Excerpt 145:

Bodies of Water, Minds of Bread

The small to medium, for the area, apartment had a stuffiness to it that went far beyond the human senses. I needed to get out before I could breathe with any certainty or clarity.

‘Can you show me around…the town?’ I asked Una and Jeff, with eyes fleshswiping from one to the other, in a sharefest of alacritude I’d never henceforthwith self-witnessed myself doing.

‘The town? Oh, we can’t be seen outside,’ Una replied, disappointed by the contents of her own reply; her nonchalance returned after all the waving and biscuitraneous excitement.

‘We’ve protocolic disenspursement. Besides, we need to get some sleep in before lunch,’ Jeff added, introducing a word-based challenge that unevenly stepped up to a ledge where common code rarely ventured.

‘What’s that?’

‘What?’

‘Protorific dismispursetant…’

‘Protocolic disenspursement. It means, as a fundamentality, we cannot, must not, be seen. Our invisibility cloak is right here, no watchers here.’

‘Outside we are cloakless, invisibleless. The outside creates a visibility to whomsoever might cast upon us what would potentially amount to super, even hyper, detrimentality. Or even simply wants to look at us, and judge, perhaps.’

‘We can be easily seen outside, in plain sight…both of us either together or individually. It’s a frightening prospect…’

‘Who is after you?’

‘Any other entity who might tell us who we are, because not knowing is out greatest survival attribute.’

Despite their protestations, deep down, they knew they were not Una and Jeff. Una knew she wasn’t Una and Jeff knew he wasn’t Jeff. Una was as much Jeff and Jeff was as much Una, as they were themselves.

‘We are Una and Jeff…’

‘I am Jeff.’

‘And I am Una…’

‘You’re not though are you? Not really.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What the…’

‘Well, I have met the real Jeff.’

‘You’ve met the real me? What was I like?’

‘Did you meet Una, too. Is she real?’

‘I never met her in person, but I know quite a bit about her.’

‘What are we doing wrong…what gave the game away?’

‘Nothing, really… It is just essence.’

‘Essence?’

‘Was Jeff an advocate of long, deep sleeping arrangements?’

‘Did they know biscuits like we do?’

‘I bet they didn’t.’

‘Fuck ‘em…’

‘Cunts…’

‘I never noticed the air of biscuits about them, not like the air around you two crackers biscofranticals…’

It took a while…clad in inevitability, telegraphed with predictability… They left with protestations around the concept that they’d been safely invisible until I’d come along and disinvisiblised them. The fake Una and Jeff dissolved in front of my eyes. Until the only remnants of them persisted out back of my eyes. Terrible, and yet relaxing me down the stress ladder. In one way I felt bad, in another I felt that this was a good place to stay, plenty of biscuits with long use-by dates on them and some interesting looking hybrid biscuits with actual dates in them. A perfect position for looking out onto the seafront and bus shelter, arose at the bay window. The bridge of my new ship.

I considered that their demise (fake Una and Jeff, remember them?) should need avenging in some way and after much (some) consideration I settled for discovering who sent them here and why. If I could put them in a box it might create an equilibrium my systems were scanning for (and fill in as a placeholder for vengeance).

Onwards and outwards…

I imagined myself waving at incoming narrative supplementation in the form of an old acquaintance; any number of them. I nearly did an actual physical wave, but it felt disrespectful so soon after the dissolving of the fake Una and Jeff. I’d have to wait another hour or so before even the smallest wave could be deemed acceptable. From my vantage point the sea was fine because it was calm and the visual/audio match up (or lack thereof) didn’t flood the senses with un-synced feedback.

Fake Una and Jeff had been expecting me and knew their mission toil had come to an end, (though to look at the biscuit stock in-house you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise). There we clues and code spread throughout the apartment. I activated, (I am not even sure how), a home butler; a management system that was suppose to support my day to day ‘domesticals’. It had never been used before and, eerily, knew who I was. And even eerilier it did its own thing from the get go; it started by disabling the off switch. I was thinking that if I were him I would not have missed the chance to do a HAL 3000 thing. But on reflection, not doing it was way classier. 

