Plato's Cave

by Russell Proctor

  "I think I’m starting to see a pattern," said David. "But I need to ask you some questions first."

  "Ok."

  "I’ve been wondering why you seem to be the centre of everything."

  I didn’t know. I had always thought I was the centre of everything, of course, but that was just natural selfishness. No reasons were needed then. However, since I had actually started being the centre of everything, and reasons were now demanded, I was suddenly bereft of a reply.

  Still, David had asked as if he expected me to provide an answer. As this wasn’t possible, I sat there in silence for a few moments, hoping he would continue. He did.

  "I’ve been trying to establish a link. Now that Mike has gone off the rails and shows every sign of being involved in the whole thing as much as you, I need to find what links you and it."

  Oh, leave him out of this, I thought. Mike and I? Linked in some way? The idea was too revolting to contemplate.

  "Are you suggesting I’m some sort of new species too?"

  Actually, that thought had some appeal to me. It would take me out of the pattern. Homo branwellii. It had a nice ring to it.

  "No, no, not at all," said David quickly. "Sorry, that’s not what I meant." Then he saw I wasn’t offended, and continued.

  "Things only started happening Monday morning. Before that you were perfectly normal."

  (Please excuse him, he didn’t know me very well.)

  "So I’m wondering if there was anything immediately prior to that that might have changed you or affected you."

  "What, like Sunday night?"

  "Perhaps. Why, did something happen on Sunday night?"

  A little scene replayed itself in my mind’s eye (wherever that is – I’ve often wondered). It even had a title.

  Sunday Night

  I’m opening two Vodka shooters. They were Heather’s, but we are celebrating Jack’s new job and don’t have any champagne. The new job means a lot more money and possible business trips to faraway places with exotic names, places to which it is more than likely Jack will take his loyal, honest girlfriend who has a penchant for faraway places with exotic names. But pride goes before a fall, as they say. I am just handing him one of the drinks when he says something that makes me pull my hand back.

  JACK: I don’t think we should go out anymore.

  ME: What?

  JACK: I think you’re very selfish, and...and I think we should go our own ways.

  ME: Selfish?

  JACK: Look, Emily, it’s just not going to work out.

  ME: Get out you bastard!

  And then I get drunk, using the Vodka shooters as a convenient starting point. Mine anyway: his I throw after his rapidly retreating form. The faraway places move even further away, and are lost to view.

  That was sort of how it went, with all the rude words taken out. But it still hurt a lot to think about it. Jack may have been right when he called me selfish, but I had actually liked the ignorant sod quite a lot. Maybe he wasn’t the man of my dreams, but he had been pleasant reverie nonetheless, an enjoyable stopover on the road to true love. Still, I hesitated to tell David about my farce of a love life, purely because it was likely to embarrass the hell out of me. But perhaps he needed to know. I sighed deeply and said:

  "I broke up with my boyfriend."

  "That’s not normally going to have the effect of linking you with some cosmic event. Anything else?"

  "I got drunk."

  "Or that."

  I wasn’t being very helpful. Then David had a thought.

  I could see he had one. There was a spark that leaped through his eyes, a small uplifting of his right eyebrow and the slightest movement of one side of his mouth. Doubtless what scientists call an Insight. I was privileged to witness at first-hand the birth of a theory. Even Bruno noticed it, pausing in the act of licking his left rear foot, as if waiting for the delivery of infinite wisdom.

  "Where was this?" he asked. "Where did you break up?"

  "At my house."

  "But where in your house?"

  Good question. Where had we been when Jack had taken that one simple step from adorable hunk of manhood to reviled outcast? Everything had been made fuzzy by the wash of alcohol that had succeeded it. Let me see: we had come home from the movies, he had not been saying much, we got out the booze to celebrate the fact that he had the new job and we had been...oh, no. It dawned on me.

  "We were in the lounge," I said. "On the cushions."

  "The cushions?"

