The Universe versus Alex Woods

by Extence, Gavin

  I glanced south.

  ‘Suspend your disbelief for a couple of hours. You understand what that means?’

  I thought for a few seconds. ‘Forget about the methane?’

  ‘Right. Forget about the methane!’

  And that’s how I ended up borrowing my first Kurt Vonnegut book. It was more or less an accident.

  Although my mother was very comfortable with the naked human form, I still wasn’t sure that she’d approve of Kurt Vonnegut’s book cover. Something told me that this was likely to be one of those instances where I thought I understood her rules, but they turned out to be more complicated than they first appeared. Two nipples might have passed her scrutiny without comment, but I wasn’t so sure about six. At the very least, I knew that any book flaunting that much mammary was bound to lead to some form of embarrassing conversation. You probably understand why I decided not to mention it. Instead, I holed up in my room and spent much of that evening and the following day reading.

  I now find myself confronted with the same problem that had probably confronted Mr Peterson a little earlier: any synopsis of the book’s plot is bound to sound insane. Nevertheless, here goes . . .

  While flying their spaceship to Mars, Winston Niles Rumfoord and his dog, Kazak, get sucked into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum, which spatters them halfway across the galaxy in a long, spiralling energy wave that stretches from the Sun all the way to Betelgeuse, the red supergiant that sits on Orion’s right shoulder (assuming he’s facing us). Although Rumfoord’s mass has apparently been converted into pure energy, he rematerializes periodically – on Earth and Mercury and Titan – to discuss the nature of God (indifferent) and make predictions about the near future of mankind. One of these predictions is that Earth’s richest man, Malachi Constant, will go to Mars then Mercury then Titan, where he will impregnate Rumfoord’s semi-widowed ex-wife. These things duly happen. There are also subplots concerning a tiny alien robot, giant bluebirds and the sirens themselves, who turn out to be not all they promise. In the end, Malachi Constant dies while enjoying a pleasant hallucination, and Winston Niles Rumfoord and his dog get blasted in different directions across the cosmos.

  About halfway through, I thought I probably understood what satire was. I thought that it was when you talked about important things in a kind of disguised funny way. But rather than obscuring this importance, satire made it clearer somehow – more pure and easier to understand. So, for instance, in The Sirens of Titan, the soldiers in the Martian army all have tiny radio antennas implanted in their heads so the generals can control their thoughts and issue commands from a very long distance away. When I returned the book, the following Saturday, I asked Mr Peterson if I was right in thinking that this was an example of satire.

  ‘Bingo,’ Mr Peterson said.

  ‘It’s a pretty funny image,’ I noted.

  ‘It’s a pretty accurate image,’ Mr Peterson replied. ‘It’s pretty much the essence of being a grunt in the army – being turned into a remotely controlled weapon for your country.’

  ‘Don’t you think it’s good to serve your country?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ Mr Peterson said. ‘I think it’s good to serve your principles. And in the army you don’t get to pick and choose your fights according to your conscience. You kill on command. Don’t ever surrender your right to make your own moral decisions, kid.’

  ‘I’ll try not to,’ I said.

  I enjoyed talking to Mr Peterson a lot, and, oddly enough, he seemed to enjoy talking to me. I mean, he was always moaning about it and saying that I asked too many questions – many of them idiotic – and telling me that I was ‘too weird for words’, but despite all this, he still let me come over every Saturday and some Sundays to help out with the letter-writing and walking the dog and so on. Officially, this was still part of my penance, which, as we’d agreed, would not be over until such a time as Mr Peterson decided that the destruction of his greenhouse had been paid for in full. But this time never came. After a few weeks, there was no longer any discussion regarding my ongoing ‘servitude’; I just turned up every Saturday at ten and found the door already unlocked.

  Of course, the other justification for my coming over each week was that having enjoyed The Sirens of Titan so much, I’d decided that I wanted to work my way through the rest of Mr Peterson’s Kurt Vonnegut library. Between the two of us, we’d agreed that this would be good for my ongoing moral education.

