YESTERFANG Part One

YESTERFANG by DFL  

an unpublished novella

Part I 

In all dreams but yours.

It is a fact universally ignored that most babies, since possessing ready-made minds more complicated than the minds of their later selves, are forever foolishly intent upon seeking - for a mind's mis-perceived tabula rasa - a greater condition of complexity that ever tantalisingly recedes from the moment of birth onwards.  A vicious circle of retrospective trickery interacting with false-bottomed cabinets of complexity. This explains the existence of ghosts, if not of God.

John, by contrast, was the exception that proved the rule: born simple-minded and thus seeking greater simple-mindedness as a final goal.  It was a heat wave in the country when and where he was born.  His tiny new-born body was placed not in front of an electric fan for cooling purposes – but, using a special cavity or cradle for new-born babies within the fan just behind the spinning metal vanes, John spent most of his memory days - before false memories took sway - in such a position, often stirring, when his mother switched off the fan to feed him by pushing her nipple through the safety-guard.

Growth meant increased danger.  As his body developed, the nearer his outer limits of skin approached the whirring vanes.  He needed to be released at the precise moment his young mind would have forgotten the whole experience or replaced such memories with new ones.  Already he would have forgotten he was being preyed upon by false memories.  It was too late to even apply hindsight.  Now, this explains the existence of God as well as of ghosts.

John was simple-minded enough to know, somehow, that he needed to be more simple-minded to deal with the adventures he was about to face when orphaned out to those who were even more simple-minded than the child they called 'Jawn' because that's what he called himself.  This was a country of intense winter all year long.  Mechanical fans only existed as prototypes in ancient books of tissue-paper diagrams.  He pointed to one and called it 'Mama'!

"Jawn, don't coo so.  That's not your Mama.  I'm your Mama now."

The simple woman took Jawn into her arms.  He had travelled the icy steppes with a wagon train of gypsies and now she had her wish.  A child to cuddle.  A child to leave her ways to.

*

Yesterfang, s. [Eng. yester and fang.]

That which was taken, captured, or caught on the day preceding.

"That nothing shall be missing of the yesterfang."

-- Holinshed: Descript of Scotland , ch. ix

Entry in LLOYD'S ENCYLOPAEDIC DICTIONARY 1895

*

"Jawn, Jawn, where be ye?"

His 'Mama' called out.  He was now old enough to wander from her apron strings.  His legs strong enough to have outgrown the old fan threefold.  But today this was the first time he didn't reply, running back smiling eagerly - having tested out (for long enough) the tolerance of his 'Mama' to withstand his increasingly courageous wanderabilities.  Today his wanderabilty seemed ever-lasting.  Ever-lasting to the point of extreme anxiety and the rest of the bewintered village alerted to the fact.

Yesterday, he had run off as far as he had previously dared.  But eventually he returned scraping his snow-shoes along the crusted ice sluices prepared as pavements during the deepest part of unrelenting seasons of biting cold.  He said he had been captured by 'snow sprites', but nobody believed because … well, there he was : his presence conflicting with that very claim.

But today there was no such claim.  Perhaps he had been captured yesterday after all.  Evidence of the present moment fills out the wide screen of current preoccupations and makes today seem to expunge yesterday as well as tomorrow.

The grizzled elders searched the blinding white horzions with shaded eyes hoping to see Jawn transform from imperceptible speck to the welcome sight of an insectoid blot wheeling its spindly arms like windmill vanes … then into full shot as Jawn himself. The only child in the village.  The one who never returned – not yesterday nor all the days before, even during that period before his first arrival in the village.

If they had been more experienced with children as well as with a perspective of time itself, this may never have happened.  His 'Mama' shut herself behind bars, as one would a caged dangerous animal with sharp talons.  She saw this as the only way to punish herself for her carelessness.  A safety guard against any such eventuality in the future. Escape was not like running away, she thought to herself without really understanding why she thought it.  She sobbed and remained unfed  … because, this being the purest possible present moment (with no context from past or future), the others fully believed her to be what she claimed to be: a wild caged animal with no hope of taming.  And there she stayed till she died, because the future never came.

