Continued from here: https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/old-and-new-fiction-miniatures-mixed.html
***
THE PRESENCE IN THE WORDS
The mansion’s antechamber was bustling with people, bristling with barbed comments.
Richard Wiles wondered how all the various paths he could have picked in life had finally led him here of all places. Sooner or later, the double doors would open and he would be allowed entrance to the Presence; along with all the others who were currently standing with contortions of cups on saucers and iced biscuits on plates. Not forgetting the cucumber sandwiches for the still peckish.
There was an older lady in particular whom Wiles found attractive, her eyelashes batting like crickets’ legs: and a young lady he half-recognised from a different occasion. As if in echo, the latter half-smiled at him, but her eyes remained cold and self-seeking. He knew she was here, like all of them, on trial or, perhaps, audition. He decided to test the water: “Coffee’s up to scratch, for a change.” Or was it taste?
She nodded minimally.
“I don’t know about you,” he continued, “but I’ve got butterflies doing pike-and-tuck in my stomach.” Or were they death’s-head moths?
However, by now, the double doors had swung suddenly wide — and Wiles, as a mere constituent of people-flow, was ushered into the Presence. Relative quiet had settled upon everybody, whispers intermittently breaking the silence, awe and wonder shrouding their earlier pointed remarks.
Wiles noticed the young lady’s hemline was too short for comfort. And she didn’t seem to mind him crowding her: the touch even of their clothes being a taste of deeper attractions. And the mixed-up sharing of a coffee cup.
=
The night before, Wiles had tasted a haunted mansion. Or was it tested?
The dream had been his earlier special assignment for the “audition”. He had left it to the last minute to ensure optimum build-up of “effects”. The edifice stood amidst the woods and the winding slopes at the very edge of the city, whence one could still just discern the distant sky-scrapers slowly rippling in the heat haze. The two towers of the mansion itself could easily be mistaken for trees, as Wiles clambered the nettly shingle. But he knew better. A full-fledged human being had built the main chassis earlier in the century from disused Elizabethan bricks and, there not being sufficient of them to finish it off, had erected its two front corner towers from well-seasoned planks of hybrid wood. The real trees, furthermore, sheltered the building against an all-over scrutiny from any angle of approach. This added to its mystery. Indeed, it had probably been built solely for its mystery by those early pioneers of imperfect humanity. And at night, both imperfection and darkness were indistinguishable.
Wiles did not bother to knock, despite a suspicion that something was at home. The chimneystack was smoking — surely such a constructed appendage, spoiling the otherwise regular lines of the roof, was not made of wood, too.
He walked straight into the hall, without further speculation, and bumped, with little or no foreplay, into the first vampire, which abruptly emitted a squirt of blood: boy-shaped with eyes all over its head like sunken wounds where eyelashes formed patches of hair. The neck was the colours of a peacock’s tail. The white frockcoat hid further disharmony.
Wiles did not have time to wonder why the vampire hadn’t hidden itself, when a second one slid down from the floor above, disguised as stair carpet. It led Wiles, squashy-underfoot, towards the lower bedroom areas.
The third vampire, lying inside a large cradle that was bent-coffin shaped, beckoned him with doughy fans. Confident of this being a dream, Wiles knew none of it was real; he burned a cigarette in evident nonchalance. Scientists were meant to be cool. And, after all, what else could he be called but a scientist with a metaphorical butterfly-net trawling “effects” to the hilt, indeed an objective ghost hunter of rational rigour. He somehow realised the vampires angled towards him leading them to the Presence in the city. Without realising the Presence might be already here in the mansion.
Meanwhile, he knew that things had become so clinical and impersonal, so technologically soulless, so “screen-staring”, the off-beat humours of outside-city idiosyncracies such as these in a vampires’ mansion were worth far more than priceless gold to the Presence, wherever it happened to reside.
As Wiles mimicked being upon a torrent of terrors, the vampire in the coffin-cot weltered in moony-eyed desire. So Wiles had to try blotting out his own lust by opening himself to other thoughts: for example, the Presence itself in the city, what was it? An essence constituted of all the sophisticated communication systems of the city vibrating as one? A god that needed to drain souls to fill up its own soul? Or just a building with meat ingredients, a combo of inner yells of pain and outer inscrutabilities of living death?
The thoughts tangled in the thinking. Wiles smiled and surrendered to the trawling flirtation of the vampire. Wiles thought he might as well enjoy himself while he was here in a dress-rehearsed dream on a test and he slipped into the wide cradle-crypt. Ghosts hung about like heavy, disused Christmas finery — dead, but intended to make the place alive with extraneous joy. The vampire in the cot, although girl-shaped, brought something special to the sensual banquet upon a bed of pilau bristles. Wiles cursed for even all vampires seemed more male than was good for them.
