I wrote this story in a hotel room in Toledo during a cloudburst; I had just returned from a hiking expedition in the wild obscurities of the Montes de Toledo, where I had been baked to a crisp by the sun. It was published in 2005 as the title story of a double chapbook project which included an original contribution that I managed to inveigle from Brian Aldiss, one of my literary heroes.
He knew for certain, or imagined he did, how to deal with bends and twists in any maze, and the narrow streets of this city had not been designed to deliberately confuse anyone. He was strong and fast and his courage could not be doubted, nor did he suffer from excessive pride at his qualities. His confidence was justified but his manner was modest.
Arriving before sunrise on the first day of the Fiesta de San Fermín, he noted that already a band was rehearsing in a public square. The celebrations would begin at midday and continue without pause for more than a week. He waited for a café to open and ordered a coffee, the steam from the cup blending with his own dawn breath as he crouched over it. Finding accommodation here at this time would be impossible, so he planned to sleep on the citadel ramparts with the other lonely, unlucky or romantic visitors. But he was more than a spectator.
He stood and walked the route from the Plaza Santo Domingo to the bullring, familiarising himself with the peculiarities of the streets. Then he wandered sedately among the parks, conserving his energy for the following morning, performing gentle exercises, stretching his huge muscles, nodding at the people who had started to gather in groups. Mostly he was ignored for his trouble and the few smiles he collected on the way were thin and dismissive.
A clock somewhere struck noon and music came from ahead, always around the next corner, a phenomenon he regarded as supernatural until he realised he was accidentally following a parade. He increased his pace and caught up with the musicians, who now stood in a circle and played wilder songs at a faster tempo. The first dancers swirled into the soup of notes, followed by others until the whole street was gyrating, he alone a static object, a point of reference. He waited to be asked to dance so that he might decline, for he wanted to be fully fit for tomorrow, but he was never given the chance. And of course this suited his needs perfectly.
When night fell he decided he had rested enough on his feet and walked to the citadel to sleep. He was the first to bed down but as the hours passed he was joined by others. It was cold under his rough blanket. He drifted from dream to dream and woke often, confused and blinking at the stars, the crescent moon toppled on its side like a pair of disembodied horns above a tide of strangely shaped clouds.
Once he opened his eyes because a stealthy thief was robbing the sleepers in his vicinity, moving in time with the wind from one prone drunken body to the next, searching through pockets and in the folds of blankets. The thief stepped over him without making any attempt on his possessions. At first he believed the thief had been daunted by his obvious strength and he was pleased, but then it occurred to him he might simply look too poor to steal from, or that he had not really been noticed at all. Far away music still played, softly with laughter.
The first to stir and rise when the stars dimmed, he walked with considerable grace across the city to the appointed place. Other runners converged from every direction and soon the bustling and jostling of competitors and watchers was intense and oddly relaxing. He inhaled deeply. This was living with passion, dangerously, intoxicatingly, the only way for any sentient being to thrive, heart pounding, sweat sprouting like dew on limbs and torso! He enjoyed the communal fear and excitement, the idea that people were sharing sensations with him.
He knew what to expect and the sound of the first rocket being launched was not startling but in fact caused him to relax even more. This was proof of his mental strength, a result of his preparations, his research and respect for process and tradition. The long whistle and detonation overhead was a signal the bulls had been released and the more timid or enthusiastic competitors started running, far too early in his view. Better to wait for the second rocket, which signalled that the entire herd of bulls was free. That way it would be easier to run with the animals in the true spirit of the Fiesta, rather than ahead of the dust and danger.
The second rocket spat into the sky and he tried to tense his muscles, to spring forward, to realise his dream of being an active part of this famous, or notorious, event, but suddenly it was no longer possible to move. Direction and desire were abstractions. Around him men hurried forward, but not one of them even brushed against his arms, which were slack at his sides. There was no bite in his mouth, no swell of blood in his head, nothing meaningful.
He simply stood and waited to be crushed by the herd, the heavy beasts with frightened eyes and dawn breath just like his, smoky, thick, almost blue in the long early shadows of the Plaza. He waited but he did not watch, for they were behind him and he faced only the sweat soaked backs of runners and a corridor with walls made of spectators and music. He waited and thought about the different types of waiting, uneasy, ignorant, gloomy, resigned, and understood that no variation matched his own particular style of not moving, remaining fixed at this precise instant. He waited and slowly his whole body sagged.
Nothing touched him, no horn or hoof, not even the erect hairs of each hot flank. The bulls surged around him while he continued to wait, leaving him unscathed with drooping shoulders and hollow stomach, and he watched the living thunder and organised confusion pass on both sides. Ignored again, even by stricken beasts, as if there was something in his very existence which could not be acknowledged by the most primitive physical contact.
Now he was standing alone and the event had come and gone without him, even though he had inserted himself into the centre of it. He remained for perhaps another hour before walking away, his mind struggling with old memories, seeking a clue as to why he was a permanent outsider in everything. He wondered if the stories were true, if he had really been murdered in his own house in the distant past and could not be here, but it did not feel like that. He suspected the answer was different at every stage of his long life, a life of travelling, waiting to be perceived and recognised. But this particular case was simple.
If his inner self was not sure who to run with, the bulls or the men, and the people did not know, how could the city care?
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THE PLATINUM DONKEY: The Online Stories of Rhys Hughes
Thursday, 10 November 2011
Tuesday, 4 October 2011
The Folded Page (2006)
My favourite Japanese writer is Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. I can't honestly say he was a direct stylistic influence on this tale, but I did try to inject some of the magical ambience I find in his work into the development of the plot. It first appeared in the first issue of Serendipity in 2007.
"Eight times," said Aguri.
"Eight times what?" wondered Mikiko. She had adopted the tone of a bored child learning a multiplication table.
"A piece of paper can only be folded eight times," elaborated Aguri.
"Nonsense," replied Mikiko firmly.
"It's true." Aguri creased his brow. "Believe me, no matter how large that piece of paper, eight times is the limit. I'm surprised you don't already know this. It's one of those unexpected facts that people like to share with each other."
"Not with me," said Mikiko.
"That's not my fault. The number remains eight."
"I require proof," announced Mikiko.
Aguri puffed out his little cheeks and folded his little arms. His expression was a combination of annoyance and resignation. He indicated a sketch pad that lay on the table next to a vase of flowers and said, "Try for yourself."
Mikiko opened the pad and tore out a blank sheet. She folded it once, then twice. "Easy so far."
"Keep going," sniffed Aguri.
A few minutes later Mikiko was scowling. "I'm not strong enough."
"Only seven times," chuckled Aguri. "If you were fully grown you might manage another fold. But consider the mathematical progression involved in this problem. Every time you fold the paper in half, the thickness of the paper is doubled. After one fold there are two layers, after two folds four layers, then eight, then sixteen, thirty two, sixty four and so on. By folding the paper seven times you created one hundred and twenty eight layers and it's very difficult to fold so many layers all at once."
"But some people can do it," frowned Mikiko.
"Yes. It takes a lot of strength. After eight folds there are two hundred and fifty six layers and nobody has ever progressed beyond that point. The ninth fold is an impossibility."
Mikiko scratched her chin. "I still don't believe it."
Aguri was exasperated. "Why not?"
"Because the paper I used was relatively small," she explained. "Next time I might try the experiment with a huge sheet. If the paper is wide enough I'm sure I can beat the limit. Nine, ten or even eleven folds should be possible."
