The Less Lonely Planet

by Rhys Hughes

  Abbot shuddered. This scenario was dismal enough but he wondered if something worse existed even earlier. If so, what sort of creature might complete the inspiration loop? Whatever it was, he was quietly confident it would be horrid beyond belief.

  Rodin Guignol blinked at the tiny crumb. It was all that was left of his expensive block of marble. A fragment no larger than a flea. Surrounding it in a neat circle were the discarded particles, most of them having an aesthetic appeal utterly lacking in the finished work. He dropped hammer and chisel and bent closer to ponder his new creation. Then he turned to face Cressida Ludo, shaking his head.

  She called: “Where has it gone?”

  His patience with questions was almost exhausted. Rolling his eyes, shuffling his feet, he mumbled fashionable curses to himself. He was the most precious of adorable fools, she decided. The urge to throw him over her shoulder was repressed yet again.

  He spluttered: “An absurd mistake! It must have been an illusion. A fake muse! Well it occurs sometimes. I’m weary, Cressida, and stiff. Art is a burden as well as a delight. I felt sure this was going to be quite special, but it seems I’ve chased it down to nothing. I wish there was a simpler way of creating! A machine or animal to work for me while I took the credit! I have defrauded myself.”

  “Let’s go out for a drink. You need to relax.”

  “Sure, Cressida. A jug of mead!”

  He pulled on his boots, hewn himself from sandstone, perched a wide hat studded with fossils on his billowing hair, wiped hands on his large ears and picked up the hateful grain.

  “Might as well carry it with us. It may serve to illustrate a silly anecdote and entertain our comrades.”

  He wrapped it casually in a napkin and sighed.

  “A bitter splinter in my heart.”

  “I love you, Rodin, you existential angstrom.”

  “My art doesn’t. Not this time.”

  She followed him through the door and down the stairs. The city was thronged with revellers who pretended not to recognise them. Down filthy alleys to the Café Worm, where the green lanterns were already lit and a sad song was in the process of being forgotten. Absinthe flared in bowls of sugar, like ghosts of drunken fairies, and faces loomed sickly out of the tarnished shadows. No table had four equal legs, no pipe had a round bowl, no door had a working lock, but the stories were all familiar, old and useless as windmills in a cellar.

  Rodin and Cressida ordered mead. It came in a barrel hauled by nine trained monkeys, a complimentary dish of sherbet tottering on the scabby head of the weakest. The artist dipped his fingers, rubbed them over the laughing cheeks of his agent, down her neck, so that her veins glittered as if with frightened gold. They toasted twilight, fame, nothing. But as the puddle grew, other artists and writers stepped closer, faces full of scorbutic grins, pulling stools and appreciation behind them, sitting on both, leaning to blink at the master.

  In a thousand years most would evolve into swine-things, lurking in the deepest underground nightclubs. A few might turn back to religion or obtain employment in thin storerooms.

  Rodin waited until they had settled. He unwrapped the marble speck, held it up to the glint of tin teeth.

  “Funny thing happened in the studio today...”

  Before he could proceed, a freelance microscopist entered the hovel and started hawking views through his instrument. Chins swivelled in his direction, as if the stubble and mascara which matted them were magnetic and drawn to the pole of his brazen novelty. A university tutor, wishing to supplement his pitiful salary. The sculptor had lost his audience, at least for a minute, and consoled himself with a long draught of alcohol. The interloper wandered the booths and stalls, demonstrating the variety of bugs to be found in cheap succour.

  Rodin planned to ignore him when he came close, but Cressida was in a generous mood and clicked her fingers. The microscopist lurched across and lowered his battered tube to the table. She threw him a coin. Before he could suggest the mead or sherbet as a suitable object for study, she snatched the fragment from the sculptor’s hand and positioned it beneath the lens. She nudged Rodin to peer. He did so with a bored, musical sigh which abruptly became a gasp of bewilderment. He removed his eye to wipe it, winked the other, adjusted focus.

