I don't think it ever had a name, but here's the fragment of incoherent absurdity I wrote in November of 2002...
On a certain Tuesday in September, Titus Tatius Brown awoke at the bottom of a lead mine. He surged up from a dream about falling, which was odd as he never dreamt about falling, or about finding himself naked in a high school exam he hadn’t studied for in a class he didn’t know he was taking, or the other things people commonly had anxious dreams about, but only about his teeth falling out. Puzzled and slightly sweaty, running his tongue over his incisors just to be sure, he reached over to turn on the lamp on his bureau, so he could see his old brass alarm clock. He didn’t really need to look at it, as his internal orrery had already indicated that it was roundabouts half past four in the morning (and that the Moon would, from here, look to be just about in conjunction with Venus), but it seemed like the sort of comfortingly normal thing a fellow might do after an unpleasant night, like saying ‘Thank heavens it was only a dream!’ and going to make a soothing cup of hashish-laced tea, so he did it anyway. The lamp did not respond. Vaguely disappointed, Titus experimentally said ‘Thank heavens it was all a dream?’ to no-one in particular, and when that at least came off successfully decided to go and have that tea. It was quite amazingly dark, but that is not really too remarkable for the middle of the night so Titus thought nothing of it and rose, stretching his long and slightly awkward frame and padding off nakedly for the kitchen. The house wasn’t very large and anyhow Titus remembered precisely where everything in it was, so despite the failure of every lamp he passed to light, he reached his destination without incident. Unfortunately the icebox had ceased to hum and the stove refused to respond, leading Titus to suspect that the power was out, which it was, because his house was at the bottom of a lead mine, which he had not as yet determined. Although he banged around with the kettle for a few moments in the half-hope that it might spontaneously heat itself, Titus’s heart wasn’t really in it and he soon gave up, plodding along to the bathroom to, amongst other things which don’t bear speaking of, brush his teeth. But the water, too, was off. What an annoying night; not as annoying, he reflected, as waking with a jellyfish fastened to his genitals would have been, but annoying nevertheless in a small and mean way. Having little hope of falling back to sleep and little else to kill the time, Titus decided to read a book. It was either that or masturbate, and the latter wouldn’t take more than ten minutes. Titus pulled a Wodehouse (it was Right Ho, Jeeves) from his shelf in the parlour and sank down into his battered velveteen armchair in the corner. Now, technically, sitting as he was in utter, hellish, inky blackness Titus could not in fact physically read anything, and to most people this would have been an insurmountable obstacle without at the least a candle, but Titus habitually memorised everything he ever read (though he never bothered to organise most of it properly) and each of his Wodehouse novels he imagined as being encoded in a cunning set of corporeal similitudes, sort of mental dioramas involving Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, trumpets, cavalry, newts, dinner parties, and other images literal or allegorical that, when he cycled through them in their proper order, recalled the words to his mind, each set stuffed into its own chain in the Wodehouse branch of the English wing of his mental library, a bursting and ramshackle place inspired mainly by Borges, a catacomb or honeycomb of hexagonal chambers pieced together into planes and helices in topologically unlikely ways. Titus Tatius Brown has a very odd sort of memory, but you’ve probably realised that already. He is one of the very few modern practitioners of a very ancient art, which involves remembering ferocious numbers of things by encoding or imprinting them onto colourful and exotic images which one then remembers as being stashed in an ordered series of places in a building or other pattern meant to give the images structure, context, and endurance, rather than taking the easy way out and just writing them down somewhere. It is a great deal of work to very little end, and a fairly silly idea to begin with, but Titus was always running out of pencils (he unthinkingly chewed the erasers off while lost in thought, then threw them away because what good was a pencil without an eraser, I mean really, one might as well just use a damn pen and he couldn’t do that because they tasted funny when he unthinkingly chewed on them; Titus was good at chewing things, having fine and sturdy teeth he was somewhat self-conscious about because he thought they made him look like an Irish donkey when he smiled, which was often) so he figured he had no alternative, and it came in handy when the power was out and he was at the bottom of a lead mine in the dead of night, or when he was sitting in a dentist’s waiting room before having little pink bits of eraser rubber cleaned from his teeth. Now, having said all that, you’re probably wondering why Titus bothered taking the actual book off its physical shelf to begin with. This is a perfectly sensible question, whose answer is this: if he just sat with his eyes closed giggling every now and again at the doings of useless aristocrats without holding a book in the general vicinity of his face, it’d be creepy. Just try it yourself sometime and see how people edge away and stop inviting you to parties. Well, yes, you might say, but isn’t it also creepy to feign reading in total darkness when completely alone? And while it may indeed be so, how creepy is it to spy on the intimate details of what a man does in the privacy of his own home in the middle of the night at the bottom of a lead mine, as you’re doing right now, you voyeuristic pervert? So shut up already.
Some three hours later, it was still absolutely, Stygianly dark, and while this is normal for the bottom of a lead mine it is not at all normal for the morning, and Titus began to grow suspicious. (You wanted me to say that at some point he masturbated, didn’t you? You were just waiting for it! Leering at the page, lascivious drool quite possibly collecting on your lower lip. Well, he did as it happens, and he is quite well-endowed and made an awful mess, but this isn’t that sort of a book at all, you sick fuck.) Setting his book aside, he went to put on his bathrobe and slippers, and stepped out his front door as boldly as any astronaut out onto the lunar regolith, after a bit of a struggle to shove a heap of something that felt like rubble out of the way. It was, indeed, quite dark, and also oddly close, and stagnant, and altogether earthy, and not at all like his doorstep was wont to be. Perturbed, Titus popped back indoors and lit the ancient brass oil lamp he kept in his cupboard, and stepped outside again somewhat less boldly. In the warm though not very penetrating glow, he found himself standing in a cramped and uneven passage, shored up with antediluvian timbers that still smelled faintly of pitch, leading off from his doorway into the bowels of the earth.
‘Good heavens!’ Titus cried. ‘I’m at the bottom of a lead mine!’
