Unconscious

By Shiva Kondapalli

…sky, pitch black, the ambient space of a questioning mind. Stars flicker like thoughts, firing meteors between one another like synapses. Far below, a tree meditates, losing its leaves sporadically, clearing the contents of its mind. Wind rushes through, beckoning those falling leaves to follow him, and follow they do, undulating like a flock of birds to the winds’ every whim, singing ecstatically at every turn a sonorous hymn. The youngest leaf to fall, mutinying from this cult of leaves, breaks away oblique into a basement window. An IKEA desk awaits its arrival, and the leaf plants itself atop this structure made from a tree, just like the one it fell from. A laptop sitting next to it lights up. The profundity of this juncture is marked by the absence of any subject to cognize it. Far removed from wind, from trees and from herself, Megha, a young-adult subject enters her apartment, flings her bag on the couch, then herself next to it. An ocean of sound blaring through her airpods, those white seashells burning the sand and the moon and the whole island ablaze. Her small, overtyped fingers with perfectly manicured nails run through alternating strands of black and neon blue hair, like the roots of a tree wiggling through the ground. Deep inhalations followed by deeper exhalations, she springs up onto the floor, piggybacking on her last exhale’s momentum (did the wind giver her strength?). She moves to her desk, whips out her phone and starts to charge this device of doom. The laptop screen lights up, she logs in and stares at a screen full of YouTube recommendations. An impersonal algorithm who knows her better than she knows herself. She reaches for a pack of smokes beside her laptop, noticing the leaf on her desk, but unbeknownst of its journey. Her gaze returns to the screen, her hands now armed with a cigarette and a lighter. She lights up that cancer stick and clicks on a random video; the laptop shuts out- eyes closed- the screen blinks - silicon palpitations- and fades to black like the infinite sky!

White Times New Roman pixels emerge from this darkness. It reads: “In the midst of the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with the madman”. “What the….?” quips Megha, frantically pressing escape to no avail, and several attempts to salvage the machine fail. Megha’s attention shifts to her cellphone, which she connects to a wall charger now, her seashells find themselves in her ear, and she returns to the island of fire: sound, water and Godspeed.

The alarm rings, Megha’s eyes close shut- snooze. The second ring, she disappears into her blanket- snooze. The third ring, she’s sandwiched between two pillows-snooze. Megha’s eyes burst open, silence- time to wake up! Coffee, poop, brush, shower, eat! And then more coffee. Wearing torn black denims and a greyish white Tee, she steps out tying her hair into a top knot. She gazes at her broken laptop, and it gazes back. Packing it with her other stuff in a sleek samsonite bag she makes a move to work. “Hey Aakash” she says, her seashells firmly placed where they should be, “I merged the pull request, all tests run fine, see you at work.” Sipping her nth cup of coffee, she glances at the leaf, picks it up on her way out and throws it in the trash.

Ten slides, a lot of code and a bunch of equations pass by, not to mention copious amounts of coffee. It’s lunch time. Megha and her co-workers Aakash and Spandana head to one of those corporate express lunch places that have sprung up over the city (which city? Doesn’t matter, in modernity there’s no identity) like mushrooms recently. The three sit down with their plates, gawking at their cellphones, de-centered and split, having a shared meal with an unshared mind. They start working on their food, and with great effort gradually wane their attention away from their phones.

“I had a weird thing happen last night” says Megha. “Sure, you weren’t high” retorts Spandana. “No, I was totally lucid. My laptop suddenly conks off and this weird text appears on the screen”. “That sounds like you were high” quips Aakash. “No dude, I was not, and it says something about mental illness and stuff”. “What?” says Spandana. “That’s what I said”, replies Megha. “Must be a virus, is it switching on”, asks Spandana. “No, it isn’t, I’ve tried many times, I’ll take it to some hardware shop to get it fixed” says Megha. “Be careful with your data” remarks Aakash. “Big brother’s anyway watching, so what’s the point” says Megha. “So, is it difficult without a personal laptop, can’t binge watch Netflix anymore, right?” remarks Spandana. ‘’The man binge watches Netflix shows, the overman binge reads Medium posts!” quips Aakash, smirking with snobbish pride while saying that. “I’ll watch it on my cellphone, no biggies!” says Megha replying to Spandana.

They head back to work discussing their favorite TV shows, none of which match, realizing the absolute personalization of modern media, viscerally feeling that something somewhere is wrong. A drab afternoon of grunt work later, Megha heads to a hardware shop to fix her laptop.