*

The wide-flighted birds-of-prey cast their individual twirling shadows over the vast blank plateau – seeking the toddler Jawn – in absurd pretence of assisting the villagers scattered (in alternately separate and joined-up examples of handwriting) over different sections of the same plateau … with the additional precisions of shadow that represented more ground-based search-parties in seeming competition with those masquerading as such in the skies above.

Jawn himself was oblivious to those interchanging patterns of pursuit as well as independent of the shuttling shapes in variously hopeful staged rescues of the yesterfang.

Jawn knew no such terms.  Simple-mindedness could never stretch that far.  And as each day went by, his wanderability knew no bounds. Only human minds that had been trained by self-enforced complexities could subsequently stay on board bodies that constrained their wild adventures by always returning home – if crestfallen – into the arms of loved ones.  With simple-mindedness, any wanderability was infinite.  Hence, Jawn running away … escaping into the bottomless pit of simplicity and honesty where no search-parties (friendly or otherwise) could follow.

In Hell, one needed the strongest fans possible to waft life-giving draughts of air towards any who had inadvertently wandered there.  The birds-of-prey screeched with scorched wings.  And the villagers stood far back from the flames for fear of being burnt into even blacker versions of their own rorschach blots.  Beyond the wild curtains of infernal orange, they saw the silhouette of Jawn, dancing and jabbing like the clown puppet of all dreams but yours.

Jawn, meanwhile, still toddled across the snow – having left a decoy in Hell.

In the distance, he saw – with simple-minded clarity – a cage-on-legs following him, evidently not deceived.  Motherly love knew no decoys.

*

Jawn was an ordinary boy and, almost unremarkably, became an even more ordinary boy – whereby he had grown out of his childhood adventures upon the plains of snow and reached, eventually, the cities where the snow didn't thaw or turn mushy but nestled along the interstices of buildings like a cold-friendly insulation for edges, corners and jagged dirt.  However, in the city of London (named after the writer Jack London as many of the cities on the cusp of snow and more-snow were similarly  named after writers) there were visibly yellow patches of lying snow in the more unsalubrious inner precincts.  Throughout the suburbs, however, the busy citizens swept the snow clear with makeshift diggers but never revealing the nude pavements and doorsteps.  It was a losing battle, in any event, because the sky ever re-filled with swarming volumes of upper grey that turned whiter and whiter with every glance downward.  'The ghosts of killer bees' represented only one of the trite analogies that Jawn heard others used because inhabitants of a writer's city such as London often adopted misfired turns of phrase as if words themselves (however clumsy) steeped the cobbles with enthralling mixtures of meaning amid the ever-changing swathes of snow.

Jawn had earlier been captured by a vast vulture between his home village and London, then left to pine in an igloo-like nest upon the bleak slopes of a land-locked ice-berg.  There he learned not to question his own simplicity and how he had survived so far amid the bodily mechanics of sustenance and waste.  He recalled his Mama who had cared for him and tried to follow him as he reached realms of yesterfang that knew no tomorrows, only recurrences of capture by the past – receding as well as growing into realms of a previous time that more readily contained all the ingredients of life without the inbuilt future of needing to function like an on-going human body. 

He watched the cage-on-legs peer up at him in his perch upon the berg.  Then, after peering, it receded into the future that Jawn could no longer reclaim.  He knew its inner-revolving vanes – imperceptibly frame-fast – were his Mama's sad heart beating with a deep sorrow at losing her surrogate son and were, too, the quickenings of a life that she must lead once escaping back to the village with her soul intact and her veins unpunctured by icicles.  Motherhood, in those days, was the tragic act of losing children rather than finding them or birthing them.

