Nemonymous Night

by Lewis, D. F.

  A waft of musky Angevin in its raw state interrupts her reverie... and eventually, having thought about it first, Susan snores peacefully for once, with no dreaming. That begs the question, however, where exactly are you when you are asleep and not dreaming? I listen to her snores which keep me awake.

  *

  Beth:

  My Susan’s soft! I always knew she was softer than me. Twin sisters come in pairs of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’, generally, and I was always the hard one, Edith. No, Clare, stop shaking your head... Oh, I see it’s the Drill shaking it! But nothing to see out there at all except damn rubble-storms, so you may as well listen to me as stare out there, ladies. And put your snobby books away. They’re full of words I don’t understand, and I’m pretty sure you don’t understand them either. Edith, stop staring at that photo of your kids. They’re grown up now and can look after themselves, I’m sure. Amy included. She wanted to be someone different. Now she has the chance. Not many of us get that chance in life. Big Eared Arthur once drove a Big Bus. Isn’t that an old Music Hall song? He can now drive a whole world to its centre given the chance, I reckon. Private Planet, Vehicle Earth, Private Person takes the World on holiday. See, I’ve still got some gumption, even words that I don’t understand I still use for some reason, despite being put away by men into this yellow cabin. Greg’s as bad as Dog, I reckon. Greg and that Captain are hand in glove to keep us quiet up here in this top flat berth, while they see the Corelight rise above the new cities of Inner Earth through their own windows cleared by the vanes… They little realise, at the end of the day, that the Core is just like another Full Moon above the earth, casting silken curtains of light across the black waves of night’s chilly sea (what poem, did that come from?). Men! They think they’re heroes at every glimpse of a new adventure. I suspect the Core is really little more than a cake, baked hard like a lump of solid carpet, a misshapen lump of tufts to gag upon. Eating that cake opens a whole vista of lost time, they say. Let them eat cake. Hope it chokes them! Susan, you ask? Well, she always used to look after wounded birds she found in our garden. In fact, I think Our Father up in Heaven meant for her to stumble on every poor creature under the sun so that she could exercise her nursing skills as a potential earth mother. I remember her once sitting in the parlour, a lump of feather-filled blood on her lap and she cooed at this lump expecting it to coo back at her. And it did. She brought it back to life. But I say—what’s the point of bringing such shipwrecks of nature back to life once they’ve been left high and dry on a crag by an egg vandal who broke its shell and left the innards to wilt stinkily in the salt winds? But Susan always rescued them. Even as a child. I scolded her for being so bloody soft. Therefore, how, dear Edith, have I allowed myself to be relegated to a backseat in this Drill? How, dear Clare, are we all so cowed by a world slipping by within men’s hands? If everything is to have a happy ending, then we need to tell someone that it is we instinctive women (soft and hard alike) who must win—who must reach out to the Core where there are no dreams at all, no confusions of truth and lie, we women who must reach out to the Core where (when we are within it) we’ll know what is true and what is false—finally and clearly and undeniably. We are just biding our time, Ladies. Don’t let submission fool you. Submission is for Susan, not me. And even Susan, I reckon will be waking up to her strengths the nearer she gets to the centre of things.

  *

  I may not even have known my own name. I was nemonymous. Some of my friends recognised me and called me by a name they thought I was named. I was a working-class lad grown into manhood with the sole purpose it seemed of becoming nemonymous. I worked as a radio phone-in ‘agony uncle’. Although that may not have been me at all. I met Arthur after he noticed his ear was getting even bigger. I tried to ignore it by staring at his other ear. We shared pints in Ogdon’s pub—and then he worked behind the bar mixing cocktails. He simply loved mixing things... sometimes mixing allotments of time together with events to make plots.

  I had secret vices. I didn’t even recognise them myself, if that is the same thing as secrecy. I wove carpets. Many did this during the Nineteen Fifties in England—a hobby and a method of saving money. I had huge brush-stiffened grids of thread through which I leap-frogged a wooden paddle threaded with further thread—knitting tight each line of thread against another line of thread with my hard-padded fingers: as if tidying a rhythm of growing patterns of thick surface-veined underlay: except this underlay was a surface—but surfaces were meant to be ‘on top’ as that was where they always tended to go. An under-surface was a logical impossibility. Arthur admired them when I brought samples into the pub. He was still not old enough, thankfully, to realise he was too young to understand.

  *

  I stared at the screen wondering where I fitted into the schematic movements of the symphony. Not that I could hear any music at all. Silence.

