The man named Xam sat in the same spot, in front of the same shop, on the same cobblestone side street, every day. He had no solid memory of the day before or plan for the day after. He sat with his legs bent at the knees and stretched out in parallel, soles flat on the ground, and stared in the direction of his clean, calloused, sandaled feet. What he saw, however, was not what was in front of him but an imagined image of himself and his cluttered surroundings from a third-person perspective. There he was, in his baggy bright white hoody sweatshirt, plain but for two streaks of gray paint, hood pulled over his head, and teal jogging shorts, the kind that had a curved wedge cut into them where the seams on the outside of the thigh end. His legs and hands, the only body parts exposed, were dark and sinewy. Behind him is a dusty window with a particleboard sign leaned against it on the inside that Xam knew, despite not recognizing precisely what language’s characters were painted on it, read “CLOTHES & ACCESSORIES.” Above his head, somewhere in the foreground, is a spherical red paper lantern with gold-embossed black lettering on it. Power lines and apartment windows chaotically frame the scene. Cobblestones and bicycles, newspaper pages, and dominos fill the space.
Xam had some vague recollection of a series of unfortunate events and decisions that had cascaded one after the other and had stepwise ratcheted him irreversibly into his current predicament. He knew that he had lost a lover or loved one, been fired and evicted, and been sabotaged at work in a way that could not be proved, as far more important and dangerous people are in political, legal, and corporate thrillers. The man had lost his judgment in a cloud of rage and hurt instigated by nameless, faceless saboteurs who were skilled in setting people up for failure or framing them. These mystery saboteurs became like ghosts, of course, when their victims inevitably tried to identify them and blame them rather than bad luck and miscalculations, making Xam and his ilk appear cursed, insane, and volatile. The man barely had an inkling of the details of his fall to the bottom rung, just that the unthinkable had become his reality.
What he did vividly remember is his decision to get lost in the convoluted labyrinth of streets surrounding the hardly furnished box of a domicile he had been evicted from. To let his on-grid identity wither. He was not a drunk, nor did he talk to himself (anymore) or believe any of the classic delusions like that people could read his mind. He had just become exhausted, fighting against the tide that seemed to be pulling him toward obscurity.
‘Take my money, take my address, take my ID numbers, take my name, take my reputation, take it all, you want it so badly,’ he had spoken in his mind to a clump of silhouettes he imagined and labeled society or the powers that be.
He had walked without any tools for navigation or any identification as deep into the urban maze as he could. He was so far removed from his past life that he barely remembered his name, let alone his way home without any breadcrumbs to lead him back.
As he visualized himself and his surroundings, he backed away higher and further out in his mind, revealing the tangle of alleys, powerlines, and pipes he was lost in. It was daytime, but the top right corner of the scene was black, like the darkness behind his eyelids, a blank space in his imagination that started to grow. Xam saw the far end of the street he sat on get engulfed by the darkness. Some cobblestone cubes fell into the abyss. Then, he was falling, surrounded by inky space, and falling fast. The last thing he heard was the cracking of his own bones as he landed on his back against the invisible bottom of a seemingly boundless pit.
Alex Ash Creative 