Aguri nodded slowly. It was clear he wanted to divulge a secret. Mikiko moved her ear closer to his mouth and listened carefully as he told her the following story in breathless whispers. It was the story she had been waiting to hear.
"There was a powerful lord," he began, "who once shared your opinion on this matter. Almost a thousand years ago he decided to settle the argument with an improbable experiment. He paid for the manufacture of the largest piece of paper in history. No blank page quite like it has ever existed since. How big was it, you might ask? As wide as a misty dawn, as long as a frosty road, that's my answer. The lord saw it and was very pleased.
"Surveyors in his employ calculated the halfway point and marked it with an inked brush. Then servants and horses pulled on ropes to draw the paper back on itself. That was the first fold. Again the surveyors ventured forth to make a new mark, again the men and beasts struggled in their harnesses. Within a week the second fold was completed. As the apparent surface area of the sheet diminished, so it grew thicker and harder to fold. Servants and horses collapsed from exhaustion.
"But the lord was resolute. He urged them on with promises and threats. Months passed, the seasons changed. First there was snow on the page, then cherry blossom, all swept away with brooms. Eventually the eighth fold was made, then with great jubilation the ninth. Poets wrote poems on the margins of the paper but their words were smudged and lost when the tenth fold was completed. The sheet was now one thousand and twenty four layers thick.
"Still the lord was dissatisfied. He grew old and should have watched his children grow up, but his attention was wholly directed at the onerous business of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth folds. Finally he realised the foolishness of his obsession and announced that the fourteenth fold would be the last one. When it was made he wept openly, for he had simultaneously achieved his greatest dream and wasted his life.
"Despite his age and decrepitude he walked around the excessively folded page to examine it and this circuit did not take long. Let me now reveal that the original sheet of paper was approximately the same size as the Inland Sea, about eighty five kilometres long on each side. Forget what I said earlier about misty dawns and frosty roads. After all that folding it was now less than a third of one kilometre on each side.
"The fourteenth fold had increased its thickness to sixteen thousand three hundred and eighty four layers. It occurred to the lord that it might be a good idea to build a new castle on the summit of this implausible paper outcrop. It was his way of redeeming those wasted years, of apologising to his servants by demonstrating a more practical result to his whimsical project. And so they laboured for him again and one year later the castle was ready.
"It towered over the surrounding lands on its paper foundations and the lord felt very proud when he took up residence with his family. He hobbled the ramparts and gazed far in every direction and access to the door of the castle was possible only with a long ladder that was drawn up afterwards. But a serene retirement was not to be his, for a neighbouring lord had viewed this paper citadel with jealous eyes and now decided to attack it with steel and fire.
"The battle raged all day. Flames licked the lofty walls but a sudden shower extinguished them. Arrows cut notches in the sheer sides, swords slashed them. The old lord repelled the invaders but the strain proved too much for him. He collapsed and died within the week. The castle was abandoned and fell into ruin. Nobody knew what to do with the folded page and so it was left where it was. It sagged in the rains and dried stiffly in the sun.
"One day an enterprising merchant came to collect it. The descendants of the lord had apparently sold it to him for a trifling sum. He carted it down to the northern shore of the Inland Sea. There he began the task of unfolding it. Suspended on high poles the original page exactly covered the island dotted expanse of water. And now fishermen and other sailors might travel between Shikoku, Kyushu and Honshu in the shade during the hot summer months.
"But there were unforeseen consequences. When you fold a piece of paper and then cut out little pieces along the crease, what do you get when you unfold it? A pattern of holes! The more folds and the more irregular the cuts, the more complex the pattern. The steel and fire of the attackers all those years earlier had created an amazing pattern in this unfolded sheet. But in fact the fishermen and other sailors were able to use it as an aid to navigation from island to island.
"During the day, the sun shone through the holes in the paper sky and formed new constellations with distinctive characters. Men on ships have always looked at the stars to determine direction. But these artificial constellations were deceitful and many sailors arrived at the wrong destination or failed to arrive at all. The problem was that the same groups of stars appeared in different parts of the sky. Identical constellations were found in the north, south, east and west!
"When you fold a page many times, cut into it along the edges and then unfold it, the resulting pattern is a regular whole no matter how irregular it may seem in parts. The individual constellations that a sailor might use to guide him to Shodo or Setoda were mirrored or duplicated in other directions and he often ended up in Omi or Yashiro by mistake. Business suffered as a result and the merchant who bought the folded page was reviled. He had provided a defective sky.
"Anything can fall into a state of disrepair, even the heavens! Birds pecked at the page, storms lashed it. Within a few generations it hung in tatters and eventually it was gone completely. Not a shred of evidence remains to prove it was ever really there. The names of the lord and the merchant have been forgotten. Yet nobody has ever duplicated the feat of folding a page so many times. Eight has once again become the limit, eight times only. That is the truth."
Aguri stopped speaking and gazed hopefully at Mikiko.
Then he added, "What do you think of that?"
"I don't like it," said Mikiko without hesitation. "I expected something better. It won't do, I'm afraid. You've failed the test."
Aguri shut his little eyes and trembled quietly.
Mikiko reached forward and crumpled him up in her fist. Then she threw him at the wastepaper basket. He missed and lay on the floor as a paper ball, one among the others already there. Mikiko selected a new sheet and turned to consult the next chapter of her book, Intelligent Origami, but then she heard the familiar footfalls of one of her human friends coming up the garden path.
She forgot about the book and hurried outside.
*************************************************************************************
"Eight times," said Aguri.
"Eight times what?" wondered Mikiko. She had adopted the tone of a bored child learning a multiplication table.
"A piece of paper can only be folded eight times," elaborated Aguri.
"Nonsense," replied Mikiko firmly.
"It's true." Aguri creased his brow. "Believe me, no matter how large that piece of paper, eight times is the limit. I'm surprised you don't already know this. It's one of those unexpected facts that people like to share with each other."
"Not with me," said Mikiko.
"That's not my fault. The number remains eight."
"I require proof," announced Mikiko.
Aguri puffed out his little cheeks and folded his little arms. His expression was a combination of annoyance and resignation. He indicated a sketch pad that lay on the table next to a vase of flowers and said, "Try for yourself."
Mikiko opened the pad and tore out a blank sheet. She folded it once, then twice. "Easy so far."
"Keep going," sniffed Aguri.
A few minutes later Mikiko was scowling. "I'm not strong enough."
"Only seven times," chuckled Aguri. "If you were fully grown you might manage another fold. But consider the mathematical progression involved in this problem. Every time you fold the paper in half, the thickness of the paper is doubled. After one fold there are two layers, after two folds four layers, then eight, then sixteen, thirty two, sixty four and so on. By folding the paper seven times you created one hundred and twenty eight layers and it's very difficult to fold so many layers all at once."
"But some people can do it," frowned Mikiko.
"Yes. It takes a lot of strength. After eight folds there are two hundred and fifty six layers and nobody has ever progressed beyond that point. The ninth fold is an impossibility."
Mikiko scratched her chin. "I still don't believe it."
Aguri was exasperated. "Why not?"
"Because the paper I used was relatively small," she explained. "Next time I might try the experiment with a huge sheet. If the paper is wide enough I'm sure I can beat the limit. Nine, ten or even eleven folds should be possible."
Aguri nodded slowly. It was clear he wanted to divulge a secret. Mikiko moved her ear closer to his mouth and listened carefully as he told her the following story in breathless whispers. It was the story she had been waiting to hear.
