"Is This Yet Heaven?"
There is a dingy room, small and dark, with the windows too grimy to let too much light through and the light bulb suffering the same problem. The main source of light in the room is white but uneven. A man sits before it, feverishly typing, his fingers blurring and often hitting the wrong keys, or missing altogether. He doesn't stop, though, or even slow down, or even curse the mistakes.
When he starts, nothing can stop him short of physical force. If anyone could look into that man's mind, a migraine would result. It is a-whirl with thoughts half formed and thoughts disintegrating. As he sets them down in a computer's emotionless hard disk, he will often suddenly go off on a different tack and abolish those last few paragraphs as if they were of no consequence whatsoever. Very few of his writings are legible until he has gone over them several times.
Often, in the course of drafting, he will look at his two conflicting ideas, one after the other, and decide that the first one was, after all, correct.
He is a philosopher, and likes to describe himself as the last of the classical philosophers. He has been called a madman, and he is. He has been called an untrained psychologist, but he will always call himself a philosopher. His prodigious outpourings have appeared everywhere, all over the world, and occasionally they get taken seriously
Above his desk, in the stark white glow of the computer terminal, is visible a Pirelli calendar. The October woman has Grecian features, black hair and wonderfully sensuous olive skin swelling into deliciously taut breasts. On another wall is a playboy centerfold. That and similar magazines are scattered around the room. He is a virile but frustrated man, and sex occupies a lot of his pages.
Finally, he stops. With fingers fatigued from long hours spent typing, he saves the file. He copies it to a USB key. He files the key as neatly as he can. He picks a half-smoked, suspicious looking cigar from out of a desk drawer and lights it, somehow. He inhales, and a look of bliss crosses his face.
He stands up, his legs shaking (he has not eaten for a day) and crosses over to one of the two doors leading out of the room. He puts the cigar out, puts it on a ledge beside the door. Beside the cigar are a lighter and a switch for a fan in the room. He never lets anyone into his flat, for the smell of his cigars has permeated everything and will not be removed. He has confined himself to this place and can never leave. He goes outside.
He emerges on a balcony, and it is not a happy balcony. It is his own flat, and he never has enough money to repair it. He has been forced to keep the fire escape in good condition, but that is as far as it goes.
The balcony creaks underneath him, and his exhausted, drug-fogged mind manages to tell his body to take it slowly. There are a few steps to the railing, and he has to jump (well, lurch) over an incipient hole. When he gets there he stares down dreamily at a new F360 Spider parked beneath him without recognizing it. If pressed, a few hours later, he would probably have hazarded "Fiat?"
He leans on the railing, cautiously. It once nearly gave way on him, and that would have been the first repair job he had undertaken if the builders had been brave enough to venture out onto the balcony. But the railing holds, this time, so he cautiously leans his weight on it.
There are people on balconies opposite him, people in the street below and noise rising towards him, but he is in no condition to really take it all in. He is still riding the drug euphoria, and his fingers are still trembling, not to mention the ache in his back and the pain in his myopic eyes at the brightness of the day.
He stretches against the railing to try and relieve the aching in his back, groaning at the pain in his abused, weak muscles. As he shifts, there is a small, protesting creak, but he ignores it. Someone waves to him. "Hey, Antonio! Emerged again!"
He waves back, weakly. "Yes, and the world is better for it! You illiterate fools never read my words, but you should!"
"Hey, from what my sister tell me some of your work might be worth reading!"
Laughter swells from all around, and the philosopher's face goes bright red.
/Bang/.
