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  ‘You’re saying that my manuscript bored you?’ asked Jude with surprise into his phone. 

  He tapped it against his ear in agitation. 

  'And what about the philosophical point I was making, what did you think of that?’

  He rolled his eyes languidly at Lisa and mouthed 'shit for brains.’ Lisa offered the thinnest of smiles in support and returned to her book.

  'What do you mean you didn’t notice it? It was right in front of you the whole fucking time, mate. It informed the entire manuscript.’

  The conversation was exhausting him. He ran his hand through his succulent blonde hair, which he always likened to being similar to laying down naked in a bed of giant tulips, and exhaled loudly. Jude Eastwood was a fearsome intellectual who wasn’t used to his theories being contradicted or challenged.

  'Well, granted there isn’t much action but there isn’t meant to be. No, I don’t want there to be more action. It’s an intellectual discourse on the purpose of a revolution. It’s not a story about a revolution. Jesus mate, you’ve missed the point entirely. I mean, good heavens, are you suggesting I include the Apocalypse as a sub-plot? You’ve got shit for brains. No, I’m hanging up. I’m hanging up now.’

  He hung up, discarded his phone noisily onto his oak coffee table and moulded himself further into his maroon leather sofa, exhausted and irritated. He looked around his apartment searchingly, as though looking for reassurance that he was right. The walls, peppered with motto’s and portraits of past world-leaders, would reassure him that he was infallible.  

  Lisa tried to remain focused on her book but was now distracted. The reach of Jude’s periodical tempers and increasingly violent bouts of irritability were weighing her down. They were getting worse. For all she knew, he was in the mire of the second-draft of his manuscript and its demands and strains were telling. His contempt for other people was getting worse. People had shit for brains, was his mantra. 

  'If most people respond to my work like that,’ said Jude, 'then I have little chance of promoting my message to a wider audience.’

  Jude had already sent his work off to several agents and each one had turned it down, saying they refused to associate themselves with such immoral literature and ideas. It had disheartened him. But he refused to tell Lisa or anyone. He wanted them to believe in his message and his infallibility. For all they knew, he was still working on it, refining it before delivering it and inciting a revolution. 

  'It’s your own fault for asking Luke to read it. Luke has always been dense.’

  Jude nodded in agreement. Lisa’s words had a particularly calming effect on him.

  'And he calls himself a convert, too. He isn’t one of us.’

  Lisa shot him a look of surprise and vexation.

  'What do you mean, “one of us”? I’m not one of you either.’

  Jude Eastwood was a neo-Marxist who thirsted for a revolution. Lisa refused to become one of his devoted, single-minded followers who would walk in shit for him if he asked them too; wipe his ass for him and even pierce their own beating hearts, all in the name of his ideology. It was an ideology that was unethical to Lisa. It was immoral and threatened to undermine the puritanical doctrine that had shaped her upbringing. His charisma and intellect often left her spellbound but that was all. His ideals, she kept telling herself, were immoral. She wanted nothing to do with them. 

  She began to pack her rucksack away. Jude watched her sombrely.

  'You’re leaving?’

  'I promised Dan we’d have dinner together tonight. For once.’

  Jude smiled. 

  'For once,’ he repeated with more than a trace of amusement. He wanted her to stay with him tonight. He found Lisa riveting and intoxicating. Her engagement to Dan was a particularly malignant source of displeasure for him. He had wanted her in the past but she’d told him that he had no chance. She was with Dan. 

  'Did you read my manuscript, though? We haven’t talked about it,’ he intoned with regret. 

  'I did.’

  Lisa fastened together the tassels of her rucksack.

  'Did you understand the message, the theme?’ he asked, speaking rapidly, as though to catch her before she departed.

  'Yes. God doesn’t exist. There are no absolutes. Everything is relative, yadayada,’ she said harshly. 

  Jude smirked.

  'I think I said a little more than that.’

