word three

I don’t suppose you understand that—I didn’t understand that when I was your age—but I understand that now, and that was how it started. It wasn’t that long after we killed the oldest kid with a brick that his pa came over to our pa and made a hole in him with a shotgun, a Winchester ’97. Did I say 1768 at the start? I meant 1867. Once he’d made a hole in him he said, ‘you’ve got no spine,’ to our pa—and he meant it.

So not long after that, or maybe it was a while after—it’s hard to keep track now, I guess I’m losing more than just my guts—anyway, a while after we ran down their girl after she stabbed cousin Jack while he was taking off his pants in that big hotel that never got finished. She didn’t die straight away. Colonel Jack went over to finish her off with that beautiful sword he’d had made for the occasion, but she wailed at him, and when we turned around to see what was taking so long they’d already fallen in love, hightailing it onto the runway to get the first plane out to Cuba. We chased after them, but she didn’t weigh much without her legs, and then they let them on the plane first, because she needed a wheelchair.

In the end she did die. But in the meantime a little baby fell down a well. When our grey-haired auntie went to get it they pushed her in after, but before she died she threw the baby back up so that it survived. For weeks the papers ran the story until we killed the oldest kid, who ran the papers, and then we ran that story until the barbarians in the east, who were all called Jack, went on a crusade and killed Jack, the oldest kid, who ran the papers.

So by the time Colonel Jack did come back from Cuba we’d all forgotten about him. The problem with that was that we were never really sure if it was him or his son, who wasn’t a Colonel, and who had a face that looked nothing like the face that we’d forgotten. For a while we thought about solving the problem by having Jack go over to the Colonel’s mansion—the Colonel who might not have been a Colonel was living with a girl who might not have been our sister—and burn the whole place down. I used to know the reason that the plan never happened, but now I ‘spose I’ve lost too much blood. In any case it never mattered much, because whether he was Colonel Jack, or Colonel Jack’s son, he got blown off his horse by a railgun half-a-year later.

This all happened in between the two big battles that it happened in between. The three brothers who started the first one liked to fly paper kites when they were kids, and so they just kept doing that when they were older and ended up dropping a full payload of hydrogen bombs over the city one summer. That ended the truce—not that there ever was a truce—and before long they were sieging us day-in and day-out. You can’t imagine the smell of a rotting cow—we watched them blow up in the courtyard and cover the walls in guts. One day Jack was too slow getting back after we’d hurled our spears and the cow landed right on top of him so they both exploded. Afterwards we couldn’t tell which bits were cow and which bits were Jack. It all stank—probably the same way my colon’s stinking right now.

The second battle was a different thing. We’d put together a fairly slick operation getting rye across the border in coffins, but we were starting to run out of bodies. For a month or two it was a serious problem, until Jack’s little brother reminded us that we were meant to be killing them, which most of us had forgotten. That started up the whole feud again and before long it escalated into another war, which was good for us even after they finished with Prohibition in ’33, because by then we’d switched to LSD and MDMA anyway, which both had better margins. Later, when they legalised them, we cut out the smuggling part of the operation completely and focused our efforts on moving the corpses, but that was later. During the second battle itself there was one particularly famous incident involving a dying man, but I’m a dying man now, and I can’t remember it.

It wasn’t until we got to the Moon that things really cooled down again. Little Jack chewed up their old lady, and for a while they were too scared of him to do anything about it. That was a good time—everyone was scared of Little Jack then, especially Little Jack, and we all lived under his shadow, worked together, built up the little town that wasn’t blown apart until years later, when we ran through the streets with sticks of dynamite and let them off like firecrackers. ‘You’ve got no spine,’ he’d say, and then he’d tremble and work harder than anyone else because he was scared he might chew up his own heart. In the end, of course, he did, but he was old then and nobody was scared of him anymore.

By then we were worried about the barbarians in the east, who were only ever called Jack and who went on crusades and who bashed in everybody’s skulls and who tossed everybody through the windows of that big hotel that never got finished. It wasn’t until after we were done killing them that we got back to killing each other, and by then there weren’t too many of us left, which turned out to be a good thing because it made keeping track a lot simpler, like old times. Jack, my cousin, used to go around with a knife then and open them up while they waited to get on the planes to Cuba. Once, your mother—before she was your mother—asked me how we could stop him, and I told her about the wheelchair that’d worked so well in the past, but of course when there’s no gravity there’s no need for wheelchairs, so that plan didn’t fly. When he opened them up their guts would float up out of them, like a bunch of balloons. It was a really neat thing, and he was good at it, and in the end he got rid of most of them until she—your mother, that is—stabbed him while he was taking his pants off.

I asked her about that afterwards, after her legs were gone and we’d fallen in love, and she said, ‘you know, it wasn’t a difficult thing,’ and I never managed to understand that, but I understand that now. Once she’d done it there were only the two of them left, her and her brother. Whenever we made love we’d always float away, back towards the Earth, and I always wondered if he was watching us from somewhere, if he had me in the crosshairs of a sniper rifle as we floated up back down towards the world.

Then one day you were born with a tail of a pig, and I realised she’d been sleeping with him the whole time she’d been sleeping with me. So I waited until you fell down a well and then I pushed her in after. Before she died she threw you back up so that you survived, which meant it was just him, and his son, and me, and you. The problem was that I’d forgotten what he looked like, but fortunately his son was also her son, so his son had the tail of a pig too, which was how we hunted them, watching for that tail through the crosshairs of a sniper rifle until one day we found them in the city, one summer.

I will glance away, but as I glance away of course I will glimpse that smile and grasp hold of it. Like the parched throat in the desert, I will drink in the saliva that glistens on her teeth; set fast the pale edges of her lips; carve keenly out the contours of her dimples from the grey matter in my brain. It will happen in a glimpse; she will pass the latte to me in a shallow porcelain cup, never knowing how deeply I have drunk of her. When the moment passes, as it quickly will, I will buy one of the small chocolates from the bowl that sits by the counter. I will buy it because of what has just passed between her and me, or perhaps because of what I wish to pass between her and me, or perhaps because of what has passed between her and me and what I wish to pass between her and me again; that is, I will buy it because I will want to see that smile a second time. And the smile will come. The chocolate will be small, and slightly soft, and wrapped in golden foil.

And then I will sit down at a table, and I will begin to write. I will be writing a very important book; the book, as I have said, dealing with the topic, which might be Über-semiotic: Critique of the Postmodern Understanding of Nietzsche; or The Road to Hegel: Marx, Freud & Foucault; or Power & Suicide: The Nihilism of Naphtha in Mann’s Magic Mountain. I will write quickly, now that I am inside the café: powered by her presence—or perhaps more specifically by the presence of her tattoo as it rests on the cool surface of the wooden countertop—I will speed through the outline of the chapter on ‘Post-Structural Semiotics’; I will zoom past the synopsis of the arguments contained within the section on ‘Identity and Post-Feminism’; I will gallop along the lines of my notebook as I explore the ‘Dialectic Society’. But, as I pause for a moment from my writing, I will take my time, working tentatively, with trembling hands.

I will lay the golden foil, still lined at the folds with the traces of the chocolate, down on the surface of the table. I will notice, unhappily, that it doesn’t reflect the sunlight coming in through the glass façade as brilliantly as I’d hoped—that in fact it looks almost dull and clouded, not like gold but really more like a tarnished bronze. Nonetheless, I will work as slowly and as delicately as I can, folding each fold as precisely as my fingers allow, feeling keenly the clumsiness and largeness of my hands. I will have chosen the moment for this work very precisely—making sure it occurs while she is occupied with other customers, distracted, not looking in my direction. Occasionally I will look up, covering the folded foil with my oafish hands, to make sure she is still preoccupied. Then I will return to my work in the secret space between my cupped palm and the closeness of the café table, running each fold flat with the back of my nail, glancing often at the instructions on my phone, hidden between the half-finished ‘Nietzschean Negotiations’ in my notebook. It will take a long time, owing both to the brutishness of my hands and the furtiveness of my movements, but at last I will finish my origami flower, and then I will place it, discreetly, on the rim of my latte’s saucer. I will look at it; it will be small and crooked and imperfect, but looking at it will warm me with a tiny spark of meagre pride.

It will be after this has happened, after perhaps the first two hours of my time in the café, that he will enter. He. He! The Antagonist. The Man. That Man. My Rival. He will be wearing something much more stylish than whatever I will be wearing: a suit, or, if it is a Saturday, a shirt, something clean and simple and coutured, and, along with it a brown leather belt, matching perfectly his brown leather shoes. Everything about him will speak of cleanliness and simplicity, but also of confidence—something solid, and finely polished, and real. He will smile back to her as he orders his coffee; not a latte, like me, but an espresso, of course—and then he will joke with her as he waits and she works, his smile as easy and as beautiful as hers—if not more so. The other patrons will also have their eyes drawn to him; they will be charmed by the lightness of his movements and the poise of his words, and will find themselves smiling, without even knowing that they are smiling. And he will begin to joke with them, as he waits for his espresso; he will pass through them—us, we mere mortals—and he will deign to speak to us, to give to us a simple word or a smile that will glow for us like a precious gift, a treasure we will hold fast in our memory, long after he has moved on. He will speak to me; in my daze, I will not hear him, will not hear his words, which will be perfect, but instead will only grasp that he is making a joke with me, that he is smiling and saying that I have stolen his table. In my confusion I will become embarrassed; I will stand up abruptly, bang my knee against the leg of the table as I offer it to him. He will laugh, as if I have made a great joke, and then he will return to her and take from her the espresso. His espresso.

His espresso. As I sit back down again I will glance around the café, and I will realise that it is his café. Not, of course, in the sense of proprietorship: it is her business. But it is his café. It is the space he has chosen to inhabit, to fill. It is his world; his territory; his domain. And I will find myself acutely aware that I am not sitting at any table, but at his table. And as I look down at my notebook again, and begin to scribble furiously ‘On the Signifiers of the Übermensch’, I will feel the crimson in my cheeks begin to spread, and I will hunch further over the paper, to hide myself from his gaze.

It will be for this reason—because of the hunching of my body, because of my desperate focus on the page in front of me—that I will not notice, for some time, that he too is writing. When I do notice, at last, the knowledge will strike me like a unexpected blow, and I will crumple further, hot and uncomfortable. As I huddle over the table like a goblin I will glimpse him over the edge of the arm I have used to hide myself and see, at once, that he is perfectly at ease. His legs will be crossed; his back will be straight; his pen will move smoothly across each page, sculpting each letter, composing the words. A slight smile will rest on his face, a very natural smile, and in fact the whole picture of him will give the impression that every word he writes is the mot juste; the perfect phrase; the ideal expression flowing, like a cool stream, across the page.

I will shudder as I take in these details, trying not to imagine my own image, but it will be impossible to keep it from my mind. I will see myself coiled round the table—the table I have snatched, grabbed, seized like a petulant child—and see the oiliness of my complexion, the shapelessness of my clothes, the matted tangles of my hair and the ugly lump of my back. I will see how I tremble, see the blotchy redness metastasising across my skin, and see that I look  feverish; I look sick, disgusting, wretched. Perhaps, I will think, I am these things. And so I will hunch back further over my writing, gripping the pen ever tighter in my sweating hand, and I will scrawl more feverishly than ever.

But it will be too late; I will be doomed. My rival will have noticed my glances; he will stand up, he will stride towards me, and in a voice that is like a breath of cool air he will say, you’re a writer!

I will nod, and look up at him, and nod again, jerking my head, wishing to shake it, to shake him away, trying to hide from him my mottled cheeks, the sweat on my hands. And then he will ask me, smiling, what it is I am writing about.