"There was a powerful lord," he began, "who once shared your opinion on this matter. Almost a thousand years ago he decided to settle the argument with an improbable experiment. He paid for the manufacture of the largest piece of paper in history. No blank page quite like it has ever existed since. How big was it, you might ask? As wide as a misty dawn, as long as a frosty road, that's my answer. The lord saw it and was very pleased.
"Surveyors in his employ calculated the halfway point and marked it with an inked brush. Then servants and horses pulled on ropes to draw the paper back on itself. That was the first fold. Again the surveyors ventured forth to make a new mark, again the men and beasts struggled in their harnesses. Within a week the second fold was completed. As the apparent surface area of the sheet diminished, so it grew thicker and harder to fold. Servants and horses collapsed from exhaustion.
"But the lord was resolute. He urged them on with promises and threats. Months passed, the seasons changed. First there was snow on the page, then cherry blossom, all swept away with brooms. Eventually the eighth fold was made, then with great jubilation the ninth. Poets wrote poems on the margins of the paper but their words were smudged and lost when the tenth fold was completed. The sheet was now one thousand and twenty four layers thick.
"Still the lord was dissatisfied. He grew old and should have watched his children grow up, but his attention was wholly directed at the onerous business of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth folds. Finally he realised the foolishness of his obsession and announced that the fourteenth fold would be the last one. When it was made he wept openly, for he had simultaneously achieved his greatest dream and wasted his life.
"Despite his age and decrepitude he walked around the excessively folded page to examine it and this circuit did not take long. Let me now reveal that the original sheet of paper was approximately the same size as the Inland Sea, about eighty five kilometres long on each side. Forget what I said earlier about misty dawns and frosty roads. After all that folding it was now less than a third of one kilometre on each side.
"The fourteenth fold had increased its thickness to sixteen thousand three hundred and eighty four layers. It occurred to the lord that it might be a good idea to build a new castle on the summit of this implausible paper outcrop. It was his way of redeeming those wasted years, of apologising to his servants by demonstrating a more practical result to his whimsical project. And so they laboured for him again and one year later the castle was ready.
"It towered over the surrounding lands on its paper foundations and the lord felt very proud when he took up residence with his family. He hobbled the ramparts and gazed far in every direction and access to the door of the castle was possible only with a long ladder that was drawn up afterwards. But a serene retirement was not to be his, for a neighbouring lord had viewed this paper citadel with jealous eyes and now decided to attack it with steel and fire.
"The battle raged all day. Flames licked the lofty walls but a sudden shower extinguished them. Arrows cut notches in the sheer sides, swords slashed them. The old lord repelled the invaders but the strain proved too much for him. He collapsed and died within the week. The castle was abandoned and fell into ruin. Nobody knew what to do with the folded page and so it was left where it was. It sagged in the rains and dried stiffly in the sun.
"One day an enterprising merchant came to collect it. The descendants of the lord had apparently sold it to him for a trifling sum. He carted it down to the northern shore of the Inland Sea. There he began the task of unfolding it. Suspended on high poles the original page exactly covered the island dotted expanse of water. And now fishermen and other sailors might travel between Shikoku, Kyushu and Honshu in the shade during the hot summer months.
"But there were unforeseen consequences. When you fold a piece of paper and then cut out little pieces along the crease, what do you get when you unfold it? A pattern of holes! The more folds and the more irregular the cuts, the more complex the pattern. The steel and fire of the attackers all those years earlier had created an amazing pattern in this unfolded sheet. But in fact the fishermen and other sailors were able to use it as an aid to navigation from island to island.
"During the day, the sun shone through the holes in the paper sky and formed new constellations with distinctive characters. Men on ships have always looked at the stars to determine direction. But these artificial constellations were deceitful and many sailors arrived at the wrong destination or failed to arrive at all. The problem was that the same groups of stars appeared in different parts of the sky. Identical constellations were found in the north, south, east and west!
"When you fold a page many times, cut into it along the edges and then unfold it, the resulting pattern is a regular whole no matter how irregular it may seem in parts. The individual constellations that a sailor might use to guide him to Shodo or Setoda were mirrored or duplicated in other directions and he often ended up in Omi or Yashiro by mistake. Business suffered as a result and the merchant who bought the folded page was reviled. He had provided a defective sky.
"Anything can fall into a state of disrepair, even the heavens! Birds pecked at the page, storms lashed it. Within a few generations it hung in tatters and eventually it was gone completely. Not a shred of evidence remains to prove it was ever really there. The names of the lord and the merchant have been forgotten. Yet nobody has ever duplicated the feat of folding a page so many times. Eight has once again become the limit, eight times only. That is the truth."
Aguri stopped speaking and gazed hopefully at Mikiko.
Then he added, "What do you think of that?"
"I don't like it," said Mikiko without hesitation. "I expected something better. It won't do, I'm afraid. You've failed the test."
Aguri shut his little eyes and trembled quietly.
Mikiko reached forward and crumpled him up in her fist. Then she threw him at the wastepaper basket. He missed and lay on the floor as a paper ball, one among the others already there. Mikiko selected a new sheet and turned to consult the next chapter of her book, Intelligent Origami, but then she heard the familiar footfalls of one of her human friends coming up the garden path.
She forgot about the book and hurried outside.
*************************************************************************************
Monsters of the Victorian Age (2010)
Lecturing Monsters
In 1877 monsters were finally allowed to give public lectures. These talks often generated considerable controversy due to the fact that the electric system of amplification invented by Emile Berliner and his Detectives the previous year rendered subtext audible for the first time. People didn't like what they heard and turned away in droves. Even drovers turned away in droves. The question of whether monsters should have delivered these lectures behind closed doors, in universities and technical institutes, is purely academic.Making the Beast with Two Backs
Victorian gentlemen greatly enjoyed making the Beast with Two Backs. In their spare time they studied engineering especially for this purpose. It is not clear why the activity was kept secret from their wives, but so it was. Hangars were erected in every major city to house the equipment needed for the regular making of Beasts with Two Backs. In 1883, some of the finished Beasts escaped and had to be legislated against. They were hunted down by Coppers and other steam-powered robotic policemen and sent to operate treadmills in the workhouse, grinding urchins.
