DAGELAN

This is for anyone
who has ever been
confused.
Problems With The Letter W..............................3
Problems With Pharmacists..............................12
Problems With Writer's Block...........................17
Problems With Art Students ............................23
Problems With Helicopters...............................27
Problems With Dreams.....................................33
Problems With Crane Fly..................................51
Problems With Chemistry.................................54
Brief, Informal Notes From Riaz.......................63
PROBLEMS WITH THE LETTER
W
I was at the Purple Crab, finishing a strawberry milkshake
when the idea came to me. A story about a man who's
convinced the letter W is out to get him. I always wanted to
write a story where the narrator goes crazy. I was pretty
sure I could work in that the letter W was somehow created
by a sect of chthonic alien creatures. That'd be great. No
wait, the chthonic alien creatures could be shaped like Ws.
Or they could have W shaped pupils or something. And the
whole thing could be full of like, tense switches, and it
could switch from first person to third person. The whole
thing could be a mindfuck. I told the barman about my idea
immediately without making any eye contact.
"So I had this idea for a story, it's about like, it's about
this guy who thinks the letter W is out to get him." I swirled
at the ice cream at the bottom of my shake. "It's going to be
like, a total mindfuck."
He didn't say anything.
I decided the whole thing could take place in a coffee
shop. No that was stupid, the whole thing would take place
in an all night diner, it'd be a conversation between the
main guy and his crazy friend who was convinced W
monsters were out to get him. And at first the guy thought
it was stupid, but then he starts to lose it too. Wait then it
all couldn't take place in a diner. Some of it could take
place in a diner. The first scene. Then there would be
another scene. Maybe there'd be two more scenes. I
drummed my finger on the bar, my milkshake was finished
and if I had another I'd feel sick so I went home. On the
PROBLEMS WITH THE LETTER W 3
train I had a million more ideas but when I got back I didn't
write any of them down.
I left my W story idea in my subconscious for a while. I did
some research (Wikipedia, WWW) on the letter W, it's the
23rd letter, two plus three is five. According to the
Pythagorean numerological system W represented five.
Coincidence, but whatever, Five is the number of instability
and imbalance. Fine. I checked the time. The reciprocal SI
prefix of five is Femto, according to the Pythagorean
numerological system Femto is six plus five plus four plus
two plus six which comes to twenty three, W is the twenty
third letter in the alphabet. I went to bed.
I managed to write part of the first scene. I put it in a 24
hour McDonalds because I don't think there are any all
night diners in this country. Maybe truck stops, but I don't
want to write a story about a trucker. I named the main
character's friend Bill, but I couldn't think of anything for
the main character himself. If you flip the golden arches
upside down they look like a W but I didn't know if I
wanted to put that in. I decided not to mention it in the
story but I'd let the readers work it out. Write, writer, wrote
all start with the letter W and I thought about making the
main character a writer but decided against it. Who wants
to read a story about a writer?
I arranged to go to the Purple Crab with my friend Will
but he wanted to catch the 5.55 train. I agreed but I made
us catch a different train.
So I'm sitting in the Purple Crab and I say to the bartender
where do you live and he says "Walsall" and he stares at
me. The letter W is like, two Vs, maybe the chthonic aliens
can have V shaped eyes, but two of them so it's a double V. I
order a strawberry milkshake. The character can go crazy
and the doctor can prescribe him Wellbutrin. Wellbutrin
was created in the eighties but caused seizures so they
halved the dosage and created a slow release version,
Wellbutrin XL. A seizure can be a sensation of fear. They
trained dogs that can get help and stop you walking into
the middle of the road when you have a seizure. Jeffrey
Dahmer was convinced demons were communicating with
him through dogs. When they caught him his fridge
contained a human head and a jar of mustard. I'm a little
relieved when I run the numbers on Wellbutrin and find
out they're not five. My phone number has five fives in it. I
should put that in the story.
At the Purple crab I got myself a strawberry milkshake and
Will got a rum and coke. We sat in a corner booth and
talked. He'd just got some sort of System Analyst job at
some computing company and we made jokes about the
abbreviation being "Sysanal.". I never noticed how much
the bartender at the Purple Crab blinks. He blinks a hell of
a lot. People who blink too much and people who don't
blink at all are really weird. Maybe I should make Bill never
blink. Or the chthonic aliens can never blink. Small traits
like this are important in creating memorable characters.
Maybe.
Will told me he likes some girl at work, I said he should
make a move or something but he told me that
"Everyone says workplace romances are totally a bad
idea,"
I said I don't know about that and he said
"Yeah, well you wouldn't."
And I didn't like the way he said you.
On the train home I tried to think of important people
from history who had W in their name. They could be part
of the Wpeople's conspiracy. Famous inventors maybe, they
could have been given their ideas from the Wpeople. No
one really obvious occurred to me though. Apart from
Wario. Or George W. Bush. He's too obvious though. If I
could find a president from the 80s or something I could
make it a period piece. I wanted to do one of those since I
saw Donnie Darko. George Bush Sr has a W in his name.
Maybe I could set it in the 90s.
At home I went over the part I'd already written, added

some commas, removed a couple of adjectives. The only
worthwhile thing that has ever happened to me whilst
stoned was that I realised that you should barely ever use
adjectives. I tried to add a couple paragraphs but they just
dragged because I couldn't work out where to set the
second scene.
I found out there's such a thing as Lambert's W function,
named after Johann Lambert but I couldn't really
understand the Wikipedia article about it and I don't want
to write about things I don't understand. I also found out
that W is the symbol for an amino acid called Tryptophan
which can cause hallucinations and delusions if improperly
metabolised. I decided that next part of the story should be
fractured as the main character (still no name) gets crazier.
Definitely not one long rolling chapter, it should be broken
up, disjointed. Maybe Bill can have difficulty metabolising
Tryptophan
I put my elbows on the bar and knock over my milkshake
glass which is already empty. I lean towards the bartender
who narrows his eyes at me.
