Nemonymous Night (22 page)

*

I may not even have known my own name. I was nemonymous. Some of my friends recognised me and called me by a name they thought I was named. I was a working-class lad grown into manhood with the sole purpose it seemed of becoming nemonymous. I worked as a radio phone-in ‘agony uncle’. Although that may not have been me at all. I met Arthur after he noticed his ear was getting even bigger. I tried to ignore it by staring at his other ear. We shared pints in Ogdon’s pub—and then he worked behind the bar mixing cocktails. He simply loved mixing things... sometimes mixing allotments of time together with events to make plots.

I had secret vices. I didn’t even recognise them myself,
if
that is the same thing as secrecy. I wove carpets. Many did this during the Nineteen Fifties in England—a hobby and a method of saving money. I had huge brush-stiffened grids of thread through which I leap-frogged a wooden paddle threaded with further thread—knitting tight each line of thread against another line of thread with my hard-padded fingers: as if tidying a rhythm of growing patterns of thick surface-veined underlay: except this underlay was a surface—but surfaces were meant to be ‘on top’ as that was where they always tended to go. An under-surface was a logical impossibility. Arthur admired them when I brought samples into the pub. He was still not old enough, thankfully, to realise he was too young to understand.

*

I stared at the screen wondering where I fitted into the schematic movements of the symphony. Not that I could hear any music at all. Silence.

The screen showed a clouded yellow surface, yet mottled with—if it were real—stains or signs of wear. Not yellow so much, I guess. Maybe beige. Not a uniform surface. Again, if it were real, it would bear perceptible bumps or lumps in its fibre. Fibre? Or weave. Or web. Or net.

It is as if I had created this site with a number of codes: codes that began with and ended with . I went to shut it down because I felt myself threatened by it, as if it were sucking me into it like a fly.

Now, I know deep down who I was. Or I was in the process of creating who I was. I was about to enter the intermittent and unsmooth flow of action. The yellowy web, hopefully, was to be the firewall or firefloor to protect me (or anyone else following me) from the dire horror that was a lurker on or within the threads of my discursive being. I was the head-lease narrator, the one from where they all had their essence and being.

Except they had escaped!

They were soon to reach the Core where truths would shine out and dreams dissipate. I shuddered. I was losing control. Mike and his party were, I suddenly discovered, on the point of reaching some mountain cutaway within the largest cavity that Inner Earth possessed—and Corelight would skim through like
real
sunshine to reveal the sorrows of mankind, but also illuminating a way to heal them. Mike would gain all the credit. Not me!

I punched away at the keys (having failed to shut down the screen) to prevent his party from ever reaching that Core or its Nirvana. Meanwhile, with my eye momentarily off the ball, I saw from the corner of my head that ‘The Hawler’, the lubricated Drill that threaded the rubble-storms, equally nearing the same Core, was about to crash-land on the outskirts of the Core itself—near Agra Aska—where they would rescue young love from the dreaded
shyfryngs
... and using the powerhouse of this love, they, too, i.e. Captain Nemo and his party, would reach Nirvana—without me!

I was aghast and I re-punched the keys, creating codes and tags for a new site of my dominion and power. A new blog city. It would be a battle of wills. And I was sure to win. I was determined to seek the information I needed, information that someone was hiding from me.
I
was the head-lease narrator. How could
anyone
be hiding anything from
me
?

Meanwhile, I tossed a quarter p coin to decide which party I’d follow. The coin dropped on its milled edge within a hole in my carpet.

*

Later, I stared at the screen in my flat. I had started typing up my things here in this rather undeserving tawdriness, having spent the earlier evening writing afresh in the square by the fountain. “I am curious—yellow,” I whispered at the screen, hardly daring to breathe. I scribbled in my bright red
Silvine
‘Nemo Book’. I 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, I 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.

I 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.

