Day 139 - Babel - Chapter 35 (1701 words)

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BABEL

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 35

Benny did not really want to go anywhere near any of the people he could see, it was eerily silent as he walked from where he had been standing underneath the giant spaceship to the abandoned houses of Big Bay Road which faced across the harbour to the airport. He had seen the plane taking off from there when had been on the hilltop, looking up and around at the world as it now was.

He had no plans to go any further and find out any more, but he could neither go back nor stay where he was the way things were. The things that he had subsisted on, the birds and animals that flourished in the new world order were fleeing the site where the ship was, where it was hurting the land and unbalancing the spirit. Now that he stood under under and he got the measure of it's size and the power that emanated from it, he felt the need to move forward and to find another home. The problem was what would be his new home, what felt right to him changed every few hours.

At first he thought that moving up the coast was a good idea, but there was a pull to the land under the ship, like he was drawn to the hole that it was creating underneath itself. When he got across the narrow entranceway to the Manukau and stood underneath it, then his sense of home and place changed again. The voices, the noise and the rushing sound he heard almost constantly in his ears, the one that had been there for years and years, before the Babel, before he went 'Bush', before he dropped out of humanity, had dropped to a whisper.

When he sat in the very middle, where the ground was weakest now, where the earth shook like sand under his feet and the grass was having trouble keeping itself rooted to the ground, that was like the eye of his own personal storm and he extraneous noise, the ones he always knew were linked to his madness, disappeared altogether. Like slowly turning up the volume knob on a stereo the noise increased slightly every few hundred meters from the centre point below the Alien Ship. At the periphery it was still quiet, and only when he was all the way out from under it and well beyond it's shadow's circumference did the full volume return.

Benny sat in the middle for a long while, he even fell asleep there rolling from a sitting position to completely rested and relaxed, his eyes drooping slowly and blinking, longer and longer every time until they closed and he keeled sideways to sleep peacefully for longer than he even knew. When he woke and the voices were not there, the noise had gone and he was at peace he felt more rested and better able to face the world than ever before. He saw beyond the land where he sat, the softening ground and the pain of the land he first perceived was now at odds with the calm and balance he felt within himself.

He returned to the hill, and could see that there were still people at the airport and that they were bustling about working on a plane, for what reason he had no idea, but it seemed like the focal point for everything he needed to move towards. There were no voices arguing, no one jockeying for position in his head anymore, not while he was here at his nirvana central anyway. The need he felt pulling him towards the spot, the centre of the ship, was now pushing him to see the airport, telling him he needed to go there. Except that it was not telling him, not really, he knew what voices in his head sounded like, how they spoke, commanded and demanded things from him, and this was not like that. This was a feeling, and he we was guided by his feelings and his connection with the land.

So now was it the land that was telling him where to go or was it the ship talking to him through the land? He could not tell, but it was more subtle and guided by feelings, sensations and images rather than by the imperious or paranoid commands that were flung into his brain for most of his life as an adult. The affect of those things in his head, the things he knew were wrong and could be dulled and blunted with drugs, those voices were what drove him from the human race in the first place, where he did not have to listen to the sniping about what everyone's agendas were. This felt better, like he was being nudged or guided to do what felt right to him, he felt no suspicions about the intentions of the feelings, whether he was being paranoid or falling prey to the sections of his brain that were miswired in some way. This felt better, this made Benny feel better.

He walked all the way to Big Bay and walked the length of the beach there, finding a boat ramp but no boats to be seen. It took him the better part of the day, pushing through the sheds and garages of the houses along Big Bay Road, and he found what he was looking for, a canoe. It was a decent stretch of water to canoe across to get to the airport, and he followed the sandbars, staying in the shallow sandbanks over risking the deeper dug channel, he knew the weather could turn fast on him and force him into a more dangerous and life threatening sea at a moments notice, so he took a bit of a long way around the edge of the shipping lane, the one that was empty and unused. He stayed around the edge until he thought he was wandering too far south and then with a careful eye on the weather and a backwards glance to the giant spaceship he took the plunge and made a bee line for the southern tip of the airport peninsula.

It was getting on in the afternoon when he reached the jetty that stuck out from the outer edge of the runway that stuck out into the Manukau. The sniping was back though the further he got from the ship and he started doubting the wisdom of his actions, maybe the ship had gotten to him, maybe that whole trust and reasonable feelings that had guided him had in fact blinded him. He recognised that on some level that the nagging was the symptom, the same signs of the troubled part of his brain that he had all his life. Away from the calming influence of the ship though, it was coming back with a vengeance and the voices were now so much harsher, so more desperate to get his attention and ten times as vicious with their suggestions. They were punishing him for being cut off from him for the days that he was soaked in the rays of ambivalent calm from the saucer, and this was payback.

Benny followed the jetty all the way and only got out on to the land when he ran out of water, and it was then that he noticed that the voices quieted down again, as he walked further into the peninsula, further on the ground and away from the harbour the quieter they got. There was no ship above him, and the feelings returned, with some extra certainty that he was doing the right thing. As soon as he had got off of the surface of the water, the pain and intensity of his own brain lessened significantly. He felt connected to the ship again, and now that he was on the land he felt more like the real Benny was back again, the Benny he had not seen since he was in his late teens.

He walked slowly up the tarmac of the runway towards the terminal buildings seeing even at this distance that there were people there and it was the right thing to do to approach them, it was a gentle push he felt in his legs, propelling them forward to make contact with the locals. He had not seen a human being for a while now, the animals were his companions and his meals, all rolled into one. A companion animal was never going to be a meal and a meal never got upgraded to a companion to avoid the executioners axe, but that was the cold sum of his relationships in the bush. He was unsure how he would communicate and what it would be about, with these people, the leftovers of humanity that had survived whatever it was that had severely depleted humanity to the remnants that barely registered these days, but he felt that it was right to let them speak to him.

No that was not it, was it? They would not be speaking to him, he just needed to be near them to meet them, to be part of their company. To touch another human being, in no needy or demanding way, but to simply reach out and connect with any one of them physically, that was the compulsion. To touch, embrace and find the connection. That was it.

The chance came sooner than he expected, a golf cart with a single person on it drove towards him in an unerringly straight line to where he was walking towards the terminal. The cart closed the gap between them in short order and it stopped a few feet away from him allowing the occupant to stand clear of the cart as Benny kept moving forward, not breaking stride and not changing pace, just walking all the way into a hug with the woman who opened her arms, not smiling or grimacing, just opening up and surrendering to the embrace with a man who had not showered or changed clothes for months.

Benny's world exploded with information and in the middle of the hug as it all came flooding into him he swore out loud.

In English.