"Look man, all I'm saying is that the letter W is weird,
I'm not saying that there IS some race of chthonic creator
aliens that implanted it in our language artificially as a
means to glorify themselves. Or" I swirl my arm around in
the air, fishing for words "or like..that it somehow..like it's
somehow a chant, like a mantra to summon them into
being. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying it's weird, it's got
three syllables and it's pronounced "Doubleyou" even
though it's shaped like two Vs."
Maybe put some religious imagery in the story. Can't think
of any religions that feature the letter W to any extent
though, plus they're mostly written in Hebrew or Aramaic
or whatever.
I found a wikiHow on creating a credible villain in fiction
which made me think of putting a villain into the story.
Maybe the leader of some sort of cult that worships the W
people. It's a bit Lovecraftian though, and I've not actually
read many Lovecraft stories. I did see the trailer for the
new Chthulu film though. It seemed pretty good. I started
following links from the wikiHow and ended up on the
NanoWriMo page which depressed me because I told
everyone I was going to do it last year but I totally failed. I
haven't even opened that text file since last November. I
think about doing it every so often, maybe cracking the first
couple paragraphs out and sending them to some soulless
online art mag but I feel that would be like admitting
defeat, like admitting I'm never going to finish that story.
#
Sunshine, you are my sunshine I wonder if girls call Daisy
get sick of guys singing that tell me your answer true song.
Anyway, I set the second part of the story in the guy's
apartment and at his job, I started calling him W, at first
just as a substitute until I could make a real name but now
I'm beginning to like it. Maybe that's the kind of twist I
deliver at the end though. That his name is W. At his job he
just starts thinking the W key on his keyboard is a different
font. I checked my W key and it's normal.
W is the symbol for tungsten because tungsten used to
be called wolfram, Tungsten is used in light bulbs because
it has the highest melting point of any metal. Advances that
would have led to longer lasting light bulbs have been
suppressed by the Phoebus cartel which was set up in 1924.
They've been less powerful in recent years, allowing
compact fluorescent light bulbs which can fit into standard
light sockets to reach the market. I thought about naming
someone in the story Wolfram, it sounded good for some
sort of shadowy agent figure. Maybe the Phoebus cartel
could be in the story and their leader is called Wolfram. I
ditched the idea after my agent said that the Phoebus cartel
were in Gravity's Rainbow.
My agent said I should get a haircut. My agent's name is
Wolfram, wolfram is an archaic name for tungsten,
tungsten is used in light bulbs, light bulb technology is
controlled by the Phoebus cartel which was set up in 1924
and persists to this day, their leader is named Wolfram like
my agent. My agent phoned me.
"Hey, this is W. " I said.
"W, listen, we need to get you out of the country, forces
are in motion, we suspect Wolfram is behind it."
"Isn't your name Wolfram?"
"No Wolfram, my name is Will, dammit man don't flake
on me now, look I don't have much time, just stay ready
OK?"
"Sure man, cool.. Oh you want to go to the Purple
Crab this evening? You made a move on that girl yet?"
"People say workplace romances are a bad idea, you
should know that."
I didn't like the way he said you
At the Purple Crab that night Bill wasn't drinking his usual
rum and coke and we were talking about the Omega
Constant. The Omega Constant is the value of W(1) where
W is Lambert's W function. The value of Omega is
approximately pointfivesixsevenonefourthreetwonine
zerofourzeronineseveneightthreeeightseventwonine
ninenineninesixeightsixsixtwo. Bill's telling me about
light bulbs.
"You ever measured a light bulb I mean a standard, a
standard incandescent light bulb? Around the widest part,
and around the narrowest part? The ratio of the two?
Pointfivesixseven, I tried seven different brands and
they're all pointfivesixseven. You ever ah, measure the
ellipses on the base that connect to a standard double
contact bayonet fitting? You ever measure their length and
their width? Divided them? Pointfivesixseven. Is this not
enough for you? Is this not enough information? That light
is flickering" He ducks down.
"What?"
Bill waves his arms, tries to pull me down to the table
level.
"That. Light. Is. Flickering, I've got to go, forces are in
motion, that's their signal, that's their signal you just I've
got to go, I need extraction." He gets up, starts picking up
his jacket, loosens his tie, his neck snaps left to right like an
anxious driver coming up to a junction.
"Hey, did you make a move on that girl Bill?" I ask him
as he leaves, he has to turn around and take two steps back
to my table, he puts his face very close to mine.
"What girl? You think this is the time? I don't have a clue
what girl you're talking about. I. Have. To. Go" and he
scurries, half crouched behind the bar and through the
service entrance.
Later at home I thought more about the W story. The

pacing was bothering me. The gradient of his insanity
seemed at times too steep. Then again I wasn't writing a
novel, I couldn't afford the luxuries of time afforded by a
longer form. Great artists work within the limitations of the
current medium or pick a new medium. I just made that up
but it could be true.
I tried copying and pasting a couple of the paragraphs to
mess with how crazy the main guy was getting but it meant
there was a couple of errors. I sort of liked it that way
though, I thought it made it more jarring so I saved the .txt
as a separate file.
I use Notepad SX for all my writing by the way, it's a
great program and if you spend any time writing anything I
suggest you use it. It's tabbed and you can put it into full
screen mode. It's not too good at writing program code
though, so you might want to bear that in mind. I had to
change the letter spacing on my version because otherwise
everything I write just seems to be full of Ws.
I'm in the Purple Crab drinking a straberry milkshake. The
bartender is cleaning a glass. The sun is setting and I think
about measuring some parts of the bartender's hands to
make sure they're not in the ratio pointsixseven. That's
one of the ways of finding a cult member, they cut don the
tip of the ring finger on the left hand until it's at a point
fivesixseven ratio to the second segment of the finger. The
light that Bill was talking about last eek is still blinking but
I've had fresh intelligence from my agent that the cartel is
no longer using bulbs to communicate. I detect no possible
threats aside from the barman ho, in all my time at the
Purple Crab has not declared allegiance to any party. All he
does it stand at the bar, clean glasses, dispense straberry
milkshakes and blink. He still blinks a hell of a lot. Like
there's something rong ith his eyes.