Musical Monsters
The vogue for musical monsters began in 1841 when Chumworth Blighter, the progressive impresario, arranged the first season of afternoon concerts in which imaginary beings were the sole performers. Prior to this achievement, common wisdom had decreed that monsters "should be screamed but not heard". Rapidly growing in popularity, recitals by monsters of music composed by monsters soon became the dominant form of acoustical entertainment in concert halls, theatres and outdoor arenas. The fad crumpled just three years later when notes H to Z inclusive, the ones most favoured by monsters, were officially removed from the octave in compliance with wide-ranging austerity measures.Petrified Monsters
The common assumption that monsters are frightening, and that they frighten human beings, and that the reverse situation never occurs, was conclusively disproved by the opening of the Imperial Monster Museum in 1866, a public facility where unique cryptozoological exhibits could be viewed for a nominal sum. The rooms were filled with monsters that had literally petrified from fright after catching sight of a human face. These stone behemoths, sciapods, harpies, colossi, minotaurs, gorgons, cynocephali, onocentaurs and other mythical beasties were arranged randomly after the directors of the museum disagreed on how best to categorise them. The Imperial Monster Museum was closed in 1899 and the exhibits sold at private auction to statue enthusiasts.Entangled Monsters
The difficulty of disentangling certain monsters after they had embraced each other led to the passing of a law in 1868 that treated knotted conglomerations of imaginary beings as single units for the purposes of moral and scientific research. Monsters can be sticky and massively elongated, making entanglements almost inevitable and natural; and yet the general public tended to regard monster knots as examples of tragedy. On the lighter side, an Italian chef was inspired to create a new dish called "spaghetti" by the sight of an especially intricate knot of monsters off the coast of Margate. Some people dispute this and claim that the first spaghetto was created in the 12th century, but such arguments are now all in the pasta. It is not entirely unknown for Lecturing Monsters to be included in the set of Entangled Monsters.Chimney Monsters
Chimney monsters keep the Empire happy. Chimney monsters keep the Empire warm. They dine on chopped wood and black stones and never complain. Without chimney monsters where would we be? Not here, not here! Chimney monsters keep stuck sweeps for pets. Chimney monsters call a spade a shovel. Black, blistered and riveted they cough all day; roaring and hissing they glow all night. Chimney monsters share our air. They jut their horns but not their chins. If chimney monsters went away, the Queen would fall and break. The Empire too. Even the smallest chimney monster is grate. Remember that!Sunday, 11 September 2011
The Paradoxical Pachyderms (2011)
The bulk of this story was written in a single sitting in the window of Waterstones bookshop in the town of Crawley during the first Crawley Wordfest. I managed to finish the tale despite regular intereference from members of the public, one of whom was keen that I write a social realist piece instead. After I returned home I improved the ending. Two of my story cycles meet in this tale: the adventures of Hogwash & Bum Note, and the exploits of Thornton Excelsior.
The greatest explorers in the world regard the entire planet as home, so it logically follows that when they get lost they get lost in their own homes. Mediocre explorers also get lost in their own homes; I know of one case, Plucky Ruckus by name, who took three years to locate the source of the leak that had flooded his living room; he followed the banks of the stream and finally discovered that it came from his bathroom, but on the stairs he was kidnapped by a tribe of cannibals and eaten for supper. Fortunately for him, there were plenty of leftovers, so in the morning he was able to stagger the remainder of the journey.
As for the very worst explorers, they don't know how to get lost. They haven't even discovered that knowledge yet. They wander aimlessly over various kinds of landscapes, between the peaks of spitting volcanoes and through shopping malls, into the houses of other people and out the other side, shouting, “Are we not there yet?”
Nobody ever gives an answer to that question.
My name is Thornton Excelsior and I am one of the administrators of the Eldritch Explorers' Club, which is a society dedicated to totally weird adventure and utterly implausible travel. My official task is to accurately document the exploits of our active members. It's not a full-time post but only one of my many posts. I have so many posts I may be described as a fence; however, that appellation seems to attract the interest of the police, I can't guess why, so I tend not to use it.
Every year, at our annual general meeting, I am required to read aloud the reports I have made of the most notable journeys of our members. In the expectant hush of our hallowed trophy-cluttered Anecdote Chamber, I stand on the podium and regale my worthy colleagues with ludicrous but factual accounts of voyages undertaken; and in many cases of explorers undertaken too, for not everyone who embarks alive comes back that way. In fact they often don't come back at all and there isn't a skeleton to measure for a coffin, or even a loose ribcage or foot for the undertakers to dress tastefully in a waistcoat or nice shoe before proper burial. But those are the risks associated with exploration.
Last year I had to recite aloud the obituary of Whymper Bowman, an explorer renowned for climbing mountains in reverse. His technique was ingenious and silly: he would jump out of an aircraft and parachute onto the summit of a peak, and from there he would climb down to the bottom headfirst. He called this method 'unconquering' and claimed it was less patronising and imperialistic than making a normal ascent. In this manner he unconquered Ben Nevis on his eighteenth birthday, Mont Blanc when he was twenty and Aconcagua when he was thirty, progressing to higher and higher altitudes. On his fortieth birthday he successfully unconquered Mount Everest. After that, there was only Rum Doodle, which at 40,000½ feet should be better known than it is.
When he finally reached the base of Rum Doodle, touching the ground with the crown of his head, Whymper Bowman formally announced his retirement; but destiny had other plans for him. A local porter, who later turned out to be a yeti in disguise, casually mentioned that in the legends of his own people there was an even higher mountain to the north; known only as Madness Mountain, it was higher than Rum Doodle some of the time, because it kept changing its height according to its moods. It was a completely insane geographical feature.
Mr Bowman soon became obsessed with it and made preparations to add it to his impressive list of unconquests. Every time he was asked why he wanted to 'climb' an insane mountain upside-down, he gave the same answer, “Because it's not all there.”
That was his last adventure. True, he successfully parachuted onto the summit of Madness Mountain; but at that moment it chose to quadruple its altitude and it rose out of the atmosphere, suffocating Mr Bowman in the freezing vacuum of space. The yeti chuckled at this, rubbed his hairy palms in cryptozoological glee and carved another notch into the handle of his walking stick, which was the tusk of a mammoth. Yetis don't like explorers very much because they often smell of mint cake, which is the most loathsome odour to mythical beasts.
So much for Whymper Bowman! He was daft but brave.
That's worth something, isn't it?
The same can't be said for a pair of fellows who almost certainly are the worst explorers I have ever encountered. Sometimes I suspect they have been sent by a higher supernatural agency to mock the pretensions of the Eldritch Explorers' Club. Yet they are likeable enough and there's never any question of revoking their membership.
Hogwash and Bum Note are their names. Maybe you are familiar with their exploits in the dense jungles of Yuckystan? One of them fell into a giant piggybank that had been erected centuries earlier by a previously unknown civilisation; it was a long fall and there was no escape from the inside, but once you fall into a piggybank you are 'saved', so everything turned out fine in the end. It has been rumoured that interest was earned on the saving; but I don't believe that.
On another occasion, they declared their intention to climb the most notable 'peak' in England; that doesn't sound like so fine an achievement until you realise that they were very bad at spelling and were referring to Mervyn Peake. I gather the attempt annoyed that great writer and he kept brushing them off. What a Gormenghastly pun that was! It made me Titus Groan! All the same, it really happened.
Not long ago, last week in fact, Hogwash turned to Bum Note. “We have explored much of the physical world together, so don't you think it's time we explored a figure of speech instead?”
“What do you have in mind?” wondered Bum Note.
“Our sexuality. We haven't explored that properly yet, have we?” said Hogwash. Bum Note considered this.
“I explored my own once, in a Soho nightclub.”
“Indisputable, but we didn't explore it together. That was merely your sexuality. What about our sexuality?”
“Fair enough. There's a bus to Brighton in half an hour.”
“Let's get on it!” cried Hogwash.
“Going to Brighton is exactly what we need.”
“Yes. Brighton's just the ticket!”
“Really? That's a big ticket,” said Bum Note.
“It's another figure of speech,” explained Hogwash patiently. “We'd hardly pay for a trip to Brighton with Brighton itself, would we? For one thing, we'd never get it on the bus.”
“We wouldn't need a bus if we already had it.”
“True, true,” conceded Hogwash.
“Let's go to Brighton! To Brighton!” chortled Bum Note.
“Ready when you are, chum!”
And that's what they did. When they reached Brighton they wandered the quaint streets at random; they visited the Royal Pavilion and went to stand on the pier. Finally they sat on a bench in the light of the setting sun and Bum Note sighed with dismay.
“We haven't even located our sexuality yet, let alone explored it. I bet we're overlooking something obvious.”
