The Less Lonely Planet

by Rhys Hughes

  Apart from my fleas, I am plagued by another entity. A bronze man called Gnathon shares my domain. He tells me he was forged on Crete by Daedalus. Unsatisfied with the result, the great inventor cast him into the sea. For nine years his hollow body was buffeted by the waves before being washed onto one of our beaches. A crack in his mould means all the truth has leaked out of him. He can only tell lies. I am suspicious of his true origins. He talks to my fleas. “What a generous host you have!” And they, knowing his condition, appreciate the sarcasm.

  Gnathon insists that the girl in the wood, the lithe musician, is named Chloe. This means she is not. However, I have nothing else to go on, so I also decide to call her Chloe. Gnathon is as bewitched as I am. He is too ugly for her, I tell him. In return he praises my mild odour. Coming from a bronze liar this is a deadly insult. We wrestle in the dust, near a stream. My fleas warn me not to fall in. We are equals in strength and our struggles come to nothing. Exhausted, we lie back and pant our mutual hatred.

  Where does Chloe come from? She is too dark to be a native of this island. I think Egypt, where men worship cats and herons. Gnathon says from under the sea. He is a liar of little imagination. I want to burst into tears with the force of my emotion. I have never shed a tear, it is difficult with my eyes. But I hope one day to defy nature and drown my cheeks with the globules of feeling. Only after my saviour has removed my fleas will this be possible.

  It is difficult to follow Chloe after she has finished her music. She vanishes between the trees, slippery as olive-oil. I try to keep up with her. Always she stays ahead. It is like chasing your shadow. I fear I will never know anything about her. She is destined to be an enigma. I believe she has no home at all; perhaps she circulates around the isle like a cool breeze, never settling.

  I wonder what would happen if I caught her. Would she be repelled by my form? Every morning, Gnathon makes a new statement about her. He never tires of speculation. “She is celibate,” he ventures. “She is a woman-lover.” I am able to dismiss such possibilities as he raises them. If Gnathon claims she is celibate, she is not. I have made a list of her non-qualities; I lack only the truth.

  One afternoon, sitting on the long beach in the south-west of the island, I spy a distant sail. I jump up and dance on my hooves. It is my saviour! He is coming at last! I watch as the ship grows larger. Soon it is anchored in the shallows. My saviour leaps from the deck and wades towards me. I throw myself at his feet. He is wearing only one sandal. His limbs are the colour of bronze.

  “My name is Jason,” he cries, “and I seek the golden fleas.” There is a nobility about his bearing. For some reason I do not answer. What is wrong with me? Why do I not show him my parasites? He will comb them from my body and take them away. But I find it difficult to deceive him. His face is too trusting. Quite against my better judgment, I clasp him around the shoulder and whisper in his ear.

  I tell him he has made an error. I give him directions to his real destination. He is grateful. “What can I do for you in return?” he asks. I whistle the music of Chloe, a melody which burns my lips. Jason nods and strokes his beard. “That is not a real melody, but a ghost made of echoes. Someone has been playing music for too long. The new notes have entangled themselves in the old. Now they seek to escape each other and their struggles are poignant.”

  I bow my head in shame at this. He is right; Chloe is no more than the phantom of my lost talent. This is why I will never be able to hold her in my hairy arms. Jason returns to his ship and disappears back over the lip of the world. I am left with nothing. I have missed my chance to rid myself of my fleas. They are relieved. “Blood is thicker than wine,” they sneer. While I sit on the sand, arranging patterns of despair with driftwood, Gnathon comes up from behind.

  “You smell sweeter than ever,” he says. “Chloe is sure to find your odour appealing.” This is the final reed. Suddenly I am up and running. The howl at the back of my throat struggles to keep up. A woodsman’s hut lies close. The fellow is enjoying an afternoon nap; his double-headed axe is left unattended. Before he can open his eyes, I have snatched it up and am racing back to the beach.