=
She nodded maximally.
It was the same young lady with whom Wiles had attempted small talk, in the antechamber. The Presence surrounded them; the change in ambience had driven her even nearer to Wiles. Better the evil you know than the evil you know even deeper. She took his hand; a haunted look batted back and forth between their faces: more than just love. Wiles was itchy with something he both wanted to scratch and not scratch, in equal extreme measures.
All the audition-makers were giving forth with their weekend’s assignments, releasing fluttering wings of gathered idiosyncracies into the chamber for the benefit of the Presence which needed such will o’ the wisps and human frailties to feed upon; otherwise it would be nothing but the brick walls it was made of.
Wiles swaddled his brain with a ravelling irrelevancy: there was not any wood at all in the city centre.
Then, abruptly, everybody, except Wiles and his adopted sweetheart, turned away from the Presence. They somehow suspected that there was at least one among them ill-fitting the ambience. Wiles visibly wilted in the wake of the others’ unswerving glances, crumbling under the memory of the unadulterated terror he had once tried to channel from carnal passion. He was indeed the inadvertent carrier of red-riddled death to the Presence, rather than simply the frills of human frailty. The young lady fleetingly flinched from his side, realising with whom she had been courting more than just small talk. No wonder the coffee they’d sipped from the same cup’s lip had become surface-mapped with crimson.
Thankfully, they’d both learnt that true presence was in the deep draughts of earlier dreams. Never upon the pages of a book that were originally sliced from wood. Real ghosts, you see, were mainly depicted on-line. And vanish as soon as they are printed.
***
“You’re very naughty, messing about with my sewing basket,” said the Nurse to the girl.
It was the time of the year when evenings were drawing in, the roaring coal fire stood out in the penny-pinching gloom as if Hell were homely.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to get it all mixed up.” The girl was too old to simper, but simper she did, nervously threading her fingers into her ringlets.
“It will be the devil’s own job to disentangle the silk cottons, colour from colour. The knots seem to be created merely by the act of looking for them.” Nurse tugged impatiently at the misshapen inspirals of black noodles which the coloured strands had become. Out came a clatter of trawled thimbles, needles and tiny scissors. Even a tiny pencil-sharpener.
“I’ll help you unravel….”
“No point, I’m leaving here tomorrow. There’ll be a newer nicer Nurse this time tomorrow evening.” Dark tealeaf tears gathered at the silver strainers of her eyes.
But the girl smirked behind her hand, as she whispered: “I’ll help you pack, then, instead.”
The fitful wind gulped in the chimney.
=
The girl died, but was so hungry she needed to eat her own body, which had become easily digestible through the process of decomposition. She hadn’t died, of course. She wasn’t even dreaming. She merely enjoyed exercising her vivid imagination which the lack of playfellows had engendered.
She wasn’t scared of the dark.
=
Nurse sat bolt upright in the truckle of her bed looking back and forth from the faintly glowing curtains of her top storey room to the dark mouth of its empty fireplace.
Would morning never come when she could leave?
=
The girl spent most of the night listening to the sounds of Santa Claus attempting to unbudge himself from the tight flue of the chimney, having first been stuck there two Christmases ago. Tangled bits of him kept falling into the grate which she’d been clearing away regularly for months.
=
As dawn spread itself behind the large rambling mansion like a backdrop in a pantomime, smoke began to curl from the many chimney-stacks — thus a sign that the servants were up and about, if nobody else.
A small face had already been staring wistfully from the nursery window above the orchard garden for some hours. Waiting eagerly to see the nurse leave. She hoped the next arrival would be a playmate, instead.
***
NOT EVEN DEATH WAS DREAMLESS
I was convinced she would one day marry a brutish good-for-nothing if she didn’t become my wife. So, for her sake, in a moment of selflessness, I asked for her hand. Indeed, I began to love her more than I could love any other, but could it be the true love that many said to have experienced? Yesterday not only did everybody in the street have their thumb and index finger as far apart as possible, but even domes seemed to be pyramids and the tops of chimneys were sunk to the waist in brick bubbles. But last night she returned to haunt me. I should never have started thinking about her again, because such thoughts made me guilty of resurrecting her.
