The Omphalos of Ferrule on Tarmac

He's not been seen outside the text before - it seems pointless to describe him visually but marking his existence in the world with pictures now seems possible, just not useful. Oh but it is said Mulligan. We see you in front of us framed by the great works of God's sea from this tower but you are not known to the rest.

It's like I saw it all. A great sweep of the bay - mixing with those pastelloved boys and their true colours, the big pictures in the sky. Buck will dive in and I will not see him again, the splash of holy water on the shore lost forever in the ocean. They'll plunge into the deeps and never once find it my boy. He'll be a smudge or revenge in the papers tomorrow.

The sound and service, the religious decanterings of that befailed Doctor faded out in the distance like a dog or some other meaningless living thing castigating the moon for its bravado and cheek at staying up to keep us awake with his orbit, his perigee becoming our own lift off this earth. What now? My head is racing the moon to the horizon, drifting foreverwards down and down behind the earth to keep us from seeing the southern stars. On my way to work I am and my feet consider the way before my thought. Out of time. I can contemplate what constitutes the epitome of genuine Macaroons - the blasphemy of Chocolate and the absence of rice-paper - the art and work of heretics blown from the sky, exiled from Eden with the fallen angels, left to sweep the floor for tea. They laugh at us in the orient, for our belief that tea is dust and floor-dirt, the brooms of the Chinese collect and forage and we remunerate like kings.

Remember our dinner shouted Malachai from the distant sea - make it a fry of unimaginable extent you fearful Fenian. It faded on the hush of surf, a lost demand, headed moonwards and spacewards, into that ellipse that careered out into the universe like a bolt, a blue bolted formless idea, a philosophical failure, an allusion to a lost and devildecked worm.

The spark of stick on rock, became a rhythm, a beat for the terpsichorean statuary that began at this point in the commute to line the path as its rocky birth merged into the human-bonded stream of tarmac and dust leading through the seaside park to the lands of gold and suburb beyond.

Stephen was happy he thought, happy in his despair maybe but happy and not at all distracted by the lifted skirts of those sherbet-eating girls on their way to late-opening department stores and stopping in the fine morning to take the beautiful salt-seasoned air of Irish shoreline. The sky lit up, became the frame for these distractions. Suzanne was one, a slight girl, who traded longingly on her time in America, on her twang of transatlanticism, built around her self-proclaimed exoticism, the woman made human somewhere on the creaking ship between Cork and New Jersey. Truth, a fine vice, made her homesicken for these shores, for the legend of Celts and stones of the green land. For she had seen the dust and filth of the Manhattan island, the broken fragments of land in that great, grey, green, greasy harbour made by mothers and other natural things and the dust had caught her throat, and the authorities had picked her up as sickening and sent her home to her mother. And here she was, something from her mixing with the sea and salt-licks of the shore where she mirrored the butterflies out of place over the lapping water where the mild swell of this June day became like a terrible maelstrom to the overwinged and overcoloured maggoty things that they were.

Her shoes, kicked distantly, led Stephen to her and he saw her testing Dublin Bay for heat and cold, and he stared at the ogive of her, delicately framed like the wings of the lepidopterous fauna that ringed her head and shone in the not-yet full sun.

It's not Rocket Surgery but it Might be Brain Science

The train passed more fields, and then suddenly the track was skirting some sort of military base. Right at the bottom of the high railway embankment was a high and rusty fence topped with barbed wire, then a few metres of daisy-speckled grass before the strange sight of what seemed a forest of white and black missiles all pointing nearly to the azimuth. This was the modern squadron, the future of warfare in unmanned craft, leaving all the risk, at least on our side, to the poor saps who fueled the things and remained out in the open. The real pilots were the radar boxes and rudimentary computers that keep them on track high into the blue above.

It was intriguing enough to be at once on the midst of this defensive display and he sat facing the window, taking in the changing perspective as missile passed in front of missile until he had lost count of how many there were. But without warning, out in the distance one of them fired, streaking out into the sky, leaving just a spiral track of white smoke dispersing over the remainder. It had been so fast and so out of his vision that at first he longed for another to launch, the desire to witness the power of the things far outweighing any worry he might have about why it had fired. He turned to where the missile had gone, straining against the brilliance of the sky to see any evidence of impact. He managed to locate the flash of sun on something high up and in the right place but there was no sudden silent puff of smoke signalling detonation. Eventually he was left straining to see where the speck had been. Back along the line, the smoke had cleared from the site and the rest of the missiles were as they were before. Leaning out of the window he could just see the gap where the errant projectile had been, its absence all that was left to signify its previous existence.

"Just a test?" he thought to himself, the question mark only half-hearted for he did not know of anything in the world that would raise our alert to the level where we might fire on something. And then he realised that he just could not know what went on at all times and everywhere. Of course we would hope that any attack out of the blue would be resisted quickly and the risks these days were more likely to be so rather than the ultimate result of sabre-rattling and raised tensions. The threat levels are just mere posturing, reassurance for the plebs and political brinkmanship for those inclined to the democratic process. "Why worry?" he mused further. The world was still the same.

High above him, close to the edge of space, the missile found its target, a speeding unknown, a slab of black and not black, glowing hot from the friction between it and the sparse atmosphere. Almost in silence, the detonation came, an instant vapourising flash of bright white, a moving off in the direction of the sum of two different momenta and the gradual fall to earth of myriad glowing fragments. Hours later they peppered the sea off the coast, unseen by anyone and the engagement was over.

