Synaesthesia.

Yet another beginning for yet another novel. I swear I'll get past chapter 5 on one of them one day.

Note: In my master copy everything written by Miles is in Courier New, but since I can't change fonts here, everything he writes is blue.

Enjoy.

Chapter One

Courier new. Size 11.

It had to be courier new, size 11 before Miles could start writing.

It was Obsessive Compulsive Disorder this time; not the compulsion, but the writing. The font he needed was a habit, but the story he now sat down to write was OCD. Last time it was agoraphobia, and the time before that was synaesthesia, but that particular one had failed.

Miles sat in front of the blank Microsoft Word page that seemed to be painted there. Getting started was the worst part. Filling emptiness is harder than killing a character, or even destroying an entire setting. Maybe he’d include one of those things a bit later, but right now the blank white space was his enemy.

Feeble attempts always work best to begin with, as long as they are obliterated once the story is moving along. So he began:

Her name was Grace Allman, and she suffered from Obsessive Compulsive disorder. Her particular problem was that she was forever cleaning and scrubbing and bathing and washing everything in sight, including herself. Most days she would have at least 5 showers and wash her hands more times than can be counted.

It was blunt and lackluster, but at least he was finally pressing keys on his laptop. After that paragraph, and several cups of coffee, he wrote until the small hours of the morning.

Two days later, Robert Burgess, editor of Stream of Unconsciousness, SOU for short, sat at his desk reading a story by Miles Tracy. Miles Tracy was loosely employed by the magazine, which had no real theme, to write short stories. SOU was a somewhat underground magazine which dealt with anything that other magazines would never really touch. This is why a substantial amount of people read it. It turned out that a large part of the population, mostly university students, were intelligent enough that they enjoyed reading abstract articles, stories and exposés.

This is exactly where Miles Tracy fits into the picture. He had recently graduated with a major in journalism and a minor in psychology, which is why he wrote about the human psyche in the stories he submitted to SOU. However, every now and then he wrote from that shadowy place where the lines between journalism and fiction are blurred beyond recognition. Yes, Miles Tracy was a Gonzo Journalist, or at least he thought of himself as one. Only twice in his life had he produced a full Gonzo piece: once in the year between Highschool and university he took off to ‘investigate’ what it is to be a teenager; and again a year ago when, in the tradition of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, he took a trip to Europe in the name of showing nocturnal worlds full of drugs, debauchery and disillusion based around some of the greatest civilizations in history. Both of these appeared in Stream of Unconsciousness, and both with great response from the readers. In fact, some readers hail When In Rome…, his trip to Europe, as one of the greatest articles they’ve ever read.

Robert Burgess knew this, and he was grateful for Miles’ contribution to the magazine, but that didn’t change the fact that he didn’t really like him. He was inept at conversation, and when he did manage to talk to someone, it was like they were totally unimportant. He didn’t look at them most of the time, and his responses to questions were always dead ends, making it impossible to further the conversation.

But he was a damn good writer.

At least in everyone’s head but his own.

Sitting at his desk, his chair leaning backwards and his feet crossed at the ankles on a stack of other stories by other writers that he had already read, he was being impressed once more by the words of Miles Tracy. The story was another human psyche piece, this time about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. The readers would love it too.

Grace Allman sat alone crying, in what her father said was the most romantic place on Earth. Bora Bora, the luscious island paradise in French Polynesia, was experiencing the most perfect weather it had ever received, just like it did yesterday and the day before, and Grace Allman was disgusted by the whole place.

“Maybe you need a holiday, dear,” her fathers voice crackled over the phone from a hotel somewhere in Tokyo. “I’ll arrange a holiday for you in Bora Bora. How does that sound?”

“It won’t help, Dad,” she had replied in that conversation two weeks ago. “I won’t be able to handle the flight, let alone the time away. I’ll implode.”

“Trust me, dear; Bora Bora is the most picture-perfect place in the world. Even someone with your problem wouldn’t be able to find fault with it.”

The flight, despite flying first class, had indeed been too much to handle. The intrusive thoughts were strong as ever, and she began shaking at clockwork intervals of about five minutes, at which point she had to go and wash her hands. Every day of her life she found temporary salvation in the fleeting touch of soap and water in her painfully sterile bathroom.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder at it’s finest.

By the time she arrived at Tahiti International Airport she had emptied her bottle of soap that had been full at the start of the flight. After throwing the used-up saviour in the trash, but obviously keeping distance between her and the bin, she walked into the airport chemist to buy some more.

Everything here was so dirty, but no one else noticed. Nothing was the all enveloping and comforting white of her bathroom; it was all so colourful. The horrid colours were just camouflage for the plethora of germs that prevailed almost everywhere.

She began shaking.

Her saviour had deserted her.

She began shaking harder.

Buy the soap. Cleanse yourself.