That most terrible question! I will start, and say that I am writing about Nietzsche; no—I am writing about Hegel; no—I am writing about Sartre and Spinoza, about—I will gulp—about Freud, and Guattari and Deleuze, about— And he will smile and say yes, that’s very interesting, he will wish to learn more, he will ask if we could compare ideas, if we could discuss, and I will shudder and try to hide my shudder and say, of course, yes, comparing ideas, the dialectic, central to my—yes, for mutual benefit, to test the—absolutely, yes—what is it he is writing about? And he will tell me he is writing a novel, a simple little story, nothing complicated, something plain and uncultured. And he will ask, modestly, if perhaps I would like to read something of it, if perhaps I couldn’t give him some feedback, I’ve been having trouble with this bit, he will laugh, and so I will find myself with the pages of his legal pad in my hands, reading his novel.

And I will read and my eyes will widen as I realise that here, too, my rival has outmatched me. His writing will be clear. Simple sentences. Simple words that mean exactly what they say. I will be captured immediately; I will understand his position exactly; I will know that in his words lies the truth of the world, and at the same time I will be drawn to the story, a wonderful story, pressing and wild and powerful. It will be as if language is a perfect tool for him, as if it were made for him, and I will feel hot and sick, because while I have been reading his prose I will have given him the pages of my own twisted words, my thorny, snarled up mess of prose, mangled and scribbled and crude.

He will look at the pages I have given to him and he will say yes, I see what you’re trying to say here. He will read about ownership: about the history of private property, about material goods, means of production, the accumulation of capital—and he will smile, and say, yes, I see. But I wonder, he will say. And then he will say that he’s only a simple man, and he’s sure I’ll have the answer, and really, it’s only a small thing. But I wonder, he will say, about the dog with the stick, who runs away from you when you try to take the stick from him. Isn’t ownership something basic?—he will ask—something fundamental? And then, as the sweat begins to prick the skin of my arms and the backs of my legs, he will say, we all want things, right? And he will say that he believes that if you want something, you have to go for it, and that that’s what he’s always thought about the world. And then he will look down and smile, and make a joke about the table—his table—to illustrate how silly he is, how he is just a simple man, who clearly doesn’t understand; after all, he hasn’t taken the table. And I will sweat and nod and feel my face burning, and he will laugh, and clap my shoulder, and pick up his beautiful words and stride away.

And I will sit and stare at my ugly pages. I will think about the dog with the stick, and about the table, his table, and about the café, his café, and about the writing, his writing, and I will worry that he is right. I will worry that all my ugly words are nonsense, that they are circular, that they are worse than hot air, not worth the trees they are printed on, and I will feel a desperate anger towards my rival, but it will be an unfair anger, because I will know that he is superior to me, and then I will be angrier, I will be furious, but I will be furious inwards, towards myself. As I listen to him chatting to her, ordering this time a cup of simple filter coffee, I will see that I am pathetic, that I am a worm, that I am so far beneath him in my rivalry he does not even feel the need to struggle with me, because he knows that I will remove myself from his territory with no more than a whimper. And as I listen to him chatting to his female friends—acquaintances as attractive as his words—I will see that he is right, that of course it is as simple as he says, that of course all it takes is strength. The strength to go for it. I will glance over at him, my arms snaked around his table, and I will wish desperately to run to him, to throw myself at his feet, to beg him to take me as his apprentice and teach me to be strong, to be powerful. I will glance over at him, see him laughing and touching the soft skin of his adoring companions, and I will wish desperately to run from him, to destroy myself utterly, to crush myself, like a worm. I will glance over at him, see him writing tranquilly, and I will know that everything he writes is beauty, and that everything I write is dirt.

But, for some reason, I will stay in the café. Perhaps her allure will be stronger than his dominance. Perhaps my writing, useless as it is, will make me lose track of time. Perhaps I will be afraid of moving, like a burrowed rat. In the end, the ‘why’ will not matter: for some reason, I will stay in the café. And slowly, the other patrons will leave. Loyal subjects, they will linger even as they stand to depart, not wanting to withdraw their bodies from the warm comfort of his domain, exchanging with him a few final, eager words, like eyes that strain to catch the final rays of the sunset. His female companions will leave too, taking with them the stares of the men, as their short dresses flutter across their thighs. The old people will go; the young people will go, the children, tired and hushed, will go. And then, somehow, it will just be the three of us: him, and her, and me.

He will come over to me, then, and ask me again about my writing. He will ask me, laughing, if I have enjoyed the table—and I will fret, and I will nod, and then shake my head, unable to decide which answer to give. I will feel his gaze prick open the sebaceous glands on my cheeks. He will ask me if I have thought about the dog, and I will fret, and I will nod, and I will say that yes, and in fact Marx said that—or no, Weber said that—or no, Butler said that—

And he will laugh at Judith Butler, because he is a simple man, and he has never been smart enough to understand what her complicated words have to say. And as he laughs about Butler, I will see that beneath his smile there is an annoyance now, that as he laughs at Butler’s words, he laughs at my words—he laughs at me. And I will see that the corners of his lips are curled downwards, that he now he is annoyed by me, as he would be annoyed by a smear of chewing gum on the bottom of his fine brown leather shoes. He will be annoyed because, just like the chewing gum, I have entered a domain that is not mine; he will be annoyed because, just like the chewing gum, I have attached myself, lecherously, to his table; he will be annoyed because, just like the chewing gum, I have stuck around when he wishes to be alone with her, to take her, his rightful prize—because in the café, he is King. And so now, I will see, he has come to laugh at me, to scrape me off of the sole of his boot, and to drop me, his lips curled downwards, into the bin.

And then she will appear beside him as I cower below him, my knuckles white on the edges of the table, pricks of sweat and blotches of crimson breaking across my brow. She will appear and my empty latte, sitting so long unattended on its coaster, will disappear, and I will twitch and flick my trembling gaze to her, to her hands, her beautiful hands that are raw from dishwashing, as they sling the latte cup into one black plastic bucket, sling the latte coaster into another; snatch the golden flower and crush it, drop it, without a glance, into a black plastic bag.

She will not have even noticed the flower; her eyes will have aimed at it, but she, concerned with the many small concerns of closing—dishes to be washed, money to be counted, toilets to be cleaned—will not even have seen it. It will fall, mangled, to rest amongst the discarded napkins, the chewed-up straws, the half-eaten wraps from which relish slowly oozes, like pus from an festering wound. The flower will be destroyed, and I will be destroyed, unable to prevent the gasp, and then the whimper, from escaping my lips. She will not have even noticed.

But he will notice.

He will catch the flower, that glimpse of gold, as it whisks across the table and out of sight. He will hear my whimper, that tiny squeak of failure, as the flower is tossed to the trash. And as he sees, he will understands, and the curl of his lips will grow crueler, and he will turn back to me, and then he will say, laughing, you like her?

And then, as he stands over me and laughs at me, I will know that I am a rat, I am a worm, and he is the King. He will laugh at me, and his laugh will say, you? And it will be a cruel laugh, but, worse, it will be an incredulous laugh, the laugh of someone who knows that their victory is complete, the laugh of a master to a slave, a victor to a victim, a warrior to a worm. And I will be too afraid, to much a coward, to even stand up to leave—I cannot stand up to him! And so I will burrow frantically into my hole, I will clutch the pen, it will slip through my hands, I will clutch it again and scribble, scrawl frantically, hunched over my notebook, praying that this is a dream, a nightmare, and that when I look up he will be gone.

But I will still hear his laughter, as he strides away from me, and I will know that he is not gone. And I will hear him as he approaches the counter, hear the clutter of the dishes stop as she turns to him, and I will hear him, I will hear the cruelty in his voice, as he asks her if she would like to come over, after work, to read his book with him.

I will be shuddering as I listen; I will be like the worm, tail squashed by the boot; I will writhe and thrash and scribble all the more, writing useless words uselessly, willing weakly, hopelessly, that my writing will be able to drown out her reply.

“What’s it about?” she will ask.

And he will tell her.

“Cool,” she will say. “Sure, after I close. Can you watch the shop for a sec? I’ve gotta go do some stuff out the back for a few minutes.”

And then she will be gone, and so will my heart.

After she departs, his laughter will fill the room, bright and fresh, but cold. I will look back down at my manuscript, trying to hide the quivering of my lip. I will scribble maniacally, not knowing what I am writing, graffitiing on the page, my arguments sputtering and running like the diarrhoea that I know that they are. I will force the words to swallow me, drown myself in the ink, and so I will not hear the sound of his footsteps as they approach me. I will dig; I will scrabble with my pen as he comes nearer, not hearing, not seeing, or at least, telling myself that I don’t hear his laughter, that I don’t see the polished shine of his brown leather shoes. He will have a grin on his face, an open, easy grin, an evil grin, the grin of the conqueror who has come to despoil, to ravage, to rape. There will be only the two of us. I will be bunched over, and the pen will run, screaming, across the page.

And then I will feel it. I will be so focused on my writing that the sensation will not come all at once, but slowly, like the dawning of the sun. And just like that dawning, the sensation, which I will feel, when I feel it, on my leg, will be warm. And just like that dawning, the sensation will be golden. But unlike that dawning, the thing that will happen to me will not be beautiful, and distant, and illusory. The thing that will happen to me will not be like that at all. It will be ugly, and it will really happen, and in fact, it will be wet. My pen will slow, then stop. I will look up at my rival, towering above me. I will take in the awful sneer that contorts his face, and I will see, at last, the thing I have felt all along—disgust. And then I will look down and see that he is urinating on the leg of the table.

That golden stream, wet and warm, will be aimed at the table’s supporting limb’s, but also it will be aimed at my limbs, wavering and spattering heavily onto my shapeless trousers. I will look at it as the stream moves to my leg, as the urine makes the fabric dark and dripping, and I will be stunned, and I will feel as if I am in a dream, and then I will hear him speak, and as he speaks I will realise that for him, too, this is a dream, that he too is dreaming and we have been dreaming together, and from the moment our dream began this was always its conclusion, the only conclusion possible, and I will look up at him with dazed eyes and see his lips whisper a word, one word, as the oily wetness of his piss splatters on my leg and the leg of the table, and the word he will whisper will be mine.

And that word will make me realise that he is right, that of course, this is the way of things: that the dog takes the stick because the dog wants it, that by taking the stick the dog comes to deserve it, and that, while the dog takes the stick, it pisses on the worms. He will take her because he wants her, and she is his because he will take her; you have to want life to take it, and you have to take life to deserve it. And I will see that because I do not take life, I do not deserve it; I will see that I am dead, that I am a ghost, that I am the smear of chewing gum that sticks to the bottom of his brown leather shoes. And so his piss will soak through the fabric of my misshapen trousers, and soak warmly into the unliving skin of my leg, and I will sit as still as a corpse, and do nothing.

And then she will walk in and say “What the fuck?!”

He will respond first—I will remain in my daze and he will try to stop, fumbling with the unsteady protuberance that extrudes from his crotch, mumbling apologies, shaken by her words from the dream he and I have shared, and as she storms toward him, shouting, he will spill the golden fluid over himself, an uncontrolled hose that whips around and splashes over his hands, through the pockets of his jeans, up the neat line of the buttons of his shirt front. She will be on him, words like “police” and “fuck” will find their way to my stunned ears as I sit, my hand still holding the pen, as if I am looking for just the right word, the mot juste. And as I sit she will drive him from the shop, and as the door slams I will at last put the pen down as I realise that now it is over, that he is over, and that now he will never return.

“Are you OK?” she will ask, staring at the puddle that has formed at the base of our—mine and the table’s—legs. “What the fuck…”

Yes, I will say.

“I’m going to call the police,” she will say. “I have his name. You should file for sexual assault—indecent exposure, as well. Jesus, what the fuck…”

She will fetch paper towels from the kitchen and drop them on my leg, her nose wrinkled.

No, I will say, he was right, he was doing what was right, he was—

“What a fucking psycho,” she will say, moving the paper towels across the urine with the toe of her big shoe. “You sure you’re alright?”

