I've been reading Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality lately, to distract myself from writing my very first mathematical paper--not for publication by any means, but for what they call my "general exam" in the PhD programme, sort of a teaser for my eventual thesis...

(Tangentially, as I was poking around for some links for this posting, I happened across this, which I thought looked quite pleasant, although I don't know if Penrose would approve.)

I've also been reading a translation of Giordano Bruno's Spaccio de la Bestia Trionfante to distract me from that, as an 1100-page tome devoted to building up the conceptual framework of relativity and quantum field theory from basic mathematics by way of principal bundle connections and spinors is not exactly tea and cakes. Even with pictures. I think Bruno and I have a lot in common. Like a vitriolic hatred of Calvinists.

As I was reading through Penrose's account of supergravity I came across a most charming piece of terminology, with regards to supermanifolds, which, I confess, are something I do not understand. People have tried to explain them to me in the past, but they've been geometers, and by and large I find geometryspeak about as comprehensible as I find Czech, although much less sexy. One of the quite engaging things about Penrose is that, like a good relativity theorist, he's very focussed on visualising things. (Hence the pictures.) As a topologist, I respect that. Proof by picture is my favourite proof technique of all, though of course I've got to keep that from my students until I've succeeded in pounding the habits of rigourous argument into their perky heads, so as not to lead them into mathematical vice. Anyhow, Penrose had another dandy picture for supermanifolds, which I think was inspired by Ashtekar, though don't hold me to that. Think of a supermanifold as just a plain old workaday manifold M embedded in some higher-dimensional M': the "super" part is that, in addition to all the coordinates on M, we now allow ourselves to imagine we have access to a set of 1-forms on M', restricted to M, which can also act as a sort of coordinates. The ordinary manifoldy part of a super-quantity, Penrose says, is sometimes called the "body", while the super-duper-lovey-dovey-1-formy part is called the "soul".

This may be the single most whimsically apt piece of terminology I've ever encountered. That's right up there on my list of favourite technical terms with "top" and "bottom" as names for quarks, clear proof either that theoretical physicists don't get out often enough, or are better than I am at keeping a straight face.

Anyhow, the point of all this is: I hate God. In fact, I originally thought of titling this post "God vs. Hog: There Can Be Only One". I've been meaning to write some kind of god-hating post since last week, after my last distraction: Richard Dawkins' recent Channel 4 project, The Root of All Evil?, coming in two installments, The God Delusion and The Virus of Faith. Some kind soul has put the whole thing up on Google Video, and I have to say I just loved this to death. Dawkins is a man who clearly hates God just as much as I do. It's really quite breathtaking to watch him go at it; he's so, well, rude! Watching him talk to clergymen and American evangelicals with funny mouths and suchlike fuckos...He's extremely confrontational and tetchy, and it's probably just his very cultivated and pleasant voice and his not being American that save him from being punched in the mouth. His face says "How on Earth can you possibly excuse being so devotedly foolish, you mendacious little shitter?" while his lips say...well, almost the same, really. But they say it Britishly. (Have you noticed that the British have a way of speaking while cross that Americans can't seem to duplicate?) Brilliant editing, too. He chooses all the very best bits of footage to use in the documentary, the bits of evangelical pastors chanting 'OBEY! OBEY! OBEY!' like Daleks at their gibbering flock and suchlike.

(That's one of the best pieces, by the way, of Russell Davies' revival of Doctor Who, if you ask me: the Daleks as insane religious fanatics, out to atom-bomb the Earth until it resembles a Daleky Paradise. Much like neocons, only more honest.)

Anyhow, Dawkins is, like P. Z. Myers and myself, a naughty atheist: not a live-and-let-live kind of atheist of the sort who might make for good PR or community outreach, but one of the honest ones who's willing to say what, deep down, serious atheists really think: religion is completely fucktarded. I love the Internet; before it came along, I thought I was the only one.

This brings us to an interesting question: what makes me so damn cranky as far as religion goes? Why can't I live and let live? I was asked about this at a math picnic recently, and I've been pondering it since...

It's not down to my upbringing. My atheism is not the fiery conviction of the convert: I have never had even the most tenuous of religious convictions. My mother turned her back on the Catholic Church (go Mom!) and my father was a Methodist in only the most technical of senses, and I never received any religious instruction at all, so far as I can recall. My first exposure to Christianity that left any kind of impression was a child's book of Bible stories a relative gave me one year; unfortunately for them, I had already been to the public library and found a child's book recounting the myth of Osiris, although it left out the bit where a fish ate his dick. Once you've shown a kid that, and some big shiny books full of astronomical photographs and Carl Sagan's speculations about Jovian life, Christianity just doesn't have a chance. It took me years more to even realise that some people took this whole "God" thing seriously. I thought it was some kind of joke! Can you blame me? I mean, how can anyone take a big beardy git in the sky as seriously as the planet Saturn? Saturn is really real. It's very photogenic, in fact. Are there photos of the beardy sky git? Does he have an impressive system of rings and a large methane-shrouded satellite? I think not.

Anyhow, as you can imagine, when it came time for a frank exchange of theological views with my peers and classmates, I found myself saddled with the nickname "Lucifer" and was informed I was going to Hell. (The fools. Little do they know my mummified corpse will endure through eternity, periodically rising from the sarcophagus to terrorize archaeologists and canoodling virgins in parked cars with a wooden dildo. For Osiris is with me!)

This was actually rather fun, I thought. Clearly, these religious folks were releasing me from my obligation as a nice-ish person to treat them civilly, which I honestly tried to do at first. So I gained a new hobby, which I have enjoyed for many years now: god-bashing. It's great fun, and so easy. And, of course, rude. A reasoned and level-headed exchange of views on matters theological, without invective and abuse, simply isn't worth the effort. There are no arguments for the existence of God or the supernatural that stand up to even a moment's thought. At least, there are none I've ever encountered or even heard rumoured. At this point, while I can't totally rule out the possibility that there might, just might, be a convincing one out there somewhere, the evidence suggests this is slightly less probable than Tobey Maguire e-mailing me photos of his bum. (Epsilon, in other words, which we can take to be arbitrarily close to zero.) No, the only reason to talk about it at all is to mock the credulous and dogmatic. I think that, in many cases, this is perfectly justified: lots of them are just gagging for it. And this was years, many many long long years, before I ever dreamt of coming out. Long before I even suspected myself what a complete and utter homosexual I am.

Anyone who brings up Hell or damnation or the Devil with a straight face immediately abrogates any right they may have had to be treated with civility and politeness. They are flaming arsecandles, sirs and madams, arsecandles and nothing more! Honestly, how vile and pernicious a concept is Hell? Eternal torment without hope of relief, for worshipping the wrong god or loving the wrong person? Or eating the wrong shellfish? Or using a condom, for cock's sake? The Catholic Church and the Southern Baptists are running protection rackets: "Nice soul you've got there. Looks a little flammable, though. Be a shame if anything were to happen to it, if you know what I mean." No better than the Mormons, who in turn are nothing but the 19th century's Scientologists. "Go fist yourself fuckwards" isn't one tenth, not one billionth, as hostile and offensive as the merest whiff of the old brimstone. It merely expresses in a firm yet measured tone that I think such people are making grave errors of judgement with considerable negative repercussions for the world we share. Putting it in milder language simply wouldn't do the sentiment justice, not given the palpable harm such forms of religion do to humanity.

And that is why I refer to the Pope as a cock-thumbed Palpatinish goiter, and why Father Dougal Maguire is one of the greatest characters in the history of fiction.

I love the fact that Doctor Who is now mainstream enough that Atrios references it in jokes.

Wow, now that I think about it, that's a really fucking sad definition of 'mainstream': spoken about on blogs. You want to feel like the fringiest of the fringe? Try being a Doctor Who fan in America about five years ago.

It's weird...I like to go browsing though bits of the political and semi-political blogiverse from time to time, see what's up and who's going down...Right now there's a surprising amount of chatter about transhumanism. To my great surprise, it seems there are actually people out there who take it seriously. This is what those on the Internets call a 'WTF?' moment. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm as eager for cyber-conversion as the next man, but the Rapture of the Nerds--the Singularity, uploading, Drexlerian nanotechnology, posthumans, anti-Semitic androids from another universe who serve a giant eaty brain monster--just isn't going to happen any time soon.