He was so surprised that he nearly dropped his oil lamp and set the whole place on fire, but fortunately he isn’t that sort of person at all. And he knew it was a lead mine, though there was not a trace of the lead-bearing mineral galena to be seen, because he’d read on the back of a very strange packet of local crisps that lead-mining had once been a profitable enterprise in this part of Iowa, and while the presence of lead mines in Iowa did strain credulity a bit, the additional presence of anything underground that wasn’t also a lead mine tore it altogether. He went back into the house and checked the back door, too, but it only let in a small avalanche of dirt and debris before being plugged up altogether. Well, he didn’t seem to have many other options, so we went back out the front door into the tunnel, which seemed structurally sound enough. Closing and locking the door behind him, because you could never tell, he began to pick his way gingerly along the passage. After a ways the tunnel branched, and branched again, and turned, and crossed itself, and got altogether twisty and incomprehensible, although Titus continued to memorise every reticulation as he went along. There is only so much anyone can say about tunnels, however, and soon the going got very monotonous indeed, and it came as a great relief when at length Titus heard something that wasn’t himself. It was a sort of faint staticky sound, almost but not quite white noise, and it grew steadily stronger even when Titus himself was standing still, resolving itself into something like an old phonograph playing a recording of a demented Speak-n-Spell from Pluto, odd hisses, clicks, and warbles nearly but not quite in the shapes of intelligible words, accompanied by a sort of irregularly oscillating hum. It was absolutely not the sort of thing one ought to hear at the bottom of a lead mine in Iowa, Titus knew, even with his admittedly limited experience of such places. Curiously he turned a corner, and found himself face to face, in a manner of speaking, with the source.
It appeared to be an old phonograph playing a recording of a demented Speak-n-Spell from Pluto, a handsome though battered walnut cabinet about four feet high, with a large and convoluted trumpet rearing from its crest like a panicked horse. It was also trundling down the tunnel towards him on four small squeaky wheels, which is not at all the sort of thing any self-respecting phonograph ought to do. Titus stopped. So did the phonograph. They regarded one another for a moment.
‘Hallo,’ Titus ventured at last.
‘Hallo,’ the phonograph parroted back, crackly and indistinct amid its ongoing background chatter.
‘Hallo?’ Titus tried again.
‘Hallo,’ the phonograph repeated, somewhat more passably.
‘Hallo!’ Titus insisted.
‘Hallo,’ the phonograph echoed in something resembling Titus’s own voice, or what Titus’s voice might be like if he were speaking through a tin kazoo.
‘Err,’ Titus said, unable at the moment to think of anything more.
There was a moment of almost-silence. Then the phonograph attempted to kill him.
A hatch on the front of the phonograph, presumably covering the bit where the record went, leapt open, and began gnashing back and forth like a sideways jaw while various arms and spindles and levers within whirred meaningfully. With a roar of astronomical static, the phonograph lunged forward. It was quite a good lunge for a phonograph, but not very impressive by ordinary lunging standards, and the phonograph merely thumped soundly into Titus’s chest and sent him falling somewhat breathlessly backwards, still entirely limbed. He kept a careful hold on his lamp despite his considerable surprise, which somehow failed to go out, and by its buttery light watched as the phonograph attempted to run him over. Rather dazed by all this, Titus sat up, and the phonograph jerked forwards again for his suddenly accessible head, spinning its turntable madly and emitting another garbled bark or cry. Without really giving it much thought, Titus stuck his lamp into the thing’s maw, which snapped shut, nearly catching his fingers. With a vicious squawk not unlike a prosthetic duck’s the phonograph burst into flames, which trickled out its sort of mouth and spat from its trumpet as it rocked back and forth, the cabinet proper catching too now with a lot of smoke and a rather homey and comforting sort of smell. Very soon something inside it exploded, showering Titus with splinters and singeing his robe as he scrabbled backwards, and the phonograph, trumpet gone, cabinet half-demolished, settled down and simply burned.
It was dead.
Titus wasn’t entirely sure how he should feel about that; he’d never killed an antique before. Titus stood there a moment, his hands in his pockets, trying to decide what to do next without actually having to think about what he was going to do, which didn’t work all that well. Perhaps, he reasoned, if he just stood there a while longer something more interesting might happen? Interesting things seemed to have been happening without much effort on his part already, after all. So he tried it; he stood with his hands still in his pockets, reading or remembering some more of Right Ho, Jeeves. Nothing interesting happened. After about ten minutes he chose a largeish fragment of walnut wood still smouldering from the explosion, and lit it. According to his internal orrery, it was now well after nine o’clock. Chewing his lip thoughtfully, Titus realised he was sorely in need of some breakfast. He set off back towards his house.
And while he’s walking, perhaps I’d better explain something. Mention has been made of this ‘internal orrery’ of his, and you’re a poor sort of reader indeed if you aren’t at least a bit curious. It is, actually, exactly what it sounds like, a sort of working model of the solar system Titus carries about in his memory, which is in his head. Usually. Some people have a knack for always knowing the time; they have internal clocks. Titus never got the hang of that, and instead found he could fit into one room of his memory library a sort of clockwork approximation of the goings of all the planets about the sun and their axes, along with a few of the more interesting moons, comets, and stars. He kept it going the way other people keep track of their internal clocks, and so long as he corrected his figures from an ephemeris every now and again to smooth out the more egregious errors that popped up by virtue of the actual planets and so forth not in fact running on clockwork, even imaginary clockwork, at all but on nasty stuff like differential equations, it ran fairly smoothly and consistently, and with careful practice he had learned how to judge from the position of the Earth around the Sun, and the rotation of the Earth about its axis, more or less what time it was. In short, it was just like an internal clock, only cumbersome and far more bother than it was worth, just like most things Titus does.
Now, while I’ve been going on about that, something very interesting has in fact finally happened, and we’ve missed it. Titus has gotten lost. He is slowly and reluctantly coming to realise this. Slowly and reluctantly because he’d prided himself on that being quite impossible. He’d thoroughly memorised every turning, every bend. He should’ve been able to find his way back without a light at all. And yet he was coming to suspect that he’d never seen these particular stretches of tunnel before in his life. It was hard to be sure, difficult to put his finger on anything specific, for one length of lead mine looked pretty much the same as any other even to him. An hour had passed by now; this was definitely not the way he’d come. The geometry, or the topology, of the passage was all wrong; Titus wasn’t sure precisely which of the two it was, but he knew someone who would. The junctions all bent in the wrong ways; not wrong in any objective sense, not impossibly wrong, or unspeakably wrong, or eldritchally wrong, if that were an adverb, which it wasn’t, but wrong all the same. He couldn’t make sense of them. That was wrong. Things, he was firmly convinced, ought to make sense. Titus was beginning to feel vexed.
