Dolphin Square. Everything was where Jack had left it. When we leave a place it ceases to exist. The hologram knits itself around us as we make our way through the return to timelessness. Jack could feel the hologram. Everything glowed. May’s deep blue light exploded the veins of every tender leaf into high contrast. You could feel the worms turning over the earth; the tree roots gnarling their way through limestone; the warm air rippled with London’s exhale.
Jack’s forehead knotted as he opened his eyes. London! There was nowhere like it. His eyes hadn’t felt this open for a long time. The spiritual retreats and the Amazonian adventures haven’t got anything on London. London is the work, where dreams and nightmares prance and splinter across a cosmic roulette wheel, spinning every flavor of Human intent.
Jack rose from his bench – his secret Pimlico vortex that connected him to the divine. His legs were still sore from yesterday. Awaking bathed in magnified heat from the stained windows of Holland House, he had taken immediately to the streets, to swallow a generous gulp of London. Air vent dust mingled with cheap deodorant and acrid hair gel. Jack could time his proximity to the nearest gym by smell. The ovulating women of London made sly eye contact as Jack walked through Soho. A blur of female smiles; knowing; that uniquely feminine mix of fear and fascination that was a drug to the few men of London who recognized it. Jack was oblivious. But the women of London had a nose for that rare scent – the rugged cowboy masculinity of a man in his prime, with little more in the world than a passport and a fifty pence piece – a dick on a stick, that irrefutably jutted out from a pre-diabetic swamp of plastic-infused worker bees and stooping construction workers.
Jack walked in and out of daydreaming. Where does the cosmic roulette wheel spin these people out to? In Golden Square, munching their triangular provisions and swiping, swiping, swiping.
Humans blurred become one. All intents known. Google. No secrets. Every conversation slowly burrowing to the heart of the matter. To crystal clear sincerity. Privacy? Premonition. Telepathy. It’s inevitable, like clockwork – like the Swiss watch mechanism of the Milky Way. The twenty-two thousand year cycle hits now. The orchestra re-tunes, and life transcends.
The men of London were stranded by logic and dogma. Women’s intuition, armed with smartphones, ran circles round them. The girls toyed their phones in pairs along the circumference of Golden Square, keeping them close to their faces like ladies in powdered wigs hiding behind fans. The builders sat in blobs in the middle, breaking fistfuls of crisps.