I guess a bunch of right-wing nutjobs on the Internets are techno-utopians. This is just silly. Shaping public policy around a blind faith that, sooner or later, technology will find a 'fix' for global warming makes about as much sense as shaping transportation policy around the idea that one day soon we'll all have TARDISes. But that's wingnuts for you.

Still, all this Rapture of the Nerds business has made for some good science fiction. Charlie Stross, Dan Simmons, and Ken MacLeod have all been going to town on it...Iain Banks has been doing it for ages now, effectively. Even Doctor Who gets in on the action: the new Cybermen are billed as an 'ultimate upgrade' for mankind. Why is this so hot right now? What's up with the Zeitgeist?

Today's episode of Doctor Who: a man fucking a paving stone. It's brilliant. Brilliant!

Part 3...

(Part 1 here)
(Part 2 here)

‘Slut!’
‘Cuntrag!’
Titus excused himself then, carrying the Dictionary and the Map, all he seemed to retain, towards the nearest stairway. Halfway there he caught a sudden flash and a thunderous rumble as behind him the Librarians attempted to exterminate one another. Oh well. He started the long climb up. The architecture didn’t play any games with him this time; the stairway led up, and only up, more or less directly to the ground floor. Only one obstacle still stood between Titus and the door: the Chief Librarian.
Jacques Derrida.
Or a cunning wooden replica, at least.
‘I command that you twist my titties and call me Susan,’ the wooden Derrida declared.
‘This is just silly,’ Titus exclaimed. And with that he walked out.
Titus arrived home to find Josef wrestling with thick, stout lengths of wood in the parlour.
‘How was your day, dear?’ Titus asked.
‘FÜRB delivered,’ he grunted. ‘And yours?’
‘Deeply unpleasant. But it passed the time. Something like a liquorice enema on a Sunday in February.’
‘Ah, yes. Is like that, Iowa.’
The pair spent the evening putting together furniture with the cunning array of hex wrenches included in the kits, becoming liberally coated in sawdust and sweat, pausing now and then for beer to rehydrate, and then for more beer when their first beers dehydrated them more, and so on in a truly vicious circle.

Part 2...

(Part 1 here)
(Part 3 here)