“I'm overlooking the beach,” said Hogwash blithely.
“Yes, but there's no merit in just exploring a beach. We must be doing something wrong. I wonder what?”
“Maybe we need to find our sexuality before we can explore it? If we don't have it at our fingertips, we won't be able to plant our flag in it. By the way, did you bring the flag?”
“Of course I did,” replied Bum Note. “I've got a nice pole to run it up. But how can we find our sexuality?”
“By hunting for it,” suggested Hogwash.
“But we don't have a hunting license,” said Bum Note. “Also, I regard hunting as an immoral activity.”
“So do I, as it happens.”
“Why don't we trap it instead, humanely?”
“Good idea. Let's do that!”
“But how?” pondered Bum Note.
“Maybe we should hire an exotic dancer as bait?”
“It's worth a try, I guess…”
The task of finding an exotic dancer for hire in Brighton was easy, too easy perhaps; but anyway, she stood in front of them and undulated in the moonlight. Hogwash and Bum Note sat rigid on their bench, side-by-side, knees touching, like statues. They stared without comment. Hours passed, but they knew that trapping figures of speech could be a tricky business. At last, just before dawn, it happened…
“There it is. Our sexuality!” squealed Hogwash.
“Plant the flag!” cried Bum Note.
“You've got it. Hurry!” blurted Hogwash.
“Watch out! Here goes!”
With a wild primeval howl, Bum Note thrust the point of the flagpole into the very centre of their sexuality. The exotic dancer ceased her sultry gyrations and covered her mouth with a hand. It was the most shocking thing she had seen in her career.
“Ouch!” screamed Hogwash and Bum Note.
It took an entire troupe of dedicated doctors to get the flagpole out and eighty metres of cotton to bandage the wounded sexuality. Hogwash and Bum Note walked with a synchronised limp for a decade afterwards. That kind of injury heals very slowly. If you don't believe me, try planting a flag in your own sexuality sometime.
I've already mentioned that my name is Thornton Excelsior. A few days ago I was woken by my pet ghost. I didn't mention that I had a pet ghost, did I? Well, I do; and it woke me up.
“But the sun hasn't risen yet,” I protested.
The ghost floated higher above my bed and said, “There are strange sounds coming from the garden. I think you should go and investigate. I don't want to go. I'm frightened.”
Grumbling, I dressed and went out in my slippers.
And I saw a remarkable sight.
Miniature elephants, a herd of them, were grazing on my lawn. There were also some tiny rhinos and hippos. Emboldened by my presence, my ghost came up behind me and peered timidly over my shoulder. “Maybe they aren't really miniature elephants, rhinos and hippos; perhaps they are normal-sized but far away,” it said.
“My lawn isn't that big,” I pointed out reasonably.
“Good point,” murmured my ghost.
I kneeled down for a closer look. One of the elephants clambered onto the open palm of my right hand.
I lifted it higher and smiled. “These must be the fabled Paradoxical Pachyderms hitherto only spotted in the Bunlands,” I remarked. But as I leaned forward, the little beast launched itself at me and stabbed my neck deeply with one of its sharp tusks.
“Yow!” I exclaimed.
“What's the matter?” asked my ghost. “Did somebody plant a flag in your sexuality?” His tone was ironic.
“Nope,” I said simply.
I went back inside the house. The entry point of the miniature tusk was already swelling into a large boil.
Frowning, I regarded the potato that had been sitting in a saucepan on my stove for the past week. The problem was that the stove wasn't real; it was just a model made from matchsticks; and those matchsticks were all burned out; so there was no way of generating any heat from the device. I found cooking meals therefore difficult, impossible in fact. I hadn't tasted a cooked potato for many years.
Now I had an idea. I picked up the saucepan by its handle and moved it next to the swelling on my neck.
“What do you think you're doing?” asked my ghost.
“Bringing the potato to the boil,” I said.
Before it was quite ready to eat, there was a knock at the door. So I put down the saucepan and went to answer it. Two figures stood there; one of them was a mirror image of the other, but I don't know which. Therefore it's impossible for me to describe them.
“I'm about to have my breakfast,” I said.
“We won't keep you for long,” they said. “We are the characters you have recently libelled most awfully.”
“If my libel was substandard, I'll try again.”
“We would prefer it if you didn't bother. I'm Hogwash and this is Bum Note and you depicted us as imbeciles. But we aren't like that at all; we're serious explorers and so we demand that you write a new piece about our particular brand of original heroism.”
“What brand is that?” I asked tolerantly.
“Please don't play games with us. It's hard enough being fictional even when we are treated with respect; but when an author creates us just as a focus for puns and silly jokes… It's irresponsible, that's what it is, and we want a better story to appear in than this; or if you can't do that, then you should rewrite our parts in this tale.”
“You must have confused me with someone else,” I said. “My name is Thornton Excelsior and I only write factual reports on what daft explorers get up to. I never handle fiction.”
They asked, “Who does the ghost belong to?”
“To me. He's my pet,” I said.
“No, we mean who was he when he was alive…”
“I don't know,” I admitted.
“Well, why don't you ask him?” they said.
I turned to my ghost and cried, “Who were you when you were alive? I assume this is just a formality…”
And the ghost replied, “My name is Hector Gloopbunny, and I was an explorer before I fell off the edge of the map. The impact killed me. The problem was that I unfolded the map on top of a magic carpet. Such a bad place to spread it out! The carpet was flying high at the time; so when I fell off, it was a very long way down. I was famous in my day but never a member of the Eldritch Explorers' Club.”
“Did you land on something hard, Mr Gloopbunny?”
My pet ghost answered with a sigh, “Two rotten explorers who looked exactly like these two fellows here.”
“Maybe they are the same pair?” I wondered.
“If so, they are ghosts like me. I killed them with the force of my fall. I recommend you try poking them with a finger. If the finger goes through, it'll be proof they are indeed spooks.”
I didn't have the nerve to extend my own finger and do what my ghost recommended. I picked up a dictionary from a bookshelf and threw that at them instead, because it contained the word 'finger', as well as many other words, not all of them suitable for poking things with. The flesh of my visitors provided no resistance at all.
The dictionary went straight through and hit the wall.
They were spectres, both of them; explorers of the other side, the outer limits, the spirit worlds, and bad at it too.
Later, I went back into the garden and collected some of the miniature elephants and other creatures. I thought it might be nice to bring them indoors and play with them for a short period, to take my mind off the stress occasioned by life in general.
I had imprisoned Hogwash and Bum Note in bottles after compressing them first in ghost-proof bags. I thought it might be fun to introduce the elephants, rhinos and hippos into the same bottles. I'm not an especially nice person, in case you're wondering.
Then I noticed that among the pachyderms there was a miniature yeti. He was stalking a miniature mammoth. I reached out to snatch him up, but it turned out I had misjudged distance. Thanks to odd perspective, he was actually a full-sized yeti far away.
“My garden still isn't that big!” I protested.
My pet ghost floated onto my shoulder and perched there. “Clearly it is. You must have ordered an extension on credit when you realised you had two rare ghosts to sell as pets…”
He has a sharp business mind, that Hector Gloopbunny. I didn't miss the hint and I went back into the house to fetch the bottles. Then I set out on the long trek towards the yeti. One day I'll write up the account of this expedition for my own organisation.
After an hour of hard bargaining, I got a very good price for Hogwash and Bum Note. And the yeti was pleased by the transaction. He chuckled, rubbed hairy palms in cryptozoological glee and carved two extra notches into the handle of his walking stick.
