That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote

by K. J. Bishop

  Nada. I’m looking at two bullets in a ball of dough.

  So I have to hit him, not out of hurt feelings, of course, but because there’s no way I can look after him and keep him safe if he doesn’t respect me and do as I say. Back before, when we just had our weekends, discipline didn’t matter so much. It matters now. Not just discipline of action, but discipline of the heart. If the inside slips, the outside will eventually slip too. For his own safety he has to respect me, not just pretend to. I shouldn’t have cut him that slack when I thought he was sulking.

  I wrap my big hand around his snout to keep him quiet while I teach him his lesson. After I’m done and he’s done sniffling and we’ve both calmed down a bit, I remind him about the discipline of the heart. Every now and then I try to teach him. I haven’t given up hope that he’ll understand one day. Not giving up that hope is one of my rules.

  Well, of course he doesn’t take any of it in. Sometimes I get to thinking he must be pretending to be dumb, as a way to cause me pain. It even passes through my mind that maybe he really got a lot smarter and tougher when he changed, and developed his own kind of sick discipline, so that he makes this non-stop pathetic act just so that he can watch my ridiculous mouse body sag as I try to carry the burden of hope for both of us – a hope that’s all the heavier for having no long-term purpose, just a load of my wanting him to be the best he can be and have the best life he can have, even under these circumstances.

  I don’t know whether that thought counts as paranoia or wishing. It might be better if he was smart and nasty. Then at least I wouldn’t have so much reason to pity him.

  His eyes still look like bullets in dough. Sad bullets now, drooping down at the corners. If you tried to think of a creature that was just made in every way to look sorry and miserable and always fearful, you’d get pretty close with him. If it’s an act, it’s brilliant.

  Time to move, anyway. I make like my pack weighs nothing, striding ahead on my strong short legs. As long as I can hear him panting I know he’s keeping up.

  II.

  Life is full of surprises, and not every single one of them is a shower of shit. I discover the hut behind a coppiced woodlot when I happen to notice the wall of trimmed logs through a gap in the trees.

  It’s a tiny place, maybe a hunting shelter. One room with a linoleum floor. Two windows. Glass in one, a square of blue oilcloth with a pattern of tropical fruit tacked over the other. The smells inside are all ordinary animal, mainly fox and raccoon. There’s a black vinyl sofa with busted cushions, an empty fridge without a door, and a TV on a stool, all nearly as brown as I am with a coating of gritty dust. For decoration there’s an orange plastic shoe and some dry fox turds lying together in a corner. No sign anyone’s been here in a long time.

  It’s the first hut I’ve seen since I upped and went walking with the kid. I wonder if it’s unique, like we seem to be, or if there are more of them around about the place, like there are pig farms and volk rally halls. I can imagine a whole lot like it lying out in the back country, each one with the same sofa, fridge, TV and shoe, too far from roads and farms to be practical for living in.

  His runtship is happy sniffing around the TV. The excitement of finding it seems to have blown the sulky clouds out of his head. He pushes the power button like he expects it to work. When it doesn’t, he goes scrabbling between the sofa’s cushions.

  It won’t be there, I start to say, but fuck me if he doesn’t come up with the remote. Nothing happens when he tries it, of course. He shoves it into my hand.

  I look into his poor face, now beginning to show the bruises from the beating I gave him. I show him that I can’t make the remote work any better than he can, doing my best to explain that there’s no broadcaster and no electricity running to the hut, while I flick the power point for the TV on and off. There’s nothing coming through it, I tell him, almost laughing. Maybe if you could steal a methane generator from a farm you could rig it to the fridge and make it work, if you had tools, but nobody has tools, which is a bitch, but not a crisis, because nothing needs fixing anymore, nothing breaks down or wears out.

