Nemonymous Night (part nine)

Dognahnyi had returned to his pent-flat and stared at a flatter day that welcomed him back from a short unexpected strobe-holiday: stared, too, upon an even flatter threadbare carpet, which he had not bothered to replace for years, despite being otherwise surrounded by hi-tech equipment together with what he boasted to be an original Rubens on the wall opposite to the other wall where glowed the closed drapes-on-silent-runners.

Amy, the new recruit to his level of narration, had also disappeared with the initial abrupt strobe-out, but, unlike Dognahnyi, she had not returned here to continue the interview. Perhaps she thought she had already passed the necessary tests, before being strobed out. However, he feared she might have been caught up in last night’s explosion in the Moorish quarter of the city – near the Bridge. However, it was more likely (he hoped) that she had already joined her alter-nemo in the tunnel’s level of narration, i.e. two levels below Dognahnyi’s own.

He laughed. The day was suddenly becoming less flat. He knew there were two main narrative levels below his headlease narration – i.e. John Ogdon (aka ‘Hilda’) and myself (Mike). Both in intense rivalry to produce the ‘truth’ of the event-conspiracies, dream sicknesses, contaminations etc., although Dognahnyi sensed the narrator he knew as Mike was too sentimental for such machinations since Mike had already admitted he was intent on a happy ending. Little did Dognahnyi actually know, however. He was not the headlease narrator at all. There was one level above him which pulled all the strings, including his.

However, Dognahnyi actually suspected that he might not be in complete control. He would not have been strobed out (albeit momentarily) if he were in complete control. But this suspicion was little more than sub-conscious, a synaptic undercurrent that hardly vibrated his thought cortices. However, the suspicion was subtly symbolised by his own tingle of fantastical belief that the city around him was also underground to other cities – just like Klaxon and Parsimony and Agra Aska were, in turn, underground to his own city. The sky in Dognahnyi’s city was indeed filled with stars, yes, but these were perhaps pinprick apertures to a further upper world where people were as yet preparing to travel to explore Dognahnyi’s city in Drills and pot-holing expeditions. He loved fantasising. The real City itself, the one around him with covered market, Dry Dock, derelict zoo etc., was perhaps itself a living creature preparing to lift its airport arms and follow its own corpuscles’ flightpaths to the essential Core of things. But then fantasising was a thing you could take to the Nth degree and still allow the brain to survive to deal with more down-to-earth concerns such as his imminent supper…

…and such as the contaminations. Dream spam. Riots in real life between dreamers from different nightmares. Dream terrorism - where no cause was too slight to warrant dream-suicide in its pursuance. Day-dream junk of confused waking. Contaminations where animal meat and bird meat welded together, even dead bits of each shuffling together in various fridges: yearning to weave threads of sinew together into the weft and woof of new palpitating substances. Dognahnyi even speculated on giant insects. If you cut them up, would their ‘meat’ be meat as he understood the term? There was a theory that insects when blown up out of proportion were the instigators of meat-off-the-insect-bone that resembled a interpenetrative mixture of poultry and beef, interleaved with yellow insect fat.

He returned to making his supper. Fantasy, even the dream-concerns of narrative level, must take a backseat to survival, he thought, as the blue flame bloomed from his cooker-hob beneath the frying-pan.
As he cooked, he speculated on his own definition of ‘hawling’, viz. dragging truths through various levels of competing narrations towards crystallisation.

****
In the past, Sudra skipped across the grass neatly lawndered in recent days: a bright shiny carpet of green that would have done a bowls match proud.

I pointed into the sky, drawing attention – for Susan’s benefit as well as Sudra’s – where I saw a large kite being flown from outside the park by someone at the end of its tether. This looked like a huge chunky toy: a Black & Decker drill the size or a real lorry – but then there was another kite appearing along the slant of another angle: a giant real model of a toy bus … followed by a complex Meccano contraption looking far too heavy to fly. Several other over-sized toys eventually floated above in delicate needlepoint: or a raggle-taggle armada … until I realised with a shock that they were not kites at all but real flying-craft in the guise of model toys … soon to be interspersed with the sounds of clattering vanes deeper and more threatening than a helicopter’s … until that shock became real as I watched one of them accidentally clip another – with the result of both careering or cartwheeling from the sky, slowly crashing into parts of the city with sickening crunches that even my feet heard, bone to bone. Wisps of black smoke soon became billows. As if routed from an in-built rhythm of flight by the sight of the accident, others proceeded to fall from the sky – more likely however they had physically felt the previous ricochet – and I prayed that they would not crash anywhere near our own house … a strange priority as even just one of them crashing into the park itself would have threatened our lives which were far more valuable than property.

