A Collaboration with Scott Urban
Published 'fantasque' 1999
There was nothing in the morning to set it aside from any other, no hint of a demarcation between the many thousands which had come before and which Owen now entered -- irrevocably, irretrievably embarking on an existence-altering odyssey that would leave him markedly changed from the not-much-more-than-primate status he enjoyed at its outset. Rising, scratching patchy chest hair; shaving, rinsing grey stubble down the drain; dressing in the suit meticulously laid out the night before -- it was all so routine, so mind-numbingly pedantic that he negotiated his flat in a state that could only marginally be called 'consciousness.' He did not turn on the radio or the television, he did not look at the paper, and no mate chattered in his ear. He was insulate, effectively cocooned in a room-wide layer of white noise which he did not even disturb with the spoon-stirring of his tea.
A short time later, he pushed a bowler atop his brow and hooked the crook of an umbrella over his arm. He glanced up at the sky just long enough to ascertain it wasn't raining nor likely to do so on his perambulation, then set off for Threadneedle Street. Papers, numbers, and columns would face him all day long, and if he were lucky, he could get through it without having to endure more than two or three face-to-face conversations.
He had strolled perhaps two-and-a-half blocks when it happened.
The ground in front of him -- most of the sidewalk and a foot or two of the road beside -- gave . . . collapsed . . . fell in. Without a warning rumble, without a sub-audible quake, seemingly without reason. The implosion produced a chasm perhaps fifteen feet across, almost perfect in its unique circularity. Looking straight ahead, Owen would have walked right over the edge of the precipice had he not seen an elderly woman with a tragically- coiffed poodle drop directly out of his line of sight. As it was, he still nearly stepped into the gulf, since he continued walking while trying to puzzle out what might have happened to her. When he looked down and stopped himself short, he was a mere six inches from the verge of the pit.
It produced only the third or fourth start he had experienced in his life.
Raising one eyebrow, Owen stepped forward so that he could see into the abyss.
Owen thought her name was Rachel Mildew. That was what it sounded like when he helped her out, leaving the forgotten poodle to remember itself. Owen was too caught up in his own routines to appreciate the implications of why this woman looked less old when seen close-up than at a distance -- with her milky-grey glasses and the unexplained single eye-patch underneath them. His father had died the year before, and the house seemed empty without him and it seemed that any odd-bod picked up off the street was a good idea as a stop-gap. Nothing, however, changed his feelings for his mother, the one who had once bounced him on her knee and told nursery rhymes together with tales of flower fairies and of poodle-dogs drowning in wells.
Rachel Mildrew bought him an atlas. That's what it was all about, at first -- the atlas. Rachel had a bee in her bonnet about presents having to be educational. Even Christmas ones. But, that atlas looked swish in its glossy covers, with each political/financial area shaded in a pretty pastel colour, and the relief maps having swirling contours of variegated brown. The countries' names were full of mystery and adventure. This made Owen think there was more to education than met the eye. He mooned over the various maps during the long hot summer evenings when he was put to bed far too early. Not only were other people younger, but also so was his very own self. His bedroom was in fact a solace, the wallpaper depicting various breeds of poodle pups. He really felt cosy there.
He never guessed at that time that most of the countries in the atlas would disappear in the then unforeseeable future. But it served a very useful supplement to his trusty stamp album and he was indeed amazed why such a small place as Monaco produced outlandishly big postage stamps. And Andorra, San Marino, Saar and British Honduras were seen in context for the first time. He even began to like Rachel Mildew for her gift. And his bowler hat had begun to fit bigger heads than his. His habits, other rituals. His job vacancy filled by other voids. Threadneedle Street sown with empty souls not holes.
Sometimes, late at night, Owen would opem both the atlas and the stamp album side by side on his kitchen table. He would locate the corresponding pages in each volume. He would practice enunciating the exotically tongue-twisting appellations: Sri Lanka, Tierra del Fuego, Papua. . . . He would run his hands over the atlas pages, as if by some psychic telemetry he could drink in a vast and distant culture through his fingertips.
