Buzzkill
I need a photo-opportunity. I want a shot at redemption.
The words on the stone were faded, and the crack running down the centre did its best to obscure the message, but after several moments’ careful studying, I was able to decipher it as such. As I stood thinking, a loud noise, insistent on my eardrums, began. The flies were obviously back. I turned around to swat them, it needed doing, and found myself enveloped in swathes of strange white cloth. The noise of the flies continued, and only upon looking around did I see the red digital numbers, 7.05. It was sometime afterwards that I realised that the thing to which they were attached, and from whence came the noise, was – had been – called an alarm clock. As I stood up, perplexed, I thought only of how apt a name it was, for the noise filled me with a dread which was made all the worse by my lack of understanding it, as though it had issued from a dream that was nevertheless one of an imminent waking-world threat. Thus it alarmed me even more greatly when, with no thought in mind of doing so, or even planning as such, I stretched out my arm and pressed a button on the alarm clock’s surface, but only with the very tip of my finger, as though afraid of the device, and I withdrew my finger and my whole arm in the following instant as far away as I could without moving the rest of my body. My body had reacted as though the clock might have been hot, but I had felt no discernible temperature as I had touched it. Deciding to banish the thought until it chose to identify itself, I shook myself lightly, as though a dog in a featherstorm, and hastened to the long, curved mirror opposite. This, I thought, I knew why to do. Even the word for it came to my mind without the slightest hesitation, and without also the feeling of my alienation from not least the object but also the concept behind it. I believe now that, had I realised the truth of this mirror, I might have been led down a different path, or I might have led myself. But that was then neither here or there, and I stepped to within six inches of the thing and began to examine my reflection. I was a vain girl back then, and tossed my hair and twirled a little, pursing my lips at the thing as though seducing it. I know not to do that now with such objects, and I am out of practice in vanity: there has been no time for it down here. We have drifted apart, our species, and now even the most distant glance is a joy to behold, a single exchange of consonant the wet dream of a nymphomaniac. And dream it is, too, for we seem to have en masse forgotten how to be together. We are adrift in a sea of the impotent and half-forgotten. But I digress. I write too much, you see. It had to become a habit.
Does it begin? Does anything begin? We’re born, we die, and the cycle returns. I am caught in the spokes, and I cannot remember precisely where – or when – my life felt linear. I barely even understand the word anymore, the world is looped so. But on the first loop – when, if the tape was not yet in play, I was at least ignorant of my place upon it – I was at universality. I think that was the word. Connection: that was the point. But I was intelligent too, and a tiresome consequentialist, and wished to make the world a better place. I loved my mind, and I loved my body, and my life. Back then, I knew what an alarm clock was. It was in my dream, the last true dream I had, where one feels (felt) different in it than how one did in what we used to call reality. It buzzed, you see, and that helped to wake me up. I was a heavy sleeper, facilitated in such by the predominance of afternoon-timed lecters. And lazier, a little, than I am now. None of the ringing for me, even then: I sickened of the sound before it was cool to hate it. Better for me the radio, or the buzzing, whichever came first. I forget, as I forget which faded last. What I do know is that back then I controlled the order: simply by pressing buttons.
I had been with my mother again, in the dream. We had never discussed fishing, she being somewhat of an environmentalist, and I, the consummate academic, useless with my hands to the point at which I still almost literally ebbed and flowed in swimming ability, at eighteen and with many a lesson behind me. But we were fishing, on a dark stream by a mountainside. I thought perhaps it was in Shetland, where we had once been to such a place. Now, of course, I wonder whether effect can so easily follow cause: whether there can be anything said any more of the subconscious, were it in fact not hokum in the old days. As such, did I dream of what I had seen, or were they random thought patterns? I wish I knew: it might help me to miss my mother, instead of lying awake wondering if the light at the back of my eyes is her, or just the suncrest.
