Billy was energy condensed. He was mass, and according to Einstein and some dust painted, yellowed books with curling corners and pages that have not felt the glare of interested eyes for a long, long time - mass is energy, or something like that, I wasn’t really listening.

     Billy was matter, he was energy reduced to a tiny vibration, millions of billions of little particles, little shitty drops of energy darting about, these particles made up bigger particles, these particles, made molecules, these molecules linked together to form bigger molecules that chained, and twisted and flailed about. These bigger molecules made up organs, bone, blood and other fluids, big red sacks full of acid, and blue-green tubes filled with red, big yellowy white sticks of molecules mashed together, all these molecules made up all the bags of shit and piss and mucus, the winding tubes filled with vomit, the stretchy dry skin, the wiry grey hair, the old brittle bones and the millions and millions of tiny cells that made up Billy.

   Billy was energy condensed. He had a beating heart, a functioning liver, a dick that could stand up for an hour and lungs that were tar-free. Billy could eat, he could sleep, he could talk, he could laugh, he could sing, he could make love, he could cry, he could see, he could work, he could think and he could feel. Billy was very much, in the medical sense of the word, alive.

    Yet, Billy was energy condensed He contained no more energy than a chair, or a table or a clod of dirt of equal mass, approximately 11 stone 4lbs. These chairs, tables and clods of dirt were, however, not alive, they could not eat, they could not sleep, they could not talk or laugh or sing or make love, or cry, work, think or feel, or scream at the top of their lungs that they are God’s holiest and most worthy creations and that they were living, breathing things with a heart or a soul or any other manner of shit that constitutes a being or organism that is so apparently “living”.

     Living – the condition of being alive.

    Billy had this condition. Billy was alive. Billy was energy condensed, if all Billy’s energy could be released at one given time, all 11 stone 4lbs of it, Billy would blow the top off the world, he would shatter the earth, he would peel off the sky like the lid of a tin of fruit. He would raze buildings to the ground, he would burn everything, living or not, within whatever mile radius the laws of physics would allow to ash. Everything he’s ever known will be thrown into the air as dust in a big mushroom cloud that would make Nagasaki look like common garden fungi. Billy would blot out the sun. Billy would rain fire upon the earth, he would scorch the ground, he would kill everything he could see and more. Billy would make the earth quake. Billy would no longer be energy condensed, he would be energy released. But, he would still be.

    Energy cannot be created or destroyed…… I think.

       Billy is unable to release himself in such a manner at the moment, because he is taking a call. He is talking down a very, very long wire to a man he has never met, and never will meet about buying tetraacatyleethaminediammine, or as Billy and the man he has never met call it – TAED, people put it in washing and cleaning agents to make things white, nice and white, just like new. The man Billy will never meet would like to by some TAED for his washing and/or cleaning agent, and by a stroke of luck Billy happens to sit in a spinny chair for 8 hours a day next to a big bright computer, selling TAED to people he has never met, and never will meet over the phone. Billy does this in exchange for money, and for quite a lot of money, enough money for Billy to fill his house full of beautiful, clean things and enough to feed his beautiful, clean family, who he loves very much and always will, and misses a lot when he’s working late.

    Billy is still energy condensed, he is energy condensed that is very busy, he is selling things and saying all sorts of words to people down wires, he is pouring molecules of  caffeine down some long tubes and email jokes that he doesn’t even laugh at to people who will not laugh at them either. Billy doesn’t laugh much anymore, that would be releasing energy, and Billy is unable to do that at the moment because he is taking a call.

   Billy takes a lot of calls.

   Billy and the desk he sits at, and the spinny chair he sits on are different in the way that Billy is alive and they are not. That’s what a doctor would tell him. Billy has a certain condition to which these things have immunity, or at least a cure. Some people would claim that the living are but a species of the un-living, and a very rare species at that. But these people weren’t doctors.

  At this moment Billy feels no more alive than the chair which he spins steadily on, round and round, coiling the long phone wire round and round the chair’s stem like a vine on a wet tree in some rainforest somewhere that Billy will never see.

