When I met the Dapper Man, I thought he said something he didn’t, and I just stared at the bottom of his reflection in the shoeshop window, while listening to screams in the sky I could not explain. Why not look up and see? But I was permanently dip-headed, as you know, and could only see the Dapper Man’s shoes alongside all the other shiny pairs on sale. His, though, were neatly laced, and the glimpse of socks was like the glance of pretty ankles in days of yore. I wondered if he wore a hat, but this reflection was not in colour, and I assumed the hat to be as colourless as the forehead skin beneath it. Why not ask him? But that would make no sense.
They turned out to be reflections of my own shoes as I wiggled them with an artful caprice. The screams that ploughed the sky were constellations of the war’s dead children, the Dapper Man guessed.hu
***
The Dapper Man went to war, there being a gap in the officer ranks that needed filling, with soldiers’ boots all the rage, their leather dubbed and glistened with elbow grease before each battle. He was inspector of the ranks, marching with his baton past the men, to see if their boots passed muster. One pair indeed did not cut the mustard, and he swiped the recruit like a credit card through a machine. And the whirring never stopped until the next poor punk was reprimanded by the Dapper Man. The men already in the trenches were to be inspected next, and mud the most danger for soldiers’ boots. But very little dog muck. One soldier whined and coughed like a whelp’s barking, his nose elongated by the intense frost. Snot as hot as Coleman’s. The Dapper Man had a moment of pity, but there can be no pity in war. So on it all went. No gap for mercy. No lap to be run for the next baton passing. The Dapper Man was a kind man at heart and in truth. But this tale about him was as scarce with truth as meat in any sapper’s gravy rations.
***
Once upon a time, the Dapper Man went off on holiday, so that nothing could be written about him. But little did he know that I followed surreptitiously in his wake, ticking as complete each of his expected movements as if he were a linear clock. Except, of course, he soon ventured off piste when caught short by everyone’s wall of watching him through me. I take full responsibility, having become a desert town’s shop window mannequin in mock array within it, outside of which window our dear Dapper Man stood and stared with his own sense of high suspectibility of being stalked. A desert town under a hot sun with thistles galore covered in what looked like frost, along with the gently mobile weed clumps of eye-floaters susceptible to every passing eye. The Dapper Man seemed to look keenly at his shoes’ shininess, but I could not follow all his movements, frozen in time as I had become by an ill-judged subterfuge. My own sight-line fixed firmly on my own feet. Here, though, unexpectedly, was an oasis of imagination and dream, if cross-structured by your gawps and gazes, japes and jeopardies, in hope or dread at this Wonderwall of Words.
***
The land lay low, the sky was not at its highest, and the horizon had been thrown there by a God with a weak-elbowed arm. And, furthermore, any distinguishing marks on such a horizon to adumbrate its nature had been forgotten. It was simply a straight line with a slightly different pastel shade either side of it. More like a Rothko painting than a real landscape, and describing it thus at length has made me forget the actual purpose of describing it in the first place and what story unfolded in its vicinity.
***
There was no need to remember what happened in the Rothko-like landscape, because it is happening before my very eyes as I write these words themselves, thus making events happen in synchronicity with the simple act of writing such words. It was like playing a piano with three hands but only one brain, drawing into focus the characters, one being the Dapper Man himself and one of the Big-Headed People employed as his rival in plot terms, and a morphing of the horizon into a recognisable city’s edge. The pastel shades above and below the horizon were blending, deepening each other into primary richness, even when veiled by the blurred effects of any words used to reveal them. Words, you see, were normally imprecise even when sporting variable colours of their own in every pinion, spindle, cross and dot of the letters’ visual configuration, disregarding any semantics or phonetics as patterned and supported by a structure of syntax. It was when the notes of the piano were played that the whole story was captured, not by the phonetics of the words, but by a separate music sonata that harnessed all the other ingredients into a vision of the Dapper Man and the Big-Headed Person having an elbow fight to decide who was real enough to proceed to the next frame of the tragi-comic story beyond any horizon’s now re-emptied cliff-edge, and the eventualities themselves would tell each other the ensuing story without needing any words other than their own.