For months I slept alone in the double bed we had once shared, recalling the way she had slid the sheet’s lip up and down, playing peeky-boo with me and rubbing my feet with hers. Even in the pitch darkness which we both had cherished during many a sleepless hour together, I had managed to discern her half of the bed rising up in even pitchier, sootier darkness. Love for me then was simple cuddling. She had never complained, only rubbed harder with her feet on my feet.
Una was her name. She told me of a father who never said anything. The psychology was beyond me, but it confirmed my belief that marriage to anybody else but me would have been her ultimate nightmare, worse than any possible father with doubtful leanings, but, on the other hand, wasn’t a spouse merely an idealized reflection of the respective parent?
So, last night, Una returned. In the darkness, I saw the tossing shape beside me, making tears come to my eyes — real tears, not the ones I used to wet my face with in the en suite bathroom. The deepest agony was finding no night smile. Yet, how could any credence be placed in ghosts, especially those that pretended to exist by kicking up bedcovers at the dead of night? They were the worst kind of ghost, because existence was a foul crime if such existence was impossible. My only weapon against ghosts was the disbelief in ghosts. Giving them the sense of satisfaction in your belief in their existence would make them into monsters far worse than ghosts could ever become. With this logical response, I ignored Una’s pleas for my acknowledgment of her presence. I simply turned over in the bed as I often did following marital squabbles in the early days. My wrenching sobs soon petered out and, upon turning back, I discovered there was nothing in which to disbelieve, in any case.
Today, I reconciled for the first time the exact circumstances of Una’s death. I must have always known that I would eventually reach such a crunch point. After all, a crunch was what it was. An amazing coincidence of converging misfortunes, her being in the street, slipping the Yale key into our front door, when the chimneystack collapsed upon her with no prior warning. There wasn’t even any wind. And the roof had never even threatened to leave us. Paradoxically, those sort of accidents made belief in God’s existence easier, which in itself was a far-fetched idea at the best of times. Indeed the act of existence itself implied He must be a bad God.
I heard Una’s single scream, cut off in half blast. I was in the front room, channel-hopping on the T.V. and I literally felt the place shudder, followed by the scream less than a split second later. I know the feeling will stay with me forever, that loathsome cataclysmic sickness, because I must have loved her after all. So, hindsight get thee hence! My earlier presumption of it being for her sake that I took her from the emotional catchment area of other men was all very well, but fundamentally I loved her madly. To hear her stifled scream and then be faced with what the fallen chimneystack hid beneath it, made me love her even more — if that were possible. I knelt in prayer and kissed the feet that had once rubbed so tenderly against mine, ignoring pointblank all the moon-eyed bastard bystanders, none of whom had thought of calling the ambulance men.
In my heart, I knew she was dead. I blamed the Building Society surveyor. Madness often struck at times like that. I felt like going round to his high faluting mansion in the suburbs (if I’d known the correct address) and doing him the direst mischief imaginable. If not him, the people who palmed the house off on us. Or the Estate Agent himself, who was a greasy spiv. The way he showed us the photograph of the house back in his office — yuk! He had it at an angle, holding it between thumb and index finger. Pointing to the chimney stacks. Una said he probably tricked his wife out of the housekeeping he allowed her. Yet, reliving that day did some good. The thing masquerading as my dead wife failed to return for ages — and soon my thoughts petered out — much as they still petered in.
I must have needed to admit to myself the cruel details of the accident. Accident? I still believed someone pushed the chimney off the roof. Perhaps the husband she would have married if it had not been for me pre-empting him. Whereas she had never told me if her father was still alive, I had always assumed he was dead and I did not push her into giving me any gory details of her past with him as a father. The word “interfere” seemed to cover a multitude of sins or minor irritations.
So, yes, she returned last night. Una for real this time, complete with night smile. The guise of ghost was not even viable for someone as dead as she. Love was much easier now. She my widow, because I was the widowing one, a widower being one who widowed, like a winnower was one who winnowed. And so much better to believe in the dead being able to return than having regrets on one’s own. Una’d come again, given half the chance, dressed as a chimneysweep, so I wouldn’t see her, bar the broom’s spiky darkness.
Remote controls could channel-hop solo, its pure remoteness tantamount to autonomy. The central heating began to hum all night now with the onset of cold weather. I couldn’t bear too many bedcovers — gave me a case of Russian-doll claustrophobia. Petering in and out could never be complete. Not even death was dreamless.
I even had thoughts that the remote control not only directed the TV programmes I watched but could also take clawhold upon the TV aerials themselves, perched so haphazardly on the precarious chimneys. Always had done so, without thinking about it.
