by Rhys Hughes
She smoothed her hair. “Did what move, Hunky?”
“The Earth. Our home world.”
“Don’t be deliberately corny,” she said.
Foam speckled the tip of his nose. “I’ll take that as a no. So what other planet did move, if not Earth?”
“What are you playing at?” she sighed.
“Greta,” said Hunky slowly, “who is Uncle Conker?”
“You know. You remember.”
“I don’t, Greta. No. Who is he? Is he green, Greta? Is that his hue? Can you prove he even has a face?”
“I have a photograph somewhere. I’ll get it.”
“Yes, you go get it, Greta.”
He smirked to himself as she left the sofa, still nude, and went upstairs to the spare bedroom. She returned with a battered metal box, used a bent key to open it, exposed a deck of faded postcards and photos. She flicked through them, selected just one.
“That’s Uncle Conker. He lived in a log cabin on an island in a lake. It was a lake in a crater. Thunderstorm sent down a lightning bolt that broke the lip of the crater. The lake poured out, left him stranded on the apex of an unscalable vertical column.”
Hunky shook his head. “Oh dear, this won’t do, won’t do at all. Try to tell me he’s human, would you?”
“Nowhere is he green,” pointed out Greta.
“I agree. He’s worse than that. He’s sepia. Sepia! I don’t blame you for lying, Greta. I’m going to bed now. I need to escape the consequences of what I’ve learned. The truth. Come later, when I’m asleep. Not now. I am excessively frightened. Sepia.”
The following morning Hunky had two cups of coffee instead of one and didn’t give Zanger any chance to toot his horn before he was out the door and halfway down the gravel path.
“Bad news,” he said as jumped inside, “I don’t think my wife is having an affair. I hoped that last Friday she might have gone off with a man, but I was gasping at straws all along.”
“Grasping, you mean,” corrected Zanger.
“That too,” admitted Hunky.
Zanger set off along the usual route. “Aren’t you composed?” he asked nervously. “In your soul, that is.”
“I’m not composed,” concurred Hunky.
“Maybe you should see a composer. They compose on your behalf for a living. That’s logical, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Do you know any famous ones?”
“Sorry brother, that kind are all long dead. And when a composer dies he decomposes and his sonatas are erased one by one. It makes sense and naught can be said to the contrary.”
“I’ve been thinking about the woman…”
“What woman, my friend?”
“The vast statue of the woman on Mars.”
Zanger chuckled. “Didn’t you see the news yesterday? False alarm, the whole thing. I don’t mean it was a hoax, but an optical illusion. A trick of perspective. Of light and shadow. No statues exist on Mars. More pictures were released from the probe.”
“Shall I jump out for a newspaper then?”
“You do that,” said Zanger.
Hunky turned pages every step of the way back, found the photos, saw the woman was a formless outcrop.
Zanger nodded at his pout.
“The lower the probe fell, the less like a statue it seemed, as the angles changed. It’s just an isolated mountain range. The probe landed more than fifty miles from the statue and there you see the entire mass from the side. Eroded red rock, that’s all it is.”
But Hunky was intrigued. “From directly above it looks like a woman, but from the side it doesn’t at all. Not remotely like one. Face to face, yes, laterally, no. Curious. What if?”
“What if what, brother?”
Hunky shook his head, lips tightly compressed. Finally he said, “Why don’t we build a telescope at work? You and me. A big one in secret. We have access to concave mirrors. Powerful enough to look at the surface of Mars in detail. My roof is spare.”
“Sorry, friend, I don’t care to lose my job.”
“OK, I understand that.”
They had reached the gates of the factory and the guard waved at them with imperious but somehow kindly gestures, letting them pass as always into the car park, for a new day.
Hunky worked with absent-minded efficiency.
At lunchtime Zanger approached and said, “I wonder if any probe will ever find the statue of a probe?”
“That’ll mean a mirrored surface,” said Hunky.
“I wasn’t being serious!”