  "We had some large cushions in the middle of the floor. We used them to sit on because the sofa had a habit of sticking broken springs in your arse. Jack and I were sitting on them. They disappeared with everything else in the house, of course, but they were in that spot."

  "That spot?" He was leaning forward even more now, almost out of his chair, hoping I would say the right thing and prove his nascent theory.

  That Spot. Where the green and blue chalk circles now were. The place where I and certain other objects found it amusing to float and point towards obscure constellations. We had been sitting on the cushions, drinking. Jack had walked out of my life, and I stayed there to finish the Vodka shooters – and then I opened the wine and drank that before passing out. And I was still lying on the cushions.

  I had woken up on them the following day. Which was how Heather knew I had been drunk. She had commented on that, but I never asked her how she had known. She had been out when Jack was there and would not have come in until very late. But she would have seen me passed out on the cushions when she came in.

  David listened to me tell him this, but he was still not happy. At least he wasn’t judgmental about my relationship or my drinking habits. After all, he was a scientist and understood the need for objectivity. Of course, if he gave even the slightest sign of a chuckle, I would have to kill him.

  "Simply being drunk isn’t enough," he said. "There still needs to be something to link you with the Gap and everything else. Did anything else happen?"

  Nothing. There was nothing else. I had rendered myself unconscious and woke up plagued with sausages and other phenomena.

  "Anything involving Mike?" he prompted.

  I thrust at the closed portals of my memory. My drinking bout had resulted in chemical changes within my body that formed a complicated path; one of those linked patterns David was so keen on finding. The trouble was, I couldn’t see where Mike might fit anywhere in this. He had been in his pot, in a corner of the kitchen, and had nothing to do with me lying on the cushions in a stupor, synthesising alcohol. I hadn’t gone into the kitchen at all, except when I had taken the bottle of wine there to use the corkscrew. I had stabbed myself with the knife on the corkscrew when I was trying to cut away the foil wrapping around the neck of the bottle. It had been an old bottle of wine, probably stolen from my father’s collection years ago. It hadn’t been one of those twist-top ones, it had a cork. If it had been a twist-top, none of this might ever have happened.

  I held up my finger now and looked closely at it. The cut had been bad, but a bandaid, long since dispensed with, had taken care of it. I had rummaged through the kitchen drawers looking for the bandaids for a few minutes...

  And suddenly I had an Insight of my own. I looked at David, and he must have seen the same sort of thing in my face as I had seen in his. Full memory returned.

  I had bled on Mike.

  While I looked through the drawers, I had held my finger up and over that part of the kitchen bench where Mike sat. A single drop of my precious A+ bodily fluids had fallen from my finger onto one of his leaves, and I had hastily used my finger to wipe it away. This only resulted in my spreading the blood further over the leaf, of course, and I had had to use a paper towel to clean him so Heather wouldn’t get upset. But it meant that Mike and I had come into contact with each other. His leaf had met my bleeding finger.

  "Plants have tough cellulose coatings to their cells," he mused when I had related my adventures to him. "There wou
ld be little chance of any material passing from Mike to you in such a slight contact. Of course, even a single molecule might be sufficient to induce some sort of symbiosis."

  Whatever.

  He didn’t have to tell me about plant cells. I had been there, remember? I had found plenty of goo on the outside of the Poinciana leaf when I was the size of a cell. DNA or whatever could easily have transferred from Mike to me. And that thought gave me, as it has probably given you, another Insight.

  "That’s why I turned into a plant this morning," I said, indicating the Poinciana tree that rose above Mike’s twisted branches. We looked at its dark bulk for a few moments and pondered the miracles of the natural world.

  ***

  After my conversation with David, I went to find the Maestro. Following our departure for the university, he had finished his incantations and fallen asleep in Joanna’s study. He had been worn out, he said, by the release of so much energy. He had been woken by Heather’s arrival and let her in, and then staggered back to the study and promptly gone to sleep again. He had he seen or heard nothing about Mike’s prodigious growth until he had been woken by the sound of us sawing and snapping branches.