    Billy sleeps and eats, he drinks, he sees, he thinks, and he surely works, every week he makes love to his wife, and everyday he wanks off furiously in the office toilet cubicle second from the end, thinking of women that aren’t his wife, never have been his wife, and as much as Billy dreams, will never be his wife. This all means Billy is alive, he thinks.

      He thinks, therefore he is, that pretty much covers it.

 Billy is a man. All men are energy condensed. Billy is energy condensed, though all men are not Billy, though, some are close enough.

   Every morning Billy wakes and every night he sleeps and sometimes dreams. Billy is a man with a boy’s name. Everything else about Billy however, is very much grown-up, he could not be less of a boy if he tried. He is a man, he is the executive sales-man his boss tells him.

   Billy once wanted to be “the man”, a “somebody” the  “James Dean” of the 4^th floor office room and breathe life, excitement, attitude into the stagnant starch pond. The pond life thinks this idea to be laughable, so should Billy.

   Sometimes Billy likes to think that he is the James Dean of the 4^th floor office room. He thinks this, therefore he is this, that’s how it works, isn’t it?

       Billy eats nice, clean food, he drives a nice, clean car, he has a nice wife that doesn’t love him and nice children that couldn’t give a solitary shit if he works late or not. Billy doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t do drugs, he doesn’t womanise and he doesn’t curse and he only drinks at Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Billy listens to Wogan in the morning and to Radio 4 on the way home from work, Billy has enough money to buy and own things he wants and things he doesn’t want. He has a big TV and a big refrigerator and a big dinner table, He has a big pay cheque and a big wallet, he has a big responsibility and a big future ahead of him. And he couldn’t care less if he tried, and believe me he did try, every single second of every single day.

  Billy is energy condensed, he has been condensed for a long time now, 48 years and 5 months to the day. He was a alive at one stage during those 48 years and 5 months, but Billy is sure that happens to everyone, even the spinny chair or the desk had been alive at one point, Billy thinks.

   One day he’d like to release some energy, and not just in the office toilet cubicle second from the end, He’d like to release it all, he’d like to make the earth quake, he’d like to blow the top off the world just for one moment, blot out the sun and rain fire, piss, shit and sacks full of acid and long tubes full of red and billions of particles  down on the earth for one moment. Maybe Billy will one day, But he can’t at the moment, because he is taking a call.

                                                                     *

    Billy did not release energy like he wanted to. He didn’t blow the lid of anything or rain anything down upon the earth. He spoke to people down long wires, drank coffee, sent emails and didn’t laugh for a longer time. He rarely spoke to anyone, he wallowed, he pitied, he hated, he resented. His life was a painfully passive rebellion. People said Billy was “dead to the world” and “in a world of his own”, whoever’s world Billy was in, he was pretty much dead to it.

   He stopped doing these things when he was 65 years and 10 days old. And when he was whatever years, however many months and like anyone could give a shit days old a doctor confirmed what Billy suspected for a long time. Billy was not living, he had entered into the realm of chairs, tables and clods of dirt, he was a biological clod of dirt. He wasn’t too bothered, he had been like a clod of dirt for a long time and now he is under, above and to the side of many clods of dirt, all as alive as Billy, Billy is still energy condensed. People would find it hard to tell the difference between this Billy and the old Billy, “dead to the world” they used to say about him, dead to the world, to the world he is dead, to the world he was dead. Dead, to not be living, to be rid of the condition of being alive, he does not eat, he does not drink, he does not feel, he does not see, he does not think.

   He does not think, therefore he is not.

   Billy lied with more clods of dirt and he rotted, he released energy for a long time, into the earth, into the air. Billy liked this idea, returning to the earth from whence he believed he came. The dirt from whence he came, the dirt he was, the dirt he now is and the dirt he lies with. Billy’s energy was released. He liked this.

  Of course he was dead, you may wonder how I know what he liked, but trust me I do, Billy is not abstract, he is as abstract as you or I and I know what he likes and he likes this.

 He likes releasing energy, but he would like more to do it all at once, in one go. Now he is releasing it like piss when someone is watching. He could never go with someone watching. He would have liked to be able to go with somebody watching but couldn’t, not in a perverse manner if that’s what you’re thinking.

     Now he leaks slowly, squeezing little shitty drops of energy out one by one, content, dead to the world.