  So, having conquered Sirens and satire, I moved on to Cat’s Cradle, which is about some weaponized ice that destroys the world. After that, I read Slaughterhouse-Five, which is about time travel and the burning of one hundred thousand Germans in Dresden, which was a real-life event that Kurt Vonnegut had witnessed during World War II. And after that, I started reading Breakfast of Champions, which was probably the most valued book in Mr Peterson’s library. It was a first edition and an early present from his wife. On the inside cover there was an inscription that read: I think you’ll enjoy this story; you’ll definitely enjoy the pictures. With all my love, R.

  ‘I probably don’t need to tell you to take special care of this one, do I?’ Mr Peterson asked.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ I agreed.

  I understood straight away the significance of Mr Peterson lending me that book. Although he never said anything, I knew that he’d now forgiven me for his greenhouse.

  Later, when I packed the book into my bag, I handled it as carefully as if it were one of Lucy’s newly born kittens.

  SARS

  Since my mother worked, and my father was a phantom, I relied on the school bus to get me home each day. The school bus was not specifically a school bus; it was a public bus operated by Somerset and Avon Rural Stagecoach, the company that ran most of the local buses. But because it was timetabled to pass the Asquith Academy at 3.45 each afternoon, most of its passengers were schoolchildren. It was also, undoubtedly, the worst vehicle in the SARS fleet. This may have been a coincidence, but it seemed infinitely more likely that someone, somewhere, had a very rational fear of sending a properly upholstered vehicle out on the school run. The 3.45 from Asquith was not properly upholstered. Nor was it (or its regular driver) particularly stable. It was a rusting, rickety affair that, like the space shuttle, had served many more missions than its original engineers could ever have foreseen or condoned. At the traffic lights, it would wheeze and shudder like a giant asthmatic cyborg. When accelerating or braking, its entire frame would groan and rattle ominously. These death rattles were at their worst at the back of the lower deck, close to the engine, but they could be felt throughout the structure, no matter where you chose to sit. This was one of the two reasons that attempting to read on the school bus was ill advised. The other was that reading for pleasure, as I may have mentioned, was stupendously gay and, as such, was best kept a private vice.

  Four days out of five, I wouldn’t have dreamed of trying to read on the school bus. My usual strategy for the school bus was to try to find a seat on the lower deck among the general public – who never ventured upstairs – and as close as possible to the driver, who looked the kind of man liable to explode the second his dubious authority was put to the test. When this strategy failed – for the lower deck was often filled by civilians with pushchairs and shopping, leaving the raucous anarchy of the upper deck the only option – it was best to find a seat as close to the front as possible and spend the whole journey looking at the floor, saying nothing and making no sudden movements. I spent most of my journeys on the school bus in this manner, staring quietly at my feet. When I was feeling exceptionally brave, I stared out of the window instead.

  Wednesday afternoons provided the only respite – the island of calm in a noisy, turbulent sea. And I had sport to thank for this. In line with traditions that had been upheld, though apparently not invented, by Robert Asquith’s old grammar school, Wednesday afternoons were always given over to sport. Wednesday afternoons meant football practice, and football practice m
eant a much quieter, happier bus.

  This was the reason my guard was down that day.

  At 3.40, the upper deck was half empty. I had a seat at the very front, as far away from the juddering engine and all other passengers as physically possible, and I didn’t plan to spend the next twenty minutes contemplating the floor. I planned to do some reading.

  At the time, I was about two-thirds of the way through Breakfast of Champions, which was about an arts fair in Ohio, an old, impoverished science-fiction writer called Kilgore Trout and a rich car dealer called Dwayne Hoover who goes nuts and decides that everyone else on planet Earth is a robot – convincingly designed but lacking feelings and imagination and free will and all the other ingredients that make a soul. Dwayne Hoover gets this idea from reading one of Mr Trout’s science-fiction stories. Then he goes on a violent rampage.

  As with many of Kurt Vonnegut’s books, the plot was kind of insane and kind of irrelevant. You could, I thought, chop up the book, shuffle the pages and then reassemble them at random without doing too much harm to your reading experience. The book would still work. This was because every page – almost every paragraph – was a weirdly brilliant self-contained unit.