***
THE MANSION OF MALDON
As far as I know, the only mansion in the world shaped like an elbow is to be found in Essex, and it is near Maldon with the name Plume Villa derived from some past events about which I am only vaguely knowledgeable. I am sure, however, the place was not involved with the Battle of Maldon, although who knows what inner ramifications there are in history that are often kept out of academic books? The elbow configuration can only be seen by helicopter or drone, both of which had not been invented, so at the time I write this story about it, I am only guessing. And when I say elbow it is not just the bony ‘corner’ of the arm but also the more fleshy extensions towards hand and shoulder. The lower bicep houses the servants and animals, the corner itself the kitchen areas, and the rest of the wristless arm — from the elbow’s hinge opening at about sixty degrees — seems to enter woodland further down where one would guess the hand to be, had it existed. This latter part of the arm houses the main living accommodation and famous library, the tops of its roofs beneath the open skies with tall chimneys stretching up like onion domes would otherwise bulge from the Eastern European versions of the same type of architecture, as an echo of its original owner’s participation in the Crusades, I guess. All of this stately structure is sitting amid gentle hills that, for an otherwise flat and densely populated Essex, are deemed to be mountains!
The main purpose of my brief story concerns the aforementioned library. I had been called to catalogue its contents that had been in place since time immemorial, and being an antiquarian and bibliographer, I was more interested in the mustiness and stitching of the spines ranked along countless shelves. I fingered them lovingly as I carefully pulled books without breakage of the spine’s top from between each other in order to note down from foxed pages publication dates &c &c, even titles and authors’ names, as the printing on the spines was usually as faded as my lady overseer was faded. She lived in a room nearer the corner of the building, as an employee of the mysterious owner of the whole building, mysterious other than the owner’s name was Plume, as far as I could gather, after which family the mansion itself was named, as earlier indicated. Why Villa I asked the dour lady and not Mansion or House? She shrugged her shoulders as she did at most things, except when the mysterious Plume figure came to visit the library, at which time I was placed in a carrel where I could not be seen nor could I see whoever it was who had just entered the room. Their voices were undercurrents that I can only call droning, but I did catch the odd word or two like ‘gristle’ and ‘bone’, and if ‘muscle’ was used I failed to hear it. Such talk originally gave me the clue as to why I had written this account at all, as if I once had prior knowledge of what I could not possibly have known even later. Like the ghosts in the kitchen areas, that cooked stews with meaty substances that exceeded their numinous strength even to grasp such comestibles let alone lift them and place into saucepans. One of the library’s books into which I read more deeply than the others eventually told me all I needed to know about the legends that did abound with regard to this Mansion of Maldon. And I have only told you a small portion, and my other passion, as well as books, is ghost hunting, so my whole life has been enhanced by this job experience, and later I intend to branch out, after I have left University, into more mature avenues of study and discovery. I shall never forget the excellent tasty stews, however. And, oh yes, the dreams of droning at night outside my room nearer the ‘bicep’ area, unless I was disorientated and was in fact billeted in one of the ‘fingers’ hidden within the woodland. But now it’s time I knuckle down and take my life seriously instead of simply writing stories for nobody to read. Or, at best, written for ghosts hidden in their own version of plain sight. The stews seemed full of grease, by the way, even if their taste was great.
***
SCRIPTUS INTERRUPTUS
When the dreams came, there was not even any sleep to accompany them, just a castle (not a mansion!) somewhere above me, and a whole day to forget what I dreamed, making it wise to record them here in real-time, but even when I take this precaution, they become garbled after only five minutes, so best to write quickly and not explain the process too much, as much about the dreams will escape me. But why is it important to record these dreams, anyway? Well, it gives some anchor to the night as it proceeds through my body’s bed-prone posture and its supposedly thinking head, indeed a method to obviate the sporadic guilty madnesses and the frequent sweats of deep-seated ichor as well as the deeper dreams that are experienced but never remembered enough in order to forget them in the first place!
