Playing the faggot

White: purity, forgiveness, eternity White is the highest virtue on the Neverhood. It is associated with good, as in having good faith (trusting transgressions were made in error and not in malice) or a good nature (being ready to let go of negative emotions and grudges). White is thinking in the long term, not poisoning the well, not creating any more evil than you have to. White makes eternal life possible, although outsiders commonly confuse it with naivete and childlike outlook.

Red: passion, games, novelty Red is the virtue of keeping oneself and one’s friends entertained. Red stands for everything new and exciting. It spurs Hoodians to refine old games and invent new ones, and it leads their hand to create ever more sophisticated works of art. Red is what makes your heart race. It makes you want to see another day. Red keeps eternal life interesting. To outsiders, it makes Neverhoodians appear reckless and starved for novelty.

Brown: patience, skill, law Brown is the quiet virtue of doing the same boring thing every day and still doing it well. A brown Hoodian finds comfort in routine, and he follows rules and habits even if he thinks they’re a bit silly. He is consistent, fair, and has a good grip on himself. Brown is about dealing gracefully with the repetitiveness of eternity. It isn’t readily visible to outsiders, but it can be inferred from the fact that Neverhoodians haven’t all gone mad yet.

White-red-brown moral code When the myth of white-red-brown personality traits began emerging, Hoborg co-opted it to teach his sons about the virtues they should cultivate. To lead a happy eternal life, one needs all three: purity, passion, and patience. Ideally, they should come in equal measure, but in practice one colour often dominates and one recedes. Let’s take the triplets as example.

Krevel: Patient (brown) and invested (red). Krevel’s greatest strength are long-term projects, such as making maps of the underground every ten years. He has both the zeal to start them and the grit to finish them. His idea of personal growth is, however, very un-white. White teaches us we were already made perfect. Krevel believes, in contrast, that we were born careless and stupid, and only become good through lived experience. This causes him to hold on to grudges (his personal mantra is “an evil forgotten is an evil repeated”), and the more bad things he remembers, the more terrified he is of the evil he is yet to cause. This is not a mindset equal to facing eternity.

Nike: Truthful (white) and principled (brown). Nike’s brothers look up to him for leadership, because they know Nike will always stay his course. He isn’t easily distracted by passions and cuts right to the heart of things. His lack of red, however, makes Nike susceptible to boredom. Failing to appreciate the finer things in life, he feels as though living on the Neverhood forces him to go through the same loop every day. The entrapment (his “golden cage”) once exacerbated his claustrophobia to the point of constant panic and suicidal intent. Nike ultimately leaves the Neverhood, in part, because the great outside offers more variety. Having enjoyed meeting different people every day, Nike can no longer consider it a virtue to strike every last spark of enjoyment out of the thirty friends you’ve known all your life.

Nehmen: Passionate (red) and childlike (white). Having ample of the two most important Hoodian virtues, Nehmen feels right at home on the Neverhood. He is a party boy. He could charge straight on and years would roll by without him noticing. However, Nehmen cannot lose himself in fun and friends all the time, and the breaks between parties are where his lack of brown emerges. Nehmen isn’t good at taking care of himself, nor of his friends and belongings. He keeps falling out with his pals because he said something he shouldn’t have. He can’t comport himself when he’s bored, becoming whiny and annoying. He relies heavily on Krevel for the mundane necessities of life, which eventually grows into a childish dependence that causes a rift between them.

Judging a book by its cover There is a strong common temptation to assign a Hoodian’s virtues according to his physical colours. Part of the reason why Krevel keeps himself obsessively clean is so his white clothes lend him some illusion of purity. The rainbow-coloured Guardians fell victim to this thinking for a long time, especially the green Arig, who was considered ugly and a cold unfeeling monster. The truth is, however, that you can’t judge someone’s personality from the colour of his skin. There are Hoodians whose temperament matches their appearance, and Hoodians whose looks have nothing to do with their virtues. The urge to conflate the two is ever-present, but the real colours of virtue are always on the inside.

White is the best, obviously Hoodians perceive a hierarchy and interaction between the three colours of virtue. White and red are locked into a rivalry where being too white stops one from being too red and vice versa. (Consider these dualities: innocence versus sin, tranquillity versus force of feeling, forgiveness versus fury.) Brown is the third wheel which moderates this primary antagonism. Ultimately, one needs brown the most to get through every day. But brown is an unassuming virtue. White is ostentatious in its association with good. Red is prominent and eye-catching. Brown is the Cinderella, the ugly sister. Nobody wants to be boring. But sometimes you’ve got to regulate the insanity and ground yourself in the prosaic reality of life. Sure, you could cut your head off, but then you’d miss dinner.

White, Red, Brown The game White, Red, Brown provides grounds for philosophical debate of the three virtues. A player is prompted to name something, say, white. Then he must explain why he thinks it’s white. (Example: “Gratitude songs are white because we sing them exactly the same way every year. Plus they praise our creators!”) If his answer is deemed satisfying, the successful player asks his neighbour to name something of a different colour. Players take turns until they can’t think of more original answers or until the debate turns into a fight.

Colours of vice While the inversions of white, red and brown aren’t used nearly as much in common parlance as the colours of virtue, they do carry negative connotations and can be used to symbolise bad personality traits or bad events.

Black: bad blood, malice, evil Black is the wellspring of evil in the world. Watching the black sky means one is yielding to evil thoughts. Looking into the watcher’s black eyes is unsettling; brushing her black hair brings ill luck. Calling someone black is calling him rotten, hopeless, and best to be avoided.

Green: disfigurement, sociopathy, sickness Green is all that is stunted and lacks vigour. Calling someone green is calling him vegetative, made wrong, inhuman. A green person sucks the life out of others. He never smiles. He is not evil by intention, but because he cannot love. He must be cured, fixed, before he can live with others.