  What I really liked about Breakfast of Champions was this: unlike most books, it didn’t assume that the reader knew very much about anything – neither about human beings nor their customs nor the planet they inhabited. It was written as if its reader were, most likely, an alien from a distant galaxy, which is to say that it explained everything, from peas to beavers – often in rather eccentric detail, often with accompanying pictures and diagrams. It explained all those things that every other book seemed to think were too obvious to need explaining. And the more I read, the more I realized that most of these things weren’t obvious after all. Most of them were decidedly odd.

  I suppose I must have been very deeply absorbed in Mr Vonnegut’s writing that day, because it took me a long time to notice that something was afoot. As it chugged away from the school gates, the bus was much noisier, much fuller, than it should have been. A dim, nagging irritation began to pull into focus. Then something clipped my ear. A piece of screwed-up paper. Of course, this made no sense. It was Wednesday, the day of reprieve – Alex Woods’s day off. I turned round in my seat, still more baffled than alarmed at this point.

  I was confronted by the extremely unwelcome sight of Decker, Studwin and Asbo. They were sitting a few rows back, with a couple of other members of the first eleven, even though it was a Wednesday. I was so bewildered by this cruel and unreasonable turn of events that I accidentally initiated a conversation. This really was asking for trouble.

  ‘You’re supposed to be at football practice,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Mr Hale has the shits,’ said Declan Mackenzie.

  Mr Hale has the shits. It sounded like the title of a play. A play of dubious merit. Either that or one of those coded sentences that spies use to confirm their identities. It was neither, obviously. Decker was trying to tell me something literal and profound.

  ‘Mr Hale’s ill?’ I asked.

  ‘The shits,’ Decker repeated. ‘Went home after lunch.’

  Mr Hale was the football coach. Without him, there could be no football practice. Things were beginning to click into place. As to the accuracy of Declan Mackenzie’s medical diagnosis, I can’t vouch for it, but neither was I going to question it. Although he was a straight-talker, not given to prettying up his language with pointless ornamentation, it seemed unlikely that Mr Hale would choose to broadcast the nature of his complaint with such unflinching candour. But then, such news did have a tendency to travel, whatever the intentions of its subject. And it would have come as no great shock to find my darkest suspicions concerning the school cafeteria so emphatically confirmed.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I said, after a short pause for thought.

  Declan Mackenzie looked at me with utter disdain, as if he held me personally accountable for the state of Mr Hale’s bowels. He was feeling belligerent, I could tell. Deprived of football, his combative instincts required an alternative outlet. ‘You reading something, Woods?’

  ‘I was trying to,’ I said. It was a stupid thing to say, but unexpected changes to my routine always throw me off balance.

  Decker Mackenzie spat on the floor.

  I turned back in my seat, as calmly and casually as possible.

  This was the point at which I should have returned the book – the book that Mr Peterson’s dead wife had given him – to the relative safety of my bag. But hindsight makes geniuses of us all. At the time, I was fearful of provoking any further interest. They’d all already seen the book, and I thought that any attempt to conceal it now would be met with anger and suspicion. So instead, I stared resolutely at the opened pages, not taking anything in, simply willing my aggressors to lose interest.

  And, miraculously, it seemed to work. No further insults or missiles were forthcoming. I felt my muscles relax. I counted to sixty to reassure myself that the danger had passed. I counted to one hundred and twenty to be doubly sure. Then I started reading again, very slowly, concentrating hard to calm my mind.

  Five minutes later, I felt my heart leap into my mouth. Quick and quiet as a cockroach, Declan Mackenzie had sneaked up behind me and snatched the book from my hands.

  I cried out in dismay. Studwin and Asbo cheered appreciatively.

  ‘Give it back!’ I yelped. There was no authority in my voice. It came out as what it was: a terrified mouse-squeak.

  ‘Share and share alike,’ Declan Mackenzie intoned moronically.

  ‘Please!’ I pleaded. ‘It’s not my book!’

  ‘If it’s not your book,’ said Decker, ‘then I don’t have to give it back.’ A bully’s unassailable logic. He’d opened the first page, his thumb braced forcefully against the spine, his hands grubby and clumsy.