He could never be completely certain, but there were times when he swore he turned to pages in the atlas that had not been there the night before. He wondered, perhaps half fatuously, if God were magnifying the circumference of the globe, thereby increasing its surface area. If so, new countries simply had to occupy that space (no longer was any square inch of the earth not someone's), and their boundaries, obviously, must be reflected in the atlas. He would bend his head to the newly invented pages, scanning for clues, but usually he could not tell where exactly these novel territories were located. He knew about the break-up of communist Russia and had heard that there were scores of little splinter countries spun out of that debacle. He had heard their names, once upon a newscast, and none of these names corresponded with his memories. How could he have missed these in -- what? fourth-form geography? Perhaps a new continent had sprung up in the last five years, and he simply had not heard about it? He supposed it was possible. After all, Rachel Mildew walked in and out of his life, and if he allowed that, anything was, indeed, possible.
One night, seated at his table, hunched over like a scribing monk in a cloister, he scanned one of the intrusive pages in the atlas. It presented a country whose name was an improbable, unpronounceable combination of consonants, full of X's and Q's and Z's, without a vowel in sight. Where was this land? Who dwelt here? Why couldn't he recall this name? Surely something so alien would have stuck in his memory. Why did he have this vague sense that somehow he was connected to this locale, although he could not recall hearing about it ever before?
"Pick it up," directed a high-pitched voice from behind him.
He had not known Rachel was present in his flat, but the fact did not disconcert him. She seemed to come and go at whims known only to herself; he did not even know how to begin to investigate them. Her clipped words, however, threw him; she was rarely so direct.
"Please say again?" begged Owen.
"Pick up the atlas." She came and stood slightly behind him, to the right. She smelled faintly of lavender and unopened closets. "Hold it on the sides. Good boy. Now, bring the page up close to your face. That's right. Go on. Closer still."
Owen frowned. "But . . . to what end?" he sputtered.
Rachel shushed him like an impatient schoolmistress. "Touch your nose to the page. Yes. Now close the covers against the sides of your face. That's right. Harder. Keep going."
The bulk of the book had closed out the light. What an exercise in silliness, Owen thought; why am I shutting my face up in an oversized map? He fully expected the covers to warp, molding themselves to the contours of his head, and yet, his skull seemed to have no substance. The front and back covers were slowly yet inexorably meeting in the space where his bland visage should have been. Owen the Threadneedler was gone and I was here in his place. In his geographical stead. His thoughts and acts of physique merely contours. Mine a spine. A backbone of mountains stiffening an otherwise imaginary land called Mind.
I was soon due to become a soldier and Rachel had been tearful for months before this, but, in retrospect, she was not upset by my imminent departure from home to risk my life for a mere splodge of colour in my dog-eared atlas. I was glad to get away, however.
The train trundled through the Home Countries. Several other khaki shapes were slouching in the corridor, cigarettes glimmering, talk kept to a minimum. I had been lucky to grab a seat at Hemel Hempstead and so was able to mull over my childhood atlas (my only memento of home). It was not detailed enough to trace my current route, so I was already several days ahead of myself in the more mysterious parts beyond wide seas which I was to experience for the first time in the flesh. It was all very well hearing about such places on the wireless, but I knew, deep down, that seeing would be no more than half-way towards believing. The faded photographs in ancient school text books were often worse than useless, because the colourful people in them had long since disappeared, with the places themselves transfigured beyond any recognition.
Even history lessons I had taken with a pinch of salt. All those crazinesses of mankind would have indeed explained the equally ridiculous configurations of countries shown in my atlas: all shapes and squiggly sizes, sometimes with no rhyme or reason at all. Even considerations dictated by physical, as opposed to political, geography appeared to be ignored. I laughed out loud when I thought of a jokke about a frontier-post that was bent and skewed by the constraints of the boundary it marked. The lady opposite me in the carriage stared coldly at my outburst. She was old but not too old to be a target for my blossoming passions. But she was not a patch on Rachel Mildew.
