Mirrors in the Deluge Page 3

  “Yes, we did, sire. Your body is fine. Both your bodies are fine, your big outer body and now also the small body of the man inside your head, which we didn’t suspect was there, to be honest.”

  “I am distressed. This wasn’t supposed to happen. I was destined to have three strange encounters, not just two.”

  “Maybe the witch was one too. Maybe you should count her as the first of the three? Shall we go back and ask her?”

  “No.” The Bungle Duke sighs and gives the order to return to his palace. We are going to assume he made it safely.

  We finished constructing the bridge, crossed it and walked all night to the nearest village and now we are relaxing in a tavern and writing postcards to our friends, including you. We apologise for the smallness of the handwriting, but we absolutely felt we had to get it all down. We are writing it in the third person because there are two of us, two persons, and the extra person helps us feel you are here too. It’s an interesting story, no?

  Most of it is conjecture, though. Hope you don’t mind.

  The Modesty Men

  The pub is a forlorn place with just one table and a solitary drinker on the only chair, sipping a beer, lifting it to his mouth with his left hand while his right remains out of sight in the shadows. I have been told that the city is a drab one, that the quality of service everywhere is modest in the extreme; but this suits me perfectly.

  I look around for a spare seat and quickly perceive there are none. I don’t wish to stand at the filthy bar, or squat on the sickly colours of the carpet, in the glow of hissing electric lamps on iron brackets that jut from the walls like fossilised snakes, so I consider returning back to the night outside. There is no real disappointment.

  But the solitary drinker nods at me and speaks.

  “Hello, do you want a seat? You are welcome to have mine. I’ll stand and you can take my place.”

  I smile. “That’s very kind of you but...”

  “My name’s Al, by the way. Al Truist. TROO-IST. An unusual surname, I’m sure you’ll agree. My grandfather bought it at an auction. They auctioned off names, back then. It was just after the war and plenty of surplus names were available.”

  “Pleased to meet you. I’m Phil.”

  There is a slightly awkward pause. Then Al asks:

  “Just plain Phil, eh? Don’t you have an unusual surname too? I suppose not. That’s a shame, really it is.”

  “In fact I do. It’s Thropist. THROP-IST. And my middle initial is N. But I never had a grandfather, not that I know of, unless he was that thing that stood in the alcove. But I was always led to believe that was a hatstand. Phil N. Thropist at your service.”

  “I see. Well, I’d like to offer you my hand to shake but being a generous sort, I gave it to a writer who was suffering from writer’s cramp. He asked to borrow it and wanted to give it back but I said no, his need was greater than mine, keep it forever!”

  And he lifts up his right arm which is just a sleeve with no hand on the end. I match his grin and say:

  “How considerate of you! But this reminds me that I don’t need a seat after all. I can’t use one, you see, because I donated one of my firm buttocks last week, to a builder.”

  “You did? A whole buttock?”

  “Yes, yes, it was my moral duty. He was a half-arsed chap and now he has a proper builder’s cleavage, and so he’s far more useful in the construction industry than before.”

  “I hope he was suitably grateful!”

  I sigh. “You must know how it is. Being humanitarian often goes unappreciated. But virtue is its own reward. That’s what they say, and I always believe what they say because my disbelief has been suspended. I don’t know who had the authority to suspend it, or exactly when it was suspended, but they did and it was...”

  He shakes the arm that is just a sleeve. “I think I know what you mean. After giving away my hand, I lent my elbow to a tennis player. It was the least I could do. The tennis tournament is over now but I don’t expect or even want it to be returned.”

  “A tennis player? A lady player, doubtless?”

  “A lady player. Certainly.”

  “One of those who grunt?”

  “Yes, one of those who, as you so delicately put it, grunt. I lent her my grunt too, as it happens. I wasn’t using it.”

  We look at each other without blinking. Then I shift my weight conspicuously from one foot to the other a few times and lean forward to rap my left knee with my knuckles.

