Chapter Thirty-Two

A View From the Bridge

Atoll’d had a deep night’s sleep and was coming to; waking to a cinematic mind’s eye drone shot that slowly panned round and closed in on a flowerbed, in a park, by the seaside…a sense of what this vision playing in the cinema of his mind meant was aired when he raised his head in the tepid morning light and saw it pop out from the flowers, looking like he’d been caught on CCTV; like a bezood animal.

The drone shot was cut and close personal vision restored. He found himself recumbent in the bonsai forest, and developed the concept of not wanting to lose himself there. 

He retraced the moments that led to a night under the flowers, keeping to the trail. Very little data transpired so he ‘raced a retrace’ applying catch-as-catch-can rules and found that the pre-booked bicycle rank had not materialised, which was most probably featured as a test to see what he would do; to gauge to what degree his resource response factors would react.

It seemed like the day had dawned intent on testing his resourcefulness…would it stack up….there was only one way to find out.

As he got up he saw a big tour bus; a coach you’d think a stadium band travelled in… A lone figure got off and it drove away.

The lone figure got bigger and bigger as it wended its way in Atoll’s general direction…becoming more and more specifically directional with every tenth or so footstep. It was a man you’d remember having a peppery goatee, whether he did or not. He wore expensive-looking and academically leaning spectacles, had pate islanded short head of grey that would have been longer given a less rigid grooming program.

Atoll recognised outside incoming interventionary intent and braced himself in high alert. Unlocking defence mechanisms and coping strategy files and bringing them to the fore.

The man, addressing Atoll by name; speaking as though some great importancy was in the waiting room, said, ‘I am here to help you on your way. You have been subjected to a nasty infection, from which you are cured but need full recuperation from.’

Atoll said nothing, which was advised out of the defence 101 manual.

‘Come,’ the man said, his accent less Germanic and more manic than expected, ‘Come with me,’ he said with rising insistence that Atoll did not want to see rising any further.

The shoreward path crested a peak and frustrated its way down a zig-zagging route that finally hit the seafront. The tide was out like the water had gone on holidays.

‘This is your point of departure to better things at greater altitudes,’ he said, gesturing to the vista. He was aiming for pointed by Atoll received pointlessness.

They walked along the promenade, where a bus shelter stood alone, promising exotic destinations, as though unknowable openings in the barrage of life’s happenings awaited. A portal from one episode to another episode along the odyssey ridge. 

‘One day soon a bus will come and you will be on it.’

It wasn’t clear to Atoll whether he’d get on it when it came, or whether he’d  be on it when it arrived…anything seemed possible with the right level of potential.

We’ve arranged for lodgings until then…so you can recover…you’ve had a nasty fall.’

‘I fell? …’

‘Yes…’

‘Did I hit my head? Because that would make a lot of sense.’

‘The fall was spiritual…emotional…but you are fast-tracking to a place of mending.’

‘I see,’ Atoll said, unable to fully see, but getting the drift.

‘They both turned towards the sea and looked out as if expecting something to appear there. The horizon was grey but not oppressively so, the sea reflecting the grey as though a photograph met a painting.

‘We’ll never meet the horizon, we’ll never know what the sky tells the sea or what waterful news the sea might illicit for the benefit of the sky and vice versa,’ Atoll toyed with saying, or something like that, to seem educated; and to academically sync; to appeal to the man who he assumed was kidnapping him, but decided against it in case it sounded odd.

The promenade walkway was rough and unevenly surfaced, neither a skater’s nor a boarder’s friend. An cyclist rattled past, generating in Atoll an unprovoked chorus: ‘bicycle, bicycle, bicycle,’ he thought, mouthing, but nothing progressed out of repeating the word; it was nonsense stuck in word spew without purchase. A glitch or a coded warning, who knew which…

‘You must avoid the unnecessary perturbations of cycling at all cost and fee,’ the fraudulent Freudian said, with a surety that promised menacing back up if needed.

Passing were two sportswear clad operatives, jog-walking, chinwagging, followed by the silent screaming agonies of tens of thousands of Palestinian children.

