Journal

When I was sixteen and very angry I opened a file on my computer and called it 'Journal', because that's what a friend had told me to do. Then I began to fill it with predictably angst-filled ramblings in entries which I dated to the second of their conception, because there was a function in Word which allowed me to do that automatically, and I thought it was cool. Over the course of the next year or so, the day-to-day details of my uneventful life were transcribed in a ritualistic fashion, interspersed with various personal reflections. I became a little more self-aware, a little better at writing, a little less angry. The contents of this journal were interesting only insofar as they represented a viewpoint; the events recorded were common to everyone aged sixteen.

After a while, I changed the name of the file to 'Hamish', because that was my name. I did this because I realized I was growing up, fast, and when the file at the end of every entry asked me if I wanted to save the changes made to 'Hamish' I felt like I was in somehow in control of this process - I could simply say 'no', and the day would be erased. Soon I'd forget about it myself, and it would be as if that it had had never happened at all. I set my memories in stone - but only some of them. Only the parts that I could put into words. By placing my in control of the past, I figured to place myself in control of the future, and the person that I would become.

A year passes this way and as I shape the journal, it shapes me.

One day I came home from school and found that the entry for that day had already been written. It was dated to the very second that I had opened the file, and described my day exactly the same way that I would have, omitting or emphasizing the same trivial incidents at school, trying to express my angst and boredom in the same tepid language. 

Nothing else happened for months, and I refrained from mentioning this event to anyone else, or in the journal itself. To write it down would have been to confirm the reality of the incident with much more confidence than I could muster - and crazy people are always certain of their delusions. I gave myself the benefit of the doubt. A lapse of memory, is what had happened. I'd simply forgotten the act of writing the entry. When it happened again, however, I all but broke down. It was the same as before; the day's entry was already written when I opened the file, and had ostensibly been written by me. The gross impossibility of such a thing was almost offensive. And it kept happening; every few months, the day would be written automatically.

I had my brain investigated. MRI scans, hypnotherapy, drug-assisted psychonautics and endless counselling sessions could find nothing to explain what I assumed, and hoped, to be episodic memory loss. This was a process that took some time, and while I was bouncing from clinic to clinic, acid-dealer to meditation retreat, the rate of entries that appeared in my journal increased until every second or third day was written for me. More symptoms developed: when I looked at mirrors, my reflection would sometimes act before I did, reaching for a toothbrush a fraction of a second early or taking off the sunglasses I was trying on before it occurred to me that they looked bad. These incidents always caused me to jump back in fright, my reflection now in time, and then examine the mirror, and myself, closely.

Then journal started to deviate and I began to go insane proper. Minor events would be recorded that had not occurred; I would remember them anyway. My mind split into two parallel streams. One contained what I actually did during the day. Then, I would read that day's entry - I didn't have to write anything at all by now - and then my second memory would be brought up to speed. I cried over a movie that I'd never watched and that may not have even existed. I felt simultaneously hungry and full, because I remembered both skipping lunch and eating it. Minor events became major ones; in the journal I began an intense relationship with a girl who I'd been introduced to at a party - a girl I'd never met and at party I didn't attend.

For, I suspect, the purposes of convenient storage, my brain treats the times when the journal and my actual life match each other as a single memory. These respites have become increasingly rare, however, and also bring into question what now constitutes my 'actual life'; the convergence of the two memories blurs my ability to tell them apart. It is hard to tell whether I have actually written this, or if I just remember writing it. Soon, I will be able to do nothing but read my journal and try to keep time with mirrors; one of me will cease to exist.

The Good Spider

'Drink more water. Take less drugs. Get more sleep. Only some people are crazy. You will be ok.'

Hardly, if ever, true. Everyone is crazy all the time. They never stop. Look. The process of growing up entails many deaths - that is to say, you don't mature, you're merely cut down to size. Your soul is taken and molded and whittled. It used to be big. Pointy. It had bits. Now it's a delicate little thing, and utterly bland. I'm terrified of spiders, but I imagine that there must be a good one somewhere. It sits over a gigantic pool of water. A huntsman as big as a truck. Huntsman, the way they move, you know, so fast - it scares people, makes them jump, but the Good Spider is perfectly serene. It just sits over a pool of water, eyes gazing out into the forest where I imagine that this must take place. To find the Good Spider is very hard, but trust me, the journey is worth your time. We only think of knowledge as an abstract concept because we were born with the wrong kind of eyes. The Good Spider has eight eyes that can see knowledge like dust moving through the wind. It can tell you anything, so be careful what you ask; the Good Spider is very old, and you weren't meant to die so many times.