And also, I will continue, I believe that the state acts only to oppress—

“They’re hear to protect you, idiot,” she will say. “It was assault. That guy’s fucking crazy. You’re in shock, victim blaming or whatever. Or you’re just dumb. But he assaulted you. It was assault.”

“Oh,” I will say. And then I will pause, and then I will say, “Yes.”

And then she will call the police and I he will be arrested, and his name will be added to the list of sexual offenders, and meanwhile in the coffeeshop she will say, “Why is it always the fucking creeps that hit on me?”

And I will be emboldened—for some reason, I will be emboldened—and so I will ask, “Can I hit on you?”

“You?” she will ask, surprised.

“Oh, if it’s not—” I will stutter, apologising.

“No, it’s just—”

“I’m sorry I asked, I—”

“No,” she will say, “it’s just that I don’t know if I like girls.”

“Oh,” I will say.

“Maybe I do, though,” she will shrug. “You can try, I guess. No promises.”

“Oh.”

“I mean, you’re kind of cute.”

“Thanks.” “Now I need to clean this mess up and close.”

“OK,” I’ll say. “I’d better go home and wash the pee off my leg. Can I come back tomorrow?”

Three days passed until the first bridge was finished by the Lumberjack, whose favourite child had been stranded on the North side of the Rift. It wasn’t much of a bridge, a few ladders strapped together with tape and rope, but the Lumberjack, in a few of her signature stomps, crossed it easily; then she picked up her child and held him close. Others followed soon after, and so life continued; for the sake of convenience the town was now known as North and South; the Northern swimming pool was regarded by most as superior to the Southern, while the Southerners were lucky enough to possess a far better selection of restaurants, except of course for the well known  oyster bar, Marcella’s, that now, thanks to the Rift, boasted an unobstructed view of the newly created waterfall, and a good panorama of the hills, besides.

The Engineer, affronted by the shoddiness of the first bridge, soon got to work, and before long an elegant arching assembly spanned the narrowest section of the Rift, along the line of the Road to Heaven. The Engineer named it the ‘Bridge to North’: his house was in North. This upset the Southerners, and for the first week they refused to use the bridge, declaring instead that they would build a far superior ‘Bridge to South’ to be designed by the Physicist, whose mind was in all aspects a cut above the mind of the Engineer. The Engineer replied to the insult with a public notice proclaiming that work would soon begin on a guard tower, to prevent the sneaky Southerners from using his bridge after sunset, when, he knew, they had been coming over in swarms, like rats. The Physicist sent out a notice to the effect that of course the Engineer would know a rat, as a member of the family, and so the exchange of offences and the scale of the plans continued, until the Mason and the Lumberjack, fed up with the notices that were beginning to clog their mailboxes, declared that their would be no stone or lumber for any of the projects, that the bridge would be renamed ‘The Bridge’, and that that, with no further argument allowed, would be that. The Engineer and the Physicist both awaited the reading of their notices in response to the Mason and the Lumberjack’s declaration eagerly; when no further notices appeared in the mailboxes of their neighbours, they sent out another set of notices, accusing the Postmaster of purposely losing the previous notices; when these did not appear either, they united, briefly, to accuse the Postmaster in person. The Postmaster shrugged, said she had never seen the notices, and that, as for the sound of fluttering leaves that echoed up from the darkness of the Rift, well, wasn’t it autumn, after all?

It was a long time until the first person fell from The Bridge; a few weeks, a few months, a few years. In the end, to the surprise of the patrons of Marcella’s, who had begun a betting pool as to whom would be the first to go, it was not the Banker—that notorious drunk who had, so infamously, teetered along the left handrail of The Bridge, cackling, coins spilling from his pockets as he swayed. Nor was it the Geologist who, after originally rubbing her hands with glee at the prospect of explaining the phenomenon of the fissure, had now begun to display an exciting sort of madness as she hopped about at the edge of the canyon, alternating between bouts of furious work on her computer models, and bouts of quiet swearing. No; in the end it was neither of these, but instead the Lumberjack, a long outsider, a dark horse whose name, when it was announced to the crowd that had gathered at Marcella’s, brought wails from all except the Lion Tamer, who had, on a whim, put down the cost of a bottle of champagne on the late forester and found herself now in the possession of a fortune that outstripped even the Banker—that notorious drunk who, in a fit of cruelly calculated commerce, had put most of his money down on himself.

It eventuated that the Lumberjack had fallen into the abyss in a thoroughly uninteresting episode that was, nonetheless, recounted by all members of both North and South for some weeks afterwards. She had been on her way back from her weekly expedition to purchase ice from the Ice Maker, the two insulated sacks piled high in her hands, her stomping as confident as ever. On this particular occasion her favourite child had accompanied her, and it was he—his cries, as the sliver of ice he had suckled on slipped from between his lips—that distracted her. She twisted—the child was behind her on The Bridge—and the sacks tipped, toppling momentarily to the side. The tipping, it seemed, was enough to prevent her from seeing her feet, and so it was that as she twisted she stomped not on the empty ground, but instead on the toe of her favourite child, whose subsequent scream, combined with the capsize of the containers in her arms, served to stop her from finding her balance, and led instead to the rolling of that always confident ankle, the bumping of that always confident back against the railing and, a moment or two later, the plummeting of those always confident arms as they followed the leaden weight of the ice vertically, past the elegant arch of The Bridge and down, into the darkness, and out of the world. According to bystanders no scream came out of the pursed lips of the Lumberjack as she fell, but for days afterwards, whenever anyone sat next to the Rift for a while, they heard something like an echo of a sigh.

The hysteria that followed the incident was matched in its extraordinariness only by the utter ordinariness of the event itself. The Banker, wounded by his loss in the betting stakes, pronounced the Rift an Enemy of the People, and employed the Physicist and the Engineer—now good friends—to establish a plan of attack. The Artist created a striking illustration of The Fall, as it came to be known—the ice sparkling in the sunlight—and the Poet wrote a poem that, while less well received than the painting, still served to reinforce the general feeling of insecurity that pervaded North and South alike. The new Lumberjack was employed crafting guard railings for beds, for fear that people might slip into the Rift during their dreams; the Balloonist’s trade boomed as safety balloons became mandatory, and the Designer’s followed, as the ugly grey rubber of the miniature dirigibles was coloured, clothed and coutured, until the streets of the two towns looked, for all the world, like they were celebrating a floating Easter. The craze continued until a demonstration by the Lion Tamer—long known to all as the rival of the Balloonist—showed that the balloons did little but cause the plummeting body to spiral, and thus to be battered against the jagged sides of the chasm on the way down. Not long after the balloons were all, coincidentally, released by their owners at exactly the same time, creating a floating mosaic that covered the sun for half a day and was, by all accounts, quite beautiful.

Not long after the end of the balloon craze the Physicist and the Engineer returned, sheepishly, from their contemplation of the Rift. To the relief of the Geologist, they had not found the answers to the mystery of the chasm’s creation, and in fact had only come up with one, fairly lame, suggestion: that the guardhouse designed by the Engineer be now built, and then built again, that  the Guard and her apprentice be employed to watch over the crossing from these two mirrored guardhouses, and that the crossing be thus controlled, and made safe, by the limiting of passage across The Bridge to only one civilian at a time. The approach was described as ‘eminently reasonable’ by the Banker, who above all valued reason, and in similar terms by everyone else. Only the Mason resisted the plan, but she, deprived of the companionship of the Lumberjack, had fallen victim to old age, and died not long after. The new Mason, eager to gain the approval of two towns still in the grip of hysteria, worked speedily to make up for his master’s reticence; and thus it was that the twin guardhouses were built.

Life went on; the guardhouses were an annoyance—especially for the Southerners, the Guard  and her apprentice both coming from the North—but nonetheless an ‘eminently reasonable’ one, and there were no more falls. It was at this time, after the time of the Fall, and the building of the guardhouses, that the exploration of the Rift began in earnest. Before someone—someone real and human, someone like the Lumberjack—had entered that chasm, the Rift was an abstraction to the populace of North and South, existing even for the Geologist not as a physical entity, but as a metaphor. It existed in the many poems the Poet wrote about it, in the essays of the Philosopher; even in the zeroes of the mathematician, but it did not exist as a ‘something’, that could be traversed, or filled in, or fallen into. Before the Fall the Rift could have been a river of lava, or a pit of spikes, or a puddle of foul mud, without making any difference to the way the people of the two towns interacted with it. Now, though, it was clear to everyone that it was what it was, and what it was was a hole. A pit. A chasm. An abyss. It was a place where the normal world, the world of the ground, ended; it was an ending, a nothingness, and, possibly, it was more than that, because it was now that the Explorer put forward a radical idea: that the Rift could be a doorway to Somewhere Else.

The Astronaut jumped up from where she had been sitting to interject, to say loudly: no! A ridiculous idea, everyone knew that there was nothing down there but magma, mantle, and the asthenosphere—she turned to the Geologist and gesticulated, trying to elicit agreement; the Geologist shrugged and looked tired. The Explorer laughed at the Astronaut and told her she needn’t work herself up; he had no intention of invading her space—unless, of course, it was space that was down there… Again the Astronaut interjected, her face turning red, to yell that it was just like a slimy Northerner to find this sort of loophole, clearly the Explorer was in league with the Lawyer—the Northerners were planning to put her out of business, to—

At this point the crowd that had gathered exploded and arguments began to break out like hives. The Poet jumped up to agree with the Astronaut: the Northerners were trying to put him out of business too, it was the only explanation as to why his poem about the floating mosaic of the balloons—the Floating Mosaic of the Balloons—had failed to outsell the Artist’s latest work, also entitled the Floating Mosaic of the Balloons—which was an inferior product, clearly it was the Banker’s doing, that notorious drunk must have bought all the copies—

The Artist jumped up with a wounded look in her eyes and reproached the Poet, after all, they could be thought of as companion works, the poem was a wonderful accompaniment to the true Floating Mosaic of the Balloons—

At this point the Poet began shouting poetry, as the Banker stood up and accused the Southerners of planning this coup, they were after his bridge, they wanted to destroy the guardhouses all because of a minor inconvenience, despite knowing of the many lives that lives had been saved, despite knowing that the method he had come up with was  eminently reasonable—

The Engineer and the Physicist jumped up to protest: the idea had been theirs, and in fact they still had not received payment from the Banker for their work, he was an imposter, it was just like a Northerner to— By the end of the meeting the air in the streets of the two towns had balled up and turned white, like a fist. The Astronaut had announced that she would no longer go to North; the Artist had announced that she would no longer go to South; the Physicist and the Engineer had announced their intention to dismantle the guardhouses they had helped to build, and the Banker had declared that the entire Southern populace were nothing more than ‘terrorists and violent lunatics’ who must be stopped, ‘at great personal cost, requiring great personal valour, in the name of great personal reason.’ No one paid any attention to him—his speech stank of rum—but nonetheless it was clear  to all that the meeting had transformed the Rift into a wound.

Time passed, and the wound festered. For many life went on as it always had; perhaps the Baker no longer chatted to the Librarian as they waited in the line at The Bridge; perhaps the Brewer watched the Mathematician walk down the street without calling out a greeting; perhaps even the Pianist forgot to announce his concert to the Waiter—but what did that matter? The Waiter never came to the concerts anyway; the Baker was known for his failings when it came to small talk; and the Brewer and the Mathematician, well, they had never been close—and that was putting it lightly. So for most it was a small thing. They muttered about it; blaming Northerners for this; blaming Southerners for that, complaining when the Guard and her apprentice became stricter—they needed papers, now—but that was all. They muttered about it, but they muttered also about their aches, and the ants, and the weather, and so, for many, life went on.