Well, tonight is turning out to be a journey and a half! Equally spiritual and borderline insane, with spectators of it to boot! But the latter, I now feel, have been part of the dream itself, if not instigators of it, and now readers of this reportage by me about them. I can’t ask them, as they have now vanished, complete with what I can on,y recall as vertical eyes. Later, no doubt, in this reportage, they will have reverted to normal eyes,an in fact, even as I write this, I can on,y visualise them with normal eyes. And the castle, after all, was a mansion, IS a mansion, one without a roof. I look imploringly down at my mentors who are fast becoming wispy ghost hovering in the mansion’s tiered attic areas. I’m now above the mansion, you see, floating above whatever this building turns out to be, rather than vice versa. How I able to float in now impossible to judge. I am sitting in a waiting-room, writing this, in my iPad Notes facility, expecting to be called soon for my Covid booster as intended for vulnerable 75 year olds like me, and by the time I return to this page, all memories of the dreams of the previous night will have vanished completely. But while they are at least partially still in my head, let me just … my one finger typing does very little to help the speed of my task. The preceptors have now vanished but I never relished their misshapen forms, in any event, and they were of very little help. My number is up next. No. 41. For some obvious reason, I wish it had been 42. It would have given me more time, those extra few minutes…
I have now emerged from the injection room. I recall nothing at all about the dreams now except what I have written above, words that I keep unchanged and, where necessary, I leave any minor typos uncorrected. I simply remember the otherwise unknown lady sitting next to me in the waiting-room suddenly saying, just before I was called in by the injector, “I am 42, so I am after you. And why don’t you type with more than one finger?” She must be a very perceptive lady. My answer was “I can’t.” And then, after a pause, I said, “I’ll now put you in my story.” A friendly promise on my part, not an inimical threat. None of this paragraph was once a dream, so it is set permanently in my head, give or take, of course, the possible onset of future senility. All true
***
DEAR POD
I have asked the same question several times. Is there a mansionn where each room is shaped like an elbow? They tell me I am an alien or, at best, a mutant AI. Never ever in my wildest dreams to be even a cyborg. But asking questions like that made me all too fallibly human all over!
But the fact that I can dream makes me question the whole matter. Why cruelly feed me dreams and memories of a human being as a ‘joy ride’? There is another entity beside me in the Pod as I warden the man-made movements through the universe. Most traffic is cargo being transported from galaxy to galaxy in tin pot spaceships and our sole job is to police the lanes to ensure one way routes stay that way. The other one’s name is Joy. She is beautiful, as well as happy, believe me.
I snuggled down under the bedclothes, trying to make the world forget about my existence. There was once a Russian novel in which a character called Oblomov spent chapter after chapter in bed, failing to summon the will power to get up. Once he started down the slippery slope of wallowing in his own mattress, he found it more and more difficult to summon up the friction. But sooner or later, as a human being, I had to go to the dentist. So I struggled from my pyjamas, dressed and then shambled down the road, squinting against the bright sunlight.
I had forgotten the whereabouts of the dentist’s but, being a small town, I eventually found it impossible to miss. I was shown into the waiting-room by the lift boy and there I found a circle of faces staring ahead into the middle distance, colour supplement magazines growing stale upon their laps. Despite being the last to arrive, I was immediately called into the surgery by a sweet nurse in a uniform. I perked up a bit at the sight of her. She fitted in with my dreams of one called Joy.
However, the dentist himself was not a sight for sore teeth. Eye-teeth, to boot. He towered by the long recliner, a metal implement poised in his hand as if he were shaping up for a rumble in the beer belt. He motioned me into the seat, where any patient was to be set back with a violent jerk.
“Well, I don’t like the look of your teeth at all.”
Without further ado, he wrenched my mouth open with a crack, and started drilling at the first tooth he saw. The grinding of metal on bone spread to the skull itself, as if the whole upper extension of my neck needed filling. Then, he decided that the tooth would have to come out instead. The nurse pushed her thighs against my side as she yanked my mouth wider to ease entrance by further implements in the dentist’s thinly veiled hands. Another tooth was seemingly gripped by a vicious vice, and not even the strength of the tall dentist, nor the crooning noises of encouragement from the nurse, could entice it to budge, as if it were conjoined to the spine itself. However, after several hours, it crunched sickeningly, enabling the dentist to gouge out the root in bits with a pair of draughtsman’s compasses for another hour or two, taking delight in a job finally well done. (I may, in hindsight, have exaggerated the hours!)
“That’s shifted the little bugger.”
It felt to me as if the dentist had been chiselling out wedges of jaw bone.
“Have you got it all out?” I managed to ask, whilst spitting on splinters. The dentist took great delight in matching up the red raw chunks upon the white enamel rinsing-bowl, so that I could see that it was all there. I forthwith fainted, my head lolling upon the nurse’s bosom, which reminded me of someone called Joy’s bosom.
“Blimey, he’s completely flaked out,” she muttered. But how did I know that?
The Pod’s called Oblomov. Even Joy has the privilege of a name. And that’s because she’s probably a real human being, despite the matchless beauty she disports. Having said (or thought) that, I can report that my own teeth today feel like long pearls. Hers must be an irregular saw-edge of white miniature tombstones, to prove she really is human. Her eyes look reflective and vulnerable. My eyes are glassed over with lenses or, perhaps, glass all the way down to the optic fuse.
