by Rhys Hughes
I advised her against asking him directly. He seemed stern despite the smile he generally wore on his leathery face. When Ruth and I flew close to the sides of the bubble he appeared from nowhere to block our way. “That is not permitted. It would be a grotesque shame if you were to smudge the stunning view by pressing your hands against the glass,” he explained.
In truth there was almost no light outside, and we saw only the reflection of the interior of the bubble, but I said in astonishment, “The walls are made only of glass? But the pressure on them must be huge!”
“Diamond,” corrected the janitor, and then he laughed.
“But you said glass,” pointed out Ruth.
“It is easier,” he spat, and he glowered at us until we retreated. Very rarely in the aftermath of this incident did we dare approach the sides of the bubble. In conversation with our neighbours we learned that nobody had managed to touch it. One ventured the unorthodox opinion that there was no solid wall at all, that our bubble was just made of ordinary air.
“It could be a natural bubble,” he declared.
I pondered this but could think of nothing clever to say. Then Ruth had an idea that she put forward partly in jest. “If we all breathe in at the same time, the bubble should contract slightly and this movement ought to be noticed. That will settle the issue once and for all. Inhale!”
And we did but it made no difference. The bubble remained exactly as big as before. But I couldn’t shake off the notion we were living in an air bubble and that our government had tricked us into relocating to a place with no future and no inherent strength. One evening, while swinging on a hammock on a platform designed to resemble a beach, I woke in a panic and shook Ruth, who lay across me like a pair of trousers filled with shells.
“If this is a natural air bubble we should be rising and we aren’t doing that, which disproves the hypothesis,” I gasped. “Unless time has been slowed to such an extreme degree that it only appears to be static. But not even our government could slow a rising air bubble this size.”
“No,” agreed Ruth, “but it might be capable of altering our time perception so that we only believe it’s not rising.”
“Do you think that during the operation...?”
Ruth nodded. “Yes, they messed with our brains as well as our bones. With a few scalpel cuts here and there they accelerated our time sense so that a fraction of a second now seems like a year. We are in a natural air bubble after all, vented from some ancient cavern or tunnel beneath the seabed, and we are rising without guessing the fact. They have deceived us.”
“What a sneaky way of reducing the population!” I snorted. “But they will be in trouble when the bubble breaks the surface of the ocean, as it must do. That is when the truth will come out. We will fly to the nearest landmass and let it be known we are the victims of a cruel trick.”
“They won’t ever allow that to happen,” sighed Ruth.
“What do you mean?” I croaked.
“They will burst the bubble long before then and drown us.”
“How will they burst it?” I cried.
“They already have,” said Ruth, and she gestured in the direction of the air locks on the side of the bubble. I frowned.
“They will open the locks and let the water pour in?”
“No, no!” she breathed, and then she added, “There are no air locks at all, merely puncture wounds. Don’t you realise that the submarine was the needle to burst the bubble? So it has already been popped. In fact it was popped by the act of delivering us into the interior. We just haven’t realised it yet and we might not actually experience it for many generations.”
“It depends on how much our time sense was accelerated.”
“Yes, I’m rather afraid it does.”
“And there’s no way of knowing that?”
“I don’t think so. It would require very careful and precise observation and calculation; and I doubt the janitor will permit anything along those lines. So the best thing is simply to continue our lives as best we can, knowing that they might come to an abrupt end at any instant.”
“In other words, exactly like life up above?”
“Yes, indeed,” she answered, and I had the impression that her words were encapsulated in a large speech bubble.
And so we continued to act as if nothing was wrong, and maybe, in a sense, nothing was wrong. Nothing, at any rate, that hadn’t already been wrong in our former lives in that depressing sordid city. We all live in bubbles of some kind or another, irrespective of the shape or consistency of our surroundings. Even those men who occupy the interior of the submarine that popped our little cosmos, the plurality of captains and crew, are enbubbled.
There is no such word and I’m acutely aware of this.
Have I failed to be convincing?
It doesn’t matter. If there is a point to this tale it will burst the meaning and spray the words all over you, reader.
A Dame Abroad
She was a dame. She talked like a dame, moved like a dame, smelled like a dame, breathed like a dame, slept like a dame, yawned like a dame, coughed like a dame, dusted like a dame, cooked like a dame, had the metabolism of a dame, knew about as much astrophysics as a dame would, had a selection of hats typical of a dame. She was a dame.
No doubt about it. A dame through and through. Her hips were as wide and curvy as a concert piano and her feet were like pedals, so if you stood on one while she was talking her voice would become a swelling overlapping echo and if you stood on the other her voice would be muted and soft. But no man could play her well. She was out of tune.
Her lipstick was a dame’s lipstick and it was the colour of the edges of a bullet wound or some sort of massive head trauma. It could even be said that it was the shade of blood that gushes from a busted lip. It wasn’t the lipstick of a homunculus or panda. She left her apartment and swayed down the length of this sentence to the end of the paragraph.