Citizen Blair

He lifted his eyes from the newspaper - fatigued by the continuing effort to take it in - and viewed the countryside passing by. The landscape had changed distinctly since he had last looked and now with it more like he imagined it should be after so long in travelling, he resolved to finish reading for the rest of the journey. And as the visual sense flooded his brain, he became aware also of other feelings, scents and sounds which broke away from this other world and making their way through the open window, called to him with buccolic abandon. He realised that he was happier than he had been for some years and in that instant of realising, he forgot the toils and troubles of the world brought to him through the journal, now on the seat at his side and looked forward for the first time in as long. The breeze blowing in gently, carried on it the gentle tang of greenery mixed in with the rusty, oily smells of the locomotive just ahead and all this seemed a drug of forgetting, of not regretting, a reverse truth serum, designed to blot out the reality of other people's lives and to leave one feeling clean and happy.

But above all, it was the knowledge that this line led him home, back from the toil of leaving school and college, the Alice-in-Wonderland racing with the world standing still all around him, the meaningless rush to make money just to eat and sleep safely when all about the nation prospered on the back of the toil of the countless millions just like him. It was not fair he thought. It was obvious to him that the cleverest people he knew were not those in control of this mad rush; they were those who appealed to tradition as the reason for all this paradoxical, chaotic activity, those who could not believe the world should change because their own view left no room for anything other than their own ideas of correctness. His friends knew the way to a better world and yet coloured by their own desire for comfort and safety, they stayed safe beneath the parapet, wanting only the plush chair the good food that came to them at the end of the day, not wanting to think about those who slept on hard ground and ate irregularly and without enjoyment.

All this was why he had given up on it, realising over time, through so many crises which at first threatened to overwhelm him, that nothing bad ever really happened. Screaming in the night gives no comfort to the tormented and the depressed and the raging that came with his own flurries of instability had not helped him in any way. Life, he thought paradoxically, was in one's own hand and also the result of pure luck, the bouncing of particles at levels that no human would ever see directly. Whatever he did or did not do was of no consequence and so he might as well enjoy himself in the place where he had been happiest. And so he gave it all up, left the city and came home to start up again where all the happiness had ended.

No cry in the distance made its way into the carriage, no vision of pain and assault met his eye for the view was one of green and rough edges, the battle of the world against the human met in the continuous toil of the sparse population. But this was a happy toil he thought in his vision of rural perfection. He would be back to nature, not worrying about the harder edges of his working life up to now. He would be happy. He would be happy.

Where do all the Ducks go?

So I don't really care about all this. It just seems so phoney. He was just a guy who died and I know that he had family who loved him but I did read some stuff about him and all those sexy girls he used to hang around with and I thought that maybe he wasn't as happy as all that. Not that I care of course. I'm sorry if you loved him.

Some of the jocks used to say that I owed my life to him but I don't know about that at all. Pheobe liked him a lot because she says she was more like him than I was and that all the time the professors and the shrinks were saying that he was just me, he was really writing about Pheobes. And because my little sister is like the most unphoney girl in the world, I like to think that I should believe her. I hope she doesn't end up like me. She might be more like Ally I suppose but he's dead so we'll never know. All that noise in my head just sort of stopped the other day, like he was making it all happen - like he was sending it from him to me, through the air. I can't work out how that would happen but then I never really did like science. Oh I could write down things alright but when it came to all those numbers they used to just dance around in front of my eyes and wouldn't stay still. It's as if numbers are the bad cousins of letters because I like letters and they go where I say. Like that essay I wrote on Ally's baseball mitt. It all sort of just flowed out like I couldn't stop and I didn't know how to stop and there were all these tears just coming out, the first for ages.

Today it seems that these words are all that I have left, like I'm fading away. I'll have nothing to do after they've gone; I'll just sort of sit in front of the TV watching goddamn game shows and eating those crappy snacks that we have lying around. There are only a few pages left in the notebook now, a few pages until I run into the messy lists at the back, those numbers of girls that you promised to call, and someone's mother who said we must visit in some really fake way that made it quite clear that you'd better not turn up because she really didn't mean it. She'd be at the door looking like she was all smiles and behind her back you know she was signalling to the maid - because they always have maids to go and get some cheapskate stuff because it was obvious she didn't really like you. And then her daughter would smile at me in her own fake way and I'd have to suddenly remember that I had to be somewhere else - to meet the guys or bring them something they really needed and I'd run off and I'd never look back because I hated to see how their fake smiles all turned to real ones once I'd gone.

When I went back to see Pheobe all those days ago when I was in the middle of all that bad stuff, I thought about how I'd like to just hide away in the apartment, looking out of the window when the lights were off with the distant light of the streets all that way below. And I could look up at the Pennsylvania Hotel with all those floors going off into the distant sky, into the fog and think about the people up there. It's quite quiet in our place - you can sometimes hear the traffic below but they built the windows all thick and that blocks out the sound and with that and being so high up it is really quiet. But up in the Penn the rooms must be so quiet that you cannot hear anything. I went up there once with a girl and her mother who had a suite up there and even with the window open it was quiet. The window didn't open all the way because they had stopped it just so as no one could suddenly decide to jump out and funnily enough when I thought about that I wanted to jump out myself just to see what it would be like to float down to the pavement. I was fine before but the thought that someone might want to jump out made me want to jump out and I had to go all tense to stop myself going over to look out of the window and see if I could take out the nail that stopped it opening. And the girl and her mother - like the ones I talked about before looked all anxious because it was as if they could see what was up with me and how tense I'd gottten all of a sudden. Anyway, I wish I could stay at home in the quiet with Phoebe looking after me and I'd look up the Penn and see if I could see anyone at the window looking out as if they were fiddling with the windows and then maybe I could stop them. I don't know how I'd do it. I could shout at them or maybe call the goddamn fire brigade or something but then all they could do would be to come around with one of those sheets they hold out in stupid phoney comedy movies where they have to stretch it so people can jump out of windows if there is a fire or something. But that wouldn't work for someone so high would it and by the time they had driven round here - there's still loads of traffic even in the middle of the goddamn night - the person would have jumped and floated past me and hit the floor. I wouldn't want to look but I would have to like all the other idiots who would stand around looking at the mess and asking why they did it. And I'd know why they did it because I've been up there and wanted to do it and not wanted to do it. It would be so difficult. I always want to go to the edge of something and I always feel as if I want to jump off.