Vision

First I went to bed, and then I started to feel, overwhelmingly, that something was about to happen. Seconds later I found myself standing in the Savannah at sunset. Something was wrong. I knew that I was dreaming, but couldn't move. Or rather, I could move my real limbs - slowly, as if through some viscous liquid - but the ones I could see, the ones that were with me in the desert, were unresponsive. Something was wrong. The ground was perfectly flat, save for the odd rock or shrub, but I began to fall. Gravity reversed direction and I tumbled into the sky. Writhing, and staying still, I brought my hands - my real hands - up to my face. Blackout. I opened my eyes; the room was dark.

***

My head hits the pillow and the desert overtakes me like a tidal wave. My limbs are far away, and though I can feel them move through some sticky liquid, they stay perfectly still by my side. Something is wrong. A boulder tumbles past, but the landscape is featureless. The sun dips below the horizon; the ground has become a vast pool of water, perfectly reflective, and I fall, or sink, into the sky.

***

Something is wrong. Sand dunes roll over my bed and I am buried up to my neck in the desert at midnight. Gravity vanishes and I evaporate slowly, into ten hundred million rising grains of sand.

Rat Trapper

There was a man below the city, and the noise he made, it sounded like wet, papery wings or maybe some kind of steam-driven pump.

Thhhhh-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th...

Then the singing:

'Mmm, na-na, na-na-na-na...'

The man looked uncomfortable on some very deep level, as if he might have been better off as a spider or an octopus, a cockroach even - something small and manoeuvrable. Anything but a human. Th-th-th. It was either laughter or breathing. Facing the table, which is placed against the brick wall underneath a naked bulb, his long arms reach into the darkness and bring back an electric drill. A white cotton shirt with rolled up sleeves, tucked into brown cotton pants. Braces. A misshapen head dotted with tufts of white hair.

'Na-na, na-na-na-na...'

The light flickers for a moment. The man doesn't notice. His eyes are clouded over, as white as marble. He is a creature of precise routine; when he sets the drill back down, in the darkness, it is no more than a centimetre away from where he picked it up.

When he sleeps - which is never for more than five hours at a time, the longest he can stand being away from his tools - the bucket of nails and screws is refilled, fresh planks of wood bought in, the battery of the drill swapped out, spent tubes of glue replaced, saws sharpened and a plate of assorted foods placed on the table. No one has ever spoken with the man. No one even knows if he can talk. Everyone knows he can sing, though.

They whispered to each other, once they'd bolted the door and retreated back up the stairs, into the depths of an ancient and crumbling house.

'But god, his eyes...'

'The way he breathes, I can hear it when I sleep.'

'The singing, though...'

The three of them shudder. Below, the man drops another of his creations down the hole next to the table. Fifteen seconds later there is a splash. For once, there are no other sounds. A rare thing happens: the man permits himself to smile, his withered lips unfolding to reveal a row of triangular teeth, sharpened to a point. No one has ever seen the man smile, but this doesn't bother him. He has never seen anything, and besides, the drains and pipes that run under the city can carry an echo for miles.


'Mmm, na-na, na-na-na-na...'

Drafts 1-8

They told me 'put your heart and soul into your writing,' so I did. But it bored me to tears; my grand statements about how I saw the beauty of the universe in the reflection of the spoon that I was using to eat cornflakes, or just how much inner torment I was experiencing, were so, so pointless. Everyone has pondered the mysteries of life at three AM over cereal. Everyone has experienced crushing despair for some banal reason or another. Your heart and your soul are the same as everyone else's. Fuck your heart and soul. Language is more interesting than that.

Dango Margraves at the End of the World.

The often misinterpreted, misunderstand and generally maligned Dango Margraves is a fictional character. I made him up. His endeavours and exploits are entirely unrelated to real life events. Having said that, he stands at the end of the world, lighting another cigarette.

'Hey,' says a nervous man who looks like some kind of janitor or caretaker, 'you can't smoke here.'

Dango raises an eyebrow. He makes as if to extinguish the smoke, but pushes the man off the edge of the end of the world instead. He falls for so long that his flesh decays and his bones rot away into a fine dust. The end of the world is infinite in terms of both time and space; it is always happening and it is happening everywhere, and if they have banned smoking at an event which is omnipresent then they have banned smoking in totality and this is something that Dango will not stand for. Cigarettes are his central conceit. Without them he is literally nothing.

Apologue Two

In the dark, crouching on top of the washing machine with our hands around our knees we wonder - not for the first time - where it all went wrong. Not for the first time - not for the last, either - we fail to find a satisfying answer. It was, is and will continue to be a long process of gradual decay. All we can pin down is the time Marcus Margraves, the fighting dwarf, dislocated his shoulder in a drunken brawl. After that he stopped fighting, though he remained a dwarf. No other change in our little world was as definable. All we could say was that things were better 'before' and different 'now'. We briefly debated whether Marcus's injury was a turning point, or even the cause but eventually decide - not for the first time - that it was symptomatic of the larger downward spiral.