hot at the same time. I remember how it felt, and I should remember. It was the last time I experienced full feeling in my left foot.

Meanwhile, Mum was still on the phone. She didn’t understand. She had heard me speaking to someone and as I ran she asked me what was going on. It was tricky. I didn’t want to alarm her by telling her that half a dozen assailants were running after me with intent to… God knows what. Anyway, it was difficult to speak without gasping, so all I said was ‘there’s some crazy people here, stay on the line, I’ll talk to you in a moment.’

My breath shot in and out of my lungs like a piston. You might think that escape was the only thing on my mind, but in reality many thoughts took shape. I was disconcerted, rather than afraid. It was as if I knew where this was going, as if I was on the verge of inevitability. My sense of familiarity with the situation became even more acute as I ran. I recognised a hint of jasmine flowers in the air. I could hear the screeching of a train as it braked on the coal corridor that passes near Anishya’s place. Imagine claws erasing a blackboard. Imagine your teeth falling out as you try to push them back in. Your breath is on fire. None of the light switches work. You are in two places at the same time.

The walk from the bus stop to Anishya’s house would normally take ten or fifteen minutes, but you could do it in five in a hurry. I was about 800m from the house when I reached the children’s playground and the freight train screeched past on the tracks. I could smell jasmine and I could see the rise of the hill in the darkness beyond the lights. The lights were connected like a scintillating grid. Darkness and light and light and darkness converged and changed places. Everything slowed down.

Right at that moment the two BMX bikes overtook me and blocked my path. The bigger youth, the one without warmth in his eyes, dropped his bike to the pavement and slapped the blackjack he was carrying against the palm of his hand. The other one, the one in the eye of providence hoodie, slid to a stop behind me. I watched the back wheel of the BMX arcing around in slow motion to the dying noise of the freight train. By the time the bike reached a standstill the guy with the blackjack was up in my face. After the running and the noise and the clatter all I could hear was my breath, hammering into my lungs. Instinctively, I turned to the teenager in the eye of providence hoodie. Up close, under the moonlight, there was a flicker of some kind of recognition as our eyes met, some kind of acknowledgement. It was like seeing someone that I used to know, a lifetime ago.

I’ll never know if the familiarity I sensed was reciprocal. I don’t even know what part this person played in the events to come. Did they join in when I was broken? Did they hesitate at the moment of decision? Did they walk away and play no part in it? I have no idea. All I know is that when our eyes met it was clear that we shared something beyond anything I can put into words.

I believe that our destinies were shaped long before our bodies came into being. This in itself doesn’t make life any easier to understand, but it does provide a framework – an explanation for the unexplainable. There are many different schools of thought, of course, but the fundamental concepts of karma and reincarnation are integral to the way I understand the world. I don’t expect anyone else to interpret the world through my eyes, but I don’t know how I would otherwise see things – perhaps only as a series of coincidences.

All of this flickered through my thoughts in that moment, as our eyes remained locked. And I could see a deer in headlights in those eyes - they looked as if they would rather be anywhere else in the world than right there, looking at me.

More than anything else I’ve wondered what brought us together; why that particular person was there. What led them to that precise place at that exact moment? What were the forces, other than circumstance, that drew the two of us together with such power? Why did our destinies draw us together? To what purpose, other than to remind me of God?

At that moment I was hit in the back of my head with something very hard. I didn’t see the guy with the blackjack behind me, but I still remember the cracking sound my skull made and the warm feeling of my blood running down the back of my neck. I remember the scent of jasmine. I remember the eyes I was staring at, widening.

I don’t remember collapsing.

I guess the whole experience took three or four minutes, maybe the time it takes to play a song on the radio. Then I was lost in the subconscious depths of a coma for six weeks. I can say tho numbers but it’s impossible for me to get a relative sense of those lengths of time, to measure them against each other. Some might think that the reason that everything seemed so familiar has something to do with the dissociative effect of being unconscious for so long after it happened. Perhaps they think my memory of those minutes was amplified or even rewritten in the gulf that followed? I wonder. I suppose it’s possible that my memory has intensified but I believe it’s more than that. I’ve always had a pretty much eidetic memory, for better or worse, and I distinctly remember the familiarity with which the situation unfolded. That’s how it felt at the time.