It's not that I'm sad or anything. The doc says I am but I'm not at all really. I just have this sort of naturally sad face and the wanting to jump off things is not because I'm sad but because of this strange thing in my head. It's not sadness - I'm really happy I am - but it's just that I cannot seem to get my body to do what my mind wants. I could be happy at home with Pheobes and with my parents not knowing I was there, and she would bring me food and little things she had bought and I would teach her things I knew from school, though to tell you the truth she probably knows more than me and of course if I was here secretly then I wouldn't be going to school and I wouldn't be learning new things so she would get better than me. Then she would go off and get a job or more likely get married and leave and I would be on my own unless I went and lived secretly at her new house but then I'd have to put up with the phoney guy she had married. They are always phoney. The girls - all those girls I have the numbers for - are brilliant when they're on their own but get them with their goddamn mothers and their businessmen fathers, they all work on Wall Street and make loads of money that they are forever splashing around on big expensive things that no one really needs. Anyway, get them away from their parents because their parents are teaching them how to be phoney and grown-up and they will marry you because you have a good job and you look good in a suit and tie.

I hope Phoebe stays away from them. We could go and live together and look after each other and we would never get married because they love you for a bit and then it all turns into dressing for parties and dressing for dinner and going to special places along the coast where they have guards to keep out anyone who doesn't spend so many dollars on their dressing up.

Anyway I suppose this guy - the one they say is me - wasn't a phoney at all - he went away like I want to do - and he had all that money and he could hide away up in the mountains and anytime he felt lonely he'd have all these girls - well they were women but they were younger than him and they'd come up the lonely road to the lonely man and they'd be happy for a few months like I suppose I would be if I married one of the girls if their parents got killed or something and they lived with an elder brother or something like that. Anyway he'd look out of the windows at night and he wouldn't have the Pennsylvania Hotel to look at and so he wouldn't have any worries about people dropping out of the windows. It would all be mountains and complete darkness apart from the storm lantern on the roof over the stoop. I'd love to live like that. Maybe he was me. I can see that house in my head so maybe he is writing everything I think. That's stupid isn't it. Maybe we are all just imaginings of other people. But what if the people who imagine us are just the thoughts of other people? Where does it all stop? Maybe he's my imagining and I'm his like a big circle. I love thinking about this - it seems real but don't go thinking about it too much because it makes your goddamn head hurt like a punch. This man who died must have loved making me hurt if he is making it all happen because I got beat up a lot. I'm a little guy really. Not so little that I look like a kid but short enough to get beaten up by almost everyone else a school.

So maybe I won't get hurt anymore now he's gone and I won't want to jump out of windows or feel like screaming at all the phoney parents of the girls I know for being so fake and for being so out of touch with what the rest of the world is really like. They just like spending money, other people's if they can get it and they do get it like thieves they are but sort of legal thieves pretending that they really care about you and then just running off with all your dollars to go and pay for some scheme on the other side of the world. And they come back in their tropical kits just to let you know they've been around the world and they laugh about how funny all the people were there. I hate all that and I hate that this is all that my parents want me to be. I don't want to learn about money or science - it just doesn't interest me - I want to learn about writing and how the great writers got to know about all that stuff they write about. Because I won't be going around the world or falling in love with really beautiful sophisticated women so I won't get to know anything kind of strange or different from what I do know, you know - just bumming around town so my parents don't know I'm here. Because none of you would want to read about that would you. I'll just have to make it up like my dead friend does. Or did because he's dead and can't write any more.

That's made me want to cry. I wasn't that bothered before because he's just a guy you know but now it made me think of all the other dead people and all the people who died today and all the people who will die tomorrow and where they all go when they are dead. You walk around the city and you can't spit for hitting live people and yet when they die where to they all fit. It's like there's no room for all those still dead people. Ally is there somewhere out with all of them and I even know where he is because I was there when we put him there but it's like I don't know either. There are two of him like there are two of every goddamn one of us - the real bits of us - the skin and flesh and all that and then there is the rest of us - the bits that make you have a fake smile at someone you don't like but don't want to offend or anything. I might call that a soul I suppose, the funny thinking bits inside. My thinking bit is running away with itself. I want to stand aside and take my body by the neck and shake it to make it slow down. Pheobe always says I think too much and today it is just too much altogether. Maybe I won't stop now he's dead. Maybe I'll just keep on going faster and faster. He was not the engine - he was the brake and now there is no brake so I will keep running and running and thinking and thinking and wondering when it will all stop. Even when I'm asleep I dream at high speed - there are lions after me - strange noises that I know are just cats outside or foghorns in the docks but they speed up my brain until I start seeing bright lights and I want to lie down or throw myself out of the window.

I don't have much more space now. I am so close to all those numbers but I don't want to see some of them because they worry me about what is going to happen. Some of the girls are nice I suppose but they all don't like talking to me know since the little problem at Christmas. And now it's snowing and it is so cold and the lake will freeze again I suppose. Then all the old questions will come back and I will have to answer them all again. Pheobe says that the real problem is not that I think too much though she says I do that as well but that I just don't know how to stop.

My God! It's Full of Speech!

You OK?

Maybe - not sure if I want to talk to you.

..

You said it would be OK and now it's just a mess ... all of it fallen apart like ... my head is so full ... I can't think of anything. You might as well have killed us all.

That's just being over-dramatic. No one died today - it was not even close. We're writing a book not fighting a war. We were arguing over where to put the punctuation marks - the chords - nothing about violence. Ow! What was that for?