#
My agent called me whilst I was finishing of the W story. In
the end I'd decided that the second and third scenes would
blend together into a montage of insanity. I picked up the
phone mid sentence.
"Hey Riaz, have you heard anything from Will lately?"
"Nah, last time I saw him he was ditching me up in the
Purple Crab"
"Oh yeah, I read about that in his blog."
"I didn't know Will had a blog."
"Yeah, yeah it's like: paranoidescapes.blogspot.com
He invents paranoid delusional fantasies and uses them
as reasons to make really big exits from boring social
events then he writes about it on the blog. He puts up
Youtube videos sometimes. Actually he might have
switched to Google Video. I'm surprised you haven't heard
of it actually, it's pretty well known. He sells tshirts and
stuff."
"Like, Cafepress tshirts?"
"Nah, American Apparel, it's pretty pro, anyway I
wanted to know if you finished that W story you kept on
going on about."
"Nearly, it's nearly done, the first draft is."
"Because your mother was reading the newspaper and
she found some local short story competition thing. You
should probably focus your mind on that."
"What? Why did she tell you about this? Why didn't she
tell me? What am I meant to do with the W story? I'm half
way though a sentence."
"Eh just leave as it is, sort of a Easton Ellis thing, You
know he wrote his first book when he was nineteen? You're
behind already."
"Did my mother tell you to say that?"
"Yes."
"Fantastic. I'll stop writing the W story then, you really
think that mid sentence thing can work?"
"Definitely
PROBLEMS WITH PHARMACISTS
Anyway, I was in Sainsburys, with Moyers, Moyers is my

buddy, he used to be a Phobius cartel hit man until I
managed to deprogram him using some unorthodox
techniques I learnt from a decommissioned AI in Calcutta.
We were at the pharmacy counter, I needed more
Dramamine. The girl behind the counter was regarding me
with suspicion. I was saying:
"No, look, I need sleeping pills, but not herbal sleeping
pills."
She was saying:
"We can't sell sleeping pills to anyone under sixteen."
"I'm like, twenty one man, I showed you my ID, I'm
twenty one and I can't sleep unless I have non herbal
sleeping pills."
"I can't sell sleeping pills if I think they're going to be
used for recreation."
"Well I'm telling you they're not going to be used for
recreation."
She stared at me, intelligence indicated that pharmacists
had become a neutral party as of two weeks ago, only a few
isolated cells were continuing operations. So why wouldn't
this woman sell me any Dramamine?
"Look, alright, forget it, never mind. Which of your
products has the largest amount of Dextromethorphan, cost
wise?"
"What?"
"Like what product is the most Dextromethorphan
dense? Like what's the best value for money?"
"I'm not going to answer that."
PROBLEMS WITH PHARMACISTS 13
"But you're a pharmacist, this is your area, this is what
you know."
"I'll call security."
"Intelligence indicates that securitypharma negotiations
broke down four weeks ago when ambassadors from both
sides went missing along with the city of Copenhagen. You
wouldn't call one over here."
"I will."
She reached for the phone.
"He won't come, you're bluffing, this is a bluff, what
about Diphenhydramine? Do any of your sleeping pills
contain Diphenhydramine? I can't sleep and I need these
chemicals."
Moyers started pulling me away by the collar but I
shrugged out of his grip and lunged back towards the
counter. The girl began to dial.
"No, listen, come on, I can't sleep and I have a cough,
you're holding out on me, you fucking pharmacists, do you
know what you're doing? You want to stay neutral? You
won't be able to stay neutral with an attitude like this."
"Pharmacists have been hostile since this morning."
Moyers said as he pushed me away from the snarling girl
behind the counter. I tried to turn to face him but he had
me in an arm lock.
"What? What are you talking about?"
"They've been hostile towards our faction since this
morning, they were neutral long enough to finish work on
their Japanese ad campaign."
"What? What the fuck?" I allowed myself to be pushed
away from the counter, Moyers is a pretty big guy. "Why did
noone tell me? What ad campaign?"
"The Japanese had no word for depression, pharma had
to create one to market their anti depressives."
We walked past an array of hitech toothbrushes. They
looked like caterpillars from Mars.
"Man, that's horrible, oh wait, wait dude," I broke out of
Moyers' arm lock and walked over to one of the shelves. "I
need toothpaste."
Moyers shrugged. "Alright, but we're in pharma territory,
this entire aisle is dangerous."
I held up two boxes.
"Which toothpaste should I be buying? This one says
tartar control, but this one says it has cavity protection."
"Dunno mate."
Moyers and I say "mate" ironically because we think it's
hilarious.
"Serious dude, this cavity protection one is slightly more
expensive, but only like twenty pence. I mean how much is
that per tooth brushing session?"
"Uh."
I check the box.
"It doesn't say. Doesn't tartar cause cavities? Maybe I
should get tartar control, then it's cavity control as well."
"I thought plaque caused cavities."
"Doesn't plaque make tartar which makes cavities? So I
should get plaque control?"
"There isn't any plaque control."
The girl at the pharmacy counter was scowling at me as
she spoke on the phone. I ignored her.
"Oh, hey, this one says it's twenty four hour protection."
As I went to grab the twenty four hour protection box I
dropped the tartar control box, and as I went to pick it up I
accidentally stood on it. The cap exploded off the tube of
toothpaste with a sharp bang. The pharmacist pulled an Uzi
out of her jacket and sprayed it vaguely at me and Moyers.
We ducked behind some floss.
"Look what you did." Moyers said as he looked through
his backpack. There was a security guard writhing on the
floor in front of me. He was clutching a dark blue patch on
the stomach of his security guard jumper. I realised the
toothpaste lid had gone straight through his gut.
"Fuck, fuck! We gotta get out of here, we gotta get our
shit to the fucking checkout." I gestured to our trolley as
Moyers pulled a Glock out of his bag. He tucked an
oversized clip into it and turned on its ultrasonic aiming
module.
"Alright," he said, waving the Glock over the top of the
floss display, the aiming module made a radar like clicking
which increased and decreased in frequency with the
distance of objects. He fired absent mindedly a couple of
times.