Her hips kept getting stuck between the margins of the story – that’s how wide they were – but she finally arrived on the street and headed downtown, a part of town under uptown. She was going there because the plot told her to and she had no choice. She was without choice, without even a dame’s choice, but she had everything else a dame should.
Yes, she was a dame. She was also a broad. A broad is a certain kind of dame and, in fact, I don’t think there’s any difference between them but I’m not really an expert. Maybe there is a miniscule arcane difference, something to do with the atoms of the ankles. Who knows? I don’t. Maybe you do. Maybe you are a dame or broad who knows. Well done.
I am a private eye. That’s who I am. I used to be a public eye but people got upset and complained to the authorities about my appearance. They didn’t like to see a gigantic eye rolling along the pavement towards them. It disturbed them that the rest of my head was missing, that I had no body or limbs, that I was just an eye with the diameter of a cottage.
So the authorities forced me to go private and encased me inside a brick pyramid and now I blink out near the summit of the structure and you can find me on the hill overlooking the town. I don’t solve many cases these days, to be honest, but that’s because I’m too busy living a fantasy life. In my fantasy life I’m a man with all my parts fully functional.
These daydreams are starting to occupy all my waking hours. I imagine that my name is Sergio Surges and I have a moustache so big that a policeman can conceal himself inside it. This is helpful when confronting lethal criminals with their deeds. For example, at this precise instant I’m about to enter a bar where a notorious gangster is playing pool.
I watch him splashing about with the rubber ducks and toy boats but it’s rude and dangerous to stare so I turn away and order a drink from the barman, who happens to be a midget pygmy. “Rum.”
Pygmies are quite small already but the midgets among them are really tiny, no higher than the knees of a freak spider.
“What kind?” he asks.
�
��The kind that begins with the letter B,” I reply.
“Brandy, you mean?”
“Sure! Make it a double on the rocks.”
He places a selection of pebbles on the bar and slowly pours the alcohol over them. I nod and pay him. I also tip him. Over the edge of the tall stool on which he stands. He plummets through an open trapdoor that leads to a very long passage that passes through the world all the way back to where he came from, which is the Pygmalion Republic.
That passage is so long it goes on for umpteen hundred thousand pages. This is the highly condensed version.
“What did you do that for?” cries the notorious gangster.
“He was corrupt,” I answer coolly.
“And what the hell do you think you are?”
“I am Sergio Surges, the private eye who is more than just an eye, and I am not corrupt at all, partly because this is just a daydream, but I know for an unchecked fact that he, the barman, was taking bribes from you in order to let wicked things happen on the premises.”
“Oh yeah? What sort of wicked things, buddy?”
“No idea. I don’t bother with little details like that. It’s too much effort. Maybe he allowed you to fight the shadows of gibbons on that wall over there. Or maybe he let you to use a freshly baked pizza as an indoor Frisbee and the toppings were pineapple and chocolate.”
“Is this some kind of joke?”
“Do I look like an Englishman, a Scotsman and an Irishman? Of course it’s no joke. You are under arrest.”
“I’m going to kill ya with my heater!”
He gets out of the pool and plugs a portable electric heater into a socket on the wall, taking care not to drip on the wires, and waits for the filaments to start glowing. But he is far too slow. The policeman in my moustache instantly reveals himself and blasts him with a truncheon that is actually a mini-bazooka and I watch him burst like applause.
A round of. Very satisfying.
The door swings open and the dame walks in like a baby grand. My jaw drops open. What is she doing here?
“This is my daydream. Get out!” I bellow.
Her lipsticked lips curl in a sneer that is half smile. “A daydream? Fine. I am a day-dame so I belong here.”
I despise it when confusions arise and unplanned things happen in what is supposed to be my personal fantasy. I usually escape them by going into the next level of daydream, by closing my eyes and imagining I am Hugo Lobes, a private eye with ears so large that a couple of pygmy midgets can hide behind each one, both armed with blowpipes.
I am sitting on the top deck of a tram and reading the newspaper and the front page headline screams at me that a terrible gangster is sitting downstairs on the same tram at this very moment, so I get up to make my way down the curving set of metal steps but my way is blocked by a woman who is coming up. To my dismay I recognise her...
The dame! She followed me into this fantasy!
“This is most unfair!” I roar.
“I go wherever I please,” she retorts.
“But I thought you didn’t have a choice. It said earlier in this story that you were a dame without choice.”
“Precisely. I have no choice but to go where I please.”
“You mean that your free will is—”
“Predetermined,” she says.
So I vanish into the third level of daydream, the level where I am Bogie Clubs, a private eye with such a big mouth that gibbons could bake pizzas in there without anyone getting suspicious, and I am on the deck of a cruise ship that is heading to the Bermuda Shorts, a pair of islands where a gangster has taken refuge in one of the deep pockets.
A steward approaches. “Would monsieur care for a drink?”
“Gin,” I answer languidly.
“What kind?” he asks in a high voice.
“The kind that begins with the letter V,” I reply.
“Vodka, you mean?”
“No thanks. Vermouth please.”
But he doesn’t go to fetch me my beverage. Instead he pulls off his cap and unbuttons his jacket to reveal—
The dame! It’s the dame again! That damned dame!
