Transmissions

Lights.
I see them high above me, flashing red in the cold night.
A rough wind plays with my form as I lean my head back in order to better view them.
It’s almost unbearable this close but I see my salvation in the lights.
         
It started about three weeks ago. Three weeks, not even a faint scratch on the unrelenting and strangely liquid machine of time, but more than enough, it seems, in which to lose my mind.
I was walking down the main street of Henderson’s CBD when I heard the first voice,
“…that I need it there by one or I can’t be…”
A meaningless snippet of some greater speech, only not overheard, I knew that from the first, the agitated voice was inside my head, extremely clear and wholly undeniable. I stopped and looked around. People were milling around, doing their thing, heading toward their respective destinations to do… who knows what… whatever they felt necessary to survive in 21st century West Auckland, there was no obvious source of this emanation, and emanation it was. I knew instinctively that this phenomenon was something external to myself.

Some days later I had almost forgotten the incident when it happened again. I was sitting on a ripped and slightly smelly sofa in the front room of the dilapidated house left to me by my mother after she drank herself to death some years earlier, enjoying the fruits of unemployed life when it happened,
“…but I didn’t even go there, I was home all night.”
Then a pause, followed by,
“I know, I said that to him but he wouldn’t listen.”
The one-sided conversation ran in my head for at least five minutes, a crystal clear oratory of the banalities of some person’s life and her trials at the hands of some guy called Hemi. It was the first inkling I had of the true nature of my affliction, it was obviously one half of a telephone conversation, only it was being played out inside my head.

Over the next few days the frequency of the attacks increased to the point where I was unable to concentrate on everyday life. The voices became my constant companion; I was unable to do the simplest of tasks without being assaulted by these faceless voices, I sat in my house and drank, being an alcoholic beneficiary with no friends has the advantage that no one noticed.

It was Thursday afternoon when I realized I was running out of the only thing capable of dulling the voices to something nearing tolerance, alcohol. I had to go out.
It got worse as I neared the more densely populated area of central Henderson. I’m not sure how I made it to the ATM and on to the bottle store. I remember standing in line clutching four large bottles of cheap bourbon and gritting my teeth to keep myself from screaming out loud. The voices now overlapped, three or four one-sided conversations continued in my head simultaneously as I struggled to pay for my panacea and get myself out of the shop before I lost it completely.
As I walked home through the shoals of humanity, trying desperately not to run, I had my second revelation. I noticed a young guy standing across the street with a cell phone attached to the side of his head. My eyes were drawn to his mouth as his lips moved in perfect synch with one of the clearer conversations among the cacophony in my head,
“Nah, I’ll sort it bro, I got some money coming in later today”
I realized I was somehow receiving cell-phone transmissions in my head.