Blue: depression, despair, weakness Blue is the crumbling of one’s life, the inability to walk under its weight. Blue accessories are sometimes worn as a plea for help: I’m feeling terrible, save me. Blue is the least negative of the colours of vice, and the most common one. “Feeling blue”, unlike “feeling black” or “feeling green”, is a turn of speech a Hoodian may describe himself with.

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The Ones Who Can't Choose

Hoborg, son of Quater and the king of the Neverhood, made his sons so that they could choose between good and evil. Their freedom of morality is what separates them from lesser beings made of best klay. Animals which can’t understand speech, made for taming and eating. Beings who can talk but cannot think past their lot in life. One should remember that having a lively discussion with someone doesn’t make him a person. Not all are owed favours. Not all must do public service. Not all can choose their destiny.

That is what I was told.

These are stories about the ones who can’t choose.

Hammerboy

We don’t really appreciate how simplified Willie’s story is. Hoborg never called his world the Neverhood until he woke from his helpless sleep. Klogg spent months choosing between good and evil before he made a grab for the crown. And Hoborg wasn’t the only one on the Hood who made things.

Take the Cannon as example. The Cannon was Klogg’s pet project. It was the firstborn who envisioned it, designed it, and assembled it. All Hoborg did was create the parts. But it wasn’t a collaboration so much as a struggle for control. To Klogg, the choice between good and evil took the shape of deciding who was more fit to rule, Hoborg or he. As the two got to know each other, both became convinced they would make for the better king, and they were out to prove it. That’s why it made Klogg so bitter when his father put a plague at the foot of the Cannon: This cannon monument was put here by Hoborg.

Hammerboy was another joint creation.

Why did Klogg ask his father to make a dwarf whose chief delight in life would be smashing people with a hammer? Well, I think he’s always been a fan of slapstick. He found the Hood dull. Hoborg was putting his next son off until Klogg had made his choice, and Willie wasn’t Klogg’s type, to put it mildly. Maybe he wanted to tempt his father into creating something truly violent. At any rate, Klogg loved Hammerboy. He played with him for hours, and when he was tired of getting flattened, he instigated the dwarf to ambush other residents of the Hood.

Hammerboy can understand English, but usually he doesn’t bother to listen. He sounds like he talks, but what he says is gibberish. He doesn’t even have words for “yes” and “no”. He just mimics the cadence and tone. When he needs to get something across, he uses pantomime. Sometimes he’ll grin at you so wide that all of his teeth are showing and brandish his hammer in the air. I think at those moments, he’s contemplating smashing your head. Or your chest. They must be sweet thoughts.

I don’t think he’s malevolent, though. Hammerboy lives for the moment the bones crack and the flesh splits. He hits once. He marvels at his work.

Once when I was a one-day-old, I was passing through his territory, and he managed to break my legs so expertly that I couldn’t get back up. I am not as immortal as most Hoodians. It hurt like hell. I was crawling on my elbows to the entrance when Hammerboy stood in my way with his hammer. He grinned wide. I covered my head.

Nothing happened.

When I looked up, Hammerboy was inspecting my legs. He pointed at my shattered left knee. He poked it. I yelped. Hammerboy looked at me in wonder. He sat down next to me. Carefully, he aligned his hammer by his hand so he could grab it easily, and he waited for my legs to heal.

When my left knee finally stopped popping, I tried to move. Gingerly I stood up. Hammerboy shuffled over to me and patted my knee. He looked up at me, brandished his hammer and grinned.

I shook my head. “No. I’m sorry, Hammerboy. I’m not playing.”

Hammerboy made a disappointed sound… and he left.

Since then, I fancy Hammerboy always pauses when he sees me. He seems to be asking: “Are we playing?”

The Clockwork Beast

There is no story sadder than The Battle of Robot Bil. When it comes to the final “Waahhh! Bil, hang on!”, half the audience is usually crying. The antagonist of that story is none other than the fearful Clockwork Beast, Klogg’s masterwork. It was the only one of his creations that came alive. He put so much wrath into it that it was animated with the sole wish to hurt Big Robot Bil.

The Beast was made to scare Willie out of rebellion. The hoophead never went straight for Hoborg’s crown, but he did get inside Bil’s chest once. He flipped his friend back to “good” and they strode toward the Castle, shouting that they’d throw the bad man off the Hood. Sadly, Klogg summoned the Bear Retrieval Unit and distracted Bil for long enough that he managed to climb inside the robot himself. He punched Willie, drove Bil back into his hole and set him to “bad” again. Afterward, he set out to build the Clockwork Beast. He paraded it in front of Willie and described in gruesome detail what the Beast would do to Bil if it was ever activated. Willie was so terrified that he never dared to revive Bil again. He was sure that the robot would die if he ever clashed with the Clockwork Beast.

He was right.

As sad as it is, The Battle of Robot Bil has a good ending. After Klaymen saved the Neverhood, he explained to Hoborg that Willie and Bil had been killed. By that time, Hoborg had spent years designing every detail of his future twenty-three sons and he couldn’t wait to get to it. But he didn’t hesitate to sacrifice two of his lifeseeds and bring his old friends back instead. Willie and Bil returned and everyone lived happily ever after.

If you ask Hoborg how exactly he brought them back, when it had been weeks since they’d fallen off the Hood, he’ll say that he has his creator ways. He won’t elaborate if you press him. He doesn’t want to call attention to the fact that Willie and Bil didn’t use to be made of best klay. It begs the question: What happened to the bodies which fell off the Hood?

There is no story scarier than Those Who Fell. I tell it in three ways, depending on how the audience is feeling. It always begins with Willie, panicking inside the dying Bil’s chest, putting out fires and fixing leaking oil tubes. He saves his friend’s life by the breadth of a hair, and together they fall through the black nothing. Days pass. They run out of water. They run out of food. They wait for somebody to get them, but nothing happens. The darkness parts and they fall through opalescent clouds, so fast that Bil is starting to come apart.