I reviewed my own dreams. The fiction could wait, as I shut down the sickly clouded crystal-ball of my yellow screen and turned to the Nemo Book with a long stub of pencil grasped like I used to grab it as a child: in the fist like a dagger.

*

Notes
:

Dream viruses. They are mutating, I fear, becoming more able to fly from dream to dream without culpability. This allows the contents of each dream to swill in and out of each dreamskin, and they can even penetrate the skin of life itself and enter the mainstream. These viruses are similar to birds with revolving beaks like drillbits, each a little pesky explorer. They multiply by ease of dreams being soaked into the birds’ lubrication-pores. Filters can and do work both ways. Each ‘bird’ burrows from, say, my dream into, say, your dream. It takes a bit of me to you, and a bit of you to me—mixing reality and dream,
as well as
you and me. Then extrapolate that at a geometric progression. Each ‘bird’ (or dream virus) has its own consciousness but that also multiplies as its mutation increases, not changing its Drill’s body so much, but changing the clouded specifics of its mind, each specific mind becoming a human mind that thinks it has got a human body—plus interaction with other ‘human beings’ of their own kind as if it is real life on the surface of our world, but really they are self-imagined figments within the bird’s cockpit as it lays waste the skins of dream throughout a mass Jungian consciousness. I know it is difficult to grasp these concepts. I have faced the situation in my own mind that I myself may be one such dream virus (or, at best, a harmless dream spam): and I’m easing the skins to open up to the manifold plankton of dream-interstitialists. Birds of Plague riding their luck as they multi-dream—‘multi-’ because there are a lot of them in themselves but also ‘multi-’ because each Drillbit carrier has more than one mind (and often several) within its very cockpit, minds
believing
they are real human beings and not interactors in a fabricated drama or fiction. There are also human minds who have fallen off their own perch and ‘walk’ independently (or so they think) within Plato’s Cave. But that’s too deep for a notebook. But whilst we are on intellectual matters, I do now realise that
La Vida Es Sueño
was written by Pedro Calderón De La Barca, not by Lope de Vega. Meanwhile, the interaction of civil riots and religious troubles and suicide bombs (bombs that explode without fear for their own cockpits of self-assumed multi-mind) and global warmings/global warnings feed off each other back and forth. That list of possible Corekeepers: Megazanthus, Godspanker, Dognahnyi, Weirdmonger, Etepsed-Egnis, Azathoth. Dreams leak, books leak...

I tore up the page I had been scribbling on. And I returned to my desk, across the littered carpet, and powered-up my screen ready for easier tasks. Fiction was always easier than truth, a generalisation with which I would need to come to terms... eventually.

*

He called her Tho, as a gratuitously eccentric shortening for Thora. He was Hataz. Always had been. In full.

Hataz was more oriental than he looked. He and Tho were not necessarily a match made in Heaven, yet fair enough for two lonely strangers who both admitted they needed somebody. Their single attempt at love-making proper had been a clumsy exercise, neither of the participants earning flying colours for their efforts. They didn’t really get near enough to each other. They were probably scared of the final penetration: a fact left unsaid.

After that, by tacit mutual consent, they never indulged in a blatantly physical approach again. Going to the only cinema left open in the city, making big talk and small kisses, the ritual holding of hands, walking in derelict parks... these activities were surely sufficient for people like them, because (as Tho thought) “spirit rode the flesh like aura”.

They also played childish games unchildishly in Hataz’s place, such as Ludo and Draughts—and, even, despite the size of the flat, hide-and-seek.

Inevitably, affairs of innocent convenience wind down and, today, Tho was bluntly determined to cut Hataz from her life before she became too enmeshed—not because the relationship was particularly claustrophobic, but simply because she was scared of a dream.

“A dream you’ve dreamed?” asked Hataz, genuinely puzzled at the sudden mention of dreaming. They had just returned from a concert in one of the riot areas of the city near the old Dry Dock—where a little known jazz combo called Erich Zann had given a desultory performance on vibes, flute and zither in an obscure unlabelled nightclub. Now, she had chosen this moment in Hataz’s flat to make a prepared statement, one she had seemingly rehearsed in front of her wardrobe mirror.