***
We had a Medium to Low Suspectibility that only one of the competing pair could possibly progress to the next frame, but in actual fact both did so, having deemed their elbow-fight to be a draw, or a truce that only truth was able to deny, and this was because they now found themselves entering the land of trust as truism. The win-all, lose-all ethos was left behind by their having crossed the broken horizon under the vertical eye of whoever wrote this about them as a word-wielder in whom they had intrinsic faith. But it seemed self-evident that there were levels of words at play and at this level you are reading, the word-wielder was unknown except by the secondary word-wielder who weighed up such a word-wielder and then wrote this about him or her. And so on, as that entailed yet another level of word-wielder who had to resort to such pronounced ‘pronouning’ as ‘him or her’, while all the time we knew the case was neither. And, thus, that ‘we’, in turn, implied collusive word-wielders as a committee considering worst case scenarios within the Art of Suspicion regarding the Balance of Probabilities. Meanwhile, the erstwhile elbow-fighters, the Dapper Man and the Big-Headed Person were playing on a child’s see-saw in a world of golden heaven’s shafts of light whereby ‘Man’ had no meaning at all and ‘Person’ very little. How long, before snapping, the precarious plank could bear their weight in alternate turns of sprung shoe wear was your guess being as good as mine, and only the next frame of the story could tell us, except, arguably, the next frame was already a palimpsest of this one.
***
The two of them had made up their quarrel, which didn’t mean the quarrel had never existed for real as described by words intended to alchemically magick it into an utterly real quarrel, and having both injured themselves, they blamed the now broken see saw rather than each other, and sought to see a hospital on this side of the horizon’s border rather than return to the thick of it before they crossed such a horizon. They soon saw the sign BLACK SWAB upon an evil-looking mansion and this they guessed must be where the doctors and nurses now operated. But before they could reach its entrance all the building’s shadows became congealed with their own, and the Big Headed One was now just the bobbing head after which it had been named and, so, without limbs, it depended on the the Dapper One to drag it in the trench that had been formed by the Dapper One’s own shoes which were all that seemed to remain of the Dapper One as a pair of large tongued tanks waddling, if not trundling, along, the laces harnessed around the huge head of their companion to gain traction of positive passage and reach rescue by subsequent healing in BLACK SWAB. They were soon ushered into the Sibelius ward that led from the triage vestibule and placed in a section controlled by someone with a name badge of Dr Tuonela. Although that previous sentence was apocryphal. Although that previous sentence was apocryphal. Although that previous sentence was apocryphal.
***
He found himself in a hospital bed, his pronoun now known, despite the medication he’d been given to neutralise it. His big head smiled wanly as he squinted to see his wrinkled face in each of his shiny shoes that stuck out from the bottom of the eiderdown. The nurses had not yet removed his shoes, and it seemed strange they had bothered to shine them up before they did. He smiled again to test the reflection’s veracity. Death would be like this, he guessed. Full of sound cancelling and sometimes jagged music.
HOLE by Robert Stone
“There was a sweet smell too. […] It was pudding-soft here.”
…the arguable sinkhole that has suddenly appeared in a man called Rice’s lawn, that is, and into which he has thrown household things like the kettle, perhaps keeping back his saucepan later to cook a rice pudding, and what happens is that I land in the hole with him and cannot get out of it again with my identity or reviewing métier intact even to say anything critical regarding this black hole of a story at all. I shall likely have nightmares tonight about my shortcomings in even saying nothing about it, having already uploaded these words of mine over a fence into the playing fields called cyberspace, before a hairy red ball like the head on the back cover bounces back. A cup of you and me. “…boiling out of him.”
“He thought that nothing cannot be real.”
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/robert-stone/