Seven Windows A Tale Of The Future

Seven windows face us as we eat at our host's table. They let in the gray light of an early spring day, a dry, cold, dusty light, still tarnished with winter. Seven windows face us, like sentinels with bad intentions, guardians of someone's declining fortunes. We eat the spare diet of our host and drink his pale wine. Tall candles provide sparse light, and smear a yellowish tinge over our dry faces... No light reaches our eyes. It pools in the broken faded tiles of the floor. The window glass might have been a mirror but the dim light was too shallow to find any reflection shining within: instead of transparency, the light further stains the glass. We are seated at a banquet table, spaced far apart to prevent conversation. Not that we feel an urge to talk. It would only bruise our pride more grievously than being here. Our host displays only courtesy. He speaks inaudibly to his two female servants. They are old and wizened like him. Only once has he addressed me: 'Thomas, more wine? ' Our host is Augustine, once the dictator of our city, who ruled with stealth and cunning. Now he is a corpse rotting slowly in solitude. His subalterns stole his power six years ago. They rule from a block of concrete in the city center. Augustine lost his wife and three daughters to the renewed SARS epidemic. He has nothing to show for his life on earth. No monument, no heir apparent, no public document recording his service. He must be lonelier than the ghosts of those he killed. Someday I swear I will stand in the public square where the executions happened eleven years ago. I will stand and wait, silent but stretched to my full stature, no hobbling with a cane, no kowtowing to their authority. Let them drag me off to prison for six months or a year. Or perhaps they will simply ignore me. Let me stand alone amid rubble until I begin to look foolish, like a man without a purpose, a bum. I have a burning question to ask Augustine. What if a man who has endured too much and has lost every- thing his heart treasured, is given a gun with two bullets? What will he do? How soon will he do it? Would he shoot the one he blames in the head, and then himself in the heart? Or would he empty the bullets and toss the gun? I wrestle with that question. But there is another question that chokes me with despair: How did so few people wreck the world for so many people? Because that's what the world is - a wreck. And we exist without pride or hope or charity. We are savages with big brains reduced to living in stale sludge. How do I live in this moment without pride or hope? What makes it possible for me to think these thoughts and not poison myself before tomorrow? Let me test this: the woman on my right is named Jane, I think the man on my left is Samuel. What if I reached out to them? What - All this talk in my head! What does it matter? It's as if I entertained myself out of thoughts of despair or suicide. But I talk to no one, I hear nothing... But my soul! I feel my soul is listening to some- thing... What? What?