Oblomov skitters momentarily in a rare space gust, thrusting me against Joy’s cushioned thigh-bone. I struggle with the control-stick for a few seconds, until it actually seems to take control of my hands. And then we’re on an even keel again. Shepherding a recalcitrant star-freighter towards its destination, beyond any of the smugglers’ side-channels, is not conducive to day-dreaming.
“Listen With Mother” was my favourite wireless programme when I was a toddler. I lived in a seaside mansion called Olive Villa near the pier. I used to settle down on the floor under a blanket with one who called herself Nanna. I often said I loved her more than all the money in the world (plus sixpence). After listening to what was incomprehensible to one so young, a soap opera called “Mrs Dale’s Diary”, in which, after the harp strains, someone with a motherly tone of voice was always ‘worried about her Jim’, the comforting sounds of something far more understandable (despite being full of nonsense nursery rhymes) was broadcast, so damn interesting and calming,
I often fell into a nap which seemed to overtake both me and my Nanna for the rest of the short afternoon … until high tea and the roaring of the coal fire — a fire which someone-called-Father stirred with violent up-draughts created by a single double-sheet of newspaper stretched across the yet barely flickering hills of cobbled black that had sat in the grate since the century began, only to end up providing shuddering orange silhouette-shows against the queer news stories which filled those far-off days of the 1950s stretching pitifully into an uncertain future.
Everything was endlessly contorted make-believe, even to the extent of my nursery bedroom becoming shaped like a moveable elbow at night … until I grew up, listening, despite being English, to Del Shannon records — and other black vinyl singles which slotted down one after the other on my spinning Dansette auto-changer. My mind was on the brink of acting without its own volition. I could hear every scratching note. But when deafness finally settled upon my head like large padded ear-phones, even sound-cancelling blueteeth, all I could make out were the sounds of Hell’s underground seas. I could no longer listen with mother.
The fires had died in the hearth, and nobody had life in them to fight wars, let alone die in them. Father was one of the few who vanished towards the rumour of a war and nearly died of disappointment when nobody would pay him anything for the useless hand to hand mauling that had transpired. They would not even let him have a demob suit to hide the fact he was now shankless and fell out.
Nanna, despite everything, could not listen either, because she was inside the very sound-box of my plugged-up head, screaming to escape from a tangled tapestry of memories which would never end. And when the nonsense rhymes started up again, I found I could actually understand, as well as hear, them.
Joy places her hand in mine, thus interrupting my revery. We have a juke-box in the Pod’s cockpit and I key in an appropriate number to get my favourite Del Shannon record, “Runaway”, on to the turntable…
There was a tall narrow shed on the edge of those backwaters where I played when still young enough to recall feeling fresh-buttocked from the nappy-changing. A boy slightly older but dim-witted and gangling enticed me into the shed. The boy said he had a secret to share. He proceeded to show a thing which he said was bigger than mine. I ran from the shed, before he could have the enticing opportunity to flaunt his own.
Next day or next decade, I wandered the dank streets of the dock area in a large city. I knew no home nor comfort and had surrendered hope even for one called Nanna. The yellow fog was lower tonight than I could ever remember. It even came close to easing down the drains and then dribbling along with the gutter slurry. Dark figures passed by on either side wrapped in night clothes in spite of the lateness of sunset. They ignored me, for they were intent on arriving home in time for high tea. If I had been able to catch their eyes in mine like I used to catch sticklebacks in jam-jars on the backwaters, I may have enticed one of them into conversation.
I reached the edge of the wharf where a henge of crates was stacked against the hull of a loose-planked river freighter which dipped up and down in the sluggish oil that the river had long since become. And the rubbing, the creaking of the crates made me think of the old days when my childhood bed had seemed like a vessel afloat on dreams. I had often imagined Nanna, Mother and Father, together with my several best friends and even a stranger or two thrown in for good measure clambering on board my bed with me … to drift amid nothingness for an interminable period of survival and camaraderie. Yes, they needed to load cans of food and the other imperishables of life along by the bed’s foot-board, in the hope that such provisions would last till the journey ended or the company broke up by hitting the maturity-line, when dreams could safely fade.
All the dangers of the disaster dream-movie would be neutralised merely by the communion of togetherness. But the bed being loaded to the seams, it had creaked, despite the nothingness through which we floated. I set the company tests on arithmetic, general knowledge, capital cities, spelling. That passed the time. Nanna enjoyed that, but didn’t like the unfairness of my marking, and threatened to alight.
