Amicus-I – Vijjwal's Feretory

Amicus is a three part short story which follows Yunus Amicus, an intellectually cogent but socially insecure fifteen year old. It is experimental, and therefore it’s continuation would depend on the response. A review in the comments would be, well, cogent for the decision. Enjoy!

The exceptionally cold January night, couldn’t keep Amicus from perspiring wet, despite him not wearing anything exceptionally warm, mixing his bodily fluids with the dew from the damp weather outside. Wearing anything exceptionally warm had gone down his priority list, after that one call. Walking with haste on the well maintained and lit thoroughfare around the All Saints Cathedral, which was also a traffic island, he thought about the God he so blatantly refused to believe in the mercy of, and decided that to be the right time to consider not being an atheist anymore. He had appreciated the architectural integrity of the cathedral, but not so much as to visit it in the middle of the night. In the thick fog, he found the black Thar he was told to look for, parked right around the north gate of the cathedral. A short and dark clothed figure stood right by it, and he opened its door upon seeing Amicus nearing.

(An hour and a half earlier)

Yunus Amicus remained unimpressed by social media as a product for personal use. The pronounced commercial and sociological impact of it, however, never failed to intrigue him. At least that was what he told his consciousness whenever he found himself aimlessly scrolling through Instagram. It was his New Year’s resolution to not log in, and it was a sunken ship which never sailed, as he could see, just a few moons since the beginning of 2022.

Sitting in the corner of his study, on his armchair, by his desk, he pitied those who celebrated New Year’s Eve, and to some degree, those who planned resolutions in accordance with it, as he saw it as yet another revolution, one of the eight million anticipated ones, if humanity would not manage to blow itself up anytime before, and countless ones after eight million years, if humanity would spread further into outer space, to colonise the habitable planets and witness their yearly revolutions. Nevertheless, humans react to incentives, and what better an incentive than postponing the beginning or end of something to the beginning of nothing but the starting of another year. And that was the food for thought he required to finally drift his attention to, from the screen of his phone.

Pushing in the power button, he placed his phone down, and glided his glance to the television screen.

The Social Dilemma, the title read on Netflix’s home screen, right before hitting Play. ‘Watching it for the fourth time wouldn’t hurt, I suppose, since my definition of progress in regards to digital well-being has already morphed into simply swapping a smaller screen for a larger screen’, he thought to himself. ‘Alexa, turn off the light’, he called out, while reducing the volume by 10 points. It was the wise thing to do, turning down the volume, since it was 11 pm, and the rest of the household had already drifted into slumber. Vacations were on, afterall, but his parents liked him to go to bed by 11. Not that they ever said that to his face, for they believed by 11 he was but studying for his board exams. His previous scores were ensuring enough for them to pardon him even if he were found not studying at that hour. They would not, of course, say that to his face, either.

The documentary could not have his attention for longer than ten minutes. He picked up the remote, and switched to Stranger Things, from the third season. He had procrastinated on it, thinking he would watch it with his mother the next day, but he thought better than to indirectly persuade the woman to act interested in the show, who did that to avoid being estranged from his life, owing to their vibrant dissimilarities. Forty minutes into it his phone rang. He did not want to pick up, but when he saw the name of the caller ID, vengeance had the worst of him.

“Hello?”, he said, trying to sound cold and diplomatic.

“Yunus. Are you free?”, the very familiar voice belonging to a girl of his age said. He resisted the bliss he felt upon hearing it.

“It depends on what you say next”,

“Okay. So I need to you to design an infographical cover page for my-”,

“No can do, Kalpana. Busy”,

“What? Watching Stranger Things does not justify being busy. I can hear Dustin Henderson cursing in the background”, he realised he had not paused the program. He let out a sigh.

“For one, entertainment is work, to some degree. Secondly and more importantly, Kalpana, I find it horrendous that you expect me to help you after the fiasco three weeks back. You have got some nerve calling me at this hour, after all this time, just to get some cover done for a presumably intellectually dilute assignment or whatever”, he pauses, before treading into the grounds of hate speech.

