Bells

Even the sound of a microwave oven terrified him. This was why he had avoided microwave cooking for just over a week. All he had to eat in his house was a shoe cupboard full of boxed meals, all of which were, necessarily, microwaveable. How daunting the quantity in which they had accumulated, these microwaveable meals. He had to put one of them in the microwave, and eat it. His ribcage was showing. He was wan and thin, sickly in frame and stare. When the hunger finally grew too punishing, MAN diffidently struck holes into the film of a jalfrezi with a fork and put it into the microwave. 900 watts, four minutes. He winced as he rolled the dial up to 900W and then the timer up to 4.00. Arriving at the desired wattage, and then the desired duration, there was a ping of recognition from the microwave. MAN grimaced sharply. He closed the oven door, and set the dish spinning with an initiating button that was green and lurid. MAN went over to the settee and picked up two cushions in each of his hands, and clamped them tightly upon each of his ears. He kept his eyes on the clock, his heart thudding ready to thunder when the last few seconds of cooking time were diminished to almost 0. When this zero came, MAN would eat. Yet he could not find any enthusiasm in his heart for this succulent payoff, so crippling the horror and discomfort at what was about to resound explosively from the ominous glowing frown of the microwave. He pressed the cushions closer to his ears and took a deep breath, his pulse racing, his whole being toxified with adrenaline, ready to leap at any moment through a window in a desperate escape, should the microwave’s final fanfare be too intense to stand. MAN was terrified of bells. Bells of all kinds. The sound was an admonition and torture he could not stand.

Down the seconds ticked. There was one minute left. 59 seconds, 58 seconds, 57 seconds. The remainder of 50 seconds came with horrendous haste. MAN grimaced, his eyes widened to full moons, shining and big with fear. He looked about the bare room. 45 seconds. He lived in one room, at the highest level of an apartment building called DIAGONAL FLATS. The building was called that because the faceless, tubular once-vertical of the building leaned so far east that it was actually a diagonal. MAN was in fact responsible for the extremity of the building’s diagonal stoop. He’d been chipping away at the west side of the foundations for twenty years with shovels and chisels and striking tools. In the last six months, he had acquired a master key, and had gone into every single flat and moved all the belongings and furniture of every single tenant to the eastern side of each of their rooms. 40 seconds. With foundations weakened on the west side, and weight weighing the building east, it gradually stopped being a vertical apartment building, and became, instead, a diagonal building. No-one lived in DIAGONAL FLATS anymore. All the tenants had left, and MAN was the only one left. The owner had changed the name from STRAIGHT LINE FLATS to DIAGONAL FLATS to honour the dedicated sabotage of its one remaining tenant. The reason for making the flats lean diagonally was so the lift wouldn’t work, because MAN was sent without fail into debilitating paroxysms each and every time he heard the ping of the lift when it departed from or arrived at his or any floor. With the apartment building now diagonal, the lift’s pulley got all tangled and the elevator itself just sagged sadly beyond any possibility of resurrection. 30 seconds. The owner, a gentleman called PILES, had taken MAN for a pint to celebrate the day he changed the name of the complex. But the pub had decided to close earlier than usual and the ringing sound of the last orders bell sent MAN into hideous hysterics. He had made holes in PILES’ face with a fork that happened to be on the table. Then he finished his pint, PILES still and grinning. Then MAN had hurried back to his apartment at the top of DIAGONAL FLATS where he knew he was quite safe from prosecution, from persecution. The police wouldn’t knock on his door because it was widely accepted that no-one lived in DIAGONAL FLATS anymore. 22 seconds until the microwave would ring out. To MAN, the sound was like a diabolical voice, screaming a scream in his ears that penetrated down to his very soul: READY! READY! READY! 

He had chosen to be an atheist simply to rule out bells from his early life. The mass bell and the angelus bell had hurt him first. He had made sure to rise above their hurts with the greatest immediacy. Whenever he travelled, or had to navigate his way around cities, he had to plan a route that kept him as far away from churches as possible. It was not only the bell the priest rang as he came in for mass, or the sanctus bells that cried out hysterically at the requested descent of the spirit onto the gifts and the elevation of wafer and chalice, but any church or church-like tower that might have bells prone to tolling, or bursts of bell sounds, for any reasons of celebration or declamation, or simply to keep the time, ringing at the quarter, the half, the quarter to and the hour, at which point if it was midday, the twelve rings would go un unendingly, and so loud MAN might not be able to hide from their pandemonium, the sounds, by design, pouring their archaic information over entire towns and streets and estates. 16 seconds. MAN used to go into libraries. They were quiet places and he liked calm and stillness. Art galleries were good as well, but libraries were more accessible, always free, and usually quieter. He’d enter a library casually and hide under one of the desks for hours. He had some kind of aptitude for camouflaging himself into the stillness, to retreat from his personhood into a kind of inanimate oblivion. He wished to be undisturbed, and took such comfort from the bookish quiet while under the table that he could not possibly leave of his own accord. Inevitably he was discovered, curled up like a foetus in the dark under a desk, by a library staff member or a janitor who would eject him forcefully believing him to be a tramp or junkie. On one such occasion, the library closed at four in the afternoon, and there were no other libraries where MAN might find solace in the town he happened to be in. There was a bookshop on the highstreet which wasn’t due to close until seven o’clock. Bookshops are not as quiet as libraries but are usually quite quiet. Unfortunately, the door to the bookshop had one of those bells that rings a crisp cling to alert the staff to a new customer. The ring of this bell just over MAN’s head was so loud and sudden, and he was so unprepared for it, and so close to its sounding mechanism, that he was overcome by one of the worst attacks of mania he had ever experienced, in the thrall of which he had assaulted a police officer with a street stall antique. 8 seconds. He was growing profusely perturbed and sweating copious wet. MAN laid his hand on the OPEN button ready to open the microwave door and kill the ring of the timer alarm as soon as it began to sound. His finger trembled. As a line of identical wailing 0s began to form, the culminating moments of this fevered four minutes, MAN’s memories and vivid reveries died away. In the dark room, the glow of heat and radiation through the microwave door was a hypnosis. As the silver plate turned the impotent jalfrezi around and around, and the frown of ghostly orange light swirled and pulsed with each oscillation, and the seconds ticked down, ticked down, MAN became seized by the fear, the untameable phobia that the microwave would not stop ringing, that its bell would ring out ceaselessly, and with its unrelenting bell a village and then a galaxy of other bells would begin ringing without cessation at MAN. 5 seconds, 4 seconds: his hands would furiously stab at all buttons and all that would come of it would be impotence against this eternity of ringing, clanging, blaring, pinging. It’ll be my punishment, MAN thought. It’ll be my judgement, MAN thought. He thought: all the havoc and terror I have caused, all the havoc and terror visited upon me...it is so ecstatic, so exacting, so articulate. I love my terror. I love my havoc. 2 seconds. I am not afraid of it anymore. 1 second. There was a giant cacophony in the bowels of the building. The DIAGONAL FLATS apartment block keeled over, falling, down, down in the direction of its eastward stoop,  and slamming with titanic impact into the ground. Walls shattered all around. MAN lay asleep in the rubble, a frown on his face that turned gradually into a posthumous smile. On top of the rubble was a microwave, the jalfrezi still spinning inside it, and a noisy electrical bell hysterically declaiming the dish’s readiness to the world.

Across the road, WOMAN woke up in her bed with a start, thinking it was her alarm clock.