I look over my audience then. If they look sufficiently scared, I say that was when Hoborg summoned the souls of Willie Trombone and Big Robot Bil and implanted them into new bodies on the Neverhood. The old bodies became lifeless, and eventually shattered to a thousand pieces against a great land. A crater is all they left behind while the real Willie and Bil lived happily ever after on the Neverhood.

But if my listeners can take being a bit more scared, I tell the story in a second way. This time, Hoborg didn’t bother summoning souls from hundreds of kilometres away. Instead, he made the new Willie and Bil just like he remembered them, and called upon new souls to inhabit the bodies. Meanwhile, the old Willie and Bil continued falling. Through clouds, through empty space, among stars. They fell until they went mad… and then they shattered to a thousand pieces against a great land.

I look out again at this point and ask if my listeners want the scary story to go on. If they’re feeling particularly brave and say yes, the third version, the real horror, begins. Willie and Bil fall, but they survive the fall, broken and maimed. Willie repairs the robot enough that he can walk, and together they set out back to the Neverhood. The journey takes them centuries. They have much distance to cover, and finding their way through the Neverhood Nebula is nearly impossible. But in the end, they make it. “Take a look at the sky,” I say. “What is that speck over there? Is it not Big Robot Bil and Willie Trombone, or what is left of them? They will set foot on the Hood soon, and what will happen then? When they realise that nobody has missed them. When the old Willie comes face to face with the new Willie, an intruder who wears his likeness and memories, who has stolen his life eternal. What will blossom in his heart? Will he happily forget his sufferings? Or will bitterness overpower him, and will he hate us all?”

I tell all three versions of Those Who Fell, to make sure that no one considers it a true story. No one ever saw the old Willie and Bil. The Wall of Records never wrote of them. It’s entirely possible that the official story is true; that Hoborg summoned the bodies themselves and fixed them up with best klay. He made Willie forget the fall because it was a mercy.

Still.

And what about the Clockwork Beast? Hoborg never brought it back. It seems unlikely that now, centuries later, it is still falling. Perhaps it shattered to a thousand pieces against a great land. Perhaps it stalks Quater’s universe, thirsting for revenge.

We do not know.

Frenchie

Frenchie… is a giant bug. He should not, by any means, be counted among those who can’t choose, because he’s an animal. But Willie bothers me every time I tell these stories without including his best bug friend, so… here is Frenchie’s honorary chapter.

Frenchie became Willie’s BBF while hitching a ride inside Big Robot Bil. They were near the Mountain of Best Klay when they found the bug hiding under their bed. Willie took a liking to him and kept him as a pet. Frenchie tried to eat them several times, but he never did serious damage and Willie thought it gave him personality. Hoborg, for his part, was too happy to have Willie along to risk it all over a bug.

Now, the interesting thing about Frenchie is that he isn’t the original Frenchie. One day long ago, Kari Katur accidentally killed the giant bug. Frenchie sneaked up on him and swarmed all over trying to eat him, all legs and foul slobber. So, in a panic, Kari slung him against the wall and kicked him. He paused to see if the bug had had enough. He saw that Frenchie’s head was caved in. His legs were twitching in the air as he tried to roll over and skitter away. But in a while, that stopped. The bug was dead.

Kari was crushed. He apologised to Willie in tears, swore he hadn’t meant to. The hoophead clapped him on the shoulder and asked him to prepare a funeral feast. Bring a lot of bread, lettuce, and onions to where Frenchie’s body was lying, and invite the whole Hood. What Kari didn’t expect was that they would be eating the bug. Fortunately, Willie did most of the eating. He chewed slowly and sadly, while everyone else took a bite to pay their respects. Once nothing remained, Willie patted his belly and said: “Well, old friend! Now we be together forever.” And he took Kari to the Castle, and they asked Hoborg to create another Frenchie.

Thus it was learned that Hoborg had re-created Frenchie a few times already. The bug wasn’t durable enough for how dumb he was. Kari didn’t know what was worse. That he’d killed Willie’s friend, that he’d been forced to eat his remains, or that he had to deal with the bug again after he was dead.

Crit Unit A and Crit Unit B

I never had the chance to meet the two members of the Bear Retrieval Unit. They left the Hood before I was made. I’ve only heard stories about them and seen their likenesses. But I feel a sort of connection to them. I would have liked to talk to them. Like my brothers and me, they were off-worlders. They struggled with being accepted, and ultimately left paradise behind. You have to wonder what makes a man so miserable he’ll give up on life eternal.

Hoborg says that the two birdmen fell from the sky soon after he made the Hood. He nursed them back to health and offered them to stay, even if neither could understand the other’s language. In those days, the sky wasn’t black yet. Pearly clouds embraced the island. Each day, they gathered thicker and became darker. To the birdmen, it must have looked like the mother of all storms brewing. They shook their heads as they watched the sky, waiting for the thunder and the lightning.

It is said that the sky became pitch black on the day Klogg took Hoborg’s crown. The Everhood turned into the Neverhood. Willie became a fugitive. And the two birdmen were employed as the Bear Retrieval Unit.

I think this was the chief reason why Cua and Cub, as they came to be called, were never liked by the original twenty. They’d worked for Klogg, not by coercion but of their free will. They never tried to depose him. They were content to steal Bil’s Teddy Bear for him any time he wanted. They had obviously chosen evil. Even after Klaymen saved the Neverhood, they never tried to become part of the whole. They ate when someone cooked, but didn’t share their own food. They littered so profusely Hoborg had to instate daily public service. They broke into every room of the Castle and stole. I can just about see the jeers they got when they walked about. Everyone was wondering why Hoborg let them stay.

Eventually, Cua and Cub tamed a pair of glider birds and they flew into the darkness, never to return.