  The study was now a mess. The pentacle was smeared all over the floor (since he had apparently gone to sleep in the middle of it) and the candles had burned down to stumps of congealed wax. Joanna was less than impressed. Nevertheless, he had managed to finish his spell and was ready to give me the benefit of it. I smiled, nodded and said thanks – and meant none of it. He was sheepishly cleaning up the mess in Joanna’s study while Joanna herself was trying to scrape the wax off the floorboards. I could tell she was in a foul mood. The Maestro beckoned me into the study. "I have this for you," he said, closing the door and holding out a chunk of metal. "Nazarlık. What you call an amulet. A talisman. You must wear it on you at all times, and it will protect you."

  I took the thing from him, a disc of metal that looked like brass, about six centimeters across, with a raised bump with a hole through it on one side, and a lip surrounding the other. On one side was a copy of the pentacle he had drawn on the floor. On the other was a queer symbol, sort of like a T with a square and a circle next to it. To someone into that sort of magical stuff it looked mysterious and powerful, I guess.

  It just looked stupid to me.

  Both designs had been cut with some care, the raw edges filed down smooth.

  "Um...thanks," I said.

  "It is a ward to guard you from the forces that attack you," he said.

  "Isn’t it a little late for that?" asked Joanna sarcastically, still on her knees with a knife, scraping at the wax. She spoke through gritted teeth: probably not a good sign. "Or haven’t you seen the sky lately?"

  "It is never too late," the Maestro said. "There will be much more to come, that is certain."

  "Goody," I said dryly. "But how can you protect me against something you don’t know anything about?"

  He smiled. "But I do know." He reached behind and picked a book off the desk. I looked at the cover: Shadowplanes. Alternate Realities and Parallel Existence, by Turhan Birgili.

  I flipped to the blurb on the back.

  "Birgili postulates the existence of new worlds and higher forms of being."

  "Amazing revelations...a world bestseller."

  "One of the world’s greatest magicians reveals the secrets of the universe."

  "Everyone pondering life’s mysteries should read this book."

  "You are part of a whole new level of existence," he said. "Read my book. It will explain much."

  I started to explain that I didn’t quite have time right then to digest what looked like 400-odd pages, when Joanna suddenly noticed the talisman. "Let me see that thing," she said, standing up and holding out her hand. I gave it to her.

  "Where did this come from?" she asked. I didn’t like the tone in her voice, but as her question was directed at the Maestro, I could stand there and watch someone else in trouble for a change.

  "I made it," he replied, quite proudly. "From the plug in your bath."

  Even if the Maestro hadn’t confessed to his handiwork, the evidence was still in the room: a hammer and cold-chisel lay on the desk, both no doubt purchased by him on the same shopping expedition on which he had secured his paperback grimoire. And now that he mentioned it, the talisman did look amazingly like a bath plug.

  Joanna was furious. "The plug? My solid brass bathroom fittings? Are you mad?"

  The Maestro shrugged, and managed to make it a pathetically condescending gesture. "Üzgünüm. I am sorry. It had to be brass, you see," he said. "For the spell."

  "You couldn’t buy one for yourself while you were out?"

  He smiled weakly. "Vaktim yoktu." He seemed to feel that covered the situation. Not understanding it, I could hardly disagree.

  Joanna and the Maestro started chattering away in Turkish. They seemed to be arguing, although Joanna was doing most of the talking. She had somehow acquired the habit of using her arms a lot when she became effusive. She nearly hit me in the eye at one point. I stood there with that distant, faintly distracted look that people have when listening to an utterly incomprehensible conversation.

  By this time, the Maestro was sweating heavily, and I had to stop myself several times from sneaking quietly out of the room. I had this image of the others in the living room, ears pressed against the door, listening to Joanna’s unfathomable tirade. She even had me scared by the end of it.

  I think Joanna won. At any rate, the flow of Türkçe eventually dribbled away. Joanna reverted to English, perhaps in order to include me in their little chat.

  "Not only do you hammer my bath plug into scrap," she said, "you destroy my study! Do you know how much these floorboards cost to polish?" And she was off again.