I had already forcefed them on mint cake.
*************************************************************************************
The greatest explorers in the world regard the entire planet as home, so it logically follows that when they get lost they get lost in their own homes. Mediocre explorers also get lost in their own homes; I know of one case, Plucky Ruckus by name, who took three years to locate the source of the leak that had flooded his living room; he followed the banks of the stream and finally discovered that it came from his bathroom, but on the stairs he was kidnapped by a tribe of cannibals and eaten for supper. Fortunately for him, there were plenty of leftovers, so in the morning he was able to stagger the remainder of the journey.
As for the very worst explorers, they don't know how to get lost. They haven't even discovered that knowledge yet. They wander aimlessly over various kinds of landscapes, between the peaks of spitting volcanoes and through shopping malls, into the houses of other people and out the other side, shouting, “Are we not there yet?”
Nobody ever gives an answer to that question.
My name is Thornton Excelsior and I am one of the administrators of the Eldritch Explorers' Club, which is a society dedicated to totally weird adventure and utterly implausible travel. My official task is to accurately document the exploits of our active members. It's not a full-time post but only one of my many posts. I have so many posts I may be described as a fence; however, that appellation seems to attract the interest of the police, I can't guess why, so I tend not to use it.
Every year, at our annual general meeting, I am required to read aloud the reports I have made of the most notable journeys of our members. In the expectant hush of our hallowed trophy-cluttered Anecdote Chamber, I stand on the podium and regale my worthy colleagues with ludicrous but factual accounts of voyages undertaken; and in many cases of explorers undertaken too, for not everyone who embarks alive comes back that way. In fact they often don't come back at all and there isn't a skeleton to measure for a coffin, or even a loose ribcage or foot for the undertakers to dress tastefully in a waistcoat or nice shoe before proper burial. But those are the risks associated with exploration.
Last year I had to recite aloud the obituary of Whymper Bowman, an explorer renowned for climbing mountains in reverse. His technique was ingenious and silly: he would jump out of an aircraft and parachute onto the summit of a peak, and from there he would climb down to the bottom headfirst. He called this method 'unconquering' and claimed it was less patronising and imperialistic than making a normal ascent. In this manner he unconquered Ben Nevis on his eighteenth birthday, Mont Blanc when he was twenty and Aconcagua when he was thirty, progressing to higher and higher altitudes. On his fortieth birthday he successfully unconquered Mount Everest. After that, there was only Rum Doodle, which at 40,000½ feet should be better known than it is.
When he finally reached the base of Rum Doodle, touching the ground with the crown of his head, Whymper Bowman formally announced his retirement; but destiny had other plans for him. A local porter, who later turned out to be a yeti in disguise, casually mentioned that in the legends of his own people there was an even higher mountain to the north; known only as Madness Mountain, it was higher than Rum Doodle some of the time, because it kept changing its height according to its moods. It was a completely insane geographical feature.
Mr Bowman soon became obsessed with it and made preparations to add it to his impressive list of unconquests. Every time he was asked why he wanted to 'climb' an insane mountain upside-down, he gave the same answer, “Because it's not all there.”
That was his last adventure. True, he successfully parachuted onto the summit of Madness Mountain; but at that moment it chose to quadruple its altitude and it rose out of the atmosphere, suffocating Mr Bowman in the freezing vacuum of space. The yeti chuckled at this, rubbed his hairy palms in cryptozoological glee and carved another notch into the handle of his walking stick, which was the tusk of a mammoth. Yetis don't like explorers very much because they often smell of mint cake, which is the most loathsome odour to mythical beasts.
So much for Whymper Bowman! He was daft but brave.
That's worth something, isn't it?
The same can't be said for a pair of fellows who almost certainly are the worst explorers I have ever encountered. Sometimes I suspect they have been sent by a higher supernatural agency to mock the pretensions of the Eldritch Explorers' Club. Yet they are likeable enough and there's never any question of revoking their membership.
Hogwash and Bum Note are their names. Maybe you are familiar with their exploits in the dense jungles of Yuckystan? One of them fell into a giant piggybank that had been erected centuries earlier by a previously unknown civilisation; it was a long fall and there was no escape from the inside, but once you fall into a piggybank you are 'saved', so everything turned out fine in the end. It has been rumoured that interest was earned on the saving; but I don't believe that.
On another occasion, they declared their intention to climb the most notable 'peak' in England; that doesn't sound like so fine an achievement until you realise that they were very bad at spelling and were referring to Mervyn Peake. I gather the attempt annoyed that great writer and he kept brushing them off. What a Gormenghastly pun that was! It made me Titus Groan! All the same, it really happened.
Not long ago, last week in fact, Hogwash turned to Bum Note. “We have explored much of the physical world together, so don't you think it's time we explored a figure of speech instead?”
“What do you have in mind?” wondered Bum Note.
“Our sexuality. We haven't explored that properly yet, have we?” said Hogwash. Bum Note considered this.
“I explored my own once, in a Soho nightclub.”
“Indisputable, but we didn't explore it together. That was merely your sexuality. What about our sexuality?”
“Fair enough. There's a bus to Brighton in half an hour.”
“Let's get on it!” cried Hogwash.
“Going to Brighton is exactly what we need.”
“Yes. Brighton's just the ticket!”
“Really? That's a big ticket,” said Bum Note.
“It's another figure of speech,” explained Hogwash patiently. “We'd hardly pay for a trip to Brighton with Brighton itself, would we? For one thing, we'd never get it on the bus.”
“We wouldn't need a bus if we already had it.”
“True, true,” conceded Hogwash.
“Let's go to Brighton! To Brighton!” chortled Bum Note.
“Ready when you are, chum!”
And that's what they did. When they reached Brighton they wandered the quaint streets at random; they visited the Royal Pavilion and went to stand on the pier. Finally they sat on a bench in the light of the setting sun and Bum Note sighed with dismay.
“We haven't even located our sexuality yet, let alone explored it. I bet we're overlooking something obvious.”
“I'm overlooking the beach,” said Hogwash blithely.
“Yes, but there's no merit in just exploring a beach. We must be doing something wrong. I wonder what?”
“Maybe we need to find our sexuality before we can explore it? If we don't have it at our fingertips, we won't be able to plant our flag in it. By the way, did you bring the flag?”
“Of course I did,” replied Bum Note. “I've got a nice pole to run it up. But how can we find our sexuality?”
“By hunting for it,” suggested Hogwash.
“But we don't have a hunting license,” said Bum Note. “Also, I regard hunting as an immoral activity.”
“So do I, as it happens.”
“Why don't we trap it instead, humanely?”
“Good idea. Let's do that!”
“But how?” pondered Bum Note.
“Maybe we should hire an exotic dancer as bait?”
“It's worth a try, I guess…”
The task of finding an exotic dancer for hire in Brighton was easy, too easy perhaps; but anyway, she stood in front of them and undulated in the moonlight. Hogwash and Bum Note sat rigid on their bench, side-by-side, knees touching, like statues. They stared without comment. Hours passed, but they knew that trapping figures of speech could be a tricky business. At last, just before dawn, it happened…
“There it is. Our sexuality!” squealed Hogwash.
“Plant the flag!” cried Bum Note.
“You've got it. Hurry!” blurted Hogwash.
“Watch out! Here goes!”