  Gnathon has followed me a little way into the wood. We meet in a glade. He lifts his bronze eyebrows in creaking bewilderment. “What are you doing?” He has little concept of anger. Bronze men are more familiar with disappointment. In his own dashed dreams Gnathon can dance all over the island. He is too heavy to pirouette. This impossible yearning is his one genuine desire.

  My first blow smashes a hole in his chest. Salty water sprays out into the scented undergrowth. I realise at once what has happened. I have already mentioned his crack. That nine year buffeting filled him with ocean. As I raise the axe a second time, he holds up a hand. “Do not do this. Your fur will be drenched with brine. Apollo remembers your sin.” At this, my fears fall away. Then the archer-king has forgotten! I am free. At last, I burst into tears. This is the long-awaited prelude to real refreshment.

  My second blow widens the hole and the cold water washes away the grime of years. Even though this is a world of misery, things sometimes work out for the best. Gnathon is made lighter by my actions. Now he is no longer clumsy; his bronze legs have less weight to bear. He can skip and dance in the way he has always wished. And I am consoled by a rare metaphysical thought. If Chloe is just an echo of my talent, then I am a pre-echo of hers. Our minims can entwine, if not our limbs. Remember too that I have learned to cry.

  More importantly, at the instant of my dousing, the fleas jumped from my body onto Gnathon’s. Because he is bronze and they are gold, they suit him more than me. And he is untroubled by their presence; he is too tough to bite. Indeed he welcomes their company, the sardonic conversations. As for the fleas, the situation is less pleasant. They know hunger and the loss of power.

  Out of the crying Pan and onto the liar.

  Below the Carnival

  Sam picked empty pockets.

  The people in the square had adopted him as a mascot, smiling indulgently when he dipped his hand into the cul-de-sacs sewn onto their coats. They thought him harmless and closed their eyes so he might enjoy an unobserved rummage through nothingness. But Sam was sly: he collected absences.

  He was so far beyond childhood his maturity smelled like a kennel. He lived in a doll’s house thick with cobwebs, which he treated like hammocks. Once a month a lady came up from the underground, connected to his lounge by a series of diminutive ladders, to brush away his resting apparatus.

  His abode was full of folded maps and the more absences he collected the more space there was for his charts and atlases. His ambition was the size of a small broom cupboard. He wanted to overlay a paper reconstruction of the world on his domesticity. At night he dreamed of rustling continents.

  There were no doll figures inside the house; they had long since crumbled to dust like soft-coloured cakes. Their remnants swirled at his feet, pouring down the stairs from the landing, puffing into his nostrils whenever a gust of wind burst open a window. An itch gurgled on his neck, an enormous boil leaking fetid vapours. His diseases were normal sized and they covered his entire body, with plenty to spare at the margins, like a hand over a spider.

  One evening, the woman from the underground left her newspaper behind. He picked it up and scanned the headlines. He saw that the carnival was in town. He hastened into the pre-dawn dark, tiny feet clattering on the pavement, a bag clutched to his chest. Sodium lamps blazed, promoting his shadow to giant.

  “I’ve come about a job.”

  His tongue flopped thickly in his wooden hoop of a mouth, like an ugly girl stuck in a manhole.

  The boothkeeper batted an eyelash. He was a yellow man, with the spectrum of deceit flickering over his face. Turning his head sideways he regarded Sam with avuncular malice.

  “Ain’t much call for midgets these days.”

  “You don’t understand. I can turn myself invisible. Fired from a cannon, I can vanish without trace.”

  The boothkee
per scratched a nose bristling with hairs. “Show me how it works.” Beneath his stale breath he added: “Crazy cack-handed mother you must have had, hair like pink fevered scribblings. Go on, you fork prong! Disappear right now!”

  “But I can only do it once.”

  “Am I still standing here talking to you? I despair, I really do. What’s the use of an invisible midget anyhow? You’re halfway there already, don’t need much trickery to finish you off...”

  “Please, I need employment. I can no longer afford to pay the woman who comes up from the underground.” Sam jumped and gripped the fellow’s shirt by its buttons, like a lecher undressing a tea urn. Marked cards fell from the boothkeeper’s sleeves as he flailed at his assailant. Blood crusted like marmite.