Once she had gone – seen as upper striations vanishing upon strobing legs – Jawn found himself old enough and strong enough to manage the descent from nest to ground. The vulture wheeled in the sky as if proud of some feat of gestation by timeslip as represented by Jawn's descent.  Jawn had learned a lot, including the lesson that learning, for him, helped rather than hindered simple-mindedness.  That was his greatest gift, he felt, as he suddenly spotted the distant towers of London, where his adventures and character-building were set to take place. But equally he now had to trudge through a white-out of blizzards that soon took the towers away again or turned them back into blind spots that looked just like the towers themselves.  Which of these it was remained uncertain simply because Jawn only saw what he saw without interpretation.  He needed all his wit and wisdom just to keep warm and fed.

*

The day before the islands of yellow snow appeared (across the park's courtyards or frozen lakes within the city centre) many strangers to the city had been seen clanking with chains into the candle-flickering municipal buildings - having crossed that very terrain stained today by misfirings from their frightened bladders yesterday.  Jawn, although still a young shaver, stared down at the offensive crystal-hard puddles with mature disgust - having decided that he was simply lucky not to have been among those gathered-up strangers.  He was always racing yesterdays against their own todays.  Thus his ability to skirt the adventures he was not yet man enough to handle.  It was straightforward if one were straightforward enough to keep it that way.  Eyes focussed on birth, rather than on death, despite growing the other way.

"Where be ye from?" asked a voice behind him. "You look Shakesperean to me … no you have the cast of being Dickensian."

Jawn turned to look up at a full-grown man whom he was soon to know as coming from the city of Congreve and calling himself Congreve because Congreve hoped he was the only one in London to be from Congreve.  Those from Congreve or called Congreve couldn't be trusted and he didn't want to meet any of them!  So he simply tempted fate as the best possible way of avoiding people called Congreve and landing other people he met with that potential problem instead of himself.

"I'm not from any city … yet," said Jawn, his voice still unbroken, despite the beginnings of beard growth on his chin. 

Congreve – who had not yet introduced himself to Jawn as an older person should first introduce himself  to a younger one in view of the dangers that youths faced when accosted by those older than them – was a man of inscrutable looks combining times past and times future with cross-sections of expression fleeting across his face in counterpoint to each other.  Trust.  Mistrust. Grim selfishness.  Openhearted jollity.  Grizzled sarcasm.  Smooth courtesies.  Blank poker-face.  Teeming emotions.

"Are you old enough to want a lass of your own?" he asked, having finally settled on the mood of interrogation.  "I know where you can get one in London."

Jawn wondered what was in store for him if he should decide upon one answer or another.  He vaguely understood that sex would soon play a large part in separating one day from another.  But he had never remembered the urges that he would one day need to quench.  He looked up at the ice-spotted darkness of the sky.  He shivered and decided to cold shoulder Congreve.  Sex would come soon enough without the insinuations of third parties.  Congreve kept pace with Jawn as Jawn tried to shake him off.  Perhaps Jawn had been unlucky after all in not being rounded up into relative safety as a stranger to the city like the strangers yesterday.

*

Along the snow-line, the cities were strung as upon a crystal necklace – London, Ligotti, Dickens, Auster, Shakespeare, Congreve, Beerbohm, VanderMeer, Sebald, Fowles & Updike. Composite city-flakes each with its symmetry of icy artistry.  Named by Nature after writers now forgotten by most, whilst their respective genii loci were still apparent to those few students who studied such studies-in-hindsight or were old enough to remember studying the books for real.

Jawn knew little of the background of the city where he discovered this period of his youth had once taken place.  London was comfortable with its own name – as if the word was built into its very soul and sewers.  The mysterious figure of Jack London himself who'd lent his name to its white-crusted roofs and roads was the city's God – a God that each snow-line city boasted for themselves with a different and competing name, although they all referred to the same God via Jungian principles that nobody amy longer pretended to understand.

Congreve of Congreve had misheard Jawn saying his name was Jung and at the very point when he befriended the youth whom he called Jung, he pronounced the J like a J not a Y.  Indeed, even Congreve thought Jawn was still too 'young' to be approached for sexual favours – much to Congreve's credit.  Yet, during some cold nights they did hug each other (like rugby or football players) as a source of warmth or counterbalance to the loneliness that London foisted even upon its most sociable citizens.