Hunky declined to engage in further conversation. He was waiting for the chance to return home. And when he did, he lost no time seducing his wife. He stripped her and pushed her down on the bed, and hovered over her, but this time he lowered himself at an angle, not into her, missing her and landing to one side. He looked.
An optical illusion, a trick of perspective.
The curves of Greta, her highlights and shadows, had changed, shifted, dispersed, and the familiar companion of his adult years was gone. With a tender but trembling hand he reached out. She was cool, not cold, smooth, not rough, but unresponsive, dead.
He slumbered, mentally exhausted, woke at intervals in a sweat. It was necessary to position a pillow between her form and his. He couldn’t bear the texture of her molecules on his.
Monday morning. Zanger sounded his horn for longer than usual. Hunky came out of his house like an old drunk. He climbed painfully into the car and smiled weakly. “Guess?”
“Only if you give me a clue,” said Zanger.
“No. My wife’s a mineral.”
“Well, everybody knew that, brother.”
“Not a woman, my Greta.”
“Of course not. Not any part of her.”
“She’s not even an alien.”
“We thought you knew. Didn’t you?”
Hunky shook his head. “Nope. It therefore came as a shock. It wasn’t a dream when I woke beside her.”
“You’ve done that before, often.”
“Not with my mind open. I thought I was in bed with a stalactite. Then I picked her up and inspected her very carefully. I wondered if she might be a special meteorite. But she isn’t. She’s a fulgurite, a petrified lightning bolt, a hollow branching tube of lechatelierite glass that only forms when electricity zaps sand. Poor Greta.”
Zanger whistled. “How did you find this out?”
“I took her to the museum.”
Zanger narrowed his eyes. “You sold her?”
“Not yet. I don’t want to.”
“You’ll get over her, brother, I swear. My own wife was a musical note that nobody ever played, a quaver, one of a pair of twins. I have a portrait of her in my wallet. Take a peek.”
He passed it across and Hunky saw a melancholy ♫ without a stave or any sort of key signature in the background. “Which one is your wife? I’m sorry but they both look identical.”
“Kristen’s on the left. Iris is on the right.”
Hunky was none the wiser, but didn’t dare press the point. He frowned and pointed. “They’re conjoined.”
“That’s right, brother. Siamese quavers.”
“Couldn’t they be separated?”
“Listen, friend, they weren’t from Earth. Do you get it now? I feel your pain, because I went through the same thing. They weren’t even from this solar system. Interstellar music!”
“That’s a tragic story already,” said Hunky.
Zanger sighed. “I want you to imagine a planet orbiting a distant star, a planet where everyone is born as conjoined twins, where that condition is normal and accepted. Yet occasional freaks occur. Separate individuals might emerge from the womb, deprived mutants who are forced to spend their entire lives in isolated bodies.”
Hunky absorbed this concept for a moment. Then he blinked. “Shall I jump out and get a newspaper now?”
Zanger nodded. “A solitaire board too.”
“If they have them in stock.”
“Only
in that eventuality. Not otherwise.”
“How many if they do?”
“Just one. That’s the optimum number.”
“Yes, I imagine it is.”
The Indigo Casbah
(i)
It was late afternoon when Miranda left the park in search of her lovers. She could escape the park, but not the leaves that swirled around her feet. And though she hurried, scarf fluttering, cigarette glowing brightly, these relics of autumn invariably followed her.
This year is dying quickly, she told herself. A fine drizzle had already lacquered the broad branches of the cedars, the stonework, the iron railings. And now the wind shook a thousand silver droplets on an oblique fall; a new rain that covered Miranda as if with a veil of sadness. It was all sadness. Miranda even felt a tear burn the edge of her eyelids.
Or was it the dust?
Surely the dust, she decided. The other was unlikely; she never cried. Yet the gloom was unquestionably affecting. Daylight was fading rapidly; out on the street, the sodium lamps came on all at once. There, near the end of the road, the faulty one flickered like a wish. Miranda kept her gaze level with it. Wiping her face with the back of her gloved hand, she fought down impatience. The street was deserted. No cars passed, though the roar of the traffic surged in the unseen distance.