I ran for the trolley as the pharmacist unloaded another
couple of rounds at me. They hit some novelty bubble baths
which began to foam. I grabbed the trolley, shoved it
around the corner and followed it in a low crouch. Moyers
followed, barking another couple of bullets at the
pharmacist.
"PRICKS." She screamed.
"We better get to the checkout before security gets here."
Moyers said, ramming a new clip into the Glock. We began
to run, me pushing the trolley.
"Hey Moyers, what's the range on your ultrasonics?"
"About six meters, I think. I think reliably six meters."
"That's really good,"
"Yeah, heavy power requirements though, pulls two
amps during transmit."
"At what voltage?"
"Six."
"Shit, seriously?"
"Seriously."
"Shit."
I could see the checkout now and man, the checkout girl
was hot. I'm not kidding. I mean, this chick had pale green
eyes that basically picked me up and threw me into the
frozen produce. No joke, I had to pop my shoulder back
into the socket and pull an ice cold baby carrot out of my
hair after she looked at me.
"Hey," I said. "We'd like to checkout these items?" I
gestured at the trolley in a way I hoped was expansive. She
didn't say anything. I started talking loudly to Moyers.
"So anyway, I've been having some problems writing my
book in Emacs."
"Probably aren't meant to write books in Emacs."
Emacs is a text editor that is over twenty years old. It is
not designed for writing books.
"It's this word wrap wrap thing," I looked over, the girl
was running my tomato juice through the bar code scanner,
she didn't look up. "The word wrap, it's just not that suited
to writing a book," still not looking at me, "It either hard
wraps, which adds line breaks so the file is awkward to
read on a display with a different width, or it does nothing,
there's no option to soft wrap."
Soft wrap has been an option available in every text
editor released within the past ten years.
"Maybe don't write it in Emacs then?"
"I mean I got this patch that was meant to fix it, but
there's some problem somewhere now, it just hard wraps
everything to eighty columns wide, regardless of window
size."
"Sounds tough."
"It really is."
The girl finally looked at me.
"Do you want a receipt?"
"Yeah, yeah sure, hit me up."
She handed me the receipt and went on scanning the
next guy's stuff. We went to leave the store as the chirps of
the scanning machines were drowned out by the heavy
footfalls of the armed response team that was locking the
place down. I slapped my forehead, I mean I literally
slapped my forehead and said:
"Dude, I forgot the toothpaste."
PROBLEMS WITH WRITER'S
BLOCK
It's Thursday and I'm the Purple Crab, destroying my third
strawberry milkshake of the evening. I'm talking to the
bartender.
"I'm trying to write a story about a man who stands on
his hands all the time. And he thinks everyone else is crazy
for walking on their feet. He says they're all upside down.
I'm having some problems though."
The bartender doesn't look up, polishes a glass.
"I'm just, I have the main scene all planned out, with the
man who walks on his hands like, attacking the narrator.
But I can't. I don't know, it's not working out. I mean why
would the protagonist meet a man who walks on his
hands? He can't just meet him in the street."
I take another sip of my strawberry milkshake.
"I mean, I've worked out that the man can have some
sort of problem with his inner ear, and that's why he thinks
everything should be upside down. That's all sorted, but I
can't work out a way for the protagonist to meet him. I
can't make a story that incorporates this character. Does
that count as writers block?"
The bartender holds a glass up to the light, squints at it
and then goes back to polishing it. It's like he's a girl, I'm
fucking invisible.
"So I mean I've been working on it for like, two or three
nights, I've got all these .txt files on my computer,
upsidedownman1.txt, upsidedownman2.txt. All attempts
I've made to write a story with this guy who walks on his
hands. Some of them I get over ambitious and work in too
PROBLEMS WITH WRITER'S BLOCK 18
many plot points. I had one where I was talking to a
werewolf who loves pineapple juice. I don't even know how
I was going to bring that round. Some of them I never
manage to work any plot points in, it just spirals off into
some dumb conversation."
Noone's listening to me, it's Thursday and I've been
having a terrible week, keeping myself awake at weird
times trying to catch some inspiration. Hours lying on the
floor in my room, trying to start the internal combustion
monologue of my prose. The bartender has a shaved head
and like, a dozen piercings. He goes into the back room,
leaves me alone with my milkshake and the sound of cars
humming beyond plate glass. I down the dregs of ice
cream, leave enough money to cover my tab and tip. Walk
out onto the street level where it's not as cold as winter
used to be. Maybe kids won't have snow days any more.
I walk home through the warm wind, which smothers
me like ether.
The next day my knees stop working. I don't know what it
is but I get out of bed and collapse forward from shock and
pain. Lying on the floor, still half asleep I assume it's some
temporary problem, cramp or an equivalent but when I try
and get up I'm met by the same agony. What the hell. I lie
there some more, bending my knees and feeling nothing.
But as soon as I apply weight to them the joints scream and
I have to pull myself back into bed, using my hands,
crawling.
I'm looking at the magazine wall in a WHSMITHS when

this guy wearing a massive trench coat stands next to me.
And I'm thinking that he wants me to move out of the way,
like he's trying to look at a newspaper that but I'm stopping
him, so I sidestep away, but he sidles up to me and says.
"There are daisies in Moscow."
I'm staring at a copy of Gardeners World thinking what
the hell do I do. He repeats himself.
"I heard there are daisies in Moscow."
I dare to look over at him and he's smiling straight at
me. He's got to be crazy, he's a crazy person and he thinks
he's a Russian spy and that this is some sort of pass phrase.
I sidestep again so that I'm in front of the lifestyle
magazines. Kate Moss is on the front of this month's GQ.
The guy carries on talking, he's wearing nice clothes for
a crazy person. Maybe he only went crazy today.
"Because of... The temperatures. Because it's so warm."
What the hell does GQ stand for? Guy...quotient?
"Global warming. It's, because of global warming."
Gay no it can't be anything to do with gay. Garrison?