I had written of that time: She caught a haddock, and filleted it in front of me. She said, “See, my love, how nature is wonderful”. It does not make sense, and yet I find that, every sunadir, I dwell upon it. The strangest thought comes to mind: it is almost gibberish: “Had them I hell, them a peony.” Flowers for the damned, perhaps? I don’t know. Please ignore the ink stain here: it is difficult to concentrate when the lights go out, I am only still writing for two reasons: I am hardened with the years, and will worry about only what I feel against me; and I want it to be known what I do. I shall fetch a bulb from the garden. If I don’t come back, I would not wish you to worry. If you can worry, or understand the word, that is. Everything is not so simple anymore. I do not want to leave it open-ended.
(Beyond Acquiring Kinetic)
A strange phrase, that, but no matter. I must press on. Time is Nothing any more, and Nothing is worse than short, for understanding. I realise that my writing is a veritable Sunzorbit of ellipses, but the Dyer Log is long since lost in Chris knows what number dimension, its author faded back into the shredded tunnel from whence he came so long ago, and I can only do my best.
It was then that the whistling came, and I scratched my pen against the parchment’s surface; more ink spilled out, but the lights brightened all of a sudden, and the ink was washed away before them before it could settle. A fissure had opened in the darkness, and Eloise came towards me, dressed in her denim jacket as so already-seen, with the stringless bead of hearts around her neck. In a world with no connection, I didn’t notice that. It had been a long time since I had remembered that I could know another being, and I smiled as she strode up to me, seemingly touched by the oblivion surrounding us; such that it rendered her unaware of it. It was several seconds before I noticed that the whistling appeared to be issuing from her mouth. It was then for the first time that the old dream-state blared into my mind, crossing realities with mine, for I knew my Aristotle as I was taught, the Absolut. Homosexuals can’t whistle. All of my dream-flies were four-legged, and they buzzed at me still louder in the face of the paradox. I made as though to swat at them, and Lissa smiled. “There’s nothing there, Chan,” she said, breathing slowly as she had since reading the release. “You’re hallucinating. It’s too long spent in this awful darkness.”
I was flabbergasted. Nobody had had a word for the oblivion for Chris knew how long. “You can see it?” I asked. Once upon a time that might have been, “You can say it?”, but I was too shocked to recall which was right, or if anything was right.
Lois merely tossed her long golden hair out of her eyes, and smiled at me. “You’re in prison, Chan. Though you can get out of it.” I stood silent: the concept of freedom was long since lost on me. “You need to come outside, away from the fire. It’s too hot for you, and you’re wilting. This is an asylum, and I want to show you the garden. Can you come?”
I took her hand: it seemed the natural thing to do, but I had no hope of enlightenment. Even the words hope and enlightenment were meaningless to me. Everything, and I mean everything, is disjointed here: it goes in loops, and is frequently frustrating, and fragmented, and nonsensical. All I had in those moments was the image of a dolphin leaping, and settling itself in a fishbowl, the undimensionality of that image not registering with me. Suddenly, light flooded the world, and I blinked heavily. “Don’t worry, Chan,” the girl leading me said. “The angels’ rays do infect so.” I remember that she led me, the strange girl, to another fissure, the word fissure occurring to me only as we arrived. There were strange symbols gouged upon the rock wall, symbols I recognised across the aeonous moments, though I could not name them then, but only their components: the first, an ellipse atop a vertical line; the second, to its right, a triple crest, drawn as though evoked by the shape of the Sunhill, yet made of a perspective that seemed to be roaring upwards. Involuntarily, I moistened my lips as I passed, and only then remembered that I was thirsty. I asked the girl in front of me, who was standing taking in the sun as though bathing in it. It was sunadir, and the tip of the hill reflected the Sun’s rays so as to obscure the top of her head, bouncing off it to give it the half-obscured look of a halo. “What are those?” She paused her bath, and turned and smiled at me again, the indulgent smile of a familiar aunt visiting a favourite niece. “Don’t worry about that, Chan,” she said. “He’s just trying to get into her house, but all she wants is coffee.” These words both did and didn’t make sense to me, and I remembered, then, so much of what had gone before: I remembered the man who had had the same problem, of how Michigan had seemed like a dream to him now (or was it a friend of his? I remembered only the Dyer Log, and that had been a lyric, which the Log eschewed), and I suddenly understood the dream, and who I was, where I had come from. The Earth was revealed to my mind, and I understood that the Sun was supposed to rise, and to set, to be periodically invisible, and to travel the sky in some path feistier than an eastwardly ellipse. The Earth had turned. Where I was now, then, was shrouded still in mystery. I didn’t know. But I knew this, and I write so that you may too be free:
I was and am a daughter of the 21st century, born on planet Earth, third out from the sun Sol, in the Galaxy’s western spiral arm. I remember waking up in the morning and walking my dogs down by the pond, I remember how my mum and dad used to kiss me goodbye as I walked to the bus stop, how my uncle used to make some crack about the bullies, how my mum would shoot him a quizzical look, just before the door would close behind me. I remember the grimy purple bus, and Caitlin, Mike and Salvin, their respective calorie-counting, waterboarding and Johnson Partnership-hating. Those were their favourite topics that last summer, anyway. I never saw the problem with the Johnson Partnership myself. The score of years had been kind to coalitions, and though this one was a No Swearing Arse Party of a particularly high and surprising order, I felt that their programmes had been working. I remember how we were breaking up for the end of school, of how hot it was. I remember how Caitlin had been reading the Dyer Log, how Mike had munched a pre-film snack before our plans that evening to see And The Key to the Love Room, which was enjoying its third week at the top of the box office, despite all the pre-press waffle of franchise-killing and non-necessity. It had been Salvin who had looked up, across whose face had spread a most peculiar expression, almost as though ile was revolted, scared even, by an injustice of terrible proportions. All I recall is a bright white, purple light, if that makes sense. It is difficult to recall, for unbidden to mind comes at its heels the phrase, Ah mon Dieu, tu as tué Salvin, tu batardes! I don’t know French, and the recall is vague and uncomfortable, with an even vaguer feeling of subtle, awful wrongness, and as such helps to shroud the events in mystery. It was only after Lois led me from the Cave that I was able to remember what I had remembered in its aftermath: what the news reports had taught me in the olden world. It must have been The Cataclysm.
The Cataclysm was not the end, of course. I was at high school when it happened, and as I have told, I was later at university, before the days of the Second World, and of the Cave. It’s important for you to understand what’s real: whenever I was imprisoned, it was coated with a tiny film of unreality, one which I could only see, in retrospect, after it had been cast aside. But for my realities, I knew who I was, and I knew the world. I only floated in its waters, when I visited them for holidays, with Mum and Dad and Uncle Vernon – sorry, Craig. It is the strangest association, that I mistake his name as such on every occasion I think of it, even here, where my past is so clear in a world of present indefiniteness.
It was then that I remembered that last dream again, the one with the Cuotation on the headstone after my mother had fished for me, Had them I hell, them a peony, and I had studied the gravestone only to wake up in my fully comprensible Fleet bedroom (was it Fleet? All I remember, location-wise, is how cold it was, and I think at these moments, are the Cult of Cuotos influencing again? Perhaps it was Southampton? Yes, that feels more right, with the marina and the three sick steps across the water, the child screaming in the dark and covering it up in front of her friend, so as not to scare him.
Thoughts overwhelmed me as Lois and I sat at the Cave’s edge, yet at the same time seemingly only inches from the stream which I could see at the mountain’s foot, below the first swell of the Sunhill. She stroked my shoulder lightly, comforting a long-time pined-for prisoner, and I shivered with the sudden cold of realisation. The Dyer Log was lost, and it must be reclaimed, if the Universe were to be complete again. The real Acacic Record within my grasp. Odd to think that so stupid a brawl could have spawned so great an insight.
Still my thoughts were jumbled, and I had no strategy, no sense of what I was to do or why I was to do it. Lois took my hand, and gently guided me back around until I was looking at the edifice out of the fissure in which she had just brought me. Three titanic angels were carved into its granite surface, towering upwards to such an extent that their glaring, haughty faces were scarcely visible as more than distant, unreachable, unfathomable omens of doom.