I haven’t always featured a chapter on the Crit Units in The Ones Who Can’t Choose. It felt like an insult. They were grown men from one of Arven’s worlds. They hadn’t chosen well, but they’d chosen. I changed my mind after Nike returned from his first journey. It was because he brought us a pack of cigarettes.

On the second day of the Three-Day Party, the 500th New Year’s Party which took three days, my brothers and I were dead tired. We had partied through the night and we didn’t want to go to sleep. We felt like if we did fall asleep, we’d wake up to see that Nike hadn’t returned; that it had only been a dream. So we burned midnight oil and kept the party alive. But after lunch of the second day, even our most loyal friends dropped off and only the three of us remained. Nike yawned, opened his chest compartment and said: “Help me out here.”

The inside of his chest compartment was an awful mess. He and Klogg had long since abandoned the good practice of storing only the necessary minimum. Nike said it was that prejudice which got them robbed. If they hadn’t kept their flying machines in the backpacks, they would have returned on time. For a while, sticking everything into their chests was safer and more convenient. Then the threshold of practicality was passed. Their chest compartments turned into jungles. Nike insisted that he knew exactly where everything was, but he also admitted something had died and rotten in there once.

So, on the second day of the Three-Day Party, we weren’t too surprised when Nike pulled out an extendable stick and told us to help ourselves to a souvenir. He’d give us directions where it was. We just had to find it and take it out. And not topple anything, please.

The request was embarrassing. Sure, he was our beloved big brother and he’d been off-world for a long time, but rummaging through his chest compartment was two steps too far. Nike didn’t help matters when he said Klogg and he did this for each other all the time. Nehmen and I were both all red when it was done, but under Nike’s instructions we managed to pull the thing out. It was a hand-sized paper packet, wrapped in plastic. Nike tore off the wrapping, opened the packet and offered each of us a slim cylinder with one end orange and the other white.

“These are called cigarettes,” he said. He fished a lighter out of his chest compartment (he kept that in the front). “They sell them everywhere. They’re made of dried tobacco leaves and they’re for smoking.” He put the orange end of the cigarette between his lips, covered his mouth with one hand and cracked the lighter aflame with the other. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Resting his hands in his lap, he let a long cloud of smoke out from the corner of his mouth. They were the casual movements of someone who’d done this a thousand times.

“Let me try,” Nehmen said and busily imitated him. Soon all three of us had burning cigarettes between our lips. The smoke tasted bad and made us cough, and Nike laughed and puffed and told us to savour it. It would prop us right up. And anyway, it was the last pack of cigarettes any of us would see in our lives.

Then he told us he’d just given us drugs. He spoke of those who smelled of tobacco smoke from morning till evening, who had to get up at night to smoke because they couldn’t sleep. He’d taken up the habit himself because it seemed cool, and then dropped it like a snake when he realised what it was doing to him. His fingers would itch for a smoke, and before he knew it, there was another cigarette in his mouth. He hated the loss of control, the idea that something else was pulling the strings. He said very few of those who started smoking more than a pack a day were able to stop. When you ran out and got cold turkey, you couldn’t think of anything else. He tried to quit three times before he managed to do it for real. And that was Nike, son of free will. He still kept this last pack of cigarettes, so that he’d have something to smoke while he lay dying in the dust.

Following Nike’s example, we crushed the orange ends of the cigarettes under our heels and returned to the Labs. That same day, the cigarette butts became a sensation. Many recalled that Cua and Cub had littered just such burnt things everywhere. The Hoodians on public service swept them away not knowing what they were.

And so we learned that the Crit Units had been tobacco addicts and that Klogg had kept them supplied with cigarettes. Hoborg didn’t know where his son had got tobacco plants, but he’d found crates of cigarettes in the Castle, hidden from both him and the Crit Units. New stashes were discovered months after Klaymen had saved the Hood. And then the last crate was gone… Cua and Cub left.

This is why I list the stories of the Bear Retrieval Unit here. I don’t think they were very free to choose, in the end.

Bernie the TV guy

On the ground floor of the Five-Pipe House, Bernie lives in a televisor suspended from the ceiling. His real name is Bernard, but most Hoodians call him the TV guy.

Bernie only has a head and two hands. He can turn and angle his TV, he can lean out of it a little, but he’s largely confined to its box. He’s like a clam living in its shell. His lot in life is telling jokes. He’ll tell them with great delight and wit and if no one talks to him, he gets sullen. He can’t think unless he can talk. His inner world stops turning when it isn’t lit by somebody’s attention.

A story is told about the TV guy, from the very beginning of the Fourth Age. When the original twenty saw the face in the televisor, they weren’t sure what to make of it. Bernie wouldn’t speak; he just stared toward the entrance door. When Klaymen walked in, he would gasp and smile and turn to follow him. It was clear he wanted Klaymen to do something. But he wouldn’t say what.

At last, Hoborg came to see what was wrong. He spoke to Bernie but was ignored like everyone else. So he said: “When you first came here, Klaymen, did he say something?”

Klaymen thought about it deeply. “Yes,” he said. “He said: ‘Hey Klaymen! Say knock knock.’”

“Well then?” Hoborg said amused. “Say knock knock.”

“Knock knock?” Klaymen said.

“WHO’S THERE?” the TV guy shrieked.

“Huh?” Klaymen said startled.

And the TV guy began laughing. Guffawing. Cackling so hard tears dripped on the floor. “Okay, okay,” he said, wiping his face with both hands, “have you heard this one? Ahem. Three logicians walk into a bar. The barkeep asks: ‘Will all of you be having a beer?’ The logicians look at each other. The first one shrugs and says: ‘I don’t know.’ The second one shrugs and says: ‘I don’t know.’ The third one turns to the barkeep and says: ‘Yes!’”

After five seconds of silence, Katcza began laughing. “I get it!” he said. “Because he asked if all of them were having a beer!”

“That’s right!” the TV guy snickered. “And have you heard this one?”