‘To fuck with the circumlocutions, then. You should move in here, stay as long as you like. Plenty of room. Good plumbing. Place smells nice. Good neighbourhood, no crack whores. And I offer this not just for your benefit but for mine. Two years now have I been here, in the fuck end of bitch nowhere. Is cute, don’t get me wrong. Hill is very hilly, houses very housey. Decent pub, many antiques. Much nicer than starving to death in gutter full of horse piss in Cleveland. But...’ Josef spread his hands, like a deck of cards he was fanning out for a hapless mark to pick one, any one. ‘Is dull. Very dull. Nothing happens. Other faculty are good old boys (and girls), born here, go elsewhere a time, come back, die here. Pillars of community. And who else lives in place like this? Married couples, selling insurance, watching television, breeding children. Ha. Children are like wolves, as soon rip your throat out as look at you. And one thousand students, too; but have you tried having conversations with 19-year-olds? Don’t get me wrong, many are good kids, but can’t even remember Cold War. I mean really. I mention Listopadove udalosti, Velvet Revolution, and they look at me like aquatic salamander. Worst part is they can’t even confuse it with Velvet Underground, because they have never heard of Lou Reed. Occasionally Velvet Goldmine, but I did not like that film much. When I go home to Prague, is so intoxicating being somewhere with people again...In short, I would very much appreciate the company.’
Titus considered another moment.
‘Thank you. That would be wonderful.’
Josef smiled. ‘Good. Let us preach to our unwashed masses, and then this evening we find you furniture.’
They checked in on the television before they went; it was curled up in its corner of the cellar, sullenly. Neither of them were quite sure what it ate, if it ate anything, and so they left some bread, half a grapefruit, and a can of paint within easy reach before they left, just in case. Josef’s day consisted of calculus lectures, in which he derived a sick pleasure from exposing his students to real proofs; no student with a serious interest in mathematics, he knew, would ever wind up at his college. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays were calculus, far too much calculus. Tuesdays and Thursdays he taught linear algebra, which he loved, and a course in axiomatic geometry for potential high school teachers, which he hated. Which was okay, because so did his students. They communicated through a haze of mutual loathing, as he desperately tried to throw in projective geometry, symmetry groups, anything he found remotely interesting, and his students told him to stick to the damn syllabus already. As the School of Education basically owned the course, he had little choice. The Education faculty had him badly outnumbered, and probably could take him in a fair fight. But linear algebra...Linear algebra was his baby. He’d feed his students proofs, and make them love it. He’d fact them ‘til they farted. The axiomatics of vector spaces. Invariance of dimension. Quotient spaces. The action of subgroups of the general linear group on a space. He was, as you may have guessed, primarily an algebraist; the thought of bringing in enough module theory to instroduce the rational and Jordan canonical forms, and possibly a brief intoduction to representation theory...It was the stuff orgasms were made of. But of course it was not to be. Titus, on the other hand, had an introductory class in Latin and then one in Greek every single day of the week, then his Silver Age seminar Tuesdays and Thursdays, and Classical Mythology Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. He had considerable latitude with those courses, since very few people ever took them, and the ones who did never expected to actually use them for anything ever again. Titus didn’t quite see why the college bothered with a Classics Department at all, though of course he’d never voice that for fear of giving them ideas. He suspected it was mianly as a status symbol, to make the institution look legitimate, respectable. It was a small school that dreamed of seeming big. Though not too big, of course. Sufficiently not-big that when they spoke of the Classics Department, what they really meant was Titus, because he was it. He was the department chairman. He was every single member of the Classics faculty. Also the librarian, secretary, and receptionist. He didn’t get paid any extra for that, naturally. But so far he didn’t mind too much. There were worse things to spend a day doing than teaching young Americans to swear in dead languages. Like smoking crack.
Nothing useful was accomplished that day. His students, Titus was sorry to see, seemed vastly more interested in telling him they’d seen his house or lack thereof on TV or in the papers, or heard about it on the radio, which was awfully popular with them because they could listen in their cars, in which they spent really large fractions of their young lives not in the hopes of getting somewhere in particular but because driving, unlike the alternative of sitting still, gave them something to do, and, as you may have gathered, things to do are at something of a premium throughout most of Iowa. They all asked essentially the same questions: what was it like? how did you escape? how can we get into the lead mines too? Titus didn’t really feel like answering them, so he made things up instead. Unfortunately, he is intrinsically a poor liar, and nobody was at all convinced, and the other faculty grew suspicious and began lurking near his office to find out what he was hiding. By the time Titus returned for his office hours word had spread, and he could hardly have swung a dead cat by the tail (if he’d had one, which he didn’t, and if he’d wanted to, which he hadn’t) without hitting a brace of professors. They were practically lurking in each other’s pockets. Honoria Warfield had landed a prime spot beside the water fountain through judicious use of her walking-stick, and Titus saw her give him a significant look as he entered his office. Several reporters turned up and attempted to interview him; Titus spoke at them in dead languages until they gave up and went away. He noticed then a certain excited milling amid the lurkers; Warfield looked as if she was preparing to give up her spot, and already there was feuding amongst her potential successors. She seemed to desire some congress with him, but before she could sally forth like a dreadnought from its wharf to fire her discursive salvoes Titus found his door filled with undergraduate.
It was Hugh Capet.
What Titus had noticed about Hugh on the very first day of class was the way he looked like a hamster. A Russian dwarf hamster. Hugh had large, round, dark eyes, whose irises were almost utterly black. He also had perky ears and sort of roundish cheeks which aunts most likely loved to pinch and which Titus felt a passing impulse to stuff with sunflower seeds. Capet’s simulacrum or avatar in the Memory Library was a hamster wearing a little golden crown, reigning over Dark Age France from within a clear plastic ball. Hugh was in Latin. He looked earnest, though possibly he couldn’t help it.
‘Dr Brown?’
‘Ah, Capet. What can I do for you?’
As soon as the question had escaped Titus’s lips he knew it had been a mistake, and he felt the urge to try swallowing it back down again, but it was too late. Hugh was a man with a purpose. He looked terribly grave and burdened with it, and Titus just knew it would be something pointless. Capet closed the door and stood before Titus’s desk, drawing a slip of paper from his pocket.
‘I have a message for you,’ he whispered. He handed the slip over.
It read: O TITE TVTE TATI TIBI TANTA TYRANNE TVLISTI.
‘This is a message?’ Titus phrased his answer in the form of a question.
‘Yes.’
‘What does it mean, then?’
‘You know what it means.’ Capet regarded him levelly.
‘”O Titus Tatius, thou tyrant, what a lot you brought upon thyself.” Ennius, from his Annales. Terrible, yet wonderful. That’s what it says. But what does it mean? You did not, I suspect, bring it in merely to eulogise dead Roman monarchs.’
Hugh shrugged.
‘Who is it a message from?’
‘I think you know that already.’
‘Can’t you just tell me anyhow?’
‘This is no time to play games, Dr Brown.’
‘That’s a shame; I’m partial to Mao.’
‘Mao?’
‘You’d like it; it’s cryptic.’
‘Laugh while you can,’ Capet declaimed.
‘Very well.’ And so Titus Tatius Brown did, repeatedly. The melodrama hung in the air thick as shitty jam.
‘Would you like to make your reply?’
‘Yes,’ Titus decided. ‘Yes, I would.’ He fished around in his desk for a sheet of paper, then dug through one of his drawers for an ancient fountain pen he’d been awarded by the university to commemorate his arrival, which he saved for special occasions because it gave him a toothache to chew, and in a neat copperplate hand inked his reply.
It read: SCORTVM GALLICVM SVM. Which meant, though of course Hugh Capet did not know this, and neither did his unseen masters, ‘I am a French whore.’
Hugh regarded it gravely. ‘Is this your final answer?’ Titus felt as if he were on a game show. Were there fabulous prizes to be won? Possibly including piles of cash, bedroom suites, and a lifetime supply of microwavable popcorn? Were Paul Lynde and Peter Marshall (born Pierre LaCock) trading jibes elsewhere in the studio? He suspected not.
Just then the door flew open, and Josef Kroll came bounding in, all a-quiver with excitement.
‘Titus! Come quick!’
‘What is it?’
‘A sale...’