There seemed no 'character' to any of the snow-line cities because their corners and edges were rounded off by snow … or rounded up or down for ease of memorability.  One needed to fraternise with the citizens within their very houses to gain some inkling into any city's 'character' … and the citizens of London were far and few between, in a similar manner as their houses were thinly interspersed between the sprawling prisons-for-strangers-to-the-city wherein both Jawn and Congreve feared was their own destiny to moulder.  So Jawn began to trust Congreve, as second best – against his own nature.  Like it was only yesterday he had dreamed of the sky-spinning vulture pouncing to peck for juicy innards beyond the chest-cages of unrounded-up strangers-to-the-city like Jawn and Congreve by means of its whitened jaw-bone or fang.  Jawn and Congreve had run like devils across the white lawns – laughing like friends of old.  Neither knew the vulture was their friend also.

*

Jawn and Congreve – one particularly cold night – spotted the towering U-shape of the Magnet pointing to the sky whence the ice melted in evidence of internal warmth within its gas-driven circuits.  This bare landmark indicated they had at last reached that part of London where services-to-men were carried out, if not exactly in the open (because of the cold) but within hothouses.

*

Having attuned his eyes to the haze of the hothouse, Jawn proceeded to pinch himself.

He was real. 

Events, admittedly, had  not been amenable to character-building as a real person in real situations, but Jawn was completely satisfied that he was real, had real emotions of surprise together with growth as an individual from toddler to his current stage of beard-teazled youth.  A young man in an ever-failing search for his lost youth as his own past vanished with each event transpiring towards completion – a past that indeed vanished, given the normal course of events of a typical young man's mindless search for excitement and challenge.  However, to obtain a graspable sense of his own being, Jawn needed to be captured by each moment with such moments later being pulled from some future hat like magic tricks of himself to assist his natural development as a unified character facing a known and believable reality.  Thus, he needed to build yester-hives of himself along the way for when he needed to travel back there one day.  A phalanx of deja-vus that maketh the man. 

As long as the past moments thus stored were not false moments.

He felt unaccountably sad about the departure of Congreve.  He read too much into it to cause such sadness.  But, meanwhile, he needed to acclimatise himself to the variable levels of haze that stained the air around him, through which he glimpsed apparently blind girls in stiff plain frocks crawling about the floor continuously striking matches.  He felt the urge to pinch their legs but, when he did just that, his actions evoked no visible reaction to his presence as the girls merely continued to groan and mouth nonsensicals of sound.  However, he did eventually discern two other girls who were seated together on a sofa.  They beckoned him over.

"I'm Sarah," one said.  A pretty girl who made no attempt to flirt with Jawn. She was just a person rather than a sexual animal. "You need to stop breathing so hard or it'll choke you."  She pointed to the atmosphere.  "You can't smell it but it's there all the time.  Sometimes you can't even see it."

"Leaks?" asked Jawn rhetorically, the first word he had spoken since Congreve's departure.  He noticed that the atmosphere was clearing (as if in tune with Sarah's prediction that it might) and he was now able to make a whole from the room.  A bare utility working-class parlour from a real post-war London.  Jawn recognised it from a depth of memory he didn't know he possessed until this very moment.  Hopefully, not one of those false moments he had earlier feared, but a real memory during an equally real trigger of such memory as represented by the room.  He watched the blind girls curl into a corner and simper in a strangely satisfied manner.

"Don't worry about them.  They're not really there.  So blind they don't exist."  Sarah spoke with intelligent conviction, in contrast to her outward dizzy winsomeness as a vision of attractiveness.

Her words made a strange sense within the context, and Jawn turned to the other girl who looked even more becoming than Sarah.

"I'm Julie," she eventually said. "We've been waiting for you."

"You expected me?" said Jawn.

"Sort of.  Sarah didn't believe me, but I told her you would come.  And that's why the haze is clearing…"

"Well, now he's here, what next?"  Sarah asked.  Both girls were a match for each other's winning wit and wisdom.

