by Alan Trotter
As he goes about cleaning the remnants of his mad genius friend, the man puts his hand on the ball, and jumps back as if he’s plugged himself into the lights. He’s seen something, although he’s not sure what. So he creeps up on the ball like it might scurry away, then he puts his hands around it and lifts it from its table. He’s struck by images in crashing waves, and larger each time, and with them: sounds, too much, too everything, for him to make any sense of, and he has dropped the ball, and he is back inside the room.
He staggers, almost falls flat. Still he gathers himself together, and lifts the ball again. ‘The great waves beat against him, their sound charged him, he felt as if he was being beaten by a fist as big as a man then big as a building then big as an island, but he held on even as around and above him patterns crawled like the constricting diamonds on the belly of a snake, that tightened its grip on the endless sky. He closed his eyes, thinking it might cost his mind to see, to try to make sense of the barrage.’
All the same he tries. He finds that he is standing ‘in the cupped hands of a tremendous figure, who looked up and away, but was recognisably himself, and he saw above and past this giant imitation, to the same figure again and again, each so large that he held the last, and he, their original, gave a terrified shriek, and the cacophony of giants was so intense, he found himself back again in the room—where he had again dropped onto the table the copper ball.’
He starts looking through his friend’s possessions differently, not arranging them for what to burn and what to keep, but looking for anything that might tell him what the ball is, and why it should be that he is driven mad with hallucinations when he touches it.
In the middle of an ‘unremarkable black notebook’ he finds a pencil sketch of the ball, complete with the scratched, dashed lines that ring it.
*
As he read the notebook he came to recognise in its scrawl and in the strange fiction it described both the friend he knew—the genius—and the lunatic he had clearly become.
It described the ball as containing everything, and as a device like a mirror reflecting the whole of the universe back to itself. His lost friend, or the madness that had possessed him, had written:
What I have made—what I have found that I have made—is a model of the universe perfect in every detail, in every component and every guiding principle, so it proceeds exactly in parallel with ours without ever diverging. To peer into it is to see exactly the instant of our own reality as it inevitably plays out, including your own peering into a mirroring reality of its own, like a man who finds himself under his own microscope.
Then, pages of frenzied script later:
I have somehow rotated it ever so slightly on a single axle, so that now it is slightly out of sync with our universe. The result, once you train yourself to adjust to its awful, fiery transport of sensation, is that you find yourself as if an actor standing on a proscenium, which contains within it another proscenium in which the actor who plays the part of you is, by the smallest moment, further into his performance than are you. And contained therein: another proscenium, another actor, further advanced, and so on, into the infinite. I have paused in my discovery to make this note, but my hand is shaking and I can barely breathe. To have sight to see what I now find it within my capacity to see: this is to intermingle with the divine.
The notebook contained much else after this febrile, barely comprehensible fantasying, page after page covered in looping ink, but not a single word that the reader could decipher.
*
Anyway, our friend reads this notebook and is all torn up about whether he can believe it: he is a sensible man but also a man who has seen something he can’t otherwise explain. He sweats it out for a paragraph or two, then lifts the heavy globe again.
*
He was hurled back into the cacophony of giants. The firmament was filled, was made of the movement of familiar, monstrous bodies and he cowered in the great noise and endless waves of sight, and they cowered around and into him. He feared he would be crushed. He stood straight and in stages the sky widened around him, as each giant in turn, beginning with the one that seemed to hold him, stood straight. Very slowly he trained himself to focus only on one of the figures, three storeys above him. He raised an eyebrow, and maybe a dozen seconds later saw the same expression reach the face of this incomprehensibly large and distant him. He smiled and waited. And there: the smile, the length of a street, yet so human, so profound, and in his control, all of it was in his control. He felt a sensation of incredible strength at this army ringed around him in time and space. Above him with eyes glistening, there was a life as large as a sky, and above it another, larger still, and he could move them all as if puppets—it made him laugh. And the laugh became a crescendo through the bodies of the giants, that grew so loud it almost deafened him before it began to recede.
He put down the ball and found himself almost as unnerved to be covered by a roof as he had been to be swept away from it and deposited into the strange mirror, the universe of its own.
He reeled to the unmade bed and fell asleep dreaming of his own incredible strength.
When he woke he could hardly contain his desire to feel again that power, to be once more the animation at the centre of a universe. He went quickly to the ball, lifted it, and welcomed the violence of the giants’ cacophony as it surrounded him. Feeling himself grown in confidence, he looked up into the infinite procession of his own body. It was fearful and incredible. A slight tremble of wonder at his own power took his hands, and the sky vibrated. He felt himself strung with the divine. Then a realisation seized him. There had been in the notebook a line: like a man who finds himself under his own microscope. For the first time, he looked, not up at the all-consuming vastness of the giants that surrounded him, but down, into his own hands.
There he saw a tiny figure he recognised as a miniature of himself. Around the figure was a small, round section of the world he thought he had left behind, as if suspended in an orb; the miniature peered down into its own hands, in which he made out another, smaller figure in a reality of its own which was also peering to a minuscule figure and world it held.