****
“The walls were red,” one of the children said, a girl with bushy blonde hair, meaning to say they were read like a book. Or perhaps she did. The Yellow Book, however, blended into the wallpaper and remained unread.

I nodded. I did not wish to approach her, because these days touching was not allowed, even by teachers. I pointed to a huge funnelled monstrosity in Dry Dock – not unlike the famous Titanic, only slightly smaller with rather more complex ill-matched contraptions as if some little boy had got carried away with his Meccano kit – had long become a fixture on the city’s skyline. Its abrupt overnight disappearance – presumably because all the work on its under-hull had been completed – was indeed the topic of conversation all over the city. This had coincided with the disappearance of many children who – despite the frantic searching by the Authorities – were still missing. Some had put two and two together and related the ship somehow to a vast metal Pied Piper…

I suspected that there was more to this trade in Angel Wine than met the eye. The girl looked as if her veins were full of it. Bulging all over like raised contours on a wall-map of a soft Antartica.

****
Crazy Lope was muttering to himself at the other end of the bar, but nobody listened then and nobody listened now, especially as he wasn’t there … but someone or something was still there with the same speech on tape-loop. Or, rather, was it a flesh-corrupted ghost … or was it a spirit-diluted body? The voice sounded like his own, despite the lack of mouth muscles or any possible throat/chest resonation. But the voice was clear, nevertheless.

Voice reflection: "There was a plane doing a sort of air show near the pier. At first I thought it was an ordinary plane, but as it came nearer to us sight-seers on the prom, it turned more into a sort of model plane, with decorative fins, as if out of a cartoon manga – and I could see the pilot as a sort of Jules Verne character in ruffs and frills – and it skimmed off and grew bigger, amazingly, as it flew into the distance, and I could see a strange word: something like ‘Angerfin’ on its side. It almost clipped the edge of the pier and I was scared to see if it cartwheeled into the sea or, worse, into the prom where we were all standing…."

Tapeworm-loop: Want another drink, Craze?

****
Greg dreamed at night, as the Drill plugged on towards the Core, window views forgotten for a while, as the vanes struggled against the worst rubble-storms in even Captain Nemo’s memory. Greg dreamed of when he worked in an office.

I usually went to bed in my body.

Dreams were like swimming through gluey blood and skin, desperately trying to keep my head above the curdled folds of flesh.

By day, however, I became a ghost. I left my home at home. Along with all the other commuters from dream to real life, I sought a working train which would take me, without mishap, to an end-of-line station - where I could latch on to an individual of my random choice and haunt its bodily home which it had brought to work for the duration of the increasingly endless day that I would have otherwise had to endure. I preferred irritation to boredom.

A ‘he’ today, I was soon to gather.

Using the windows at the front of his skull, I could peer down at the office papers on which he was currently working. But, what was that? He kept looking at a young female creature a few desks away in the office - perhaps he wanted to ask her out. I wouldn't have truck with such peccadilloes, so I forced the muscles at the back of the neck to relax, so that he could return to the proper business at hand. However, I misjudged the neck's elasticity and it abruptly flopped over, as if it were hinged at the middle. The head thumped the desktop, knocking over his cup in the process, the contents of which, luckily, slurped across the green blotter-pad - with a strange geography of stains.

"Are you OK, Greg?" Evidently, the voice belonged to Greg's boss, unseasonably released from the manager's office aquarium.

For the rest of the day, I left so-called Greg very much to his devices, if not on his own. After all, he knew best in the circumstances. But it was more than just an irritatingly hairy ride on the flesh fairground. I had no taste or discrimination when choosing hosts and companion-minds for my daytime existence as a benign parasite.

Greg had a headache. Since leaving the train which had taken him from his home to the City centre, a feeling of nausea and heaviness had seeped from the attic basin to lower sumps of thought and feeling - not that I would have expected Greg to be in tune with such a way of describing his unaccountable spiritual predicament. He shook himself like a sopping wet mongrel. This must be what a woman experienced at the wrong time of the month, he found himself thinking without really thinking.

