“Don’t you go anywhere, bud,” said Aleku seriously. “We need a proper chat after this. It’s high time I let you in on what I am truly thinking.”
The bright white lights of the corridor hit at every angle upon Rod’s dirty, fungi-ridden skin, sinking into him like a heavy, sprawling mass of hands in a clinical, sterile hospital ward.
They had been walking down the long corridor, directly opposite to the server room where Lena and Cee had threatened Rod with his life. They had now reached the balcony overlooking the ground floor, which was spacious and lighted by gorgeous chandeliers dangling from the ceiling, and the beginnings of morning light through the numerous 80-foot windows, over which each was stained with gorgeous primary-colour designs like a gothic sanctuary. It reminded Rod of a time when he, Aleku and Jam went for a long hike in their small village when they were much younger, before their university days, and they had stood watching for some moments looking over the city at a great distance when it was dark, with the red, white and blue moving lights of the cars, and how peaceful they had been, how naive they had been, how innocent.
“Look here, my good friend,” Aleku said, turning around to him surprisingly, “what is your opinion on me?
The young man was taken aback by the suddenness and randomness of the question, forcing him to reply quickly, “Since when do you care what I think about you? You have never cared one bit – in fact you have cared the absolute opposite to anything that I would think about you because of that big ego of yours.”
Sophia covered her mouth and hid her smile. Aleks chuckled. “Well, I’m going to tell you about my plan, what I actually plan to do with the system to liberate humanity,” he interrupted. “I don’t want you thinking that I’m only interested in acquiring wealth and power. “No,” he shook his head solemnly, but still wearing a pathetic smile. “My plan is to free humanity from their shackles.”
“Free humanity?” said Sophia, taken aback by the suddenness of the statement, but intrigued by the answers to the questions the man had created with his speech.
Rod narrowed his eyes in suspicion and held onto his tongue, however, for his gut told him a different story. “What are you playing at?” he thought; but then he thought again immediately after that thought with a counter thought, accompanied by a feeling of guilt, “Am I not judging him? Maybe this man is really doing something for the good of humankind. Do I know him?”
“I’ll tell you the honest truth,” Aleku said. He flicked his forehead and sent the resultant beads of sweat down a different path than to what they were intended for. Rod saw them land on the rich red rug, which draped elegantly over the staircase, drying instantly and disappearing from view. “But in exchange for telling you everything,” he added, “I want to know everything about your intentions: why are you here?”
Sophia looked at him sideways, keeping her face neutral as she walked beside him. “There’s a limit to what I can confess to you Mr-”
Suddenly Aleku raised the desert eagle to the woman’s temple. “You’re my employee now. You work for me. The sooner you realise it, the better.”
At first the woman said nothing, but then she gulped and said, so faintly that Rod could barely hear above his own thundering heart, “I understand.”
“Good,” said Aleku, lowering his weapon. “You shall meet the girls. Hm...I thought they’d be here,” he said, resting his hands on his hips. “Strange.”
“Would they not be in bed,” Sophia asked suddenly, her face flushed and beginning to glisten with sweat.
“You mentioned my daughters, Rod, where did they run off to?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. He did not want another encounter with those children, for he was afraid of them and also wanted to keep the millions of pounds offered to him. “I best leave,” he thought. “Aleku won’t even remember today when he wakes up.”
But Rod had come increasingly nervous and apprehensive over the duration of his time spent in the mansion, especially because of his time spent with the teenager girls in combination with the drunken antics of his friends and their friends. He did not like the fact that his friends had other friends beside he, but he congratulated himself for at least making the effort in trying to socialise with them. He was aware of how false he was being even to himself in these thoughts: this sort of meta commentary of his own thoughts was not a new phenomenon, it had been going on ever since he was a young teenager. He used to replay conversations in his head over and over when he was eighteen, trying to understand how to operate in them. When he had asked his classmate if they did something similar, they laughed at him and called him weird. For a long time did they try to become his friend by interacting with him during philosophy class, but he could only give surface level answers, for he was always afraid of them. That was his life in a nutshell – afraid of being outed...For a long while he thought about his next action, ruminating over it. The two people in front of him were obviously drunk, and the man held a live firearm too. Rod was reassured by the fact that Aleku did care about him a lot, for why else would he invite him to his mansion, so no matter how angry Aleku got he wouldn’t shoot his childhood friend. Although, upon second thought, which made Rod’s face grimace, Aleku had almost accidentally blown his brains out with a rifle back in his father’s home in Poland many years ago. This was not a malicious act, but an act of immense stupidity.