You mentioned violence and I just thought it needed some. And now the look on your face is just so funny.

Thanks for that. I was going to ask if we were cool but now I think that you should ask me that.

Well - are we?

...

Probably but I'm not sure why we should be.

...

I wish it would carry on raining like this for ever. I love it like this, all the noise, white noise is it? Well anyway, all this sound - it seems to blot out everything else, all those damned songs in my head and all the little pinches of embarrassing conversation I had over the last few days. Sod it - I can't even remember what we said that made you come out here to apologise.

I didn't apologise.

I think you did.

I think YOU just said you couldn't remember what it was.

I lied. I lie a lot. I might have lied that I like the rain.

I know you do. I can tell.

You cannot. You cannot tell anything about other people. All the non-spoken stuff just goes overs your head. You are missing something - a body-language/speech stress gene, the ability to work out how other people think. You don't imagine that any of us can think differently to you.

That's normal for everybody surely?

No it's bloody not. You're a freak.

...

I do know what YOU think. I can tell. I've known since we were kids.

We're still kids now.

You know what I mean. I know when you lie because of that thing with your ear and your hair. I know when you are sad but don't ask me to tell you how I know. It's some sort of Jedi thing - a field - an aura all of that new-age rubbish.

Yeah and I know you know because I can tell all the signs when you do know things or are embarrassed by something. Mum and dad think you're weird. Mum even got one of her old medical books out the other day but she thinks what you have is something new and not in the books yet.

That's horrible.

Why?

You and your mum have me down as some sort of medical specimen. I'll wake up tomorrow and you'll be both leaning over me with a gauze soaked in Chloroform ready to stuff me in a giant jar of formaldehyde.

You got us there. Roll over Napoleon. I'm going to knock you out.

You think I need to go to the docs?

Maybe! You have been getting weirder lately. Like something has happened. And I can't see what it is. But I'm not going to bother any more. It's your problem. Go away now I'm bored.

That's not fair. I know you are joking and yet when idiots at school say it I just get confused.

Just do what they say. If you treat everything as genuine rather than ironic or sarcastic of any of those stupid other 'ics' that make everything such a pain, you won't go wrong. Unless it's a teacher I suppose. ... I want to know when I'm going to die.

WHY DO YOU SAY THINGS LIKE THAT? Do you hate me or love me or what?

I love you. You are the best friend I have. Honest no 'ics' The thing is, just at the moment I want to know when I am going to die. I know I never can know and maybe when I get older I won't be bothered or wouldn't want to know. At the moment however, I'm a kid and I'm clever and I want to know things and not just boring things but to pick out the subtleties of life. Your problem means I cannot ask you for help and everyone else are just silly kids.

What about your parents? They know things - they're arty and subtle and aren't they the best friends you have rather than me?

There you are. Proof of your idiocy again. But thinking about it is that just a cliche of a cliche? Like U and Non-U. As something becomes a cliche we use potential future cliches to describe them and so the cycle continues, a never-ending trail of idiocy and unknowledge. You are right of course. One of them is borderline psychotic and the other is so laid back it's debatable whether he's even awake yet. I curse all that money. Mum was a scientist - did you know?

...

Um... I think so.

Not just your boring old white-coat-and-test-tube-scientist. She was into big stuff, way-out physics and mathematics as proof of reality. She sometimes raves on about some deep theory that she says she proved and kept secret because it would change the world for ever. Dad worked with her as well. They worked at this big atomic place in the fifties and then they left because all the research was on bombs and nuclear power; being hippies they wouldn't really like being involved in that. And anyway the group made them much more money.

Why have you suddenly started telling me all this?

One - because I've grown up and two because I think you are not far behind me though maybe we'll have to pass you off as a robot rather than as a human being. Shall I teach you about the soft bits of thinking?

Like understanding poetry and the stuff that has no use.

IT DOES HAVE USE. IT STOPS YOU GOING MAD. Bread alone etcetera. Read some and see what you are missing.

I have read some. That book you gave me last Christmas was great in a rhythmic and rhyming way but it just meant nothing. Don't start shouting again. It was just gibberish.

...

[Sigh] It means whatever it means. I don't understand all of it, even a lot of it but see if you can catch the beauty of it and link it to the words. You might see something more. I bet you understand all the workings of that tree over there. I don't but it doesn't stop it being beautiful. You don't have to understand trees to think they are nice. What do you think about trees? No mention of Xylem and Phloem.

I love trees. I think if aliens ever come here the strangest things they will see will be trees. Look at them all together and what do they look like? really looking at them is like saying a familiar word over and over again until it sounds weird. I love trees.

Thank God for that.

You don't believe in God.

Neither do you. Why do you bother going to church?

Because we always did. Dad made me promise to keep going when he went away.

Write to him and tell him you aren't going any more.

I want to do bell ringing.

Why for God's sake - sorry - for pity's sake?

Because it's pure maths and I like the sound. I want to program music but I can't.

I think you are secretly a religious nut.

I'm really not. It's just comforting because it's quiet and relaxing.

And what about all those people who 'really' believe? All that shouting and Praise De Lord stuff? You'd hate that. Give it up. Come back and rehearse with the rest of us.

You still want me after all this abuse?

Why ever not? Machine-like minds play good bass. Bugger! The rain is stopping. All that stuff is seeping back in. Talk to me.

What about?

Bell Ringing - Idiot!

