The Fez

by L. T. Hewitt

  “No. I wanted You to explain why I need to be under this oak tree.”

  “Ah, yes. Acorns are important. The Acorn hasn’t arrived yet. It should be here soon. Preferably within the next few months.”

  “I’m afraid You’ve lost me there again.”

  “The Acorn – the one We proposed to plant whilst also losing our sobriety – is alive. It will only arrive in your possession after a long journey and some complex time-travelling. Time-travelling from the Acorn, that is, not from you.”

  “Thank Quack for that; I’m only just getting used to this time.”

  “Well, you should have adjusted to it when you were alive now, but a year younger than you are now. If that makes any sense whatsoever.”

  “Very little,” answered Arthur. “I did get used to this year a year ago. Only then I adjusted to next year when it came around. You can’t really expect people to be on guard non-stop, waiting to be hurled back to the time of their memories.”

  “I gave you fair warning, from what you’ve told Me.”

  “That was years ago, and still it bothered me. Can You seriously not remember any of this?”

  “I tend not to pay too much attention to each individual person. Right now, for example, I’m not looking at you as you go about your business. That’s too boring. I’m applying false nails to see if it brings out the colour of My eyes.”

  “What? What colour are Your eyes, anyway‽”

  “Blue, of course.”

  “It figures,” said Arthur. “What do You mean by ‘false nails’? Are these those ‘fingernails’ everyone keeps going on about?”

  “Yes. They’re great fun, from what I hear. Also available for toe.”

  “But You don’t even have fingers. Or toes, for that matter.”

  “Technically I do.”

  “What‽”

  “I have webbed toes. But I don’t have fingers.”

  “Thank Sock for that.”

  “I take extreme offense to your comment.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to upset You. But it’s just that You are unable to wear fingernails, when You possess no fingers.”

  “You’re such a wet blanket. Can’t a Man have some fun around here? It seems everything I do is responded to with ‘Oh, Quack. Don’t You know that’s not technically possible?’ or ‘Your current actions are in offense of section 8991 of the Laws set out at the Megannual Mothers’ Meeting of the Multiverse’ or ‘We don’t want to see You or Your type around here or in any of the twenty-eight listed precincts’,” Quack moaned. “I want fingernails, even if they are pointless and the glue gets stuck in My feathers.”

  “No,” said Arthur. “Neither a Man nor a man can have any fun around here. There’s work that needs doing.”

  “Oh. Not even a bit of fun?”

  “Getting back on track,” Arthur said rather loudly and through clenched teeth. “How do You want me to set about adjusting to the current time and how do I acquire the Acorn?”

  “Getting back on track as you so rightly say,” said Quack, a little disgruntled, “first off, I’m going to pull a few strings and get you a place to stay. There’s a nearby flat that never seems to be occupied for too long.”

  “Thanks...” Arthur had never stayed in a flat before, and was painfully sure that he didn’t want to start with that one flat whose many former residents had all chosen (or been forced, by law or by hygiene) to stop living there, for whatever reasons they might have to abandon the hovel or the world. However, he concluded on reflection, it’s probably better that the former residents do stop living there before I start. Just so long as they don’t stop living, there.

  “I want you to stay there for a week. I’ll keep you supplied with enough food. All you have to do is think. I want you to think about Me, and the Acorn, and the year ahead. After the week is up, return here and take out the rock. I’ll talk to you again and give you some work to do, some moving around. Is that all right with you? There’s still time to turn around. It’s not too late to change your mind.”

  “I’m fine, Quack,” Arthur lied. “I’m perfectly willing to do this.”

  “You’ll be a great help, Arthur. I really appreciate your commitment,” said Quack. “I don’t know why I’ll appreciate your help, or why you’ve made Me a commitment, but I know I’ll need you. And Arthur?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” said Arthur. He paused for a long and uncomfortable while. “What for?”

  “Respect. Thank you for capitalising the pronouns. It really means a lot to Me.”