For some, though, life had changed. The Rift had become a wound, certainly, but it was more than that. It was no longer just an obstacle, no longer just a ‘something’, but also, now, a concept, or perhaps, even, a paradigm. It was a way of understanding the world, and at the core of that understanding was the concept of the Rift as a boundary. Not a hurdle, not a hole, but a line, on a map. It had become a boundary that marked the end of Us and the start of Them, the place where ‘I’ ceased and ‘they’ started, an idea that cut out ‘here’ and ‘there’—because the map was not just a piece of paper, but an illustration etched onto the inside of the skull, and the Rift was not just a component of a definition, but the enabler of definition itself. To these people—the Poet, the Banker, and the Engineer were among them—the Rift had become a concept just as basic as the shoreline, that separated sea from land; the horizon, that separated earth from sky; and even the skin, that separated world from self. To these people, difference was now an absolute. And so it is to these people we can look, now, for an explanation of how the war began.

In the end it was the feud between the Explorer and the Astronaut that did it; it could also have been the feud between the Poet and the Artist, or the Engineer and the Banker, or, indeed, the Brewer and the Mathematician—their relationship had degenerated—but in any case it wasn’t, and  we are interested here in what was. For some time the Explorer had been working on a TV special—alongside the Producer, who lived in South but had refused to take sides in the feud—on his ongoing journey, further and further down, into the Rift. The show had largely been a failure, as so far all that been discovered was that the Rift was very deep, and that the walls were made of a different type of rock lower down to the type of rock they were made of higher up. Nonetheless, the show had made the Astronaut very angry. She had begun to stand follow the Producer to The Bridge in the mornings, yelling very loudly through her spacesuit that the Producer had betrayed them, the people of South, and that she, the Astronaut, would not stand for it any longer. The Producer would smile as she walked, and try to explain, and ask the Astronaut if she would like to talk things over, and that would make the Astronaut much angrier, and she would continue to yell until the inside of the visor of her space suit was covered in tiny flecks of spittle. For some time this continued—occasionally the people in the line on the Southern side of The Bridge would yell at the Astronaut, while at other times with her—until the day when the Astronaut found herself with more to say than usual, and tried to follow the Producer onto The Bridge. The Guard—who always sat in  the Southern guardhouse (her apprentice sat in the North)—stopped her. The Astronaut redirected her yelling towards the Guard, who calmly repeated that the Astronaut had no papers, and the Astronaut continued to yell and she yelled that she shouldn’t need papers, that the Guard was a  pompous Northerner who had no right to stop her, no right to tell her anything, after all wasn’t it a Southerner who had built The Bridge, and now the Guard chuckled and reminded her that the Engineer had been a Northerner when he built The Bridge, and the Astronaut chuckled back and yelled that of course this was evidence of the superiority of the Southern people, and the argument continued and the spit continued to coat the inside of the spacesuit until the Brewer, who had been next in line, and who had sampled too much of her own product the previous evening, finally pushed past both the Astronaut and the Guard and stepped out onto The Bridge.

The Guard scrambled after her, but now it was the Astronaut who blocked her way, and as the Guard’s apprentice scrambled to block the Brewer, and the Artist scrambled to block the Poet, and the Banker scrambled to climb the side of the bridge to pronounce them all ‘terrorists!’ the scramble became a brawl, and then the brawl became a fight, and then, when the Explorer produced the pistol that he carried during filming to toughen up his image and aimed it, shakily, at the Astronaut’s heart, it became a battle.

And thus, war. The two towns chose their colours, erected their fortifications, imprisoned those they suspected and conscripted those they did not. People fled, only to be banished; people were banished, only to flee; the shots from the cannons echoed down the walls of the Rift and the bodies were tipped into it, by the cartload. It was dull; it was awful; it was war.

And it lasted a long time. To understand how long you need to know only that we are leaving,  losing, drifting onward to a time when the Astronaut and the Explorer had long been forgotten; when the Banker was no longer a notorious drunk but a thin, cold Merchant of War; when Marcella’s was dust, beneath dust, beneath rubble. It was a time when the war had been going on for so long it was known only as The War, and it was all that was. There was no Poet, then; no Philosopher, no Geologist or Lumberjack or Mason; there were only those who made The War possible, and those who fought it. And forever, now, they had done nothing but.

There was a reason The War had lasted for so long; indeed, it was the same reason The War had begun in the first place. The Rift. The Rift ruled out any possibilities of positioning; it made strategy impossible; it reduced each skirmish to nothing more than the grinding of teeth against teeth, bone against bone. At the start of The War there had been attempts to build bridges in the dead of night, shooting grappling lines and whispers over the taut air of the chasm. The end of each attempt had been the same, as the screams of Soldiers pierced the darkness and were swallowed, beyond the starlight, by the darker darkness, below. Later there had been the maverick Generals who had led their forces out in wide arcs, hoping to ford the Rift at some imagined narrow point in the east, but when they arrived they found that the point was no narrower than anywhere else, and that, moreover, the enemy was waiting for them.

It was this, ultimately, that confounded the Strategists of North and the Tacticians of South, that saw each brilliant plan tumbling and flapping and screaming, down, into the chasm: the Rift was the ultimate high ground. It was always too wide, always too exposed, always too impossible. Three twitchy conscripts could hold any section of it against a thousand hardened veterans; ten daring kids could bring down an entire army; in short, any attempted crossing always resulted only in failure. And so the war continued.

Which brings us to the moment we have been brought to; the moment when the race between the Hero and the Hero began. The war had been going on forever. The people in North who suggested peace were hung from the walls as turncoats; the people in South who proposed a ceasefire were thrown into the Rift as traitors; the war had been going on forever. All attempts to cross the Rift existed only in the stories of the grandmothers, whose fathers, as little boys, had seen their aunts fall to their doom. The war had been going on forever. And then the idea of the Hero was born.

In North they said that the first Hero was a Northerner; in South they said the first hero was a Southerner; in both towns the truth was extinguished long ago. Who was first and who was second is not a matter we concern ourselves with: the fact is that there were two heroes, and they were both known only as the Hero. The Northern Hero was a woman with short silver hair and eyes that were always in shadow; she rode a pure black stallion. The Southern Hero was a woman with short silver hair and eyes that were always in shadow; she rode a pure black stallion. They were both known only as the Hero because they were both going to make their town the only town that remained; they were both known only as the Hero because they were both the only real Hero; they were both known only as the Hero because they were both going to find the end of the Rift, and thus give their army the ultimate advantage, and thus end The War.

They both began at the same time on the same day, a Wednesday in October, and they both set off in the same direction, heading east. From the beginning they were the fiercest of rivals, and as they watched them ride away both towns were in awe of their Hero’s skill: the Hero would jump her horse forward and fire an inescapable barrage from her carbine; the Hero would drop her horse below the volley and let off a deadly round from her pistol; the Hero would twist her horse round the bullets and lob a grenade with impossible accuracy; the Hero would fling the grenade back with unparalleled finesse; the—

And so it went on. The Heroes moved eastwards, still fighting, until they were beyond the hills and beyond the two town’s sight. They fought like dancers, and then they fought like killers, and then they fought like fighters and each moment of the fight was more incredible than the last because both were unbeatable; both were unmatched. They fought in the dust at sunset; they fought in the fog at dawn; they fought in the burning heat of the midday and their short silver hair glinted gold in the light of the sun and they fought on and on until their horses, both at the same time, collapsed from exhaustion, and then they fought over the bodies of their horses as the sun burned their scalps and the sweat dripped into the earth that was the colour of blood and they went on, leaving their horses behind, rolling and firing and grunting and sprinting along the line of the Rift until their guns, both at the same time, broke apart in their hands, and then they fought on with the shards of the metal from the barrels, the slivers spinning through the air and whistling like death, and when the metal was gone they fought with the sticks from the trees that they hurled like spears and that splintered into shrapnel in the places where their heads had just been, and when the forests ended they fought with the the stones that they tore from the earth and that they launched as if they were meteors that left craters in the dirt where their heads had just been, and their silver hair whipped in through the air, because it was longer now, and they fought on.

At last they came to the desert, the long desert, where there was nothing but nothing and sand, and even here they tried to fight, tried to sling it into their eyes and cut themselves apart with the grains, but it was sand, and the wind took it, and now there was no way to fight any more. And then they both collapsed and slept.

When they both awoke at the same time they both stared at each other, their gazes unknowable behind the shadows of their eyes. They were both in pieces. Their thighs had been battered by the horses; their hands had been torn by the metal; their shins had been smashed by the rocks, stomachs gashed by splinters, necks burned by the sun. They were both in pieces. They both began to run at the same time.

They were running to a point they had both seen as soon as they had awoken, a distant part of the Rift. They were running towards that distant point because it was different to all of the other parts of the Rift, and its difference was important, because its difference was that it was narrow. They sprinted, both broken, both faster than any other, both destined to get there first. Their silver hair streamed behind them; their feet barely touched the sand; they were both the fastest, both arrived first, both leapt before the other, both struck a deadly blow in mid-air, both dodged a clumsy strike, both landed, both turned, and both realised that they had now changed sides.

They stared at each other again. It was not possible for one of them to jump; with the other prepared, a jump would have been the same as a suicide. They stared at each for a moment longer. Then the Hero began to run, and the Hero began to jump. The Hero glanced back; the Hero  landed; the Hero continued running; the Hero began to pursue her enemy; the Hero ran faster than ever before; the Hero ran faster still; the Hero noticed a kink in the Rift; the Hero noticed a kink in the Rift; the Hero prepared to duck and send her enemy flying into the Rift; the Hero prepared to jump and kick her enemy into the Rift; the Hero kicked; the Hero ducked; the Hero flew over her enemy; the Hero watched her enemy fly over her; the Hero continued to fly and reached out her arms; the Hero swore as her enemy reached out her arms; the Hero grabbed the other edge of the Rift; the Hero prepared to jump after her enemy; the Hero lifted herself up from the edge; the Hero  began to jump; the Hero began to run; the Hero glanced back; the Hero landed; the Hero—

And thus it went. The Hero would become pursuer; the Hero would become pursued. With each leap the distance they soared grew ever more extraordinary; with each leap they would change sides again. Occasionally they stopped and fought with fists and knees and teeth; the Hero would gain the upper hand; the Hero would dodge the killing blow and run; the Hero would grunt and the pursuit would continue. It wasn’t long until they lost track of which side was which; the Rift was like a seam, now: all they did was follow the stitches.

Eventually the Rift grew wide again. They slept. When they woke their hair was very long, and they were hungry. They killed lizards and threw the tiny bones like darts. It was as they were eating the lizards that they began to speak. The Hero, realising she couldn’t defeat her enemy with strength alone, had decided to employ psychological methods—to that end, she began to tell the stories of her past deeds, to instil in her enemy a fear just as deadly as any wound. The Hero, in turn, had realised that what was necessary was distraction, a tiny slip, and so she began to tell the stories of her past deeds, to disturb her enemy, to create a moment of inattention that would become as fatal as the drop to the bottom of Rift itself.

And so they began to tell their stories, and they travelled, and when they could, they fought. When the Rift was narrow they were pursued and pursuer, changing sides and roles like the sand that shifted with the wind. When the Rift was wide they told their stories and tossed the poisoned needles that they made from their ever-growing silver hair.

The day came at last. Their hair trailed behind them, like two silver rivers. It was thin, and dirty. They were thin and dirty too. They were telling the stories of their past. For a long time now the Hero no longer told her own stories, but instead told the stories of her enemy, in an effort to confuse her. The Hero, in turn, did the same—though sometimes she told her own stories again, to further confound her rival. The Hero had long cottoned on to this particular trick, and employed it herself, alternating between stories that were hers, and stories that were the stories of her enemy. They both knew all the stories by heart; when they slept, it was the stories that made up their dreams. The Hero was telling of how she, the Hero, had once climbed the mountain to the south of North, and the Hero—who knew that her enemy was attempting to confuse her, because in fact it was she, the Hero, who had climbed the mountain to the north of South—was laughing, when she saw it. The Hero saw it at the same time, and at once they both began to run and their hair rushed like a torrent behind them and the Hero howled and the Hero roared and they both ran faster than they had ever run towards the reason they were howling and roaring and running and the reason they were howling and roaring and running was the end of the Rift.