  I start pacing around and waving my arms as I go over the batch of facts I’ve told him a thousand times before, hoping he’ll eventually catch on. I explain the simplicity of the world as it is now. It isn’t exactly an elegant simplicity, but if deros and trogs can understand it, I tell him, so can a mouse and a gopher thing. In the middle of the new world order – and don’t ask me who ordered it – is the fact that maryjanes have pig farms. They make food for you and me and deros and trogs and methane for the pickups and the farm machines. Maryjanes have moms and pops who have stores where you can buy useful staples like bennies if you have credit from jobbing in the meatworks or the shitworks. Deros and trogs and dogs live in towns, cats roam. Dogs and cats hunt everything except angels, bactyls and dreams. Volk hunt big game, raid towns and hold rallies. Pigs eat anything dead except angels, and bactyls eat anything dead and anything alive that doesn’t move fast enough to get away. Dreams hunt everything, eat anything. Angels don’t eat, but they kill, which comes to the same thing for you and me. And that’s all. It isn’t so much to keep in your head.

  I tell him again how there aren’t any big, complicated systems anymore, no long involved whys and wherefores, therefore no electricity, no TV networks, no shows. I finish by throwing the remote back down on the sofa. Right away he grabs it and tries to make me take it again.

  Then I remember our game, where we pretended the buttons did other stuff, like turn my car into an F1 Ferrari, or make us able to fly, or nuke his teacher’s house.

  He always said it was just our game, he didn’t play it with his mama.

  Is that it? I ask. You want me to push this button and do some magic?

  I look at him looking up at me, and as if I’m seeing inside his scrambled head, I know he’s thinking I could use the remote to put things back the way they were. Including her. That’d be part of it, naturally.

  Or maybe he isn’t so scrambled as all that. Maybe he’s actually making a fairly reasonable guess based on the facts he knows, namely that we turned into rodents, she turned cat, and the world filled with monsters. Given that, is it entirely batshit to think that magic might be possible?

  Scrambled or not, I can see this much: while he doesn’t want to believe what I’ve told him about the serious things that really matter and require hard work and endless daily effort, he sure wants to believe in me now that he’s thinking we’ve lucked upon an easy way to fix all our problems.

  But I’m touched, all the same, that he suddenly shows this trust in me. He didn’t try to mend the world himself. He gave the remote to me. On the flip side of that, of course, if – when – it doesn’t work, the failure can be my fault. Still, maybe I finally got through to him, and now he’s trying to show he respects and trusts me. I’d like to believe that, though I shouldn’t let myself just yet.

  I’m supposed to be the adult, the one who knows shit from clay. But before I can act in step with what I know, I’m stricken with stupidity, just like him. It’s got to be because I haven’t slept enough. But I can actually see, like a madman would, the zany possibility of making our own hoodoo happen. The belief suddenly gets a hold of me like some kind of holy running shits.

  Overwhelmed by this diarrhoea of faith, I point the remote at the window with glass, aiming it at everything out there. I put my other hand on his shoulder and close my eyes. Go back, I tell the world, to the way you were before. Or better. But the same would be quite ok.

  Since there’s nothing wrong with the yellow and red leafy corner of things that the window lets me see, I can indulge for a moment in the wildly retarded idea that I’ve changed everything outside that needed changing, so that all I have to do now is change us two.

  I say, Ready?

  His funny face does a funny smile.

  Ok, I tell him, we’re gonna go back. Everything’s gonna be just normal again, ok? And after we’re n
ormal, maybe we’ll see what other magic stuff this remote can do.

  It occurs to me then that according to the logic I’ve been following, I’ve already fucked up. If I’d changed the world back, then magic wouldn’t work anymore, so we’d have to stay as rodents, even if everything else was ok. I have to stop this bullshit and get back to reality, obviously. But the belief hasn’t run out of me. I let myself indulge just a little longer, closing my eyes again as I point the remote at him and command him, in my big squeaky voice, to go back to being just the kid he was. Smart, no guts. Whatever. To myself I say, Be a man again.

  I open my beady eyes. He opens his beady eyes. Well, that’s that. As for the world, if it’s all fixed up, there’ll be a power line running to the hut from somewhere and the TV will work. I only have to turn the power point on and push the button to check. Push it a few times.