She gently took hold of my upper arms around the inner elbows, and looked into my eyes, and I saw then, behind hers, a glimmer of understanding. I was transfixed: there was something important I had to do. And then she breathed deeply, as though exhaling all of the spring breeze in the world, and I felt flushed with life, the answer seeming to dance on the tip of my tongue, and then Lois was there, her mouth on mine, and I was alive with full realisation at last: she gave it back to me, what I had lost, and the mountain fell away, and the last of the dream-state lifted. When I looked around again a second later (for a sense of time had now returned to me), Lois was standing feet from me across the small stream in which I could see the haddock leaping, and the mountain reared behind me taller than before, further away, so that I could no longer see the fissure in the rock, and the angels’ breasts were mere outlines in the haze. It was better down here, with their disapproval inevident. I looked at Lois, who was kneeling by the stream, scooping herself water. I looked at her in gratitude, unable as of yet to find the words. She drank greedily, looked up and shrugged. “You wanted me to keep it for you while you died,” she said, matter-of-factly, and I nodded. “You’re a good kisser, even when you’re not trying”, she added. Then, crossly, “Why aren’t you gay?”
I shrugged again, and smiled. “I’m sorry, hon.” A thunderclap issued suddenly from the mountain, and the two of us looked up in apprehension, for the day’s weather had, until that point, been no worse than overcast. Nothing had forewarned us of the sudden change, and I felt a chill run down my spine. I felt as though I had been, for whatever reason, and by whatever agency, reproached. Maybe it’s too late... I forced the thought away, and bent and shouldered my pack. She shouldered hers, and beckoned, still smiling. I stepped across the stream to join her, and the haddock passed through my feet, soaking my socks. “Let’s go to work,” she said. I ignored the déjà vu, and followed her, leaving the Angels behind where they belonged. That chapter of our lives was over.
It was mostly grassland, that day. The two of us saw the occasional buffalo, and other than my remarking once on one’s uncanny resemblance to Sandra DeTamble (was that her surname?) the day passed without much event. Eventually, the grassland ended, replaced by soft sands, light brown and crisp in strange evocation of a chip, and with the Sunhill left far behind us the day darkened to what, on a more familiar Earth, would have been a late summer’s evening, with this world’s faint stars hanging over us like planets, the strips of turquoise sky like a latticework between them.
After we had travelled under these bodies for half an hour or so, warming ourselves from their faint light in the Sun’s new not-utterly-absent invisibility, Lois pulled a blanket out of the hammerspace beneath her rucksack, a blanket that I recognised: red with purple diamonds crisscrossing it at the corners, and purple lines in the same shade a hash sign framing the edges. She sat down, and I followed as she took out a thermos and shook it, eliciting a muted, bulky sloshing sound. “Listen to that, Chan!” she said, enthusiastically. “That’s coffee!” I noted the absurdity of the stress, but I had not had coffee since I had remembered its existence, so shortly earlier, and I drank eagerly the half she offered me. I did not notice the paradox at the time, but shortly therafter, I fell asleep. Alis stayed awake, I learned later. She doesn’t sleep so much any more.
I dreamed the dream again, more prominent than it had been in – I laughed later at the words that rose to mind - Chris knew how long. Chris was smart. He knew a lot of things. You didn’t get to be a celebrity for nothing in our world. You had to know stuff. My mother, the uber-vegetarian, gutted the haddock and handed it to me, and I felt its solidity in my hands before laying it onto the stone beside me. The scene dissolved, as it always did, and I found myself in the thick grass of the graveyard. But this time, I saw a different grave, newer and less cracked, though moss was spreading over it in swathes. I bent to look at the inscription. It was important: it had something to do with the Dyer Log, and I had to know what it said.
And the pattern still remains, on the wall where Darkness fell,
And it’s fitting that it should, for in Darkness I must dwell.