And what a sale it was! Twenty-five percent reductions across the board (or so they interpreted it; the ad itself wasn’t in any Indo-European language) at the most exotic store in all of eastern Iowa: FÜRB, the home of affordable solutions for better modern living through wood. It was, like all truly interesting things in Iowa, located in Iowa City, about an hour and a half’s drive through cornfields and surprisingly unflat little rolling hillscapes westish, which may seem at first like a really long ways to go for a hatstand, but not if you truly loved your hats. No-one was quite sure where the company was headquartered, or what language their catalogues, advertisements, or price tags were meant to be in, though there was suspicion in some quarters that it was Finnish, not because it resembled Finnish necessarily but because it didn’t resemble anything at all. Beds, armoires, wardrobes, sofas, chairs, desks, tables, cabinets...If you could make it of wood, they had it. Even if you couldn’t, they’d give it a try. Their wooden lamps never failed to amuse, and the wooden can openers...A visit to FÜRB was not unlike a waking dream, if one’s dreams involved massive quantities of pine, spruce, and beech, in easy-to-assemble kits. One walked along a Yellow Brick Road of sorts, past cheery displays of furniture ergonomically arranged for maximum efficiency and ideal Feng Shui, past massive bookcases or tiny yet darling nightstands or amazingly blue chests of eight little drawers and all manner of other cabinets, surfaces, and lounging solutions which would look absolutely perfect, one was sure, in just about any room one cared to name, all of them labelled with names like REDRUM and TOGO and FFFFFFF (which Josef suspected was a typo) and affixed with three coordinates, two informing one where one could collect the kit for this particular bit of domestic bliss in the self-serve warehouse when the journey into the fairy-lands of interior decorating was at an end, and the third informing one of the price, though as none of these three were in characters belonging to any language Titus or Josef knew (and between them they knew quite a few, and so should you) one never knew quite what one had in fact bought, or how much one was in fact paying for it, until the very end. The suspense made it better than Christmas. Everywhere the two looked, they saw something massively useful. NEDEL, a free-standing compact disk shelving unit inspired by Egyptian obelisks (‘How fine that would look in my library!’); FROTAG, the honeycombed cedar tea containment vessel (‘It would be a source of unimaginable power. Over tea.’); a retro-futuristic ultra-asymmetrical roll-top writing desk named SODOF (‘Almost I could sleep in that monster...’); wood to sit on, wood to sleep on, wood to put things atop, wood to put things inside, wood to put inside other things. Wood in every imaginable shape, size, and geometrical configuration. Wood to meet every household need Titus had not even known he possessed. It was every beaver’s dream come true. The two were so dazzled by the panoramas of optimised lumber-centric living set out before them that they very nearly failed to notice, tucked away in the back of the warehouse while they were hunting for BÄTMÄN (a chest of drawers), BALSAC (a bed), and BILLY (quite a fetching bookcase system), a small and inconspicuous alcove filled with televisions, radios, toasters, stereos, computers, and the like. None of them were made of wood. Curious, the pair investigated; they seemed so out-of-place, so unFÜRBish, so lacking in stark yet organic optimisation. They were all labelled MAMMON. They came in a variety of styles and models, no two quite alike, but no two quite unalike, either. They were ordinary, almost relentlessly so; they looked like every single television or radio or toaster anyone had ever seen, so archetypically televisual and radionic and toasterrific that one could see them a million times over and never think to connect them with FÜRB or with one another. They could turn up in pawn shops and second-hand stores with complete nonchalance, slip unnoticed into any entertainment system. They could go anywhere and do anything and no-one would ever suspect. And they were all, Titus and Josef couldn’t help but notice, all holding their breath and doing their best not to blink their tiny glowing eyes. An espresso machine accidentally met their horrified stare, and did its best to look inanimate. A toaster coughed, like an electric oboe.
They were alive.
The two backed slowly away, and turned, and began heaving their wood-laden dolly towards the register.
‘Act casual,’ they both whispered at once. Titus began to whistle; Josef hummed. They made a point of ooh-ing and aah-ing at every single display they passed. At one point they paused to carry out an a cappella performance of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Waters,’ to show off exactly how suspicious and alarmed they weren’t. At last they made it to the register, cold sweats building up on their brows, after half-paranoid glimpses of video cassette recorders behind every display. They didn’t notice what the price actually came to, Josef because he wasn’t paying and Titus because it was only going on a credit card so it wasn’t like he was spending actual money anyhow, and as soon as the receipt was signed accelerated casually for the Home Delivery office, arranging for Titus’s treasures to be transported the following day via friendly FÜRB haulers, and then made a mad dash for the parking lot, leapt into the Beetle, and screeched off leaving a trail of rubber behind them.
‘Mother of ass,’ Josef gasped. They had found the source of the infernal engines. Which raised the disturbing possibility that the infernal engines had taken notice of them. Was the television in Josef’s basement still in contact somehow with its fellows? Had the phonograph been reporting to its superiors? Were even now the cohorts of home entertainment chaos watching, and drawing up naughty, naughty plans? What connexion could there be, they wondered, between homicidal media-related technologies and incomprehensible foreign showrooms of wood-based home environmental reconfiguration? What connexion could there be between anything and the strange message Titus had received? What was the significance of MAMMON? Who had delivered Titus’s chair the day before, and what did they know, and how, and why? And would there be enough screws in with the packages to put all of the furniture together when it arrived the next day?
Well, don’t bother asking me. I don’t know either. What do you think I am, omniscient? We’ll just have to wait and see, that’s all. Watch, and wait.
As other forces, both naughty and nice, too, were watching and waiting, their thoughts fixed immovably upon the speeding Beetle and its swearing crew.
This would be a good time to go and get some popcorn. For you, at least. Josef and Titus were, at this point, too shaken even to stop by Iowa City’s own Java House for crappy service and amusingly-flavoured lattes in an atmosphere of faux sophistication. They sped back homewards, in an anxious silence, apart from occasional random obscenities from Kroll. Only when they were safely sealed away in what was now home to them both did they begin to unwind. Televisions and toasters could hardly wait in ambush for them on the streets, after all, or creep in their windows as they slept While the examples they had seen so far had been amazingly mobile by the standards of ordinary consumer electro-mechanical apparati, they couldn’t imagine them making it up stairs. And what sort of a threat can’t even climb stairs?
They sat up baking apricot marijuana hazelnut scones until late into the night, from a recipe an acquaintance of Josef’s in Oregon had sent on the occasion of Josef’s last birthday. The homey cosiness of the activity soothed them. So did the marijuana. The house was filled with sweet and savory scents, and they both felt certain of sound sleep, and if and when they woke in the morning with what some call the munchies, there were plenty of scones left...
Some of you, perhaps, may be alarmed by the ease and frequency with which these two academics, who by rights ought to be pillars of the community and setting a good example for young people, have been indulging in strong drink and THC-bearing compounds. The reason for this is simple: it was fun. They were also godless socialists who engaged in sexual intercourse out of wedlock.
‘Josef?’ The two were degenerately dunking their THC-laden scones into a couple of gin and tonics (or gins and tonic, or is it gins and tonics?) before bedtime.
‘Yes, Titus?’
‘How long have you been here?’
‘Right here? About five minutes.’
‘Generally speaking. Here in Iowa.’
‘Let me see. This is the start of my third year teaching great loads of bugger-all, to use the vernacular. So two years and some change. Two years of uttermost tedium.’
‘Funny, but it’s only just now struck me how curious it is, that a junior faculty member like yourself, who presumably is in the same financial circumstances as myself, could acquire a rather splendid and fetching old house here in the oldest and most desirable neighbourhood in town.’
‘Very funny. Hilarious. Like this joke: what, I ask you, is the contour integral around the boundary of Western Europe?’
‘Give in.’
‘Zero, because all the Poles in the interior are removable. Most droll!’
‘Indeed. Now, perhaps it’s the lemon talking, but it seems a bit too convenient, doesn’t it?’
‘Why did the mathematician name his dog “Cauchy”?’
‘Why?’
‘Because he left residues at all the poles.’
‘You’re changing the subject.’
‘Who, me?’ Josef put down his scone, and gestured sweepingly with palms outstretched, much in the fashion of Christ in Grunewald’s Resurrection. ‘You suspect me of such diabolical cunning? I am but a simple Pole in this complex plane!’
‘You’re a Czech.’
‘Great-grandfather Oswald was from Silesia.’
‘That’s a bit of a stretch.’
‘Would be amazingly funny if you knew complex analysis. Poles, you see, are non-essential singularities of a complex function: some point z0 in the complex plane is a pole of a function f if for some positive integer n, the quantity of z minus z0, to the nth power, times the function f, has as its limit as z approaches z0 some finite value, while if we have any more powers of z minus z0 our limit is zero, and if we have any fewer, it is infinite. This is a pole of order n. A simple pole is a pole of order 1. Also, and here is the clever part, a Pole is also a person from Poland, or a large tall thing sticking up from the ground, or occasionally someone’s penis, which is a most witty pun indeed, is it not?’
‘You’re forgetting to talk in an endearingly foreign fashion.’
‘Oh! Most apologies. Is not knowing what is what. Go shit-sod-bugger all day long.’
‘You’re overdoing it.’
‘Ah yes.’
‘My suspicions are aroused.’
‘Arousal: I know it well. For in one of my classes I have a student—‘
‘You’re changing the subject again.’
‘But I do it so engagingly.’
‘You are not what you seem.’
‘Neither are you.’
Titus was at last surprised. He always thought he was exactly what he seemed. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You are a traveller in time and space.’
‘No I’m not!’
‘You said yourself that in the mines you found a portal to another world.’