He turned around, to retrace his path back to the dead phonograph and start over again. He walked very carefully back down the passage. It was about ten meters until the first bend; he had turned right coming out, so he turned left going back; there was no way, he knew, he could be mistaken. He was. This was really intolerable; he could see, in his mind, precisely how the tunnels went, precisely how he’d come from here to there. Only the tunnels themselves didn’t agree. Titus gave up; he didn’t know what else he could do. He wandered, padding with his consumptive torch downwards, downwards, always downwards...Whichever way he turned, it always led him further down. Or perhaps he was imagining it. He was, he was sure. If he were really going down, then when he turned around he’d be going back up. Yet he invariably felt a sense of depth, almost as if he were sinking: quod erat demonstrandum. He stepped around the corner, and found himself absolutely and positively not where he was meant to be. He was certain of this, because he was meant to be in a drab and nondescript stretch of abandoned Iowan lead mine, while in fact he was in a vast and cavernous space whose boundaries were lost in the infinite darkness. The wall behind him, he saw, was gnarly as the trunk of an ancient cherry tree, limestone etched by centuries of trickling water. The stone underfoot was damp and uneven, showing every desire to burst out in stalagmites at any moment. Titus took a step forward, raising his torch. He wasn’t very well-dressed for spelunking, he realised, as his slippered feet slipped out from under him, and with a sort of rolling slither he oozed along the slick stone until he thumped rather soundly into something very unyielding. He lay there a moment, moistly recovering. Water droplets plopped against and into his ear. Coupled with their fleshy smack, though, was something else. Something oddly familiar, yet not. Titus slowly picked himself up, running his hands over the whatever-it-was, possibly the thingy, against which he had come to rest. It was, he determined in the darkness, a stone thingy, of wet, uneven, possibly and disturbingly mossy blocks; it was hexagonal, about waist high, a meter and a half across...Titus stood, gripping its rim, for it was hollow, and this slightly but not really familiar sound, which was louder now and definitely similiar to something it was not, seemed to be ascending up from within. It was, Titus realised, a well, and there was something in it. A light. Just a mote, really, a tiny green fleck, barely visible; he stared down at it, and watched it grow, as the noise grew louder still and tantalisingly distinct...It was a speck, a dot, a pinhead, a thumbtack, a breath mint and still growing, and a rush of fetid wind came pouring up before it, and now the light was a flashlight, and now a lantern, and now one of those halogen floor lamps every single apartment furnished in 1999 had seemed to have, and the noise was really pounding, a sort of throbbing or churning, and just then Titus realised what it sounded almost like, and very prudently went scrabbling backwards as something that was almost but not quite a train from the London Underground came bursting up out of the well.
For a very confusing moment, the cavern was filled with lights, strobing and pulsing like a bad discotheque, and the air was filled with a sort of electric popping. Then it was gone, and the cavern was dark and empty once more, and Titus picked himself up, reeling, and prompty fell down the well.
It was a good fall. Almost a dive. And it took quite a while. Titus with a sort of gleeful detachment observed his progress. For a while it was all very monotonous, air whooshing past and a sense of weightlessness which quickly grew boring. After an unspecified amount of time, he began to see a light. A very faint light, vaguely green though it was so dim it was hard to be sure. It seemed to be drifting up from somewhere below, and by its uncertain glow noticed that the wall of the well was riddled with openings he felll past too swiftly to comprehend, and the stone was taking on an odd regularity, as if a pattern was struggling to emerge. Then he found the source of the light. He fell, it seemed, through an endless pipe of textured green light, a bit rubbery perhaps, twisting and looping, though he always twisted and looped along with it and could feel no trace of acceleration. Perhaps, he thought, it was all some sort of optical illusion. It was a pretty shade of green; if he absolutely had to fall through a colour, he was glad it was green. He fell, or drifted, or hung; it was hard to say which now. And then, at last, there was a lack of light at the end of the tunnel. Titus met it.
He fell, surprisingly gently, onto his ass, which in turn fell onto a beach. Titus sat there a moment, taking that fact in. Then he realised that the sand was, in fact, rather cold, and gritting up his hog something fierce. Standing, he brushed himself off as best he could, and, having nothing else to do, had a look around. Sand sloped up in moist and wave-lapped ripples from a wide rolling lake or bay or sea, who knew? The water had a cool and silvery sheen in the moonlight, and its waves rolled over the sand with a soothing almost-irregularity. They rolled up very nearly to where Titus himself stood; he turned to make his way to drier parts, and saw a line of stone stelae, grey teeth slick with spray and moss or algae, running like watchmen up and down the beach. Ivory sticks of driftwood were strewn here or possibly there. Chalky cliffs rose up at the beach’s edge, their tops lost. For want of a better plan, Titus, stretching and checking his organs for continued functionality, walked over to them, and along their base. Soon he came to what appeared to be steps, cut into the cliffside; they were worn and crumbly, but seemed sound enough, and so Titus climbed them. At the top of the stairs, the cliffs became undulating hills, dropping off, it seemed, in the distance, through a thick pelt of trees. Titus turned, looking back out towards the water.
Two moons hung in the sky, one waxing and one waning, one clouded like an opal, the other mauve. Stars shone down in unfamiliar constellations, bold and brilliant as he had never seen them before. Something flickered across the sky, a meteorite; it left a glowing wake, a gossamer strand of red, seething for a time, boiling over, at last fading away. Another followed; it was chartreuse. It was also rather cold; the air had a crystal quality only to be found on cold nights in the dying days of the year. Titus shivered, and again. He kept moving for the body heat it yielded. Along the cliff, watching for more meteorites, doing his best to enjoy the tranquillity of the scene despite his numbing fingers and ears. His breath puffed out in roiling clouds. He enjoyed watching the turbulence of its flow and diffusion, like the trails of the meteorites. There was an order to such chaos, he knew, a mathematical precision, too subtle for the eyes...
At length, and before anything of his actually froze and snapped off, which he had begun to fear was a real possibility, he came to a structure. Beyond, he saw, the cliffs fell off again; the building, whatever it was, was perched on an outcropping with what seemed would be a swell view in every direction, when there was light. Light trickled from between sealed shutters, and a red bulb burned over a knobless door, which swept open at a touch, counterweighted, he thought. Inside was a large low hall Titus instantly recognised, through years of close personal experience, as some sort of public house. A fire blazed in the maw of a stone behemoth set into one wall; around it were clustered bowl-shaped wicker chairs garnished with pillows, a bit like the sort he’d found indelibly cool in the Eighties. Several of these had people in them, pale people tending, in the case of the males, to neat beards, in loose, vaguely Indian, linen tunics, and off-brand jeans. They regarded him in what he took to be a friendly fashion, and addressed him in a language he completely failed to comprehend.