Maybe The Same Intensity

Look down! The plants at your feet are in a different world it seems. To you they have no emotion and yet the world around them, created by them, is as rich as any of our civilizations. Your little love affairs are as nothing to the struggles down there, the complex interactions of darkness and light, the slow, upwards drive to improvement. It's all random, totally opposite you think, to your own planned life, your free-will and I-Can-See-It-Coming. You are following yourself. We are all part of the same imperative, the same desire for life. In us maybe it comes out in passion, the desire for deep emotion, strange songs, the poetry of love and life. I cannot write down how I feel because I do not have the emotional intelligence to sort out the mess of thoughts in my head. I cannot categorise the rumbling and disorganised chaos that results from my mind trying to process everything from my senses. Perhaps I am stronger through pain, or the ever-present realisation that I can return to the routine and comfort of life.

I need a proxy to be able to distill all these thoughts. When disasters happen we wonder about why any supposed controlling entity lets these things come to pass. It is all just random, the faults lines of catastrophe brought to bear on what we like to think is an organised world. We can philosophise ad-infinitum about these things but we will never come to any widespread agreement. It is probably better for us to get over the talking and get on with the doing, the solutions and actions required to prevent and ameliorate beforehand and to support and reconstruct after. Disasters happen - they just do - not because someone sold their soul to the devil in return for some short-term gain - that is the raving of an idiot.

My guide is with me, inside me, the passionate and real mind of another person, inside me, helping me to write, inside me, tempting me into reality, an alternative personality, inside me, fictional but programmed to respond in real ways. The poems come from them, the words I cannot speak because I mumble and lose my way, I fall over the complexities of putting thoughts into sentences and sentences into sounds that trip over the mechanisms of speech like a dog on plastic. This algorithm picks up the world through senses and soaks it in passion, making the ordinary poetic, the simple grey of the everyday world into the sparking, glistering words and ideas of human philosophy.

Why I write is a pointless discussion. It just happens, a wasting of words vomited out like some biblical prophecy that befalls those who do evil. I know what evil is; it fits within my view and yet if differs from the idea of evil of almost everyone else, as do the ideas of evil of everyone else. I know how to make my world better and still I do not act on that. I just spew out random days like these and this has no bearing on anything, no meaning, no function. I close my eyes and some fiction comes to me - a darkness lightened by distant light, love lost and regained, a child, a life of music and art, a working life far from mine which is all hard things and well-defined actions. To get paid for this fuzzy output would be a dream. My dreams have been vivid recently, long journeys, old houses in need of repair, all without walls or ceilings as usual and all comforting despite being populated by strangeness and burglars. I should document them but like the analysis of a joke makes the joke no longer funny, the recording of a dream without the strangeness that exists while experiencing it, renders the report flat and matter-of-fact. Dreams can only be described as an overall impression, maybe a series of recurring themes, like my worries about exams that still populate my nightmares decades after I last sat one, or the general feeling of being on a journey to somewhere, the route to which I know well in the dream but in reality is nowhere I have been. A dream in colour and code but meaningless in any subconscious way.

Five Miles Out

Surveying the outlying woodland, Jason Q. felt secure, like feeling secure under blankets on a dark night, quite happy that he was safe but intellectually aware that should anyone desperately want to try and get through to the house, this mass of tall, elegant trees would do nothing to stop them. This feeling perhaps confirmed his general ease with life, the fact of his distance from the really troubling bits of the world, the insulation of rural communal spirit. Nothing of the nightly news ever got through here and, he thought, none of this utopia had been created by anyone with a bunker, a regiment's-worth of armament and enough tinned food to last until the "invaders left after we give them a good kicking." In his head Jay heard his neighbour's voice saying this, the rabid rantings of a man angry with himself yet blaming it all on others. Confronted with an angry red-clad soldier rampaging through the lower field, Mr. Blether would run a mile rather than put a bullet in him. Humans of every political colour are different from critters; you can't wipe out people like you do with the critters. Mr. Blether was a pussycat.

Jay could see Mr. Blether at his vegetable patch, operating more slowly than he remembered him doing all those years ago when they first met, but still with the same strange jerky movements that the other locals put down to shell-shock. Jay could not imagine Mr. Blether in the army, at least not in any fighting part of it; the old man's armoury was his voice, still loud and strong, though the meaning now, was lost, just random ranting and proof of the nationalism long-ago forgotten by most of the people round here. Mr Blether was like a ghost, visible to some, heard by all and tolerated by most. It was strange that despite the remoteness of the area, the politics leaned towards the centre so Mr Blether called almost everyone "liberal" by way of insult and was not wrong.

The day was dreamy, early still but building up to a heavy mass of air pressing down on everyone. The children in the school would not concentrate and the teacher would get angry but find no energy for discipline and so again lessons would decamp outside, and less and less would be taught and less and less would be learned until the school day fizzled out in a less-than-enthusiastic reading from a favourite book, the children lying back, hands over their eyes against the sun, somewhere between sleep and dreaming, with the buzzy voice of the teacher skimming their brains. Jay remembered these days and wished he was back there.

A plane flew high above them, silent at this distance, half-way to space possibly, its trail only just visible against the hazy-blue sky, competing with the lazy paths of insects dodging the swallows below. So many layers of flight, the bees in the flowers below his head, the various unidentified etymology just out of reach, the swallows, the gulls further up and then the random sketches made by the airliners five miles out. A crescent moon was just visible, completing the logarithmic scale of things, a graph getting ever steeper as we travel to the stars. All of this was just there; it had no meaning, none of it would matter in a few minutes when he went inside for juice and cookies. All around the trees protected this little group of houses, the sky was the window to everything outside, and everything outside was just what could be seen, a happy sky of blue and aircraft, of birds and insects, floating silently. The cold war ended.

