by Rhys Hughes
“You mustn’t attempt to anticipate me.”
“I humbly apologise,” I said.
“The horses called the giant man Najort Esroh.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Merely a name. What do names mean? They mean only themselves. Any other meaning isn’t important.”
“I take your point. Please continue your narration.”
“Yes, I will. From my vantage I could see what transpired. One misty morning, the citizens were astounded to confront the giant man standing in the main square. They guessed quickly what was happening and they pushed and dragged the thing far outside the city walls. They knew that mutinous horses were concealed within and it took every denizen of the settlement to shift the vast figure outside.”
“Including the women and children?” I pressed.
“Of course. Every inhabitant.”
“And what happened when Najort Esroh was expelled?”
“They set it on fire. Burned it!”
“And killed all the horses inside?” I gasped.
The toy horse laughed, a rasping sound. “No, for there were no horses within. They had played a double bluff, remaining behind in their stables and waiting for the city to be evacuated.”
“Ah, so the horses were now in control of Troy?”
“Indeed. They locked the gates and left the foolish citizens outside in a light rain that came to hiss against the charred embers of the giant. When the men and women wanted to return, the horses refused to let them back in. I witnessed everything and it was the strangest thing in my three thousand year history. You asked and I answered.”
I digested his odd account for a few minutes.
“But how did the horses get to learn of Odysseus’ trick?”
The toy horse snickered. “Me!”
“So you helped your own kind, even though you are artificial and they were real; and this happened after Herr Kremkraker automated you? And that’s how you were able to urge the real horses to rebellion, by speaking to them with your mechanical voice.”
“No, no, it happened before I ever met him!”
“But you said you were dumb then, non-sentient, a simple toy with no more intelligence than any dead object!”
“And so I was. Why are you so shocked by this?”
“It makes the tale more impossible.”
“Jakob Kremkraker gave me a personal history but I don’t know how he researched it. Perhaps he simply made it up. All I know is that I recall the incident very clearly. I also have some concrete evidence. Before they built the full-sized giant man, the horses made a model to demonstrate the viability of the design. Look behind me.”
I could see almost nothing in the gloom but I reached out and groped with my clumsy fingers. Sure enough, there was another toy there, further back on that shelf, a wooden man, a miniature giant. “How much for this toy?” I asked the horse without irony.
“I’m not for sale,” the giant suddenly said.
I left that shop in a hurry, not because I was frightened by the peculiar nature of the items inside, but because I was late for an appointment with my mechanic. I am the Lord Mayor of this faded seaside resort and I need regular winding. Because I can’t reach to insert the brass key into the hole in the middle of my back on my own, a reliable mechanic with big hands is essential for my continued wellbeing.
Travels with my Antinomy
There is no absolute truth. Or is there? I went travelling with my knapsack and curiosity over a range of mountains far from home. I was looking for a village I had once been told about, a village where I might find something I had lost that was neither my senses nor my virginity. It was a long way but ways are longer often than this one so complain I did not.
At last, when the sun was setting beautifully in the west – where always it sets, at least to my knowledge – I saw the village spread below me. It was tinted rose and purple at that hour and I hurried down the slope towards it. There was a solitary tavern with an oaken door that yielded to my knocking. I asked for a room for the night and was given the attic.
After resting for a short time, I went down to where there was a blaze and mugs of cider available for me to slake my thirst. And, while engaged in the arts of stretching my legs afore the flames and sharpening my innards on the brew, I asked the barman, who seemed an agreeable fellow, if there were any other men hereabouts who had a beard just like mine.
“Not only not like yours, but not like anyone else’s.”
“There are no beards here?”
“Every man in this village, Señor, is clean shaven.”
“You have a very busy barber.”
“Ah, the barber shaves only the men who do not shave themselves. That is the law among us who dwell here.”
“And no man ever neglects to shave or be shaved?”
“That is correct, Señor.”
Then I knew I was in the village I was seeking, the village where all men are smooth cheeked and either shave themselves or are shaved by the barber. So I tugged at my beard, the beard of a wanderer, sipped my cider and felt the warmth radiate outward from my body toward the fire; as if two different kinds of heat were about to meet and mingle.
“In that case,” I said lightly, “who shaves the barber?”
“Shaves the barber, Señor!”
“Yes indeed. Who?”
The barman sighed and tapped his nose but it was mercifully clear he did not yet regard me as a troublemaker, merely as a stranger, an ordinary man who had finally asked the awkward but inevitable question he had been expecting for years, if not decades. He poured a mug of cider for himself and he shrugged and then came over to sit next to me.
“The barber has two choices, Señor. He can shave himself or he can go to the barber to be shaved. There is only one barber in the village, so if he decides to visit the barber he will visit himself. In other words, he really has one choice and it is not even a choice. He must shave himself. But, by tradition he shaves only the men who do not shave themselves.”
“So he cannot shave himself?”