‘I’m sorry, I have no idea what you’re saying,’ he told them, though without much hope of understanding. They smiled, and spoke again incomprehensibly; Titus smiled back, and told them a joke. Everyone laughed because no-one understood. They gestured him over to one of the chairs, one of the unoccupied ones, and they had a pleasant although meaningless conversation while a solid greying woman brought him a plate of fish, a baked potato, and some crusty bread. It was quite good; he thought the potato had a hint of paprika to it, and possibly oregano, and the fish wasn’t one he could identify, which he appreciated; when he ate animals, he preferred them to be unrecognisable. Titus was feeling quite jolly indeed, in a dazed and clueless sort of way, when tiny glasses of a flaming liquor were brought out and passed around; He smiled, and raised his glass, which they seemed to appreciate, blew it out and sucked it down. The fluid had kick to it. It filled Titus with a sense of geometricity; for some reason, he became convinced that his head was a triangle. He attempted to explain this to his newfound friends, who listened quite attentively although without result, but seemed in general terms to understand what he was getting at because they were feeling the buzz too. There was some jolly back-slapping, and then a sing-song, when Titus finally began to notice how long their words were, consonants rolling in a stream over crisp vowels. He wondered how their grammar worked. He also wondered where the bathroom was. He also wondered how he was going to go about asking them. It was a mystery.
It was not one he was then able to solve, for at precisely that moment his chair seemed to swallow him up; he felt a suction, of a sort the most ardent fellator would have envied, and pop! Something gave way, and he found himself falling again through an endless pipe of blue light. How far down, he wondered, could he go? And what would he find when he got there? He had a great deal of time to wonder this, or so it seemed. Or possibly no time at all. Though he’d felt he was falling, when he hit what must have been the bottom it felt he was surfacing at last, gone so far down that down became up, after an endless swim. Only for a moment, though. Before he knew what was what he was spat back out of the well in the darkened cavern, landing painfully on the slimy stone. He was very afraid something was bruised.
Miraculously, though, he no longer had to use the bathroom.
Titus didn’t think to think as he wandered through the tunnels, hugging the walls and feeling for turnings, and he can’t really be blamed because this is not at all the sort of thing a Classics professor is trained to deal with. Let us rejoin him, then, somewhat later, when he had stumbled at last into a chamber not so much lit as accented by a dim yellow light, square, brick, and featuring, of all things, an ancient wrought-iron spiral staircase winding up into obscurity in the light. Titus climbed it, for quite a considerable time, and at length he emerged into a large dusty space full of boilers and a few emergency lights, found a less picturesque stairway leading upwards, and emerged into the rotunda of the Leviticus A. Macphinney Business Administration Building, dominated by the famed Shrine to Mammon. Blinking, Titus realised he had found his way somehow onto the campus, that it was not yet mid-morning, and if he hurried he could just make it to his first class in the (Micah Q.) Albert Hall. He did, and he did, and delivered a very soothing lecture on the present, imperfect, and future active indicatives of Latin verbs of the third conjugation, and as many examples of uses for the verb ago as he could remember. There were an awful lot.
As Titus was finishing his routine (he’d borrowed a syllabus from one of his old professors and committed it all to memory, so he could basically let his mouth run itself and space comfortably out inside), he noticed someone lurking in the corridor. This was not at all unusual; people were always lurking in corridors in the Albert Hall. They were very good corridors to lurk in, high, a bit narrow, usually quiet, bendy, lined with display cases, cabinets, cupboards, stairwells, offices, and other convenient alcoves. They were so good, in fact, that lurking had become something of a competitive sport among the faculty whose offices were there. No-one was entirely sure how it got started...Perhaps Hopkins of English lingered for a moment outside the History Department, hoping for gossip....Then Warfield, the historian, hovered near Hopkins’s office, to see if Miss Peach the secretary was within, taking dic...tation. Then Fox spotted Warfield and began lurking outside her office to see what she was up to, and Warfield decided Fox and Hopkins were in it together, and Miss Peach started lurking in the stairwells to try and see what all the fuss was about, and Hopkins began lurking downstairs from her so he could see her bum, and then Clement started lurking because he didn’t want to feel one-upped by Warfield...These things have a way of snowballing. However it began, the residents of Albert Hall took pride in their lurking, but all agreed that never had there been a more talented, versatile, and natural lurker than Josef Kroll, the most famous mathematician Prague had ever produced and then sent to Iowa. Not coincidentally, it was Kroll himself gliding about in the corridor outside Titus’s classroom. When at last the period ended, Titus went to greet him.
‘You look like fuck,’ beamed Josef up at him. One of the things that made Kroll such an excellent, a really remarkable, lurker was his lack of height, topping in at barely 165 centimeters compared with Titus’s 190. He was compact. Like the unitary group, he liked to say. Or like a throbbing sex piston, as he also liked to say, generally when he’d had a bit to drink, in a smoulderingly Slavic sort of an accent. And to be honest, Titus did look like fuck, his spiky red hair all askew, lined with dust and smut, his bathrobe looking threadbare and his slippers decidedly uneasy. ‘So. I hear your house is at the bottom of a lead mine now?’
Titus paused a moment. ‘Yes,’ he said, with great certainty. ‘It is.’
‘That is fucked up.’
‘Yes,’ Titus agreed. ‘I thought so, too.’
‘Come, I’ll buy you a drink.’ Without really meaning to Titus found himself impelled down the hall, with Josef gliding alongside.
‘It’s a bit early still, isn’t it?’
‘In Prague it is dinner-time.’
The inner, compelling logic of this statement shone through immediately, and Titus gladly acquiesced. Technically, it was true, he still had a section of Greek to teach, and his seminar course on Silver Age literature of the Roman Empire, and so many other things to do he could scarcely count, but he felt his students would understand. The two of them meandered across the hexagonal courtyard at the crest of Perrot Hill, around which stood the original six halls of the university, spiky Gothic goblins’-buildings of brick and ornamental concrete erected around the turn of the Twentieth Century, turreted, buttressed, vaulted and ivied. They followed the road down and around the hillside towards the river, where it turned into the aptly-named River Street. Securing one corner of a stout and weathered brick and timber block is a perfectly charming pub called the Wig and Wicket, with comfortable chairs, a tin ceiling stamped with interesting wheely patterns, faux English Tube signs, and the best pizza oven in Dubuque County.
As they walked, they talked. ‘I saw your house on the news this morning.’
‘Did you? Did it look well?’
‘Eh. Hard to say. Light was poor. It was, as perhaps you are aware, at the bottom of a thirty-two-meter pit.’
‘Yes, the pit. I was wondering about that. How did it get there? I really think I would have noticed it if it had been there before.’
‘The reporters were curious, too. They asked around with your neighbours. “Did you happen to see that nice Mister Professor Doctor Brown’s house get swallowed up by the earth in the night?” As luck would have it, they had.’
‘They had.’
‘Yes. A Mrs Bishop, next door, was letting her dog out in the night. Your house, she saw, was sinking. Very slowly, you see, the earth was giving way underneath, and taking your house along with it. For many hours it sank.’
‘She watched this.’
‘Yes. Mr Bishop, too. And the other neighbours, when the Bishops telephoned.’
‘All night long. They watched this.’