  “My muse! Such a long way! Full circle!”

  She elbowed him aside. The rim of the eyepiece should have felt icy against her nose, but his own had warmed it. Then she understood what he meant. Atomic but perfect, his finest work. The contours and expression, the inner character, all were of the highest order, divinely marketable, if a thing from heaven can ever adorn a stall, and she clapped her hands and demanded aloud if he knew the significance of his creation, in vain, for there was one emotion he would never express in public, and that was enthusiasm, not he, not Rodin Guignol.

  He answered modestly: “A self portrait.”

  Accordion Beach

  I used to dream that the Sandman was lulling me to sleep. But each time I nodded off in my dream, I would wake for real with a little sigh.

  It seemed to me that some principle of balance was in operation. I could not quite grasp this law. Because the enigma remained unsolved, I forgot it.

  Much later, the past became the present.

  Which is where I am now...

  The accordion man is standing on his corner again. It has stopped raining, but he is always there. He plays to the passing years.

  Perhaps they don’t listen. The pedestrians ignore him, or so I thought at first. Now I know better. They are too aware of him.

  The problem is that he doesn’t make tunes. His fingers coax something else out of the wheezing bellows. And yet he grimaces as if what he really wants to do is prevent these notes from emerging. His hands fly over the buttons of his instrument as if to push them back in at every point from which they protrude.

  If sounds had shapes, they would be needles thrusting out from the mysterious inside of that ludicrous box, that groaning contraption.

  The pedestrians hurry on because they are too polite to kick him.

  I merely watch from my window. Sometimes this window is a reflection in the mirror and I observe him as I shave.

  The little cuts on my chin are like his notes. They are mildly irritating and form a pattern on my face which is always irregular and meaningless.

  My razor is as old as his accordion. It is spotted with rust.

  But it was a gift from the woman I loved, many years ago. I refuse to buy a new one. It has sentimental value.

  I wonder if the accordion was also a gift?

  A few days ago, I guessed his true identity.

  My ears told me. They must have known long before my eyes. They are connected directly to my throat, which leads to my lungs and stomach, those neighbours of the heart. The eyes merely lead to the brain.

  I had assumed the same as everybody else – that he couldn’t play. His horrible chords were mistakes. I really believed that.

  Now I realised they were deliberate. They were refined.

  He was trying not to play recognisable tunes.

  In this endeavour, he succeeded marvellously. I frowned as I considered the idea of congratulating him. It was ridiculous. I decided to do it.

  I finished shaving and went down onto the street. I walked with my hands in my pockets, mimicking a character I did not know, a cooler version of myself. What was the point of this deception? My face betrayed my anxiety.

  He did not stop playing as I approached him.

  “It is good to see you again,” I said simply.

  His fingers relaxed on the buttons. “How did you know me?”

  Then I smiled and replied: “All other accordion men try to play melodies. They have repertoires. Perhaps they know ten songs, or a hundred. Maybe even a thousand. They vary the order of these songs, if they can, but eventually they are compelled to repeat them. Listen for long enough and you will hear the same tunes come round. With you, this is not true.”

  He nodded. �
��I never repeat myself.”

  “Because you do not play tunes,” I added. “You are more skillful than that.”

  “Correct. My repertoire of non-tunes is enormous. Indeed it encompasses every single combination of unmelodic notes that can be played on an accordion. And there are many more non-tunes than possible tunes. You must have very good ears. Most people assume my cacophonies are random. They all sound roughly the same to them. They do not appreciate my range of disharmonies. But I could not fool you. The temptation to play a melody can be resisted. I have proved that.”

  I frowned at him. “Will you tell me your story?”

  “Yes, but only if you reveal your secret.”

  I pointed at the building across the way. “I live on the highest floor. My apartment overlooks this corner. Every morning, while I shave, I write down a few bars of what you play on the steam which condenses on my mirror. With my finger I draw the lines of a stave and then press my thumb over the lines to represent the notes. I have been doing this for a year. The bars are never the same. The lack of form in your pieces is rigorous. And it is exhaustive. You are gradually working your way through every sequence of single notes and chords, avoiding only those which are pleasing to a listener. You are a virtuoso of dissonance!”