Gauteng? The guy is silent for a moment, waiting for me to
reply.
"There's not normally daisies in Moscow at this time of
year."
Gorilla Quarrel. Goat Queries. Why so animal themed all
of a sudden?
"They say maybe kids around here won't have snow days
any more."
Gentleman's quarterly. That's it. Bingo. I've got to get
away from this crazy guy. But before I can escape to the
jigsaw section or look at greeting cards he says:
"Sorry to have bothered you."
and disappears.
I stand, staring at Kate Moss' cleavage and think about
how hard it is to write conversations. Every time I try to
write a story with conversations I get ruined. And I always
think that next time I'm reading a book I'm going to pay
really close attention to what they do when there's a
conversation. But I always forget.
My agent calls whilst I'm trying to play Tom Clancy's Ghost
Recon: Advanced Warfighter.
"Riaz? Wolfson here, how's it going?"
I say it's alright whilst I order Brown to put suppressing
fire down the street so that I can get Allen across the road
and into a position to snipe the machine gun nest that's
pinning me and Kirkland.
"What happened to that story?"
What story
"The one with the man who walks on his hands. You said
you were going to write it weeks ago."
"Write a story? About a man who walks on his hands?"
"Yeah, Riaz, remember? You write stories?" Wolfson's
getting sarcastic.
"I think you've got me confused with someone else, I just
play Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter all
day."
"Very funny kid, but I seriously think you should focus
on that story, I thought it had potential."
"I thought it had potential." I'm copying what Wolfson is
saying because that takes the least effort. Kirkland yells
that he's taking enemy fire and as I check the tactical map I
see that two rebels have managed to flank our position.
Kirkland bites it covering my retreat. I dive behind what I
think is meant to resemble a Mercedes S Class.
"Well you should work on it then, what's the problem?
Writer's block?"
"Maybe,"
"Well snap out of it, whatever it takes." Wolfson's still
talking whilst I cower behind the Merc which is shuddering
under gunfire. Brown's M60 jams whilst Allen is out in the
open and a sniper, now unsuppressed, drops him as he
sprints across the road.
"a road trip, maybe go to a club."
I neutralise one of the flanking rebels from the cover of
my luxury sedan but I can't see the second one because he's
worked his way behind Brown who's still trying to unjam
his machine gun. I can't hear him scream over the noise of
the Merc's alarm which has bizarrely only gone off now.
" ake some drugs or have a girl break your heart, those
two are GUARANTEED to work kid."
I give up, reload the game.
Life continues, though some nights I sit at my chair with
my forehead resting against the screen which is black
except for the blinking damned cursor. And some nights I
wake up on the floor. And some nights I forget the lights.
And some days I forget the curtains.
Eventually I get sick and lie in my bed with a fever at
night and feel sick with time and it's passing. No watch and
no sunlight means there's 8 hours a day where I'm forced to
investigate my place in time. It's revolting, I'm hopeless.
Every time there's a noise outside I think it's the end of the
world, I think the Koreans have nuked me, the terrorists
have crop dusted the country with Sarin and the fascists
are outside my door, ethnic cleansing boots on. It happens
all night. Vivid, repeating nightmares that travel in stale
spirals.
I go into my housemates room and look at his fish.
Camera from behind the tank, distorted view of me and Joe
looking into it.
He points at one of his angelfish "This guy keeps
swimming upside down, it's freaking me out."
"I bet he thinks all the other fish are crazy."
"I think he's sick."
I bet he thinks all the other fish are insane and he's
screaming at them:
"WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH YOU FUCKING IDIOTS?
You're UPSIDE DOWN, DUBMASSES."
Rotate the camera upside down and track the upside
down fish for a while.
#
I took a load of photographs once and showed them to a
photographer friend of mine who's never really liked my
work so I've always figured she was a good person to show
my photographs to. She said the photographs were
depressing. So I said:
"That's what I was going for, like, a bleakness, I wanted
them to feel bleak."
And English isn't her first language, so she didn't know
what bleakness was, so I explained it to her. And she said
"But why make something just to make people feel that?"
#
I'm telling Bill about my idea for the man who walks on his
hands.
He says "It sounds like a good idea actually, not the kind
of thing I'd write but it could still be cool."
"Y'know where I got the idea?" I'm holding my half full
strawberry milkshake and limp wristedly waving it around.
"I got the idea from my housemate, he's got these fish, and
one of them started swimming upside down."
Bill's nodding.
"And I thought, I thought I bet that guy thinks all the
other fish are insane for swimming that way round. I bet
that fish thinks that he's right swimming that way round."
Bill looks thoughtful for a second, munches on the celery
in his bloody mary. Then he starts talking: "I bet fish have a
really complicated idea of up. I bet it's not that simple in
the fish world. And I bet they don't say 'Things are looking
up,' or 'I'm feeling down.'"
"Well obviously they don't Bill. Why would they."
PROBLEMS WITH ART
STUDENTS
So I get contacted by Aliens that can travel through time. I
know, ha ha, I'm ripping of Vonnegut. Shut up, he didn't
invent aliens. Anyone can use them. The aliens want to
know about destinations. They say that they can see
everyone on my planet and all we do is walk forward, all at
the same speed. We're terrifying, we keep on moving
forward through time, en masse. Their philosophers have
been theorising. Some of them thought that we were
pilgrims. They noticed the way we reproduce so that there's
always someone going forward in time. They theorised that
we're all travelling somewhere, that we were passing
something to our offspring which has to arrive at some
destination. They asked me where. They did it through my
computer. They said Hi through my computer and they
asked where I was going, they were very polite. They did it
on MSN, they said WHERE ARE YOU GOING. They
pretended they were a 19 year old female art student,
they'd noticed my demographic's predilection for that
demographic. They added me on MSN and said
WHERE ARE YOU GOING.
I said I was going to go for a skate, I figured
skateboarding would make me seem cool, reckless,
youthful. I tried to enlarge their display picture to try and
work out if they were hot but I couldn't. They said,
YOU ARE SKATING .79 SOLAR CYCLES AWAY FROM
HERE. BUT YOU CONTINUE TO MOVE FORWARD. IF YOU
WISH TO SKATE YOU SHOULD RETURN TO .79 SOLAR
CYCLES AGO. YOU CONTINUE TO MOVE AWAY FROM
THIS POINT.