‘Had coffee to keep them going.’
‘Why didn’t they call me?’
‘It was your house,’ Josef shrugged expressively, a complicated sort of movement involving most of his upper body. ‘They thought you knew. They thought maybe you wanted it that way.’
‘Down in the bowels of the earth.’
‘Down, as you say, in the bowels of the earth, yes.’
‘Did they think,’ Titus sort of waved a hand, ‘of calling anyone else?’
‘Who do you call? Police? Unless the house is being stolen from underneath, there is not technically a crime. Fire department? Nothing alight, no cats in trees. Called the building inspector in the morning; he had a look, and now your house is condemned. Word gets around, next thing reporters are coming by, I hear all on the radio, and there is consensus that it is a big cock-up all around.’
Titus was not entirely sure how to react. ‘Indeed. If the cock were any farther up I think I’d choke on it.’
They reached the pub, and took a corner table. Josef waved a hand and undulated his eyebrows, and the waiter brought out his usual Pilsners.
‘Hmm. Well. That’s strange.’ Titus enjoyed stating the obvious when he was feeling surreal, which was often. ‘What next?’
Josef passed him a spare pint. ‘Next, we drink alcohol in large quantities. Then you come round to my house and have a shower. You stink.’
They sat, and drank, and ate a pizza when it came, and drank some more. Titus felt infinitely more centred for it, connected, once again, to the rest of his existence. He talked about his morning, the tunnels, getting lost and coming out in in Macphinney. He skipped over the jaunt to an alien world, as his story was strong enough, he thought, to stand without it, and it was a bit odd, wasn’t it? The sort of thing that might have people sitting on his head and calling for the loony-wagon. Four rounds later, Titus was feeling uninhibited enough to talk about the phonograph.
‘Now, this is the really odd things. I mean the really really odd thing. The thing that puts all other odd things into perspective. The thing that redefines, in many ways, what our very notions of oddness are all about.’ Titus paused; he pauses often. It gives him a slightly unearthly air, as if he’s following events from the Moon via satellite. ‘While I was down in the mines...’
Josef nodded encouragingly.
‘There was a sound. A very faint one. I followed it for a time, until I began to suspect it was following me. A sort of buzzing, or static, or hiss. It was a phonograph, a really old-fashioned phonograph, though oddly it wasn’t quite right, the cabinet looked like a Victrola but it had an external speaker horn...Very strange. Well, finding a phonograph warbling like a senile Macintosh in a lead mine is odd enough, I’ll grant you, but that’s not the half of it. It moved. It moved itself, I mean. Forward. It tried to bite me. Knocked me over. Wanted to eat my head, I think. I set it on fire with my lamp. Isn’t that silly...’
‘Fucking shitballs.’ Josef drained his pint. ‘Killer appliances. So you’ve seen them too.’
‘Now I really don’t think this is quite the time to tease, Josef. I’ve had a very trying day, and I’m trying to unburden myself.’
‘Tease? Jizz on tease. I am telling you my television attacked me last week. Had to beat it near to death with a waffle.’
‘That isn’t funny,’ Titus chuckled into his glass. ‘I think some beer went up my nose.’ He mopped himself with a napkin.
‘Just wait. I show you.’ Josef always attempted to sound foreign when he was being dramatic. ‘Is true! You come now, we see.’ He summoned over the waiter and paid their bill. ‘Follow...’ he intoned diabolically.
They made it the six blocks to Kroll’s house, weaving and occasionally holding one another up, while Josef made vague pronouncements of mystery and doom. Titus wondered for a moment if it weren’t all some sinister ploy to lure him into Josef’s den of uncircumcised Eastern European sin, but given his unwashed and possibly lead-lined state he judged it unlikely, and wrote it off as either paranoia or wishful thinking. It was a nice house, much nicer than the new clapboarded thing Titus himself had been renting, one of a street of utterly identical pale grey houses that had sprouted up like a fungal bloom on the outskirts of the town. Josef’s house was of two storeys—with an attic, even, just dripping with gables—slathered in rich blue shingling, rectangular shingles on the lower floor, rounded ones, like fish scales, on the upper, with pale green wooden trim, faintly though not unpleasantly asymmetrical, with a fireplace in the parlour, which they entered. (The parlour, that is, not the fireplace. Obviously not the fireplace. That would be silly.) Josef led him resolutely though not quite directly to the cellar door. He held up a hand.
‘Now,’ he said, meaningfully, without being at all informative.
He opened the door, and flicked the light switch. Down in the cellar, Titus heard something move.
‘See,’ Josef said, significantly.
They descended...The cellar seemed ordinary enough, concrete, with a furnace, water heater, washer and dryer tucked away in its recesses. Behind the stairs...
‘There,’ Josef pointed.
Chained to the wall at the rear of the cellar was a television set looking somewhat ill-used. It was battered, and scuffed, and dented, and stained with what looked to be syrup, and its screen was cracked, and its cord gripped in a vise on a work bench nearby. When it saw them, it growled, an angry sound like a swarm of cybernetic bees, and squirmed in its chains. It slunk back against the wall as best it could. Behind its cracked screen, three faint lights glowed: red, green, and blue. As Titus watched they blinked in sequence. Like eyes, he thought.
‘How did you beat a television set into submission with a waffle?’
‘Is very difficult.’
‘Indeed.’
They stood in silence a moment.
‘I’m sorry,’ Titus began at last, ‘I really have no idea how to react to this. I think I’d better just have that shower now.’
Perhaps an hour passed. Vague vapourous clouds filled the bathroom as Titus scrubbed every exposed surface of his body under the shower, and had a go at some of the more defensible ones too. It was comforting, domestic, and normal. Titus enjoyed it so much that he had a second shower after his first, and then a bath after that. He hoped his rubber ducky was all right, down in his own bathroom, at the bottom of the lead mine. Thinking of that disturbed him; there were so many questions still to answer.
‘And another thing—‘ he shouted through the door.
‘Eh?’ came the muffled response.
‘I fell down a well to another planet, too.’
‘Interesting. Now get out of the damn bathroom already; I need to go.’
Titus towelled himself off. Wrapping the towel around his naughty bits he stepped out, and Josef scooted in. Eventually matters were resolved, in a manner unsuited to polite conversation. The two regarded one another for a moment.
‘I suppose we ought to do something,’ Titus ventured at last.
So they went down to the cellar and tortured the television for a while, in the names of science and fun.
‘I suppose we ought to do something more,’ Titus ventured once again, after they’d taken turns jabbing it with the fire poker. It quivered, and hissed again, each time.
‘Vivisect it?’
‘I was thinking more along the lines of finding me some clothes.’
‘Ah yes. Perhaps we ought to talk. Has been new development while you bathed.’