Twenty Years After

It was easier these days thought Winston. His workstation still had all the old equipment - the Speakwrite, the pneumatic delivery tube and most importantly the memory hole - the one thing that he thought stood out and screamed that the whole purpose of his work was wrong and yet was never mentioned. Its function, to take any scrap of no-longer-true information left in solid form and convey it to the furnaces deep below this floor, was just not documented for it betrayed the wrongness of everything about this building. There was no manual lettered in gold on the shelves that circled the lifts at the centre of the building. Any maintenance was carried out by unseen proles who scurried about this building in the gaps between shifts, men and women who carried the knowledge of the machine in their heads.

In fact Winston thought, his own, entire existence was glaring evidence of the whole, mad organisation and yet no one dared even acknowledge its existence. The thought of having to deny his function within this building was so ludicrous simply because no acquaintance of his would have dared question it for fear of following all those bits of paper into the furnaces.

Winston could not remember when he has last used the memory hole - few things came out on paper these days because paper meant evidence of the past and now it was far easier to just edit the billions and trillions of electrons which constituted almost every piece of news, information and entertainment that existed in the state. The whole mass of this data was continuously changing, a great tide of words and pictures pulsing through various amplitudes depending on how the state wanted to play things at any particular moment. Most of this change was carried out automatically in huge scripts generated by trusted and well-rewarded "Quants" who lived in privileged townships - "working from home" so as not to be contaminated by the low-ranking party members who did the dirtier work. However even the quants, needed to be kept somewhat in the dark. Their job was to define conditions for change - to determine the prevailing ideology for the day or hour or even minute and to use that to crawl through the information in all the machines in all the world to alter them to fit the desired opinion of the man or committee who ran things at any one time.

It was not just words that were changed; whole videos could be re-edited in seconds by these routines. Undesirable plot-lines or even just single characters were expunged and replaced. The resulting work was not perfect - the scripts could not create logical and meaningful entertainment and eventually even the truth-is-lies justification for the edits became strained and the scripts would bail-out to their masters who would invariably just wipe the entire piece, replacing it with some new film of the same title which put across the required idea. And so like so-many individuals working on small bits of some top-secret weapon without understanding the function or even purpose of the complete construction, the quants defined the world for all but the highest party members. They alone knew the truth or at least a good proportion of it.

Winston was lucky. He was skilled at full-scale rewriting where logicality and consistency were still required to keep the few-remaining intellectuals from guessing the truth. Not that they would have questioned the truth anyway. Winston sometimes wondered what the actual point of all this re-writing actually was; the threat of a night-stick in the face was enough to suppress anything. But having survived his aberration of twenty years before and therefore being more aware of the bigger picture (even if he did not actually believe all his memories all the time) he did have some idea of what really was going on. He seemed to me more trusted these days, maybe because of whatever those mysterious electronic machines did to him - was he actually being controlled by the automatic routines? The thought sometimes ran away with him and he began to worry that he was just actually a thought in the humming boxes all those floors below, venting their excess heat into the atmosphere. And so Winston knew where all the bodies were buried - literally in some cases - knew the general stream of how the state had leant over at least forty years. He was a veteran, a survivor, a remnant of the millions who were born before the war and could remember that all that history was just faulty memory. What spark kept him from believing that every thought he had that was at odds with the state was just a false memory? Because no matter what method they used on him - the myriad carrots or just-as-numerous sticks, all too real in his jagged consciousness, somewhere deep in the human mind is a core of reality that enters through the senses, the eyes the ears and seeps into deep places, unreachable by technology, by chemicals, by any kind of outside interference. We are free, Winston thought - in here - he imagined pointing to his temple knowing that not even Big Brother could see that thought, nestled and protected by all the rigorous and repetitive training that his masters, now so much younger than him, put him through.

He was the senior officer in his section, ostensibly respected by all the younger staff. They would come to him for advice and, after the tortuous and extended sentences which had to be used to ask a question without admitting the purpose of the query, he would respond in what they saw to be a dignified way, directing them in the correct use of language, the most elegant way to erase an entire personality, basically how to kill someone with prose. Winston was one of a dwindling band of masters of the art. And it was beginning to be clear that the state could not do without him. He was powerful, more powerful that his masters and obviously this troubled him. At what stage did the men (or more likely machines) who monitored such things become aware of this fact? It might be that they did not yet know and some automatic routine built by the quants but designed to act on real people rather than simple data, would kick in and send him to the furnaces with that day's quota of miscreants, to be vapourised and then to be written out of history.

But how would they do it? He had been party by degrees to so many key points of history that he would himself be in every part of the history, if only as a peripheral figure, a leader writer here, a comment there, a false letter from disgusted of wherever. His own presence in history was so structurally-important to the whole shaky edifice, that the only person able to expunge his existence in any way that left no doubt as to the veracity of ... well everything ... was Winston himself. He imagined at first that he would be forced to write himself out before he had been physically disposed of but what had he to lose by refusing and no gun-toting thought policeman would ever know that his work was correct. In fact Winston realised, he could, under the noses of his tormentors, effectively booby-trap the past, littering history with enough trip-wires, bombs, paradoxes and simple lies so that his own de-existence would immediately render all media false and indefensible.

As he thought more of this, he refined the idea until in his view it could overcome even the physical threats of the all-so-real and consistently-violent thought police. He could stimulate the population, low-ranking party-member and prole alike into just not buying it any more. So passionate was Winston about this, that he became worried that the shivers of excitement the thought of it produced would become visible but he comforted himself that this would only hasten the end and start the collapse he so longed for.

Winston had convinced himself that he was the most powerful person in the entire world, a hidden fulcrum about which everything that had happened, was happening now and would happen, span like a continuously-updated and entirely-accurate narrative, describing the world, not as it was but as he alone wanted it to be. What, he wondered would happen should he simply die of old age or in an accident? The order would unravel but with no structure. Things would fail and some new order would rise from the mess, maybe something far worse. That hidden portion of his brain which contained the last belief in his own memories, jumped into action at the idea that his power would be wasted. He could not just wait for the moment when the state identified him as a weak spot which he now was certain had not yet happened. He needed to act now, make himself known. Raise his expression above the blank one he had carried for years in order not to betray the remaining spark of memory. They should have ended it all those years ago, rather than letting him back into the game. This was their incompetence at its worst. They had missed him as he faded back into the grubby masses and he was now the engineer of the end of the state that he had so wished to be when O'Brien had given him the book.