  Yeah, well.

  My ears pick up whining engines in the distance over on the volk side of the hills. Another rally. Early arrivals.

  I must be much too tired, or I wouldn’t be slipping like this. But he doesn’t look dejected. Maybe he hadn’t really thought it was going to work.

  I tell him we can stay here for a couple of days, so that we can both rest. He nuzzles into my belly. I tickle him under the chin and he lifts his face up. He’s getting a black eye, making him look half ’coon. It’s hard to imagine what he’ll look like when he grows up. Not that I can see me ever finding out. Something will get one or both of us before then.

  He holds out his hand for the remote. I give it. He sits down on the sofa and starts mashing the buttons. He points it at himself. Dog, he says. He curls his lips and snarls, then giggles. He points it at me. I’m afraid he’ll say cat, but he says pig, so I get down on all fours and make oinking noises. I pretend I’m falling down a meat hopper until he covers his eyes and squeaks at me to stop.

  I turn him into a volk and he marches around squeaking purity slogans. He turns me into a bactyl and I stick my butt in the fridge pretending I’m oozing out of it. I do a floppy, writhing bactyl dance in front of the TV.

  When it’s his turn again he says, Now you’re Potatohead.

  But he says it in a cute, funny way. There’s nothing mean in his look. He’s just playing. I lie down obediently on the floor and spread my arms out.

  He squats over me, pokes me in the chest and says, Are you dead?

  Yeah, pretty much.

  Then how come you can talk?

  Maybe I’m not quite properly dead. It’s hard to tell with angels, remember?

  Well, you can die properly, now, he says. But there’s still nothing nasty in his eyes.

  I lie stiff for a bit, sticking my stubby mouse legs in the air. That makes him laugh.

  Since he’s starting to look tired, I herd him outside to go to the toilet before he gets really sleepy.

  Carrying my gun and pack, I march us for about ten minutes so that the smell will be a reasonable distance away from the hut and supervise him digging a hole with his hands, which are more like paws than mine and have pretty strong claws. We both use it, then fill it up and cover it with leaves.

  The afternoon light is sloping through the tree trunks as we return. He’s got a real shiner. I refuse to let myself feel bad about it. He has to learn self-control, and he has to remember that I’m his guardian and teacher, and that he’s damn lucky to have me.

  We eat our pig. Inventory of all supplies is now: Twenty-five tins. Ammo: six 30-round magazines. First volk I killed – with my old Dirty Harry gun, before it went down the rabbit hole – I took his AK. Since volk all have exactly the same firearm, picking up ammo is no great problem. Three litres of stream water. Water sanitation pills: nineteen. Worm pills: sixteen. Bennies: twelve. Flashlight batteries: four. Antiseptic: not much. Antibiotics: none.

  I figure I’ll have to work for about a month to earn enough to trade for meds. If there are any meds. Last place, the farm store had nothing. The mom and pop were waiting for new stocks to punch in.

  The light’s low now, marshalling gold in the trees – what I think of as the unknown soldier’s prize for lasting another day. I sit on the floor to first pick my teeth with a twig, then clean my gun, listening to the pleasant evening bird chitter.

  As for him, instead of sleeping, he plays with the turds, arranging them into patterns that apparently mean something to him. Art isn’t dead.

  I look over and see he’s made a neat little pyramid. That’s good, I say. Real good.

  He clenches his fists and jiggles them in the air, cheering for himself. He gets up and checks that the remote is still where he left it on the sofa. He can’t find it, of course, because I hid it when he wasn’t looking. I shrug like I don’t know anything.

  It’s a little test, to see if he can tell I’m kidding around. Can he put himself in my head, or is he really only ever in his own head now?

  I can’t say that I get an answer. He goes scrabbling between the cushions like he did before, and eventually finds the remote, and gives me a gopher’s vertical grin.

  But the remote isn’t all he’s found. He gives me something he’s holding in his other paw.

  It’s a torn off corner of printed paper from a TV program guide. My best guess is that it’s just part of the decoration. If there are other huts, there’ll be identical scraps of paper caught in their sofa cushions.