If you’re ever unhappy and in need of a distraction, Bernie is the one to see. Even when his jokes don’t land, he never gets discouraged. My brother learned from him and look how far he’s come. He’s almost as entertaining as the TV guy.

Big Robot Bil

I’ve been asked not to include Bil in this collection. While he lived on the Hood, he was venerated. He had kept Hoborg safe on his travels and he’d sacrificed his life to reinstate him as the rightful ruler. He even had his own rack of favours, though he didn’t have to do public service because he was too big for it. But the matter of the fact remains: Bil could not move the lever in his chest cockpit between “good” and “bad”. So, beloved and respected as he was, he wasn’t among those who can choose.

Bil is a builder by vocation. On the Neverhood, however, there wasn’t much for him to build from. For most of the time he spent here, he was simply bored. In the beginning, he’d walk around, careful not to step on anyone, and observe the little ones at their daily games. But by the time my brothers and I arrived, Bil rarely ever left his Pit. He’d play with his Teddy and hum, lost in thought. Willie said Bil was building in his head, designing a castle. There was no evidence, but we went with it. Bil didn’t speak beyond “me Bil”, and while he was skilled with toys and mock-ups, we never saw him perform the thing he was made for.

Bil stopped his brooding on the day Ottoborg first came to the Neverhood. He climbed out of his Pit and followed his king around like a gigantic puppy. When he learned that the world that had been shattered was a prosperous kingdom once more, he decided on the spot to travel to the Brokenhood and live his days out there.

They all set off together, Ottoborg, Bil, Willie and Caline.

Only Willie came back.

He said that the moment Bil had touched the ground of his new home, he began building. Working day and night, without pause as if he knew each brick by heart, he built a beautiful castle. Ottoborg moved in at once. Thus the first Brokenhood Manor came to be. It has been rebuilt many times since then, always by Bil. I think the old robot is very happy there, doing what he was made to do.

I don’t think he misses Willie half as much as Willie misses him.

Triangle and Square

Triangle and Square are brother and sister, as much as one can be in their circumstances. They are both beings confined to the darkness of a small tree-like object. The “tree crown” is conical in the case of Triangle; box-shaped in the case of Square. Like the TV guy, they can’t leave their “tree”. Or, in another sense, the “tree” is their body. Anyway.

Hoborg made Triangle and Square to help him with cooking.

Triangle is a wellspring of cooking recipes. Tell him the ingredients you have and he’ll whip out a recipe. He’ll explain all the fine details, like how long you need to simmer the butter before you dust it with flour, on how high a heat, in what kind of pot, with a spatula made of which wood and how long since the tree should have been cut down. He isn’t interested in discussing anything but food. If you don’t honour that basic courtesy, Triangle will be angry that you’re wasting his time. He’s called “the rude guy” a lot. But I prefer to call him by his name. He taught me how to make sandwiches with grapes and cheese, and for that I am forever in his debt.

Square, Triangle’s sister, was made to cook food. Her box has a front door and two round dials: heat intensity and time. If you put something into Square and turn the heat on, she’ll happily hum and purr and bob on her “trunk”. “Ding!” she’ll say when the timer is up. “Your food’s ready! Mmm, smells delicious!”

To be clear, Square has no sense of smell or taste. If you mishandle the dials, she’ll happily burn the food to a crisp. But, if you ask her nicely, she can tweak her heating system. She can heat the food uniformly, which is ideal for cooking. She can roast the food from above, which puts sandwiches on a whole new level. She can blow scorching hot air on the food, which makes potato chips absolutely delightful. Most Hoodians don’t cook with her, and she couldn’t serve the whole Hood in time anyway. So she usually stays in the Kitchen where she’s at Hoborg’s hand.

Triangle and Square hate each other.

I was still a one-day-old when I found you never mention one in front of the other. I told Triangle that I didn’t need to get zag wood, a tripod and a pot to boil potatoes – I could just put them into the microwave in the Castle Kitchen. Triangle spluttered before he managed to say: “Did the Serpent put you up to this? Well! So she thinks she can boil potatoes as well as salted water and zag wood! That’s it! I’m going to have a word with her.” And to my astonishment, Triangle pulled himself out of the ground and hopped toward the Castle. It wasn’t a talking tree, which I’d taken it for. It was a being with one leg that just didn’t like to move around.

Triangle and Square don’t have a way to hurt each other, fortunately. They just yelled at each other and headbutted their “treetops”. Triangle concluded that he’d never leave the North Plane again and hopped away. Square shouted after him: “As grumpy as Triangle!”

“As dumb as Square!” Triangle shouted back.

Since then, I take care not to mention to Triangle that I’m going to cook with Square, and I don’t tell Square I have the recipe from Triangle. Some Hoodians think it’s funny to make them fight, but I prefer to enjoy my food in peace.

The Serpent

Beneath the roots of the Spiky Tree, there lives a snake with two tails and no head. He’s two metres long and striped with yellow and green. He comes out on occasion and whispers to those who can choose. His purpose is to tempt them toward evil.

The catch with the Serpent is that he’s as dumb as Square. Hoborg wanted him to spark discussions about morality, not to actually turn someone. So the Serpent is hilariously bad at arguing. He makes for such an easy target that engaging him seriously brings no joy. He only has one friend, and that is Square. She lets the Serpent curl up on top of her, turns on the heat, and they chat for hours. Some say the Serpent’s influence is why Square burns food so often, and Square’s company is why the Serpent is so dumb. I find the duo interesting, though, because it’s emblematic of our customs around food.

We don’t cook much on the Hood. You don’t realise it when you live here, but the contrast is jarring when you visit the Brokenhood. So much time is spent preparing food there, not to mention growing it. Of course, we can’t stockpile food because it doesn’t survive the night. There’s no point in cooking preserves when the jars are going to be empty in the morning. But it goes deeper than that. Call me wrong but the less processed a meal is, the better it is for you, isn’t it? Case in point: should you eat mulberries whole, or leave the core? The burping is an inconvenience; the core is bitter and scratchy. But we still eat them whole. Because that’s how Hoborg made them. You aren’t supposed to improve upon perfection.