  Chapter 40

  As the group plummeted to the Glix’n marsh, they could see a street appearing beneath them. The street seemed to be very open in terms of business, yet it stopped at one end with a fierce halt. While they tumbled, screaming, to the ground, they were slightly consoled by the fact that they had made it to the end of England.

  The Space Chicken ran through to the main seating area of the vehicle, cradling Fred Jr in his arms.

  “I hate to be a disturbance,” said Clein, as the team hurtled downwards towards their doom at a colossal speed, fearing for the loss of their lives or insanity, “but I told you so.”

  “Now isn’t a good time,” Dave replied through gritted teeth, only now realising the irony of the event.

  “Really? I thought this seemed like the perfect time to bring it up.”

  Dave was about to retort, when Clint chipped in. “I thought we were planning on landing at the Border anyway.”

  “Well, we are now!”

  “Yeah,” said the Space Chicken. “I thought you’d at least want to do a bit of sightseeing as you passed the mighty edge. Oh well, no time for it now.”

  “No, it’s not that,” said Clein. “Dave said he was going to start landing as we approached the England/BongVe Bong border. If he were doing that, how did we fall out of the sky as we were flying over it?”

  They all gave Dave the Look.

  “I’m not very good at Geography,” he admitted sheepishly.

  “Oh, and now we’re all going to die,” Crazy Dave said melodramatically. “Perhaps, if you’d paid more attention at school, you wouldn’t have killed three teenagers, a prophet and his unborn child.”

  “There were a lot of errors in that sentence,” Clint said.

  “I thought Margery was the pedant.”

  “That’s for language. She’s a linguistic socialist. You’re just wrong on a logical and unequivocal level.”

  “Buckle up,” said Dave.

  “Put our seatbelts on?” asked the Space Chicken. “Why?”

  “Buckle up!”

  They did so with great and frantic force and airbags burst out of the dashboard and the backs of the seats. Additional bags inflated out of the floor. This inflation seemed to decrease the rate of their plummet.

  “That was smart thinking, Dave,” said the Space Chicken. “You dealt with that calmly and quickly.”

  “Um, right,” said Dave. “That was deliberate… We’re all going to die!” he screamed.

  “We’re not going to die,” said the Space Chicken.

  “We’re going to crash and burn!”

  “Again, I told you so,” said Clein.

  “May I just remind you that we’re heading towards the ground where we will splat upon impact,” said Crazy Dave, looking out the window.

  “That’s what we’ve been talking about,” said the Space Chicken. “We’re just talking about it in a calm and civilised way.”

  “We’re all going to die!”

  The Speedvan landed in the middle of the street with a thud, causing more damage to the tarmac than to its own body.

  “See,” said the Space Chicken. “This is a space vehicle; it is designed to withstand the impact of falling down upon a planet. There is a field around it to separate the passengers from the vacuum,” he explained. “We only went out into Light Space. As soon as you start going into Deep Space, the fiel
d comes on. But the field was always partially there to protect us, even if it hadn’t separated the kenomazelesphere from the van. Also, the cushioning effect of the airbags meant that we couldn’t possibly get ourselves hurt.”

  “Right, that’s great,” said Dave. “I think I broke a bone in my foot.”

  The six men couldn’t resist a wander around the high street, excusing their interest in window shopping by claiming it was a search for onions. Somehow it seemed doubtful there would be any onions in a clothes shop, but the unfitting dress enthralled the Space Chicken anyway. The buildings appeared to be mainly office blocks full of people concerned with various different numbers for various different purposes. The group steered away from these and became more and more disgruntled by the lack of shops. It was the Space Chicken and Dave’s view that, in any given business environment, at least 80% of space should be devoted to retail. And not the boring kind, either.

  Eventually they found a building that claimed ‘Fuel Station’ in large letters above the door. They entered there straight away, no longer bothered with what little the rest of the street had to offer. As they walked in, they all remained oblivious to the fact that there were no fuel pumps outside. None of them – besides Dave – supposed for a second that any fuel pump in Glix’n Britain contained onion juice. On the contrary, Dave wasn’t even sure if they used fuel pumps there.