Lapsing into a coma is not uncommon after a severe head trauma. The brain needs to use energy responding to sense impressions, conscious thoughts and muscle movement when awake, and that energy simply may not be available. For this reason it can actually be in a patient’s best interests to remain unconscious; to rest and recover. Sometimes comas are actually induced, by cooling the body and creating the conditions for hypothermia. This reduces the brain’s oxygen needs and also inhibits the production of neurotransmitters and free radicals. Apparently, there was some deliberation in the hospital about whether ‘targeted temperature management’ would prevent the blood clot in my brain deteriorating, but in the end they opted against it.

Despite what was going on around me, time in the sense that we normally think of it played no part in my life while I was in the coma. As far as I was concerned, the clock only started ticking again when I woke up in the ICU at St George hospital. I didn’t know it was 42 days later. The first thing that I became aware of was the rasping dryness in my throat. I couldn’t make a sound. There was something immobile, some kind of tubing thrust into my body through my mouth. I was desperate to swallow but it was impossible. It felt as though I was being force-fed sand. Fluorescent shafts of light stabbed my eyes and I wanted to throw up. I guess the opiate tide was receding.

When I first regained consciousness the man in the next bed was trying to get up. Anna, one of the nurses that I got to know, was patiently explaining that he was in hospital, but no matter how many times she repeated herself the man didn’t get it. As far as he was concerned he was late for work and he couldn’t find his shirt and tie. It might have been funny in a poignant kind of way, if my head hadn’t been throbbing like it was going to explode. After the exquisite otherworld of the coma I found myself thrust back into a prosaic life that I had not missed. A life of shirts and ties and pain and pathos. Time seemed to be slower than I remembered it, and reality more excruciating.

When she saw that I was coming to, Anna hurried over. She took my hand in hers and started crying. It might sound ungrateful but I didn’t want a bar of any of it. I wanted to go back. I wanted to retreat into my unconscious. I wanted to go back to God.

But that was it. I was ‘here’ again. And from then on the sedations weren’t the same. The pain still sank underneath me but I had lost my place in the thoughts that had engulfed me while I was in the coma. More than anything else I felt a sense of loss. And I hated being in the hospital. For a start there were no windows in the ICU. I had no sense of day or night as I drifted in and out of semi-consciousness. The humming and beeping of various life-support machines was constant, and the sharp smell of disinfectant hung over everything. Nurses and doctors and visitors came and went with the hours but a pervading sense of being in limbo haunted me. It was as if time was in no hurry to bring me back under her wing, as if my body and soul remained dislocated.

My parents couldn’t afford to come to Sydney to visit while I was in the hospital. Dad is on a pension and they were dependent on any extra money I could send them already. So it must have been terrible to have been in their shoes. Anishya called them from time to time while I was in the coma, but the news was never good. Even when I regained consciousness, it looked like I might still die.

Anishya and Prakash were the first people that came to see me when I came to. They didn’t stay long, as Anishya had left the baby with my aunt, back at the house. Prakash didn’t make eye contact, but he told me his side of the story, and said that they’d called my parents to let them know I was awake. After the relief Mum had kept asking about the cost of my hospitalisation. I told her to thank God we’re not in America, Kash said, with an attempt at a laugh.

While I’d been in the coma the US had elected their new president. At first I thought it was a prank, but then I saw him on the television – a smug con-man celebrating the greatest swindle of his life. It made me think of another sci-fi story I’d read as a kid, called ‘A Sound of Thunder’. The ‘hero’ in the story, Eckels, is a glorified game hunter who travels back in time to kill a Tyrannosaurus Rex. When he leaves his own time a moderate candidate has just won the presidential elections, to everyone’s relief. Sixty million years earlier, however, Eckels freaks out and accidentally steps on a butterfly, thereby altering the course of history to the extent that when he returns to his own time he finds a fascist despot in power. I wondered if somehow I’d stepped on a proverbial butterfly in my absence…

My recovery was slow and arduous. At first the doctors were sure that I’d never walk again. And then there was the question of the catch-22 clot in my brain. The scans were equivocal – on the one hand the clot could rupture, causing massive brain damage or death, but on the other hand, if they operated, there were good odds that the surgery could kill me anyway.

Internally I was also at an impossible junction. With how I felt,