The black box fell through the air and punched the concrete surface, emitting bright stars against the darkness.
This wasn't the death of an aeroplane, but the end of a mobile telephone, shattering into the ground at the culmination of an out-of-character act of violence.
I'd raised it an arm's length over my head when its connection went kaput again, this time in the middle of sending a message to Bluefish. The severing of its signal - bisected by forces unknown - prompted my momentary spasm of rage.
Rage against what? Against a fusion of metals, whose functioning is, like that of my own body, a mystery taken for granted? Against the arbitrary harbingers of fate, who dispense bitter and sweet entirely at their discretion?
Rage at the violation of the capitalist transaction which permits no deviation? The society with money as it roots forgets about love and leniency and lends itself only to a transaction: I must pay, or get chased through the courts; and the phone company must deliver perfection, else I shall snap its product like a twig.
Rage because the idea of such a transaction has ever formed in my mind, thus putting me beyond the reach of nature and pity and beauty, with each and every thought poisoned with the unbending philosophy of the human-made, human-tuned market?
Rage at my own ignorance, that the device might as well be a holy turd for all the understanding I have of its working? That, even if I knew it intimately, its 'moods' are still beyond my control?
It is all the above, and it of course concerns the separation from Bluefish that the fluctuation of a mobile phone invariably brings about. Anger, rising up through the self like a wish, and then the dark thud against the pavement bringing relief and closure.
