Chapter 1
Ifram Blest had sat in front of his home computer for a very long time. He wanted to start
writing the thoughts that had been occupying his mind lately. But he was afraid.
Outside it had begun to snow heavily. In spite of the weather conditions, he could see through
his living room window that the flyers were out in large numbers. The sky was aglow with their
bright multicoloured lights. They went by with great speed but soundlessly. People flying home
from work. It was rush hour.
He very tentatively punched a key and the first letter appeared on the luminescent yet mat
screen. He erased it quickly. Almost certain that what he wrote would immediately be known by
the burocrats at the Office for the Control of Systemic Irregularities, he was about to turn off
the computer. But a sudden impulse he knew was probably suicidal made his hand move rapidly
over the keyboard. The first sentence appeared on the screen. It contained one single,
silly question:
" What makes the writing of Jack Kerouac dangerous to read?"
His next impulse was to erase the sentence. But it was too late. The computer screen went a
dreadful crimsom and it remained frozen regardless of what combination of keys he pressed. He
shuddered with fear, realizing that he had been discovered. It was a crime to express any thing
in writing which was not an officially recogznized fact. All fiction had been long prohibited, as well
as any kind of philosophical questioning. And he, Ifram Blest, had just proven that he was an un-
balanced individual by doing what he had done. Yet he was feeling a kind of relief besides the
fear, because the truth was that he had been wishing desperately to go against the general
protocol which disallowed any written expression of uncertainty or useless imagining. Never
mind that the state prisons were full of people who had done just that, many of them waiting for
a labotomy to rid them of their asocial inclination to think unproductively and against the Rules
for The Maintenance of Systemic Harmony.
He knew they would come for him soon, although he couldn´t tell exactly when.
He unplugged the computer and got up. It was hot in the apartment and he went to the fridge
and took out a bottle of half frozen water from the freezer. He always kept a bottle of water
there, and took it out occassionally to prevent it from freezing completely. He couldn´t stand
lukewarm, or even tolerably cold, water. It had to be almost frozen to satisfy his thirst. And he
was always thirsty because, being a dialysis patient, he wasn´t allowed to consume more than
half a litre daily.
He took a sip and placed the bottle back in the freezer. Then he walked to the front door,
grabbed a thick long woolen coat from the coat hanger in the corner and put it on. Then he
walked out of the apartment where he lived by himself. Shutting the front door and walking
down the stairs to the ground floor, he felt the loneliness, the gloom and the
despair receeding behind him.
Ifram Blest, who had once had a wife and a child, was now an abandoned man. He did
not doubt that some fault in his character which he had failed to recognize had been the cause of
his wife´s decission to leave him, taking the child with her, but that awareness had not only come
to him too late, it also proved uselees to lessen his sense of failure and the grief from his loss. He
was a lonely man now. The world around him was grim, and very few things in life made any
sense to him anymore.
Yet he still enjoyed walking the streets of the ghetto at night.
The word ghetto, in the not so far past, had meant a place where people different from the
mainstream had been grouped together, within very defined physical boundaries, so that
they could be supervised or even kept apart from a more acceptable society. But it was different
now. A ghetto now was merely a numbered neighbourhood with its own Office for the
Maintenance of Systemic Harmony, where the citizens lived apparently well, but suffered the
constant surveillance of the so called Guides. These guides where in fact a sort of police force, but
they operated on a new set of beliefs and protocol . The Law was based on a theory which had
arisen right after the end of the Third Great War: that every accident and mishap and every
negative element affecting the correct course and outcome of any process, arose from an
uneducated and uncontrolled interference. Human lack of meticulousness and human
tendencies to wanton and impractical thougts and acts were at the root of all accidents and mis-
fortunes. Everything had to be done according to positive rules and regulations, from the
upkeeping of the environment, to the management of the wheather and, specially, the
thoughts, hidden or outwardly expressed, of each individual. There where no longer any visible
political leaders or clearly defined structures of power. The System itself was composed of an
infinity of grey individuals who dutifully did their jobs and thus procured its impeccable upkeep.
Those who were phisically unsound were carefully vigilated, given their tendency to morbid
emotions and especulative thinking. They all lived in Ifram Blest´s ghetto, which was number
62. It was a hard job the Guides had, keeping the anxious and wondering nature of those who
were ill, maintained alive by medication or machines, from causing alterations to the System.
There existed a generalized opinion that those who were infirm in any way should be put to
death for the sake of the well being and securityof the rest. But the Times of Brutal Inhumanity
were still remembered, and such a measure would have defeated the very purpose of the
System.