Josef led him upstairs to one of the spare rooms, which he had turned into a library. In one corner stood an immense and unwieldy thing, a sort of lacquered Art Deco ziggurat, encrusted with grilles, arches, flanges, knobs, and dials. It was, Titus realised, a radio, or what might result if a Depression-era radio had had a wet weekend with the Empire State Building. From it issued a newscast, from the college station. (It wasn’t a terribly powerful station; its broadcasts barely reached the edge of town, and that wasn’t saying much. But what it lacked in radius it made up for in enthusiasm; the station’s motto was: ‘Kicking your ass with all 100 watts.’) He tensed when he saw it, and put a hand on Josef’s shoulder. Through the corner of his mouth, he whispered.
‘Is it safe?’
‘Radio? Probably not. Disseminating art and information, it gives the populace a shared reservoir of culture to bond around despite geographical isolation, promotes global thinking, and undermines attempts of the ruling class to dominate public thought. Bound to cause social upheaval and possibly anarchism.’
‘What about that radio in particular?’
‘Oh, that. Harmless, I assure you. It has nothing in its guts but vacuum tubes, and fiddly old bits like that.’
‘Vacuum tubes?’
‘Oh yes. The darndest thing. Found it at a rummage sale soon after moving here, oh, two years ago? A steal.’
By this point whatever Josef had wanted Titus to hear was long over with, and when at last they turned their attention to the broadcast it was only Leonard Nimoy singing about hobbits.
‘Ah, shit. Perhaps then you will just look out of the window?’
Titus did so. The day had been, as days in September often are in Iowa, warm and clammy, the air thick, unfriendly clouds gathering. While Titus bathed, they had let loose at last, and an angry, scalding rain was falling in sheets. A rain like this, Josef had learned, would invariably taste and smell metallic, like tiny, rusty nails. And everything would smell of fish afterwards. Off in the distance, there was a peal of thunder.
‘On the radio, you see, reporter was reporting from former site of your house. Sides of the pit did not react well to rain. Caved in, a bit. Your house is now buried in mud flow.
‘Oh dear.’ Titus stood in silence a moment, looking elsewhere. ‘That’s unfortunate.’
‘Yes.’
‘Can we go and have a look?’
‘Ah! A capital plan. I will hail a taxi. Go across hall to my bedroom and see if, ha, you can find any clothes to fit you.’
Of course Titus couldn’t. Not even close. Josef was a sturdy, muscular little man while Titus was tall and lean, though broad in the shoulders; their waists, Titus judged from the other man’s wardrobe, were roundabouts the same size, but there was not a chance in hell of getting into his trousers. (Ooh arr.) In the end, unwilling to pry further, Titus pulled out another bathrobe, though it reached only to mid-thigh. It got him some odd looks from the cabbie, though not as odd as the looks received by Josef’s belanterned helmet, coil of rope, and pick.
‘Bohemians,’ he elaborated, ‘were once famous miners.’ And he said no more. Titus took care to keep his hog out of sight. The ride was short, as the town was small. Through the pleasant little neighbourhood by the waterfront and hill where Josef lived, of bulbous Queen Anne houses with exotic textures and asymmetries, cute little turrets, and thoroughly liveable aspects, old, perhaps a trifle eccentric even, but homey. On into the Beaux Arts civic centre with its neat little columned post office, courthouse, high school, and so on. Then the ring of bungalows after the Frank Lloyd Wright fashion. And then into the fresh, sterile streets of identical, cloned apartment complexes and houses precisely like the one in which Titus lived, or had lived. Architects of the time, it seemed, had all gotten together and decided, ‘You know, we’ve been designing pretty buildings for so long now, how about we do some really godawful ones for a change?’ And so they had. Each house stood precisely 2.1 stories, with a 1.4 car garage and room for 3.6 people on its porch. Titus imagined the residents were always running in and out of each other’s houses, unable to tell from outside which one was theirs. He found it all very distasteful, and, had it not taken all of his worldly possessions with it, Titus would have considered his house better off buried.
Beyond this lay only corn.
The cab deposited them at his driveway, leading up to a sort of sucking crater where his home had once stood.
‘Well, here we are, then,’ Titus noted. ‘What next?’
They surveyed the desolation.
‘We did not remember to bring an umbrella, did we?’
‘No.’
‘Ah.’
‘Yes.’
‘I am thinking that we are getting back in the taxi.’
And so they did.
‘What, exactly, are we hoping to accomplish?’
Josef looked at him blankly.
‘What were you going to do with that pick?’
‘Well, we want to get into your house, yes?’
‘We do?’
‘Of course.’ Josef spread his hands, as if his palms were coated in patent truth. ‘All of your stuff is within. And if the house is underground...’
‘You were going to dig it out.’
‘Yes.’
‘In a rainstorm.’
‘Ah.’ Josef rubbed his chin. ‘I see your point. Perhaps I am not thinking this plan through beforehand. I am letting myself be carried away on a tidal wave of enthusiasm. Like a tiny ship tossed at sea.’
‘Well,’ and Titus may very well have been a bit drunk still, or else this may not have seemed like such a sensible idea, ‘we could always go in the way I came out.’
‘Past infernal phonographic engines. Through the tunnels in which you got lost.’
‘Yes.’
They were probably both drunk, really.
‘Okay.’
They directed the cabbie on to Macphinney, a somewhat later addition to the original campus built around halfway up the hillside in 1926 to echo the style of the six halls of the Hexagon on the crest. The original buildings had been designed by an architect who would rather have been doing Gothic cathedrals; the Leviticus A. Macphinney Business Administration Building had been designed by an architect who would rather have been doing skyscrapers, and as a result looks as if Notre Dame had shit on the Chrysler Building and then gargoyles in bowler hats had roosted on the result. The pair climbed the steps as quickly as Titus’s slippers, for which no suitable substitute had yet been found, would allow. They passed through the foyer and on into the rotunda, on which stood the Shrine to Mammon on its plinth. It was a rather severe golden calf, with a disturbingly unwholesome udder that seemed to whisper ‘Milk me, bitch.’ They tried very hard not to look at it as they headed for the stairwell; the door was locked, of course, but a few moments of surreptitious jiggery with the pickaxe fixed that, and down they descended into the basement.
‘Hey,’ protested an elderly janitor. ‘You can’t come down here. It’s off-limits.’
Josef said something in Czech, and pretended he hadn’t understood.
‘There it is,’ Titus pointed. Off in a corner the spiral staircase wound down. They took it.
‘Dammit,’ the janitor shouted after them. It was not clear precisely what he wished them to damn.