‘You have nowhere to run now!’ shouted the Hero.

‘You can no longer escape me!’ the Hero called.

‘I will end this at last!’ yelled the Hero.

‘It will finally be over!’ the Hero screamed.

‘I will bring victory to…’ and the Hero frowned.

‘A triumph to…’ and confusion seemed to flicker behind the shadow of the Hero’s eyes.

‘I don’t remember…’

‘I can’t recall…’

‘North…?’

‘South…?’

And then the end of the Rift came, and the Heroes stared at each other, and instead of fighting, they were overcome by something they had never before experienced. Fear. They had no doubt that they could defeat their enemy; it was not a fear of death that gripped them, nor a fear of failure. It was the fear that, in winning, they might lose—that they might destroy themselves, by mistake, and walk away with the wrong self, return as the victor for the wrong side, and die, even as they triumphed. They were still absolutely sure of their abilities; they were no longer sure of the identity that commanded their use.

‘I’ll kill you…’ said the Hero, slowly—but she was no longer sure who ‘I’ and ‘you’ were.

But suffering is a thorny thing, and to hack our way through its tangles now would take more time than we have, so instead I thought we’d talk about ice cream. I went to the ice cream factory—you know the one, though it is old now, the chrome has become tarnished, and it no longer shines in the sun, as it did then. “Then”—it is perhaps worth mentioning that I, had she not been called I, would have been—though of course she still was—000 101 023 843. So, though a long way from where our time will take us, her time was not so far from our time. Now ice cream is nothing, but when the factory first came there were many who travelled to the factory to try it there, to see how the cream was iced, and to taste it. I was among those who travelled, with her class mates, on a Sunday, in the summer.

The ice cream factory was also the marshmallow factory, its location chosen for the mallow that hung down in thick sheets from the branches of the nearby forest. It was through this forest that I and her schoolmates walked that Sunday, laughing, spooling the mallow around their palms and tossing the wads at the birds, who scattered, only to be drawn back once the party had passed, to continue their feast. I didn’t join in the laughing and the tossing; she was twelve, and serious. She walked at the front of the party, alongside 000 101 023 847; he who would go on to be the fiercest of soldiers—this was a time of honour, and later there would be many soldiers—but who was, for now, a young boy, pulled in by her seriousness, and her strangeness. I never reciprocated his adoration, and we may be tempted to speculate that the bitterness of unrequited adoration led 000 101 023 847 to the sword, the mud, and, one day, the heart of the king—but that would be outside of our role, and we will not venture there. Our role is simply to say this: that the two walked at the head of the party, past the mallow trees, in silence. His mouth was open; hers was firmly shut.

I was feeling something like excitement as they approached the factory. It’s important, that ‘something like’, because again the way that I understood excitement was nothing like the way her classmates understood excitement. She had begun to notice this herself; when she did speak, which was not often, it was almost always to ask someone how they were feeling. Her interlocutor—normally the boy who clung so desperately to her side—would respond with something like “OK”, or “alright”, and she understand no better than before. In turn the boy, aware of the interest the object of his adoration had in feelings, would try to respond with better answers, concrete details, like the butterflies that somersaulted and dive-bombed through his stomach. But these in turn would only deepen the frown on his beloved’s brow, and in the end they would both be back to where they started; silent, frustrated, unsure.

It may be tempting to postulate that this early exposure to the difficulties of one being’s relationship to another—that is, the problem of expressing one’s self to another’s self—that is, the failure of the lingual in addressing the non-lingual; that is, the impossibility of all communication—turned the young man away from these complexities and towards the simplicity of honour, respect, and violence; that the unwitting alienation of I by her parents led in turn to the unwitting alienation of 000 101 023 847; that this, in turn, led to the young man’s love of the physical, the muscular, the simple joy of power; and that this, in turn, pushed that famous blade through the arteries of the king, cut the tendons of the neck, and tore that head—the same age as I, who died only three days after—from the royal anatomy that had borne it so beautifully, for so long. But to postulate in this way would, as has been already mentioned, be outside the realm of our duties, and so we will not venture there.

The question came to him on this particular day as they entered a clearing, recent, the ragged stumps of the mallow trees between the dirt-caked undersides of the newly upturned boulders. It was the same question as always, coming out of I’s mouth in the same way the words always came out of her mouth, as if it was the next question in a long line of questions their non-existent conversation had been following for the last, silent half-hour. How are you feeling, she asked, and he swallowed and jumped a little, prepared as he had been for her question but not, never, for her, for her words, the audible confirmation of her physical presence alongside him and simultaneously her confirmation of his presence which, for some time now, seemed to him to be nothing but an extension of her presence, a period at the end of her sentence, or perhaps not even a period, but only a comma. Once he had recovered himself he told her, biting his words as they rushed out of him, that he felt like a box full of ants with no lid, or, no a box full of fleas—but the moment was gone, she had frowned and turned her head to study the upturned boulders and the flattened scraps of mallow strewn around them. 000 101 023 847 swallowed again, this time swallowing the hot bitterness of disappointment, anguish, self-loathing; at the last minute he had decided that it was ants that he felt, not fleas, but now he saw that of course it had been fleas all along, ants didn’t get the point across at all, it was the fleas that made it come together…

I didn’t care about fleas or ants. Her excitement was something far off, existing for her only in the word ‘excitement’ and even in that word only barely, as if the letters were half-translucent, built out of smooth, small pieces of clouded glass like the shards she picked from the sea shore, every autumn. She had hoped, against hope, that 000 101 023 847 would say that he was just a little excited, or, better, yet, that he wasn’t excited at all, or, best, that he didn’t know excitement, hadn’t an idea of it, hadn’t known and had never known—but ants? Something so intense, wriggling and squirming and alive, a real feeling—that was beyond her, and always had been.

When they got to the factory they were greeted by a large woman with a larger moustache that extended beyond the boundaries of her head and gave the impression of something looming, something about to strike—though these impressions were lost on I, who thought only that the woman had a moustache much larger than was the fashion for the time. The woman led the school group through the various chambers of industry in single file, I having now moved to the back, 000 101 023 847 moving, like a shadow, just behind her. Visible in the woman’s silhouette as she was illuminated by the soft blue light that was at that time a byproduct of the marshing process, the ends of her moustache moved with her voice, as she rattled off the volumes of mallow marshed by the factory, the flavours with which the cream could with current technology possibly be iced, the many achievements of the conglomerate responsible for the factory’s origins, and so on. I considered asking her shadow if he had feelings towards the moustache but, unsure of the importance of that impressive sculpture of hair and wax, she kept her mouth shut. 000 101 023 847 did not have feelings towards the moustache of their guide; in fact, he was unaware that the thing existed, having focused exclusively, for the entire duration of the tour, on the mole that rose so faintly from the soft brown underside of I’s arm. Possibly it was that mole that he thought of, as he led the final charge on the castle; possibly that mole occupied him as he fell, bloodied and exhausted, to his seat on the broken throne; possibly it was that mole that filled his final thoughts, as the counter-revolutionaries spat at him, demanded he beg for mercy, and then, disgusted, tied the rope around his neck. All of these possibilities are, of course, just that, and nothing more.

When the group came at last to the tasting room the reason for I’s subtle shift from front to rear of the column became obvious: she wanted everyone else to taste the ice cream before her. Marshed mallow was too valuable to at that time be tasted by any 12-year-old other than the king himself, and so it was to ice cream that they were confined, and this, too, in only one flavour, the cheapest to produce which, when questioned by an eager brunette near the front of the group, the moustached guide described as tasting similar to the night time, just after the rains. The brunette nodded and asked in turn if it mattered, with such a flavour, if one ate with a spoon or directly, with just the fingers, to which the moustache quivered with a snort, and the brunette reddened, ashamed that her query had been so obvious to the others who now chuckled in time to the wobbling of the moustache. I frowned and waited to see if a spoon was indeed the correct method, which, of course, it was.

Here are some of the things that I heard from her classmates, when she asked them how they felt, as they ate the ice cream:

like the ice cubes that stick to your fingers like the music they play on the radio in the early morning, while you sleep like the cherry trees in winter when the leaves are already shrivelled and white like the last toothpick like the moon

Good. Here’s some coffee—though I’m afraid it might be a little cold. Today I’m going to tell you about the Pianist’s hand. You’ve noticed his missing hand, I suppose? You haven’t? That is concerning. You must notice it, the next time you see him. It’s very important for the storyteller to notice things—especially the rude things, like the way the Golfer’s trousers—but you haven’t noticed that either, I see. You mustn’t avert your eyes from these things—you must stick your nose in it all, let your curiosity take the reigns and wash your propriety down the sink, along with the rest of your coffee. I’m sorry it was cold, but of course if you’d gotten up earlier—but enough of that. Be nosey! Eavesdrop always—you are a spy for all the world’s experience. Here’s your breakfast. Now sit and listen.

The first Pianist to crush their hand was 000 000 032 437. 000 000 032 437—we remember her well. She appears in quite a few of the early tales—perhaps that feeble brain of yours recalls, at the very least, the teapot incident of that time? Good; you aren’t quite so useless as you make yourself out to be. Well, it was 000 000 032 437 who first suggested the movement of the handle, to the side—but we don’t have time for that now. I doubt we will ever come to that story, if you continue to sleep until such an hour as this every day! The teapot incident occurred in 000 000 032 437’s youth; it is her old age—long after she had stopped being known as 000 000 032 437 and was known instead as the Pianist—that we are interested in today.

Of course it was an accident, the hand-crushing. I hope you have learned by now that all important things begin with accidents. 000 000 032 437, the Pianist, was sixty years and three days old. She had finished her morning practice and was on her way to the café to meet her apprentice. Now it is worth lingering for a moment on this apprentice—000 000 032 588. In fact it is easy for me to reveal the character of this apprentice, this 000 000 032 588, because I need only say that he was very similar to you, and at once you understand that he was lazy, disinclined to the practicing of his art, a serial forgetter, unorganised, uncaring, uninterested, and conscientious only in his attempts to avoid the duties to which he was bound. In short, he was your spitting image, and in every way the most typical of apprentices.

The Pianist was fed up with carrying, on her able but aging shoulders, the burden of such an apprentice, and as she walked to the café she put her hands in her pockets and considered—but of course you must understand that it was an accident. On no account are you to tell it any other way. She only considered how she might shift onto the shoulders of that slob, 000 000 032 588, a little of the responsibility it was his destiny to carry. The accident, when it happened, was just that—an accident. You understand? Don’t chew with your mouth open.

So. Where was I? You see, already my memory is beginning to slip—such little time is left to us! And yet you don’t even listen—you’ve forgotten too, didn’t pick up so much as a word—not that I’m surprised, over the sound of those masticating molars. What’s that? She was considering? So you do listen—you just choose not to communicate? A storyteller who fails to communicate?! It would be better, indeed, if you were deaf! And we have such little time!

We must continue at once: she was on her way to the café, hands in pockets, considering the possibilities of change—a coincidence, nothing more than a coincidence—when the accident occurred. A momentous occasion, destined to ripple through the long channel of our history, and, at the same time, the simplest thing: she fell. Tripped. Tumbled, toppled, keeled, collapsed. It has never been clear what it was that caused her to fall, but fall she did. And—the crucial detail, of course, for where were her hands? Just so. The smallest of details, you see, for, in the sudden rush of downward movement, she had no time to remove both hands from where they lay. Only her right hand, the fluent hand, the hand that makes the Pianist’s art—only it emerged from the waistband in time. While the left struggled uselessly against the fabric, the right was drawn: the sabre from the oiled sheath, the pistol from the cowboy’s holster. It was drawn; it’s wrist rotated; it’s palm faced downwards and—crack.