  Inside, there appeared to be no fuel pumps either, but busy waiters hastily serving food left, right and centre. They walked through, puzzled, to the order desk at the back of the room, with the Space Chicken taking the lead.

  “‘Fuel Station’?” Crazy Dave quoted. “This looks a lot more like a fast food restaurant to me.”

  A pizza-maker walked up to them and chirped in on their conversation. Dave thought the man looked like he could have been from Brooklyn. If Glix had a Brooklyn.

  “Here at Fuel Station, we are encouraging walking as an efficient mode of transport,” the cook said, upon the Space Chicken’s confused enquiry. “It’s much more environmentally friendly than driving. Why, were you looking for a real fuel station? You won’t find one of them for many kilometres around,” he told them. “Ironic, isn’t it?”

  “We were looking for fuel for our vehicle,” Dave informed him. “Sort of.”

  “Why don’t you walk to wherever you need to go?”

  “We would, but it’s a very long way.”

  “Then you can take public transport there,” the man explained.

  “But we have our vehicle with us,” Dave justified.

  The man looked very disappointed with them. “You shouldn’t have brought it.”

  “Somebody gave it to us.”

  “Do you honestly expect me to believe that someone just gave you their car?”

  “No,” said Dave, raising his tone out of annoyance, “it’s a pick-up truck that flies through space and runs on onions. It has a jam spoon on top so we can feed the Chicken prophet. Is that all right, you madman?”

  Dave stormed out of the restaurant.

  “It’s actually a jelly—” Clein started.

  “I don’t care!” Dave snapped. He returned to the desk, grabbed Clint and Clein and then stormed out again. “Are you coming, Space Chicken?”

  “Just a second, where’s Crazy Dave? Oh there he is. And is that Waiter Dave with him?”

  “Yes, it’s nice to catch up,” Crazy Dave agreed. “While I’m here and you’re there, could I have a frankfurter?”

  Chapter 41

  The Space Chicken went – with little hope – to find some onions. The rest of them – with nothing else to do – walked over towards the Border so they could finally give the Fez a location. Not that it would give them much hope with a useless Speedvan and little energy left in their bodies. Dave used more of his quick thinking to find a button on the dashboard which would inflate all the airbags with helium instead of the oxygen they had preserved for emergencies. This meant that the vehicle was only gently resting on the floor and could be moved using minimal effort. Dave told everyone to grab a wheel and they took it to the Border alongside them with relative ease.

  The Border was very surprising, even after everything they’d been told about it. Dave wondered if the person who’d first thought up the idea that ‘seeing is believing’ had been here at the time. This was the centre of the Border City, which was as built-up as anywhere Dave had ever been. And it stopped. What should have been halfway through a skyscraper met a jagged end, all for the sake of a signpost. Seeing is definitely believing, thought Dave. Yet even as the group stared into the overwhelming abyss, they couldn’t possibly believe what they saw.

  Dave looked back to check that the street they had been on several seconds ago was still there. It was, and it was still busy, but only in a business sense. There was a tall wooden signpost saying ‘Dollybridge Lane’ protruding from the centre of the street. The street itself – which was seven metres wide, with a metre either side for the path – seemed so large and existent, yet when he turned around and saw the desolate ground he could swear there was not a life form for many kilometres around.

  Carrying the car right up to the edge, they observed the closest office block, which split in half in line with a sign similar to that of Wales – this one stating ‘BongVe Bong’, however. A man sitting at his work desk, idly typing away and signing paperwork without taking the slightest notice of the four by the Speedvan (or the three-metre drop if he were to inch to his left) accidentally slid a sheet across the line and into BongVe Bong. A single rock slid down from one of the many hills and mounds of BongVe Bong, or possibly it had been tumbling for a while off the edge of a mountain. This rock flew through the fog and, upon entering that country, the paper was crushed.