Was it really so desolate? It was as if a powerful decay had set in since she had last been here. Debris littered the way; rubbish that barred her path and made progress difficult. As she walked, stumbling occasionally, sighing frequently, she tried to shake off a growing unease.
Perhaps, for once, reality was not going to conform to her design. The truth of this was made ever clearer as she neared Ian’s house: not only was the amount of junk on the road increasing, but she also began to recognise its elements. Without her, she recalled with a shudder, he had always been a human focus of entropy.
So what could she expect now, after a whole month? It did not bear thinking about. A whole month! And it seemed much longer; she could scarcely see his face in her mind, though she knew what to expect there: the myopic eyes with the crescent of white under the iris always visible, the long black hair ruffled in a Neanderthal way that did not quite suit his slim build and narrow shoulders.
Her heart was snowbound by the time she reached the flickering streetlamp that had always marked out his house and made it unnecessary for her to remember his number. And now, she saw that the river of junk found its source here. It had broken the rusty iron gate off its hinges and spilled out into the street. She gasped. It was as if the whole house had been turned inside out. No lights shone from downstairs but in the highest room there was a pale blue radiance. And higher still, the ruined chimney belched forth a dense black cloud.
Cautiously, Miranda clambered over broken furniture, cardboard boxes, bedsteads, mounds of mouldy carpets and waded slowly to the front door. She rang the bell. She waited.
There was no answer.
In desperation, she fumbled in her pocket for a coin and cast it in a graceful arc at the high blue square of light. The resulting sharp crack brought thunder to her ears; with a faulting rumble, the window was drawn up. An arm thrust out and dropped something as if in return: a smouldering cigarette butt. Miranda was about to call out, but it was too late; the window rumbled shut again and the brief storm was over.
For the second time that day, and the second time in her adult life, a useless and improbable tear stained Miranda’s cheek.
(ii)
Books, thought Ian. Books and words. He paced the warped floorboards of the tiny room as if seeking stagnation, and consequent relief, in motion. His eyes darted over the window, wondered at the crack that had appeared from nowhere, and then returned to the fire. The iron grate glowed with a light far too steady for his taste. The absent possibilities of flicker.
When the seething column of books, stuffed as far up the chimney as it had been probable for him to reach, and ignited with a final bottle of poor cognac, had collapsed upon itself just a fraction more, he swooped on the opportunity to add another volume. Torn pages sucked themselves up the flue to doubtless emerge, in his imagination at least, as a series of banshee heads, one after another, pale white with blazing hair, lines of age comprised of lines of prose, to drift over the city in a crumbling formation, without purpose, as ashen as himself.
It was slow work this; stoking the ideas of thousands back into the oblivion from whence they had been snatched without permission. He had created an easy chair upon which to rest when his frayed nerves would allow him. A sculpture of hardbacks; a use that gave him the illusion of revenge. In spite, he had finally attained a chair in mathematics; his booted feet rested on a footstool of philosophy.
Again he rolled a cigarette, tearing paper from the nearest Tolstoy at hand. If Miranda were here she would know what to do. If Miranda were here, there would be some clever solution or other. He lit the hallowed reefer with the charred cotton cover of a Goethe, plucked fresh from the furnace and burning blackly, in appropriate Faustian irony. Oily smoke greased eyes and lungs; he coughed in staccato rhythm. Smoking this parsley, tea and nutmeg mixture, in lieu of chopped tobacco, afforded as much pain as pleasure. The blood in his head boiled in slow circles, lovely as the amputee’s swelling.
It had all started spiralling downwards when Miranda had left. She had followed a blond geophysicist across Europe, never more than eleven paces behind, among the galleries and castles, the cafés and puppet shows of Corsica, Sicily and Rhodes. Certainly she had kept in touch; postcards had arrived without fail, detailing her progress (or regress?) from one mouldering city to another. Somewhere in Turkey she had lost him, or had selected a quarry travelling in the opposite direction, and was now coming back. Her journey, he gathered, had not been wasted. At one point she had been close enough to breathe up at the lightly freckled nape of his neck.