PROBLEMS WITH ART STUDENTS 24
I was like, woah, this chick worked out that percentage
wicked fast. Maybe she's one of those smart art students. I
bet she digs programming. So I say. "Nice maths =)" and
they say.
WHERE IS YOUR RACE GOING.
They don't use much punctuation because they can't be
bothered to get the ASCII codes for it. I'm thinking, she's
getting like, philosophical on me, sort of political. My
subconscious starts giving me advice, don't be a downer
dude. No chick has ever been attracted to a dude who
depressed her. My subconscious thinks it's a surfer or
something. Always saying Dude.
(R^1) says:
I dunno, some days I think it's getting worse,
but most of the time I think it's definitely getting better.
ARTSTUDENT says:
ARE YOU NOT AWARE OF YOUR DESTINATION.
My subconscious says Dude, try and sound deep about
how you feel your life doesn't have any sort of direction,
but put an emotional disclaimer on there dude, like say
that you're sure everyone feels that way, don't sound like
you're stuck up or chicle. I say
"No way, I mean, life is random, how could anyone know
what's going to happen?"
Try to create a connection with her by sharing a dislike
of something dude.
(R^1) says:
I mean,
don't you hate those people who are sure what they
want to do with their lives?
Like they want to work for this company and live in this
place and do these things?
She's an art student, dude, she must hate those people.
Everybody hates those people.
ARTSTUDENT says
IF YOU ARE UNAWARE OF YOUR DESTINATION WHY
DO YOU PERSIST.
There was a point in my life when I asked a lot of people
why they persist, I was trying to get some good ideas that I
could use myself. It was very juvenile, it was very teenage
and I don't want to tell her about it. It'll make me sound
like an ass. Like a 14 year old with eye liner and a poetry
journal. My subconscious agrees. Dude, you've got to bail
from this conversation with this art girl. Who can deal with
women man? Who can deal with art students?
The aliens say,
WE CANNOT FIND YOUR DESTINATION, IT EXISTS
BEYOND THE CURRENT UNIVERSE. HOW DO YOU
NAVIGATE TOWARDS IT.
They want to know how we're so sure of the direction
through time we're taking, how we know where we're
going to be in the future when it doesn't exist yet. They
think we have a choice. The universe expands physically
but it also expands through time and we are permanently
on it's raw frontier as it does. We are all on a train and the
track is being laid in front of us as it moves forwards. The
aliens don't get it. The aliens know we have memories and
they understand them as biological analogues to maps.
They don't understand why we have these maps of what is
happening at what point in the past if we cannot navigate
towards it. They don't understand that we can only squint
at these moments of the past through a blurred lens of
neurons, watching them grow smaller and more indistinct
as we move away from them. Some of the aliens have
theorised that these maps are what cause us to move
forward relentlessly, maybe we are cartographers of time,
constantly exploring it's frontiers.
WHY DO YOU TRAVEL TOWARDS THIS POSITION.
WHAT IS YOUR AIM.
I'm not paying attention to the art chick any more, she's
talking like a cross between SmarterChild and Doctor Who.
My subconscious is just saying Dude, this chick is crazy
wack, you gotta get out whilst you can. Let's eat some cake
dude, let's try and eat a load of cake. I don't like my
subconscious, I don't like art chicks, I don't like my haircut
and I'm not travelling anywhere. I'm in my room. I don't
have any aims. I was going to go skating.
(R^1) says
I gotta go
The aliens want to know where, but I sign off and walk
outside. As I close the door the aliens watch me from
above, but they're afraid to talk to me in person, they try to
avoid travelling into the unknown of the future as much as
possible. So they leave me to kick myself up to speed, and
roll away down the road.
PROBLEMS WITH HELICOPTERS
After the helicopter crash I was convinced I'd become

invisible. I started acting out of character. I started wincing
at car horns, I started to collect discarded pieces of foil that
I found on the floor, I started covering my face in bandages
and wearing a vast sweeping trench coat. Women loved
this. I told them I was a burn victim and didn't mention my
foil collection and they started coming back to my house.
Some of them wanted to look under the bandages but I told
them it was impossible and that they were beautiful and I
sealed all of my foil inside a plastic bag and put it into the
cistern of my toilet. I turned off the lights in my room so
they couldn't see that I was invisible and in the morning I
would wake before them and reapply my bandages and
wear very well ironed pyjamas and slippers with socks and
gloves. This must have seemed odd to them but no one
ever said anything.
It was easy to wake up before them because after the
helicopter crash I had repeated, vivid nightmares of
screeching metal and melting snow. I awoke from these
soundlessly and without fuss, sometimes two or three hours
before dawn. I would replace my bandages in the bathroom
whilst the women slept.
They would leave me phone numbers which I would call
sometimes, if something about the girl struck me
particularly, a curl of hair or the strict metrics of a stride.
These relationships lasted until I was asked when I would
be able to remove my bandages. I wouldn't ever be able to
remove the bandages because my face was invisible but I
couldn't tell them this so I would make an excuse to leave
and come home. I would remove my collection of wrinkled
foil from its bag and spread it onto my bed to stare at the
PROBLEMS WITH HELICOPTERS 28
bright surfaces which could not reflect my body.
I went to see my doctor about it.
"I don't know Harry, ever since that crash. I just don't
know what's happened to me, I think I'm invisible now,
light doesn't reflect from my body any more."
Harry didn't say anything. I can still remember him
screaming to eject, he knew you couldn't eject from a
helicopter but he screamed anyway.
"God I just don't know Harry, I'm really very sorry. I hope
you know how sorry I am." I felt a bit like crying.
Everything seemed very heavy around me and my hands
were tingling. I sniffed a little but it was very windy, people
at the graveyard probably just thought I had a cold.
"Fucking hell mate, cheer up." Harry said, he was
floating next to me. "At least you cured my fear of flying.