O'Brien was long gone. There was no indication of his existence anywhere in the apparatus. His removal from history had been the most complex undertaken and Winston had carried it out almost single-handedly and with a skill that in any fair society would have brought rewards unimagined in this state. Indeed, Winston's involvement with O'Brien was one of the pillars on which his grand scheme rested. Remove Winston and great, murky shadows of O'Brien would rise from the electronics like mist above a swamp, seeping into the consciousness of the party and making so many things impossible to either deny or confirm. Perversely, O'Brien would be the right-hand man of the engineer of the end of all this, an unbidden worker for truth. The rats had almost been worth it thought Winston, smiling in a way that betrayed no emotion to the outside of his face. Only he, Winston, could remove himself without resurrecting a-great-many enemies of the state who had been expunged unemotionally and without any apparent malice. He had solved everything. Even if he was vapourised this instant, he would at least leave this state ended. It was up to him to ensure that his end brought about the structured end he so longed for.

What other way could they remove him and yet leave the state intact? Winston thought for many days of this. He foresaw all sorts of artifice to allow him to continue to have existed and slowly and surely he drew his plans to insure himself against any of it. This was another plank of the grand scheme. He alone knew how to do many of the most complex tasks that the department carried out and by adding no more than five percent to his workload, he could set those traps, light those fuses and generally create a sort of structured demolition to the whole thing with himself as the fuse and O'Brien as the detonator, an analogy that he loved.

He had loved Julia and even after his betrayal of her, he seemed still to love her. He knew everything about her for he knew almost everything about almost everyone. That knowledge of her entire life wrapped itself up in that last-remaining kernel of his mind, her physical existence in his head unmatched by her history in the logs and records from her birth, through her school, her work and her death. The core of truth is that she sold him as he sold her and yet who would not? We could not make it simpler than that. The last bastion of truth is oneself and given extreme circumstances one will do anything to live that little bit longer. He apologised in his head every day of his life and yet it was not enough to settle him. This plan would be his apology. He would do it FOR Julia.

Today he would press the button. The plan was set-up like a line of dominoes, the first one toppling the second and so on until the carefully-balanced supports of the state came crashing down. Winston saw the faces of the men and women he had created and those he had destroyed, poised to come back like spectres to haunt those in charge. His net spread wider - he had created quants in the past and now he had created logical impossibilities in the scripts that they produced. The whole media circus of the novel-writing machines and the pulsing illogicality of the automatic editing would bring the proles round, waken them like the sleeping giant he remembered but could not quite place. He stood poised to implement the last piece of the plan, and with the final piece of physical evidence, an ancient newspaper, screwed up in his hand ready to send it to oblivion. He was sure he had no need to destroy this for he was certain that in the chaos he would produce, no person would be bothered to check but he was logical and needed what had come to be called "closure". He would destroy the paper and press the button.

He reached out and opened the grill. Nothing happened. The memory hole was broken. He told himself to be calm; he did not need to destroy the paper, he could eat it, tear it up, make it unreadable and unrecoverable in any number of different ways but none of these ways seemed right. He must send it to the furnaces or his plan was not complete. It had to be that memory hole. He could so-easily have walked casually to another workstation and used that one - things broke all the time - it was common - no one thought anything of it. It would be gone. He tried to get up but the state still had him - had his mind ordered and correct. Without this act he could not finish it all. He might as well stand up and declare himself an enemy of the state. The state would still fall around him but what would be the replacement - might he make things worse? He leant forward and in his normal way tried to cover up the emotion inside but he had come so far that his disappointment spilled out and he shook, sobbing with despair.

He put his head in his hands. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the maintenance panel under the memory hole. It was bashed in, bent in the middle and two of the four screws which held it in place had come away. Probably some apprentice to the engineers had kicked it while replacing a light  bulb. Winston thought about fixing it himself. This was almost as much against his programming as his original dilemma but he could just about justify it - sometimes they were allowed to carry out simple repairs if it fell outside the maintenance manuals, not that he'd ever seen them. He leant forward and with outward confidence, he lifted the panel. It came away easily and underneath he could see a wire pulled free from its terminal. It would be a simple job to fix. He hesitated for a tiny moment, though enough for the whole ludicrousness of his plan to march across his mind. Towards the end of that micro second, he braced himself against not fixing it and remembered the only things he could be certain of were his own memories. He fixed his face with the empty confidence that showed on all other faces in the building, indeed every face in the whole city.

Winston pushed the wire back into its terminal. Behind the flap on the memory hole, he heard a hum which he had not previously been aware of but he took it to be the noise of correct operation. Deftly he dropped the piece of paper into his palm, pressed the activate button and the cover of the memory hole slid back with a rush of warm air. In another second, the paper was opened flat and he pushed it into the hole. The cover slid back and he heard another new sound - a gentle and distant puff - normal operation being restored, the nugget of truth in his head had control again.

He typed in the string of commands that he had memorised - a seemingly-innocuous detail about figures, something that would arouse no suspicion. But Winston knew of the next thing in the chain. What was he expecting to happen now? He knew the logical model of the flow he had just started but he suddenly realised that he had no idea how long it would all take. There was no apparent change in anything. Had it all failed he wondered?