“It’s not a dream I’ve really dreamed, as such—it’s strange, I can’t explain it.”

Hataz had started the evening hating the music. Now he was more generally confused than irritated—an uncommon feeling with him. Usually confident about life in general (if not with girls in the shape of Tho), tonight’s disorientation was difficult to fathom. He had already felt vague indications of being unbalanced on previous dates, but nothing quite like now. Surely she was not going a roundabout way to ditching him. His pride, as far as the opposite sex was concerned, seemed fragile enough, already. For one peculiar moment, he felt these thoughts were not his, but Tho’s. Osmosis? A twinning of auras?

“It was the edge of a dream, Hataz. I could see the dream in my bedroom, as if it had a transparent cover. Not really a bubble nor a balloon. Just a shapeless watery skin. Inside were all the nightmares I knew should have been in my sleep. I was awake, watching an independent dream that nobody was dreaming. There were glowing things that walked about. One of them I later saw was you, Hataz. Or someone who looked like you.”

Tho coughed. She had tried to make it all sound natural, but Hataz was fully aware that she was reciting something she had learned parrot fashion. It almost felt as if he were dreaming. And the recital was silent.

“One looked like me? What are you trying to say?”

He had the uncanny sense that he was also reciting something, learned without his having remembered learning it.

“It was you, Hataz. You were inside the body of somebody else, trying, I think, to yank yourself out, using the shoulders as a lever.”

There was a silence, broken by more silence, only this time it was a silence deeper and more frightening. Hataz’s flat was always a quiet place at the top of a tall building. Tonight, there were no lonely aeroplanes droning over the sky from a forgotten airport.

In many ways, she didn’t need to say the words. Hataz’s new-found faith in the phenomenon of osmosis was nurtured by the silence, as she sprayed further implications and he allowed his inferences to burgeon. But, then, of course, her words would spill out autonomously, more visible than audible.

“I could see the host body’s neck tightening,” she continued, “bursting at the seams, as you tried to clamber out, except the seams were knotted veins rather than rows of stitches. Other creatures gathered at your feet—things I couldn’t recognise, let alone describe. Some just a mass of wriggling tentacles. Others with more head than body. Tails and teeth. All chanting bits from an invented religion. To describe things in a dream makes remembering them more easy. The words and the names of the things seemed the most natural parts although, afterwards, they were the strangest. God knows how they were spelt. A good job, perhaps, that one can’t remember every dream. But this dream was different, being one I was viewing from the bed, whilst still awake. It was growing in size, too. The dream’s wobbly skin getting nearer and nearer, as it filled with more and more nightmares. Can’t you see, Hataz, how I’ve been worried? I didn’t know how to tell you. Nor if I should tell you at all.”

“Do you want a drink?” Hataz asked, thinking that a psychologist would probably call this a nervous breakdown. She needed humouring, not scolding. He still couldn’t shake off, however, the suspicion of a sting in the tail. Tho wanted to chuck him. That was bloody obvious, if nothing else was. In the meantime, though, she needed help.

“A drink? Yes, why not? A coffee, perhaps. Make it with milk if you’ve got plenty.”

She heard him pottering about in the kitchen, as men did. Hataz imagined her hearing him—the chink of cups easing the silence more efficiently than the earlier exchange of words had done. Words were not really sounds, when they meant so much. Meanings were there whether one said them out loud or not. She shook her head. Or so Hataz inferred. How could she be thinking such thoughts? Thoughts were words injected straight into the vein. Surely she had intended to tell him of his host body in the dream with its skull splitting, tilting sideways from his own skull which was inside it. Bone within bone. The brain slid down his face like porridge, hair brylcreemed with blood. It was strange she could describe things better aloud, than describing them silently to herself. Osmosis was telling him too much of what she thought.