  “See this knee? Not mine! Belongs to a housemaid by rights, but I swapped her tarnished one for my own, which was of superior quality. Didn’t have to do that but I did.”

  He’s not as impressed as he ought to be.

  “That’s all well and good but my neighbour has asked me to keep an eye on his house while he’s away on holiday, so I plucked out my right one and left it on his doorstep.”

  I point to his right eye. “What’s that, then?”

  He lifts his hand and removes it from its socket and rolls a marble on the table. “A glass one, of course!”

  I grimace and fiddle with my ears. “See these? Wooden replicas, that’s what they are. That’s right. I was watching Julius Caesar in Stratford two ‘ears’ ago and when Mark Anthony made his ‘Friends, Romans and Countrymen, lend me your ears’ speech, I tore my real ones off and threw them onto the stage.”

  “Commendable.”

  I cup my hands around my ears. “What?”

  He raises his voice. “Commendable, I said! But I think that my generosity might exceed even that. See these teeth of mine? I saw a tramp looking through the window of a restaurant and the chap was slavering and drooling and staring at the food inside. He turned to me and said that he’d give his eyeteeth to be able to eat a three-course meal in there. I immediately punched myself in the face and knocked both of my upper canines out and presented them to the fellow, saying ‘allow me, please use these to barter for a meal.’ The pearly whites I now sport are dentures and I wear them with pride.”

  “Remarkable, but not as remarkable as this.”

  And I step forward and pull my trousers away from my waist and I wait for the fellow to peer down inside.

  He whistles. “Incredible!”

  “I gave it to a woman who wanted to able to relieve herself more easily when she went hiking in the woods.”

  “That reasoning sounds like a fallacy.”

  “Nothing phallusy about me now, as you can see.”

  He rises slowly from the chair and stands erect facing me. Then he also pulls his trousers away from his waist. I peer down inside and then look away with a shocked expression.

  “The dog’s bollocks.”

  I recover my composure and smile thinly. “The poor animal was quite dysfunctional, I take it?”

  “I’m sorry to say that he was.”

  “Take a second look, my friend. A bit further down this time. I will pull my trousers away again. Well?”

  He looks. “You mean to say?”

  “The badger’s nadgers.”

  He shakes his head. “We are so generous!”

  “To a fault, to a fault. By the way, when you looked just now, did you happen to notice how bald I was down there?”

  “Yes, I did wonder about that.”

  “Donated to the Prime Minister’s head.”

  “Good lord! I did the same thing for the Queen! But she turned mine down. Too curly, she said.”

  “Talking of donations… Ever donated sperm?”

  “I had an appointment with the sperm bank yesterday but I had to phone them to say I couldn’t come.”

  “I donate all the time. It’s a good place for opportunities to make puns – but you’ve pre-empted me!”

  He rolls down a sock.

  “See this scar? I donated a six inch square piece of skin to that writer chap I mentioned, the one with cramp. He said he needed it for a footnote at the end of a page.”

  I lift up my shirt to reveal a scar on my abdomen. �
�The truth is that I know the writer you mean. He also needed an appendix. It’s a textbook he’s working on, you see.”

  “It’s refreshing to find someone after my own heart!”

  “My dear chap, I’d never demand such a thing from you, even though I recently gave my own away.”

  “I was speaking metaphorically. I too am heartless. Only last week I removed it with a Swiss Army Knife and presented it to a young lady who had never experienced true love.”

  “We are truly princes among men. Princes, I say! I extracted my heart with the silver spoon I was born with, and I gave the silver spoon away, too, once I was done with it.”

  “The poor simply have no idea they exist in order that we may exercise our considerable generosity.”

  “Our modesty too!”

  He nods and his agreement is absolute, unconditional. Then, as the lamps continue to hiss, I frown and scratch my exposed chest vigorously, and my eyebrows dance on my head.

  “Tell me, does your heart surgery scar itch?”