She fought her way through the chemist, while others simply walked with ease. This is what OCD does to the human psyche. In Grace’s case, it didn’t exaggerate her mind’s awareness of germs or anything unclean, it simply distorted reality to make it absolutely necessary to avoid them. The people around her knew, to some degree, that there were germs all around them, and Grace had pretty much the same idea of what was out there; she just knew how horrible it was.

In two of the hardest minutes of her life, she managed to grab a bottle of the same soap she had before and quickly proceeded to the airport bathroom. She would have never survived the unimaginable terror of the airport bathroom without her bottled safety. She used half the bottle there and then.

After the flight from Tahiti to Bora Bora, she could think of nothing to do but sit in her bungalow that sat on stilts above the water and cry.

This was defeat.

There was no world for someone who lives in microscope fear all the time. There wasn’t even anyone to help with the battle; they were the enemy.

Her mother was a Trojan horse and her father only about as involved as a credit card.

Ever since the fear had taken over she couldn’t even let her mother into her house. The germs had gathered inside her, just waiting for Grace to open the gates. They’d burn Grace down as she slept.

Sometimes, when her mother really needed to see her she’d sit in the car on Grace’s driveway and yell to Grace who would be at the window. This was as close as she’d let her come. She wanted nothing more than to hug her mother, but that’d be microscope suicide. It would never happen. She’d never hug anyone ever again.

Her father was a wealthy businessman who wouldn’t hug her mother either. He was caring, in the same way that people cared about the moon; promising to get there one day, yet still admiring from afar. He had been doing the same job for as long as Grace could remember, but she still didn’t know exactly what he did. She figured it involved making people buy stuff, but really he could be an international conman for all she knew.

They were both germs too.

Insignificant until you’re totally afraid of their presence.

There were two things in life Grace could be totally comfortable with: soap and alcohol. It was distilled – perfect - so after washing the bottle it came in, she opened the bottle of rum that was in her room’s mini-bar. She wanted to be numb, now more than ever. There was just too much stimulus here for a cleaning frenzy.

She was tired, crying and slowly becoming numb with each sip of rum. After dulling her nerves enough she stood up off the bed and stumbled over to the small balcony that overlooked the twilit lagoon of Bora Bora. The moon was low – close to the horizon – hanging there like a child excluded from a game. Just to look at it you knew something was wrong. Its reflection on the water was drawn out, stretching from the sudden end of the horizon to a point in the water very close to where Grace stood.

She was that moon.

Alienated because of what she was.

Scared of the Earth but still watching it.

She was sick of it.

“Are there germs in the afterlife?” she asked herself, intending to find out soon enough.

OCD doesn’t convince the mind that it is doing the right thing; it just compels it to do things. Sufferers know there is something wrong with what they’re doing, but they can’t stop their obsessions and compulsions. It never ends, in exactly the same way as life never ends; an end signifies an alternative afterwards, and there may not be one.

Still, Grace Allman was willing to take the plunge. She knew that right now was the perfect time to end it all.

She had thought about it for years now, ever since the obsession had taken over. One time she had sat actually bought some sleeping pills, but she didn’t go through with it that night. Those sleeping pills were now in her suitcase back in the room. It wasn’t like she came planning to use them for harm, she actually thought she might use them to help her sleep. At home she could sleep well enough, but in this foreign environment she would have great difficulty.

Enough sleeping pills combined with a little bit more alcohol than she had already ingested and she’d be going to the great psych ward in the sky.

So she stumbled over to her suitcase, opened it up and fumbled around for those wonderful blue pills. She found the glazed brown glass bottle amongst the assorted cleaning products. It was the greatest cleaning product she’d ever bought; it was going to cleanse her soul.

When life loses all meaning beyond avoid discomfort and germs, it becomes a sort of unpleasant hedonism that is a discomfort in it itself. At that point, suicide doesn’t require the same contemplation as it normally would. This wasn’t taking her life - Grace Allman didn’t live a life - it was just making things easier.

Easier. It sounded so good when she thought of that word.

She hastened to open the bottle, just so she wouldn’t be forced to wash her hands or take one last shower.

When overdosing on sleeping pills, or anything really, the results were unpredictable. Death only came in a few cases, and severe organ damage, though not to a lethal degree, was much more common. Grace didn’t know this.

Two minutes later, with her mind made up finally, she stumbled over to the door to carry out the second last act of her life. The ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign was hung on the outside of the door, so she wouldn’t be disturbed in her binge of rum and sorrow. She took it and hung it on the inside of the door. She didn’t want to be left there for a long time afterwards, so she made sure the maid would come in soon enough.

She made her last stumble over to the side of the bed and sat down with the two bottles she needed. The taste of rum on her tongue was now a bit less disagreeable. She took one last swill, a rather large one, and opened the bottle of pills. How many she took, she didn’t know, but it turns out it was enough. The last thing she ever saw was the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign hanging on the inside of her door.

She’d never disturb the outside world again.