But Atoll merely had a fleeting zip-cut editing chaos interlude that passed and dissolved into inconsequence…

The man, who presumably was kidnapping Atoll, observed Atoll’s reactions to the parade of dead suffering and was highly satisfied, like he’d just completed and exact copy of a small city he’d personally constructed out of match sticks, lolly sticks and engineered twigs. His cheeks seemed to redden as he took on a Father Christmassy air.

‘Bicycles and Plasticine…the two big avoids. Not too bad a tariff…some folk have the most mountainous avoidance regimes.’

‘They do?’ Atoll said in mock understanding. And then went on to think, ‘What did Palestine, I mean plasticine have to do with anything? The Doc sure spoke in riddles.’

The professorial, doctorial man also noted some out of sync symbolism as the sea air did a number on Atoll’s wayward eye-moisture…which the man found worrying enough to report, but not worrying enough to worry about the report’s reception by whoever’s job it was to worry about it.

Atoll suspected that if the man was not happy with Atoll’s status, vis-a-vis his persistence to cogitate, he could have him eradicated within a quick murdering smatter of split-seconded fire.

Atoll was experienced enough to suspect that the basic scene-setting, ridden through with lacklustre just-so-ness, was part of the quotidian mundanity needed to convince the environment to promote a sense of immersive reality and abiding actuality; he’d been a creator of such stuff in the past, but now he was being created….his imagination sequestered within the fold of his own usurped creativity.

The kidnapper-cum-psychotherapist led Atoll across the road and bade him farewell, ‘I’ll check on you once full recovery has been induced,’ he said as he wandered off swinging his arms like he was in a military parade for mad militarimen.

There was a knock on the window from inside the building he was standing outside. It was Jeff, or an animated version of him, waving his arms overexcitedly as though the hopeless horizon was filling with supertankers of Hope; the come-forthing of the marine cavalry…

As Atoll navigated the stiff gate the waving doubled; what looked like a more than passing resemblance of Una joining in. They mouthed warnings…they charaded warnings….all Atoll picked up was that he should be quiet so as not to alert someone. But that interpretation didn’t fit snug to the truth of the matter and was subject to ongoing investigation.…

Below the windows containing Jeff and Una where they were pointing with their express gesticulations, was a Public House; boarded and sealed, ‘closed’ signs apologising for the thirsty walk to dryness. And a descriptive biography of the building and its owner: the establishment was called The Lord Duncan De Bisquitz. The sign was a faded oil painting of a Bavarian Baron, known in Bavaria for his arrogant and belittling good looks. He came to these shores on a reverse Grand Tour in the mid seventeen-hundreds and died while drinking the local gin in what was then called the King’s Purse, rumoured to have been built by an Eighteenth Century courtly-gang-kingpin whose descendants were said to have gone on, in later centuries, to form such agencies as the CIA.

Atoll, believing he had hit a dead end, knocked on the pub door ‘closed’ sign and with each knock the door shifted, at first imperceptibly but then in gaping increments until no more knocking was required to surreptitiously gain entrance. Wary of attracting unwanted attention Atoll edged in and eased the door closed. Lost in the dark interior…allowing a wall to lead him to the foot of some stairs, that began creaking before he’d even stepped on them. When he did there was a cacophony-of-creak; a veritable celebration of the opulent extremes of the scope of post-modern creaking; it was as though he’d entered a world where all the creaking in it had come at once. Depths and breadths of creakiness layered in choirs of shout-stunning; attaining far-fetched notes of unwieldy wretchedness…

‘Quiet,’ Atoll thought, trying to imagine himself taking on a wealth of silence, but to no avail: the cult of steps shared amongst themselves a sick disregard for noise-metering, as one step handed over to the next in a creaking chain of raucous elevation. 

‘Shshshshshsh!’ Jeff said, poking only enough head around the bejarred door to establish some sort of visual contact, “Shshshshsh!’ Una shushed from behind.

‘Using the door as a shield, but incrementally exposing more of himself, Jeff said, ‘the landing…’ He reached out an arm and switched on the landing light which began to flicker as if controlled by the Unnatural.

‘What…what about the landing? Is it booby-trapped, what?’ Atoll felt like an immediate migraine had decided to set out its stall.