It felt like the flat was growing around me. It seemed to be the butler’s intent. I felt sleepy and craved biscuit like substances at the same time like my body was intending to biscuitfeast in its sleep.

I tried to fool myself that a saunter along the seafront would cure all my ills. Somewhere deep from the back country of my programming I had the model of a specific kind of focus to cling too. I imagined being at sea; my life support a collection of flotsam dovetailed with jetsam that impossible made an ocean going vessel, of sorts.

A bona fide consumerist check of the biscuit stock of local outlets for future reference occurred to me, as if being beamed directly from some distant screening of the Shining.

But…

The butler had locked all the egresses and I had to actually write down a three page contract in order to make an application to take my leave; promising to observe a paltry curfew and keeping within camera surveillance corridors at all times. All conversations had to be recorded. Multiple body cams worn, etcetera. I had to sign the document before the back door fire escape popped its lock. As I was free from the physical bounds of the building I realised that I was still roughly bound, mentally, by my contractual obligations. The way things were set up I went only where I was supposed to go. It was a lot easier to do that than not.

By way of introduction I followed a narrow ankle-weed footpath along the side of a low wall…the wall grew to an average semi-urban/country village height and from their did not stop until it was extraneously tall, seeming to grow as I traversed its apex; it’s tallness seeming to have no more function than to draw attention to itself. And then it suddenly ended, looking half-built. After a few hundred yards of barbed wire I found a route that took me round to the other side of the wall, which I followed back to where I’d come from without witnessing any point to it at all, (sometimes ‘no point’ can be the point, right?) other than a walk from Meon Sea to a place called Meon Marsh and back. I thought, rather ridiculously, that maybe I had been diverted to give them enough time to assemble the area they wanted me to visit next, but all that was fantasy that my mind was churning out, mainly, I suspected from boredom. I asked myself, honestly, was I bored? Then I noticed that someone seemed to be following me and the internal banter ceased; overridden by a waking survival administration. My pace quickened with no input from me. Apart from the hanging question: was I being followed because I was bored?

Crossing some disused rails, (once used by pleasure trains that had long since ceased giving pleasure) I found myself walking into an area that seemed like a different world. A large, arcing sign read: Chinatown. (The word was inherently wrong on two counts, but for a while I believed wholly in what it seemed to denote.) Lanterns, pagoda shapes, lantern shapes, pagoda lanterns, all statically-paraded like all-year-round Christmas decorational adornment. As I waited for interaction to evolve from the inactive, I was put in mind of an old saying that goes, ‘Despite what they say, there is much more to fire than just smoke and flames.’ Why I thought that remains a mystery to this day.

The black clad, almost ninja-like, male who had been following me was joined by a young woman in fancy-dress-level geisha garb; convincing whom? And they did the ‘extras mouthing words’ thing, looking at their watches, pointing out of scene, etcetera, as though they were auditioning for a bit part in a big production. I stared at them with interactive intention, not in a ‘why are you following me’ way, but in a weird, gawping fashion that could easily have screamed: ‘pervert warning’… My attentions left them undisturbed. Unphased, they utilised a sly version of peripheral vision until it became gapingly obvious they were focussed on two things: me, and me not noticing them focussing on me. Who is watching whom, I thought, wondering if they’d pick up on what I was thinking. Which is what they were trying to do.

They seemed rooted to the spot, but when my impulse to approach them reached actionpitch I realised I must have been even more rooted to my spot than they were to theirs. They finally drifted over as if caught in an unexpected gust; in a time span that evaded quantifying. As threat-perception entered the flinch-zone, I spoke with intended deflection. ‘This,’ I blurt, ‘is, unsurprisingly, a place of surprises…and yet,’ I continued, perhaps foolishly, ‘it’s surprising how many surprises reveal themselves as surprising…’ and unfinished, I could’ve extended, I added with decorative effect, ‘or not…’ leaving open the possibility of me being correct and incorrect in some quantum duality I could still climb out of with my slipping facade intact.