Jawn turned to look at the corner where the blind girls had crawled – only to find them gone.  Despite the clearer view, things that had once been there weren't there now, as if a new invisible or non-characterisable haze had intervened between him and them.  However, the room retained its character.  Not so warm.  And he felt the beginnings of a cough from the after effects. 

Jawn thought of Congreve and cried.  Then, just as suddenly, he shrugged off such thoughts as he turned towards his new friends, Sarah and Julie both of whom smiled at him, ready to participate in a silent vigil for memories lost - with new ones waiting in the wings … in the making.

Sarah, shivering, eventually got up to switch off the fan.

*

Congreve, having left the vicinity of the hothouse, laid down as close to the London Magnet as it was possible for any commoner to reach.  While the white snow around him gradually turned into faint tinges of yellow and, finally, to a deeper more diseased form of the same colour, he beckoned the wheeling shape of the vulture from the sky, inviting it to descend and cuddle him close with its huge white wings.  The hefty weight of the bird settled upon him, with a flutter of feathers, as the beak's fang opened his face and fed on the brain.  Congreve – before the destruction of his brain – had known instinctively that was what the bird's fang was about to accomplish – an assisted suicide for the loss of a loved one.  And despite the brain's destruction, the remains of Congreve cried … cried for longer than Jawn had managed to cry in earlier reciprocity.

Eventually, the vulture lifted into the sky, itself temporarily stained by its lengthy feed, leaving a muckheap of a brighter red and yellow (separate and mingled), a muckheap that steeped the otherwise virgin snow of London's Magnet precinct with its landmark of memorable colour.

*

Sarah was a girl who originally had ambitions to make something of herself.  From a working-class background, she had a chip on her shoulder which made her avoid otherwise typical working-class pursuits – such as hen parties and hanging round town centres on boying activities.  Her parents had long since slipped into TV Hell whereby their eyelids drooped in nightly boredom at the 'excitement' of each night's programme schedule.  They had no life except thinking they were living.  Sarah was determined not to fall into the same trap.  Watching her parents being sucked into an old-fashioned close-down screen of snowy reception was worse than any future episode of Dr Who could have portrayed. 

She had hair that hung down her back in a rather over-girlish way, like an Alice in Wonderland but one who had lost her Wonderland.  Even her dreams were forgotten by morning.  Dreams of intense heat or intense cold, where the events were either so melted or so frozen they could not follow any linear path, particularly any paths of memorability. Puberty came and went without any problem.  She was mature enough to ride over all the body-changes that this entailed and came out the other end as the same Sarah that went in.  She had an eye on University.  But was overtaken by events.  Because on just one night of weakness she forgot all her own self-made rules of rectitude and ambition by allowing her drinks to be spiked at a party – then herself.  She had a child she put behind her just like the dreams she once had.  She met Julie, soon after.  And yet one more direction emerged in which her life could follow.

In contrast to Sarah, Julie was essentially from the top drawer.  A girl (with a bob) who had a yearning for a bit of the rough that her posh upbringing had intended to turn into a blind spot where she could not wander – as if violence, cruelty, sex itself were on the other side of tracks she could not even view from her secluded bedroom window in suburbia.  The internet changed all that in a distant future when Julie and Sarah felt they were now as old and as unfulfilled as their parents once were.  And they made friends in that virtual world.  Choose your own path to adventure – where the choices fanned out into a million possibilities, one of which was a fantasy land far more scrutable than a literary Wonderland.  Fantasy and reality mixed with poker-casino spam and porn sites – screen-sacrificers that in turn mixed their own spells within far more innocent areas of surfing.

Sarah and Julie were cyber-heroines trying to find minds to personalise themselves.  The internet was an effficient smoother-out of the classes.  It made us all vulnerable.  It even made the innocent feel guilty. And what Sarah and Julie would have been in real life – if they had been allowed to live a real life without being entrapped by the world wide web – would have been quite different.  They filled the cyber-heroines' minds with their own minds until they subsequently feared losing their own minds and sensed other minds touching the edges of their minds from all directions like a kaleidoscope of Venns.  Until they didn't even sense this touching upon the tender edges of their fragile personalities.  Because the original personalities had changed so radically (over time) that they could no longer sense the violation of themselves by others.  Because, too, they were these others. They had been entrapped within these new ball-games of identity when young, but – eventually having failed to rediscover the yester-eggs laid on their backward path (like a Hansel and Gretel who had wanted to follow a line of white crumbs earlier dropped for themselves) - they soon became as old as they felt when outside the screen and as young within. 