‘It is ready to fall through… Coincidentally though, not connected to the situation….although it might.’

‘Might what?’

‘Be!’

Rickety floor aside there was an ambience of haunt filled spookiness that the two flat-bound agents seemed to be promoting.

‘You won’t make it…the floor will collapse…there is a pool below laced with hungry robot alligators…’

‘Crocodiles…’

‘Crocodiles…’

Persistence will out; perseverance, tenacity, resolution (played properly) they’ll all do the job…

Three steps in….another half step, breathe; a pause, and most of the hallway’s shadows began to relax; the lights stopped flickering, and the formaldehydey odour vanished…the door swayed open. Jeff and Una stood back, a welcome of sorts, still fraught as they were with the remnants of liquid chemical fright-inducing suspicion, ‘Would you like a biscuit?’ said Jeff, ‘or three,’ added Una, in rehearsed platitude. They’d been in the ‘hellish here-and-now’ too long, they’d become vaguely frenzied with biscuitmania; a kind of biscuit-orchestrated logic-paralysis; biscophobia, biscuititis as it were…

‘Thank the Lord the gods of merciless destruction were not stirred by your clodhopping act on the stairs just now,’ Jeff admonished….merely to establish that his lack of Alpha behaviour was neither chronic nor persistent.

They were not the real Jeff and Una; they were representations; good copies, they were, nevertheless an important waymarker on his journey. Important because they were most likely a trap and his trap avoidance dexterity might be what was being tested. And he reminded himself that they probably thought he was there to get them, so they felt intimidated, despite his lack of intention.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘biscuitry be thy faultline,’ making sure he came across as meaning it; laying the foundation stones…troweling on the ‘go-withery’ thick and sweet. And emitting unconscious code packets.

‘We are out of tea, would you like an extra biscuit to make up for it?’ The answer should have been, no, but the main concern was seamless conducivity…

‘Yes, I don’t mind if I do,’ he said, loading his hod with bricks and mixing the mortar; building the foundations.

Atoll didn’t ask, they offered information in order to gain purchase in the wrestling match for their own survival.

’We are essentially a sleeper cell here and what we do day to day, night to night, is, essentially, sleep…there is, literally, nothing else to do. So your arrival is significant. If it isn’t?… If it isn’t…’

‘If it isn’t…’ Jeff aligned himself with Una’s concern; matching her output. Then, rising mid-thought, ‘…ah…more biscuits… Roll out the barrel,’ he sang…and of course it was code.

Then, out of the blue, and into the red, Una shouted, ‘let’s get our ears fucked,’ which made no sense at first. But when the ensuing, ‘excuse for music’, was so loud, distortion ran amok even many decibels lower, it became apparent that the noise confused the systems monitoring and recording them…as well as everything else.

Audibly shellshocked, Atoll entered the perspective of a rabbit who, in the headlights of the car it was driving, froze trying to miss itself. 

Atoll read, first Una’s lips, as she reeled off a lengthy monologue and then Jeff’s, as he mopped up oversights and understatements and tied up the ribbons of completion. And only then, was the noise curtailed.

There was a long pause that seemed fitting…

‘The sea,’ Atoll finally said, ‘the sea…’

‘Yes?’

‘…the sea…the waves…the waves in the sea, and the sound of the sea, the waves don’t fully sync…with the sound.’

But they didn’t know what he meant, which made him question himself. His ears carried on ringing, ‘Is that your phone?’ he asked at one point.

An awkwardness took over between them…business had been concluded and they needed to hit the road, but a feeling that could be described as a cat that crept into the crypt but couldn’t crap…persisted…word constipation caused a sort of straining amongst them.

Atoll’s mouth and auxiliary components were dry, inducing unintended tea-sipping noises. Which got out of hand before resolving themselves, but aided in easing the blockage of spoken interaction.

‘Would you like a look round?’ Una said, with a pervasive vacuousness that cudgelled the will of inspiration.

‘There’s more?’

The apartment had a stuffiness to it that went far beyond the human senses. It gave Atoll the conviction that he needed to get out before he could breathe with any certainty or think with any clarity.