  Or it might be a leftover. The whole hut might be, even. I suppose that’s possible. It took about a year for all the farms and rally halls and highway towns and all the accessories like AKs and pickups to punch in, and by then just about everything else was gone, but maybe there are still a few drops to shake off.

  I sit him down on the sofa, put him on my knee, and read out what’s on the paper. Football, news, current affairs, cartoons.

  You remember cartoons? I ask.

  Maybe, he says. Then he points to the word. I spy, he says. C.

  You can read that?

  He gives me a look like he isn’t sure what I mean, but he points to the letters in the words and says them. He mostly gets them wrong, but he knows they’re letters. Maybe I Spy has somehow kept the letter pictures as well as the sounds alive in his head. There’d be no point in trying to teach him to read properly, though. The only thing left to read is what the floor boss maryjanes write, and they just use tally marks.

  B, he says. D, I correct him. Documentary, I read out aloud. The Land of Samurai.

  Might as well be the Land of the Pus People for all it probably means to him.

  His memory of before definitely isn’t as good as mine. Your maryjanes, moms and pops, deros, trogs – they don’t remember anything. When you try to talk to any of them about the past, it’s like they hear you saying something else, and they respond to whatever they think they heard. I don’t know about volk and the rest, but I assume it’s the same with them. Something like a bactyl probably doesn’t have thoughts at all. So if me and him really are unique, we might be the only critters with memories, and his is only half a memory. Not that it matters in the big picture. If there are others like us, I bet they’re just as dead-ended as we are. No reason to suppose they’d be good eggs, either.

  I sometimes wonder if we’re dreams, but if we are, we must be the smallest, weakest, least scary fucking dreams in this world.

  I’ve never bullshitted him. He’s never asked where we’re going and I’ve never said anything about it. I always figured that if he asked I’d tell him the truth and say we’re going nowhere in particular. I had an agreement with myself that I wouldn’t bring the subject up, but that if he asked, I could consider him ready to share my burden of knowing we’re going nowhere except the next farm, the next cold night in a ditch or a dero town, the next struggle with evil. And ready to understand me better because of that.

  But now something gets a hold of me, like that belief-shits again, as if I’m possessed and talking in tongues and I say, Hey, have I ever told you where we’re going?

  He shakes his head.<
br />
  I can’t help myself, the bullshit flows.

  I tell him we’re going to the land of samurai, where there are no pig farms, just rice farms and orchards and trout streams. And all the people there are real people, with proper faces and brains. Every person there is a samurai, strong in body and spirit. They don’t need bennies, and they can eat all kinds of food.

  I tell him the most important thing a samurai needs is discipline of the heart. To endure, to be alert, to think of others. And to feel nature in your soul – to be reconciled to the life that falls and melts, and comes back again, but not as what it was before. I kind of start to explain a personal philosophy, putting into proper words the things that go around and around in my head all the time, but that I don’t say all the way clearly, either because I’m trying to dumb things down for his benefit or because I’m too done in or strung out to think straight enough. But it’s flowing from me now. Truth all mixed up with crazy talk.

  In my mind, this AK here that I’ve been cleaning is a sword. A very clean sword now, but I’m still cleaning it in my mind. I’m not just cleaning a sword, I’m cleaning my spirit, keeping it in working order. Making it as clean as the water in my made-up land.

  I don’t know where this urge to talk through my ass has come from, but the more I talk, the more I like what I hear myself saying – even despite the fact that like a lousy hypocrite I’m breaking my own rules.

  He’s looking at me, but I don’t know whether he’s taking any of it in, the sense or the nonsense, until he asks if his mama’s there, in the land of samurai.

  Of all the questions he could have asked, naturally it had to be that.

  Yeah, I blather, she’s there. She’s got a job, finally, too. Queen of the samurai. Doesn’t get much better than that.

  What the hell, if I’m going to talk bullshit, it might as well be gold-plated bullshit trailing clouds of glory.

  III.