Enlightenment

A Short Story

I’ve been thinking, how do we delineate the term ‘turgidity’? A quick Google search has shown me that there's two different meanings. A sack of fluids can be turgid, excessively swollen, bordering on collapse. Beyond this, we have turgidity as pompous or bombastic speech. I am a calm person, I am repulsed by turgid phenomena; hence, I’ll abstain from giving an example. I’m sober and to the point. Banality soothes, caresses and massages the dried and crusted scabs of my soul. My grandmother always used to meander on about how every come-up is destined to come down. I always thought that was profound and unequivocally true. But. I am confident that cognitively circulating around the potential limits of the term ‘turgidity’ will reap benefits. It awakens a sense of rejuvenation, of righteous pride within me. Of course, I must halt you here. I am not talking about the self-righteous kind. To be turgid, is to refuse the come-down. To be turgid is to – as Freud was well aware of – reek of an anal refusal to defecate. Somehow – and here I am approaching the limits of my knowing – turgidity combines the notion of overzealous excretion with its very opposite; constipatory accumulation of excrement.

Richard Apemantus O’Briar neatly placed his gold alloy fountain pen in its stand and looked out the window. Large windows such as this one, he felt, were decadent and could never compare to the serenity of blank white walls. Still, his view was sufficiently unchanging. The flat green field ahead of him stretched out in a seemingly endless plot of land which had been bought but not yet touched by a monstrous corporation, and submissively awaited upheaval and construction. Finite endlessness — the opposite of turgidity, perhaps? Richard, or Dickie as his mother used to call him, let out a deep sigh and pondered his imminent displacement. He would have to leave this place, and soon. His suitcase, a tense brown square waiting by the door, stained his peripheral vision. His train tickets, which he had printed out twice, weighed heavily inside his breast pocket. 3:07, platform 4a. He would leave his keys in the door.

As it was 3:00, and the station was at least seven minutes away by bicycle, Dickie started to worry. Not because he’d have to rush cycling to the station, but because his bicycle had a flat tire. “Dickie, that is the name I have been sentenced to. What will I do for it!” he thought to himself. Forgetting to zip up his fly, he flew out the door and zipped away through the streets of Shifterswil City. He was so fast and fabulous in his sprint! We are so proud. Fortunately for Dickie, he had the privilege to step onto the platform at exactly 3:06. How did he run that fast? We do not know. He looked at his watch, gave himself a moment to breathe, and walked to the closing doors of the train. He wiped the sweat off his forehead, let out a sigh, and pressed the button to re-open the doors. “I love buttons, I am a button-type person, not least in the physical sense; I abhor virtual buttons which have been designed to deceive and humiliate my sense of autonomy.” For some reason, the door did not open after he pressed the button. For a split second, his heart stood still. But then he was relieved when he saw a sign on the door saying “PRESS DEFECTIVE BUTTON AT YOUR OWN RISK.” So he walked toward the other door, which was just 5 metres away. While approaching the door, he realised that the next problem was that the train was filled to the brim with Chinese tourists. Dickie looked Chinese himself, but would never lower himself to the tourist variant. Self-loathing was an activity he passionately clung to. A few years ago he got an anti-squint surgery performed on him, a purported attempt to cure his passion. He would never tell anyone about it, but I will. He paid his friend Slort Chomskyhonk to slice a piece of skin out of his eyelids. Chomskyhonk was from Nigeria, where he studied the art of procrastination during his university courses on sustainable development. Needless to say, his doctorate was not fit for meticulous operations involving knives and eyelids.

Dickie was the luckiest man alive, his eyelid surgery went flawlessly. Entering the train compartment was something else though, and even here his laughably short height and scraggy body did not help. A big and muscled Chinese tourist kept shoving him back to the platform while intently gazing and frowning at him. The strength of his body was almost godlike, in Richard’s view that is.