  Dave gulped.

  “I guess we’d better continue,” suggested the Space Chicken, who’d quietly and sullenly returned from his fruitless onion expedition.

  Dave started to cross the line, but was interrupted in his path by an avian wing. “Allow me to rectify it first,” the Space Chicken said kindly. “We don’t want any more uncertainty.”

  The Space Chicken stepped over the border and his beak exploded with the word ‘Glaswegia’. His wing rose subconsciously and pointed directly towards the spot in the top-right corner of the country.

  The rest of the group also crossed the line and they were overwhelmed by the power of an object nowhere near them.

  Clein became apparently hungry, pondering about returning to the Fuel Station, but instead inclining towards the frankfurter possessed by Crazy Dave. The Space Chicken was about to complain but decided against it.

  “That hot dog smells nice,” Clein said to Crazy Dave.

  “Yeah,” he replied, not paying as much attention to what Clein had to say as he did to the frankfurter.

  “Did Cash— Waite— Cashi— Whoever Dave put enough sauce on it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How about mustard?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ketchup?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Salsa?”

  “No.”

  “It probably wouldn’t go, would it?”

  “Not really.”

  “Does it have any lettuce?”

  Crazy Dave swallowed a mouthful. “Yeah.”

  “How about onions?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Aha!” Clein exclaimed, snatching the frankfurter out from Crazy Dave’s loving clasp.

  Crazy Dave looked on, distraught, as Clein opened up the hatch on the Speedvan and threw the reclaimed dish in. The vehicle immediately started up heartily, stored away the airbags and helium and, with some futuristic technology, healed the perforated panels.

  “Climb in, everyone,” Dave said excitedly. He wondered if there was some sort of extra benefit from hot dogs or if onions were just naturally powerful, because the fuel gauge was now showing full. Or maybe the car just has a small tank, he wondered. He hoped it was one of the first two.

  After they ha
d all clambered into the car and resumed comfort in their places, this time – hopefully – without so much stress, they set off down the dusty track, resuming their seemingly everlasting quest for the great, travelling Fez.

  Chapter 42

  Dave found it was a mess to be journeying where there were no roads, but at least it allowed them to travel as the crow flies. Sometimes quite similarly to how a crow flies, as well, which made it difficult for the bird and the Bird and the bird-brain. Dave also found that he was very thankful for the feeling deep down inside that allowed for him to know exactly where he was going, always. He hadn’t been sure if he would have this emotion, being of a different race, but he did, and so he resolved it must be one of those inner feelings belonging to everybody.

  Dave thought about the buttons he’d seen as he re-entered the car and when he had filled the airbags with helium. After a short while spent pondering, he thought he had rediscovered the apparatus for sending them into outer space. It was a long shot and Dave hoped it would work. They rode over the bumpy mounds for a few yards, and then Dave threw caution to the wind and pulled the lever.

  It took them several minutes to leave the ground before taking off into space and Dave began to hate the rough terrain of BongVe Bong and feared they may not take off and would remain on this harsh surface. But, sure enough, they had lift off and Dave put the excess time down to building up speed as they must have done earlier.

  Dave was once more thankful for that sense in his middle, his internal detection of the Fez’s location. This time he was grateful that it stayed with him, even in space where not much else did.

  Being back in space – even if it was Light Space – felt like home once again for the Space Chicken, who was readily prepared and sitting with Fred Jr in the back of the Speedvan.

  “Here we go again, son.”

  ‘Yes. I am excited.’

  The Space Chicken, at home, felt relaxed. As he was sitting with his son, he felt like letting his emotions flow out to the only one who understood him. Out of a happy feeling of solitude (and also because some of the other Speedvan passengers were trying to get to sleep), the Space Chicken no longer spoke aloud, but to the Egg through his thoughts.

  ‘Fred Jr, what do you suppose we’ll do after all this Fez-hunting is over?’

  ‘I do not know. What if this journey ending means the beginning of others, and the cycle never ends?’