A Day in Consulting

Limonka
13 hours ago
5 min read

I’m talking to you the way you talk to someone who can’t interrupt, with a voice that spreads out because there’s nowhere else left for it to go. Maybe you’re real; maybe you’re nothing but an audience I invented so I wouldn’t be alone with what I think. I’m telling this because, when I’m alone, the images come back without asking permission and crowd my head until it hurts. There’s one detail that never returns the same, and it isn’t an image or a word, but a smell that arrives without warning, lasts only a moment, and leaves a thin residue behind. Sometimes it feels like warm skin, sometimes like soap, sometimes like something sweet that shouldn’t exist in a burned world. When it comes, my body reacts before my mind: my shoulders loosen, my breathing shifts, as if it remembers something memory has stopped keeping. It’s the scent of love—or of whatever came before it.

I was in a dead countryside after the Church had taken power. They still called it countryside out of linguistic inertia, but there were no fields, no harvests, no animals. Only split earth, charred shrubs, and bones bleached by the sun. The heat rose from the ground like a feverish breath: it wasn’t that the sun burned especially hard—it was the earth itself, contaminated, unable to cool. I walked for hours, because walking keeps your head occupied and thinking had become dangerous. Sometimes I slowed down as if someone should be beside me, as if a sideways step had to adjust to mine. I would stop, listen, wait for a sound that never came. There was no one. Maybe, before anything else, I had a wife. I don’t know for certain; I only suspect it, the way you suspect a locked room in a house you don’t visit anymore but still remember exists. Every now and then I’d light a bonfire with rotten wood and melted plastic. The flames were unnatural—green and blue—and I liked them because they gave me the illusion that something still obeyed laws I could recognize.

I had an object I called a friend: a broken compass I found among the ruins of an elementary school. The needle spun uselessly, unable to choose a north. I kept it in my hand when I spoke to myself and asked it where we were going. It didn’t answer, but it stayed—and that was enough. After the war people had forgotten geography, not because the world had disappeared but because it no longer mattered. Borders had evaporated along with capitals, and only moral zones remained: above and below, contaminated and pure, blessed and damned. The Church had redrawn the planet as an ethical map, and when God becomes cartography, someone always ends up outside. The end didn’t arrive with a single blast, but as an orderly sequence of lights, first in the east and then in the west. The Russians launched; the Americans replied, out of consistency. The world exploded because it was consistent with itself. Cities became shadows printed onto the asphalt, and the air took on a metallic taste that would never leave.

When states died, the need to obey remained, and the Church understood it before anyone else. It had archives, hierarchies, rituals, and a language capable of turning fear into meaning. The Pope spoke of sacrifice and purification and many followed him. Not me. He spoke of love in the language of control. I remembered almost nothing of the old world: names, flags, ideologies—everything reduced to noise. I remembered being Jewish, or at least that remained: not rites or prayers or a language, only the weight of a word that came before me, the idea of being something even before choosing. I was hungry for structure, not for meaning but for form, because things without form make noise inside your head. I found the pages in a burned library. They were torn, incomplete, filthy, full of words like homeland, unity, collectivity, shared freedom, strength born of standing together beneath a single purpose. There was a name that meant nothing to me, and I read those pages the way you read a message that arrives too late. I reconstructed that thing the way you reconstruct an extinct animal from a few bones, and it became a grammar of order for me: mutual discipline, standing upright together. I wasn’t looking for justice. I was looking for silence. Everything I knew was in those pages—isolated sentences, concepts left standing while everything else had collapsed. They spoke of order, of unity, of a collectivity that precedes the individual. They spoke of personal renunciation as a necessary gesture. They promised stability; in that moment stability was the only form of good I could still imagine. I wasn’t drawn to an ideology. I was drawn to a form. To a structure that demanded adhesion, demanded alignment, demanded that we hold together the weight of what was left. That’s why they took me.

The guards came in silence, wearing light armor, with carved crosses and blessed weapons. They bound me, and I still remember the dry snap of plastic against my skin. We went down underground, and the farther we descended the better the air became—cold, regulated. Down below, life continued; up above, we served as an example. In the redemption centers I saw human breeding: misshapen bodies paired out of biological necessity and religious justification. A woman looked at me with the gaze of someone who has already understood everything and stopped arguing. The smell returned—weak, out of place—and I thought I would not accept this as a substitute for love. My cell was white, without bars, filled only with symbols repeated until they lost all meaning. Time was measured by recorded prayers, and I couldn’t sleep while the voices spoke of purification and God.

On the third day the archbishop came. He smelled of perfume. He spoke to me the way you speak to someone who is ill, and he raised the instrument. The scent came back stronger, and with it an incomplete image: a hand searching for me in the dark. I thought I had forgotten something, and I thought I must not remember it.

“Come, Benjamin. It’s noon. You have to take your medicine.”

I open my eyes. The ceiling is white and clinical. A clock reads twelve—always twelve. I swallow the pills. I can still feel the heat of the earth; I can still see the green fire; I can still feel the compass in my hand.

Every day, at noon, someone decides for me what is real.