The Hawler (part twelve)

Meanwhile, please see the following earlier DFL stories that provide background reading:

The House Of Cutt Auguries (1988).

And 'Dognahnyi' (1991) reprinted in Weirdmonger (2003)
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The Hawler (part twelve)

Ogdon stared at the screen in his flat. He had started typing up his things here in this rather undeserving tawdriness, having spent the earlier evening writing afresh in the square by the fountain. “I am curious – yellow,” he whispered at the screen, hardly daring to breathe. He scribbled in his bright red Silvine ‘memo book’. He was more a dreamer than a pub landlord, but he needed a proper job to bring in the beef – and why not combine that with his second love (drinking and indulging in pub talk)? Dreaming never brought in much money, even when one could turn the dreams into words. He actually wore a long cape when he was the dreamer – and called himself Crazy Lope. He wore non-descript clothes when working behind the bar, as differentiation. These days, Ogdon hardly worked in his own pub, for various reasons, and had got in a locum as a manager.

He spent much of most nights exploring (wandering) – mainly the two disused airports on the eastern and western sides of the city – areas called the City Arms. They inspired with their direct emptiness and spent force. Bleak and windswept, he imagined the roaring of the jet engines, the clacking of old-fashioned propeller vanes, the residual sorrow and misused heroism of war veterans that still filled the air with poignant empathy. It was all good meat for his dreaming (he saw fiction as miraculously feeding the multitude) and these airports were much more efficacious in this regard than the large city-centre area of the covered market – now divorced from its secondary role as an Underground station. And more efficacious than the now disused dry dock where gargantuan ships and liners used to arrive for riveting.

The western airport area – now overgrown like a long-forgotten golf course – reminded him of another derelict airport he had seen on the web as part of his dream research. This one was in a place called Hawler – where was it? – in Kurdistan? Whether the city airports were connected with this middle eastern one in some way was uncertain, yet Ogdon believed in complementary ley-lines veining the whole surface of the Earth, proud as inflamed swellings on a human body … invisible to most uncaring eyes as the eyes’ owners conducted their selfish lives on a daily basis, lives only interspersed with sleep or with whatever sleep contained.

Ogdon reviewed his own dreams. The fiction could wait, as he shut down the sickly clouded crystal-ball of his yellow screen.

He was quite aware that there was not enough detail, not enough provenance and not even enough providence in whatever had by-passed his mind. He recalled the city-centre zoo visit with some pleasure, but weighed down with equal displeasure bordering on dread. Had justice been done to this zoo? Mike was still not filled out as the real person he was. Some of the others had given a good shot at it and even gave a passing impression of having deep feelings and understandable impulses or intuitive intentions: mixed intentions some logical, others paradoxical. All of them were like this, except, perhaps, for Beth’s husband. Ogdon at first thought Beth’s husband was the wild card. Little did Ogdon know, however, that he should keep a beadier eyes on one of the children. A bewitched child. Yet nobody seemed to have put a finger on this. Give them time for nailing down.

Ogdon sighed. Despite the coin tossing, he was still undecided which of the two parties to follow. Either one of the audit trails could hold the crucial clue as to the rest of it. He prepared himself for dreaming about the huge man-made flying-craft down south. Next, he made a stab at dreaming of the dark striated horizon of the bleak north, its coal-towers and clanking works, all stitched skyward with the gigantic webby wings of real and living flying-craft.

First, he needed somehow to resolve the zoo visit. The much earlier clue as to Mike’s “lorry-driver face” and his voracious approach to beefsteak were red herrings of the first water. Beth’s husband was the lorry-driver (in waste management), after all. There was some confusion that Ogdon would never be able to resolve. Real people (as opposed to fictional ones) had real idiosyncracies and paradoxes that could never be conveyed by a dream or even by the near-photographic description of realities (because each description was imperfect by the nature of words): realities that were simply and inexorably realities, and nothing else. If people were such realities, then there was no way of imagining those realities – and this was because realities (by being real) were unimaginable. They kept avoiding Ogdon’s flawed ‘camera obscura’ of a mind. And this applied to real things as well as to real people.

In the zoo, there had been a cage they all peered into with some trepidation. This scene had been left unreported, for whatever reason, but as things panned out, it gradually grew into view from a single atom of dread in one of the witnesses’ minds. Poultry combined with beef in some complex miscegenation. In this cage was a truly massive pulsing amorphousness with feathers tufting in all directions from each suppurating pore. He first saw it as black but, in retrospect, he knew it was white. He wondered if further hindsight might make it later look red like skinned meat. But, no. It was unutterably white. No amount of retrospection could change that, he knew. A noticeboard attached to the cage had identification: “Infinite Cuckoo”. That was when they all decided unanimously to leave the zoo grounds by the exit turnstile. They’d pay anything to leave, even if it were more than the normal ticket price of a few p.

Well, in further hindsight, the creature wasn’t infinite at all, Ogdon thought. It couldn’t be contained in a cage, otherwise. Unless it was a bit of an infinity. The implications were too wild to deal with today.

And he returned to his desk, across the littered carpet, and powered-up his screen ready for easier tasks. Fiction was always easier than truth, a generalisation to which he would need to come to terms … eventually.

(THE HAWLER continued here: part thirteen)

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