Chapter N

The boy waited in the afternoon gloom, made possible by the lack of initiative that the majority of his species is endowed with as the living room light remained darkened. His hands, like two bifurcated serpents wriggled endlessly across the largely-empty table, glimmering slightly from the thin, stretched plastic covering that pointed to a mother too busy to wipe off the furniture.

Rocking back and forth like a children's toy head that bobs, back and forth, he was staring at the single sheet of paper as I saw him through the portal of the cell he called a home. I wanted to announce my presence, it was the decent thing to do, but I couldn't, so mesmerised was I with the laconic flurry of twitching that supposedly added up to a boy. It was impossible. Not much more than a heap of murmuring and muttering. snickering and shrugging. That was what it was. But a boy, nonetheless. I sighed.

And stepped into the cell.

Almost immediately, I was accosted by two squealing little dervishes, twirling around my legs. Treading carefully, for I would want to refrain from allowing the larger of the two a swift and painful examination of my bag, I smiled bleakly and waited for them to let me pass. The larger of the two returned that macabre facial expression with a gap-toothed one of her own, chin and nose barely reaching my hip which seemed so able to simply, crunch.

The boy had not turned to look at me, acknowledge my presence. It is a special instance to be ignored by one who is unable to comprehend that ice is indeed colder than water, but I let it pass. File that away with all the other imbecilic brush-offs that my life has been punctuated by.

So it began.

Wordlessly handing me the sheet of paper that had appeared so tantalisingly distracting from the outside world, he went back into the semi-comatose state as I was left to interpret what I held in my hands. An angry red mark caught my attention. A single angry red mark. One stroke, one joint. Synapses fired, and it was a seven, I belatedly realised. Hot on the heels of that pleasant thought, my eyes wandered down a bit and found that the angry red seven was imprinted, by hand, over another digit, in ink.

No, digits.

Seven, from thirty. That's almost 25 percent, I gleefully told myself. An improvement.

At this point, let me take you somewhere else. Imagine yourself trapped in a crumbling building, alone, hungry, bleeding, unarmed, tired, scared and broke. You can even not have an eye or any other appendage. And you look out a crack in the plaster (with your one good eye) and see about seven zombies marching towards you. These things can be large, snarling, razor-clawed and be retro-fitted with rockets, but deep down, you know they are going to eat your brains. Slowly.

Then you sigh, look away, and tell yourself, at least it's seven. Not worse.

Back to the fallout of present-day Naz, that's how I was consoling myself. And at the same time, I felt my brains were being slowly chewed out while I could only wait.

Exasperation or irritation or aggravation would only be as accurate in describing my state of mind as saying "The sky is a little big."

For some reason, I recalled the term n that was widely used in mathematics, where that single character signified an unknown number, usually in a long repition or pattern. Here is where I stood. A lonely road-sign on the endless highway to nowhere.

David Eddings once used the phrase "... a look totally devoid of anything remotely resembling intelligence" and it was at that moment where I shared a special bond with the author. Survivors of war and catastrophes have their own little support groups and reunions. Right then I had joined the select council for Those Who Had Faced Down Blinding Stupidity And Lived To Talk About It.

Roughly an hour and a half after stepping into the chamber, I stood wearily, mumbling something about returning the next time. Thoughts whirred through my mind like hamsters in pudding as I had to stop to think of an appropriate time for the next session, hoping that it would not precede the end of all things.

I walked out, under my own power, a fact that I am strangely proud of. You try sitting through ninety minutes of such mind-numbing tedium. Watching two old women slap each other would have made me a better person than what I went through that day. Even the elevator seemed to be a throwback to days where lead and asbestos were reliable building materials. I punched "1" and the door closed, slowly, every so slowly. And did not even attempt to reopen to accomodate a desperately-sprinting woman who looked for all the world like she was escaping a rapist, but in reality was probably just wanting to buy 4-D.

The descent was painfully slow, just like everything else in the vicinity. Another sigh, another day gone by. Bye-bye brain cells.