When people look at him, talk to him, interact with him in any way, Ifram Blest is always surprised to realize that he does not read them at all.
Often, he feels that such a lack of comprehension on his part is a result of his illness, which has turned him into an alienated, excessively introspective man. But he knows, on a deeper level, that that isn´t the case.
Children often show naturally that they have a sort of psychic perception of each other´s inner lives and imagination. That is possibly due to the fact that their memories are still vastly unoccuppied by recollectios of ewxperiences which would make them dissimilar. They are all waiting for life to happen. And, as life happens, their minds begin to dwell on personal interpretations of what occurs to them, and little by little the distance between each other grows, until they become adults, and can no longer see what makes them beings of the same species.
But the moment, pleasnt ot painful or indifferent, is of no import in the end.
The mind of Ifram Blest lingers mostly in eternity. That is to say, while his body deteriorates day after day, imposing myriad symptoms and evidence of ongoing collapse, his mind constantly absents itself from time and flies over a veritable ocean of events, instances and moods that, although faded from immediate reality, constitute the truth of life.
From a window of an apartment high up near ths sun, his mother, as she appears in his memory before she grew sick, waves her hand at him, with a beautiful smile on her face. And who cares if his mother, in the end, hadn´t been so good to him? What really matters, will always matter, is that she could smile at him like that.
It was the same with everybody else, his father, a long time dead but breathing seeply into his dreams, into his mouth everytime he spoke. With his sisters, whom he never saw any more, but who were there in the corners of his world looking at him as he moved into his own immateriality. And the women he had been intimate with. And of course his son, whose eyes contained the calm and fury, and the colours, of a sea of yore.
That everyone hailed from that same sea and that the blood inside us flows from and back to it, he knew beyond a doubt. But then, what caused the cold distance, the misunderstanding, the vast nothingness between people?
A frozen morning begins and the city looks hard, and from no where in it comes any sign of warmth or compassion. People begin to fill the streets and go about their routine with a sort of forlorn tenacity. No body really wants to be there, to do what they do.
At a little coffee shop, Ifram Blest drinks his first coffee of the day. He reads the news on the small screen in the middle of his table. He must read fast, as the lines appear and disappear quickly. The screen, that particular one, is blue, and the letters are yellow. Everybody inside the café is avoiding to look at anyone else. Exchanging glances is lewd a thing to do. Looking at someone more than fleetingly and aloofly is an invasion of space.
Ifram Blest enjoys a far away memory of the days when people used to smoke and there were drunks in the corners. Now everyone must exercisce control over themselves, and physicality in general has to be disguised with the proper behaviour.There is an irony in that, beyond the rigorous manners required of every citizen for the sake of equilibrium and at least superficial harmony, a lot of people like himself are dying silently, of illnesses still as primitive as in the days of old, and of a sadness equally profound and primieval.
And the news are full of horror. He reads that the remains of a murdered man have been found along a stretch of railway tracks, cut in pieces neatly wrapped in plastic and spread at intervals of twenty feet or so from one another.
Ifram Blest feels the beginnings of nausea rising from his guts. But he is hardly surprised, because he knew about this atrocity. Some days before, as he lay half asleep in his dialysis bed, he had had glimpses of a dark figure walking by the railway tracks, in heavy rain, placing those bloody plastic bags on the ground carefully, as if he was concerned with the creation of a geometrical pattern. Of course, he had told the doctor about that vision, or dream, as he was supposed to do with all he experienced while on treatment.