In fact, it was not immediately obvious to her, to our mellifluent master, the importance of her injury. Indeed one could say she resented it: it was not only the wrist that was shattered, but the palm, too, and indeed some say no less than six of the fingers. What? Good! You’re still listening—and I hope you see that I have inserted, here, a lesson for you. You must be critical at all times, ever vigilant against the silly, and more than that, the stupid. And now we must continue.

Our Pianist protagonist finds herself frustrated: she has been made quite useless. For months she attempts to go on as before. And so she calls upon the Machinist, to machine for her a hand, one that might replace that useless right, that broken tool, that mangled mitt. And create for her a hand she does, our Machinist, and a fine thing it is, too. For three weeks the Pianist learns the device, learns the strangeness of the feeling of the metal as it couples to her nerves, learns—what? What do you—yes, of course she cut off her hand! How else would the Machinist’s instrument have functioned? And have we not spoken, not just a few ago, of the missing hand of our own Pianist, to which this tale is an explanation? No more interruptions! We have no time for your stupidity now! And you must not anger me further: this story is too important to be told rashly. Do not interrupt me again.

For three weeks the Pianist learned to work the device. On the Sunday of the fourth she gave her recital—her apprentice, for the three weeks preceding, having been forced to perform. As I believe even one so stupid as you would understand, the recital was a failure. It was no fault of our peerless Pianist, nor of our masterly Machinist: both were, at the ages of sixty and sixty-five respectively, the pre-eminent practitioners of their professions. In fact it was a simple matter of art. For the Pianist needed a Pianist’s paw to play; our maker, of course, could create only the Machinist’s metacarpus.

Ah—now you are awake, I see? You noticed, did you, that number? No? You didn’t want to interrupt? And how do you propose to learn? Well? Exactly! You will never learn if you don’t ask questions! What? I never did. It is a moot point besides—I’m sure you didn’t notice the number at all. Really? What was it, then? Don’t speak with your mouth full!

But, good—you are not so dull. Yes. Sixty-five. Just so: sixty-five. Five years the Machinist had worked, beyond the bounds of the age at which we cease today. Five long years! For she, too, had an apprentice quite typical, quite lazy; an apprentice who had refused to take up the tools that were his duty, who would have, as had so many before him, let his Machinist master work and work and work, until the day she died.

I said to you before that this story served as explication, as to the missing hand of our present-day Pianist. It is also an answer to this second mystery: how it was that these negligent neophytes were able to force their masters to work, long after the duties of their profession should have been passed on. And perhaps you see the answer before you. For while the Pianist was thwarted in her attempts to bring her automated appendage to bear, it was her apprentice who was forced to play. For, despite all of his indolence, all of his indiscipline, and all of his incessant objections, there was no other. His handless master could no longer fill the role.

And so, he did. He had little choice. The master, no longer able to perform, became the teacher; the apprentice, feet dragging in the metaphorical mud, became the practitioner. And, in time, our old friend the Pianist began to appreciate her uselessness. In it she found a freedom never before afforded to her, a license to curiosity, to indulgence, and to that greatest of all vices, entitlement. No longer was she the Pianist; she was 000 000 032 437, again. And so time passed, her life was lived, and she was buried amongst the stars with a smile on her face.

A good ending to our story would be that line—but there is of course an addendum. It comes in the form of our friend, the reticent reciter—the Pianist’s lazy apprentice, 000 000 032 588. He it was who was forced into service, before his time; while his friends continued their lives of languor around him he it was who worked, practised, performed and, in time, learned the frustrations of an apprentice of his own. And so his life went, until, suddenly, he too was sixty years and three days old, finished with morning practice, on his way to the café to meet his apprentice, and, hands-in-pockets, considering.

But this time it was not a fall—this time it was no accident. Our new-old Pianist was, in his way, a straightforward character, and his approach was, thusly, simple. His solution was neither ingenious, nor delicate; neither artful, nor dramatic; in fact, it’s qualities do not extend beyond the simplicity I have ascribed to it, here. In short: he smashed his hand with a rock.

And eyebrows? Eyebrows are just plain weird. They’re like fat caterpillars hanging off the edge of your skull. Chins are like the thumbs of the face. Ears—jesus, don’t even get me started on ears. It’s like—someone tangled up all the cartilage, and then they were like, “shit! no one will notice if I just stick a bit of skin over it. And then I’ll just staple this lobe”—what the fuck, it’s seriously called a fucking lobe—“I’ll just staple that underneath to distract everybody.” Oh yeah, and I’ll stuff it full of wax. And then make it oily. Like—what the fuck, dude?

Lips. Why did we need to paint them a different colour? We’re meant to be homo sapiens, not a bunch of fucking clowns. Or maybe it was because we kept forgetting which hole to stuff the food in. It wouldn’t surprise me. There’s definitely way too many orifices in the face. That’s right. Orifices. Your face is full of orifices. Orifices. Seriously. We’ve covered the big holes, but then there’s all those tiny little holes. The ones that oil and hair and—if you’re really lucky—pus comes out of. We call them pores—like porous. Like, shit goes in and shit goes out through these. Like the face is a fucking sponge. People say their faces are like craters, but craters don’t have weird fucking shit ooze out of them all the time.

If anybody thinks the rest of the body is any less of a fucking tragedy, I’ve got one word for you: elbows. Just look at them. Look at your elbows. OH, is it tough? Not so easy to look at them? Almost as if you weren’t meant to look at them? Yeah. That’s the only saving grace of elbows—you don’t have to see them so often.

Arms are alright, though, aren’t they? Yeah, arms are cool, nothing wrong with—wait… what’s all this blue stuff I can see, coming up to my wrist? What the fuck? Or those my veins? Why can I see my veins? Jesus Christ, why are they blue? Oh my God, they keep going? I can see them in my fingers? What the fuck is my skin made of, tissue paper? At least I can turn my hand over and then—oh, wait, there are my fingernails. Coming out from under my skin. Never mind.

Let’s try the chest. Obviously for that there’s the big ones, but let’s start around them. Collar bones. We named clothes after them. Wait, why did we name clothes after them? Oh, I dunno, maybe because we wanted to cover them up and never look at them ever again. Like, they’re literally bones, and you can see them pushing through your skin. And they look like fucking support girders for your shoulder, and not fucking stable ones. And they’re not—who here has broken a collar bone? Who here knows somebody who’s broken a collar bone? Everyone.

And while we’re talking about shoulders—what the fuck, shoulders? They’re like all soft and squishy, except for that weird hollow bit, and then that gets hard, and you know there’s just a fucking mess of tendons and gristle and weird tiny bits of bone in there, and then if you get fat that all gets fat on it and then you’re like a hunchback and… Yeah.

Ok, back to the proper chest: the main event. Boobies. Boobs. Knockers. Melons. We’re obsessed with them—straight dudes, obviously, but a lot of other people have been taken along for the ride as well. Two lumps of fat, with scrags of darker skin that gets hard when you get cold or horny. The same way your nose gets red. But nobody freaks out about a red nose—OK, maybe at Christmas. But, like, seriously. Boobs are such a big deal. They’re like half of the world’s media coverage. They’re also like fried eggs stuck to your ribcage with a glue stick.

What next? Butt holes? Dicks? Cunts? There’s been enough said about them already. Nobody thinks they aren’t weird. They’re fucking weird. Oh, man, I know—I haven’t even started on ageing yet! All of this shit is nothing compared to that.

So: what does ageing mean? Ageing means everything starts melting. Right? That’s like the long and short of it. Your skin starts melting, your neck melts, your boobs melt, your dick melts, your knees melt, and your feet turn into puddles. That’s what ageing means. Oh, and hair starts growing out of your ears.

We’ve all got shit to do, so let’s just do a quick roundup, to finish up. Your eyes are globules of jelly. Your toes are snails with skeletons. Your legs are two vases full of blood and bones, and your ankles are marbles stuck to the bottom. Your knees are salad plates sliding over a tangle of seaweed and guts. Your belly button used to be guts. And your guts are, well… guts.

I know—it’s depressing. If I had a human body I’d be depressed too. I’d like to say it’s not all weird, but it is. I guess the one thing you do have going for you, though, is that you’re all crazy enough to keep calling yourselves beautiful.

We met in science class, I think—we sat next to each other. I don’t know if I ever asked her out but if I did she said no, and it as the type of relationship that the internet now calls the ‘friendzone’. I hate that term passionately, but it does do a good job of describing me, pimples and all, making furtive glances at Tess’ fully developed breasts pressing against the fabric of her polo— masturbating furiously every day when I got home—while she laughed at my jokes and dated, hotter, cooler guys. I remember one day someone found out her bra size was a D. She was teased about it which didn’t make any sense to me because of course every boy that teased her just wished he had access to those breasts (and it was only boys doing the teasing). I teased her too, all the while both wishing I could touch her skin, and being glad that she was my friend—that my friend had a D cup. Did I mention that she was a model, too?

The other person I need to tell you about is Omar. Omar and Tess were friends because they had lived on the same street for a while—their families knew each other well, etc., etc. Together we were a sort of geeky, science-y trio—Tess loved science and I did too (though I’m sure I loved it a lot more when I was around her). Whether Omar loved science or not I can’t quite remember—he was a smart, serious sort of guy in that particular way that only Middle-eastern guys can be smart and serious. I don’t know what that’s about, but my theory is that in Persia (Omar was from Persia, though I don’t remember anything more specific than that), men are allowed to love poetry in a serious way. As a result they have a different masculinity to the one we care about in the english world—they value spectacles and books as a symbol of male power in a way that we don’t. That’s my theory, anyway. Omar didn’t wear glasses.

I think in some ways he hated me for upstaging his position as Tess’ male confidant, but we got along well enough. In retrospect of course I may have just wished Omar would envy me; just as I imagined I was more of a confidant than I really was.

I was obsessed with social standings and power in the way that most teenagers are, I think. Groups are so important in high school. Tess for me was a ticket to glory. I was friends with a hot girl! I think that’s a part of growing up that a lot of guys miss out on—losing that attitude and opening up to the fantastic possibilities that come from real, close female friends. Then again, maybe I’m being too harsh on myself—my memories from the period are pretty negative, and very self-deprecating. Our friendship might have been more real than I now remember it, and I might have been a better friend than I’m giving myself credit for.

Those are the characters, whatever the case—Tess and Omar and me. The memory I referred to at the start of this piece came one day when the three of us were at Tess’ house. We’d been put in a group for a science project, and had been dropping water balloons from a tree near Tess’ house, encased in various constructs that were meant to keen them safe: cotton wool, egg cartons and other typical school science project items. We’d finished for the day and gone back to Tess’ house for a bit to talk and eat and play Halo. We hadn’t been there long when Tess’ mother walked in with a pained look on her face. Tess followed her into the kitchen and then there was some talking and Tess came back into the room with tears on her face. It turned out their dog was going to be put down. It had been on the cards for a while, I understood, but today was the actual day when it was going to happen. Omar and I hugged Tess a lot (I remember the feeling of her wet cheek and her bra pressing against my chest); we weren’t as awkward as you might expect two teenage boys to be in that sort of situation, but there was certainly a feeling of floundering, at least for me. I’d never had to deal with something like this before, and didn’t know what to do.

Tess’ brother got in the car with the dog and Tess kept crying as she said her goodbye. We all hugged some more. Then I suggested we play Halo. And here’s the quandary—the reason, or at least I think the reason, this memory keeps on buzzing around. Omar couldn’t stand the idea. He was very upset by the notion, almost angry, though his serious, Middle Eastern character prevented the emotion from manifesting openly. His opinion was that now was not the time to play Halo—that it was a disrespectful thing to do.