“It's just all so horrible."
"I know but it's not all bad, I can go through walls now,
spy on people."
After the helicopter crash Harry had become convinced
he was a ghost. He began floating instead of walking and
entering buildings through walls instead of doors. He was
still my doctor though.
"You don't spy on me though do you Harry?"
"Mate, you're fucking invisible, how would I spy on you?
I've seen the women you take home anyway, they aren't
worth spying on."
I wondered if he knew about my foil collection. I liked
the tinted foil, red or gold from chocolate bars. A week ago
I'd spent a morning trying to collect all the fragments of a
shattered Christmas ornament near my bus stop. It was
ground into a fine metallic sand by people's shoes. I had
brushed as much of it as I could into my palm and put it
into my pocket before I caught the bus.
"But what can I do about my invisibility Harry?"
"Get more sleep, do regular exercise three times a week,
cut down on red meat and food with preservatives, buy fair
trade, organic."
He began to drift away from me, following a pair of
female joggers running past the cemetery gates.
"Take ginko bilboa supplements with your breakfast and
eat plenty of fish rich in Omega 3. Wash your hands,
sterilise all utensils, try to reduce stress."
I couldn't hear him any more, just see his pale shape
effortlessly keeping pace with the joggers. I got off the
bench and started to walk home.
Harry said I was the only one who could see him, but I
didn't know why. He said it might be because I was a ghost
too but I knew I wasn't because I couldn't fly or go through
walls. I asked him if he saw other ghosts and he said
sometimes. He said occasionally he would see the ghosts of
other people but they would never speak to him. He said
mostly he saw the ghosts of animals. He said they were
everywhere, that the skies were dense with flocks of
spectral sparrows. That it mas impossible for him to see the
floor between the heaving mammalian bodies that
inhabited it, practically overlapping each other. Harry said
that the world he could see was clotted with undead
wildlife, that they crawled over the infrastructure of the
visible world, that they crowded onto phone lines and
garage roofs. I couldn't see them either way but sometimes
I thought of them, and wondered what unfinished business
wildlife could have.
I began taking Harry's advice. I bought herbal supplements
and installed a treadmill in my front room so that I could
run without people seeing my invisible arms sticking out of
my tshirt. I stopped eating meat altogether, I stopped
frying things. I tried meditating but I wasn't stressed
anyway. After the helicopter crash my insurance had paid
out heavily so I sat cross legged on my carpet and thought
maybe Harry was right, maybe it wasn't so bad. I had cured
his fear of flying and being invisible had made me more
successful with women than I had ever been in my life.
They kept talking to me, in bars, at bus stops, in queues
and on benches. It felt like they were following me, waiting
for excuses to start up conversation. I thought they might
be training their dogs to bark at me in parks. I used to love
dogs but now I found myself hating them. They sniffed at
my hands as I tried to pull bits of foil from underneath piles
of dead leaves.
I bought a metal detector and moved my collection to a
loose floorboard under my sink, I bought
compartmentalised boxes to sort and categorise all of my
shiny pieces of trash, first by colour then by size. I bought
more bandages and at the counter the cashier asked me if I
wanted to go for a drink. Then he winked at me. I went to
a different shop and I told the sales assistant that I needed
a fireproof safe. I installed it under the loose floorboard
and threw the sales assistant's number into the bin. I
needed time to myself. I called Harry and asked him who
had inherited his chalet. He walked through the wall of my
kitchen.
"Sorry, what was that?"
"Who inherited your chalet Harry? I need some piece
and quiet. Being invisible has made me irresistible."
"If you're so fucking irresistible then why are the women
who come back to your place such dogs?"
"I just want to get away from it all Harry, I can't handle
this attention. Can I go to the chalet? Is it empty?"
"They're dogs, the lot of them, no wonder they're all over
you, probably desperate."
"What are you talking about?"
Harry threw up his arms, one of them went through my
light shade.
"These women, they're fucking ugly. Or fat. They're
throwing themselves at you because you're too nice to
them. You keep telling this kind of woman that she's
beautiful, course they're going to find you irresistible."
I was confused, I could feel myself frowning as I replied.
"But I like them, and they like me. I used to tell women
they were beautiful before but they never liked me then."
"That's because you've become such a good fucking liar
lately."
"I don't know what you mean Harry. I just want to use
the chalet for a while."
Harry snarled and looked at the floor.
"Well you can't, my niece sold it the same week she
inherited, she didn't want to have to remember me.
Besides, how would you get there? Surely they revoked
your license after the crash."
"We didn't crash because of pilot error Harry, it was just
too windy that day. You know it was."
"Whatever mate," he said, "No one's going to sit in a
helicopter flown by an invisible man." Then he floated
upwards, through my ceiling and away.
I bought another fireproof safe and installed it with the first
one underneath my sink. My collection grew and grew but I
still spread it on my bed sometimes. Women kept talking to
me and I kept telling them they were beautiful. They all
wanted to know about my bandages, I told them I was born
horribly disfigured, that I couldn't bear the world to see
me. Some of them stayed and some of them went. I
couldn't make anything work with the ones who stayed.
They all expected to see my face eventually. I stared at my
own distracted reflection in pieces of garbage and I
wondered if the girls really were pretty or if I was lying to
them. I didn't know and it didn't matter.
After the helicopter crash I'd begun thinking about
suicide. There just didn't seem to be a lot to life as an
invisible man. I remembered reading about other people
who'd become invisible after heart attacks or nuclear
explosions or rail accidents. None of them lived very long
afterwards, most of the articles were written after they'd
killed themselves and been discovered. Many of them had
hidden their invisibility from close family and friends until
the very end.
The thing that made me hold back from suicide was the
idea of having to see the other ghosts. Harry said it seemed
like every animal that had ever died was a ghost. He said
that in comparison to the animals there was barely any
living humans, let alone dead ones. I dreaded being alone
with the ghosts of thousands of sparrows, mice and deer.
Seeing them clustering around my kitchen, pushing
through them to reach my car. I couldn't face them and so I
stayed alive.
