by Hughes, Rhys
The argument that screen violence encouraged aggression in real life was too unimaginative. It seemed to him that as well as glorifying injury and death, fictional violence also set limits to the pain and destruction wrought by one person on another. A man inspired by a film to plunge a knife between the ribs of an innocent victim had by necessity also been inspired not to do anything worse. The moment an extreme was manifested in fiction it prevented itself from travelling beyond that extremity and lost all potential to become even more disagreeable.
These were the thoughts that lulled him to sleep.
He experienced a vivid dream: a landscape belonging to another world, a desert of blue dunes dotted with oases of strange trees. Figures moved between the branches picking fruit. He viewed this scene from a distance and was overcome with a feeling of dislocation. Then a sudden wind shifted the sands, uncovering the ruins of temples dedicated to gods with forms and faces he would never recall. Thin smoke drifted from oddly shaped doorways, trapped clouds of ancient incense released after an unimaginable number of centuries.
He awoke with a start but did not know if it was morning or still night. The sun had been bricked out of his abode and there was not a single timepiece in any of the rooms. He looked at the level of oil in the lanterns but this meant nothing to him. So he rose and resumed his pacing of the floor, his senses painfully alert.
He found it impossible to imagine the city outside, to remember the buildings and streets. He had lost Montevideo during his sleep. He still knew the names of his favourite haunts, the Museo Romántico, Teatro el Picadero and Plaza Zabala, the Bar Lobizón and Sala Zitarrosa, and those steak houses where he always ate, El Palenque, El Fogón and the others, but they seemed less real. There was a distance between them and his present situation, a gulf of time and space larger than a single night and wall of bricks.
The world of blue dunes felt closer.
He pressed his ears to the walls but heard nothing from outside, no traffic or arguments, none of those sounds that blanketed his normal existence in this house. One explanation was that the brick shell insulated him completely. He licked his lips.
He waited impatiently for his daily meal, his appetite increased by the tea he sipped from a gourd, and when he heard fumbling on the far side of the chute he ran like a child to watch the arrival of dinner on his plate. It came and he gasped.
Something flat and purple and very sticky.
He carried it to his writing desk and sniffed it cautiously. Then he picked it up and crammed it into his mouth, chewing with a reckless joy. It was a fruit concoction of a mysterious kind — he had never known such a taste before. He wiped his lips with his sleeve and sat up in shock, toppling his chair.
A thought had come to him and he could not dismiss it, despite the fact it was absurd. His house had left the Earth and travelled far across the universe to the planet in his dream. The figures in the oases had been picking fruit for this meal. It was they who had just fed him, not his friends. This was a better explanation for his feelings of loss and separation, his own alienation.
It occurred to him that the remote control was responsible for bringing him here. Long months of inactivity had somehow altered its internal workings, dust had interfered with the function of its circuits and now it no longer switched channels on a missing television but dematerialised a house and reassembled it on another world.
He went back to the bedroom and found the device. He pressed more buttons and his head span. He sank to the floor and gripped a cushion for safety: he could feel himself rushing into the vacuum of the cosmos, passing through clouds of stardust. When the nausea passed he knew he would not write a single line today. The occasion was too momentous. His only desire was to learn what new planet he had reached. It was a bittersweet irony that he could see and hear nothing of what existed outside. Only through the sense of taste might he be made aware of his latest destination.
He waited anxiously near the chute.
The meal came when he had almost given up hope of being fed. It was more peculiar than his previous feast, consisting of complex geometrical shapes mixed together, each of the same rubbery consistency and glowing with a deep red light that had substance and flowed in response to the jabbing of his spoon. He finished the meal and licked the plate clean. Then he returned to bed and considered the clues he had been given.
He allowed his imagination to summon up a landscape of shallow seas sprinkled with atolls and tiny islands, the opposite of the desert world, and he convinced himself this vision was a product of a true dream rather than his conscious mind. There were no temples on this planet, but enormous canoes bore idols of twisted coral between the islands. The blood in his head resembled the beating of drums. He slept and digested his new status as an interstellar emissary.
When he awoke he jabbed more buttons.
He found it impossible to do anything other than wait for his meals. It was all that mattered: he was experiencing one of the most extreme adventures any human had ever attempted. To write or read would be an insult to the gravity of the process.
His third meal was a collection of roughly spherical objects with fibrous husks under which palpitated a creamy yellow lava. He pictured a young world of active volcanoes with basalt cities lurking beneath showers of ash and sparks. The inhabitants rarely ventured out but took shelter beneath roofs of thick stone. Even their clothes were made from minerals. He did not linger long on this planet.
Every day he voyaged to a different world, exploring its geography, history and culture through taste alone. He was amazed and relieved that the inhabitants were never hostile but always willing to leave offerings for him, depositing the finest examples of their unutterably bizarre cuisine through his chute. Possibly they regarded him as a deity of some kind or it might be that simple generosity was a universal constant. To judge alien civilisations by the standards of those on Earth was surely a mistake. He accepted each act of charity with good grace.