‘Can you show me around…the town?’ Atoll asked Una, and then getting no response repeated the question to Jeff. Jeff closed down momentarily. Una chipped in, ‘The town? Oh, we can’t be seen outside,’ Una replied, making out that she wasn’t disappointed by the contents of her own reply.

‘We’ve protocolic disenspursement. Besides, we need to get some sleep in before lunch,’ Jeff added, introducing a discipherised code-malintroduction that went to a place code rarely ventured.

‘What’s that?’

‘What?’

‘Protorific dismispursetant…’

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

Cameras abounded that could argue to the contrary, but Atoll was running with the Emperor’s new ball.

‘Outside we are cloakless, visibly suckered.’

‘We are naked,’ Una said, but it sounded wrong and Jeff tried to ease it back, ‘Even fully clothed,’ he said, ‘Always,’ agreed Una, back on track.

‘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. It is a complex situation we really must avoid.’

It was obvious they were regurgitating what the manual had programmed them with. He’d seen and heard it all before…he was just waiting for a window in their delusion to strike his final blow.

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

‘A prospect neither of us can face even if we wanted to.’

‘Who is after you?’ he wanted to ask, to get their opinion, but he knew, after all, it could only be ‘them’ and ‘they’ are not to be questioned without consequences. So he dropped it.

He wondered if they knew they were not Una and Jeff. Una knew she wasn’t Una and Jeff knew he wasn’t Jeff. But together they convinced each other they were Una and Jeff and they both thrived in a coping delusion that cut through the reality of confusion…creating a functional, biscuit-based, belief system.

They ran through a tedious but necessary uncoupling process that Atoll needed to witness to get a clean break. They were not conscious they were doing it but it still made them into cardboard versions of themselves.

‘We are Una and Jeff…’

‘I am Jeff.’

‘And I am Una…’

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

The bombshell, metaphorically exploding and not exploding in quantum dual-singularity: a pause that felt like a rollercoaster gone fatally wrong…

‘What do you mean?’

‘What the…’

‘Well…I mean…I have met the real Jeff,’ Atoll squeezed the tube.

‘You’ve met the real me? What was I like?’ Jeff tattled, changing tack on a pivot’s eye-hole…

‘Did you meet Una, too. Is she real too?’

‘I never met her in person,’ Atoll replied, sounding sage and rancontuerial, ‘but I know quite a bit about her,’ he added, once-upon-a-timely.

‘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 never noticed the air of biscuits about them, not like the air around you two bisco-crackers,’ a sentiment they seemed to like and toyed with with a certain amount of satisfaction…

It took a while…clad in inevitability, telegraphed with predictability… But they left. They did it amidst protestations around the concept that they’d been safely invisible until Atoll had come along and disinvisiblised them. 

Atoll watched them walk fervidly away in imagined persecution… As they reduced themselves to Northerly dots amid the receding shoreline, leaving the impression that they were entirely imagined.

Their departure allowed Atoll to relax down the stress ladder. In one way he felt bad, in another he 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. He had a latent feeling that a complete ban on biscuits was the plan of attack in a defence strategy, but it was willowy and wan; too ill-defined to levy management execution procedures.

He had procured the perfect position for looking out onto the seafront and bus shelter… The bridge of his new ship arose at the bay window… He would log comings and goings that would build a picture from 2 to 3d panorama so he could see what he was dealing with. He didn’t feel captive at all, but then, they had most likely ordained that he wasn’t meant to. The apartment developed a sophisticated feeling that fitted with ongoing self-evaluation within minutes.

Evidence suggested that fake Una and Jeff had been expecting him, or someone of his ilk, and for a long time. They’d left official clues and code, whether intentional or not. Atoll searched for less authorised secretions: under-cog-cipher-soma and semiconch-altercoding.

Atoll activated a Home-Butler by mistake while checking the bread bin for biscuits. Did he find it, or did it find him? 

The Home-Butler was a modified Domicile Management System (DMS) specialising in on-site incarceration and home correctional facility enforcement. 

It stated that it was there to support the concept of living the dream of a domestic idyll.

It lied at every available opportunity.

It disabled its own off switch.