‘Well, maybe just that once. One portal to an alien world hardly makes me into a traveller in time and space. No more than strapping on ice skates makes me into a sled.’
‘Ah yes. Just one portal. Which you very coincidentally happen to stumble upon, while very coincidentally wandering lost through long-forgotten mineshafts, into which very coincidentally your house happens to plunge while you sleep.’
‘What are you implying?’ His head was already abuzz with pot, so there was no room left for paranoia, just a sort of vague bewildered suspicion.
‘I think the facts speak for themselves.’
‘I think they don’t.’
‘Do too.’
‘Do not.’
‘Do too!’
‘Do not!’
Then they broke up into hysterical fits of giggling for a few minutes.
‘I will bet,’ Josef gasped at last, ‘you are not even of this earth! You have two hearts, confess it! And you change shape. And like to run around with English girls who scream.’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘What a shame. I share name with amusing giant squid monster on old television show of which I speak.’
‘Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m as human as you are. If you are human, that is. How do I know you aren’t a phonograph?’ Titus accused.
‘I have no turntable, and cannot play records. QED.’
‘All right, perhaps not a phonograph in particular, but of its foul ilk. What are the odds that you, of all people, would have encountered one of the Infernal Engines,’ which seemed to be the name they’d unofficially given their legion of mechanical foes, ‘just when I needed to talk about them?’
‘Probability is for ass clowns, I say!’
(Which reminds me of a little joke: a Statistician once refused to fly, knowing that the odds of being blown up by a bomb during his flight were one in a million; it was his life on the line, after all, and the probability was just too high to hazard. Then one day, a colleague bumped into him at a conference on the other side of the country. ‘Why, good show, old bean! However did you get here?’ ‘I flew,’ replied the Statistician. ‘But what about the odds, man? How could you risk it?’ ‘Well, I knew the odds of a bomb on the plane were one in a million. So the odds of having two bombs on the plane must be one in a million squared: those are odds I can accept. So now I always make sure to bring my own bomb along with me.’ Josef would have told this joke at this juncture, had he not been locked in heated conversation, to which we now return.)
‘Are you in league with the Infernal Engines? What did you hope to accomplish at FÜRB?’
‘I need a hatstand.’
‘But you never wear a hat.’
‘I can hang scarves from it, too.’
‘A likely story.’
Josef shot up. ‘Silence, knave! Let us put an end to your vile slanders!’ Grasping Titus by the arm, Josef pulled him off down the hallway, to a closet near the cellar door. It was full, Titus discovered, of scarves. Blue scarves, green scarves, black scarves, white scarves. Striped scarves, checkered scarves, paisley scarves. Especially paisley scarves. ‘I also have many boots. I need many, so I do not have to wear any pair too often: I am saving their soles.’
‘Was that a pun?’
‘Possibly.’
‘What did we come out here for?’
‘It is hard to say.’
Just then, there came a thump from the front porch.
‘What the shit?’
The two attempted to hide behind one another, while sidling over to a window. This involved much pushing and shoving. At last they made it, more or less side by side, and pulled aside the curtains. Out on the lawn, a ring of tiny, luminescent red, green, and blue eyes surrounded the house. They saw steroes, and televisions, and DVD players, toasters, and waffle irons, and digital clock radios, standing in a still silence, staring. They were surrounded. At some unseen signal, the Infernal Engines advanced. The thump came again, and again; with it now came a mournful howl, a bleak and desolate cry of static as might be heard from a lonely and forgotten television at four in the morning, when all the channels are off the air. Josef and Titus leapt to the door, tripping over one another in their haste to lock it. From all around came the whine of static, and the rattle and thump of small appliances, electrical cords scrabbling for purchase on the walls. They were besieged by an enemy that never stopped, or slept, or gave up.
Who couldn’t climb stairs.
This thought filtered through to the two at last. Peering out a front window, with the outside light on, they discovered that the thumping was the sound of Engines attempting to scale the stairs to the patio, and falling over, since the things they used for legs were never more than an inch long, and sort of flopping about pathetically like dying fish until they slid back down. They were similarly unable to reach the back door, or, indeed, any of the windows, since there were none to the cellar, nor an exterior door. Being remorseless machine creatures devoid of fear or pity, of course, they would always keep trying. They kept trying, in fact, until shortly before dawn, when as one they withdrew into the dwindling darkness, leaving no trace but some odd impressions on the lawn and some scratches on the paint. But Titus and Josef were both long asleep by then; after watching the assault for a time, their panic abating rapidly, they gave up and had another scone, and thought to check the television chained up in the cellar.
‘What would happen,’ Titus wondered, ‘if we switched it on?’
Gingerly he pressed the POWER button beneath the sullen thing’s screen, as it lurked in its corner. It burst into a grey light, which resolved itself into shifting patterns of light and shadow, coalescing slowly into anthropomorphic forms. Details crept out from the chaos; they began to recognise...
What they saw was a charred and mummified husk, dry cracked flesh in a thin patina over bone. Its face was turned away from them; tendons stood out exposed on its throat as slowly its head began to turn, and its jaw creaked open. Something poured from within, a fire burning inside the dead thing, filling its empty places, pouring out in hungry gouts from its mouth and empty eyes, searching tendrils of morbid light.
They turned off the television before it could look at them. They left the cellar, and locked it behind. They got themselves some nice rehydrating glasses of water, and went upstairs, and tried very hard to stop thinking and be jolly until they felt prepared for sleep. Titus bunked down on the divan in the library.
When morning came, neither of them felt quite ready for it. They were groggy, and grumpy, and did one another the courtesy of pretending they were each unaware of the other’s existence until they’d both had a chance to shower and get themselves properly together. As soon as they each felt up to it, they gravitated back to the kitchen, like stars circling into a black hole.
‘Good morning.’
‘Good, as you say, morning.’
‘Sleep well?’
‘Unspeakably.’
‘Ah yes.’ Thus did they exhaust their small talk. Uncomfortably, they got to the point.
‘About last night...’
‘Ah yes?’
‘I don’t really think you’re in league with electro-mechanical horrors. It was uncalled-for on my part.’
‘Do not worry; I understand.’
They waited a few moments.
‘I, too, am sorry, that I called you a time traveller.’
‘No hard feelings, I hope?’
‘It is over and forgotten.’
‘Good.’
They helped themselves to scones.
‘But don’t you think,’ Titus continued at last, ‘that it’s rather suspicious, all of this happening to us, all at once? All these coincidences? And you never did explain how you got this house...’
Josef sighed, and twiddled with his queue. ‘Perhaps I have not been altogether honest with you on every particular point...’
‘You are a phonograph?’
‘I might perhaps know more than I have let on about Mammon, and potentially I may shed some light on cryptic Latin warning you were issued.’
Titus regarded him levelly. ‘Go on.’
‘Well, is like this...’ Josef stood, and began pacing, alternately clasping his hands behind his back and letting them dart about like naughty hamsters. ‘Even ten years after the Communists fell, it was not easy to break into mathematics in Czech Republic. Few posts, none of them for me. Little money. American colleague of mine finds for me this piddly little job here, and so I pack up and ship out thinking grass may be greener on other side of the bong. Two years ago and some, I arrive, and move into sterile apartment in same neighbourhood where your house once stood. I begin to teach, and explore, a bit. I find, as you did, rotten awful Macphinney Building, which was built by a man who I think hated himself a great deal. In this Gothic parody I find, attracting no particular attention or fuss, the Shrine to Mammon. I ask people, “What the hell? What is all this pagan idolatry in God-fearing Iowa?” They shrug, and say that compared to the Mormons, it is positively mundane. I am not so sure, so I start to dig.
‘Collegiate records from the time of its construction are all in deep storage, somewhere in library vaults no-one has managed to catalogue, and impossible to find. Very sad. I ask around; no-one seems to know much, no oral traditions passed along from generation to generation of faculty. Students, it seems, have all manner of quaint superstition regarding it. Frequently they dare one another to lick the cow’s teats. Gosh only knows what else. No reliable data to work with, you see; I am stumped. And then I go to the newspaper, the Telegraph. Editor there, a very nice woman named Diane Warfield, niece of Dr Honoria Warfield of the History Department as luck would have it, saved me much bother, by showing me collection of clippings she had herself amassed over the years. Local colour, you would say. I will continue in proper English to save time.
