Terminal View

The key slipped into the lock with a firm clunk and Jon felt the reassuring click as it turned in the barrel. His luck was in tonight. Success on the first attempt - it wasn’t usually this easy!

As he stumbled up the hall, negotiating his way around furniture he did not recall leaving in such awkward positions, Jon found his way into the bedroom without causing any major damage. Normally he would discard his beer-tainted clothing in the bathroom before retiring to his bed. But not tonight, he instinctively grabbed a bottle of Scotch from the top of his wardrobe and simply sat on his bed deep in thought.

Tonight the physical world crammed with the complexities of buttons, zips and belts held no challenge to him. The innate complexity of his clothing was completely lost on him, so he elected to stay fully clothed, supping cheap super-market Scotch from a plastic cup as he scanned through the 200 plus channels of his digital TV to see if some late night pornography might be on offer.

After several stiff drinks he turned the TV off and lay face down on his bed. He was unable to stop his mind replaying the evening’s events over and over again like a computer trapped in a logic loop. His mind seemed doomed to continually recycle the same information over and over again until somebody finally flicked the switch. In the same way that Roger and his attitude that evening had fuelled his anger, the alcohol now seemed to be fuelling his anxieties and magnifying his insecurities to infinity.

For months he had felt a creeping, sometimes overwhelming aura of emptiness hanging over him but could not understand why and as he lay there, dazed and confused, he found himself subconsciously plummeting into the depths of the feelings he had been experiencing of late.

There were times when he felt a failure, as if all that he had worked for meant nothing to him. Previously he managed to convince himself that these feelings must be wrong, after all, he would arrive home and actually see the trappings of his unquestionable success first hand: The top of the range car outside, the latest hi-fi, the Italian furniture, the strip wood floors, all these items proved to him that he could not possibly be a failure, that his life was full and he was performing a valuable role in society. But somehow tonight the evidence didn’t seem so crystal clear.

Tonight, it seemed to him, that perhaps just as he had successfully amassed some of the physical spoils of his success, those very tokens that were supposed to set him apart from his contemporaries seemed to provide evidence of a yawning chasm in his life. His life was full, that was true, but full of what? It was full of things with buttons to push, screens to view, full of brushed aluminium and chrome things which simply took up space. Crammed with cars and holidays, hand woven rugs from India and pretentious jade ornaments. Full of things whose sole purpose was to clutter up his life and distracted him from what was really going on around him. In fact his life was, he guessed, actually filled with large quantities of irrelevant shit that only served two purposes – gathering dust and getting in his way when he was drunk.

Childhood thoughts which had until recently been safely locked away where the world could not get at them came flooding back to him. He laughed as he remembered how his parents often despaired of him as a child for his overly simplistic perspective on the world. He remembered, through the alcoholic haze, the lonely and desolate world that his mind created as a teenager, recalling how the events around him had frightened him. It seemed he was being visited by that same world again. A world filled with question marks, and uncertainty populated by people he could neither understand or communicate with.

He somehow guessed that many of the things he had ‘learned’ in the last ten years or so, counted for very little. His mind seemed to be forcing him back to re-evaluate his life and to question whether the world around him had actually changed over this period of time, or whether, as he now perhaps suspected, he had simply become accustomed to living on the surface of life. Just skating on the thin ice of humanity, oblivious to the ocean of fears and insecurities that lay trapped beneath.

Like drugs or alcohol, drive and ambition seem to blot out insecure thoughts for only a finite period of time. You never really answer those early doubts and questions - you just slowly cheat yourself by constantly refining and rephrasing the questions as the years pass. Eventually substituting the over simplistic answers that the people around you supply you with for the real answers. This is what we naively call experience. But by going through this process of mental suppression at some time all those doubts and fears are bound to simply return and haunt you with a vengeance when you least expect them.

Jon’s saturated mind recalled the changes that had happened over the last ten years, how that desolate and unfathomable void which he saw at seventeen had quickly been replaced by clarity and order - the rules, procedures, codes and regulations of his chosen career.

Where there was chaos, came order, and right from the start he accepted that those rules, regulations and guidelines that were to govern his working life, would somehow lead him to a better existence. They would create him an affluent life that was not on offer to many. Only those who seized the chance and willingly focussed themselves on fitting in could benefit. Indeed after only a short period in his chosen career Jon felt as if he had found his niche in life. He liked the feeling of comfort that niche gave him and suddenly without realising it all those feelings of alienation had been replaced by an overwhelming feeling of belonging, and he found he had no time to stop and ask the questions ‘when’ and ‘why’.

That night, as the alcohol sped the thoughts through his mind, he remembered how good it felt to belong, to be with like-minded people, to feel part of one great big club. With this sense of belonging had come respectability, self-esteem and status. Those around him began to see Jon Manson the professional, the eager young man who could be depended upon by those around him.

For over ten years he had happily worn the cloak and mask of professionalism that Westbank had loaned to him for everyone to see. But lately and particularly tonight, self esteem and professionalism seemed to count for very little.