Ghetto 62 was nice enough, a clean place, but a place were people were picked off the streets
quite regularly, and subjected to labotomy more than frequently. It was above all a very quiet
neighbourhood where everybody minded what they said to everybody else.
No one was rich in the ghetto, yet no one starved. The rich lived in different areas, and they
were never seen by the common citizen. The rejuvenation od cells had become a fact, and it
was mandatory for everyone to undergo this procedure every ten years. Ifram Blest
himself looked and moved, according to the old standards, like a forty year old man, yet he was
almost one hundred and thirty. His mind however was full of such sadness and regret as no
person in a former era would have had a chance to know.
It had been in a time almost out of memory that people could look up and see an empty sky, and
draw a sense of wonder and calm from it. Whenever one observe the sky now, it was crossed by
countless flyers. They looked like symbols of fire , almost Biblical in their ominousness and
intensity. yet they were mere machines, and the human eye had no rest from them, Nor was
there any real darknessm because the many lights of the vast cities, which had long connected
with one another and taken over most of the world, reflected against the heavens, which was
forever a lacteous mother of pearl colour.
As he meandered along the cold, snowed in streets of ghetto 62, Ifram Blest could not help
feeling that the luminescence from the sky were actually lights meant to keep him visible to
people whom he could not see in return. He tried not to be afraid or irritated, but he would have
given anything to be able to walk in real darkness, undefined, himself a shadow.
He walked for a long time without a soul crossing his path. The silence was deafening. And the
fact that he could walk for so long without feeling tired or out of breath surprised him considera-
bly. ¿How could someone with end stage kidney failure, whose blood was taken out and put back
into his body by a machine in order to be detoxified, feel even remotely like a normal, healthy
person? Contrary to general belief, he understood that no disease affects everyone in the same
way.
Ifram Blest had always been a very strong individual. And he still was. His energy did not
originate in the body alone, and he was secretely aware of this. A sick man, he nevertheless
didn´t fit the bill as someone who, without the hemo machine, would have been long dead. Not
that he didn´t wish to be, frequently enough. But there was something about his unusual
resilience and strength which led him to believe that he had been predestined for some mission.
Of course he kept that notion hidden from all, since to harbour it meant that he was a believer in
something beyond human order and intentions, which was forbidden and a sympom of madness.
He had no way of knowing what that mission was. The Universe leads us places and
seldom lets us know where or why. But one thing he knew: every so often, whe he was
undergoing his dialysis session, he felt, among the preternatural, garggling sounds of the
machines, as though he had been submerged in amniotic fluid, which caused him a weird
stupor, and he would experience a sort of trance. In that trance, he had visions more vivid than
any reality. Yet there was nothing phantasmagorical abut them. They were in fact mon-
dane, about things that had happened, or were happening, or would happen at some point.
The ones that had the clarity and logic of real life sequences, often came surrounded by the
grostesque and terrifying vestiges of nightmares that were truly dreadful and impossible to
explain. He could not tell where the monsters he saw came from. They were perhaps
reflections of his own fears, or a bizarre jumble of the many horrible memories gathered by the
human brain through its evolution. It didn´t matter. He did not want to analize his mind, the
one instrument which allowed him to recognize that he was a man bent on surviving in the
middle of hell. For he could not deny that the world was, had always been hell.
The night was very cold but he was enjoying it. Snow flakes brushed softly against his face like
myriad little wings of butterflies of frost. And he felt the beating of his own heart inside his chest.
He stopped walking when he was across the street from the behemoth building of the Health
Center, a gloomy affair in old style architecture, the only structure remaining in
the ghetto which was not glass and aluminum and uninflammable plastic, but brick and wood,
with neo gothick windows and crooked old gables. It was also the highest building
around. Highrises had not been built since the end of the last war, when they had been found
insecure and the easy targets of areal strikes.
A line of ambulance flyers resembling huge ray fish were parked in front of the building, and the
hemodialysis patients of the night shift were coming out of them, helped by medical technicians.
Most of them used aluminum canes. A lot of them were missing a part of a leg, amputated
because of uncontrollable infection resulting from diabetis. Long term suffering was reflected in
their eyes, which had a lost, glazed look. They moved slowly to the entrance of the building, like
a long line of ghosts in a dream. The ambulance flyers brought them there and back home every
time they underwent treatment. He also was a patient at this bulding, three times a week, four
hours each time. An ambulance flyer also brought him here and back on those
occassions, alongside a good number of other hemodialysis patients. He still felt awkward and out
of place among them, as if he had not been sick like them, but the victim of a false diagnosis.
sallow skin
