Vicarious

My attempt at something different from the other things I've written. The attached song is what I was listening to as I wrote it, so... yeah. Enjoy.

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                Martin’s eyes slowly blinked open to reveal a bright, sunny day; a gentle eastward breeze grazed his right cheek with an uneasy quiver.

                Where am I?

                He looked away from the shining sky glaring from out the open window and found himself staring at a drab, brown room chock-full of men and women in crisp formal wear sitting on ornate chairs, drinks in hand, enveloped by a general atmosphere of... what was that word?... bereavement. The faint buzz that could only be a cacophony of whispered conversations permeated the still air arbitrarily as the rhythms of natural speech intermingled across the room. He stifled a yawn and attempted to focus on one of the conversations, trying to pick up whatever details he could about wherever the hell he was.

                A few words directed towards an elderly man from some lady in a black gown with hair pulled up in a neat bun informed Martin that he was at a funeral of sorts. He tried recalling the events of the day and drew a complete blank. How did I get here? Another woman walked in from the far side of the room, out of a corridor of sorts. She directly approached the table to her right and leaned over to embrace a man in his fifties whose face was stained with tears. That guy looks like my father, Martin dimly noted. Strange.

                He stood up and suddenly felt very, very tired, and felt the need to emphasize that by taking a long, deep breath coupled with a stretching of his leg muscles. My hands look pudgier than usual. I need to lose weight.  No one bothered to look at him; they were all either engrossed in whatever whispered conversations they were a part of or simply looking away.

 He spotted a sort of casket across from where he was sitting and decided to walk over. Whose funeral was this, anyways?

                Martin looked inside the open casket and suddenly found himself struggling for air.

                He was in the casket. All eighty-five kilograms of him was lying there, dressed impeccably, that ever-present scar on his right cheek still prominent – good old Martin, accountant, aspiring writer, occasional drummer… and now a corpse.

                Martin coughed and hacked in a feeble attempt to hold in his screams, choking on whatever it is that you choke on when shock hits you with the force of a freight train. The same lady in the black gown was now in front of him, and he barely heard the ‘Excuse me, are you all right?’ softly emanating from her lipstick-caked mouth.

                “I’m… fine…” he managed, and the fit gradually passed. Why is my voice so deep? “Where can I get some water?”

                The lady pointed in some direction, but he did not look, nor did he care. Now all eyes were on him, and he gingerly made his way back to the seat next to the window.

                Martin’s head was spinning. Who am I? What the hell just happened? He looked over to the table near the corridor and saw that the man seated at the end of that table did not just look like Martin’s father – he was Martin’s father.

                Another patron walked on past and Martin casually inquired, “Excuse me… where can I find the bathroom?” The man did not seem at all surprised – he had probably witnessed Martin’s coughing fit – and pointed in the direction where he had come from.

                Martin clumsily stumbled towards the bathroom and shoved the door aside to reveal a spacious room with two sinks at one end and a pair of stalls on the other. He unconsciously less walked and more dragged himself towards the mirror over the sink closer to him and found himself looking at a completely different face from the youthful one he was accustomed to – he saw the face of a balding, forty-something businessman, complete with beady eyes and pudgy mouth. Martin grabbed at his face – no, it couldn’t be his face, never never never – as if he could peel off this deformed caricature masquerading as him. Must be a dream, must be must be has to be a dreeeeeam...

                He ran out of the bathroom, stifling whichever screams had been building in his throat, and ran towards the corridor at the far end of the room. He was the center of attention once again, but he didn’t care – he needed to get out of this godforsaken body and into his, lying there in the –

                Why is my body in a casket?

                “Sir!” screamed out a voice behind him as he made his way down the corridor. He knew at once that it was his father; he would have recognized that commanding voice anywhere. Martin edgily shoved aside a thin man entering through the door with that pudgy hand he had come to hate, ignoring the cries of his father behind him.

                He pushed himself out of the door to find himself in the middle of a quiet street, surrounded by a dense suburban settlement. A faint memory circled and then made itself clear; the house… the house where I grew up is on this street. He ran across the pavement as far as the thick legs that were not his could carry him; running all the way to nowhere. He had no clue where to go, what to do – but by now Martin was utterly convinced that this was an elaborate dream, a lucid dream, the kind where you knew that you were no longer restrained by the dense titanium prison bars of reality.

                He took a quick peek over his shoulder. People were stopping in the wake of his path to stare at ‘the random fat guy who just ran right past’. Martin’s father was also out there, but he had stopped giving chase – his hands were on his knees and he was panting for breath.

                Martin continued on his blind run, trying to get as far away from his own body, resting in the casket, as he could. His legs were burning but he pressed on – he didn’t know why – he just had to get out of the neighborhood.

                The humming sound of traffic suddenly reached his ears and progressively got louder and louder as he ran until he was standing at the side of the intersection of what he knew to be between the road out of the suburban neighborhood and one of the busiest avenues in the city. On the other side of the road was the enormous building belonging to the large insurance company that his father had worked at during Martin’s childhood.

                The traffic light ahead of him turned green and the loud hum picked up once again as cars started moving. Martin didn’t budge. He stayed on the pavement, knowing what to do.

                The cars picked up speed and next thing Martin knew they were crossing over to the other side.  The intersection was now filled with all sorts of vehicles, but it was when a bus drove along that Martin started to sprint as fast as he possibly could to the shock of the other passersby – straight into the path of the gargantuan vehicle. Just a dream, right? So I’ll just wake up…

                Tires screeched. Onlookers screamed. The world died away to all-encompassing shades of black.

                His eyes trembled and slowly opened to reveal a bright, sunny day. The same gentle breeze trickled across his face with the same sense of trepidation.

                He looked away from the window to the same drab, brown room. The same casket lay at the far end. Martin once again stood up and, trembling, walked towards it. In the open casket, impeccably dressed, lay the pudgy businessman.

                Martin screamed his lungs out.

                The world continued to turn.