  He sighed, but there was a glint in his eyes, as if he felt relief at being discovered in this game. His fingers remained on the buttons of his accordion, seemingly stuck there by the jutting needles, but the bellows were still. Then his lungs heaved, as if the operating mechanism had migrated from the instrument to his torso, and he spoke. He told me the reason for his daily vigil on this corner, his ghastly performances. He said:

  “Very well. There’s a woman at the bottom of it. Isn’t there always? I’ll tell you where she lives. Imagine the city of Córdoba in spring. Not Córdoba in Spain, but the one in Argentina. She still dwells there.

  “And imagine how she sleeps, with her beautiful black hair spread out on her pillow, and her face serene with dreams! I fell in love with her eyes first. I had watched her grow more lovely with each passing season, and now it was spring and I could no longer deny the truth of my feelings for her. Yes, I loved her! It was strange that this should happen to me, and I knew it could never be reciprocated, but it was no use fighting my heart.

  “I started to visit her more often. I couldn’t keep away from her side. I went to her beyond my usual hours. In the afternoon, the morning. First it was her dark green eyes and her long lashes when she closed them. Then her smile. Even after she was asleep I remained with her. It was foolish, but everything in my existence was pointing toward her. At long last, I was a vector: a force with magnitude and direction. I neglected my other customers. I concentrated just on her.

  “Remember that time when the whole world seemed to grow irritable? People wandered about with vacant expressions. They made mistakes in everything. The human race was on the threshold of a peculiar crisis. Nobody could sleep. Beyond this threshold was a realm of waking dream. Hallucinations were as common as yawns. Scientists rubbed their own bleary eyes and called it contagious agrypnia. They blamed it on an unknown virus. But in reality it was familiar enough to any man who has ever loved.

  “And what did she do, with her surplus sleep? She could not share it among her neighbours, the insomniacs who lurched along Córdoba’s streets, greeting each other with growls, full of anguish but too weary to convert it into aggression. It was not something to be given away, her sleep. It was hers alone.

  “She dreamed and kept dreaming, filling up all her sleep with pictures and people and movement. And I sat next to her, my heart bursting with joy just to be close. I knew I ought to depart, to go out among the other citizens of Córdoba and the world, but each time I turned to leave, a profound sadness came over me. I had to stay with her, gazing at her beautiful face, awash with dreams.

  “What is a dream? It is a reflection or refraction of something that has happened or something that might happen. Something seen or heard. Or many things all mixed together into absurd, wonderful or terrible patterns. But without a waking life, without experience, there can be no true dreams.

  “As the nights passed, my sleeping beauty began to forget the little details of the real world, and her dreams grew strange. Not strange in substance, for that is the function of dreams, but in form. She now dreamed of what she knew best, which was sleeping. She dreamed that she slept, and it was her dreamself that now dreamed true dreams, not her.

  “It was as if she had retreated from me without moving. It was as if she was now another layer deeper than before. When I leaned forward to gaze upon her, I felt I was standing on the edge of a well – a wishing well – looking down upon the woman I loved, but more distant and smaller.

  “Still I did not abandon her to attend to my other duties among the teeming millions. I simply moved closer and watched. Inevitably, her dreamself also stopped dreaming of the waking world and started dreaming of being asleep. This new dreamself began dreaming of yet another layer of reality, even deeper. A dream within a dream within a dream!

  “I was losing her. My persistence had proved to be my undoing. Now she was three times as remote as when I first fell in love with her. And she would keep dwindling away in layers of dream if I did not allow her to awake. But I simply could not tear myself away for even a moment.

  “No, I continued to gaze upon her, and the world outside her room went mad from lack of sleep. And she dropped down away from me, deeper and deeper, falling into a bottomless pit of sleep and dream. Finally I had to stand over her with a telescope, peering down into an unfathomable gulf. My head reeled with the immense distance of the drop. I was assailed with vertigo. I could no longer look on the face of my beloved without fearing for my life.