What happened next I don’t quite remember, but Omar ended up going home because he didn’t think playing Halo was right. I think perhaps I argued my case sternly and Tess agreed with me. She may also have just wanted a distraction from the pain, and I might have been a useful catalyst. So we want and played Halo and then when her brother got back he played Halo too. I remember Tess’ sniffly, post-cry laugh as she cheered up while we played, and I remember being chuffed that I had “beaten” Omar, because Tess had sided with me.

Nowadays I’m not sure what I believe. I’ve never had to deal with death or pain or loss in any serious way myself, which might be why this is such a complicated topic for me, but I guess the two sides of the argument go something like this:

ME (THEN): We should play Halo because life is full of shit and pain and there’s no way to escape that fact. The best thing you can do is just get on with things, give yourself a break and try to forget. The more serious the pain, the more distraction matters, since dwelling on pain will magnify it, and might even be unhealthy. Isn’t there something sick about obsessing over death and suffering? That might even be the definition of sickness So don’t think about the dead dog; play Halo instead, and let time heal over your wounds.

Omar (THEN, TOO): Death is an important part of life. When anything dies it’s really crucial to pay your respects to the wider forces around us, to acknowledge your own smallness, and to allow yourself to feel pain. The person who doesn’t let themselves feel pain will ultimately become hollow, and inhuman, because they will lose touch with the real world of suffering that surrounds them. Increasingly, especially here in the West, we separate and quarantine these uncomfortable, ugly, painful parts of our lives from everything else—we put dying people in hospitals, where people who don’t care are paid to clean them up and wait for them to die so that the family can look at the corpse (after it has been put in makeup and dressed for the funeral), and then burn it into nothingness. But not only are we removing ourselves from suffering and all that is painful about reality: we are also denying ourselves the great and incomprehensible beauty that comes with death: it’s absoluteness, it’s finality. Death is a reminder to live while you can, and to respect the world around you, because soon you will be a part of it again. To deny yourself mourning is not just disrespectful to the dead: it it disrespectful to yourself, to your world, and to what it means to be mortal.

His sounds better than mine, I think. It’s poetic. But I guess that’s an aspect of the whole thing. Obviously mine is very tied up in modern, western science and the cynicism and coldness that comes with it. Omar comes at this question from more of an Eastern cultural place (even though Persia and Islam are Abrahmic, he’s a lot closer to Hinduism and Daoism than I am). I remember hearing a thing from an Indian doctor (a TED talk, I think), about how Indians know the weight of a dead body, from personal experience, and that that is a very important thing.

“now he was gone”. Is that a good line? It’s hard to know with lines like that. I found this while going through one of the many junk subfolders inside my writing folder. I think I must have written it while I was drunk. It’s bad, I think, but I also think it gets across how I was feeling about Ryan Davis’ death, and it reminded me to write about him. He died on July 3rd, 2013. If you don’t know, he was a videogame journalist with a vaudevillian streak. He hosted the “Giant Bombcast”, a podcast where some dude-ish dudes talked about videogames. I started listening it when I was maybe 14, and it helped me through a few long, tortured years of teenagedom. Each episode is normally between two to three hours long; absurd for a working adult, perfect for a teenager. Especially for the style of teenager I was—nerdy, lonely, oily.

Each week, in the course of those few happy hours, I came to know Mr. Davis and his interlocutors that little bit more. Ryan was the host, but everybody else talked over him, and before long I knew them all. I would walk home from school with my headphones nestled in my ears, smile when they smiled, laugh when they laughed. Unless I was on the bus—then I wouldn’t laugh. Soon, I wasn’t coming to the podcast for Ubisoft news and Mass Effect discussions: I was coming to the podcast for Jeff, Brad, Vinny, Dave, Drew, Alex, Patrick, hell, even Matt Rorie. It wasn’t about the videogames: it was about the chatter in between, the places where, briefly, the lives of those people in that studio on the other side of the planet were opened, just a crack. Warm light spilled out from under those cracks, and I basked in it.

And so I came to know those people. I never consciously thought of them as my friends, but what else do you call someone you’ve listened to—really listened to—for hundreds, or even thousands, of hours? I bet you haven’t even spent that long listening to your husband, or your lesbian lover. We have the technical vocabulary to discuss headphones, iPods and podcasts (though podcasts is a terrible word), but when it comes to the new types of relationships these technologies suddenly bring into being, the discussion is still embryonic. I sat in a virtual room with Ryan Davis for years; I rolled my eyes at him, laughed with him, swore at him, and sometimes, agreed with him. I sympathised with him every time he had to deal with a bunch of drunken assholes during the E3 specials. I was happy—really, unreservedly happy—when I heard about his marriage. And I hurt— really, unreservedly hurt—when I heard he had died. And he never even knew I existed.

Celebrity culture is part of this same set of relationships, of course. Fandom: that’s what you’re thinking. I’m just a Ryan Davis fan. A lot of people would be happy if Taylor Swift got married; a lot of people were sad when Robin Williams died. That’s not wrong. I am a Ryan Davis fan. But I think there is a difference; if not a fundamental one, at least one of degree. The older media formats— TV, film, music and so on—exist in a world of planned interviews, promotional posters and photo shoots. A world of PR. And that world of PR is like a wall. The wall might be made of warm, crumbly earth, or it might be made of cheap pink plastic—either way, it’s a wall. And while I don’t want to be the asshole who argues that their medium is more authentic than others, I’m going to be: podcasts are more authentic than most of those old media formats. It’s a muddy, bloody Wild West out there, and people aren’t covering themselves in cling film before diving in. I’m not saying that hearing Ryan Davis on the Giant Bombcast was like spooning with him, but it wasn’t like reading about him in Today Magazine, either. Podcasting—the informal style of podcasting I’m talking about here, that is—is a lot closer to sitting in a room with someone than any other media format I know. You can read a biography about Robin Williams, but I heard Ryan Davis say uh uh uh uh as he mimed shanking someone, and later I heard him make fun of himself when that got quoted in the New Yorker. I heard the embarrassment in his voice as he explained that he was adjusting his microphone to get rid of his nose whistle. Who cares about his parents’ names, or the school he went to? None of those things are knowing someone. Knowing someone is being with them now; existing in a moment with them like two strangers brushing hands on a street corner. I was with Ryan Davis in those moments. And if I go back to the Giant Bombcast archive, I can be with Ryan Davis for countless hours; again, and again, and again.

There’s a loneliness to that. I watched Her the other day. We’ve been talking about falling in love with AI’s for a long time. The idea of everyone falling in love with the same AI—eyes down, headphones in, passing each other on the street—that seems like a possible future. But what about falling in love with the same person—someone you hear every week on a podcast? Sure, Scarlett Johansson in Her might talk back to you, but Ryan Davis is a person—a real person—and he can read your emails too (though it takes a while). And at the end of the day, they’re both just voices in your headphones.

3/11/14          9km          43min

The same run as Friday, this time at 11am. The things I noticed—the ocean, hoodlums, yellow car. 

THE OCEAN is a lot heavier here, and more at odds with the people and the land. Back in Perth [Australia] there’s a sort of old, fuddy-duddy, rivalry between the sea and the shore—as if they’re both aware of how silly it is to still be fighting after so long. So even though occasionally they do get a bit stirred up, for the most part they’re pretty comfortable together—and if you catch them when they think no one’s watching, you might even think they were friends. Here it’s different. The waves smash on concrete along the shoreline and swamp the docks with heavy, inevitable surges. The water isn’t happy with the walls men have built and it has been laying siege to them for a long time now, with all the great wild fury it can muster. It’s sunny out the window now, but earlier it was grey, and the sea was painted a vicious, dark, roiling blue. It knows of the evil of these people and their great, cancerous ambition, and it will not stop until it has swallowed this place out of history and erased both its physical and symbolic existence. You can see the clawing fury in the way the water runs, heavy and thick like blood, between the cracks in the concrete.

Forget the hoodlums and the yellow car. I thought this first bit was sort of well written, so I’m going to extend it and add to it a little here and try to elucidate what I’m getting at. To start, a common image: the great, wild North Sea and a man (always a man) battling against it—encapsulates a lot of my thinking on Scotland, and the Scottish. I have a theory that the reason the Scots have so much fight, and so much poetry, in them, is because this is a country where you can fight. The thing about the concrete and the water that I described above is that the concrete is winning. The North Sea is vicious, sure, but that doesn’t stop a whole lot of people sucking up a whole lot of oil out of its breast. Before the oil, it was fish—people have always been fighting the ocean here, wrestling something from it. Nature is a real presence in Scotland, no doubt about it, but it’s not an insurmountable presence. That’s the thing that matters—that you can triumph over nature here. 

The contrast for me of course is the Swedish attitude and its own associated weather. In Scotland, if you’re outside for a night in winter, you’re at risk of death, but you can fight to survive, and you might well make it through and go on to tell your grandchildren (in beautiful, well-worked language) all about the experience. In Sweden, if you’re stuck outside for a night, you freeze to death at one a.m. There’s nobody to tell the brave tale of a struggle against overwhelming odds because the odds truly are overwhelming, and they’re all dead. This, I think has a lot of explanatory power when thinking about Swedish pragmatism (that is, the r2 is high). You can’t be anything but pragmatic when you live in that sort of world. If you forget your coat, you don’t laugh about it and do pushups to keep warm; you get frostbite, and lose some fingers.

So why does that matter? Well, from a “current events” perspective, I think this theory also has significant explanatory power when it comes to understanding the various attitudes towards environmental issues in the modern world. Here is where Australia, my beautiful homeland, comes into the picture. As I tried to detail in the diary entry, the Australian climate—at least providing you don’t live out in the desert, which nobody really does—has all the ferocity of two old pals sitting on rocking chairs, toothlessly swearing at each other, and holding hands when they think they’re alone. Despite the reputation, Australia is a truly soft country to live in. I can back up that assertion with some demographic realities: one of the most urbanised countries on the planet, incredibly wealthy, incredibly obese, and so on. I’m not arguing that the climate has made us obese—that’s sort of a separate topic—but I do think we’ve come to take the climate, and a lot of other things, for granted. 

At least in Scotland ‘beating’ the weather takes some effort: there’s a reason they’ve churned out so many good engineers. In Australia “winning” against the climate means sitting in a hammock all day and not moving too much. In that world, I think it’s easy to prioritise air-conditioning over solar panels: the climate is never much more than a sweaty nuisance. In Sweden, there are daily reminders that this planet can kill you as easily as farting; in Australia, we left any fears of weather back on the shores of Britain, long ago.

The cabin itself was simple: thick log walls around a kitchen and a living room, joined by a large opening. The living room housed an armchair, table, bunkbed, and fireplace. Each of the four pieces of furniture was as dense and immutable as an old man's grip. Dusty knicknacks lined the windowsills and the mantel. The cupboards in the kitchen were stocked with tins of beans, boxes of tea and a bottle of whiskey.

Elvira took two empty jerry cans from underneath the kitchen sink and directed me back outside. I followed her down the path, laughing as I tripped over a root. She helped me up and kissed me, then took us down to a stream that ran cold and clear from the top of the valley above us. The water was so cold it numbed my hands. As she collected the water, I pushed my head under the surface, and came up red-faced and electric. We ran back to the cabin, slipping on the mud, Elvira squealing and laughing as she tried to escape my dripping hair. Just before we went inside I looked down at the lake. It was rippling with the rain, the tiny waves capped by a light wind, its flecked surface reflecting the still grey of the sky. The pines across the lake were too far away to be more than a solid mass of dark green, shivering in the wet air like the fur of some ancient animal. Everything dripped, and smelled of earth, and I could taste the rain in the air. I couldn't see anything human anywhere: only the quiet, ceaseless rain and the great, breathing earth.

We closed the door and shook off our raincoats, stomping the mud off our boots. The kitchen had a gas stove, which we put to use immediately for a pot of tea. We started the fire and hung our socks to dry, then Elvira settled down into the armchair, curled up in rugs, tucked her feet into the furrows, and set a heavy novel across her legs. I smiled, and poured the tea. As she read, I sipped at it and warmed myself at the fireplace, letting my eyes wander through the memorabilia on the shelves. It was blanketed in a thin layer of history and dust: yellowing photos of Elvira’s relatives smiling on snowmobiles; a medal won during the shooting competition that happened here in spring; little wooden figures carved from fallen pine branches, and a guestbook.