“Say, will you stop that?” Dickie uttered through gritted teeth, as if he needed the extra barrier, because the question was only a tiny sliver of what he wished to say. But he would remain civil. If he was ever to unleash the wild storm of exasperation he harboured in the deepest, darkest, most cramped space of his otherwise tidy brain, he would not unleash it at someone with godlike bodily strength. The target of his cathartic outburst would preferably be shorter than him, and weaker. “Please let me in,” he begged. The Chinese tourist said nothing, and did nothing. Dickie stared at him as he, very slowly, attempted to step onto the train again. The man kept staring back at him. His frown, though unmoving, seemed to deepen. His eyes were the only part of him moving. They followed Dickie as he entered the train and shuffled to the side, so he could lean with his back against the wall and eliminate any possibility that someone would push him out. He put three tourists in between himself and the aggressor. Just to be sure. “Sorry, apologies,” he kept saying as he wiggled past them. A sharp whistle trilled in his ear; the doors closed with an unsatisfying thwomp. Then, slowly, the train started to move. 

He had made it. 

The train conductor started to speak unintelligibly over the intercom, and the babble filled Dickie with an unpleasant amalgamation of satisfaction and dread. He did not like paradoxical emotions. Outside, the landscape flashed by in stripes of dark purple skies, greyish yellow wheat fields, and silhouettes he could not quite make out. This is what he was leaving behind. He supposed he preferred it over what was to come, because in his mind, the future looked like TV static. Void. Though that was not entirely true. Dickie stuck his hand into his pocket and felt around for the instruction letter he had received. It was still there, and so he knew exactly where to go, and what to do. 

“I don’t have any feelings.” He murmured to himself. “Look how they treated me.” He nervously pulled his hand out of his pocket, as if the instructions would contain yet another alien imperative subduing him to a rule that was opposed to his own free will. It read:

---

BRAIN RESTITUTION CO.

Congratulations!

You have been selected to voluntarily participate in the mandatory “Chosen One Programme” in the famous capital of the Beldeguuz Canton, Switcherland. Follow the following instructions to be followed:

1. Exit your train at Beldeguuz-City Central Station
2. Wash face and hands at Free Public Toilet in the Central Station
(not reimbursed by BRC)
3. Take a cab or taxi to BRC HQ in Fizgole Alleé 57A
4. Clearly articulate the following code to our reception service

WARNING: Mentioning anything other than the provided code will result in immediate expulsion from the programme.

CODE: XX XX XX XXX (X)

Safe travels, and thanks to FatherLord HighFriend for gifting you the opportunity!

BRAIN RESTITUTION CO.

For those who will have been who they are, to become what they will be

---

A wave of gratitude and relaxation came over Dickie. He crumpled the instructions, electrified by a vigorous excitation. Smoothly, he slid hand in his pocket, and he savoured the fine texture of the wad. While intimately feeling around its contortions, he thought: “These instructions are clear enough for me. I used to have problems with stainless clarity, like the transparency of water. I used to be fettered to arbitrary abstractions getting in the way, pushing me around to assert my particular inclinations without greater care for what is deemed polite by social life at large. I was so impulsive, but now, I freely assume my mandatory subjugation by this foreign corporation. I am to be free at last.” His eyes. You should have seen his eyes. I think that which comes closest to a viable description is to denote them as white marbles marinated by a type of demonic possession, like those carried by followers in MegaChurches in the Nighted States.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to Beldeguuz-City Central Station!”

Dickie startled, and woke up from his dream-like state. “This is me.”

For a while now, worry had been growing in his gut like a bread rising in the oven. There were things to be done, important things. Dickie enjoyed executing necessary tasks, especially if those tasks bore an authoritative air, but only if he knew how to. The horror of attempting something new, meticulously following every instruction, and still failing, was grotesque to him. 

To subdue himself, he had to find the Free Public Toilet in the Central Station as soon as possible. “At least there is no wrong way to execute step 2 of the BRC instructions,” Dickie thought. “I just need to find the Free Public Toilet and wash my face and hands.” Bravely carrying himself across the platform and down into Beldeguuz-City Central Station, he kept his eye out for signs alluding to toilets. He found none. No iconography of the bowl, no little man and woman figurines, not even an abbreviation. This could not be! When Dickie had circled the entire station hall twice, he felt a quiet desperation dawn on him. He reread his instructions to make sure that he had not missed a clue somewhere, and kept looking. Twenty minutes passed. He considered asking for help, but feared the BRC would expel him from the programme if they found out about his incompetence. After forty minutes, Dickie let out a high-pitched whining noise. The lament sickened him and drove him to the threshold of the station, on the verge of fresh air. 