  “Her rejection of me was complete. I left her that night.

  “I felt empty, as if there was too much room inside my body and skull. I can barely remember what I did when I ran out of her room. I must have returned to my work, for I dimly recall people curling up in doorways, or in the gutter, as I passed them on the street. And my hands rose and opened to cast sleep into their eyes. The faces all seemed identical to me.

  “I strode across the continents without my heart. I had left it behind on the pillow next to my beloved. I knew she would be awakening now, one dreamself at a time, rising back up from that wishing well of nested slumbers until she was level with her bed again. Would she finally open the eyes of her real body and know that I had been with her all that time?

  “No other face interested me. I grew contemptuous of other people. They all looked the same. I developed a disgust – perhaps a horror – of the concept of the identical. I craved difference as an antidote. Endless variety was my medicine. I sought it in the motion of sunlight on water, but sooner or later the pattern of sparkles repeated itself. I sought it in chess and its enormous combinations of play, but the full range of its possibilities was never realised. I sought for it, equally vainly, in smells and tastes.

  “At last I found it in music – in this accordion – in all the non-tunes I might play. Escape from the identical!

  “And that is how I forget her. I focus on the difficult task of playing every potential sequence of unmelodic notes possible on such an instrument. By avoiding the curse of repetition, I am never reminded of how identical, how mundane, the faces of all people other than my beloved always seem!

  “I am safe while I concentrate on my demanding task and play. But one day I shall reach the final non-tune in the sequence. There will be none left. What will happen to me then? I must go mad!”

  He finished his tale with a sigh and I saw he was desperate to return to his playing. My own face was inferior to hers, and its shortcomings suggested her perfection, in the same way that an ill-fitting shoe suggests the comfort possible once it is removed. It was time for me to depart.

  But there was something which puzzled me. Something connected with his talk of sequences and potentials. I frowned and asked him:
r />   “What will happen when there is no more sand left? When all the beaches are exhausted? Will we be condemned to a life of permanent wakefulness?”

  He did not answer but resumed playing. He treated me as if I no longer existed. I grew angry. I plucked at his sleeve, but he shook me off with a scowl. I don’t know how it happened, but I still had the razor in my hand and its blade was open as I lunged at him. He blocked the blow with the accordion and the rusty blade bit deep into its bellows.

  Sand began pouring out from the gash.

  I was astonished and stepped back a pace. He watched the steady stream of yellow particles and stamped his foot.

  “Fool! You have made my task much harder! With these grains – which are all exactly alike – I had lulled melody to sleep!”

  He chewed his lower lip and then added: “And now you have woken the tunes inside this instrument. Curse you!”

  I opened my mouth to apologise, but he sneered and hurried away. Strangely, the corner seemed less empty without his presence. I knew I had done a malicious thing. I decided to follow him. The trail of sand guided me.

  It came to an abrupt halt on another corner on the far side of the city. There was no accordion and no player. I stood there for a long time and the pedestrians rushed past me. They ignored me, but I don’t know why. I wondered if I had mortally offended him and if he had simply vanished through frustration and grief.

  But last night I fell asleep, and the night previous to that, so he must still be out there somewhere.

  The Mice Will Play

  “The cat is late,” announced Mark.

  But Vanessa shook her head. “The cat has a name.”

  “Pangur Bán,” hissed Mark.

  “Well?” murmured Vanessa with hooded eyes.

  “Our dear friend Pangur Bán is late. Is that better? He’s not here. He is absent. We remain unmolested.”

  It was true. They lay next to each other in bed under an unoccupied quilt. He was not sitting on it, kneading the pattern of interlocking squares, snagging an occasional claw on a loose thread, glaring at them with large yellow eyes. There was no presence demanding breakfast. They were free to drift back to sleep, and yet it was already an hour past dawn. The situation was unprecedented.