Except Hoborg also made Triangle, a well of recipes. He also made potatoes, beans and mushrooms, which don’t taste good unless they’re cooked. He tells us not to eat raw eggs and meat, although there are no health concerns except for the meat wriggling in your mouth. And we hold many traditions, such as weasel hunts or the Bread-Making Day, whose entire point is long and elaborate cooking. So what gives?

I thought of an answer while I was watching the Serpent and Square one day.

“I’m bored,” Square said.

“Let’s play White, Red, Brown,” the Serpent hissed.

“Okay. Name something brown.”

“Brown is to eat a sandwiches every day.”

“I heard that,” I said.

The Serpent hissed with delight, and I realised I’d been baited. Just as well.

“Can I join you?” I asked.

“Of course,” the Serpent said. “Krevel, name something white.”

“White…” I said, collecting my thoughts. “White is to be as you were made. If some sin grazes you, you forgive and forget until you become as you were when Hoborg made you. Full of wonder and good will. Now, Serpent, name something red.”

“Cooking is red,” the Serpent fired off.

“What,” Square said. “You just said cooking was brown.”

“No no,” the Serpent said, “cooking the same thing every day is brown. Cooking new things, delicious things, is red. The more effort you put into it, the more you spoil it. The better it tastes, the more sinful it is.”

“Red isn’t sin,” I objected. “Red is joy.”

“It is sin,” the Serpent said. “And I know of the reddest, tastiest fruit. It’s sweeter than mulberries. Do you want to know where it grows?”

“Is this about Hoborg’s crown?”

“Mmm,” the Serpent said surprised, “yes…”

“I’ll pass,” I laughed. “I know which fruit you’re speaking of. But you should also mention that it goes bitter in your mouth. And then you regret you ate it.”

When Klaya came to the Hood, she was in awe that no one had taken the moniker “the chef”. It was such low-hanging fruit, too. No one can cook. My daily sandwiches are considered fancy. I tried to explain to her that only that which came straight from the blessed ground was pure and safe. She scoffed at that. No wonder Triangle was so grumpy, she said. We’d mandated him evil and useless. She, for one, had five sons and she was going to feed them well.

Heather Lelache

I profess a stout love for Heather. Her initial characterisation is a “black widow” in the sense of having keen killing instincts (she’s a capable lawyer) and a hard shell of clacking jewellery. The latter seems as some sort of defensive armour, maybe? Heather thinks of herself in rather inhuman terms as a spider snaring its prey. It only comes home in retrospect that “black widow” also meant she was black (well, brown) and she was a widow. Heather is the love interest, the least crucial main character whose job is to witness the dualistic struggle between George and Haber. Le Guin does not, however, do her dirty. While it is quickly established that George likes Heather and vice versa, it does not immediately dominate Heather’s role in the narrative. She isn’t there as the love interest initially; she is there as a lawyer protecting her client, and doing it well.

Halfway through the story, Heather’s colour is removed, figuratively and literally. George dreams her back into the progressively utopian universe as a grey-skinned waifu whose sole narrative role is to comfort him. I was quite unhappy with this as it happened. The love interest character is reduced to providing pleasure to the male protagonist at last. However, at the end of the story George literally leaves the grey-skinned Heather behind. The reasons are unclear. He only says something in the vein of “you can’t follow me there”. In the new and final world spawned by Haber’s nightmare, George spends half a year searching for Heather in vain, only to bump into her by accident. She is brown again (in the sense of “right”), and though she has some recollection of him, she is hers only again and not his. Even if the narrative doesn’t explicitly confirm this, I decided to read the waifu as an imperfect fantasy which has to be discarded in the end in favour of the real woman. That’s encouraging.

Dr William Haber

I have a lot of sympathies for Dr Haber, too, even though he’s the villain of the story. He’s a doctor, I’m a doctor. He’s huge, I’m huge. He wants to make the world better, I want to make the world better. He won’t listen to anyone telling him he’s wrong, I’m also not great in that department. I can smell testosterone off the book pages he’s in and I bet his chest would feel great to lie on.

Dr Haber has a curious quirk for a psychiatrist who should probably let the patient talk: long monologues which completely take over the narrative. Sometimes you can reconstruct stuff happening in the background (“Will you lie down George? Very good.”) and sometimes characters interrupt the monologue with their own thoughts (mostly notes that the dear doctor sure is running his mouth). But usually these long paragraphs make the story grind to a halt as Haber talks and talks and talks. Now, it didn’t feel boring since “what the hell is Dr Haber thinking” is a pressing plot question and these monologues are an opportunity to try and read him. (Thank you, Le Guin, for giving us something to think about while reading the speeches.) But I think there’s a big reason for these monologues, other than showcasing one system of belief, to be pitted against George’s. It’s characterisation by showing, not telling.

Thing is, Haber is very masculine-coded. He’s all about progress and control and exploitation. Of course he loves hearing himself speak! He’s like everything male rolled into one character. His plot journey is linear and upward, promotion after promotion. He has boundless confidence. The first chapter is all him having quick judgements about George, which include “he’ll never amount to anything” and “he’s completely passive, like a woman or even a child, dear God”. He attempts to dominate George with threats, but he secures feeling good about himself while doing it, because he’s helping the world and benevolently letting George be a part of it. And ultimately… he’s wrong. He doesn’t “get it”. “It” being the main message of the novel, which is something like “just because you happen to have the power to change the world, doesn’t mean you should use it at will”. The book is a lovely critique of the masculine ideal, where power = good, more power = better, and power to change everything else to your image = best. There’s even some back-and-forth toward the end where Haber tries to blame the dystopian elements of his new utopia on George and George goes, rightfully: “Uh uh, doctor, you specifically designed your method so that I have no conscious control over it. The only one having intentions here is you, and so the bad stuff that happens without your intent is also your responsibility.” Haber sees himself unequivocally as good, as a paragon or bravery, as ushering humanity into a new, better era, as evolution on steroids. Man, he’s a manly man!