  “Okay, let me go, I’ll give you a chance!”

  He straightened his collar and emerged from the rear of his booth to usher Sam inside a marquee smothered on all sides by other tents. It was dark: all the light fittings (except for a hole to let in the Pole Star) were grimy with thumbprints. Crates and boxes were stacked to form the walls of a maze, dividing the interior into a gross of trapeziums. The edges of Sam’s lungs were stubbed with scents — fruit jams, bug poison, elephant dung.

  “Here’s an empty space and a loaded cannon. I’ll arrange chairs in a crescent and paint a sign. When you attract enough suckers, you can do your thing. You pipe leak!”

  “Suckers?” Sam frowned. The boothkeeper sighed, peeled off his false sideburns and mopped his nostalgia.

  The first customers wore flared slacks. They seemed to have an active interest in the past. A few men had brought their wives, but there was only one child: huge and sullen, with nineteen chins. The sign above them, hanging from the rafters by chains, announced shrilly: The Non-Existent Midget! (Roll up and not see!)

  Sam thought that was a funny expression, a humorous idea, like a giant tablecloth full of secondhand bookshops, antique with High Tea, or like a sunny day moving about in a cellar.

  When his audience was settled, he paced his makeshift stage and tried to speak. The infection on his neck had spread to his throat, silencing him with chiding tingles. His customers grew impatient and cracked knuckles. A wife coughed. Her pretty new moon fingers squatted in the plangent nostrils of a man not her husband. In desperation, Sam decided to make use of gestures.

  He lifted his bag and pulled it open with the drawstring, pouring its contents down the mouth of the cannon. Then he lit the fuse with a borrowed match and hunkered down to indicate he was going to vanish. Leaning forward to peer more closely at his trick, the motley audience received the blast in their faces.

  The absences, collected over many years, stolen from businessmen, tourists and students, tramps and local politicians, riddled them like sharpened playing cards. Their astonished expressions were gouged out of existence. Now they were invisible and therefore blind, as photons passed through their eyes instead of reflecting onto the optic nerve. The remaining absences punched a hole in the fabric roof, bursting and settling on the exterior crowds.

  Small as Sam was, and lovely as a casserole, he was able to dodge the shrapnel and preserve his opacity. He flitted between tents, happy as a bayonet, delving into desks and cupboards. Finally, in a portable basement below the boothkeeper, he found his desire — a sheet of paper more creased than the Holy Ghost.

  His gratitude, manicured like his anxiety, broke his illness and released his voice. This was the only map in the entire world he did not own; a schematic of the carnival’s route across the land. Wrapping the diagram around his shoulders (a cape of bad hope?) he departed the unfair fair. His steps were precisely cut. All through the city, the houses were winking out.

  The woman from the underground was burning her mops. The hearth was full of crackling handles and brass nails. The smoke sucked up the powder of the decayed doll figures, hurling them out of the chimney. Without a smile, she returned to her subterranean domain, to ride the escalators and mind the gap. As she went, she tugged the diminutive ladders down after her and they fell apart, so that the raining rungs knocked off her horns and tail.

  Sam regarded the new world, the crisp tectonic plates fixed to his walls with string. Reality always adopted the easiest position. He had reproduced the planet in his house, the smallest detail lovingly marked, so there was no need for it to continue existing out there. It had come inside, revolving around him.

  More importantly, now she had to clean the whole world instead of just a doll’s house, the woman from the underground had gone away. Sam filled his pipe with the remaining dust.

  Later, he would stick pins in the people in the square. Settling onto his favourite cobweb, he puffed.

  The Muse Ouroboros

  The sculptor, Rodin Guignol, stared at the block of marble in the corner of his studio. To the eye of a normal man it was a boulder, but to him a figure lurked inside, a finished work. It was just a question of setting it free, using his chisel as a key.