“As you say, Señor. But he cannot grow a beard because there are only clean shaven men dwelling in this village.”
“That is the paradox,” I replied. “I had it once upon a time but I lost it in my youth. Now I have found it again.”
“What will you do with it, now you have it?”
“Take it with me when I leave.”
“But we need it, Señor; it is the only one we have. This is the village with only one barber, who is male, and who shaves all those, and only those, who do not shave themselves. If you take the paradox with you, what will we have left? And he is a very heavy man, too heavy for you to lift. I also believe he will fight back and perhaps slash open your throat.”
“My presence here spoils the paradox anyway.”
He gazed at my beard a long time.
“Yes, Señor, I suppose it does. But if you are gone in the morning, it will be repaired. The paradox will thus only be suspended for one night. And, in fact, you cannot take the paradox away with you, because while you are here there is no paradox. The paradox only works if every man in the village is clean shaven and you most definitely are not that.”
This was true. I realised that I had been questing for a rainbow or horizon, something that would move further away and out of reach the nearer I got to it. I understood that this was a logical consequence of my situation and that only one of two courses of action would help. I would either have to shave myself or else go to the barber to be shaved. So I said:
“May I borrow a razor from you tonight?”
“You may not, Señor.”
“Then I will have to visit the barber tomorrow morning.”
The barman lowered his head.
I finished my cider and went up to my room. There was a desk in a corner of the attic and a chair. I did not feel sleepy and so I decided to update my travel journal. I opened my knapsack and took it out, together with my quill and
bottle of ink, which I arranged neatly on the desk. I heard footsteps outside and I went to the little window and peered cautiously out.
The barman was hurrying down the street in the moonlight. I guessed that he was going to rouse the barber and tell him to hide when I called round to see him in the morning. I would not easily get a shave here, but, if I did manage to, I would certainly not be permitted to take the barber back with me. I would have to remain here, a prisoner, imbibing cider.
Shaking my head ruefully, because that is my favourite way of shaking it among the several methods I am aware of, I sat down and opened my journal to a new page. Then I dipped my quill into the ink and began writing. I told of my trek over the mountains and how I... but no, those were not the words that now lay on the page before me. I blinked at them.
My blinking was so rapid and my eyelashes are so long that the ink dried more quickly than it would have done had another man penned those words. It appeared that I had written an account of how to tend horses in a stable. Had the rigours and stresses of my journey muddled my brains? I began again on a clean page but once again the words tricked me.
Now I had written about gathering windfall apples in the orchards on the edge of the village. I tried a third time. Now my account told of milking goats on the slopes where the wild flowers grew.
A fourth and fifth time, a sixth time, seventh, eighth...
It was peculiar and unnerving.
At last, in agitation, I got up and paced the room, creaking warped boards with muddy boots. I paused only at the window and looked out again. The moon was still shining brightly and I could see the whole village. In every house just one window was illuminated and it always belonged to the highest room of that house. They were lit by lamps like mine.
And men were behind each one of those windows; and some of these men were sitting at desks of their own, writing in journals identical to mine, but most of them simply stood there, faces pressed to the glass, and gazed in my direction and grinned when they saw me looking back. And then I realised that I was part of another paradox, one related to the first.
There is a village with just one professional scribe, who is bearded, and in this village every man keeps a careful account of the day’s events, and does this by doing one of two things. Either he writes his own journal or the scribe writes it on his behalf. The scribe writes only the journals of the men who do not write their own. Who writes the scribe’s journal?
I knew that if I took my journal with me when I left, as I was planning to do, I would free the paradox from this prison. It would be my companion on all my future travels, like a woman but easier to read, to flick through, to replace or forget; not at all like a woman really. I blew out the lamp and went to bed and I dreamed only once of a looming shiny blade.
The Bubble Bursts
To live and work in a giant bubble, far beneath the surface of the ocean, seemed like a good idea to Ruth and me. There would be all sorts of opportunities down there that we didn’t have up here, and many chances to further both our careers. Exactly what forms those opportunities and chances might take we couldn’t actually specify but that didn’t matter.
The important thing was that we had made a positive decision. We were going to leave the city that had been our prison for so many years and relocate to a contrived subaquatic paradise at a depth of some two kilometres. It wasn’t just a case of deciding to go because there were bureaucratic hoops to jump through, and a lot of application forms to fill out.
Interviews too. But we were successful in the end, surely because we were still young and vibrant. Neither of us could swim but that didn’t matter. It was explained to us that the interior of the bubble was utterly dry and that, even if we could swim, it wouldn’t make any difference in a disaster. It was just too deep to expect survivors if anything went wrong.
That reassured us and we submitted to the operation that was necessary to help us integrate. I know what you are thinking. No, it wasn’t fins or gills they grafted onto us but wings. They replaced our human bones with hollow ones made from some new material with a name I never learned to pronounce, and our feathers were silky smooth but rip-proof.