Six feet away, built against the outer wall of the Beldeguuz-City station hall, stood a crooked white cube with a red-blue flashing sign that read, Free Public Toilet. Dickie exhaled and felt his face contort into a mellow smile. 

Clean-faced and fresh-handed, Dickie watched the streetscape of Beldeguuz-City float by. There were tall grey buildings reaching up into the clouds, loudly decorated with painted storefronts at the base level, but blatantly boring when you looked up. The taxi driver was humming something cheerful and it was hard not to sing along, though out of respect for the unspoken rule of pretending not to be in the same car together, Dickie resisted the urge. Instead, soundlessly tapped his fingers along with the cheerful rhythm. He had been chosen for Restitution, and although he was unsure what ‘restitution’ meant exactly, he did know that words starting with the re- prefix oftentimes had to do with improvement, like revival and restoration and rejuvenation. Morphologically speaking, his life could only improve. 

“Fizgole Alleé” said the taxi driver in his thick Beldeguzian accent, which was sensually ugly. Before Dickie had paid him, he drove off into the sunrise and his cheerful song faded in the distance. Befuddled, Dickie turned his back to the growing light. He had been left to his own devices in front of a ginormous concrete building, imperially decorated with pillar facades. A sleek blue door awaited him, windowless and without a letterbox. It was a tall slab, so smooth that Dickie could vaguely make out his own reflection in the blue surface. Next to it, a small intercom had been built into the wall. ‘Brain Restitution Co.’, a name tag below the intercom read. And below that, in the sober helvetica font: ‘For those who will have been who they are, to become what they will be.’

“Code please.” An exhausted and disinterested voice said through the intercom. Dickie looked away from the in-built camera. He finally felt seen, yet he did not like it. It awakened a novel affect in him – the feeling of spiritual nakedness. “I am here for the restitution programme, I have a note, one moment please.” “Code. Please.” The intercom sounded again. Dickie raised his left eyebrow in astonishment. “How come I am feeling rushed?!” He blurped out while still looking away, wagging a finger at the intercom. He clenched his fist and slid it into his pocket. His hands were sweaty. The amount of liquid would definitely spoil the wad and make the code unreadable. “Excuse me, do you have a napkin?” He said. Yet he knew he could not even find the wad in the first place, let alone clean it with a napkin. “Code needed for entry is necessary for the door to open. Code please,” said the intercom again. “What the hell am I on about, why does everything worsen? And why now, why to this pedantic extremity?” He loudly exclaimed. “Dickie, cut the bullshit,” a familiar voice sounded from behind. A shiver went through his spine as he felt a hand pat his shoulder. “I got two tickets left, I would’ve come along with my fiancée, but during our discussions on the progress made in the Nigerian oil fields, she wouldn’t cave to my claim that green oil is the future. Ugh, green coal is nonsense. Flying money pigs don’t grow on trees, let alone a wife in crude oil. Hence, I decided to come alone.”

The intercom beeped happily. Slort stretched himself out by putting his hands as high as he could and let out a profoundly primal roar, making sure to show he was at the zenith of comfort. “Orghshoshmaloch!”

The door opened. 

Dickie, with Slort’s arm around his shoulder, entered the building with each step in unison, insofar as Dickie could keep up with Slort’s arrhythmic pace.

The vast and baroque hallway made its impression on Dickie.

“Woah.”

As Dickie attempted to halt, Slort’s strong hands pulled him away. Slort did not have the patience to savour the architectonic beauty surrounding him.

“Don’t sweat it Dick.”

“I am not.” he said, while wiping his face, undermining the content of what he said with the form of his bodily actions. The way in which he pretended to be confident in his obviously pathetic shape repulsed Slort more than ever before. They would walk on for 20 minutes. At the very end of the hallway stood a statue of FatherLord HighFriend’s son, Peter. “The turd,” Dickie whispered to himself while seeing Slort’s deep bow humiliate his purported nonchalance, or worse, sarcastic disrespect for dominance hierarchies. Slort pretended not to notice any of it. He stayed in his bowing position for a few more seconds, looking like some sort of carpentry tool. He felt that making Dickie wait a bit more was his appropriate punishment. “A 90-degree angle is not only a right angle, but also the right angle par excellence!” He exclaimed while raising his torso and coming to stand upright again. Then, he started pinching his eyes to make out the details of the face of the gargantuan statue, or, pretended to, as it was merely to show Dickie the amount of esteem he had for the FatherLord’s son. The building had its own internal metro system. Fortunately, the station was right beside the statue. They took their seat while the apparent conductor somehow disapprovingly stared at them. As the metro rode away, Slort kissed Dickie on the cheek, showing a sign of maternal love that he knew Dickie had been missing out on in his childhood.