The office lighting blared. Since the Firm had decided to move, Greg simply knew that he would never be able to endure those air-conditioned office wastes. A one man Sick-building Syndrome, that was what he feared he was destined to become. The light fitments were dysfunctionally concealed behind false ceilings. The lift systems far too complicated. And the roof-garden prone to aerial buzzing. Each disorientated department had its own identical 'bay', where the open-plan design caused confused faces to scrutinise each other across the wide clerical areas, rather than knuckling down to the core work. Line-management sat behind tinted glass partitions, not unlike frogs in aspic, sporadically blinking as they kept watch on the their office 'young'.

Greg considered himself too old to be watched. Yet, today, it was not age that irritated him, but thoughts that kept coming unbidden to his mind. Usually, he accepted his lot in life: poring over meaningless actuarial statistics of mortality and morbidity - whilst growing towards the old age pension that waited like a little yapping monster at the end of time's telescope which he often held up to his eyes the wrong way round. Today, in short, he saw everything for what it was: close up: in skin-pore detail: the girl's pimply face...

He studied the coffee stains which he had so carelessly prevented from spilling. He felt the back of his neck, discovering nodules he never knew were there. The green blotter had already dried into ... a face ... yes, that was what it was ... a configured face ... not a pattern of islands which he'd never thought it was in the first place. As in those scribbling, doodling childhood games, he added a few biro lines to the otherwise haphazard blotches, smuts and smudges ... then, slowly, there gathered the features of one he recognised from erstwhile forgotten dreams. Unaccountably, he wrote "Weirdmonger" underneath, finishing the word with the automatic flourish of a signature.

Greg suddenly sensed a load lifted from his mind as he reached the railway station in the evening. But he wondered if he was on the right platform, as everyone seemed to be congregating on the opposite one. He had already struggled across the river, his legs like soft iron, a hand in his pocket to keep in place a hastily prepared ad-hoc nappy against his incontinence. The other faces that floated with him through the adhesive air turned to neither side, whilst he kept a weather eye open to all quarters, expecting the worst. A distant tower was almost sentient as it reared from the screaming orange oils of the sunset like a pair of siamese-twin creatures that cantilevered in slowmo progress through the slimy river gunk. Over his shoulder, barely discerned through a hairline crack in the back of his skull, was the gold-pulsing tip of the liner in dry dock, as if it were flinching from a ghostly swarm of second-world-war fokkers. The far-off entrance to the station was a gate to Hell, each trundling strand of traintrack-humanity loosely-coated with fireproof shells of costume jewellery.

Resuming attention to the frontward view, without turning his head, Greg's eyeball ratchet-zoomed upon its red-veined stalk and managed to see, in the tapering distance, a blurred roof of what was once known as the covered-market, but now it was an Unidentified Flying Object - albeit planted in the ground, unlike those that once floated above in earth's tidal ether. But that was strange, because it was now commonly accepted that there was nothing surrounding the earth but the known universe - which, to his mind, if not mine, made UFOs obsolete.

I was glad to escape such an irritating mishmash of thoughts. I dislodged myself from Greg's bony meat-haven and fastened myself to the back burner of the train as it sped southward. I could see Greg dangling his erstwhile crutch-pad from the window like a ragged army's flag of convenience - before, eventually, letting it fly off as an integral part of dusk's fading red. I later watched him getting out at his usual stop: home to wife and children where, no doubt, they would welcome him with open arms, blissfully ignorant of the weirdities with which he had been freighted. Though the overspill of blood on his underpants, without a wound, would take a lot of self-explaining.

As for myself, I eased back into my own boring body in time for night - in some industrial wasteland, not far from Greg's abode. This, my real body, was an ancient metal contraption that had once served as a sleek British Rail train. I then submitted to an irresistible need for sleep and drifted amid the archipelago patterns of inherited history and Collective Unconscious.

Gradually, however, I was eventually to know, day by day, mind by mind, that my actual substance of existence was indeed a sump of universal mind-and-matter, one that was cruelly abandoned each night within a rusting sample of Man's futile industry, yet sufficiently compos mentis to recognise that I was the true gestalt, perhaps Megazanthus itself.

(THE HAWLER continued here: part thirty-five)

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