I vanish into the next level.
Now I am Griswald Jerkins, the private eye with a chin dimple so deep that a tram driver with a halberd could conceal himself and pop out and swing it most effectively at the drop of a hat, especially one of those very heavy hats that make a clanging noise when it lands. I am furiously pedalling a unicycle up a mountain path in pursuit of a gangster.
Another unicycle catches up with me, draws level.
The rider is the dame again!
I escape into the next level. I am Morton Punchbowl and—
The dame, the dame, the dame!
Through all the daydreams she follows me and each subsequent fantasy has slightly less detail in it, is less fleshed out, sparser, bleaker, less real then the one that preceded it, and each private eye is less convincing because I’ve spent less time working on their identities and environments than I might have done. But fleeing this way is my only hope.
Here’s a short list of some of the private eyes I become:
Mickey Stains.
Hercule Pompbustus.
Heston Furball.
Flippy Masters.
Duckbreath Chumptaster.
Ratleg Smashy.
Occidental Brushtooth.
Ajax van Scruba.
Chickpea Bunkerlove.
Zippy Buttons.
Gusty Nuts.
Lemontoe Thumbrag.
And then I run out of daydreams and run out of names and run out of big body parts and run out of time, energy and space, and I find myself, as I’m sure you have already anticipated, completing the circle, closing the loop and becoming myself again: a colossal eyeball inside a pyramid, and I glance down and see her climbing the hill towards me.
“Leave me alone!” I scream.
“I will now,” she says. “I just wanted to go on a journey, that’s all, out of this story and around the world. I wanted to go abroad. I was a dame but a stay-at-home dame. And now I’ve been abroad, so I’m a dame abroad and a broad at home, and it feels just fine. I climbed up here to thank you but also to ask your advice. I really need to know.”
“What is it?” I am frantic to get rid of her. I’ll say anything to make her go away, answer any question. And then it comes, she hits me with it, and I’m more acutely aware than ever before that she’s a dame, that she has the soul of a dame, the heart of a dame, the plot of a dame, the metaphors of a dame, the grammar of a dame, the power of a dame.
“How do you curl your lashes?”
A Real Nowhere Man
I was bored with my home, my friends and my job, so I took a few days off to go walking by myself. It was a relief to be away from the telephone and to give my voice a rest. But I had not hiked far when I spied a figure approaching from the opposite direction, a lean man in a tattered cloak who wore enormous blue spectacles on his nose. I hoped we would pass without exchanging a word, and I even turned my face away from him, but he hailed me the moment he saw me, with these words:
“Tell me, O stranger, about the lands you have come from, the regions you have lately trodden with your feet, for you travel north and I journey south, and so you already know everything that lies in wait for me. Relate everything you can, omit no detail, about the customs of the people, the buildings and bazaars, the foodstuffs and textiles, the beliefs and biases, the climate and geography, the artworks and music, the laws and festivals.”
“I beg your pardon?” I cried, for he was still distant.
At much closer range he repeated his request and I shook my head. “You are the first to refuse me!” he spluttered in wonder.
“Frankly,” said I, “my mood for talking is in abeyance. I sell insurance over the telephone for a living. I care not to speak in my spare time, if I can avoid it, and the main reason I am out here is to enjoy the silence and isolation.”
“I am sorry,” he mut
tered dismally.
He looked so crestfallen with the shreds of his cloak hanging around him that I relented, at least in part, and said, “But I am prepared to listen to your story, if you have one, and I will do so with good grace. Is that enough?”
“Will you provide comments at regular intervals?” he pressed.
I replied in the negative and watched as he adjusted his spectacles and considered my terms with a frown that threatened to split his weathered forehead down the middle. Then he arrived at a decision, nodded once and commenced his tale:
“Many years ago, I was gripped with a powerful desire to travel the world. I wanted to see all of it, every inch, and this urge was so intense and so impossible to achieve that I fell suddenly ill. A fever burned my limbs for days and I lay gasping on a mattress on my balcony, unable to conduct any of my normal business affairs. The people who passed in the street called up advice and the irony was that they suggested travel to distant lands as a cure, unaware that dreams of far places had caused my sickness in the first place.
“When my fever subsided and I could move freely again I was astonished to discover that my friends had raised a sum of money between them to make a long voyage feasible for me. Touched by this generosity, but curiously disheartened at the same time, for reasons I will explain in a moment, I wasted many days debating what to do next. I finally decided to conceal the bag of gold coins in a secret place, at the bottom of the opaque waters of the foulest fountain in my city, and I set off almost penniless just before dawn on the longest day of the year.
“The streets were deserted as I left my house and the outlines of the buildings were firmer and more definite in the early light than they seemed at a later hour, an illusion that confirmed the feeling inside me that I had finally awoken into reality after a lifetime of sleeping on my feet. Even the shadows had a clarity and precision that delighted me and my pace was rapid in response to my general glee. Out of my city I went, into the hills, and did not rest until noon when I stopped under the shelter of a boulder to unwrap and devour my lunch.