They arrived at the station, entered the waiting room and sat down on the sofa. Slort immediately decided to stand up again. “I’m done here,” he said while doing jumping jacks. An impeccable performance, given the speed with which he was enacting it. Dickie stretched out his hands, yet Slort turned 90 degrees and marched into the metro tunnel. Slort felt conflicted about his friendship with Dickie. And Slort had nothing to do in the building; his brain had been restituted since birth, and so was not in need of further operations, unlike his fiancée. And, having been born from BRC employees, he felt certain that Dickie’s participation in the programme was a lost cause. As he heard Dickie call his name from the waiting room, Slort increased the pace of his stride and tensed his muscles to intensify the dominant appearance of his military march. Why you might ask? To be ready to belittle anyone inhibiting his determinateness, even, no, especially Dickie. While striding through the metro tunnel, he noticed Dickie let out a final squeal, which he knew was common to Dickie when he did not have his way with Slort. Yet Slort also knew that the intonation of this squeal was of a defeated type. So he relaxed his posture, decreased his pace, walked through the emergency exit in the metro tunnel, out into a meadow. He took off his clothes, stood still, widened his nostrils, inhaled deeply, and like the scary lion he envisioned himself to be, opened his mouth and let out a gratifying and majestic roar. After which he twirled around a few times, let himself fall with his back to the grass, and tenderly scoffed at the insignificance of the outer world, grinned, and dozed off.

The act of doing absolutely nothing is, in some cases, incredibly useful, as self de-actualization makes space for renewed individual fulfilment. The act of waiting, however, is in most cases tedious, even harmful in some, because the paradoxical combination of rising anticipation and unfathomable boredom is difficult for the human brain to endure. Dickie wondered whether his brain restitution would make waiting easier for him in the future. There was no clock in the waiting room; only a faux-leather beige little bench, one very silent door, and a chandelier made of vertically hanging fluorescent lights. He was tapping his index fingers together, wiggling his toes, and clicking his tongue. A one-man orchestra playing the Neurotica. 

“Richard Apemantus O’Briar?” someone called from behind the door. It was a woman; her voice was slightly high-pitched from the strain of kindness. 

“Yes?” Dickie asked. When nobody replied, he rose from the bench and slowly approached the door. He raised his fist to knock. 

The door flew open to reveal a tall, lean woman wearing a skin-tight white space overall and a bonnet. One blonde curl escaped the haircover behind her left ear, and it was shaped so perfectly that Dickie thought she must have placed it there on purpose. The woman was beaming at him with teeth even whiter than her overalls. “Welcome. Slort has told us so much about you, Richard.” 

“It’s Dickie,” he said, realising too late that he had just ruined his chances of no longer being named a diminutive. 

The woman placed her hand on the small of his back and gently led him through the door into a dimly lit hallway. His eyes sluggishly adjusted to the darkness. They started walking side by side at a pace that was slightly too slow for him. “Well then, Dickie, as you know, FatherLord HighFriend has kindly chosen you as a candidate for brain restitution,” the woman said. “We would like to start the procedure shortly – is that alright with you, Dickie?” 

“Where is Slort?” 

“Oh, no idea, darling. Now, it is our strict policy to share as little information as possible about the procedure beforehand. FatherLord HighFriend finds it crucial that the candidate find their own purpose in the restitution process. Influencing your expectations now could harm the rest of your journey.” 

“I don’t think I have any expectations,” Dickie said.

“Wonderful!” said the woman. They stopped in front of a solid wall, which turned out to be a wall-textured door. She placed a keycard against the stone, and a green light flickered in the top-right corner. The door opened soundlessly, revealing bright white light, and the woman’s voice suddenly sounded very far away as she said: “Go on in. He’s waiting for you.”