  The screen showed a clouded yellow surface, yet mottled with—if it were real—stains or signs of wear. Not yellow so much, I guess. Maybe beige. Not a uniform surface. Again, if it were real, it would bear perceptible bumps or lumps in its fibre. Fibre? Or weave. Or web. Or net.

  It is as if I had created this site with a number of codes: codes that began with and ended with . I went to shut it down because I felt myself threatened by it, as if it were sucking me into it like a fly.

  Now, I know deep down who I was. Or I was in the process of creating who I was. I was about to enter the intermittent and unsmooth flow of action. The yellowy web, hopefully, was to be the firewall or firefloor to protect me (or anyone else following me) from the dire horror that was a lurker on or within the threads of my discursive being. I was the head-lease narrator, the one from where they all had their essence and being.

  Except they had escaped!

  They were soon to reach the Core where truths would shine out and dreams dissipate. I shuddered. I was losing control. Mike and his party were, I suddenly discovered, on the point of reaching some mountain cutaway within the largest cavity that Inner Earth possessed—and Corelight would skim through like real sunshine to reveal the sorrows of mankind, but also illuminating a way to heal them. Mike would gain all the credit. Not me!

  I punched away at the keys (having failed to shut down the screen) to prevent his party from ever reaching that Core or its Nirvana. Meanwhile, with my eye momentarily off the ball, I saw from the corner of my head that ‘The Hawler’, the lubricated Drill that threaded the rubble-storms, equally nearing the same Core, was about to crash-land on the outskirts of the Core itself—near Agra Aska—where they would rescue young love from the dreaded shyfryngs... and using the powerhouse of this love, they, too, i.e. Captain Nemo and his party, would reach Nirvana—without me!

  I was aghast and I re-punched the keys, creating codes and tags for a new site of my dominion and power. A new blog city. It would be a battle of wills. And I was sure to win. I was determined to seek the information I needed, information that someone was hiding from me. I was the head-lease narrator. How could anyone be hiding anything from me?

  Meanwhile, I tossed a quarter p coin to decide which party I’d follow. The coin dropped on its milled edge within a hole in my carpet.

  *

  Later, I stared at the screen in my flat. I had started typing up my things here in this rather undeserving tawdriness, having spent the earlier evening writing afresh in the square by the fountain. “I am curious—yellow,” I whispered at the screen, hardly daring to breathe. I scribbled in my bright red Silvine ‘Nemo Book’. I spent much of most nights exploring (wandering)—mainly the two disused airports on the eastern and western sides of the city—areas called the City Arms. They inspired with their direct emptiness and spent force. Bleak and windswept, I imagined the roaring of the jet engines, the clacking of old-fashioned propeller vanes, the residual sorrow and misused heroism of war veterans that still filled the air with poignant empathy.

  I believed in complementary ley-lines veining the whole surface o
f the earth, proud as inflamed swellings on a human body... invisible to most uncaring eyes as the eyes’ owners conducted their selfish lives on a daily basis, lives only interspersed with sleep or with whatever sleep contained.

  I reviewed my own dreams. The fiction could wait, as I shut down the sickly clouded crystal-ball of my yellow screen and turned to the Nemo Book with a long stub of pencil grasped like I used to grab it as a child: in the fist like a dagger.

  *

  Notes:

  Dream viruses. They are mutating, I fear, becoming more able to fly from dream to dream without culpability. This allows the contents of each dream to swill in and out of each dreamskin, and they can even penetrate the skin of life itself and enter the mainstream. These viruses are similar to birds with revolving beaks like drillbits, each a little pesky explorer. They multiply by ease of dreams being soaked into the birds’ lubrication-pores. Filters can and do work both ways. Each ‘bird’ burrows from, say, my dream into, say, your dream. It takes a bit of me to you, and a bit of you to me—mixing reality and dream, as well as you and me. Then extrapolate that at a geometric progression. Each ‘bird’ (or dream virus) has its own consciousness but that also multiplies as its mutation increases, not changing its Drill’s body so much, but changing the clouded specifics of its mind, each specific mind becoming a human mind that thinks it has got a human body—plus interaction with other ‘human beings’ of their own kind as if it is real life on the surface of our world, but really they are self-imagined figments within the bird’s cockpit as it lays waste the skins of dream throughout a mass Jungian consciousness. I know it is difficult to grasp these concepts. I have faced the situation in my own mind that I myself may be one such dream virus (or, at best, a harmless dream spam): and I’m easing the skins to open up to the manifold plankton of dream-interstitialists. Birds of Plague riding their luck as they multi-dream—‘multi-’ because there are a lot of them in themselves but also ‘multi-’ because each Drillbit carrier has more than one mind (and often several) within its very cockpit, minds believing they are real human beings and not interactors in a fabricated drama or fiction. There are also human minds who have fallen off their own perch and ‘walk’ independently (or so they think) within Plato’s Cave. But that’s too deep for a notebook. But whilst we are on intellectual matters, I do now realise that La Vida Es Sueño was written by Pedro Calderón De La Barca, not by Lope de Vega. Meanwhile, the interaction of civil riots and religious troubles and suicide bombs (bombs that explode without fear for their own cockpits of self-assumed multi-mind) and global warmings/global warnings feed off each other back and forth. That list of possible Corekeepers: Megazanthus, Godspanker, Dognahnyi, Weirdmonger, Etepsed-Egnis, Azathoth. Dreams leak, books leak...