  He adjusted the belt on his smock and pulled his small beard. Would the shape help him in the endeavour? At the moment it was hiding deep in the stone, out of view. If he chipped away part of the outside, he might expose the edge of whatever it was. He raised his iron mallet and struck sparks from the glittering mineral.

  Shards of rock flew in all directions. Long years at this craft had stained his flesh with purple dust. He was almost a statue himself. What price would he fetch at auction? The concept amused him as he worked. It soon became certain that he was not making a human, nor any recognisable beast. The angles were too strange.

  The door opened and Cressida Ludo, his agent, entered. She was tall but fashionably stooped. She wore earrings that were glass models of his most famous piece, The Soul of the Toothache, a crystal matrix of acidic vapour which represented halitosis.

  “More art?” she cried. “Do you never rest?”

  He glanced over his shoulder and shook his head, but his hands were still active, cutting and defining.

  “Not when inspiration catches hold of me. It’s odd but I don’t feel like the creator of my own work. I’m a conduit for a higher sentience, a channel flowing with alien talent.”

  “The usual romantic excuse! A pining for metaphysical beings! Who’s your muse now? Sure to be a woman!”

  She approached and wrapped her long arms around his chest, allowing her chin to sink into the soft curls on the crown of his head. Excessive hair is essential for a bohemian reputation and her attentions collapsed his towering fringe back over his eyes. He continued to work without his sight, as if the parameters of his composition were wholly internal. His brain was filling up with instructions from elsewhere, signals that flew past his senses to his mind direct.

  “Sorry, Cressida, I’m a puppet for angels!”

  She disengaged slowly. “You know I’ll always pose for you. Just say the word. With or without clothes.”

  He sighed, spitting out splinters which impaled his lips. Already a mound of rubble lay at his feet. The shape was elusive, shrinking deeper into the core of the stone. He chased it with his tool. Eventually there would be nowhere left for it to hide. And then he would haul it out from the cosmos of potential, set it firm on a pedestal, like a frozen sunset or ossified drop of music, forever.

  “I’ll take you up on that offer eventually, I swear. But this piece doesn’t belong to me. The design is a gift from beyond. My own abilities have drained away, and now I’m translator working for a superior artist, fixing his vision in our universe.”

  “So inspiration is a form of plagiarism?”

  He chuckled. “That appears to be true. I can’t explain it any other way. I’m a receiver, host or pawn.”

  “Well I hope your muse forces you to make something marketable. But where precisely has your inner creativity gone, if it has been displaced to make room for the outer genius?”

  He shrugged, wiping his face with a grimy sleeve.

  “What does that matter? It’s vastly more intriguing to speculate
on the nature of the external entity.”

  Without losing rhythm, he attempted this.

  Across time, in the emerald depths of the Tethys Sea, a pair of courting zeuglodons were considering a similar problem. Coral arcades and palaces of basalt studded with starfish and urchins rose around them. Here was a safe and alluring retreat from the predatory megalodons which feasted on aquatic mammals in the shallows. The once enormous ocean was contracting rapidly now as the continents of Barbary and Lavinia rushed together and the rival monsters which patrolled both coasts would soon meet. A spiral of teeth and fins and unblinking eyes! A maelstrom of foaming blood! The image was not horrible to these serpentine lovers, because they were not able to feel fear outside the present, but they knew a quiet despair, an intellectual disgruntlement with geology. The Miocene Era was proving to be one of the vilest in prehistory.

  These zeuglodons had no names. Or perhaps they were called Loop and Fjskjdhfekjs. The male was collecting bright anemones and arranging them in patterns to charm the female. This was his art, and it was difficult, for the finished mandala was of less consequence than the paths taken by the anemones as they crawled away. These routes formed the climax of the piece and they could not be calculated with accuracy. Luck and intuition were the main features of a successful seduction. Coiling herself around a smooth pillar of cobalt ore, propping her sleek head on a sponge which grew from the side of the column, she watched the efforts of her suitor. He had already impressed her with a song and a curious undulating dance, but here was the real test to see whether she cared to spend the rest of her excellent life with him or not.