Now, else when, I inspected the crates on the dockside. More like coffins than cargo. The lids screeched on rusty hinges. In one was a friend from early childhood, but I couldn’t remember the name. Whoever the friend was, he had grown older, so I could hardly recognise him, and the body was too big to fit, hunched up and foetus-like in its last resting-place. In another crate was Father, a sheet of newspaper stretched across his face like the coal fires he once tried to ignite. Nanna slept sedately in another, staring icily into my eyes, as if I had let her down in one way or another.
In other crates, there were people I did not even begin to recognise, since I had not known them, except perhaps in a forgotten dream: a middle-aged woman with glasses and two dead babies of either sex pressed against her dry breasts in one, and a frilly-dressed gentleman in another who had a date stamped on his forehead. These last ones were the strangers, no doubt, who were the makeweight crew. They had existed and grown older in some different, preferable future, I guessed.
One long crate, resting on two others like the top of an ancient gateway, had a gangling lop-sided body in it that was almost alive, grinning imbecilically, with a protruding tongue that was engorging.
There was a single empty crate. Better load the others on the freighter first, though. I’ll be in dire need of rest, then.
Such memories echo off the close-formed walls of floating darkness, as if they only have ears to suck them back, like unshared secrets. By now, Oblomov, a Pod that is the cornered centre of an arm’s elbow-shape, is stationary in night cover. Both Joy and myself have long given up being mutually affectionate. It was all show. How can she ever love something like me?
My only significant dread was that my eyeballs would one day swivel round in their sockets one hundred and eighty degrees and they would only be able to see the frightening blackness of my head’s cavernous innards. I did not allow this reasonless phobia to mar the day to day conduct of my life, of course. That way would lie madness. However, I did have certain preoccupations concerning these my windows-of-the-soul. I always wore shades, so that the eventual fulfilment of my dread would be less marked, by comparison. Also, I would never allow girls to look winsomely into my eyes, as many other couples allow each other to do, while they waft off on wings of true love. Whether this was purely a selfless act, even I was uncertain. Not that girls ever wanted to canoodle in this way with me, anyway. Until I eventually met my one true love in a different but preferable future.
Even as a boy, in one of those archetypal school playgrounds — where the cracking of conkers, like elbows, were often louder than that of boys’ skulls in boisterous play hitting the arcanely white-lined concrete — I would never dare enter an “out-staring” game with my friends in case the final Big Blink was not quite as fail-safe as one would normally expect. Opticians, to me, were far more a gross-out than the worst conceivable dentist.
One day, in the local pub, I picked up a loose-limbed lovely whom I christened Joy in honour of my dreams. As usual, all the signs were there. I found myself staring at her blonde downy legs, travelling up the curves with my eyes, mentally unravelling the knitted dress.
“What you giving me the eyeful for, mister?” Her voice was as coarse as her body was beautiful. But I was literally trapped by her gorgeously unclouded bowls of sight, mooning out towards me, weltering in cosmetics. “Well, feel my knee!” she crooned loudly, as I shuffled nearer on the legs of my bar stool, knowing instinctively that this was exactly what I wanted to start doing. At least, she couldn’t possibly be a qualified optician, with a voice like that. But, when I bent her arm up behind her back in some apparently motiveless nostalgia for the good old boy’s school playground (or perhaps I thought she was a fruit machine), I saw the writing on the wall. She kicked me hard in the crutch … and I found himself teetering above a bottomless pit of black slime seething and burping between the stalags of my own gigantic brain.
Joy is awake, even if I’m not. She has startled me with a jump-start from unconsciousness. Indeed, we require a watch-out, like carnivores need back teeth. The freighters find it easier to give us the slip at night, even though the degree of darkness is unchanged. It’s something to do with moods, or with half-chances, because the art of surreptitiousness needs only a tiny twiddle on the tuner for the programme to change. The juke-box whirrs in the background, its needle only a fraction of space and time between hitting the scrawling tracker-groove of “Hats Off To Larry” by Del Shannon and hovering there forever like Pod Oblomov itself.
Even awake, it’s difficult to land thoughts.
The voice was clear and bright, like freshly hammered bell steel. I could not believe what my ears told me, for I was ensconced alone in a sound-proof booth, acting as a guinea pig for an experiment in solitary confinement. For days now (it could have been weeks for all I knew or grown to care), I had rested on my back, connected up with relatively silent in-and-out drip feeds which penetrated the sides of the coffinish booth through light-tight valves. Only the sound of an odd muffled bubble had infrequently broken my dreams.