Being in somewhat less of a hurry this time, Titus took more careful notice of his surroundings. The staircase ran down a square brick shaft, somewhat worn, for quite a considerable ways, while the light from above grew more diffuse, and the air grew rather warmer. At last they reached the bottom, a cubical brick chamber with horseshoe-shaped arches leading off on each of the four walls. They looked, Titus and Josef both thought, rather like upper-case omegas. The mathematician switched on the lantern of his helmet, and shone the beam down each of the tunnels. Three of them were as brick as the room they now stood in, lined with thick metal pipes slathered in flaking white paint, and fat rubberised conduits, with very occasionally a glimmer of a bulb set into their walls. They must be, they realised, the steam tunnels, though why they should be so far down they couldn’t say. The fourth archway opened into a limestone passage, very roughly hacked and smoothed into traversibility, with absolutely no indication as to what it was doing there. They took it. Now, this was very, very foolish indeed, and just demonstrates how little thought they had given to their project. And anyone reading this should consider themselves thoroughly warned never to try penetrating forbidden catacombs below their college or university without a map, while under the influence, even if their catacombs are not infested with infernal engines. Perhaps it was the unbelievability of their situation that led them to do it; perhaps they found it difficult to take themselves seriously, after fighting off bloodthirsty televisions and savage phonographs. Perhaps Titus preferred not to think about whatever had transpired down in the well. In any event, for whatever reason, they pressed on. Titus thought he knew which way he was going, though he had not seen anything as he wandered out; but he remembered his turnings, and the times and speeds of each leg, and though his memory had somehow (how?) failed him on his way out, it functioned perfectly on the way in. More than perfectly, in fact. As Titus retraced his steps, he found that the fragments of the map in his mind were spontaneously piecing themselves together, resolving into a sort of sense, as far as they could. He couldn’t quite see all of it, for the shape of the map didn’t seem quite right, somehow, but he knew now how he had gone from his house to the cavern to the stairs, and how to get back. And so he did, with growing confidence. They avoided the cavern with the well altogether, and though they paused often to listen they heard nothing but themselves. When they paused, Josef grew so still and quiet he hardly seemed to be there at all. They pressed on, and etched limestone gave way to the shored tunnels of the mines, sagging though sound, and soon to rivulets of water oozing down the way. To their surprise though some water and mud came trickling down from above, Titus’s front door stood unblocked.
‘The roof of the house must,’ Titus thought out loud, ‘be sealing up the pit perfectly. What a really strange coincidence. What are the odds?’
‘Bah,’ Josef spat. ‘Probability is for ass clowns.’
‘I forgot my keys,’ Titus noted.
Josef hefted his pick, gave it a few exploratory swings, and with one blow gouged the lock off of the door. He looked awfully pleased with himself. They went in. The house, amazingly enough, still appeared sound. Or as sound as could be expected. A few of the windows had broken, letting in little cacades of rubble, but by and large nothing had changed. They wandered from room to scantily-furnished room; Titus had only been there a month and a half, and hadn’t had time to accumulate much clutter. Most of his books, in fact, were still in boxes. His furniture was all, apart from the armchair, new, and had little sentimental value. His velveteen armchair was the one bulky article he’d had shipped down from Winnipeg, when he’d taken the job here in Iowa, which he kept confusing with Idaho and with Ohio (where all of his forwarded mail was winding up); he hadn’t been all that keen on moving to the US, but times were tough, and Classicists couldn’t afford to be picky. He really hadn’t had any other choice. The chair had been with him since he was an undergraduate; he’d bought it secondhand for his dorm room in his first month at the University of Toronto. He had actually managed to lose his virginity in it. They had a history, Titus and his chair. In the bedroom Titus made a beeline for his closet and somehow managed to dress in faded jeans and a red Chester Fried Chicken T-shirt without actually taking the robe off first, and then slid his feet into a pair of hiking boots. He felt at once infinitely more secure. Denim was a comforting fabric, heavy, durable, practically armour, really. Titus loved the feel of it. They wandered on, for the sake of completeness, and found that even the garage was still attached, Titus’s old green Beetle waiting within. Josef eyed it speculatively.
‘Titus, how wide would you say were the mineshafts we saw?’
Titus felt liberatingly surreal.
‘Wide enough, I think.’
‘Good. You load up car, and I will smash holes in walls of your house.’
‘Former house,’ Titus corrected.
And this is how two intoxicated university professors wound up driving an old green Volkswagen full of Canadiana through several perforated walls and out into an abandoned length of lead mine below eastern Iowa which wound upwards to meet at length a storm drain that deposited them in Blackjack Creek, from which, several hours and much explaining later, they were extracted by a party of local mechanics with winches. Remarkably enough the car was still completely operational, and deposited them at last in Josef Kroll’s driveway in time for a late dinner.
Sitting on Kroll’s doorstep, wrapped in plastic, was Titus’s velveteen armchair, which by no conceivable means could he have squeezed into the vehicle. On it was taped a little note.
‘Happy birthday,’ it read.
‘How bizarre,’ Titus declared. ‘My birthday isn’t until April.’
Titus spent that night on the ghastly zebra-striped sofa in the parlour, and as he did so he simultaneously found himself walking down a rolling hillside coated in thick, springy, luscious grass, dotted with forked poplars. The sky overhead was prophylactically sheathed in clouds of a sort of opalescent grey, luminescent even, as if light were trapped within waiting to be born, seeping out in vague hints of pinks and blues here and there. It was the sort of grey one would get if one mixed together all the colours one could find, quite opposed to the soulless corporate image most people cling to of grey. The clouds were just breaking up, he saw, dissociating slowly into harmless fluffy white sheep and leaving no-one any the wiser. As they broke apart Titus saw through the gaps something like a rainbow. Only there was something odd about it, like the way it was made up of distinct, monochromatic pipes of light, to all appearances quite solid, not altogether round and seeming to have a faint texture, perhaps of vinyl. One was a brilliant red, another a seething orange, then canary yellow, forest green, navy blue, and a royal purple, more like a box of crayons than any rainbow Titus had ever seen. As he watched they seemed to expand or lengthen, worming their way out through the hole in the clouds, zigzagging across the sky, and disappearing back into another rent. Every time another gap opened up in the clouds, another of these pipes, almost organic in their irregularity, would worm its way through, and dart in crooked strokes across the sky before plunging back out of sight. They began to intertwine, to weave themselves into cat’s-cradles and Gordian knots, twining up into agglutinations of impossible complexity. All the angles they made were acute, he saw, even when they were right, or obtuse. The last of the clouds parted and Titus saw overhead that he was caught, that a web of pipes sealed in the entire world, growing only thicker and more imposing at higher altitudes, and no matter where he looked the knots only seemed to grow worse and worse...Then a bald fat man with his pockets full of singing fish began shaking Titus by the collar, and tried to lock him in a dishwasher. Then one of his teeth fell out. He bent to pick it up, and perhaps stick it back into place, and as he did so a blue pipe about the width of his fist came rocketing through the point where his heart would have been, and stuck fast in the fat man’s bloated flesh. Titus looked on, fascinated; pipes, he knew, are meant to move substances from here to there; was something going to come down this pipe, or was it going to channel something back up it? He soon had his answer. With a moist sucking sound the fat man’s eyes disappeared into his skull and down his throat, leaving black and bloodless pits. Then his tongue followed, and his rolls of fat began to drain away, leaving his skin slack and empty. His jowels grew leaner and longer, sheets of spare skin drooping down onto his milkless tits. Soon the fat man was empty, nothing but a rubbery suit of skin standing still somehow upright, and Titus saw another pipe, a little pencil-thin red one, descend slowly and deliberately from directly above and drill its way into the fat man’s skull. More pipes plunged into his empty eye sockets, and a thick green one forced its way down his throat. Something poured down them, filling up all the empty space in the fat man, who began to swell up like a water balloon. It began to rain light, more pencil-thin pipes of red and purple plunging with unflinching determination towards the earth and towards Titus; when he stepped out of their way they sank down into the earth, in which he could feel them dumping their seed.