‘In 1902, Leviticus A. Macphinney was riding high on the proverbial hog: he had made a fortune in swine, building up a mighty empire of pork that stretched across the Midwest. He was a rich and powerful man; and, as are many rich and powerful men, he was rather vain, and decided to endow this little university as a living tribute to himself. Twenty years pass; Leviticus feels the clammy finger of death wriggling its way up his rectum. The old goat starts losing his grip. Enter then, of all things, a countryman of mine, calling himself Orá?. Ploughman, in English. Though possibly he had a pun in mind. This Orá? was a spiritualist, a Theosophist, and an astrologer. He made all manner of claims to ancient and secret wisdom, revelations from On High, a hotline to the Powers That Be, and so on, and he had a sidekick to back him up, a Mr Wight, an Englishman. They claimed, among other things, to have secrets brought out of Prague: the Philosopher’s Stone, and the manufacture of golems, and something they called the Highest Science, which could only be shared, of course, with the initiated. They had a fascinating grasp on Renaissance mysticism, centering around the Emperor Rudolf II and his parade of alchemists around the turning of the Sixteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries. The point is, Leviticus fell for it. Orá? invented this Cult of Mammon to milk the old boy of every penny he could, which was awfully funny, though Leviticus never caught on. To make a long story short, Leviticus in his last years invested heavily in Orá?’s schemes, including of all things a wooden observatory outside of town to watch for signals from the heavens, and some sort of clock, though no-one was too clear on what sort; he bought up all the lead mines he could get title to, and built his Cathedral to Commerce along with the Shrine to Mammon to Orá?’s specifications, out of, so the story went, lead he had transmuted into gold. Philosophical gold, of course. Then very suddenly he died, and his heirs were rather less indulgent; they rode Orá? out of town on a big fat rail, closed down all the boondogglery,and left the Shrine to Mammon standing as a permanent monument to the mind-numbing foolishness of Leviticus A. Macphinney.’
‘What happened then?’
‘The official story ended there. The paper made no further reference to Orá? or his Mammon cult. We tried to find maps of the mine workings, or traces of the observatory, or anything; quite impossible. We attempted to find the university’s records; hopeless. Dead end after dead end. Except for one tiny little thing. Among the many projects of the famous Orá? were a theological seminary, established to boot the Mammonites along on the road to gnosis, and a Department of Alchemy, both at the university. Diane, using her editorial wiles and probably pointy boots applied to crotches, got us a copy of the University’s official budget for that year, and do you know what? The Seminary and the Alchemy Department are still getting funded. They even have offices, which do not appear to exist. They requisition office supplies, and purchased that year some new office furniture of FÜRB. All itemised. But we cannot find them anywhere. So, what else could we do, but write anonymous note to the Theological Alchemists threatening to expose them all unless quantities of money were passed along to us at regular intervals?
‘Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘You’re a blackmailer!’
‘It sounds so illegal when you say it like that.’
‘It is.’
‘Is that a problem?’
Titus pondered.
‘I suppose not as such, no...’
‘This is America. Everyone does it here.’
‘It is the Land of Opportunity.’
‘We were not the first, either.’
‘Not the first?’
‘Substantial fraction of the Alchemy budget was earmarked for blackmail already. Is not the best-kept secret in the whole wide world, if we could root it out in our spare time. I have theory, actually, that almost everyone on University faculty and staff is blackmailing them by now, but we never talk about it. Can never tell when someone will be one of Them, after all. And if people we are blackmailing find out who it is blackmailing them...’ Josef raised his eyebrows significantly. ‘Well, I would not like to be in their shorts. Diane too had theory on this. That members of the Alchemy Department had been first to think up the swindle, anonymously blackmailing themselves. Went on and on until they required so much funding to pay themselves off that ordinary souls like ourselves began to find them tucked away in budget.’
‘That’s silly.’
‘Yes.’
‘And this Mammon cult, you believe, is responsible for sending me that warning?’
‘Unless you can think of another shadowy underground organisation in Eastern Iowa.’
‘And this Mammon cult, you further believe, is somehow connected to the Infernal Engines?’
‘Unless you can think of anyone else using the name “Mammon” in Eastern Iowa.’
‘How does FÜRB fit in? Or the portal I discovered?’
‘Please, I do not like this word, “portal”. Might we call it a gate, instead?’
‘If you insist.’
‘Then I do not know.’
‘I think,’ Titus resolved, ‘that we ought to investigate.’
And so they did. In Titus’s case, this involved plumbing the depths of the library. He was good with libraries. After, of course, slogging through a day’s lecturing. Hugh Capet kept casting baleful glances at him through Latin, giving much the same effect as an angry rabbit. Titus felt the urge to pinch his cheeks. Apart from that, there seemed to be no sign of Mammonite wrath about. No parties of cowled figures stepped from the shadows to rend and tear his flesh. No time-travelling robot ninjas met him in single combat. Dark and terrible gods failed to smite. It was, in fact, a quiet day, all things considered. The media never turned up, and fewer professors were lurking outside his office. Interest, it seemed, had waned. Sinking houses were so passé. Very Wednesday.
When in the course of human events Titus was at last free of instructional obligations, he set off for the Ecclesiastes P. Quagmire Library, directly opposite the Albert Hall on the Hexagon. Like all the other buildings on the Hexagon, it was designed by a famous alcoholic who dreamed all his life of building cathedrals, and had done his best to echo in brick, limestone, and ornamental concrete the pointed arches, buttresses and stained glass he so loved. And the random mysterious pointy bits. He had a total fixation on mysterious pointy bits. He had visited London in his youth and seen Westminster Palace, and it make a lasting impression. A very sharp one. The walls, gutters, peaks, turrets, and buttresses of the Library were all encrusted with bits of ornamental conrcrete cunningly worked into forms guaranteed to impale anything unfortunate enough to fall atop them. The building now was old, and ivy clung to its sides, but still the mysterious pointy bits jutted forth from the softening greenery like the teeth of an ancient, yellowed skull lost in a primaeval jungle. There were also an incomprehensible number of weathervanes; either they were all broken, or the wind blew over the building in sixteen different directions at once. Given the erratic character of Iowan weather, either explanation is possible. Titus went inside.
Before him, a central hall, stark and sterile compared to the Gothic facade, stretched the length of the building, housing Circulation, Information, Media Services, the card catalogue, and a warren of tiny rooms serving undefined administrative purposes. There was also, he was sure, a map. Somewhere. It was standard equipment for a library, displaying where, in fact, they kept all their books. For university libraries seemed invariably to consider it their duty to conceal their books from the casual observer, on upper storeys, behind closed doors, as if the actual books themselves were untidy, or unsightly, or possibly obscene. If he was intent on finding Deep Storage, the map seemed a logical first place to look. Titus went the length of the hall; he inspected the walls, read notices on overdue fees and reminders to faculty to renew their books at the end of the semester. He found photocopiers, a pair of amazingly old dot-matrix printers, an exhibit of local art (pottery, mainly), fun facts about the presidents, a drinking fountain, and a quarter in the change-return hopper of the pay phone. But nowhere did he find a map. Inquisitively, he approached the Assistant Librarian manning the Information Desk. He was a fat and hog-faced man with bushy whiskers who would have looked quite at home in a Dickens novel.
‘Excuse me, could you direct me to a map of the library?’
The Assistant Librarian fixed him with a stare of irritation, briefly.
‘Maps are information. All information is stored in its appropriate section of the Library.’
‘And where would that be?’
The Assistant Librarian fixed him with a stare of equal irritation, somewhat more briefly.
‘Please consult the card catalogue and attempt to answer all questions yourself before imposing them on Information.’
So Titus turned to the card catalogue, an antiquated phalanx of pine cabinets. The University had never quite gotten around to computerising things, for, the administration claimed, budgetary reasons. He started in the obvious place, opening the first drawer of the M’s, and flipping through in search of MAP. Under that subject heading there were in fact quite a lot of maps listed, a bewildering number. Topographical maps, hydrographical maps, population maps, resource maps, historical maps. There was also, he found, something called the Ecclesiastes P. Quagmire Library Map. All the call numbers were in another language, the same, he suspected, as he’d seen at FÜRB. He still couldn’t read it.
The Map was in Deep Storage.
Titus returned to the Information Desk. ‘Could you direct me to Deep Storage, please?’
The Assistant Librarian raised one bushy eyebrow in disdain.
‘I suggest you check the map.’
‘According to your card catalogue, the map is in Deep Storage.’
‘Well, then I suggest you consult it there.’
‘How do I get to Deep Storage?’
The Assitant Librarian raised his other eyebrow in disgust.
‘I suggest you consult the map.’
‘But the map,’ Titus explained patiently, ‘is in Deep Storage.’
‘Then why don’t you try,’ the Assistant Librarian hissed through clenched teeth, ‘pestering the Sub-Librarian down in Deep Storage instead of me?’
‘I don’t know how to get to Deep Storage.’
The Assistant Librarian threw up his hands, and looked to be on the verge of doing the same to his lunch.
‘Then consult the map.’
Titus felt his head swimming. Even in the American Midwest, stupidity of that calibre had to be rare; surely no-one would think recursion was a very original gag this far into the digital age. Perhaps he ought to call in someone, to have the Assistant Librarian stuffed and mounted for a natural history museum somewhere, to show children what really blithering idiots look like. But then again, they probably knew that already; children watched a lot of television.
‘Can you give me a hint, at least?’
Malice dripped from the Assistant Librarian’s tongue like melted butter from an ear of corn.
‘Hints are information. All information is stored in its appropriate section of the Library.’
‘Do you actually give out any information, or are you just here to annoy people?’