A dingy place: visages that evoke pain, secrets and sorrow pass Megha’s gaze as she passes through a shady street. A kid knee high running by her hollers, “Deedee, come to our shop, we’ve got every kind of software you can think of, from jailbreaking the iPhone to blockchain to red rooms we’ve got it all, you’ll love it!”, he continues prancing along with a playful innocence, ignorant of the weight of his words. Positively disturbed, Megha ignores the child and strides along to the hardware shop. An overweight man with a ring on each of his nine fingers greets her, “Hello madam, kya dikkat hain?” he asks; Megha places her bag on the glass shelf separating them, unzips it and drawing out her laptop says ‘Bhaiyya, iska kuch kijeye, kal se kam nahin karra”. As the shopkeeper inspects the laptop, a twenty something male enters the shop; wearing a short half-sleeve kurta thrown atop plain-Jane chinos, with a thick unruly beard orthogonal to his scrawny gaunt like figure, he screams nonchalance, his cortisol’s probably eternally low, and is so named aptly: Varun. Pulling out his latop, he hands it over to the purveyor of digital goods and asks for it to be repaired, “Bhai isme kya tho bhi virus attack hua miya, kuch message ake chala gaya!” Megha’s eyebrows tilt upward, her neck rotates about sixty degrees counterclockwise and her eyes take notice of Varun’s profile. He too glances at her, takes a moment to read her face and remarks “Same problem?” She answers in the affirmative and asks as to what message Varun specifically received. Varun shows a picture of the message on his phone, its exactly the one Megha received! The two millennials leave perplexed, discussing their predicament as the shopkeeper watches on, smiling at them, assuring a speedy repair of their laptops. This mild-mannered evil, annoyed at this turn of events, disappears behind a wall of his shop.

Megha and Varun make their way down a flight of stairs, “When did this happen?” quizzes Megha, “last night” replies Varun, “What! Same here, I mean like...”, Varun suddenly chimes in, “I am sorry, but I need coffee to function, wanna join, coffee and conversations are like man and war, meant for each other!” Megha readily aggress, and off they go, to a south Indian coffee joint where the bean is God.

A ruby red sword of light pierces a dark dungeon, its vibrations creepy as hell. Nine-fingered fatness steps into this unholy hell hole with a timidity on his face, servility in his demeanor, and a bunch of files in his hands. Walking up closer to where this redness seems to emerge from, grimacing he speaks, a voice possessed, bitter, filled with resentment. “Two more instances of this have surfaced again, the collective will find these two in no time”, perusing through the files in his hand he says “their YouTube recommendations, medium posts, tweets, bookmarks, Google searches all show the same pattern, running a DBSCAN shows they are similar to the collective’s interests, they want out, they want to share, they don’t want to be isolated islands of mindless consumption, we can’t let this happen!”. The red light flashes a few times, “I’ve checked the stock patterns, saw if cicada is up to something, analyzed traffic signal frequencies, looked into seismic fluctuations but I can’t figure out this thing called the collective, what am I missing?” The red light cryptically flashes again. An epiphany strikes fatness. “The wind patterns have been funny, yes, the wind!” He looks toward the light “Thank you my dear friend, time to mess things up”.

Ineffable wafts permeate the south Indian coffee shop, Megha and Varun, terrified at their shared experience last night, and the inscrutability of it all, give up on finding a rhythm to this madness and move on to discussing other things. “You can come along with my colleagues; we’re going out tonight!” says Megha, a silence follows as Varun decides whether to affirm or to not. The silence gets punctured by the simultaneous ringing of their phones. A robotic voice speaks at the other end, the two cut their calls instantly. A message lands on both their phones. Varun reads it out “Strong winds, please stay indoors.” I got the same message says Megha, checking her phone too. They shrug their shoulders and call it a day.

The Earth revolves, and so night falls. Post drunken revelries of sound, light, sweat, vomit and pizza, Megha, unheeding the strange message she received earlier in the day, along with her friends moves past mud, water and leaves, as if following the stars buried inside the ground. With shawarmas in their hands and exasperation in their heads, they drudge along the empty night. A tree, stoic yet dynamic, charged with secrets galore awaits their arrival. Aakash is lost in his headphones, Spandana endlessly scrolls her screen. Megha, taking a bite from her shawarma and lost inside a virtual dream walks beneath the surreal tree. A leaf bids farewell to its arboreal friend and gives itself to gravity. Free and falling, it lands on Megha, distracting her from her phone. The leaves act shifts Megha’s attention to a puppy on the street, she slips her phone into her pocket and offers the puppy some shawarma. The wind gets stronger. This sudden surge of the unknown: visceral, tranquil, total, permeates this juncture, wholly cognized by the three subjects. Spandana inexplicably looks to the nebulous…

By Shiva Kondapalli