  ‘Please! You’re going to damage it.’

  Mackenzie’s eyes widened in evil joy. He’d found the dedication. ‘I think you’ll enjoy this story,’ he recited in a whining falsetto; ‘you’ll definitely enjoy the pictures. With all my love, R.’

  Story, pictures, love – each word reverberated over the juddering engine, each word more damning than the last.

  Studwin snickered. Asbo howled with delight. There were little ripples of laughter all the way to the back of the bus. This, apparently, was the type of verbal lynching that everyone could enjoy.

  I found myself on my feet, my face red with public ridicule. But my humiliation was now a secondary concern. The priority, I knew, had to be the rescue of Mr Peterson’s book. I made a lunge for it; Declan Mackenzie pushed me back as easily as he might have plucked the legs from a crane fly.

  ‘Please!’ I implored (for what would turn out to be the final time).

  Decker had opened the book somewhere in the middle, hunting for more ammunition. He wasn’t disappointed. He opened the book on the page containing a large hand-drawn picture of a stegosaurus, and read aloud the accompanying caption: ‘“A dinosaur was a reptile as big as a choo-choo train.”’

  There was more laughter. It was a funny sentence, but I doubt this was the reason.

  ‘Fucking hell, Woods!’ squealed Decker. ‘You really are retarded!’ Or he squealed something similar. I was no longer listening. He now held the book aloft and was waving it around like the monkey with the bone at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

  It was at this point that I decided I didn’t want to be a pacifist any more. I decided that if ever there were a just war, this was it.

  As I’ve already mentioned, I’d held for some time the untested suspicion that I wouldn’t be much to shout about in a fight. This turned out to be the case. The little I knew about fighting I’d gleaned from James Bond films and from watching the occasional altercation between Lucy and one of the neighbourhood toms – whose advances were not always welcomed. Neither of these sources provided a good grounding in the realities of hand-to-hand combat.

&nbs
p; What I did have on my side was the element of surprise and a complete disregard for the rules of ‘fair’ fighting – that and a decent grasp of the physics of moving bodies. Borrowing a little kinetic energy from the accelerating bus, I sprang at Declan Mackenzie and raked my claws across his face, opening up several deep gashes, the best of which stretched all the way from the outer corner of his left eye to his downturned lower lip. There was a yowl of mingled disbelief and pain, vibrant blood, and a single arm raised defensively, and rather too late, to his mutilated cheek. That, I thought, was my opening. I abandoned my wild, unsustainable attack and made a grab for the book. Unfortunately, my plan – insofar as there had been a plan – had failed to account for the reflexive tightening of my enemy’s grip in response to sudden, unexpected pain. My fingers closed, pulled and slipped. Then my arm went dead from the shoulder. I fell forward into one of those strange boxers’ cuddles. There were lots of screams and shouts, and the general clamour of people shifting up and down the bus to make space for the fight or secure a seat closer to the ringside. I grabbed again at my opponent’s face, but instead found myself holding, then pulling, a handful of hair. There was a general tutting and groaning, even from the girls; my tactics were not endearing me to the crowd. Then all the air left my lungs. There was less pain than I’d been expecting – Declan Mackenzie hadn’t had the room to deliver a knockout blow – but I still found myself stumbling backwards into the metal frame of the nearest seat. I was quite proud that I didn’t fall to the floor; although the floor, inevitably, was where I ended up. Still unable to breathe correctly, I backed away to the very front of the bus and then, with a quiet dignity, lowered myself into a sitting position in the aisle. Declan Mackenzie was soon looming over me again, his foot poised curiously in midair, as if he couldn’t quite decide whether to kick me or stamp on me. I didn’t much care which option he plumped for – my defensive strategy was unaltered. I raised my knees as high as they’d go, held my legs with both arms and tucked my head in, like a turtle retreating into its shell. A half-hearted boot struck my outer thigh, but it didn’t really hurt too much. In the warm, musty darkness of my almost foetal position, I sensed that I was no longer such an appealing target for physical violence. It would take a sustained, purposeful attack to cause me any significant damage, and if this hadn’t happened yet, it wasn’t going to happen.