‘Wherever two people would meet in Ann Arbor,’ said one of the singing fish, ‘there a bar would germinate.’
Titus awoke with cramps in his legs and his back, counting his molars. He decided to check his internal orrery, suspecting he had a good long while yet before he had to be anywhere or do anything. He closed his eyes, and passed into his Memory Library. Metaphorically, of course. What he was really doing was sifting through an immense and recursive set of data exhaustively indexed and cross-referenced according to relations and algorithms set out in yet more data painstakingly graven onto his memory with years of intellectual discipline, which differs from physical discipline in being easier to practice in public and involving less leather. Though he didn’t realise this, the self-referential character of his memory structure meant it could be modelled as a set of infinite sets with some very interesting functions mapping between them, in a way that echoed the workings of the unconscious mind, particularly in the act of dreaming. None of this is really important; all one really needs to take from this digression is the understanding that having to think one’s way consciously through data structures or hierarchies of infinite sets potentially of uncountable cardinality every time one wants to remember where one left one’s car keys is not a winning proposition. This is where the Art of Memory comes in. It is a means of representing or symbolising. Human beings are intrinsically bad at remembering abstractions like the phrase ‘My car keys are hanging from the beak of the stuffed penguin my mother gave me, which is in the hall,’ and very good at remembering concretes like the image of a nun performing fellatio on a giant golden key on a late-night FOX variety programme. The trick to memory, then, was to associate to any abstractions one needed to keep track of a very specific, vivid image, preferably involving bad visual puns, after committing to memory a scheme of places in which one could put these for easy reference later on. And so while Titus was actually running complicated mental algorithms, he was doing all the hard stuff unconsciously; all his lazy layabout conscious mind had to really do was imagine itself standing in an ivory hexagonal room capped with a dome, beneath which a clockwork Woody Allen juggled the planets in ultra-slow-motion according to a system of associations and in-jokes that couldn’t possibly make sense to anyone other than Titus, which isn’t worth explaining anyhow as, when on this particular occasion he popped in to see how Saturn was getting on (he’d always had a soft spot for Saturn), he found that the orrery was, in fact, gone.
He had forgotten it.
He never forgot anything. Or so he’d thought. Though if he had forgotten something, and also forgotten that he’d ever known it, how would he be able to tell? Immediately after thinking this, he forgot it.
What else had he forgotten? He began to hurry through the rooms of his Memory Library, looking for gaps, missing links in chains of associations, free-floating symbols with nothing to symbolise. He ran down from the Orrery Chamber through the Time and Space Wing, past more hexagonal rooms decorated in a variety of styles, filled with reminders of how to get around Toronto and Winnipeg, how to get from a hotel he’d once stayed in in London to the Tube station, and where he habitually left his car keys, and on the way he found something rather odd. His rooms were being emptied out. They seemed to be folding into one another, jumbling up their contents. He found his clockwork Woody Allen, for example, staring at Jesus shitting into a sausage-maker (which reminded Titus that his parents’ new house was on Frankfurt Street), and found Saturn rolling happily across the floor in the cinderblock basement hexagon containing the unthinkable numbers of things reminding him of the layout of the lead mines. Though, looking at them, he felt sure there were more than there were supposed to be, and when he tried to remember what they were all for, he simply couldn’t make sense of it. He knew precisely which tunnels lead where and how, but what he knew, he didn’t actually understand. The contents of the room seemed to move slightly, as oatmeal does if you stare at it long enough trying to find any excuse to avoid putting it in your mouth.
Running up one wall was a small blue pipe.
Titus opened his eyes. He was, to the best of his awareness, awake. Now. Had he been dreaming again? Had he in fact never stopped, and only dreamt he had wakened? Did he still dream now? Had he been dreaming everything from the lead mines on? Was he dreaming up all of godforsaken, corn-ridden Iowa?
Had he ever, in his life, been awake?
It was the sort of vague and pretentiously portentious rhetorical question only asked by terminally silly people who’d never learned to think, and if you ever hear anyone ask it you have my permission to bean them in the head with an olive or grape. If, hypothetically speaking, he had always dreamt, and had no other state to compare dreaming to, drawing a distinction between dreaming and any other state of mind would be meaningless. And if he couldn’t wake up, and he couldn’t make his every carnal wish come true with his merest thought, what difference did it make anyhow? So Titus didn’t give the notion the time of day.
He still couldn’t tell what time it was.
He had to look at a clock.
Perturbed, he did the only sensible thing and made a cup of tea. Then he made another. Then Josef came upon him at last. Josef looked groggy, his long black hair unbound and billowing about his head like the mane of a Gothic lion. The two sat in silence for a time, the sort of silence that knows it’s a silence and has come to accept and even appreciate its own noiselessness.
‘Bizarre dream last night,’ Josef said at last. ‘We went drinking over lunch and wound up driving small German automobile through ancient mine workings out of your house, which had sunk after being torpedoed by some unfriendly subterrene, and wound up in a creek giggling like drunken men sufficiently old to know better. Ah, wait. Now you tell me was not dream at all, which explains why my head aches and arms throb from swinging pick at your walls, and how you come to be in my kitchen in the ass crack of morning to begin with, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then all becomes clear.’
They sat again.
‘It was fun,’ Josef added at last.
‘Fun?’ Titus mulled it over, exploring the unfamiliar shape of the thought. ‘Yes, you know, it was, actually.’