This rang a bell with me, though I could not think whence from. I tried to read the final two lines, but they were lost in ground moss. I took comfort, though, even in my dream, in that this was the confusion of the old world, the inner bell that rang one of forgetfulness, not the forced distortion of the Cave which, seconds later, caused me to wake in a cold sweat, as I would for so long after leaving it. I awoke with only one thing in my mind besides the detail of the dream: an image of my grandfather, before the Cataclysm, guitar in hand, smoking his pipe.
It was a cool morning. I saw Lois, lying asleep just above the high tide line, her hands laid together beneath her head as though praying. I remember because she looked content. It’s a rarity to be savoured. Beyond her, about a hundred feet away, nearing low tide, the sea washed up and down. I noticed that we were both lightly wet, and reasoned that the sea must have been at its height earlier, and reached us across the distance. It was difficult to remember the rules about this place, and I sat a moment in the early morning purple, watching the sea and Lois, trying to figure it out. Once it came to me, I knew what I had to do. I stripped off my blouse and trousers until I stood only in my underwear, and I plunged, cotton and all, into the sea.
It made no sound. Even the world beneath the waves was silent, and the only variation of the view was the vague patch of darker green in the middle distance. I swam towards it, flicking my tail in anticipation I knew not from whence came, and not until I reached the mermaid statue did I realise what I had become. I had no time to reflect on what this meant, on the unreality of it all, for the statue, for all that it appeared made of marble, bucked suddenly, and the world shifted to the left. I was thrust around as though trapped in a revolving door, and I was suddenly in the forest outside home. My natural proportions were restored, Lois was slumped against a tree, deeply asleep, some twenty feet away, and I was digging up the soil as soon as I saw the ribboned oak tree. We had buried it here, all five of us, and the Cataclysm had ended our plans to dig it up.
I dug for what felt like hours, but it felt as though there was a mental roadblock in my way; for every foot of earth I ploughed through, another nine or ten inches seemed to take its place, and before long I was sweating in the hot sun and getting nowhere. I took time out to breathe, the sweat licking around my face like humid flame as I pushed my hair out of my eyes. My last sight was Lois, thirty feet away from me now as I leaned back against my own tree, before I followed her into slumber.
Dreams have plagued me since Lois led me from the Cave. In nine years I haven’t gone a night without one of which I remember at least some detail, but this one was - then and later – different. I stood and watched my old, blissfully ignorant self, and my old friends, and I remembered how it was for us, and lost my sleeping self in the past.
***
The first girl, tall and blonde, wiry-haired like a six-foot human terrier, and with an energy to match, comes bounding across the clearing, turning occasionally to beckon to those behind her. She is in fantastic shape, and knows it: the product of regime upon regime of strict exercise, and she is buoyant in her health. Today, however, it is her mind which she celebrates: she has something to share with her more lumbering friends, and it must be shared quickly. The first two followers break into the clearing behind her, and she turns and smiles at them. A shorter girl stops and, panting, clutches at her chest, but the blonde’s face does not show concern: she knows the dance too well. “Lois,” she says, as a hard-nosed boy pulls up behind her, the two’s heights to within an inch of each others’, “you’re fine. You do yoga.” Then, not unkindly, “Get a grip on yourself. You’re going to need it for this.” Identical expressions of intrigue cross the boy and girl’s faces. The girl starts forwards, but her younger companion turns and takes a stride back towards the trees from whence the trio came. “Oy, you lot!” he bellows, and a quintet of sparrows take flight at this alien volume. “Get a move on, she’s showing us it.” A few seconds, during which the short girl’s gaze does not waver from the hole beside the tree to which her brother’s back is turned, and the blonde girl, equally oblivious, has fallen to her knees and is scrabbling in the dirt, pausing only on occasion to push the bottoms of her shorts away from the muddy ground and its rough tree roots. By the time two final figures appear from around the trees, only thirty seconds have passed since the short boy shouted, but the blonde has already made a hole a foot deep with a combination of her hands and the short trowel lying on the other side of the tree at whose roots she has been digging. Suddenly, just as the faces of the furthest two (a similarly tall girl with grime-streaked red pigtails and glasses; and a smirking boy of five-eleven wearing a green school blazer over dark blue tracksuit bottoms (and under a shockingly short black haircut - one that would likely place him in the military were he not wearing school uniform)) come into focus, the much closer face of the blonde lights up. She thinks she has found what she is looking for, and a second later she gives the Greek voice to her thought. “Eureka! I told you Craig and Clara hid it somewhere here!”