  'You’ve plagiarised Nietzsche just like thousands of others. You’re just another just another apostle of Nietzsche running around thinking that you’re important and original when, in fact, you’re neither. There are many out there like you.’

  'Yes, but I practice what I preach,’ he said.

  'How?’

  Jude calmly lit a cigarette. He said cigarettes were the divine gift of God, if God were to exist. They could kill you but only if you take them too often. Running would kill you, he would say, if you ran too often. He took a long drag on his cigarette, absorbing its precarious divinity, before dangling it by his side. He looked over at Lisa’s painting that was slumped in the corner, deteriorating in neglect and want. It had been Lisa’s gift to him but he’d left it in the corner, saying there was no wall space, and besides, he was redecorating - just not yet. Lisa wanted it back if he wasn’t going to hang it up. It was a gift from her, not from God. It was a gift from a friend. 

  'You don’t practice what you preach either,’ he said.

  A sigh came from Lisa. She had no time for Jude’s games. She needed to get back to Dan. She’d promised him. This time she would be on time. Yet she perched herself on the chair arm.

  'Jude, I have no time for this.’

  'But you don’t practice what you preach, do you? I mean, you keep going on about how your parents are Christians and you’re a Christian and yet you know, deep down, that its all a facade. A scum-ridden facade that I can see through like clear glass. You’re an illusion to me sometimes. You don’t exist as you claim to exist. You’re a liar and a sham,’ he said heatedly. 

  Lisa was shaken, though the pair had been through this routine before. 

  'My beliefs are private,’ she said quietly. 'I don’t believe I’ve ever revealed them to you.’

  'Oh, you have through certain actions and words,’ he said, evidently amused. 'i mean, look at your painting down there. You paint subversion and antithesis in all its forms. You paint amorality, lust and avarice. And you’re not condemning it but seemingly praising it. And yet you walk around pretending to be a good Christian.’

  'I paint ideas and theories. It doesn’t mean that I embody what I paint.’

  'You paint what you feel and desire. You’re suffocating under pious burdens and demands from your parents. Underneath it all are your true drives and desires, remote but certainly within touch. Felt and heard in whispers, if not seen or expressed. I know what you are, my dear. You’re just like me.’

  Jude occasionally felt a strong desire to strangle Lisa into self-realisation but it was always to no avail. She continued to deny that she was anything like him. Many people called Jude a madman. They said his theories demonstrated that he was insane and capable of tremendous bouts of psychosis. She never went that far but always distanced herself from resembling him in any way. 

  'You don’t know anything, Jude,’ she said. 'And you can’t preach to me. You write self-improvement manuals yet you don’t adhere to any of the rules and principles yourself. You claim to but you don’t.’

  'Okay then, for a bit of fun, tell me which principles and rules I don’t adhere to,’ he said, sitting up with enthusiasm, 'and I’ll either agree or disagree. Name only the rules and principles that I have created, of course.’

  He puffed away on his cigarette, continuously looking amused, as though it was all a game to him.

  'In your manuals you condone terrorism.’

  'Agreed.’

  'When have you ever practiced terrorism?’

  'No, I agree that I urge people to use terrorism.’

  'So, you agree that you’ve never practiced terrorism yourself?’

  'I agree.’

  'So you don’t practice what you preach.’

  'If you read my manuscript carefully you will note that I urge terrorism only when necessary, under controlled circumstances, within context and as an end to a beautiful means. I have not yet needed to make use of terrorism.’

  'You haven’t made use of anything to meet any of your ends! You sit around all day smoking, eating and drinking. You binge. You’re a binge writer, drinker, smoker, eater. You’re little more than a bum with an unusually high IQ.’

  'I like the sound of that. That’s how I might describe myself on my next dating site profile.’