  I eventually came to the Maestro’s rescue, more to give Joanna a rest than because I felt any sympathy for him.

  "Are you sure this will work?" I asked in a moment when she had paused to suck in much-needed oxygen.

  "Of course," said the Maestro. He pulled himself up to his full height and waved his eyebrows at me, as if I had called his mother something unspeakable. "It has all my power and knowledge in it."

  "Have you read this?" I asked Joanna, proffering the book.

  "Of course," she said. "One of the best of its kind. That’s the book that made the Maestro famous." Despite her anger, there was the unmistakable sound of admiration in her tone.

  "Joanna’s bath plug will help you learn," said the Maestro. "And it will protect you from all dangers you may face."

  Joanna made a scoffing noise that quite defies transcription into print. "Well, there’s one way to find out," she said. "Emily, take off your shoe."

  I could see what she had in mind. "Maybe that’s not a good idea," I said. "That blue spark thing hurts. Who knows what will happen with this?" Of course, I knew nothing was going to happen with it, since all this magic stuff was garbage anyway.

  Nevertheless, I took off my shoe, my lesions exposed once more. I sat on the floor and Joanna took my foot onto her lap. "Now," she said, "I’ll just bring the talisman close to them. I won’t risk actual contact, even if nothing happens, ok?"

  I nodded, but felt very bad about all this. Surely the thing was just a lump of metal, but there was still a nagging thought in my mind that something bad was going to happen.

  The Maestro was leaning over us, his thick breathing noisy in the room. Joanna took the talisman in her right hand, cradling my foot with her left.

  "Wait," I said.

  Joanna hesitated.

  "Maybe you shouldn’t do it. I mean, your touch causes the sparks to appear. That might happen if you are holding the thing anyway."

  "True," said Joanna.

  "Sparks?" said the Maestro. "What sparks are these?"

  We told him about the blue sparks that happened when Joanna came into contact with the lesions. He seemed impressed.

  "You should have told me about these," he s
aid. "They could tell us much."

  "Do you want the Maestro to do it?" asked Joanna.

  "No," I said quickly. He looked a little disappointed, but this was no time for niceties. I actually didn’t want anyone to do it, but if anyone had to, it should be me.

  I took the plug and glanced at Joanna. Her eyes met mine.

  "This isn’t going to work anyway, is it?" I asked.

  She shrugged. "I have faith in the Maestro," she said. "Despite his - aggressive methods."

  Something inside me said Big fat hairy deal.

  I held the plug/talisman gingerly, keeping my foot in Joanna’s lap. Slowly, I brought it close to the uppermost lesion. No sparks. Nothing. I moved it closer. Still nothing. I touched the cold metal to my skin.

  Well, that was an anticlimax.

  I glanced up at the other two. There was nothing revealed in Joanna’s face. The Maestro was beaming.

  "Gördün mü?" he said. "See? You do not have the blue sparks. It protects you."

  I remained unconvinced. I suddenly grabbed Joanna’s right hand and placed it on my foot, gritting my teeth slightly against the anticipation of the pain.

  Again, an anticlimax. Not a spark snapping anywhere. Joanna took her hand away slowly, then put it back on my foot. Still nothing.

  "Sorry, Maestro," I said. "It looks like it doesn’t do anything after all."

  "No, no," he said, pressing my hand. "You must keep it. Very important." His eyes glittered eagerly.

  Joanna was touching my foot over and over again, but still nothing happened. I slapped her hand away. She looked disappointed. I was sorry for her sake.

  "Geçmiş olsun," said the Maestro. Joanna didn’t bother to translate, which was rather unfair: he sounded sincere.

  ***

  "Max is on-line," said David.

  Max was indeed. David had set a laptop up in the living room and plugged in a small digital camera. On the screen were two little boxes, one with Max’s head in it, with a glimpse of his office at the Planetarium. The other box held a picture of the living room. I was in it, standing beside David. They had been chatting. I looked at the last few lines of chat text under the boxes.