In an instant he realised the true meaning of his friend’s creation. He might have thrilled to see the giants at his back enact his past, but these nesting dolls he held in his hands represented his true power. As they shrank into a point they were a lance that pierced the future.
Whatever he intended to do, he would see first begin to play out in his hands and he would know how he should proceed. Any misfortune would be avoided because he had become an entirely new type of creature: he had become a legion of infallible guides, guiding each other. The thought seemed to burn inside his head it was so large and intense: he felt barely capable of seeing to its farthest edges; it hurt him. He reassured himself with one section of the thought: he possessed a new, strange strength like nothing before it.
Then in his hands he was alarmed to see a movement climbing up the ladder of the tiny creatures towards him, closer and closer, they moved their heads as if in shock. It reached him: he gave the same motion. It was as if he were a string that had been plucked. Then he saw them lean in closer and in horror he followed them to see what drew their gaze.
He found himself hollowed: every capacity in him removed. In his confusion he was unsure whether he was himself or the creature he held: both, all froze in a dreadful paralysis. Nothing, he thought. There is nothing I can do unless I see it performed first. Madness swept towards him.
None of the creatures in his hand lay down the copper ball he had lifted when he thought himself free.
*
That was the story. Of all of it, the words that still turned in me were those first ones I saw, ‘the ball, copper and heavy-seeming’. Whatever in Holcomb’s story lit out from what was real, there was a straight tip somewhere deep in there. Because I had seen that ball sitting on his desk.
I put the magazine back into my pocket with the other two an
d walked around the empty box of a room. I stretched out my arm. The torn seam at the shoulder snarled at me. I sat back down on the ground beside _____, still pressing his eyes into his binoculars.
When I thought of the ball now, I could see it clearer than when it was sat in front of me. It was copper, it looked heavy, and it wasn’t pitted with dots: it was ringed by broken lines.
The rest of the day died slowly. Nothing happened this time out, not that I saw and not that _____ saw through his little binoculars. Not even a bum slinking out to spray the wall.
*
The next morning, _____ and I walked back into the new quarter, but we were only there through the morning. I reread the story with the copper ball and liked it more this time, knowing what would happen.
When I’d finished, _____ had already put away his binoculars, though they hadn’t even dented his face yet, and it wasn’t long before he was looking as often at his nails as out the window, or then at a coin he played with, turning it in his fingers and using it to bounce the light from the sun into his own eyes. Then he stood up, pushed his hat hard down on his head and stalked for the door, whistling for me to follow.
We went to the fairground, the first time in weeks, and rode the rides for a while. Then _____ folded a fin out of his pocket and gave it to the man by the target range and we shot pellets till even the toy guns got to feeling heavy.
After that we went to buy sandwiches and sweet, fizzing drinks from a stall at the rear of the park. We had to wait in line and then, when we were standing at the front, before a young mother tired from a day of having a horrible brat kid, _____ realised he didn’t have any paper money left, and couldn’t find any coins. My pockets were empty. The young mother started fuming, till _____ found a roll of pennies in his pocket he kept to use instead of knucks. He peeled open the roll and flicked the coins one by one across the counter and we sat and ate and drank.
We each ate half of a sandwich then we swapped, washing them down with the drinks. When I’d finished I asked _____ what we were going to do now. He said we were going to ride the rollercoaster and then he was going to go and pick up a woman and I could find someplace else to spend the night, and that’s what we did.
*
There had only been a few nights since I had dragged my mattress to by _____’s bed that I’d slept anywhere else. There was the night on Holcomb’s couch. Then there was one night I’d sat in Lydia’s apartment, listening to her talk while she drank gin until she fell asleep, and I went walking about town, getting my feet wet in gutters and enjoying the emptiness of the streets.
I’d have gone to see Lydia, but the apartment manager still wasn’t back and I didn’t expect her to be in a mood to drink gin and tell jokes. Instead I went to a hotel, the New Europe, where I knew the house peeper on the night shift. In exchange for some company he would let me use one of the empty rooms, as long as I left it as I found it and I was gone before the end of his shift.
*
We sat in the radio room and listened to music. My peeper friend was in an armchair, looking like someone had just used him to mop up a spill and had only half wrung him out. He looked a lot shorter than he used to. We’d been in a bar once where he’d won a bet that he could lift me off the ground for ten seconds—I was allowed to fight it but not with my arms or legs. He’d struggled but he’d managed it, and there are plenty police wagons that wouldn’t.
As some piano played through the radio he told me that when he’d taken the night shift in the hotel he’d thought it might take him a while to adjust. He spent the first two weeks where every thought he had, there was always another thought behind it: he mimed playing the piano and said, ‘Whatever was going on up here,’ and he twirled the fingers on his right hand, ‘down here,’ and he did the same way over with the left, ‘there was always this thought: I am earthly tired, yes sir.’ And then after a couple of months he had realised that he had never stopped being tired—those chords were there, he had just stopped hearing them. It had been three years, and every day he was more tired.