“What’s gotten into you?”, Kalpana asked. He, despite telling himself multiple times that he did not want anything to do with her, had wanted this question for a long time. Not just by her, but by several other people he had bad blood against, and had played subtle online tricks in making that visible. He wanted those people to suffer by whatever answer he gave, he wanted them to experience the same baning emotional effect he had upon their wistful and pitifulness-radiating approach to his attempts at being on good terms with them. He wanted them to remember as the guy they had let down, “I don’t even remember this fiasco you are acting so sensitive about”, but he held himself back from lashing out entirely nevertheless. ‘Of course she doesn’t remember’, he thought to himself.

“Very well, then. Either way, you have like a couple thousand followers on Instagram. Looking at my position on your sociological order of precedence, it is safe to say that I should not be the only person who can get your work done, since you are so goddamn good at choosing the right people to have around. If that’s all, I’ll be hanging up now”,

“Y-”, and he hung up. So much was enough to feed his craving for humiliating someone from the list. With a smile on his face and a lightened mind, he resumed the program, and sat back to enjoy it, just when his phone rang again. Exasperated this time, he picked it up this time. The caller ID couldn’t identify the number, and the number itself was +0. Just that. ‘Spam’, he thought.

He didn’t take the call. It rang again, and he ignored the ringing again. And again, and again, and again. He placed the phone on DND, the position at which the phone most often found itself. The Netflix stream on the television screen started to buffer, to lag. He thought of it as the doing of the poor internet. Only, he didn’t have a poor internet, at least according to Indian standards, if to those standards 400 mbps could be considered fast. The program started to play smoothly, and it played smoothly for the next two minutes, before it paused. Amicus sat up, taking the remote in his hands. He pushed the play button, but to no avail. “Alexa, resume”, he thought that to be workable, since Netflix was installed on a Fire TV Stick. Alexa didn’t respond. The stream, without any input by Yunus, closed, and the home screen of Netflix zoomed out across the 64 inch screen.

‘Son of a bitch’, he thought, in shock and a tincture of horror, but overflowing with undefinable excitement, the kind which glorifies noughtoriosness. Yunus was tech savvy enough to distinguish between a software bug messing up the playback and someone trying, or in that case, succeeding at controlling his device remotely via the internet. It was illegal, it was dangerous, but Yunus saw it as a way to make contact with the first batch of like minded people of his life. But he had to be safe first. He tried switching it off, but the remote’s access to the TV’s control panel was electronically cut off. Standing up, he started walking towards the switch board, and before he could flick the TV off, the individual behind the security penetration had already played a specific scene from a specific show, which focused on the dialogue, “Pick up the damn phone!”. That one clip replayed itself, over and over, and with each replay, the volume got louder, and Yunus’s phone rang again. It was a demonstration, and Yunus knew it. By whom, and why, he wasn’t aware of, and the closest, as he saw it, he could get to it was by picking up the call. As he swiped up the green phone icon to receive, the volume got lower, and the program, which he just noticed was Suits, closed, with the home screen occupying the space on the TV.

“H-Hello?”, he said, hesitatingly.

“You are a difficult guy to reach”, the male voice, not depictive of an age any more than early twenties, with the added static to reduce traceability, chilled Yunus to his bones.

“We have an open casket lead on racketeering of 16 crores INR. The lead has not yet been released, and it has been structured such that the casket can hold any name. Be it the Prime Minister, be it your Dad. We seriously doubt him to be able to afford the law suite, or the compensation, that might head his way. Whether we release it or not, is negotiable, if you are willing to negotiate”, Amicus, being the geek that he was, had often, while striding by gardens, walking to the general store, or wandering lonely around his school field during lunch, liked imagining himself in situation such as that, and the various witty replies that he may give and the clever acts he may commit to save the day. Now he knew, he was only imagining.

“What do you want?”,

“Walk to the north gate of the All Saints’ Cathedral, alone, needless to say. You’ll find a black Thar. Get inside it. We’ll talk there”.

‘So much for like-mindedness’.