Moreover, Sarah became certain she had become Julie, and vice versa.  But even that certainty was built on shifting sands.  Or on surf-scuffed snowfields. Until they met a fixing-force called Hiver Jawn.

*

Jawn heard a familiar vulterine voice through the ear-wax of his ears that told him to be wary; belief was not part of it; not even an issue; at his relatively young years he was not to be fooled by a fictionalised system of communication called the web; the only form of power in London, after all, was a yellowy gas  that hissed from under ground-surface in streams of the thinnest possible slime; the web was far beyond the capability of such a non-electronic source of motivation, being so tenuous, so dream-like using screens-that-had-no-surface-at-all; reality was an empty-ended screen which he entered and exited at will, along with his two new friends called Sarah and Julie; they denied their roots elsewhere; they were as real as him; here and now; they didn't need to fool anyone; they were not oldish gentlemen trying to groom gullible youngsters; Jawn had no fears from the likes of Sarah and Julie; you could trust they were whom they seemed to be, they assured him; they were as real as him; a Joycean monologue that pulsed in and out, up and down, till all three left the hothouse hot foot for greater adventures along new paths they could choose at whim; like facing the red and yellow zombie muckheap that squelched in their wake; dangerous to look at, dangerous to love, dangerous to know; but nobody mentioned the Magnet; it was just a towering U-shaped unsnowed-upon monument that people saw without seeing and didn't know without knowing they didn't know; snow at least would have disguised it.

*

Julie and Sarah took Jawn by both hands, as if to lead him from the room, if not from the hothouse proper.  They had no truck with thoughts of deeper realities – or lesser ones.  They were here and now.  All else was subterfuge to try prove they were fiction.  They were far from fiction. They were worth more than that. They were two genuine girls with caring hearts and a new charge for their hearts to care about.

Jawn saw that one of the blind girls had returned and was now squatting in a corner near a small old-fashioned bakelite TV set.  She was vigorously puffing post-concupiscently (Jawn inferred) on a cigarette.  Jawn was not old enough thus to infer with the use of any words beyond his current vocabulary but he inferred, too, that he was due to pre-fashion many words for each tomorrow's yester-hives that he would lay like eggs-of-self awaiting a particular future self to send it bowling back along the same egg-laid trail for the benefit of his younger self.  Or so he inferred.  An inference without actually thinking at all.  He was so intrigued by his two new attractive friends that he did not even bother with thinking.  Merely living for the moment, as his own urges continued to develop with the two girls' hands in his own hands: more erotic for him than any full-blooded love-play.  He had also abandoned Congreve, not even bothering to devote one of his yester-eggs as a Congreve hive.  He would never think of Congreve again.  And he wondered why he now started a repetition of his crying.

Outside, the full surge of winter made the relative temperature in the hothouse (which seemed very cold compared to its own intense heat that had welcomed Jawn when first entering it) seem like a very balmy warmth.  White-out piled upon white-out in shuddering blindnesses of bladed blizzard - except for the barely noticed never-snowed-upon monument: either u-shaped or n-shaped, depending on the ability to encompass its form as well as its purpose, while mostly seeming to have neither.

Noticed or not, the two girls escorted him through its vibrating archway*.  If archway it were.

* When one needs a dream sequence, it's difficult to differentiate it from reality when the reality - into which any dream sequence is inserted – already has its own elements of dream-likeness.

As Jawn, Julie and Sarah passed through the archway of the Magnet, it was as if they left a black and white world of reality and entered a colourful dream like The Wizard of Oz. Passing from reality to dream, without leaving one or entering the other.  Black and white with no memory or premonition of blood yolks.

*

CONTINUED: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/yesterfang_part_two.htm