A few hours later he was called to a room where there had been a disturbance. A drunk had thrown a bottle of scotch against his wall, irritating his neighbour, and then passed out, his breathing strained. I helped him carry the drunk across the street into an alley. We found a blanket behind an empty vegetable crate and laid it over him and went back to the radio room. If the drunk’s breathing went from strained to stopped it wouldn’t be good for my friend if it happened in the hotel.
My friend the house peeper sat back in his armchair, lighted his pipe and shook out the match. The piano music continued tinnily from behind the lit panel of the radio. He sighed with the grandness of a stately death.
‘You hear that?’ he asked, and his left hand played its keys in the air. Just then I couldn’t hear anything else.
A while later I went and lay on top of the sheets in one of the unused rooms.
*
The next day I was to go back to babysitting Holcomb.
I knocked at his door, and the voice that came back was puny with fear. He was hiding behind his door frightened that a man had come knocking to kill him, and for a moment there was a thought that I could just take the part, and get it all done with, and I’d be doing the three of us a favour.
Instead I stayed in character as his babysitter, his faithful muscle, and he undid the three locks that were keeping him safe. He locked them all tight behind me, told me to take a seat, and went back to his typewriter. The copper ball was on his desk, on top of a stack of paper. As I went to my place on the couch, I felt as if I was edging around the ball, as if it filled the room, and when I was sitting it didn’t matter where I tried to look, whether it was at Holcomb tapping away on his machine or the flies dying in his window, I’d immediately find myself looking at the ball again, like I was doing circuits round a phone booth or the inside of an ashtray.
Holcomb would sigh loudly to himself every once in a while, or light a cigarette, or look out the window as if some big sadness hung in the sky and he liked the way it lit him. I wanted to pick up the copper ball, or ask him about it, but the thought of either made me burn. I wanted to laugh at myself or boot my own teeth in—what a lug, what a dummy. I needed distraction.
I took the magazines from my pocket, but couldn’t bring myself to read them. I put them down on a table in front of the couch beside a black notebook. I fed the brim of my hat through my fingers, round and round, until the spinning spread to my stomach and my head, and I started feeling ill.
Holcomb’s tapping had picked up pace. I figured he wouldn’t be paying me any notice and I took up the notebook. I read a page of it. It said,
We are crawling along the ground into a vicious headwind. Or, better, because we do not control the pace at which we move, we are being dragged. Though whatever is doing the dragging does not obstruct the wind, which is vicious and biting, and so intense that, as we are dragged through it we are reshaped by it, slowly, as a glacier bears through rock. As we are dragged forward, the buffeting of the wind elongates us. From small worms we are drawn out, our legs stretched, our chests, our pricks pulled long, we are lengthened finally to man height, and as the battering continues our skin is shaken by the wind, pulled from us until it is no longer taut, until it hangs and sags. And finally we are dragged through the vicious wind until our skin is torn from our skeleton, as the dragging continues, and awareness ceases, even if the dragging does not. We can cut the tether that pulls us forward, but we cannot turn off the wind. We can do nothing to escape the wind, but, in a limited way, we can free ourselves and explore ahead of the ever-forward dragging. We can send from our groove in the dirt emissaries of our selves: though the ability is limited, it exists. These emissaries
I went to turn the page when Holcomb’s little kid hand took the notebook away from me and returned it to the table. ‘You looking for words out of me, Box? There’s a fee.’
He sat down on the edge of the table, offered me a cigar
ette and lighted it for me. He looked at the magazines. ‘Have you been reading these? “The Traveller in Time”. Look at this one.’ He picked up the magazine with the fishman on the cover, his cigarette tucked tight in the corner of his mouth. ‘I can’t remember what they called the story in this one. I got a name stuck in my head for it, a terrible name, “The Spherical Oracle”, a dumb, terrible joke and it got deep in my head and wouldn’t leave, so I told them to give it whatever name they’—he’d found the page and his cigarette drooped in his mouth like he had just taken one in the gut. ‘“The Spherical Oracle”,’ he read. ‘Cripes.’
He flopped the magazines down.
I glanced over at the copper ball on the desk, and I thought Holcomb’s eyes narrowed, as if he had noted the look.
He stood up and said, ‘How about I make us some sandwiches?’ and began pulling on his coat. ‘Two blocks down there’s a sorry old bird who hasn’t smiled since Gomorrah, but he’s got bread and cigarettes and he’ll sell us them.’
He unlocked the door at length, then turned to me with it open an inch. ‘I thought you’d figured this thing out,’ he said. ‘Up! You stick with me.’ I took my hat and made to get up.
And then howling rage came barrelling through the door, knocking Holcomb to the ground. He was bald, his sleeves were rolled short, and he bulged with anger: his head round his collar, his fists looking like they might burst through themselves they were squeezed so tight. He kept his howl up at Holcomb, who scrabbled back across the floor, and I got in between them, but he kept coming forward, a bald pulsing demon. ‘I said I would kill you, so I came to kill you, Holcomb. This is what keeping a promise looks like, Holcomb’—and I knocked him in the chest and he howled at that too. He was old for a demon. He couldn’t have been younger than fifty, and he was crying and he took a second to wipe at his tears with his fist, then he grabbed me round the middle, fixing my arms to my chest before I could stop him, and drove me back.