Ruth looked extremely attractive when she flapped her wings and took to the air. I soared after her and we played an erotic game of chase for a quarter of an hour before the chief surgeon clucked his tongue and said, “That’s not really the most appropriate sort of behaviour in a hospital, is it?” Then we were discharged and told to await transportation to the bubble.
A few days later it came: a submarine on wheels that picked us up from our old home, with its sagging roof and mouldy walls, and rumbled with us down the broken streets of the decaying metropolis to the dark river where it slid beneath the oily waters with a grateful plop, watched by listless pedestrians on bridges, and then continued onwards to the estuary.
Beyond the estuary lay the open sea, and a week or so later we had reached the middle point of the ocean where the bubble was located. Down and downer went the submarine, the captain making sonar noises as it did so because the real sonar was broken, until we felt a gentle judder and knew we had hit something more solid than water but just as yielding.
“We are passing through the air locks,” the captain said.
There were no portholes so we had to take his word for it, and we did, but we gave it back later, when it was too late. Ruth flapped her wings in excitement and I did the same and our shiny feathers reflected the lights of a dozen consoles and devices scattered about the bridge of the submarine. “Don’t do that, you are making a cold breeze,” the captain growled.
Eventually the submarine came to a halt and the hatch was opened in the conning-tower and we were permitted to disembark. We found ourselves on a platform in the exact centre of the bubble and this platform was held aloft by a pair of rotors that span in nacelles below us. But how had the submarine reached this platform from the side of the bubble?
It took only a single blink to discern the truth of the matter. It dangled by a hook from a cord and the cord was strung from the platform to the airlock far to the side. It had slid down the length of this cord like a cucumber on a zip wire, if you will pardon such a useless comparison. It would return on another cord to a slightly lower air-lock. An ingenious system!
But we were given no time to ponder this or anything else, for a man now fluttered down to us and shook our hands. He was the janitor, he explained, and was responsible for more things than such a humble title might lead us to suspect. For instance, he was also the political officer here and was charged with ensuring that no one living in the bubble caused trouble.
“But I don’t think I’ll have any difficulties with you,” he said, looking us carefully up and down and nodding happily.
“What is our work?” we asked.
“Anything at all. Just play and enjoy yourselves,” he said affably. “For that is work as useful as any other; but, if you wish to grow food or clean surfaces or teach children, please do so. It is voluntary.”
“Will you show us to our new home?”
He wagged a finger. “Ah! That is the mistake that all newcomers make. No citizen of the bubble has a home of their own. Everything here is shared equally among everyone. You may go anywhere, partake of anything, sleep and eat and bathe where you like, provided the facilities for doing such functions are present and available. The bubble is a commune.”
“That’s a breath of fresh air!” exclaimed Ruth.
But the janitor glowered at her and said in a sharp whisper, “Do mind your language and think before you speak; or even better, don’t think at all. There are some topics that are taboo down here. They may have been perfectly acceptable up on terra firma but simply won’t do now. Fresh air being one of them. That’s a mighty sore subject for many inhabitants.”
After delivering this rebuke he became friendly again and bowed deeply, a man with no greater desire than to look after the citizens in his care. He flapped away and we watched him depart with
admiration at his flying technique, for he had mastered the art of using minimal energy and glided for rather long periods between each beat of his shimmering wings.
It was time to explore the bubble and examine our new home, familiarising ourselves with as much of it as we could and getting to know our neighbours, so we leapt off the platform into space. All the structures in the bubble had rotors and suspended themselves in mid air without touching the sides. Some platforms were circular, others were square, triangular, polygonal or irregular. A few were bowl shaped or resembled saddles or pyramids.
Many of the platforms contained gardens or were entirely one big garden or orchard; others were crammed with buildings, including apartments, shops and schools. There were unsavoury platforms too, full of narrow alleyways, lurking shadows, and an essence of menace. Something for everyone. We were very civil to the folks we met and they were equally polite.
“Are you enjoying life in the bubble?” we asked them.
Always they shrugged. “We don’t know yet, for we haven’t been here long enough to reach a final decision, but our instinct tells us that soon we will be able to give a positive response to your question.”
“When did you arrive?” we wondered.
“Just now. On the submarine. What about you?”
This baffled us. And yet it was the reply we always received. “But we were the only passengers on the vessel. We stood on the bridge with the captain and all the other crew members. Where were you?”
“We were on the bridge with the captain!” they insisted.
After much thought, Ruth and I came to the conclusion that the submarine had contained many bridges and many captains all sealed off from each other and that it had been designed in this manner to give every passenger the feeling he or she was special. Was this a sinister truth or did it simply mean that the authorities were more considerate of human feelings?
“It seems,” said Ruth, “that no one was here before our arrival. We are the first to arrive and yet the illusion was created that we were joining an established society. I wonder when the janitor came?”