  “Constantly it does.”

  He unbuttons his own shirt and we stare hard at each other’s chest scars. Then we both cry simultaneously:

  “You should be dead. And so should I!”

  As the realisation hits us, we fall to the ground and expire. But I’m still aware of my surroundings. Maybe it takes a long time to die in such a place. Perhaps I am too modest to do so.

  The doors swing open and two Buddhists enter.

  I know they are Buddhists because they wear saffron robes, carry simple wooden begging bowls and have shaved heads. They look around and one of them declares serenely:

  “That was a very fine meditation session, wasn’t it? I managed to reduce my ego by exactly 25%.”

  “Only 25%? But that’s nothing! I reduced my ego by more than 42%, which I believe is a world record.”

  The barman, unseen until now, rings the bell. “Last arguments gentlemen, please! Last arguments!”

  The first Buddhist snarls quickly. “My modesty and humility are simply the best in the entire world.”

  “No, mine are! Mine!”

  They start fighting and they fall to the floor on top of us, the two already dead men. Then the lights go out.

  The Soft Landing

  I am a photon and I have just been expelled from a star. I don’t mean that I have done anything wrong, it’s not that kind of expulsion – merely that a sequence of events has taken place over a long period of time that finally resulted in me leaving home forever.

  There’s no acrimony involved and I don’t bear my parent star malice of any sort. It’s part of a natural process and, I daresay, you too have gone through a similar event in your own life. This is a fundamental law of the cosmos. We grow up and leave home.

  Not that I was ever in a position to ‘grow up’. I’m a photon and have a very limited capacity for change of any sort. But to make you understand me properly I’m compelled to speak in metaphors. My natural language is mathematics, yours is made of words.

  This primary fact has now been established. I have escaped the body of the star that created me and I’m hurtling through space at the speed of myself, the fastest velocity possible. This isn’t arrogance but simple truth. I am a particle of light, pure and basic.

  My knowledge of the universe, of reality, is sketchy in the extreme. It is certainly sufficiently accurate to portray me as an innocent, as a naïf, a particle unversed in the objective truths, lacking all experience and armed merely with submicroscopic knowledge.

  But please don’t assume that I am young, that my creation was recent, that only a few seconds have elapsed since I was born. I have yearned for the instant of escape for long ages. Be aware that photons remain at home considerably longer than human beings.

  In the heart of a star, where we originate, there is scant opportunity for independence of any sort. We pop into existence in the middle of opacity, amid a seething mass of reactions, and we are lost and blind in the chaos; more helpless than abandoned orphans.

  The idea that a photon, the messenger particle of light, might be blind probably strikes you as an absurdity, and so it is but that is no argument against the absolute truth of it. With so much ferocious plasma all around it was quite impossible to see anything.

  The fact we have no eyes didn’t help us much.

  For a photon to grope its way from the centre of a sun to the rim, to a point where it is free to shoot out into the void, takes ten million years or so; we are continually absorbed and re-emitted randomly by the ferocious furnace until chance leads us to the edge.

  Only when we reach the surface of a star are we able to leap out of the boggy plasma and hurtle off into the cosmos, extending ourselves to our full length, which is a psychological rather than physical state, feeling a non-existent wind in our imaginary faces.

  So there is excessive joy in the act of liberation, and that instant when a photon, or any related subatomic particle, understands that he truly has overcome the gravitational pull of the sun that is his mother and father is one of the highlights of his existence.

  At this very moment I am suffused with delight.

  But there is anxiety behind the glee; and with the passing of time the anxiety will be strengthened, the happiness lessened, and the thoughts of every sane and intelligent photon will focus on the future, on the outcome that fate has in store for us. I know this.

  The number of photons who remain permanently ecstatic and carefree on the voyage through the vacuum is tiny and they are fools. They fail to understand that, although the universe in an enormous arena for our flight through space, it is not completely empty.