Two days after her first postcard, and fixed to her second by first class static, he had found on his mat a letter of such ominous lightness that he surmised it was the first and last communiqué of some powerful source. His fears turned out to be completely justified: it was from a solicitor he had never heard of, from a town he had never heard of, and it announced that he had just inherited the nine-hundred and ninety-seven thousand dusty tomes that comprised the private library of his deranged and possibly heretical dead Uncle Daedalus.
The letter also managed to outline the circumstances surrounding the demise of this eccentric worthy. Reaching high on a stepladder for a goatskin-bound edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, and tugging with too ardent a determination, he had propelled himself backwards, arms windmilling, stepladder and bookshelf a-topple, into a void of golden literary dust. The will he had completed, as he lay among his own broken bones and plum bruises, on the flyleaf of the scornful classic, with a finger dipped into the pool of blood that filled his mouth like a bottomless well. The signature had been followed by an ironic inscription: Rest In Pieces.
Ian had twirled this letter thrice before folding it into a paper glider, affixing it in this new incarnation with a paperclip and filing it out of the window. He thought no more about the matter, but packed his bag and laced his boots for college. He did not have an Uncle Daedalus, and suspected one of Miranda’s mordant jokes. The cornflakes wedged themselves between his teeth as usual, but that morning he did not stop to pick and lever them free with the tines of a salad fork snatched from (and returned to) the cutlery drawer without even the courtesy of a cursory wipe on sleeve or trouser.
Instead, he had launched straight out into the grimy world, bag weighed down with secondhand dissertations and various adjuncts of his student status: a college scarf wrapped tight around zany sandwiches of chocolate and Tabasco; a copy of that week’s cult novel, a Lowry or Hesse; a flask of cold tea and another of hot beer; an elaborate clay pipe for smoking the pungent resins from incense lands far away, so far away that they never materialised; a hearty cough.
(He had once even ordered a tame bear
from a mail order company, but had received merely a chain and broken manacle inside an enormous box full of straw and salmon bones. This, even his most self-conscious colleagues had to admit, was going too far; the powdering of shamefully healthy faces with chalk and the dipping of a paper carnation in green ink should have been enough. Ian was cowed, if not quite touched.)
Naturally, at college little happened. He satisfied himself fitfully by turning up at the wrong lecture theatre and sitting through a rant on integral calculus, as opposed to the calculated internal rent that the doubts of Schopenhauer were supposed to tear in all smug self-assurance. He juggled with coins and oranges during the almost imperceptible shift from lecture to lunchtime and amused others by counting the caramel hairs on the legs of exchange students, each hair more elegant by far than the homegrown variety, beyond appreciation some of them; beauties from shores of white chalets, the taint of sandalwood and coffee and croissants still on their joyous roots.
And then he had resumed afternoon studies, lounging on the grass embankment, nodding not quite in time to tinny jazz blown on blades of grass clasped between the thumbs of psychology graduates. The sun had disappeared behind a cloud; he had consulted seven droplets of rain on the tip of his nose before climbing painfully to his feet, blinking key changes from damp lashes.
And then he had returned home…
There were forty-three streets to be negotiated before the comforting duvet and blind television were gained. His umbrella flapped in the sudden downpour less like an injured crow than a muddy parrot. He used the tip to make modal music on the cemetery railings and then to scratch the bristles on his chin. His pride and bliss, this chin; the apotheosis of his student image. A three-day growth in five.
At the end of the thirty-seventh street, he had become aware of a dull ache in the region of his liver. An ache of some awful anticipation. These aches did not come upon him for frivolous reasons; the last time he had suffered so had been the very minute before a suicide had jumped on him from the penthouse of a six-floor apartment block. Brow and suicide had struck pavement at the same instant: it was an augur. Something quite momentous and horrible was about to happen.