With a wild primeval howl, Bum Note thrust the point of the flagpole into the very centre of their sexuality. The exotic dancer ceased her sultry gyrations and covered her mouth with a hand. It was the most shocking thing she had seen in her career.
“Ouch!” screamed Hogwash and Bum Note.
It took an entire troupe of dedicated doctors to get the flagpole out and eighty metres of cotton to bandage the wounded sexuality. Hogwash and Bum Note walked with a synchronised limp for a decade afterwards. That kind of injury heals very slowly. If you don't believe me, try planting a flag in your own sexuality sometime.
I've already mentioned that my name is Thornton Excelsior. A few days ago I was woken by my pet ghost. I didn't mention that I had a pet ghost, did I? Well, I do; and it woke me up.
“But the sun hasn't risen yet,” I protested.
The ghost floated higher above my bed and said, “There are strange sounds coming from the garden. I think you should go and investigate. I don't want to go. I'm frightened.”
Grumbling, I dressed and went out in my slippers.
And I saw a remarkable sight.
Miniature elephants, a herd of them, were grazing on my lawn. There were also some tiny rhinos and hippos. Emboldened by my presence, my ghost came up behind me and peered timidly over my shoulder. “Maybe they aren't really miniature elephants, rhinos and hippos; perhaps they are normal-sized but far away,” it said.
“My lawn isn't that big,” I pointed out reasonably.
“Good point,” murmured my ghost.
I kneeled down for a closer look. One of the elephants clambered onto the open palm of my right hand.
I lifted it higher and smiled. “These must be the fabled Paradoxical Pachyderms hitherto only spotted in the Bunlands,” I remarked. But as I leaned forward, the little beast launched itself at me and stabbed my neck deeply with one of its sharp tusks.
“Yow!” I exclaimed.
“What's the matter?” asked my ghost. “Did somebody plant a flag in your sexuality?” His tone was ironic.
“Nope,” I said simply.
I went back inside the house. The entry point of the miniature tusk was already swelling into a large boil.
Frowning, I regarded the potato that had been sitting in a saucepan on my stove for the past week. The problem was that the stove wasn't real; it was just a model made from matchsticks; and those matchsticks were all burned out; so there was no way of generating any heat from the device. I found cooking meals therefore difficult, impossible in fact. I hadn't tasted a cooked potato for many years.
Now I had an idea. I picked up the saucepan by its handle and moved it next to the swelling on my neck.
“What do you think you're doing?” asked my ghost.
“Bringing the potato to the boil,” I said.
Before it was quite ready to eat, there was a knock at the door. So I put down the saucepan and went to answer it. Two figures stood there; one of them was a mirror image of the other, but I don't know which. Therefore it's impossible for me to describe them.
“I'm about to have my breakfast,” I said.
“We won't keep you for long,” they said. “We are the characters you have recently libelled most awfully.”
“If my libel was substandard, I'll try again.”
“We would prefer it if you didn't bother. I'm Hogwash and this is Bum Note and you depicted us as imbeciles. But we aren't like that at all; we're serious explorers and so we demand that you write a new piece about our particular brand of original heroism.”
“What brand is that?” I asked tolerantly.
“Please don't play games with us. It's hard enough being fictional even when we are treated with respect; but when an author creates us just as a focus for puns and silly jokes… It's irresponsible, that's what it is, and we want a better story to appear in than this; or if you can't do that, then you should rewrite our parts in this tale.”
“You must have confused me with someone else,” I said. “My name is Thornton Excelsior and I only write factual reports on what daft explorers get up to. I never handle fiction.”
They asked, “Who does the ghost belong to?”
“To me. He's my pet,” I said.
“No, we mean who was he when he was alive…”
“I don't know,” I admitted.
“Well, why don't you ask him?” they said.
I turned to my ghost and cried, “Who were you when you were alive? I assume this is just a formality…”
And the ghost replied, “My name is Hector Gloopbunny, and I was an explorer before I fell off the edge of the map. The impact killed me. The problem was that I unfolded the map on top of a magic carpet. Such a bad place to spread it out! The carpet was flying high at the time; so when I fell off, it was a very long way down. I was famous in my day but never a member of the Eldritch Explorers' Club.”
“Did you land on something hard, Mr Gloopbunny?”
My pet ghost answered with a sigh, “Two rotten explorers who looked exactly like these two fellows here.”
“Maybe they are the same pair?” I wondered.
“If so, they are ghosts like me. I killed them with the force of my fall. I recommend you try poking them with a finger. If the finger goes through, it'll be proof they are indeed spooks.”
I didn't have the nerve to extend my own finger and do what my ghost recommended. I picked up a dictionary from a bookshelf and threw that at them instead, because it contained the word 'finger', as well as many other words, not all of them suitable for poking things with. The flesh of my visitors provided no resistance at all.
The dictionary went straight through and hit the wall.
They were spectres, both of them; explorers of the other side, the outer limits, the spirit worlds, and bad at it too.
Later, I went back into the garden and collected some of the miniature elephants and other creatures. I thought it might be nice to bring them indoors and play with them for a short period, to take my mind off the stress occasioned by life in general.
I had imprisoned Hogwash and Bum Note in bottles after compressing them first in ghost-proof bags. I thought it might be fun to introduce the elephants, rhinos and hippos into the same bottles. I'm not an especially nice person, in case you're wondering.
Then I noticed that among the pachyderms there was a miniature yeti. He was stalking a miniature mammoth. I reached out to snatch him up, but it turned out I had misjudged distance. Thanks to odd perspective, he was actually a full-sized yeti far away.
“My garden still isn't that big!” I protested.
My pet ghost floated onto my shoulder and perched there. “Clearly it is. You must have ordered an extension on credit when you realised you had two rare ghosts to sell as pets…”
He has a sharp business mind, that Hector Gloopbunny. I didn't miss the hint and I went back into the house to fetch the bottles. Then I set out on the long trek towards the yeti. One day I'll write up the account of this expedition for my own organisation.
After an hour of hard bargaining, I got a very good price for Hogwash and Bum Note. And the yeti was pleased by the transaction. He chuckled, rubbed hairy palms in cryptozoological glee and carved two extra notches into the handle of his walking stick.
I had already forcefed them on mint cake.
*************************************************************************************
Sunday, 4 September 2011
The End of the Road (1992)
This story began life in the mid 1980s as a radio play that I never completed. My main influence was Chekhov's story 'Romance with Double Bass'. The early Chekhov was a big influence on me back then. A few years later, I turned it into a short story just to get the idea off my back. It was eventually published in The Third Alternative #4 in 1994.
This is a long dark road for a weary music student to be trudging up. And this is a heavy instrument to be balancing on thin shoulders. If only I played the piccolo instead of the double bass! But now I am frozen in my tracks by a groan. A man is lying in a ditch by the side of the road. I am always polite, so I lower my burden to the ground and sit down to talk to him.
His name, he tells me, is Marcel; and he is in love. When I point out that love is scant reason for lying in a ditch, he replies that he was knocked there by a Porsche, a Porsche, furthermore, driven by the greatest beauty ever to swerve across a road. It was love at first strike. His bones are all broken, but it is his heart that aches. I am sympathetic. I offer him a cigarette. He declines on the grounds they are bad for your health.