Almost beside him, near the gold-rimmed hand railing of the balcony, there was the spy, whom he saw in a different light than he did before. Her right leg was slightly trembling, although one would have to stare at it for long enough to see any movement out of the ordinary, and her hands were tightly bound up in a tangled cluster of twitching fingers behind her back. All at once he heard her utter completely unintelligible words while staring off to the side with unmoving eyes. This was itself strange to Rod; the man they both were speaking to was a couple of metres away bending over the handrailing at his waist with his head obscured from view, and thus there was no one for her to be speaking to. Of course she could just be someone who talks to themselves when they were nervous, who rattles off unintelligible matter to calm their anxiety, but he could not shake off the suspicion that the woman was talking to somebody else, and that if he did not leave soon then he would certainly be even more worse off than he was before; the woman began talking a little louder, and with various details of the events of this night and those of which only could have been gathered from an intense interrogation of Aleku.
“Let’s start with the crown prosecutor,” she said, seemingly unphased or unaware of Rod’s eyes upon her. “He tried to kiss our target’s twenty-year-old daughter. Yep, I saw it with my own eyes, so I can confirm the accuracy of this... Yep. Uh-huh. Yep. So, he left the podcast room, where we all were gathered, and I later found out that he ran into her at the front door, and that’s where he...Yeah, it was disgusting. He is a disgusting individual. He tried to forcibly kiss her. Then he proposed to her, and... How do I know if I didn’t see it? I saw the CCTV footage. We need to stop these two men from ruining more lives with their behaviour. Yep. It is utterly unacceptable I agree with you. The other guy’s a total wimp so there’s no fear there. Yeah, I mean he is a nice guy from what I can tell...”
And she went on for many more minutes describing how utterly weak and pathetic he was, how if she got into a boxing match with him he would run away screaming; how Aleku seems to surround himself with people who are less physically and socially capable than himself, but makes sure to have people more intellectual than him so that he can exploit them easily of their ideas and creativity and so on. The spy chattered on, saying that Aleku had sixteen daughters, whom he there was no doubt as to why he kept from the public eye, for he was preparing them to become idols through rigiorous exploitation. And the worst of it all was that there were rumors that they weren’t even his real children... He kept them locked up in his mansion, even building his own shopping malls on his land so that they didn’t venture out.
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Rod wanted to correct the woman, saying that young girls do much more than shop, but he held his tongue because he thought that perhaps she wouldn’t appreciate the correction.
“There’s a conundrum for you,” cried the woman suddenly, and laughed, forgetting that she was in company.
Aleku lifted himself to his feet and turned toward Sophia, who he gave a look of displeasure to. “Why are you laughing?” he asked as he searched the pockets in his pants. “Damn, I left my cigars in the podcast room. Go be a good friend and fetch ‘em for me, would you?” he said to Rod.
“But, Aleku-”
“Just do what you’re told,” snapped Aleku with a pained face. “Honestly, you would have never done well in my construction company. You don’t know how to shut up and just do what you’re told. This is why you’re a failure in life, and why your parents are ashamed to be seen with you.”
He and the woman began discussing about business. Sophia spoke to him with a boyish charm that completely enchanted the billionaire and was laughing continually at his attempts at humour and seduction. Aleku grew red in face, but was all the more enamored, listening to her with great interest about her home country, and in turn telling her about his childhood (all things he never breathed a word about to his closest childhood friends) and his hopes and dreams. Rod stayed put and listening fervently. Aleku once again had to tell Rod to go get his cigars. The young man began to walk backwards slowly, eyeing them both suspiciously and with confusion. From what he gathered, the woman was from a small country near the border of Russia, was in her thirties, and owned a small business selling Molotovs to the resistance in that country. She was supporting all her family on what the business brought in, but then started gaining more favourable contracts with the militants in exchange for certain favours. Soon enough, she was doing things for the higher ups that she could not breathe a word about to anyone else in fear of torture and execution of all her family. She wanted out, but they wouldn’t let her; and so, then she struck a deal with the Invaders, who were and are currently invading her country, to sell out the resistance in exchange for her freedom. To do this, however, the Invaders told her that the satellites in space are giving the resistance a strong advantage since they can use the internet provided by these instruments to track and monitor the movements of Invaders soldiers. She found out, then, through a little research that these satellites were owned and operated by none other than a business tycoon from England. And this business tycoon was an Eastern European like herself, and yet was the reason that she could not stop her favours for the resistance.
“Why did you want to stop helping the resistance?” asked Aleku with a look of concern.
“It is not that I do not want my country to be free,” she said, “but these favours I was doing...” she looked down at the floor, her face turning white with shame, “I cannot ever breathe about.”