‘The latter.’
‘Aha!’ Titus thrust an impudent finger upwards. His index finger. He was making a point. He has manners, after all. He’s not about to go flipping a librarian, even an Assistant Librarian, the bird. He’s not Josef. ‘Caught you. You just gave out information.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘I say!’
‘You’d better believe I fucked your mother, too.’
‘Can’t you go back to being unhelpful, rather than obscene?’
‘And I told your sister to smile like a doughnut.’
‘Now what does that mean?’
‘That’s information. All information is stored in its appropriate section of the library.’
‘Are we back to that again?’
‘That’s information. All information is stored in its appropriate section of the library.’
‘Fine.’
There was a pause.
Titus returned to the card catalogue. Just for kicks, he decided to look up CARD CATALOGUE in the card catalogue. He found, to his surprise, an entry: ‘See CATALOGUE, CARD’. It would be wrong to say he was wholly surprised thereafter when the entry for CATALOGUE, CARD read ‘See CARD CATALOGUE’. It was that sort of place. He looked up DEEP STORAGE. All the entries under that subject heading were, as one might expect, located in Deep Storage. He checked for ALCHEMY, and for MAMMON, and ORAC; none of them were listed. He returned to the Information Desk, where the Assistant Librarian looked at him like a dead ferret. By which I mean the Assistant Librarian, like a dead ferret, looked at him.
‘Excuse me,’ Titus said perfectly reasonably, ‘but there don’t appear to be listings in your card catalogue for Alchemy.’
‘That subject,’ the Assistant Librarian hissed, ‘is catalogued in the Special Index.’ He crinkled up his face and farted emphatically to reinforce his point.
‘I didn’t think you gave out information.’
There was silence.
Perhaps, Titus speculated, he only gave out information that wasn’t referenced in the card catalogue? He thought he’d test his hypothesis.
‘What in God’s name did you eat for lunch?’
‘Cheese.’ Never had that word been infused with such bitter loathing.
Titus went back to the card catalogue, and looked up SPECIAL INDEX. Its card read: ‘Please consult the Information Desk.’ He went back to the Information Desk. ‘Where can I find the Special Index?’
‘I suggest,’ the Assistant Librarian shouted, his ruddy face growing ruddier still, ‘you consult the card catalogue.’
So Titus did the sensible thing and gave up, and wandered off to find Deep Storage or the Special Index on his own.
‘I hate you,’ the Assistant Librarian called out after him.
Titus roamed through the three upper storeys of the Library; each one consisted of two long chambers decorated in an extremely bland cream, separated by a central hallway capped by stairwells and an elevator. There were, he found, Periodicals and Reserves on the first storey; Maps, Government Pulications, Theses, and Special Collections on the second; and books, at long last, on the third. Special Collections was of course closed to browsing; without much hope he inspected Maps, in search of something vaguely useful. The maps were all contained, laid out, in a series of drawer-like trays, slotted into a vast wall of cabinetry, labelled in tiny and almost-illegible handwriting. He pulled out one at random; pinned to the tray, like a butterfly in a collection, was an old map of Prague, circa 1602. What an odd coincidence, Titus thought. He pulled out others, but found nothing more interesting than a highly detailed map of the men’s restroom, and a map displaying the distribution of the ash tree population worldwide. As he expected; whatever dark, terrible, or silly things might lurk in its depths, the Library was a Library, filled with, primarily, the sorts of things people would go to a library to look up. Not nearly as colourful as his own. Especially now; when he peeked into the recesses of his Memory, he found great swathes of hexagons emptied of their icons, filled instead with shining masses of pipe in bold, solid colours, growing like kudzu...
Titus suddenly understood that the real danger in thinking of memories as things, giving them concrete representations as he did in his Library, was that things could be lost. Data demanded a medium, his brain, in which to be stored. It couldn’t escape. A thing, on the other hand, had an existence of its own; it could slip from one’s grasp, like car keys, and roll away under a sofa, or down a drain. And also a thing could be found. Was he losing his mind, or at least mislaying it temporarily? Did he leave a trail of lost thoughts behind him like breadcrumbs?
It was a silly thought, and he immediately forgot it as he went down the stairs in search of Deep Storage. It slipped from his head, a little dumbbell-shaped thing about the length of his thumb, made, to some eyes perhaps, of a faint crystallised mauve light. It dropped to the stairs, and rolled down ahead of Titus to the next landing, where it bounced into a corner and was lost. Titus didn’t realise it was gone.
Titus descended. The Library had, he found, a warren of basements and subbasements, none of them labelled, or when they were, labelled as something they manifestly were not. Something labelled ‘Custodial’ was actually full of pornography; the Rare Books alcove was really a lavatory. They were decoys, Titus felt sure. He continued to descend. There seemed no limit to the number of storeys he could descend. How far down did it go? As deep as the steam tunnels? As deep as the lead mines? The walls had gone featureless and grey, concrete everywhere lit by tiny bulbs. Corridors bent at random, folding back on themselves; staircases occasionally led up or down to blank walls. It was impossible, a mess, incomprehensible; yet Titus had the invariant sensation that he knew which way to go. A path seemed to stretch out before him, through the warren of identical hallways and meaningless turns.
It was, he realised, just like the lead mines; how had he been lost down in their bowels to begin with? And how had he found his way the second time? Somehow it all seemed to unfold itself in his mind, crowding out everything else; the directions to a bed&breakfast in Vancouver plopped from his head, a little nodule of solidified teal light, and shattered on the floor, but he failed to notice, as his goal resolved itself, his compass pointing the way.
He was there. At the bottom of the last staircase, at the centre of the maze, there was a nondescript door labelled in big block letters: DEEP STORAGE. Titus went inside. It was a large, vaulted room, lined with cinderblocks. It was full of shelves and crates, watched over, he saw, by the Sub-Librarian, a severely ageing woman with grey hair piled atop her head frosted, for some unfathomable reason, blue. She sat behind a desk with old-woman glasses on a chain, and regarded him with some surprise.
‘I’m sorry,’ she informed him, ‘but the Deep Storage archives are not open for browsing. If you wish to view a document, please request it here via call number.’
‘You’re informative!’ Titus exclaimed.
‘Of course.’ The Sub-Librarian gave a little titter into her hand. ‘What do you take me for? An Assistant Librarian? I am here to oversee and safeguard the Deep Storage archives. Nothing more and nothing less.’
‘So if I ask for a document I’d like to see, you’ll actually get it for me?’
‘Naturally.’ She quivered with a brief chuckle, much like certain vending machines quiver when delivering up a can of soda.
‘I’d like to see the Ecclesiastes P. Quagmire Library Map, please.’ Perhaps it could help to make sense of things.
‘Very good.’ The Sub-Librarian looked on impassively.
‘Do you have it here?’ Titus asked her at last.
‘Of course,’ she tittered.
‘Then I’d like to see it.’
‘Very good.’ Again she sat on, waiting.
‘Will you fetch it for me, then? So I can see it? And all?’
‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘Do you have the call number?’
‘Yes, in a manner of speaking.’ He remembered it well: a string of meaningless symbols he’d etched into the walls of one of his rapidly-dwindling store of memory hexagons. ‘I don’t know how to say it.’
‘Oh dear,’ the Sub-Librarian clucked her tongue. ‘I’m afraid I’m not allowed to release documents without a call number.’
‘Can I write it down?’
‘Certainly.’
Titus had, he realised, no paper, and no pencils. He’d chewed the eraser off his last one between Latin and Greek, and had thrown it away.
‘Do you have a pencil I could borrow?’ he asked.
‘Pencil?’ The Sub-Librarian chuckled. ‘I’m afraid everything’s computerised down here.’
Titus looked over the desk; something vaguely computer-like certainly crouched beside the Sub-Librarian, a cube of what seemed to be mahogany, carved with a pattern of interlocking gears and wheels. Set into the top of the thing was some sort of cathode ray tube, its image reflected off of what seemed to be an old shaving mirror on a pivot above, into the Sub-Librarian’s field of vision. Jutting from the front of the thing was a brisk metal keyboard, like a very old-fashioned typewriter’s. It was in Czech.
‘How do you enter call numbers on this?’
‘I transcribe them all into Czech, of course, silly.’ The Sub-Librarian seemed poised to titter again at any moment.
‘Can you tell me what each character used in the call numbers corresponds to on the keyboard?’
‘Certainly! Atye, that’s one; and menye, that’s two; and...’
‘Could you show me what they look like?’
The Sub-Librarian looked up at him, covering her mouth while another spastic giggle struggled free. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have a pencil.’
‘Can we go into the stacks so I can show you the call number I want?’
The Sub-Librarian considered for a moment, sucking her teeth.
‘I’m afraid that would count as browsing, and the Deep Storage archives are not open for browsing. It is the strict policy of this Library to prohibit browsing through Deep Storage. For fear of damaging our materials, you understand.’
‘Oh god.’ He could see the call number he wanted so clearly. It would only take a moment to copy it down...Titus brought his left index finger to his mouth, and bit down, hard. He tasted blood, sickeningly salt, a mouthful of rusted iron. The pain was sharp, all the sharper for being self-inflicted. He could hear his body scolding him. Titus felt a wave of disgust. He brought his bleeding finger to the blond wooden desk, and carefully drew in little whorls of blood every character he could remember seeing in the catalogue. He had to bite his finger again to get enough blood; it was more difficult the second time.