What am I to make of this last statement? As a poor student, tobacco is frequently an alternative to a meal rather than an adjunct. I remark that suppertime in my draughty garret is often a damp cigarette in front of my faulty paraffin heater, with the single red head of a broken match to ignite both. At this, he adopts a dreamy tone. Redhead, yes, and her hair flowed out behind her like molten copper…
I have never seen copper, molten or otherwise, though once I had a brass monkey, so I ask if he managed to have a good look at her. Oh no! A glimpse is all he had; but it was enough. It seems to me that he is burning up with fancies. Love, of course, is an illusion. I decide to play him something to calm him down. I stand up, open my instrument case, take out my double bass and proceed to play a few notes of a dismal melody.
My hands are too cold to extract much worth. I apologise. Perhaps a cigarette will help to warm me? I fumble in my pockets. Five left: one every mile till my destination. My destination? The end of the road. I am to play my double bass there at a soirée attended by various aesthetes. Yes, perhaps the Porsche was repairing thither when it knocked you head over heels into love and this ditch. She wore a silk scarf of the palest pink? Then she certainly sounds like an aesthete.
Naturally, I do not envy him. He is in love, it is true, but it is unrequited. His girl ditched him, in a manner of speaking. If I feel anything at all, then it is pity; but he does not want to be pitied. He insists that, for the first time in his life, he is happy. I am astonished. For only the first time? Yes, he has had a loveless existence. Like some grey and sad whale he has always wallowed in the seven seas of depression. But all that has changed now. It changed when the Porsche struck him down.
I am contemptuous. How could it? The woman he loves was a bad driver and a glimpse of red hair and pink scarf. Nothing more. But he insists that there is always more. Seeing is not always believing. We have already worked out that she is an aesthete and can be found at the end of the road. Surely, with a little more effort, we should be capable of deducing exactly what she looks like, how the facets of her personality glitter, even what her name is? This is his argument.
As I said before, I am always polite. I wish to help him. I cannot turn back to summon help, nor can I carry him forwards to the end of the road. In the first case, I would lose sight of my destination; in the second, I would have to arrive without my double bass. Yet there is one thing I can do.
I tell him that philosophy, like bad poetry, should be reserved for the college paper, and not declaimed aloud from a ditch. I tell him that ideals exist only in the mind or the liver, and very possibly do not exist at all. I tell him that, fantasy aside, he can name not a single one of her attributes and therefore cannot possibly be in love with her.
As a musician, I am used to developing themes. I dismantle his picture for him, piece by piece. He is a poor deluded fool, and I wish to bring him to his senses. I hammer the final nail into her coffin. I tell him that she must have been exceptionally vacuous not to have realised that she had been the cause of an accident…
At this, he begins to laugh. I have obviously misunderstood. It was no accident. She drove into him deliberately. There can be no doubt about it. She altered her course as soon as she spotted him in the glare of her headlights!
I am astounded. I shake my head in bewilderment. I can do no more for him. How can I reason with such? My conscience is clear. I return my double bass to my long-suffering shoulders, bid him farewell and resume my journey towards the end of the road. As I walk, his final words ring in my ears. Deliberately?
My step is not so heavy now. I am eager to reach my destination. I begin to increase my pace. Although this is a long dark road for a weary music student to be trudging up, I am content. Although this is a heavy instrument to be balancing on thin shoulders, I am happy. My heart flutters like a trapped butterfly. His final words have had a profound effect on me. At the end of the road, if he has spoken truly, she will be waiting with pink scarf and molten copper hair. At the end of the road, I will find the woman I love.
This is a long dark road for a weary music student to be trudging up. And this is a heavy instrument to be balancing on thin shoulders. If only I played the piccolo instead of the double bass! But now I am frozen in my tracks by a groan. A man is lying in a ditch by the side of the road. I am always polite, so I lower my burden to the ground and sit down to talk to him.
His name, he tells me, is Marcel; and he is in love. When I point out that love is scant reason for lying in a ditch, he replies that he was knocked there by a Porsche, a Porsche, furthermore, driven by the greatest beauty ever to swerve across a road. It was love at first strike. His bones are all broken, but it is his heart that aches. I am sympathetic. I offer him a cigarette. He declines on the grounds they are bad for your health.
What am I to make of this last statement? As a poor student, tobacco is frequently an alternative to a meal rather than an adjunct. I remark that suppertime in my draughty garret is often a damp cigarette in front of my faulty paraffin heater, with the single red head of a broken match to ignite both. At this, he adopts a dreamy tone. Redhead, yes, and her hair flowed out behind her like molten copper…
I have never seen copper, molten or otherwise, though once I had a brass monkey, so I ask if he managed to have a good look at her. Oh no! A glimpse is all he had; but it was enough. It seems to me that he is burning up with fancies. Love, of course, is an illusion. I decide to play him something to calm him down. I stand up, open my instrument case, take out my double bass and proceed to play a few notes of a dismal melody.
My hands are too cold to extract much worth. I apologise. Perhaps a cigarette will help to warm me? I fumble in my pockets. Five left: one every mile till my destination. My destination? The end of the road. I am to play my double bass there at a soirée attended by various aesthetes. Yes, perhaps the Porsche was repairing thither when it knocked you head over heels into love and this ditch. She wore a silk scarf of the palest pink? Then she certainly sounds like an aesthete.
Naturally, I do not envy him. He is in love, it is true, but it is unrequited. His girl ditched him, in a manner of speaking. If I feel anything at all, then it is pity; but he does not want to be pitied. He insists that, for the first time in his life, he is happy. I am astonished. For only the first time? Yes, he has had a loveless existence. Like some grey and sad whale he has always wallowed in the seven seas of depression. But all that has changed now. It changed when the Porsche struck him down.
I am contemptuous. How could it? The woman he loves was a bad driver and a glimpse of red hair and pink scarf. Nothing more. But he insists that there is always more. Seeing is not always believing. We have already worked out that she is an aesthete and can be found at the end of the road. Surely, with a little more effort, we should be capable of deducing exactly what she looks like, how the facets of her personality glitter, even what her name is? This is his argument.
As I said before, I am always polite. I wish to help him. I cannot turn back to summon help, nor can I carry him forwards to the end of the road. In the first case, I would lose sight of my destination; in the second, I would have to arrive without my double bass. Yet there is one thing I can do.
I tell him that philosophy, like bad poetry, should be reserved for the college paper, and not declaimed aloud from a ditch. I tell him that ideals exist only in the mind or the liver, and very possibly do not exist at all. I tell him that, fantasy aside, he can name not a single one of her attributes and therefore cannot possibly be in love with her.
As a musician, I am used to developing themes. I dismantle his picture for him, piece by piece. He is a poor deluded fool, and I wish to bring him to his senses. I hammer the final nail into her coffin. I tell him that she must have been exceptionally vacuous not to have realised that she had been the cause of an accident…
At this, he begins to laugh. I have obviously misunderstood. It was no accident. She drove into him deliberately. There can be no doubt about it. She altered her course as soon as she spotted him in the glare of her headlights!
I am astounded. I shake my head in bewilderment. I can do no more for him. How can I reason with such? My conscience is clear. I return my double bass to my long-suffering shoulders, bid him farewell and resume my journey towards the end of the road. As I walk, his final words ring in my ears. Deliberately?
My step is not so heavy now. I am eager to reach my destination. I begin to increase my pace. Although this is a long dark road for a weary music student to be trudging up, I am content. Although this is a heavy instrument to be balancing on thin shoulders, I am happy. My heart flutters like a trapped butterfly. His final words have had a profound effect on me. At the end of the road, if he has spoken truly, she will be waiting with pink scarf and molten copper hair. At the end of the road, I will find the woman I love.
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