Later on, Rod happened to discover the reason for Sophia’s arrival to the mansion, her desire to meet with Aleku, and why she was intent on selling out her country. Of course, Rod himself had no qualms about that, for he had long discovered that nations are a fabrication of the mind, put there by the state to control its subjects. Ideological subjugation. No longer, Rod went on thinking, does the state control its citizens through violence, though it will if it comes down to it, but through authority, whose credibility is enforced by ideology. Now, Rod pondered to himself, imagining that there was an opposition to his presupposition that the ideology is necessarily false – as if that was his only reason for using the term, ‘ideology’ and not truth! Oh, Rod smiled at this counterpoint, this attack upon the strong walls of reason he had so readily built up and fortified in his mind. It was a very simple and ordinary thing to argue against, so much so was it utterly unexceptional and lacking substance, of critical thinking, of real philosophical inquiry, that he laughed out loud; right there in the middle of the corridor did he laugh so triumphantly at this imaginary conversation. For many months now – nay, for many years now – he had felt, and then he had thought, that he was at the interim between the world that everyone else occupied, experienced, and the world beyond which there was no doubt to him existed: he was inside the walls, so to speak; utterly alienated...for, is it not true that the self is constructed by the social agents around it? What then, if all these social agents ruthlessly and mercilessly reject him all his life? Should he then turn to crime? Does he have a good reason? No, the state says, no, the people say, for he would be a bad person and deserving of punishment. But what if his life is punishment? What if every breath he takes is perpetuating only a life of living between two sets of plaster? No matter what he does, he thought grimly, no matter how much he has, he will always be living between two sets of plastered boards.
He scrunched his face, and thought some more, perhaps not a thing that he should have kept doing, but he thought of how the university did not offer anything to help people like him. All they did was offer counselling...but what good is counselling when the aggressor is the one offering the counselling?
Shaking his head, Rod reflected back onto the passing conversation between Sophia and Aleku, all that he had heard before they had disappeared from earshot. The woman had four brothers and four sisters, all of whom were significantly younger than her, and all of whom were still there in her worn-torn country. She had first discovered Instagram, and by extension all of the social media available to today’s market, through the internet provided by Aleku’s satellite scheme. It completely obliterated the small businesses in her market, for now everyone and their grandma could connect to the cheapest suppliers on the continent; the next thing she knew, her own and her neighbours’ businesses were run out due to people being able to get things cheaper from across the border. In order to survive, and hoping that the market interruption was just a fad, she sought out alternative means to earn money.
But Rod was suspicious of the woman. The traces of which remained in him, written upon his bronze face, long after he had departed from her, and her face but a faint memory in his mind; for he went back to thinking about that woman. Yet despite this changing awareness, he was always more alert to his surroundings for strange activity, from outside in his present time and to the rummages of the past which replayed in his mind like a horrific slideshow. He was rubbing his hairy, patchy chin when he was confronted with the sight of the basement door, the one in which he had entered through behind Lena. Then at once he was reminded of what he should do, and he turned to look over his shoulder at the way that he had come. For a little while he stood there petrified in case anyone should happen upon him since he was expected in two places at once by those most acquainted with him, and he thus stood there sweating from head to toe. When he had at last decided to leave the premises and keep the money that was promised to him, he felt an insurmountable disgust with himself, and suddenly extremely self-conscious of the fact that his love-handles spilled out of the sides of his t-shirt like an overbaked vanilla cupcake. He gripped onto them, his face wrinkling terribly, and squeezed and kneaded hard as though it was slime.
When he had reached the balcony once again, he did not see them expectedly, and he started down the steps. By this time, he was sweating incredibly and huffing and puffing; his pectorals underneath his worn and faded fabric were rising and falling with each step as though he was jumping up and down on the spot. It was a terrible, unfortunate sight, and he wondered how anyone could be attracted to him. His eyes naturally stuck to the floor, and his head low, as his heart thundered and clapped within his breast. But even if he lost weight, he reasoned, he would not be any better off than he was now – in fact, he would be even worse off because then he would have to justify his failure in attracting a mate, in attracting relationships! Oh, he fell slightly onto the handrail, bending at the waist and his head hanging over it, his widened eyes dangling from their sockets in abject fear and twisted pleasure: he was brought back to the past through this sudden action.
“I am fucking tired of being ignored,” he started suddenly, overwhelmed with memories of the people he met recently in university as part of a new hobby he had taken up the months prior. “They get all friendly with me,” he said, clawing his hands together as though he was sculping a clay pot or vase, but which was in actuality a mangled mess of instrumentality, “I am fucking sick of this society discriminating against me: Give me the fucking social goods. If one cannot communicate in this world according to its set of rules, then you’re a dead man. I am a man made sick by society, not a sick man in and of myself.” He finished his rant by gritting his teeth and snarling menacingly.