It was a simple thing: two pieces of solid wood flattening old leafs of paper, bound together by fraying leather shoe laces. I thumbed through it, savouring the soft rustle of the paper and the comfortable weight of the wood. There were a lot of entries, covering many years; thankyou’s, goodbyes, apologies, congratulations, sorrow, happiness, jokes and regrets. I made it to the end, and found my entry, waiting, on old, blank pages. It had always been there.

Tea is best in mugs. Paper cups are not for humans. People are sad because of paper cups. If everyone had a heavy white mug full of good tea no one would jump out of skyscrapers any more, because there wouldn’t be skyscrapers. There would be houses with roofs made of earth, all painted the same colour, or different colours, because the colour of your walls wouldn’t matter. The roofs would come alive. First there would be simple bacteria that crept up from the compost patch, then long, soft grass growing out of seeds blown in from far away places. Small insects would make desperate leaps from towering elms and eucalypts, like tiny skydivers, and land safely - plunk! Or not. Finally there would be birds who would make big, colourful nests between the roof-sedges. Then, when it rained, the rain would pour down on a happily developed ecosystem, and families would run home and hide under their breathing, wriggling, singing roofs.

And it would be beautiful because the supporting beams of the houses would begin to rot and fuse with the living roof, and they would have lots of earthworms inside them that had slowly come further and further down into the soil until they reached the drawing room ceiling. Because of the warmth of the fireplace, the earthworms would retreat, finding solace in the heavy oak of the supporting beam. Mushrooms, after getting word from the beetles (who had spoken to the earthworms on an impromptu visit), would come down too, and begin growing out of the beam upside down, like edible stalactites. And all the people would look up from sitting in their armchairs reading Douglas Adams’ novels and look at the upside down mushrooms growing out of their growing roof and they would all say at exactly the same time,

“I am like those mushrooms.”

And it wouldn’t be very loud, just a passing comment, but it would be everyone over the entire world, and ‘those mushrooms’ would travel like a snowball in the places with snow and like a ball of spinifex in the places with sand and it would get louder and louder and louder and louder and louder and louder until the cold words and the hot words met.

And then there would be a silence, because all of the growing roofs would absorb the explosion of sound that came out from the meeting of the cold words and warm words, which would be like the big bang and like matter and antimatter (which might be the same thing) and also like love.

And then all of the houses would shudder just slightly, which would be the burp that came after they swallowed the last word, ‘mushrooms’. But actually then they would shudder again, because when everyone in the world says ‘mushrooms’ at the same time, it becomes the resonant frequency of earthworms.

And so all of the earthworms would die. It was the earthworms that held up the rotting beams- they were inside them, filling the cracks, gaps and crannies, holding on to one another in earthworm dances, making an unbroken line of earthworms through the length of the beam. So when all the earthworms died, first nothing would happen, because they would all continue to hold onto one another, because of rigor mortis.

And then, at the end of the day, or the beginning of the day, after the earthworms had been dead for a few hours, they would separate from one another. In the cold places this would be because the cold made them contract. In the warm places it would be because they began to dry out and shrink.

And all of the people would be getting out of bed, or getting into bed, and they would look up at their growing roofs and smile and snuggle down into the sheets and blankets next to their partner, or their child, or their partner and their child. They would all be thinking about what they would do today, or tomorrow, about the eggs, or muesli, or eggs and muesli they would have or had had for breakfast, about the dreams they had when they were younger, the dreams they had now and the dreams they wanted to have in the future.

Then there would be one big crack, like the world splitting in two, and the beams would all break and the growing roofs would all fall down on the people all looking up smiling and snuggling into their sheets and into each other. The growing roofs would all be very heavy but actually it would happen so fast that everyone would die instantly from being so surprised, and no one would have time to be scared or happy or angry or sorry. And while the roofs were very heavy, they would also be very courteous, so they would try as hard as they could not to crush anyone too much, and over time they would spread themselves out to cover everything because they would be so embarrassed about what had happened. Then, because there were no earthworms, all the people would be perfectly preserved in one layer of growing roof that covered the entire world.

Eventually the mushrooms in the growing roofs would grow into new intelligent life, inspired by the memories of spaghetti bolognese and swing sets and jumping in very cold lakes that were left in the soil. The new mushroom based life would slowly develop into beings that would walk and gallop and fly and love over the roofs for thousands of millions of years, some of them much smarter than scientists and some of them much more creative than artists and all of them not knowing why they loved each other so much but doing it anyway. Then they would watch from spaceships shaped like falling leaves as the sun expanded and consumed the perfectly preserved and never discovered seven billion people in the growing roof layer of Earth’s history. But everyone does not have a mug of tea, they have paper cups.

The builders laughed at them when Two told them they were going to start with the rain still going, so it was just the two of them. On the first day they pulled out all the weeds that had grown over the sand of the block. When grey sky turned dark they fell into the caravan, drenched and exhausted. On the second day they tried to lay the cement of the foundations, but when they woke on the third morning it had all been washed away. They set a tarpaulin over the site and tried again, four days of smoothing the concrete until it was so dark and so cold they lost sight and feeling in their hands. By the seventh day their bed was soggy and thick with a sludge of sand and cement, and when they went outside they found the tarpaulin torn in two by the wind and the road at the bottom of their block clogged with the remnants of their foundation.

“Maybe we should just wait for the rain to clear,” said Two.

“No,” said One. She set her mouth in a hard line. “We’ll do it with bricks,” she said.

One by one they dug the blocks deep into the sand. They re-set the tarpaulin and covered the bricks with concrete mixed with rainwater. Every evening they stood over the tiny section they had completed that day with hair dryers, working slowly to get the concrete to set. It took twelve days until the tarpaulin was again in tatters, this time pounded apart by the ferocity of the water itself, but it was enough. One walked across the foundation and traced her calloused fingers along its hardness. Then she turned to Two and kissed him. Two beamed. That night they burned their mattress and made love on the caravan floor.

It had been raining for over three months. They began to work on the walls with the same plodding tenacity they had brought to the foundation—one mortared brick after another. Three, a young, quiet brickie from the building company, offered to help them for fifteen dollars an hour. They accepted. He was no more proficient than either of them, but it was nice to have the company. Occasionally people would stop their cars outside the front of the block, wind down their windows and call out to the trio. Two would wander over to them and smile and scratch the back of his head as he talked. One never stopped working.

As they were nearing the fifth month of work the caravan collapsed. One had been laying out the beginnings of a new row while Three stood by with the next bucket of mortar, and they both watched as the off-white plasterboard sagged, groaned and then fell inwards, as if it was made of soggy bread. Two emerged from the rubble, still holding the thermos of coffee. He walked over to One and Three and handed them their cups. They all sat and watched the rain soak into the couple’s worldly possessions. “We’ll have to buy a new caravan, I suppose,” said Two. One said nothing, but she took his hand in hers and held it, for a long time.

After half a year they had to stop paying Three for his labour, but he kept showing up anyway. A famous meteorologist had been quoted in the papers saying the rain would stop in a week, but nothing changed. If anything, Two thought, the rain had gotten heavier. He had started to fantasise out loud with Three about dry clothes and sunlight. One remained as mute and as hardworking as ever.

They were doing the roof now. It was even slower going than the walls had been, because in the original plan this roof was also the floor of the storey above. Every few days the water would find its way into some supporting beam or another and bring sections of bricks tumbling down. Three tried to get his old building friends to help the trio but nobody was interested. As they built, Two placed small gas heaters underneath the completed sections, hoping that they might ward off the roaring damp.

They were coming near halfway when Three broke his arm. A brick had fallen on it edgeways, and he had collapsed without a sound. Two, as he ran over, thought that maybe the young man was dead, but as he got closer he saw the rise and fall of his chest and the mist of his breath. Two days later the bricklayer was back from hospital, his arm in a sling. Two asked if perhaps he would like some time off, but Three shook “no”, and began working with his left arm instead.

The roof of that first room was finished after eight months, and twenty-three tarpaulins. One and Two moved in immediately. The caravan was sold to some people who were leaving the city for drier weather. One bought a sheet of corrugated tin with the money and set it on a slope above the newly completed brick roof. Two thought about asking why they hadn’t done that to begin with, instead of building the whole floor out of bricks, but he didn’t say anything. Sometimes they had to replace bricks that would slip loose in the walls and floor and ceiling, but with two small heaters and a heavy wooden door the room was comfortable enough to live in.

It was summer now, but all that happened was that the rain got warmer. Three had broken up with his partner and moved in with One and Two, who didn’t mind. The room they were working on now was the bathroom, and progress was good—the rain had taught them lessons over the ten months of building.  Every morning Two would head put soup and coffee on the small gas stove in the corner of the room and bring it to One and Three, who would be working slowly on building up the walls, replacing what they had lost to dew and mist the night before. Many days they made no progress at all.

After a year the bathroom was finished. Two flushed the toilet and sighed with relief. On the radio they heard about the stream of cars that left the city daily. The people that had watched them building didn’t come any more, and the neighbouring houses were both empty, ‘FOR SALE’ signs drooping in the front of their yards. Two sometimes looked longingly through the windows of these houses at the abandoned beds, dry and gathering dust. One had given Three her penchant for silence, so Two had no one left to talk to.

After eighteen months two more rooms were finished. Two’s skin was transparent from lack of sunlight and some days he felt like a ghost. He would walk out from under the tarpaulin and watch the rain fall on his hands and chest, just to check that the droplets weren’t passing through him. One remained as tanned and strong as ever. Three’s arm was still in a cast and Two suspected the young man had just forgotten about it, so used to using his left arm instead. Two thought about reminding him, but it had been so long since anyone had spoken that he felt silly when he went to open his mouth, so he closed it again. The only sound was the rain, drumming on the tarpaulin and the tin of the roof.

It was two years and thirteen days when Three announced his departure. A car had come by a few days earlier and Three had been called over to speak to a woman. Two could barely make out his figure through the falling water. When the young man came back he said nothing but looked troubled. Two tried to ask what was wrong but the words stuck in his mouth. A few days later Three told them he was leaving. “I’m leaving,” was all he said. One nodded. Two nodded as well. The next day the car came back and Three got inside it, still wearing his cast and his tool belt. One put down the trowel and watched the car turn the corner of the street. She moved over to Two and touched the side of her head to his. That night they made love for the first time in a year.

The longer they continued to work the more strongly Two felt himself falling for One. He hadn’t known that a person could love another person so much. They were finishing the hallway, but the original floorboard supplier had left the city, so they’d had to lay carpet instead. Two worried that the rain would get in through the kitchen and soak the new wool, but it stayed dry. The upstairs was half done. They’d been working for two-and-a-half years and the rain hadn’t let up for a day.

It was September. There was no more coffee in any of the supermarkets so Two had started serving hot water instead. The lonely old man at the checkout had told Two he was leaving the day before. Two had told the old man that their house was nearly finished, and that he should drop by to see it, before he left. The old man frowned and said he would try. He never came, but he left the door of the supermarket open with a note telling Two to take whatever he wanted. Two looked at the calendar on the wall of the old man’s empty office and realised the rain had been falling for three years.

One placed the last brick at the start of December. Another summer had brought the coldest rain yet and the radio only picked up static. They painted the house for two weeks and every night Two saw his lover get a little closer to speaking. The final touches were the door handles, rusty from years spent in a covered pile, in the rain. On the twenty-fifth of December, One and Two stepped outside their house and took it in from across the street. It was finished.

“I love you,” said One.

“I love you, too,” said Two, and his face broke into a grin as he looked up at the sky and realised that the sun was shining.