The Sad and Sorry Tale of My Own Untimely Demise: I

Presence of Mind - Rene Magritte, c.1960

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1

  
Being a writer is such a shameful and sorrowful way to earn a living that when people ask me what I do I am rather inclined to tell them that I am in marketing.
        If not that, then it is that I drive a taxi, or, my most favoured of all my guises, as I feel it suits my sullen, jaundiced disposition rather well; that I am a private-eye. Out of work and out of luck. Hard up, washed up, down, and drunk. I have always found, rather to my surprise, that one's acquaintances generally accept you as a dishevelled debacle quite readily if you preface your social inadequacies with the threat of a concealed firearm. I believe they see them almost as a necessary requirement in the field.
    And so it was on one afternoon in the height of May that a lonely girl strolled into my life, and upon leaving rather briskly an hour later, took it with her, in the most gruesome and unnecessary of fashions. Life is like a loaded gun, I don't much like the idea of other people having one, but would feel a lot safer with one tucked underneath my overcoat. Though of course I never have owned a gun. Being a writer, not a private eye, in actuality there is not much I have done which I have not just been able to convince myself of having done through instinctive reasoning and arbitrary guess work.
    The event of my own demise is for me a touchy subject, and so I wish instead to spend a little time procrastinating around the morning in question, then ambling slowly into the afternoon in answer, and finally stumbling blindly headlong into the problem in surprised exclamation. As a writer I find the element of surprise to be essential to any deft narrative that deals with the great themes of love and death as it's the best chance one has of subduing them quickly before one gets maimed. Love is a beast one would prefer suddenly to find oneself in the belly of, rather than to remember as a whole the digestive process.
    The morning started much like any other morning had ever started for me. Inevitably. I woke suddenly at 8.45 amidst an ictus of coughing, chocking, splurging, and general suffering, and again at 9.30, and 10.45. I got up at 11, stumbled blearily into a pile of papers, stubbed my toe on a bedside cabinet, knocked my head on a slopping ceiling as I lurched backwards clutching my throbbing foot, and finally managed to push my way through my bedroom door, stopping momentarily only to attempt to pull my way through, before remembering the counter intuitive system on which my entire house was built. Possibly by Escher. The corridor that leads unto my room is narrow and dark, with two sconces positioned equidistantly from both ends that don't so much shed light as they do produce a more orange shade of dark. Flanking these on both sides, and arbitrarily hung along the walls are a few watercolours of what I imagine to be rural scenes, though I have never had the faintest inclination to verify this. I see this corridor twice in a day, once when I blearily awake, and once more when I  blearily stagger home blind drunk, and at neither extreme am I tempted to appraise their artistic worth.
    There is another interesting aspect to this corridor, and that is that it has been made to appear to the untrained eye to writhe and twist disconcertingly towards each end. The reason for this was not quite known to me, save beyond being merely another facet of a house designed to infuriate and disorientate as part of a grander scheme of imperialist expansion, till one night in November when I staggered home blind drunk to that particular house for the first time. Upon scaling the banister I conducted a rather precarious turn, and faced what I found to be a perfectly level corridor. It has become over time, through way of repetition, clear to me that, by painstaking mathematical and artistic processes, the corridor was designed to perfectly counterbalance the refraction of sight lines that occur when too much alcohol has entered one's blood stream. The reality of this was lost on me upon first viewing this feat of architectural dilatory for two very important reasons.
    The first of these reasons was that upon seeing this perfectly straight corridor my eyes were immediately drawn down the symmetrically converging sight lines onto the unmistakable shape of an axe, and from there onto the shape of an unmistakably angry man, who seemed unmistakably fixed on removing the view from my shoulders. I had very little time to reason first whether he was a burglar or an assassin, secondly, his weapon of choice, and  thirdly what avenues of action lay open to me, before he was too close for reason. Luckily for me, as I post-rationalised later, he had not the advantage of being unmistakably drunk, for he took three great lumbering steps towards me, swung the axe clumsily at my head, and, most likely because of the disorientating effect of illusion, missed, embedded it in the corner to which I was next, and pivoted himself round, and down the stairs. There emitted from his great silent form as he flew past me a half uttered syllable which I caught with surprise, before a howl that became a shriek that became a sound which made my blood curdle, that very abruptly became silence once more. The sound that directly preceded its absence was a sound that cut sharply through the fog of drunkenness enveloping me, like the lamp of a lighthouse swiftly slices through the night's veil.  It resonated through me, making every atom of my being shrivel together for protection, and pierced my soul with a sickening thud. It was a sound I have heard only once since then, which I regret with every mangled bone of my pulped body, and I have no intention of attempting to describe it here, but will suffice by simply describing the rippling effect it had upon my own person, in the desire that you comprehend, but do not understand.
    By the rippling effect, I refer to the theory that each and every occurrence in the universe has multiple consequences which begin each other, and that these ripples of accountability spread through the pond of life until they either peter out, or run into something bigger. For example, I have already described the effect that one man's hurried introduction to a stone floor rushing excitedly towards him can have upon another man's sensibilities, but I have not yet explained one of the many, more immediate, consequences of this first great ripple. And that is the second of the two reasons why, upon seeing the corridor in all its unadulterated structural glory, I was not immediately impressed. Namely, the sudden and rather jolting realisation, that this was not my house. This realisation was in turn sharply followed by the realisation of what had just happened, a sudden justification for the man's misjudged actions, and an abrupt involuntary emittance of a whimper that I hastily swallowed back down out of fear of a far weightier substance which suddenly manifested itself in the back of my throat. "