He was dimly aware that the planets and cultures he encountered were not really so original in concept after all. They tended to be exaggerations and distortions of what already existed on his home world, as if he had taken one element of a particular climate or country and wrapped a whole globe in it. Planets of ice or mountain ranges or swamps or grasslands. And the beings who dwelled on the surfaces were fairly bland creations, minor variations of each other, based on his own ideas of what noble savages should be like.
Only once did he manage to imagine a truly unique world, a planet with static weather patterns but pliable continents: the tectonic plates flowed and altered under the unmoving winds and rains and heatwaves so that the people who lived on the surface experienced changing weather as they were carried back and forth by the shifting ground beneath them. It was a nice conceit and he was proud to deduce the existence of such a place from taste alone.
But he slowly began to feel a despairing kind of homesickness and this evolved into a panic that he would never return to Earth. He became obsessed with the idea of reaching Montevideo but he did not know which buttons to press in the correct order. Another worry dominated his mind: the inevitability of eventually landing on a world with a hostile population. This drove him to greater efforts to find Earth again, blind efforts, a desperate faith in chance.
Finally it seemed his nightmare had come true. One morning he heard a pounding on the walls of his house. A force was breaking down the shell of bricks. He lunged for the remote control to propel his abode to safety but something had gone wrong. The device no longer worked. The pounding continued. Now he realised how facile his former views about violence were, how acutely different the threat of genuine pain and injury was. He did not care to imagine what limits would be set by any act of brutality on his person and how this would preclude something more extreme. He cared only about the integrity of his physical body.
He took refuge under his writing desk.
Something shattered at the front door. Daylight flooded the rooms. H
is friends found him shivering and begging for mercy. They lowered the hammers they carried and lifted him up.
“Your month of exile is over,” they said.
They were astonished at the ferocity of his tears, the thanks he gave them and the delight he expressed at being once more on his home planet. He was weary beyond belief, a man who had returned from the stars alive and full. They blinked at each other.
“Show us what you have written,” they suggested.
He did not seem to hear and so they picked up the papers on his desk. The pages were stained with food, the remnants of a month of daily meals, but they did not contain words. So they berated him for wasting their time and betraying his own ambition.
“I was too busy travelling,” he protested.
He told them every detail of his adventures, describing the many worlds he had visited, the cultures and marvels, and insisted the stained pages were a superior record of his experiences, that they should be published just as they were. At first they listened as if suspecting a deliberate joke, then they decided that delirium was the answer. They carried him to the couch, trying not to laugh openly. Gently they explained the obvious truth.
“We prepared those meals and took the responsibility in turns. We are from many different nations. Therefore you received a variety of ethnic dishes. For instance, on the first day we gave you Szechuan date pancakes, seafood stew from Somalia on the second day, Dukunoo from Jamaica on the third, and so on. Because you formerly ate only at steak houses — like an honest citizen of Uruguay — you did not recognise those dishes as originating from your own world.”
He shook his head and showed them the remote control. “This device is my proof.”
They examined it and smirked. “When you invited us around to tell us about your scheme we removed your television without telling you. We knew it would prove too much of a distraction and prevent you from writing. Now you may have it back.”
They carried the contraption in and lowered it into place. They stayed with him for another hour before they were convinced he had fully regained his sanity. When he was alone he blushed with embarrassment and turned the set on. The remote control switched channels, nothing more. He had been a fool. He watched for the remainder of the afternoon but perversely his homesickness grew more intense and by the time he had sampled every channel he was more confused than ever and simply could not tell what planet he was really on at all.
Ten Grim Bottles
I want to tell a story about the cannibal who lives under our old stone bridge but first I need some characters and a pot — I mean a plot. Not much is known about him. It is almost certain that he has lived there since the beginning of time and answers to the name Toby. Aside from that, he is often feared for his bad breath. He never cleans his teeth between travellers.
Lladloh village is just that sort of place. There are too many wonders to get worked up over one little cannibal. The uncanny is a part of everyday life; if you can’t digest the odd over breakfast, it is best you leave quickly or do not come in the first place. Having said that, the village is impossible to find unless your arrival is absolutely essential for some anecdote or other.
There was a gaunt fellow who came to visit us last summer. I remember him as a flapping crow of a man, all dressed in faded black, with a tall hat and a nose. This nose was so prominent, so remarkable, that nothing more need be said about it. But his dark cloak rose high in the wind as he roared in on his old motorcycle and he cut quite an impressive figure. Glum as the devil’s dentist, I said to myself.
In his battered sidecar, poorly concealed by a dusty tarpaulin, a box of tall blue bottles jumped. The stranger stopped his motorcycle in front of the public house and made his way inside. In the gloomy interior, he tipped his hat at all and ordered a whisky. “For my tongue is as dry as an ancient flatworm,” he remarked. To which Emyr, the landlord, replied, “Merely as dry as that?”
The stranger regarded him with pinpoint eyes. “Oh, drier than that by far,” he added. He rolled the whisky in his mouth and let loose a chuckle as sinister as a finger in a pie. But Emyr was not going to let him go so easily. “How far exactly?” he pressed. “As far as the furthest star in the Milky Way,” the stranger whispered. “As far as Judgment Day from the Day of Creation.” He finished his whisky at a gulp and ordered another.