We don’t learn what exactly goes wrong when Haber tries to use his dreams to shape reality, but two reasons are implied. 1) Hubris. George talks twice about how self-hypnosis didn’t work for him; Haber boasts in reply that he can induce whatever dream he likes in himself. No no, with a few weeks of experience, he can control what a life-long haver of effective dreams grew to be terrified of. 2) He doesn’t ask for help. George goes out of his way to give the doctor advice. It’s not even fairytale advice in the vein of “yeah don’t look into any mirror but also I won’t explain why, because I want you to obey me blindly”. No, George lucidly explains that there are many aliens with effective dreams, and that they’ll help Haber to do it right. Haber even goes “yeah that sounds like a good idea, I might do that”. And then he doesn’t ask for help. Presumably because he wants the glory to be his alone. He isn’t punished by heroic tragic death. No no, that’s a male thing where wang bang, you’re dead, you don’t have to care anymore, now the survivors are legally obliged to honour your sacrifice. Haber is punished by forever looking into the chaos and void of what he created. You could say, in the same literal and figurative manner as that Heather loses her colour, that he’s condemned to looking into himself. I’m saving hopes for Haber to come out of his catatonic state one day, and through the humbling experience of utter dependence on others build a better model of “making good in the world”.

Even though Haber is a manly man, he does not partake in toxic masculinity. He’s even less sexist than Genly Ai, the manly man protagonist of Le Guin’s earlier novel The Left Hand of Darkness, who spent paragraphs on how repulsive and effeminate he found the genderless Gethanians. Haber is cordial, he laughs a lot, his aggression isn’t overt and he’s bisexual (though he is described as having encounters with “women” and “young men”, which makes me think he does not bottom, sadly). He’s a cool guy! And the narrative is very specific that he means well, that he wants to help, that he isn’t happy with the dystopic features of his utopia either. Haber’s hard to hate. He’s just wrong, and he doesn’t listen to anyone telling him so. Gosh I like Haber.

Final note: Being Czech and reading a Czech translation of the book, I pronounced his name in the German way, Haa-ber. It means the Haver. So cool.

George Orr

And finally, the protagonist. Cis male with stark feminine features, carrier of feminine energy (Wikipedia says daoistic philosophy, but I say no, we’re all heathens here in Czechia), the one who eventually comes out as “right” in the narrative. I have mixed feelings about him. He is described as slight, thin, with a light beard and light hair down to his shoulders, with captivating light blue eyes. Now I know that might evoke white Jesus to some, but I am cursed with an ex who looked just like this. With this mental image, I couldn’t help but take immediate dislike of George. Now that I write this, I realise it’s biased and unfair, but it is what it is. I cannot look at Jesus pictures and not remember my goddamn ex-boyfriend, who taught me that I am bad. George Orr ends up with baggage in my book. Sorry. Well, this delightfully Jesus-y protagonist is the carrier of the feminine energy and our foil to Dr Haber. He has no aims, his plot journey is cyclical, he has spent his life happy in the present moment, and he has supernatural powers that shape reality. The womanliest man to ever woman. When I give in to my internal feminine, I also gain supernatural powers. Mostly the power to withstand the first years of my kids’ lives and not go crazy with the longing to write gay fanfiction instead of pitting my cleaning rate against their dirtying rate.

I found it strange how George always insists that his dreams change reality. If I found myself in the morning with two conflicting histories of the universe in my head and everyone remembers only one of them, I’d conclude I must have had a real weird short circuit and fabricated the unreal one. Sure, it happens repeatedly, and it feels like the “fake” history was here first, but I’m a fallible human and I don’t trust my inner dating system that much. Maybe I’ve just read too many books on popular psychology. But maybe it would have added another feminine touch to George to have him doubt his perceptions at the beginning. “Obey authorities instead of your inner judgement” is a message women tend to hear all their lives. It would have complicated the plot by adding the intermediate goal “let George come to trust his hunch that he isn’t dreaming up alternate histories, he is actually changing the world”. Maybe Le Guin wasn’t up to that. Eh.

George spends most of the story in the way of the jellyfish described in the prologue, battered by the sea of his psychiatrist’s ambitions. Even when he makes his first Decision in the book (that he won’t help Haber anymore), it’s with the backup of an alien race and he ends up going back on it. Thankfully, his passivity doesn’t hinder the plot, since that is carried by the mighty thrusts of Haber’s ego and the reader’s along for the ride, just like George.

I like when George is described (on multiple occasions) to be at the centre of things. I dislike when he is described as the centre of all bell curves. I don’t like conflating “average” with “normal” with “good” with “centred”. George is described at the beginning (to be fair, in Haber’s POV) as a passive, moony person who never has interesting ideas. You won’t convince me that the personality tests he’s given at this time come out halfway between dominating and yielding, Le Guin. The movie Idiocracy did the same trick with the man in the middle of all bell curves. Its protagonist is literally the Everyman, and the movie uses this to demonstrate how much the population regresses. But George is not an everyman. Complete inner equanimity is not a trait most people have. I’d guess le Guin wanted him to oppose the male love for being special, to be on the tail of the bell curve. Average can be good, because your perspective represents a lot of people. But George is too much of a special snowflake even without his effective dreams. Sorry, but I do think this particular monologue of Haber’s should have been cut.