  Lisa sighed heavily, her tired lungs gave all they had to give. She was breathless from speaking rapidly and fighting her corner against Jude Eastwood, one of the greatest minds in the City. She knew she could never overcome him with words and the futility destroyed her. Jude frustrated her more than anyone else. There would be weeks where she would hate him endlessly, infinitely, dismissing him to the black vistas of the Universe. It was his untouchable intellect that infuriated her, how he always had a way of slaughtering her battle-worn arguments and appearing right even if he was wrong. Jude saw it all as a bit of amusement. He found most things amusing, even the Universe. He laughed in the face of black vistas. 

  I’m going,’ asserted Lisa. 

  She made her way through the door while Jude quickly finished off his cigarette. He coughed and then exclaimed words to coax her back before she got too far. He bolted up and caught up with her in the hallway. 

  'One moment, Lise. I wanted to show you something. Please, just come in for a few more minutes, thats all it’ll take, I promise. I promise. That’s a good girl. There’s no need to react like you just did, I was only messing. I got carried away. You know me and what I’m like.’

  They both stepped back inside his apartment and he closed the door.

  'I guess it’s just the whole Luke thing. I expected better from him. I suspect if he doesn’t understand my manuscript, who will? Maybe it’s too esoteric. Either way, let me show you something spectacular.’

Jude led Lisa to the window. Jude’s apartment complex sat like an unmovable giant, a bulging cyclops among the cultured quarter of the city that circulated it below. His apartment was on the seventh floor.

  'Look at them all,’ he said with spite as he looked down at the transient mass of people outside.

  Lisa, her arms folded, made no attempt to look at the view. She had already seen it dozens of times.

  'The many faceless, limbless dots that make up a city. They move with an almost mathematical precision don’t they? If everyone stood still, the area would swell until it exploded like a giant head filled with too much blood. So they don’t stand still. They keep moving to make way for the next batch of dots. There are too many people in the world. What was it Marx called them? The surplus army or something. Not enough jobs and too many people. Therefore, a lot of people don’t even have a right to exist.’

  'There is something charming about living in this part of the city. You get a lot of bohemians milling around. Trouble is, though, most bohemians are ugly bastards. Fucking ugly. I guess you like the bohemians. The artistic, beardy type. Not sure what you saw in Dan, in that case. You know what defines time, don’t you? Change. Things change. People get older, people die. Some people get sick. Etcetera. Eternity is defined by there being no change. If you’re forty in eternity, you’re forty for eternity. You get me? If you’re rat-ugly in eternity, you’re rat-ugly for eternity. And so on. But you see, from this view up here, very little actually changes. It strikes me that, from this viewpoint, from this actual point that I’m focusing on, time doesn’t really exist. This pattern now, consisting as it does of this multitude of dots arranged in a geometrically puzzling order, remains so until dusk, when there are no dots. But then at dawn, the arrangement proceeds again. You could say that each dot has a personal identity, and that it goes somewhere to live a life of its own once it leaves my viewpoint but I don’t see it that way. Because it will only return again tomorrow. Each dot belongs to the collective of dots - it cannot exist independently of it.’

  'To change the pattern, we need to reprogram the dots so that they don’t keep fucking meeting up all for the sake of me getting a good view each day of a strange, almost unearthly pattern. Because that’s all they’re good for. People don’t have an independent, individual purpose because they’re told  they don’t. I know it’s now an old cliche but they’re all cogs in a machine. They say if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. I don’t give a damn if it’s not broke. It’s just shit and boring.’

  'Jude is there any point to this riddle? I have to go home to Dan,’ said Lisa.

  She always had a curiosity whenever Jude was inspired, a curiosity which had caused her to be late home for Dan many times. It was a curiosity to see through Jude’s white-hot spiels to the end, to see what amoral point he was making this time. Though she vocally rejected Jude’s ideals, she had a singular fascination with listening to them. The conclusion of his rhetoric and his rambles often left her breathless. Sometimes, when he was inspired, his mind would drift  and he wouldn’t finish the point he was making, or he would reach an inadequate conclusion which left Lisa dissatisfied. But often he reached a particularly explosive conclusion that spoke to her in an odd way, so odd that it made her shiver inside. 