“Quite far then?” said Emyr. He placed the little glass down onto the bar, making two wet rings like eyes. “Further than Aberystwyth, for example?” And this time, the stranger toyed with his drink, swirling the contents around, watching the sediment rise and fall. “I think so,” he agreed. “Oh yes, much further. So far that by the time you get there, you have quite forgotten the reason why you went.” But few people present in the bar that day could see how this differed from going to Aberystwyth, and so the poetry was lost.
I was one of those who happened to be there. It was obvious that a battle of dark wills was in progress. Emyr is not overly keen on serving locals, let alone visitors, and indeed he resents all attempts to make small talk. So when the stranger turned his head to take in all the patrons and said, “Does anyone here have an ache in their soul?” we knew that trouble was brewing. It was at this point that Hywel the Baker spoke up from the shadows. “I have an ache in my hands,” he said thickly. “And how do they ache?” the stranger asked, with a leer. “Not how, but what sort,” Hywel replied. “What sort then?” the stranger returned, knitting his brows. “A fruit ache,” said Hywel, spluttering crumbs. “But there’s none for you.”
The stranger hissed and it seemed that he was grinding his teeth together. But eventually he turned back to his whisky and this went the way of the first. I was able to take the opportunity of studying him more closely as he stood there, elbows on the bar, tall hat tipped at an angle over one of his disturbing eyes. Later I was learn that these eyes were like tiny obsidian mirrors, although it did not seem so to me at the time. But you know how folks will have things; the eyes of a stranger are always like tiny obsidian mirrors in the same way that a ghost is not a real spectre unless it is trailing a bloody winding-sheet behind it and talking with a voice tuned to the pitch of the autumn wind.
“Perhaps I have an ache in my soul,” said someone from another corner. And now my knees knocked together and everyone else in the bar looked to their cups. For this was the voice of Elizabeth Morgan, the fiery witch of Cobweb Cottage, who rarely spoke except to augur some crisis and whose nettle jam was an inarguable reason for living one’s life in a state of quiet desperation. But when my curiosity finally overcame my better judgment and I glanced up, I saw that she was talking to herself and staring at the bottom of one of her shoes.
At last the stranger stretched himself and once more addressed those gathered. “I am looking for the local poet. All these villages have one. I see no reason why yours should be any different. Lladloh is it? Well then, my fine fellows, where can I find the Bard of Lladloh?” And suddenly I bit my lip, for this personage was none other than my good self, or so I liked to think. “Why do you seek him?” I ventured, not entirely sure that I wanted to hear the answer. The stranger turned those mysterious eyes upon me and a faint smile cracked the stiff parchment of his face. “I have a service to offer,” he said slowly, bowing a menacing bow and doffing his dusty hat.
I felt a sudden, absurd urge to throw myself at his feet, grasp his ankles and cry, “It is me, sir,” in a vain attempt to solicit mercy. But as I did not even know what he had planned, I managed to restrain myself. My hand shook as I raised my drink to my mouth and took a long draught to steady my nerves. “What sort of service?” I managed to gargle into my beer, the bubbles exploding around the lip of the glass and sloshing over the floorboards.
The stranger moved a pace closer and his left eyebrow arched ever so slightly. “I am an extractor of egos,” he announced with a hint of a chuckle. “I travel the land seeking out poets whose ambition is greater than their talent and I remove the source of irritation that is making thei
r lives a misery. In short, I cut out their egos. I perform an egoectomy! I have the tools, such tools you have never seen before in all your dreams. I made them myself. Out pours the ego like blood from a broken nose and I collect it in a blue-glass bottle. The operation is almost painless. My fees are reasonable, but I make a good living. My services are always in great demand, if not from the poet himself then certainly from his friends and family!”
I glanced around the bar at my companions. Would they betray me? Despite their public endorsement of my verse, what did they really think? I noticed that they were all frowning. There was indecision etched on every face. The stranger stepped forward another pace and stroked his pale chin. All eyes in the bar were now turned upon me. The very air bristled with some horribly subtle meaning.
I guessed that my drinking companions would not be able to resist the temptation to give me away for much longer. This was a profoundly depressing insight. I had no wish to lose my ego. After all, it was only a very small one. I had spent the last five years attempting to build an extension to it, but had repeatedly been denied planning permission for the project. In other words, I was an unpublished poet. A failure. But I liked to think that I had preserved at least some measure of pride, of hubris, throughout all my rejections. I did not want to lose this small crumb of what I still hoped my identity might one day evolve into.
I had produced reams and reams of verse in my thankless capacity as self-styled Laureate of the locality. My untitled magnum opus, in twelve handwritten volumes, told the sombre story of a young man who wandered cemeteries at night in a state of lyrical angst but who fell in love with the reanimated corpse of a drowned girl who rose from her grave before him during a freak thunderstorm. Her name was Gwyneth Bellows and she had been dead for just a month, so she was still quite maggoty as well as bloated, but this minor objection aside, he found her rather fetching. Indeed, he eventually summoned up the courage to propose to her and she accepted.