Whilst jitteringly entering, being ecstatically frantic, trembly knowing himself to be emasculated, but simultaneously mantic, he thought:

“Now the time has come, the time has come for me, and only for me. Personally – I don’t feel like I am ready yet, I feel a sense of perturbance, a sense of protruding, too. Whatever I have been missing out on, it has not been a part of me, I aligned with it, and condoned its will for the sake of higher-”

“Slort!” FatherLord HighFriend interrupted.

“I am Dickie!” Immediately taken aback by his rude and unthoughtful abreaction, he froze.

“Slort!” Another FatherLord HighFriend pounced on him, knocking Slort, no, I mean Dickie, to the ground.

“Get me out of here!” Dickie, or Slort, whoever you want at this point. – They are all the same to me now. Vague screen memories tend to melt different singularities into a mess of particular colour palettes, but in a mix, a melting pot wherein each colour loses its vitality without succumbing to the Great Brown.

First things first, it was turgid, turned sped up, so I spat it all up and got fed up – the Chinese tourist did not stop to frown. Dickie thought himself as high brow, but high-flownness was not wherein he excelled, not by far, it was more or less far-fetched, it might all feel smashed, mashed up together now, don’t get riled up, I’m hardly impressed. Wow.

Condemn the condo and expect a slugfest. High friends, are fatherly. The totem erects because the Lord of the forebearers was unbearingly, daringly, making the One in hole – the mole digs deeper and does take its due when due time’s dully and it all seems like folly but the continuation relapses, transgresses and fends off what clashes.

“The sceptre swings and I cling to the crown!” FatherLord HighFriend A cried out.

“I am greater and more cruel! I challenge thee to a fencing duel, take this sabre and bow!” FatherLord Highfriend B slyly shouted.

As soon as the poetic function of a discourse dominates, overtakes what the emotive adresser attempts to narrate, each signifier in line is but a shrine for what is yet-to-come. Wait, hold up, here, a last word: tricky, no, fat chance – bait.

“Now wait just a second,” Dickie stammered as FatherLord HighFriend A and B had at each other. They swirled around him in a piercing dance — there was one, two, many FatherLords — the world was a kaleidoscope, visually and sonically. “Cuse-excuse me! Excuseme! I ididn’t come all this way justo watch you two have a dis a greement!” 

The two FatherLords slowly lowered their sabres and turned their heads in complete synchronicity, they might as well have been mirror reflections. They took three steps toward him, blending into One. The FatherLord HighFriend handed Dickie one of the sabres. Dickie took it and held it like he would a wand. He tried sticking the blade out in front of him. 

“You have to treat the sword as an extension of yourself.” FatherLord HighFriend pointed his sabre at Dickie’s and started to draw tiny circles with the tip, around Dickie’s blade. “The institution for restitution counts on your intuition to bring the process to fruition, Richard. Bow in earnest or ironically towards iconography, it does not matter to me – this, Slort knows. Whichever way the wind blows, straighten your back, Richard. You have to treat the sword as an extension of the Self, replacing something that you lost, perhaps. It is a temporary solution, though not quite restitution-”

Dickie frowned. “I starkly dislike physical violence.” 

At this, the FatherLord HighFriend laughed and opened his arms wide. “Defeat me. You might find fulfilment, Dickie. Become me, and be restored.”

Dickie became him, and was abhorred. There, on the floor, lay a deflated body delicate as a popped balloon. The body was cartoonishly still – an uncanny semblance of a person. A hunk of lowly, stinking meat, and Dickie towered over him high and mighty. 

“Is this what they call the state of separation? Is this not precisely a residue of the self-alienated dread of post-mortem narration?”

Dickie’s eyelids came down, as he was carried away by the relaxation of his receding frown. What now, he thought, what now? He reached into his pocket, and found that the wad of instructions was truly gone.

Then, he finally awoke from the dream that was his former life, into his truest dream. Wherever he went, wherever he used to leak, he would now seep. As ever, he was still made out to be a freak, yet he refound his foundation time and time and time again, each as ever slightly oblique, rearranging his shape, reaping the misfitted benefits. Time and time and time again.¹

1. The authors took turns writing each scene. The one rule during the writing process was that they could not speak about that which was not written yet, or what was to come.