  One day we must strike something solid. That’s a fact.

  And when we do connect with matter, we will be absorbed, reflected, refracted or split, depending on the nature of the impediment. Every one of these outcomes is a hazard. Only absorption is desirable and even then only under extremely rare circumstances.

  Uncounted trillions of my fellows are radiated every second from the average star; most will never see each other again. Only those emitted in a line perfectly parallel to your own trajectory will remain in earshot for the duration of the journey through space.

  The others must fly off to those remote zones of the universe reserved for them by arbitrary circumstance. A difference of a fraction of a degree will end long friendships as the two companions gradually diverge until a distance of many light years divides them.

  It is best not to grow too emotionally attached to other photons. I have made the mistake and the particle that accompanies me on this adventure, immediately to my left, is like a brother to me. We travel in parallel and I rate his company more highly than is wise.

  For it is impossible to know when one of us might hit an obstacle and vanish or be deflected, and this uncertainty is a painful prelude to the act itself, which must come eventually. The truth is that selfishness is the one sensible attitude: each photon for himself.

  But cynicism sits uneasily on my absent shoulders.

  Time passes, will pass, has passed…

  I see that we have just entered an alien solar system together. The star at the centre of this family of planets is a typical yellow ball; the photons it gives off call greetings to us as we pass in opposite directions. I hope it won’t be our luck to fall into the star itself.

  There are at least eight worlds orbiting that hub.

  We have passed several gas giants and seem to be heading directly for a small blue globe wisped with white. I turn to my friend and say, “Well, our destination appears to be on the surface of that oblate spheroid. Have a soft landing, dear Lux! The best of luck!”

  “A soft landing to you also, friend Glo! Farewell!”

  We chuckle with mildly bitter irony…

  The statistical chances of having the right soft landing are so small it’s impossible to calculate them, for there is only one kind that’s suitable and it relies on a chain of bizarre physical, chemical and biological fl
ukes, but it’s traditional to shout out the formula:

  “A soft landing to every photon in existence!”

  Lux and Glo: comrades to the end…

  And then we are screaming through the atmosphere of this world and a blink of time later I suddenly find myself passing through something hard but transparent, a lens, and I hear poor Lux’s anguished cry as he smashes into the opaque rim that I have avoided.

  I am inside the telescope for the briefest of instants; I pass through the second lens and now attain what every photon scarcely dares dream of, a soft landing! A cushioned crash into the open eye of an alien astronomer! Why have I been chosen for this honour?

  There is no answer to that question. It doesn’t matter. I strike the retina of the stargazer and with infinite cosmic bliss I’m absorbed into a spongy organic paradise. But this is not a paradise of the dead. My collision seeds new life, birthing the concept of a far star.

  For my arrival in his eye after such an epic voyage has fired impulses in the optic nerve of the astronomer and those impulses are speeding on a journey, considerably shorter than mine, towards his curious brain. And when they arrive they will fertilise his mind.

  And he will fall back from his telescope for a moment and reflect that he has discovered a new sun in a distant constellation but, in fact, that sun is a child, an idea planted in his imagination, and he will communicate it to others like him and so the child will grow.

  This is how stars reproduce. My mission is accomplished.

  Gathering the Genial Genies

  Too many of my tales have begun in the same way so I feel obliged to do something different with the opening sentence of this one, but I don’t know what. There was once a man who collected genies. He was a very wealthy and influential individual and he spared no expense or effort in acquiring new specimens to add to those he already owned. But one day he bought a bigger house in a better land and he decided to move his entire collection across the open ocean.

  He had already travelled ahead in an aircraft and was waiting in his new home for all his furniture and other possessions to arrive. And, although he was slightly nervous of flying, he had arranged for the wings to be sprinkled with salt and vinegar, thus making a plain crash impossible. He was rich enough for puns to have a beneficial effect in the real world, something that most people will never be able to afford. He waited in a rocking chair on a terrace.