How I had been landed with this job began as a long story cut short, now long again. Suffice it to say, I was stony broke, loveless and careless. Hence, the job would give me warmth, sustenance and physical comfort for as long as it would take to use up several dole cheques. So, until the novelty wore off, I was in clover. I had yearned for such an opportunity when not needing to get up nor exert myself either physically or mentally: a perfect memory in the making.
Then (and how!) the darkness grew darker in my eyes, the silence a dead weight, my body and non-body alike becoming a mass of aches and mental prickles. They’d told me (and I’d forgotten who “they” exactly were) the various drugs contained in the food streams should prevent any bodily discomfort. But, I began to suppose, that’s what the experiment was designed to discover: the efficacy (or not) of such medication and, indeed, the adaptability (or otherwise) of the human condition.
It was strange how I became philosophical under the increasing strain. At one time an “ordinary, relatively normal” member of the human race — listening to the football results come a Saturday afternoon, getting my end away (or leg over), coping with the wear and tear of entropy (though I now call it balls-aching old age) and negotiating the trivial, transient matters of which most lives are constituted — I was now speculating on the Existence of God (and why God was so goddamn important to warrant speculating on His (god)forsaken existence), the undependability of the senses (speculating even on the uncertainty of my own existence), the mind-body dilemma until the thoughts tailed off as if they couldn’t be bothered any longer to stop disowning me as the thinker thinking them. And an elbowy Pod that threatens to crack open at the hinge as the weight of global-warming bore down upon it, a climate change spreading like a pandemic into outer space itself, making the whole universe subject to man’s uncaring tenancy of it.
But, then, as the symptons of discomfort infiltrated from each and every angle and as I actually discovered that my body was jacking against the pinions which shackled it, my haywire mind would slip out of gear and become entrammelled in the labyrinthine syncromesh of premature senility. So before such an onset, I should introduce myself as the one running the Oblomov Experiment, with one beautiful assistant, true, but she’s currently off sick with Covivid. So, it’s predominantly me with a notepad beside my elbow that I write in sporadically and upon which posterity will have to depend. Sleepless nights galore, all for the sake of science. One dead of night, I will hear the bell-clear voice ringing out at the same time as Oblomov’s moving graph pen indicates that a man screams from inside the sound-proof booth. But I fear that the screaming will come from my own mouth, penetrating places where even the Richter Scale fears to tread. Then I’ll be dead, or entombed, I don’t know which, but not before I have a chance to finish a real dream.
Dear Pod, You feel good in my hands, as I thread you through the channels of space. It just needs the slightest touch on your controls which, by means of the craftily positioned pulleys and gears, shifts your majestic bicep-rudder in wide sweeps … thus drawing as much friction as is possible from the vacuum that space surely is, without the need of fiction.
And you’re like a person to me, Pod. That’s why I’m addressing you personally. We’ve been together, it seems, since eternity itself began all those years ago, man and boy. Or is it man and something else? Whatever the case, we took off when I was but a mere stripling and, as you know, I hadn’t experienced love. Thinking about it, they (whoever “they” were) were rather cruel sending the likes of me on an endless task like this … but all’s well that ends well (if at all). I’ve at least known your love, dear Pod, and that I cherish more than anything in the whole world (plus sixpence). The world? What is this thing called World? Only a mind can hope to know, if only via its own filter of reality.
I often speculate on the channels of space through which we thread, dear Pod. I’ve always liked that “we”, makes me feel cosy, but, one day, perhaps, I’ll call us me, then we’ll never be separated, I’ll never be us again, or some such words, if you get my drift, dear Pod, ramble though I’m prone to do. Yet I have nagging doubts. I often wonder if these are but channels in my dreams and if the freight be cargo-cults of memory … that you don’t exist at all … utter benighted solitude … just me, in an imaginary impersonal coffin-cask, shifted from pillar to post amid the mere quirkish stalactites and stalagmites of my own brain … that’s a thoughtless doom to face. Not surprising that I’m fed up to my back teeth with consciousness. Upon a bed of gums by means of which only I managed to escape, and I must sign off. Time for sleepy-byes. I can rest long and easy because you’ll keep me safe, won’t you, dearest Pod. And, surely, you love and care for only me. You see, automatic pilots, by definition, are mindless as well as shankless and I am no exception. Control is so very very sweet. With that last thought, I sign off, dear long-lost Podcast. Yours adoringly, Joy Stick.
CONTINUED HERE:
https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/new-discrete-fictoniatures-1.html
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