The quartet of followers press forwards, intrigued. In particular, the blazered boy looks thunderstruck, as though he had been certain it was all a hoax, the trick of a high-minded exuberant, who seeks just to prove she can be followed. But the girl is serious. She is unearthing something from beneath the tree, and she straightens up with it clasped, babylike, in her arms.
“What is it?” breathes the first boy, the shouter, whose amazement can be heard sheerly in his reduced volume. The blonde turns and looks at him smugly, as if she has just been voted Super Queen of All the World, the Chieftainess of beauty. “Evidence,” she says. “I told you I could prove it.”
The furthest two have caught up now, and the blazered boy rubs his eyes in disbelief. “You’re kidding me”, he breathes. “No way that’s real. What did you drug me with?”
But the blonde only smiles more broadly at these words, and the watcher’s sense would be that she is revelling in life, and in herself. “Nothing, Mike,” she says, calmly, clinically, the queen of science. “You can all see the discrepancy right here.” She turns back to Mike, and the silvery blue badge on her shirt glints in the sun beneath her smile. “Why deny the obvious, child?” she says. “That’s not here. That’s not anywhere we know. The red mist, the sea going up and down instead of back and forth.”
Mike is stubborn. He is unconvinced. “You’re photo-shopping it,” he says. “Or mirrors...or...” The girl holding the object purses her lips, she thinks of saying “One mirror, Mike, and look behind you: what is it reflecting?”, but there is no need: with a glance behind him he has seen that nothing in the glass is a reflection, and he turns away a little, shooting back the occasional half-glance at the mirror in the blonde’s dirty hands, as though afraid of it, but unwilling to turn his back on it.
The girl who came with the blazered boy brushes her hair out of her eyes, and cleans her glasses. “Wow,” she breathes. “What should we do about it? Tell someone?”
The short girl turns and frowns at her. “Who could we tell?” she says, but a keen listener could know: she knows the answer, and the last girl knows it too; she hesitates before she speaks. “M – my parents, maybe?”
Mike scoffs quietly. The girl who spoke rounds on him, but Lois gives a little cough, and nods to the blonde, who stands and stares at the mirror as she speaks.
“We can’t tell your parents, Cait, you know that. They’d want to check it out, and they wouldn’t be able to keep it secret. The FAQers’d find out. Those FAQers” – the group sniggered briefly – “know everything, if you only so much as show it to them.”
After much further bickering, the quintet come to an agreement: they will guard their newfound treasure, and keep its secret. The girl who holds the mirror slips it into her jacket pocket, and then, with no more than the occasional glance between select members of the five, they move on with their lives.
By the next day, the mirror is deliberately half-forgotten.
The next day after that one, comes the cataclysm.
And that strange world within the mirror is where she wakes up, that girl with the mirror in her pocket, and she is in its pocket, or so she thinks on first recognising her surroundings. She is a level-headed girl; she would have thought to have been set up in a mirror-world-mimicking place as a prank by others of the five, but for the fact that the contents of that mirror world are so impossible to duplicate. She neither thinks it is because of the cataclysm, because she does not remember the cataclysm, except in distant, blurry nightmares forgotten on waking, and she will not remember it in clarity for a long time.
And that, of course, is when the alarm clock goes off, and, for a time after that, of course, she remembers nothing. Certainly the real world is hidden from her. Because they need it to be.
The FAQers.
***
I will find the Dyer Log. And I will find the others. And I will be back.
Bzzzzzzzzzzz.
I can get up, and switch it off, and it doesn’t affect me any more: the world is still my own, my one original.
I will be back.