  She knew in the back of her mind that she still had to go to the store before heading home to Dan and it was already past three in the afternoon. But she was always prepared to make Dan wait. 

  'Do you see the street cleaner down there?’ asked Jude. 'You’ll have to come closer. Just there. See him?’

  'Yeah.’

  'I watch him a few times. He’s the archetypal proletarian that I wrote about in my manuscript. He just drifts aimlessly through life. All he thinks about is food, drink and how much shit can amass on a pavement overnight. The government love people like him. He’s a government darling, as I like to call them. Government darlings do all the menial jobs. They don’t want him them be intellectual because then no one want to do the menial jobs. People like the street cleaner here are the reason our education system is fucked. Poor schooling, due to lack of government funding, and a diseased gene pool.’

  As he spoke, he opened a cupboard and pulled out a handgun, concealing it from the window.

  'The government invest in education, sure, but only in certain areas.’

  He made sure it was loaded.

  'This guy down there, for example, would have had no chance at school.’

  Jude concealed his weapon from the people on the streets but he let Lisa see it. Her pious eyes, seen through a Christian medium, saw him stroke it with a gentle caress, as though it were a dying cat. He gave Lisa ample chance to see it, holding it suggestively near his crotch, holding it brazenly. She looked at him in disbelief. His gun was taboo and its exposure was getting him excited. He was exposing it to Lisa’s professed innocence, looking for a reaction to its pomposity and stigma. She tried her best to remain calm and not to look horrified or moved even slightly. She hoped it was another of Jude’s attention-seeking acts. Another of his inimitable circus acts, his sickening bravado that he got too easily caught up in. 

  He looked at her with a smile, as though pushing her for a reaction, a word, anything. She shrugged as nonchalantly as possible but her nerves arrested her muscles and manipulated her movement. It was a half-shrug and a half-shake. She shook inwardly but yet she couldn’t draw her eyes from the weapon which Jude was twisting and touching as though it was poetry at his fingers. 

  'Lovely little thing, isn’t it?’ he said.

  'If you like that sort of thing.’

  Jude smirked.

  'It’s loaded, you know. Don’t worry, I’ll be careful. I have a lot of experience with firearms. I bet Dan doesn’t have a gun.’

  'I didn’t know you had a gun, to be honest.’

  Jude was fixated by his gun. He was looking at it with tender eyes the way a lover looks at her soulmate. 

  'There’s a lot you don’t know about me.’

  Jude always affirmed that weapons shouldn’t kill people, ideas should. Ideas were bigger than weapons. Weapons were a means to a beautiful end, as important as dress-code, location or time in any harmful endeavour. 

  'Right, you’ve shown me your gun. Now may I go? I mean, is this it? Brilliant, fantastic for you. You own a gun. Congratulations. You’re boring me.’

   'One moment.’

  He moved to the window but hung his gun down by his side. He lifted the window pane up with one hand and then tested the breeze with his free hand. The cold November air swept into his apartment. 

  He lifted his gun, aimed, shot the street cleaner and then hid. The action barely took a second. With rapid strides he buried himself in his apartment, gesturing for Lisa to do the same. The smell of fresh, burning terror and the haunted cries of the flesh rose up from the streets below with all the horror of a soul leaving its body. The cries and screams entered the apartment, their entrails enveloping Lisa, nulling her senses and rooting her to the spot. She couldn’t move. She wanted to move but only her eyes were working. They darted from the window to Jude, from Jude to the window. Jude was smiling thinly to himself. He was only annoyed that he now had no bullets left.

  'Well, come now, come away from the window.’

  Lisa could feel her eyes watering like a fountain that was being pumped with blood. Her body trembled uncontrollably, it was as cold as a glacier. Without thinking, she walked towards the chair. People said Jude was a madman. She never said it. Yet now she’d seen him overcome by pure madness and viscera. She was stranded in her own cocoon of disbelief and horror. 