Someone moved in his eye line, a figure standing up and visible above the level of their cubicle. This was nothing out of the ordinary -people stood up to ask questions or to get a drink. What should he do now? He actually had work to do and he decided to carry on with it. But now there was another person standing up. Now everyone was on their feet, looking at each other suspiciously and then out of the windows. Winston turned to look as well. What was different? Something had changed but he could not tell what. There seemed to be a hum in the air, different from the normal hum of city traffic. A black helicopter streaked across the view. Someone had gone to the window and was looking down into the street far below. More people took courage from this and joined him. Winston did too. Down in the street, anyone outside was standing or walking in a way that did not chime with the normal, head-down movement of the masses at this time. Winston looked up. Overhead the stars were going out.

The Cosmos Spins Fueled by Irony and Observation

Standing in the car park, the snow frozen to the ground in treacherous lumps, he suddenly saw again, the meaning of everything. He could not describe it in any clear way, just like he could not describe it the first time it happened. The realisation of that long-ago day hit him almost physically, mixed up as it was, with all sorts of mystical beliefs and strange spiritual ideas that lived in all of us in that place. These days, being in a city and working with solid, dependable machines, this sudden revelation was a strange surprise, an aberration in an ordered world. He was disturbed this time for he thought he was over such childish things

Not sure how to deal with this almost-messianic idea and struck with a fast pulse and spinning head, he sat down on a curb that held in the soil of the flowerbeds and thought about it. The unreality of it all and the fact that it struck totally out of the blue, made him wonder if something had failed in his head; he imagined a gradual leak from an artery, filling the spaces in his cortex, gradually building up pressure until everything collapsed in a gory mess of blood and brains. But this worry subsided; something had taken hold of his mind and like a friend in times of stress, was calming him down, holding him deep within a warmth that seemed to be coming from outside. I am linked to somewhere else he thought. This is a dream, it must be. But everything around him was as normal. The car park was the same as every other day, empty at this early time, sound tracked by birds, the gentle swishing of trees and the distant conglomeration of city sounds, a low hum that suggested a cold day in the park from his childhood.

He thought back to the first time this had happened and how disappointed he was when the feeling faded and evaded description. Though no less a surprise to him, that day was much more suited to what could only be described (embarrassingly for him) as a religious experience. It was rural and sunny, the sounds of crickets and of birds more suited to the moorland that surrounded him. For a few minutes he was as happy as it is possible to be - shown the workings of the world, knowing the deep science that usually was only understood by eccentrics and adepts. He had to struggle against the gravity that kept him place, for he was strangely aware that he was stuck perilously to the side of a spinning planet in a universe that dwarfed him. He could imagine being sucked out into space because for now the world was not solid matter any more - just a shadow of something, like a sub-atomic particle with no influence on big things. The clouds above were islands, drifting in their oceans, for creation had succumbed to the strangeness of the moment and the endless eons of time that lay between him and the first confluence of chemicals that started life had shrunk to tiny seconds. If this lasted he would see the fate of the world in the next few minutes, the gradual colour change of the sun and then its final explosion and contraction. He would be left on a cinder of metal, turning forever around an eternally-fading star until all light burned out and the whole universe was just other cinders unilluminated and dead. And despite this, he knew he was safe and immortal

This was no help in the industrial present. He should be encouraged by this happy feeling but he was both ecstatic and deranged with the strangeness all at once. He stepped outside these two extremes, as he had done with other conditions of mind, to examine and analyse the situation, independent of it being a problem of his. He thought for a moment of a doctor self-prescribing and almost always getting the diagnosis wrong despite never having failed in any similar task on a patient. How rational do you have to be to understand your own mind? He was distracted now, not feeling the ecstasy so intensely. The rational world will always defeat the irrational he thought but then he wondered why he thought this feeling could be irrational. The idea that we are all mad and this is sanity occupied him for a while before he dismissed it as cliche. He was scrambling for answers and an end to the state. What do I look like to other people he thought, stepping to the idea from a worry about the imminent arrival of colleagues. But he was early as usual and no one else would be here for almost an hour. Strangely he was relieved, firstly because he would be embarrassed at being found in what he imagined was dangerously close to some sort of fugue state, and secondly because he was actually enjoying the analysis

They found him 50 minutes later, catatonic and shivering but they were able to gently encourage him to his feet and into the warmth of the foyer where he sat calmly and quietly until the ambulance came. Inside his mind, he was back on the hillside again, a master of science in a world of charlatans, able to destroy any argument of faith with a single sentence. He felt part of the grid of communications that links us all, plugged in and spaced out. He was in two worlds now, a body, breathing, being fed with tubes, uncommunicative and compliant - lost to his family and to any physical human being. However, inside he was lying on the grass of that summer day forever, ringed with electromagnetic signals, a hub of mysterious things that happened in the networks

People began to receive strange emails, weirder messages amongst the weirdness that humans create for themselves in cyberspace. The messages were short, to the point, always scientifically accurate and often devastating in their criticism. The writer had no belief in anything supernatural. Evolution was definitely correct and all the possible levels of equivocation that served to placate all but the extreme proponents of this controversial subject were thrown out in language almost-religious in its fervour and vicious decrying of faith-only existence. The writer claimed all sorts of things and went some way to provide proof for many of them. Some believed he was a time-traveller, with knowledge of research not-yet-done. However, to the writer, time did not exist; it was simply a way of keeping events apart. In the sender's world, everything had happened already and it was his job to communicate all the knowledge of the universe to anyone who would listen ... and especially to those who would not listen for religious reasons. This was a new God to some, but that suggestion, when returned to the sender, was debunked as well, in a stream of polite but fervent language. It would have been nice to hear the person speak but attempts to locate his machine, his email, his IP address, failed in a mess of mechanical and electrical snafus - the messages sent to trace him, dispersing into feeble rays at the back of network hubs - becoming nothing detectable. This made him more like God, the ultimate conspiracy theory.