The war was long and hard, with no sweethearts. Indeed, I returned home in a modicum of glory. The village had strung a banner across the main street saying "welcome home" with my Christian name appended (which was a great honour, no doubt, despite being slightly misspelt). I still had the atlas. It was still dog-eared, even poodle-tailed -- and many of the countries I had been privileged to visit persuaded me that its maps were nothing but a sheer fantasy world. I had been a gullible fool to believe any of it. Still, it had nostalgia value, if nothing else.
My childhood home had moved down the street from its original site. But this was not definite, with all the terraced houses having identical walk-in parlours from the street. Television aerials had sprouted on nearly every chimney, giving an anachronistic modern feel to the area. I dreaded, however, it might turn me back into a bowler-hatted Threadneedler.
Meantime, I was proud of myself -- having done my little bit to change the world. Or was it to preserve the world? Yet I needed to weep upon discovering that Rachel had hung different wallpaper in my bedroom: a complicated design of flower fairies that now held very little interest for me. Indeed, I discovered that ennui, turpitude, had become my new nemesis, for there seemed to be nothing I could focus my attention on any more; I paced the ground floor endlessly, hundreds of ambitious designs and grandiose plans swirling above my brainpate, but none of them settling long enough for me to seize and act upon. Increasingly revolted at myself, I found myself pick, pick, picking away at whatever was in the immediate vicinity -- the edge of the coffee table, the wallpaper beside the doorjamb, my nose -- inane, vacuous idiosyncracies I once despised in others and now could not bring myself to curtail. Cur. Tail. Dog's end. Yes, I suppose that was how I sometimes thought of myself.
Rachel was there less and less, an evanescent presence that barely seemed to register even when I knew she was in the house. Is this how ghosts come about? Individuals' auras, their ambience, simply tenuously attentuate out toward nothingness. . .
Some day or some century I sat on the hassock, rocking back and forth as mindlessly as an autistic child, flipping the pages in the hardbound atlas, reaching the end only to begin over again, almost as if the book were cylindrical, an ouroboros serpent, its mouth enveloping its anus, and yet, and yet, at one point that was different from the others, I noticed a variation, a novelty, a page or actually a two-page spread that I knew had not been there before (and who was printing and slipping in these pages, even as I held the volume in my hands?). The new land was huge, covering both pages, seemingly larger than any three other continents combined; its name was MORTUIS and its capital ABBADON; the colour selected for its depiction a disturbing puce unused anywhere else in the atlas.
Although no one gave me instructions, I knew what to do: I placed the open book on the floor, planted one foot firmly on each page, and slowly arose. As I did so, elevating myself to my full height, so too did this land spread out like a swelling stain from the atlas, the puce-coloured countryside blotting out the old homestead, my merry village, and all of the green and pleasant land; instead of me going to MORTUIS, I had brought MORTUIS to me (or perhaps we compromisingly met on some plane inbetween). I licked away ashy dust from my upper lip and scanned a horizon marked only by stunted shrubs that bore no fruit. I wondered that I could see at all under a sky so overcast as to be no brighter than a bomb shelter, yet I also understood this was full midday and would never be otherwise.
An apparition appeared and neared. It might have taken a year to draw close enough to recognize. The milky-grey glasses and eyepatch identified Rachel Mildew, although there seemed to be precious little physical mass remaining beneath the stringy remnants of what had once been a dress. I entertained fantasies of flight, but somehow I knew this was a closed universe, endlessly looping upon itself: I would reach the border only to begin all over again.
Rachel reached down and grasped the hem of her draping rags. She lifted up the material to reveal the gaping cavity where her heart once lodged. "Put your fist inside me, O Doubting Owen," she commanded.
Then I knew it was time to be gone. I flitted away from Owen the Threadneedler, as he would be becoming an emissary for representatives of Those who sat even behind the Movers and the Shakers. Dei gratia. I feel nothing but love and gratitude. With sparrow's wings, I beat against the tangible arc of the sky and search for egress, Sisyphus-anew.
"A Thatcher God threads the straw -- weilding a huge heavy-duty
needle against the rain's islands of Spain on the roof of your
brain. Earn a lot, own a lot, die in pain."
- Rachel Mildeyes, Tails, Dots and Other Archipelagos