Chapter 4 (Cont.)
I turned on the sink for no apparent purpose: I noticed the uniform flow of water, purified of radioactivity, chirping out from its mouth; as if not distressed nor elated birds, but detachedly serene ones unaware of their songs. Our house back in Tatterstown had an even more lavish sink. My husband had a niche interior designer work with what he calls baroque sensibilities. Another of his nostalgias for the old world... He is only two years older than me and as such, even though he was born two years before the nuclear war, by the time he could make sense of his surroundings, it was no longer the old world. He was born in Eastern America, near the time of its frozen limit. I know very little details about my parent-in-laws, but his father was an active politician serving the Niqqson regime. Their ancestral home was out of the bounds of high-priority zones, can we even call them high-priority zones in the original sense of the term? Saying those were the only habitable zones would be more apt. Their ancestral estate in rural Massachusetts was razed to nothingness as my in-laws, with my husband- infant Chauvin, relocated inside the protective matrix of what would later be Tatterstown. So even though Chauvin was born in the pastoral beauty, buttered by rainwash daisies, of Massachusetts, by the time he could perceive beauty and ruminate on its transience, he was within the artificiality of high-priority zones. By the time he was in middle school, he had taken on its own to learn about the old war culture; chasing the phantom of his birth age in an unmapped labyrinth. Tatterstown, just like any other city-states in the NWF, has no inclusion of old world culture in its curriculum. It emphasised on science and the cultural education was strictly contained to those facets which the new world education ministry had crystallised from the molten salts of the old world cultures. Hence there was regulation without fluidity. Chauvin would not know of his past if his father, politician Benzo Gotard, had not fallen into terrifying guilt shortly after the nuclear devastation and started erratic monologues at home. It seemed that the warheads did not just land on his proudly passed-down ancestral estate, but on his psyche as well. What initially was the grief of his estate soon had spiralled down into unbearable remorse of being part of the system, even if he was a mere cog. Mr. Benzo Gotard was a charismatic and composed person who had extraordinary persuasion, tactical reasoning and all the qualities of a successful politician. In fact, the post-nuclear Niqqson regime had given him a key place in Tatterstown's governance due to his competence. But fate's tempest had taken a tumultous form as burdened by unshakable trauma, he was driven into utter insanity.
Funtitled #31
In memoriam Martyr Mir Mughdo I / Who Needs Water in This Heat (Deceit)?