They both looked through me and continued as if I were constructed from ghostware…(there were more ghosts in Meon Sea than there were non-ghosts, as I later discovered) so their seeming lack of awareness could just have been observation of correct procedure. As I was not entirely sure I wasn’t a member of the ghost fraternity (or sorority) myself. Earlier, pre-Una and Jeff, I’d forgotten; I had seen an old, what would you call it, let’s say friend, the Professor. He was representative and ghostlike rather than real. I don’t know whether he was imagined or had outside strings attached. He was at the head of a horde of little people who turned out to be children. You’d probably look away. The kids were from Palestine and moved in a shared smog of horror and abandonment. Orphans of Humanity with no way back….so they’d taken to following the Professor like a throng of pied pipers following a rat.

I needed, at that point, to introduce a technique to cope with the anticipation of the task ahead so I could deal with it… I gathered the quantamentations of a potentially great plan and proceeded with aplomb. I blank-screened. Pivoted and postambulated. I would reconnoitre the domain with a cartographers zest. Meon Sea Mapmaker extraordinaire. The believability factor of my off the cuff ruse gave me a confidence I was not normally disposed to possess. I sensed fear, but it was not for me; it was for my adversary buddies and acquaintoversaries.

It seemed I’d struck a chord; I’d tinkled the black and white teeth of the piano headed people; tickled the bellies of snoring attack dogs, dreaming of a better life in domestic passivity; and licked the nostrils of domestically passive dogs dreaming of a better life as attack dogs…

How did I determine this?

Well, by the time I’d circled round and sat down on a cardboard chair designed for seating cardboard people, I was being followed, at distance, and close and mid-distance by no fewer than sixteen of the total seventeen residents of Meon Sea’s tiny Chinatown. By then I could’ve guessed that they were all Japanese and this was closer to being a film or movie set than it was a town or quarter. I mused, rather toyed with the idea, that the quarter was only really a sixteenth…but the musing, the toying went pretty much nowhere…as the followers closed in, cutting off exits, bearing down, projecting danger.

It was not clear who to speak to and whether and speech would be coming from any of them. We were caught in an impasse generated bizarreness that engulfed all of us, rendering all our brain/mouth highways tarmacless.

Were they considering what I’d said, to myself out loud, to be code, which it wasn’t, it might have had code in it, maybe on some level. Did they think I was code. A coded physical message?

My stuck cognitive embroiglment started rattling off all manner of quirky scenarios when there was a yelpy-shouting-bark; an incoming man’s voice dopplershifting into the lecturers’ podium that stood vacant. When the body caught up it scattered the voiceless but dangerous sixteen. 

It was Judith. Not the real one; a bad manifestation. But this signature and code was different than anything else around it. Her presence opened up several memory vaults that had ancient Egyptian entrance cubicles. Her looks were a triumph of deceit; I’d been totally deceived. Fair play to her she could’ve pranked the cement out of a high rise from that mantle, but she confessed early. 

‘Looks can be deceiving,’ she’d said.

‘Especially as the last time I saw you you were less…and more…’

Her plump masculine face and head betrayed decades of ill-pursuit and impactful horrors of all manner. Her body-language delivery spoke of past confidence bordering on arrogance, sloping off, slipping away, indicating the dirty manipulations of the laws of entropy rewiring fate; a debt collector that takes and takes, as if recovering the debt accrued by the privilege of owning a viable Life-force.

Was this a gross, greasy man of corpulent stature containing my well-loved, old female friend, or was he a gross, greasy man of corpulent stature through and through. I needed proof of Judith’s internal presence. The proof came, but not so as I could notice.

She/he spoke at length. I listened with as much breadth as I could hoping to cram everything in. But I dozed off into a partially full biscohallucinogenic biscosis… When I rallied all seemed lost. But that feeling evaporated and realisations dawned as perspectives auto-tweaked into positive spins. I was not conscious of what she’d/he’d said, thankfully. And yet whatever information had hit home, my unconscious responded like my mind had got a sudden bonus erection… Useless as it was stuck in my mind… I had to wait for the unlit firework to spark back up.

My unconscious now held data that completed a circle. My conscious self was being denied access. My work here, in Meon Sea, was not yet done.