  Jude had sat himself on his sofa with a calm lucidity that suggested that all he’d done was have a play-fight with a friend. He covered his mouth with his gun to politely veil a yawn. Lisa slumped but she didn’t know where. She paled. Her stomach was like a pit where vomit stirred. This had been a room where debates were exchanged on passionate subjects. Now it was a room where bad things happened. Jude was an unhinged madman, people said. He gave free expression to his ideals. She’d been caught in his maniacal crossfire. She’d witnessed what he did when no one was looking. She was one of his long-serving spectators who’d been invited to one of his one-off special shows, reserved for VIPs, where he demonstrated his true madness. He lived in a self-absorbed circus. 

  'What did you do?’ she asked, as though she hadn’t believed what she’d seen. 

  'I shot him.’

  Jude wanted food. He had only coffee and steak on his mind. 

  'Why?’

  'Why not?’

  'You’ve just killed a man.’

  'Wounded. I wounded a man.’

  He began to tap away on his phone as though he hadn’t a care in the world. 

  Lisa stared vacantly into nothing. Her skull was like an empty tin can inside which a fly was buzzing around, zooming through the wide open space, trapped and buzzing inanely, without purpose or hope, smashing its head from wall to wall, smashing its face in. It was loud, it was piercing. Lisa’s face had clouded over with a whiteness that made her look like a porcelain doll . She wanted to be sick but she was powerless to do anything except sit still and stare, unaware of anything except a frosty, penetrative force of dread. Jude watched her and grew agitated.

  'Jesus Lisa, you don’t half get morose over the tiniest of things,’ he said.

  He helped himself to some coffee.

  'There are plenty of damned people about. He’ll be attended to soon, sent to the hospital in an ambulance and healed. I was making a statement. A bloodless one. People have to know that I’m serious about this revolution.’

  'Why did you have to do it in front of me?’ asked Lisa sombrely. 

  'I needed a witness. The act would have been worthless without a witness.’

  'You think that act has worth?’

  'Oh for crying out loud, you’ll never understand a thing.’

  Jude kicked back with his coffee. 

  'Just stick to Christianity. You can go home now by the way. Go back to Dan and your sedate, suburban life.’

  'You care as much for me as the street cleaner you just blasted. I’m just a witness. That’s my worth to you.’

  Jude was infuriated by what he considered to be her naivety. He always said naivety was the hallmark of religion. 

  He made her a coffee to bring some colour to her cheeks. It appeared to work for, within moments, she looked healthy again and even lost her empty stare that was haunting Jude. She quietly said that she had to get back to Dan. She was late and he would ask questions like he always did.

  When she eventually left, in silence and without a goodbye, Jude covered his hair with a hat and walked out into the manic scene he’d created. It wasn’t quite carnage but it was a disorderly sight, a spectacle of panic and rumour.  A crowd of people had gathered around the incident, with the wounded man being treated on the spot by paramedics. They were urging people to stay clear and let them get on with their job. People looked worried and aghast, they were filing forward, trying to get a closer look. The women looked more filled with dread than the men. Grating choruses of chatter and gossip filled the cold afternoon air with rumours and malicious whispers.

  Jude didn’t care what was said. He had a morbid curiosity to see the injured man, who was lying prostrate, but he had no platform, there were too many hulking bodies protecting the bloody cleaner from his view. He took in the fragmented conversations, for what they were worth, but they were largely worth nothing. People knew he’d been shot. They didn’t know where from or for what reason. Why would anyone shoot down a street cleaner who was cleaning everyone’s scum off the streets. Surely the street cleaner’s should be protected from animosity, like the firemen or the nurses. 

  Jude went for a pint of ale. It was just what he needed after what he considered to be a hard day’s work. He drank his pint and cursed Lisa for being so weak. He’d expected her to find an inner strength that he long suspected she had. He shook his head and drank.