  I tore up the page I had been scribbling on. And I returned to my desk, across the littered carpet, and powered-up my screen ready for easier tasks. Fiction was always easier than truth, a generalisation with which I would need to come to terms... eventually.

  *

  He called her Tho, as a gratuitously eccentric shortening for Thora. He was Hataz. Always had been. In full.

  Hataz was more oriental than he looked. He and Tho were not necessarily a match made in Heaven, yet fair enough for two lonely strangers who both admitted they needed somebody. Their single attempt at love-making proper had been a clumsy exercise, neither of the participants earning flying colours for their efforts. They didn’t really get near enough to each other. They were probably scared of the final penetration: a fact left unsaid.

  After that, by tacit mutual consent, they never indulged in a blatantly physical approach again. Going to the only cinema left open in the city, making big talk and small kisses, the ritual holding of hands, walking in derelict parks... these activities were surely sufficient for people like them, because (as Tho thought) “spirit rode the flesh like aura”.

  They also played childish games unchildishly in Hataz’s place, such as Ludo and Draughts—and, even, despite the size of the flat, hide-and-seek.

  Inevitably, affairs of innocent convenience wind down and, today, Tho was bluntly determined to cut Hataz from her life before she became too enmeshed—not because the relationship was particularly claustrophobic, but simply because she was scared of a dream.

  “A dream you’ve dreamed?” asked Hataz, genuinely puzzled at the sudden mention of dreaming. They had just returned from a concert in one of the riot areas of the city near the old Dry Dock—where a little known jazz combo called Erich Zann had given a desultory performance on vibes, flute and zither in an obscure unlabelled nightclub. Now, she had chosen this moment in Hataz’s flat to make a prepared statement, one she had seemingly rehearsed in front of her wardrobe mirror.

  “It’s not a dream I’ve really dreamed, as such—it’s strange, I can’t explain it.”

  Hataz had started the evening hating the music. Now he was more generally confused than irritated—an uncommon feeling with him. Usually confident about life in general (if not with girls in the shape of Tho), tonight’s disorientation was difficult to fathom. He had already felt vague indications of being unbalanced on previous dates, but nothing quite like now. Surely she was not going a roundabout way to ditching him. His pride, as far as the opposite sex was concerned, seemed fragile enough, already. For one peculiar moment, he felt these thoughts were not his, but Tho’s. Osmosis? A twinning of auras?

  “It was the edge of a dream, Hataz. I could see the dream in my bedroom, as if it had a transparent cover. Not really a bubble nor a balloon. Just a shapeless watery skin. Inside were all the nightmares I knew should have been in my sleep. I was awake, watching an independent dream that nobody was dreaming. There were glowing things that walked about. One of them I later saw was you, Hataz. Or someone who looked like you.”

  Tho coughed. She had tried to make it all sound natural, but Hataz was fully aware that she was reciting something she had learned parrot fashion. It almost felt as if he were dreaming. And the recital was silent.

  “One looked like me? What are you trying to say?”

  He had the uncanny sense that he was also reciting something, learned without his having remembered learning it.

  “It was you, Hataz. You were inside the body of somebody else, trying, I think, to yank yourself out, using the shoulders as a lever.”

  There was a silence, broken by more silence, only this time it was a silence deeper and more frightening. Hataz’s flat was always a quiet place at the top of a tall building. Tonight, there were no lonely aeroplanes droning over the sky from a forgotten airport.

  In many ways, she didn’t need to say the words. Hataz’s new-found faith in the phenomenon of osmosis was nurtured by the silence, as she sprayed further implications and he allowed his inferences to burgeon. But, then, of course, her words would spill out autonomously, more visible than audible.