‘Can you tell me what these characters are, and what they correspond to?’
The Sub-Librarian was unfazed. ‘Certainly. Atye,’ she pointed, ‘one. Menye, two. Telye, three. Ulye, four. Orye, five. Korye, six. Nonye, seven...’ There were twelve numerals, zero through eleven, with ten mapping to A, and eleven to B. Titus memorised them all immediately.
Closing his eyes, more to avoid looking at his finger, which he simultaneously wanted and feared to suck until the pain left it, than out of mnemonic effort, Titus rattled off the call numbers for the Map, and for every volume he’d seen on Deep Storage itself. The Special Index would have to be in one of them.
‘Very good, very good,’ the Sub-Librarian clucked. ‘I’ll have these for you in a jiffy.’ And off she went into the stacks, clucking to herself like an old hen or an alarm clock, seeming to glide without effort beneath her long skirt. She returned at last with an armful of books and papers, which she set upon her desk, next to Titus’s dried blood. He reached for them, and to his surprise was allowed to pick one up, a fat old tome. He began to open it, when the Sub-Librarian’s shrill call dropped it from his hands.
‘I’m,’ she screamed. ‘Afraid,’ continuing in her usual tone of voice, ‘that lingering is not permitted in Deep Storage. Please go to the Reading Room if you wish to view the materials.’
‘Where is the Reading Room?’
‘Oh, I can’t recall, exactly,’ she giggled. ‘It gets so confusing down here, as I’m sure you’re aware. I suggest you check the Map.’
Titus reached for it, only to be brought up short by another cry.
‘If!’ she shrieked. ‘You wish to view the materials, please go to the Reading Room,’ she concluded, unperturbed.
‘Very well,’ Titus bluffed, ‘I will.’ He scooped up the books and papers and set off for the door. Suddenly the Sub-Librarian appeared in his path.
No!’ she howled, ‘patrons are allowed to remove materials from Deep Storage.’ The Sub-Librarian seemed to find this unspeakably amusing, rocking back and forth with suppressed laughter. And from a certain perspective, Titus thought, it was. Just not from his.
‘Well, then,’ and he pushed his stack into her arms, ‘ why don’t you remove them for me? We’ll find the Reading Room together.’
‘Oh!’ The Sub-Librarian seethed with mirth. ‘I can’t leave Deep Storage while I’m on duty, you silly goose.’
The Sub-Librarian, Titus suddenly realised, had no legs. Whatever was underneath her skirt, he saw, was not touching the floor.
‘What if I asked the Assistant Librarian to remove them for me?’
‘He’d tell you to go fuck a duck,’ the Sub-Librarian said sweetly.
Titus took back his armload of books. ‘What would happen,’ he asked quietly, ‘if I told you that the Chief Librarian had given me permission to remove these?’
‘The Chief Librarian,’ she squealed, eyes wide. She brought a hand delicately and melodramatically to her mouth. ‘He never gives permission to anyone. For anything.’
‘Nevertheless.’
‘If the Chief Librarian had given you permission, he would have given you an authorisation code.’
‘He did.’
‘Well, then, what is it?’
‘I’m afraid,’ Titus smiled, ‘I don’t know how to say it.’
‘Then write it down,’ the Sub-Librarian said peevishly.
‘Do you have a pencil?’
‘Of course not, we’re computerised.’
‘Then I can’t give you my authorisation code.’ Titus headed for the door.
‘But no patron can remove materials from Deep Storage without one!’
‘I suggest,’ Titus laughed, ‘you take that up with the Chief Librarian.’
And off he went.
As soon as he was safely out of sight down another pointless, featureless corridor, so basic and spartan in its corridorness as to be quite possibly the very archetype of corridorosity, Titus did the sensible thing and paused to look over the Map, Reading Room or no. It was an ancient and delicate thing, a thick wad of some thin and translucent paper folded over and over again, dry and brittle, smelling like cinnamon or the nicer sort of fallen leaves in autumn. It crackled when Titus unfolded it. Before he could give it a good solid look, however, the floor suddenly dropped out from beneath him, and Titus found himself sliding on, as they say, his butt down a brisk chute with an alarmingly chafed sensation, to land firmly on said posterior after a stomach-churning series of twists and loops. My ass, Titus reflected, is certainly taking a pounding this week.
No, not like that.
Coincidentally, or perhaps not, the chute had deposited him right before double doors quite clearly labelled ‘READING ROOM’. Titus did the obvious thing, and went inside.
The Reading Room, it transpired, was a vaulted, echoing hall, like the belly of a great whale, ribbed with pointed arches. The ceiling was covered in frescoes he couldn’t quite make out in the uncertain light pouring, or dribbling, from flocks of candles burning on every surface: on the shelves that lined the walls, on the great stepped altars that capped either end of the chamber, on the tables, even on the floor itself. And, of course, in the double row of copper chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. The candles set the high, narrow stained glass windows on the walls above to glittering. Who, Titus wondered, puts stained glass windows in a sub-sub-sub-basement?
Nevertheless, it was all very fetching, which is not at all like felching. Majestic, Titus was tempted to say.
Sitting at one table was a wooly-haired old man in tweed with a creased face, by which you are to understand that the man had a creased face and was in tweed, not that the tweed of the man had a creased face. He was the Librarian. He was, Titus saw, beckoning him over silently. Even before Titus could speak, the man held a finger to his lips and passed him a notecard drawn without looking from a valise.
‘There is no talking in the Reading Room,’ it read.
As Titus was digesting this, the Librarian passed him another: ‘For the inconvenience of all our patrons, materials may not be brought into the Reading Room from outside.’
Carefully Titus tore up both notes, and spelled out his own message facetiously on the tabletop, as if he were playing Scrabble: ‘is Reading alloued?’
(In case you were curious, he cannibalised his question mark from one of the Rs (Rs, not arse) and a full stop, by tearing some bits off. Try it yourself; it’s easy and fun.)
The Librarian passed him another note: ‘Don’t be silly.’
The Librarian, Titus had noticed, had not read his message.
‘are you Reading These?’ he spelled.
The Librarian impassively handed him another card: ‘No.’
Titus puzzled over an appropriate response for a moment, before the Librarian pre-empted him with another card: ‘If you are bright enough to be communicating now, there is a 94% probability that these pre-made cards will be appropriate to your responses.’
‘what If i talk?’
The Librarian passed him the next card, choking back a smirk: ‘For the convenience of our other patrons, you would be exterminated.’ And the Librarian drew from his jacket something that looked a bit like a brass herring frolicking in a solenoid, which Titus did not recognise as a compact charged-particle beam weapon far beyond the capabilities of human science. It wasn’t his field. The corners of the Librarian’s mouth twitched spastically as he fondled it. The herring, that is. Not his mouth.
‘why not exterminate me anyhow?’
The Librarian’s eyes shone as he passed the next card: ‘That would be against the rules.’
‘This is silly,’ Titus spelled. He was getting very sick of this place.
‘I don’t think anyone will dispute that,’ the Librarian’s next card read as he bit down on his lower lip to stifle a giggle.
‘If you Don’t wish me to Read These materials, why let me find them at all?’
The Librarian passed over a thick sheaf of cards. ‘An interesting philosophical question,’ they began. ‘When I studied under the great Dr Frottage, a seminal figure in postmodern library science, he voiced support for the Deconstructionist point of view that a Library, sounding as it does so much like ‘Liberty’, comes to represent through its containment of so much text rather a Liberty from Text, and that by abandoning text with its crypto-fascist colonial implications we can get inside of the underlying not-text and synthesise from Text and Not-Text a very Jungian sort of Ur-Text in the act of not-reading, combined with not-not-reading, which is the defabrication of...’ and here Titus stopped reading. He shredded all of these cards as he had the others. Then he scooped up a handful of gibberish, and ate it. He made a point of belching loudly.
‘Where is the Special Index?’ Titus spelled from the leftovers.
‘Behind you, third case from the left, second shelf up.’
Titus rose and inspected said shelf, which was packed mainly with reference works, old editions of the Encyclopædophilia Britannica. But sure enough there was a Special Index too. Amongst many other things, it contained listings for:
The Life and Times of Orac
The Book of Mammon
A Complete Explanation of the Entire Plot and Everything
Introduction to Alchemy
Electronomicon
Magia Siderea
Summa Physica
All of which sounded terribly promising, but when Titus searched the shelves for these books, which were all supposed to be in the Reading Room, he found only a copy of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language and dust. He brought the Dictionary, and as little dust as he could, back to the table, where the Librarian was wiggling his caterpillar eyebrows and holding out a card that read, simply, ‘Ha ha ha.’
Titus opened the Dictionary, and held one single page between thumb and forefinger, and with it very carefully gave the Librarian a nasty paper cut.
‘Ow!’ the Librarian exclaimed. Alarm bells immediately rang, and concealed red lights strobed, and somewhere a klaxon did whatever it is klaxons do at times like these. Someone had dared to speak in the Reading Room. The Librarian looked around gultily; the Sub-Librarian glided in, looking very cross indeed, holding another brass herring.
‘You must be exterminated,’ she told the Librarian sternly.
‘Aha!’ The Librarian jabbed with a bony finger. ‘Now you must be exterminated!’
‘No, you must be exterminated first.’
‘But you admit that you must be exterminated too.’
‘I admit no such thing.’

I don't think it ever had a name, but here's the fragment of incoherent absurdity I wrote in November of 2002...

(Part 2 here)
(Part 3 here)

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.’