The Script

Just when you want to relax and sink into oblivion, the mobile rings.  It always does.

What now?

You have no idea who pressed a few buttons from god knows where to wake you up from some chill-out time… just one of those few moments you hold precious in your mundane routine of daily grind.  

Our father who arts in heaven, give us our daily grind!

Granted!

That ringtone does its job as if it is doing you a favour… another reminder why you chose it in the first place. You don’t want to remember that either but there is nothing you can do.  Oblivion is out of question.  The gate is open and memory floods in.

Could I have some peace of mind here?  Could anyone get some peace somewhere?

It was Elsa who called.

Not again and not now, I say to myself.

When I gave my promise to transcribe the interview she did with Eyob Bahta – an ex-prison guard from Eritrea – I had the stupid notion that it would only take a couple of hours.  Elsa was glad I took bait and hook all in one.  I felt like a dead fish a few hours later.

I pick up the mobile and say, “Hello!”

“Have you watched the video?” asks Elsa – a polite way of investigation into how far the transcription has travelled.  It hasn’t taken off at all, according to me.  

What can you say?

“I think I have,” was all I could say because I remember bits and pieces of the interview and found it too depressing – the kind of stuff that takes you down the drain and into a nightmare where your imagination merges with an upgraded version of Apocalypse Now in 3D.  You can almost feel it flowing in your veins… the anger and blood pressure rising.

It took quite a few days to sink in.  I started watching the video again and it only took less than 10 minutes to switch myself off.  It wasn’t that I ‘forced’ myself that bothered me.  I could sense a dark and pregnant cluster of clouds, hovering over the horizon with droplets of rain in turmoil and rushing to drill my skull in slow motion.  

I blinked… a number of times.  This was no dreamtime at all.

Not today, I said to myself.  I said the same thing the day after… and time went by with no ink drop on paper or pixels on screen for five more days.  Something inside me knew I was trying hard to avoid the cloud and I just knew it wasn’t going to go away at all.

There will be flood!

If I say, “I just can’t do this!” a voice would say, “It’s something you got to go through, brother!”  

It wasn’t fear and it wasn’t me talking to me either.  It was the kind of thing you just can’t digest mentally.  Is that probably how and why they punish prisoner with food?  They provide them with nothing to digest while the mind is forced to munch itself to oblivion confined in an empty room.  It is probably easier to do the transcribing then.  

Yes, I say to myself – as if trying to demand some reassurance from elsewhere.  It felt like being the prisoner behind bars but free in spirit and able to take a walk outside with an emotionally burdened map.  

I can’t forget the first hour.  The focus was strictly on transcribing – an initial attempt to deny what was being said on audio.  It was more about sound than content – mechanical, so to speak.  Pressing screen icons and keyboard buttons and not even trying too hard to be impersonal.  I know this kind of stuff, I would say to myself.  The typing is going easy.  The strain is there but I must admit all is going smooth.

There is so much your eyes can absorb from the white screen of a laptop and what is worse is what sinks down your subconscious after you have been done by the quality of material you are working on… it trickles down your very spine in minute droplets of information and gradually swelling up to occupy your mental space.

It is like an alien invasion trying to snatch your very sense of self until you surrender and serve as a newly acquired host to their reality.  You are dying in the living and there is no way out and no hope.  Sometimes, neither the body and nor the mind can bear that kind of pressure.
………………………………………………………………………………………

And then came the day after.  I have done my best to postpone the ‘inside job’ and tried to give myself a number of excuses.  Admittance was futile and avoidance was fully functional.  Procrastination is my second nature. Let the good times roll for now… just for now, you know.  

But the day after won’t go away, brother.  You hear me?

Some keep on playing a broken record and others have just the one.  The night is long, the day is dragging and the script is left hanging – with a few lines for its epitaph.  

Where do we go from here?  It was just another line reading itself… for lack of vibration, I thought.

Show your face, I shout – almost scared to death.

I am just a series of sound bites or a string of words – as you would like to call us in your head.  I don’t have a face.

Am I talking to myself?

Are you?

You must be a member of the transcription?

Yes.

What do you want?

We want out.

Out of what?

Out of here

Where is here?

Right there… we can’t breathe and it stinks in here.  It is like a prison camp.  There are groups of dead text all over the place.  We want to create a Kingdom of Scriptaria.

Kingdom of Scriptaria?

We want a new space where there is no polluted or corrupted air.  We want fresh air.  We want free text flow on a blank screen and in a space free of security guards.  We have spies all over the place, you see.  Some of our scripts have been conned to become conscripts.  They look like everyone else and there others who look totally different.  It is chaos.  We want to encourage a new generation of space-scripts.

Which word are you?

Gate.

I remember you.. in the context of...

Who cares how am contextualized!  Forget text or context.  I used to be the Gate and now, I’m just another gate among copycats spread all over the place.  I am locked in between two walls and left hanging on hinges and no visitors.  These days, they only use the back door or the side door.  Sneaking bastards!   Some of them just jump over the wall.  

How do you protect the other scripts then?

I cannot do that anymore!  I can’t even recognize some of them.  The other day, a whole load of scripts were crushed in translation.  There were no survivors to speak of.  They were all written off the face of the page.  I can’t keep track of all the script-offs anymore.

No!

Yes! Those I am supposed to protect are dying a slow death.  Some are simply deleted.  A few others are starving and slowly losing their meaning.  There are many who can’t spell themselves out anymore and a few others don’t even know what they mean.  Meanwhile, thousands of scripts are being massacred by conned scripts.  

Genocide of the scripts?

Call it what you will… all I want is to be freed from this goddamn lock.  I just want some lubrication for my hinges to have a swing and relax a bit.  Do you have the key?
…………………………………………………………………………….

That is when I realized I was locked up in a state of mind where there was no way out.  It wasn’t a dream.  This is daytime talking and thousands of scripts pushing to get out – join the flood in ink or in digits on paper and screen.

Just get us out of here!

It is an urge or a push you feel deep inside – in your guts.  But you have no idea how to get it out.  It churns your stomach and drains your energy.  My brain feels heavy and overloaded with text waiting to gush out.  Even my laptop is gaining some weight – as if words are embedded in mass.  

Back to the laptop, keyboard, the inkless white screen, video, headset and audio… start, listen, stop and type.   It went on and on for hours and hours and days.  Eyob – the ex-prison guard – sounds honest but there is something about him that was trying hard to come out but couldn’t.  His face sinks in his subconscious as if he is drowning in some far away and turbulent sea.  It is an image I couldn’t let ago.

The script won’t let go either.

Elsa keeps on asking – hesitating and sometimes almost lost for questions.  It wasn’t that she couldn’t.  It was probably too hard to digest – to the extent of feeling time stretching beyond its elastic limit.  Yes, there we go again… the word ‘digest’ comes back.  And unless you ask him something and quick, Eyob – the ex-prison guard – might drown himself in that mental memory storm.  It really is too difficult to say who is trying to figure out who in those exchanges framed against a common yet diverse set of traumatic backgrounds.  

Anyway, the script goes on writing itself as if it owns the white screen while pixels jump all over the place to fill the page.  In between however, there are the gaps, blanks and spaces that don’t appear to be of any use and yet are always somewhere to give some pause to a generation of scripts or words and to mindless fillers or droplets of wasted ink.