Other

Masterful writing was employed in the book. I was glad to be reading this one, not listening to an audiobook, because I had to return and reread on several occasions to make sure I hadn’t missed something. For example, when Haber links George up to the Augmentor while awake for the first time, from one paragraph to another, poof, the scene changes. George is now in the street bumping into an alien. In the opening scene, George is lying on concrete steps dying of radiation poisoning and then, in the middle of a sentence, he is in his 7-square-metre flat on his inflatable bed. These transitions are smooth. They seem to mirror dreams, which are the subject matter of the book. In a dream, the scene changes on a whim and you go along with it (like George does in the book). But when you wake up and think back on it (like the reader of this book does), you realise “wait that was weird, the content has just changed”. The whole book comes together remarkably well. The jellyfish at the beginning was like “huh I guess we’re doing marine life now”, but then you realise it’s a metaphor for the way the protagonist is written. Very cool.

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Thoughts on The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

Constant filtering of Becker's sexism was only made bearable by uncovering its depth. Upon first impression, he uses "man" and "he" as general references to human beings. On occasion, however, he slips up and reveals that he's actually only got men in mind. When he talks about castration complex, he says the child looks at the mother's genitals and goes "Oh no, something's missing there. I've always had a peepee, so Mum must have also had a peepee. But hers was cut away! Nooo!" Why do girls have castration complex when, from their point of view, Mum's crotch looks completely fine? Uhhh, goes Becker, look here, a broader definition of the castration complex which involves fear of dependency on the mother! Don't worry about it! Also, we're still calling it the castration complex and repeatedly referring to female genitalia as mutilated. When Becker talks about fetishism, he literally goes "women are often disgusted by fetishists because they only see them as sex objects and not as people". While that's a surprisingly decent insight for a sexist, in the same breath Becker implies female fetishists don't exist. (He's got a footnote where he wonders why, and concludes women don't need to get aroused to have sex, so they don't need fetishes. Ouch.) It's really weird how the writing constantly reminds you, not only is Becker not talking to you, woman, he also isn't talking about you. He has about five passages in the entire book where he discusses women in particular, and the rest of the time you're wondering if he's talking only about men. Oh, and he uses "manly" as a profoundly positive trait. Nice. I'm trying to unravel fear of death here, I don't need to be constantly distracted by sexism.

It's funny how Becker constantly tries to analyse Freud's character, down to dissecting two recorded occassions on which Freud fainted. He seems to think that Freud's personal history and fixations can explain the errors in his take on psychoanalysis. He never does this for Rank or Kierkegaard, his favourite senpais, or for himself. I think that if he did, he'd realise how badly he wants to suck Rank's and Kierkegaard's dick for inspiring him so much. And then he'd have to reconsider his views on homosexuality. (Which he sorts into the chapter on mental illnesses, section perversions. He also discusses homosexuality as a purely male matter. I wish the editor had reminded him lesbians exist.)

Becker spends so much time praising people who are creative and dissing people who aren't, I would be very surprised if he didn't consider himself top notch creative. I agree with him in the metaphor that artists bite off more of the world than they can chew, but then they spit it back up in the form of artworks, so they aren't choked by it. Art is definitely a grand way to process what's happening to you. But I don't think we are quite so special that we'd deserve to be elevated as the closest thing to "a whole man".

I wish Becker had spent more time on the trappings of real-world religions. He concludes that the ultimate way to deal with the fear of death is to put your faith in a grander power, a god, but a god whom you have devised and who will not control you. But I don't know if that can even be called religion. Becker analyses religious group dynamics in the same vein as sado-masochistic relationships (I kid you not). The group member and the masochist are comforted by becoming part of something greater, something so powerful that it can shield them from death at the cost of giving up their personal identity. The group leader and the sadist are comforted by accumulating so much power in their hands, surely they can fend off death themselves. Thing is, the group makes the leader and vice versa. If necessary, they will string in bystanders to create each other. So I'm thinking it would take a very strong-headed person who would place their ultimate belief in a higher being, but resist projecting that being onto a real person and letting themselves be controlled so that they can enjoy the security. My homeland is an exceptionally atheist/agnostic country. Our common sentiment is that religion doesn't provide anything of value. It only makes you vulnerable to old guys (face it, it's always old guys) posing as religious leaders, who want to use you to boost their ego, power and bank accounts. I think it's a bit of a shame that we've foregone spirituality so completely, but I also think Becker, in strongly inviting his readers to make a "leap of faith", should have admitted that a real bad fall may follow the leap.

While you can poke fun at Becker all day long, I did finish the book and I did like some of its points. Reading that phobias let you glimpse the terror of death you're always keeping at bay, I went "Ahh". I have a phobia of throwing up; it kicks in particularly bad when the kids get sick. It dominates my mind in an instant. I can't think about anything else. I'm caught in fight-flight-freeze, peak adrenaline, trying to tell myself they're fine, they're fine in 19 cases out of 20, and it does nothing to calm me down. Everyone, down to my psychologist, says "well nobody likes throwing up, but it doesn't really hurt you". Yeah, I know that! And all it does for me is making me feel stupid and a bad mother, because I'm frightened silly by something that's a part of life. But Becker goes: "Nah, you aren't broken or even wrong to feel that overwhelming fear. Everyone feels it. It's the fear that the buildings on the street will collapse and crush you underneath. It's the fear that you'll contract an exotic illness and bleed out from your eye holes. It's the fear that the kid will hit his head just the wrong way and die on the spot. When your phobia hits, the curtain lifts and you can see all of these fears rolled into one staggering fear of death. Of course it paralyses you. You aren't greater than this fear. Nobody is. All we can learn to do is yield to the terror gracefully." Put that way, not only do I feel less stupid for having the phobia. I also feel more at ease and more courageous to face it. It lets me appreciate the self-control I still have. Hey, I'm freaking out, but if I wasn't doing a half decent job repressing the fear, I'd be in the next room crying and covering my ears so I don't hear the kid retching. I still have some power. I can still carry my responsibility as a mother, despite the crushing fear, because it could be worse.