PROBLEMS WITH DREAMS
First of all I'm going to say the narrator of this story is me
Riaz Moola. I'm mentioning this first. I'm getting it off my
chest. I used to try to distance myself as heavily as possible
from my stories. I think I did this because I thought it was
somehow teenage or juvenile to write stories about
yourself. Like taking self portraits in the bathroom mirror. A
trait worthy of derision and mockery. ,A Myspace kind of
trait.
So I stopped doing it. But I found this made everything I
wrote seem sort of contrived. Everything seemed sort of
fake. I wrote some OK stuff, but it was a struggle. I
struggled and moaned and beat upon my chest. And
eventually I went to the library and took out a book on
Egon Schiele, this expressionistic painter from Vienna who
seemed to do nothing but paint self portraits in mirrors. He
seemed to be getting away with it though. Noone seemed
to be calling him teenage and juvenile and Myspacey. No
one was calling him out on it. Noone in the book at least.
So I went home and talked to a friend of mine who
knows more than me about art. She was the one who told
me to look into Schiele in the first place. She told me that
the art world has a history of being obsessed with self
expression, that it's considered totally legitimate to do
nothing but talk about yourself. And apparently you could
still become critically acclaimed and successful doing so.
And if you did it right, basically noone would call you
teenage and juvenile. This realisation has liberated me
from my own self criticism for a while, and as a result I
have placed myself firmly within this story. Operating as an
omniscient, informal narrator. I am aware that this
PROBLEMS WITH DREAMS 34
approach is not particularly innovative nor is it worthy of
particular attention.
As the omniscient narrator I'm going to say that the thing
with this story is that it's set in a world where people can
accurately and vividly record their own dreams as first
person videos with sound. This is the major conceit of my
story. I read Crash recently and JG Ballard said in the intro
that the modern writer should be a sort of scientist. He
said:
"His role is that of the scientist, whether on safari or in
his laboratory, faced with an unknown terrain or subject.
All he can do is to devise various hypotheses and test them
against the facts."
Maybe its not exactly what he meant, but this is what I
have tried to become. A scientist investigating what would
happen in a world where people can record their own
dreams. To that end, if you'll allow me to strain the
metaphor, this computer I sit at is my lab, and this story, my
experiment.
#
The setting of this experiment is some sprawling, coastal

city. Covered with rows of light, modern houses that all
look the same. The kind of place that noone goes on
holiday to. The kind of place where every fake marble floor
is covered with sand. Like Milton Keynes if it was built in
the South of France.
The first subject in this experiment is named Famos
Eeprom. He's a small time blogger with dreams of the big
time. He's got one eye on his hit counter and the other on
his ad revenue. Which is a shame, because they're both so
small that you really need two eyes to make them out. He's
vaguely Greek, and fairly overweight. He has profiles on
too many social networks and his blog is about Electronic
Design Automation. This is the activity of training
computers to help make better computers.
According to my notes, on the first day of this
experiment he walked into a dark bar on a sunny day to
meet some friends he'd never seen before.
The second subject in this experiment is Ben Wei. He's
Taiwanese to an unspecified and irrelevant degree and his
dream logger is a basic Logitech model that he bought with
the maximum of fuss. The result of a solid week trawling
online review sites and comparison search engines. He
dedicated an entire folder of his bookmarks to the activity
and although it's beyond the scope of this experiment I will
mention that he absentmindedly kept the folder for two
years, only losing it when he reinstalled his operating
system and forgot to back up his bookmarks.
Although he records his dreams, he refuses to show
them to anyone. He says it's because he thinks dreams are
meaningless, but in reality he's ashamed by how boring his
are. They're rehashes of his day job as an I.T technician for
some generic company. They show him sitting down,
staring at a screen and occasionally mulling over the same
problem he was thinking about before he fell asleep.
On the first day of this experiment he forgot to password
his screensaver when he went downstairs to get a
sandwich.
The third subject in this experiment is named Ellen. She
and Ben met at someone's house warming party. They
didn't like each other at first, but they live together now in
a featureless apartment near the sea. Her dream recorder is
a sleek Sony model that she uses some days and most
nights to record her hazy subconscious. It captures feverish
nightmares of endless production lines and vicious
computer game bosses half remembered from a tomboy
youth. She's crazy. But over the years many men have been
willing to overlook this due to her willingness to discuss
esoteric side scrolling shooters or the differences between
competing digital content distribution systems. This
attention, exclusively distributed by nerds, has only made
her crazier.
On the first day of this experiment, she nudged Ben's

mouse to cancel his screen saver, plugged a memory stick
into his computer and copied over a script she'd created.
She set the script to run whenever the computer was
turned on and went downstairs to distract Ben for long
enough for his screensaver to reactivate.
The distraction took the form of a pointless argument
over whether Ben had been reading her emails. He hadn't,
but like I said, she's crazy.
At this juncture I think I should say that these names

deliberately reference other things. Ellen and Ben are the
titular characters of a Dismemberment Plan track and Famos
Eeprom is a type of memory device that I studied at
university. According to my notes, in the next scene I'll
introduce a character called Neon El Basha. This isn't a
reference to anything in particular, but I saw someone
using the name on the internet once and I wrote it down. I
often struggle with names, and Neon El Basha seemed ideal
to place in some kind of vaguely futuristic story like this
one.
I'd also like to really quickly mention that I got the idea
for the dream recorders from this video I saw online that
had a robot programmed to mimic the movements of a
dreaming person. They'd somehow scanned a person's
dreaming mind and rebuilt the movements out of that. It
doesn't seem too great a stretch to imagine them rebuilding
the things a person hears and sees too.
The reason I mention this is that I don't want people to
think the technology presented in the story is too far
fetched. I want it to seem reasonably contemporary. I don't
want the story to seem like it's set in the world 2020, I
want people to feel like the story is set in the present day. I
want it to seem familiar.
#
When time = zero, Famos Eeprom walks through a
doorway and into a bar and a blog meet. Strictly a C List
event. Odd looking women and men (overwhelmingly
men) trying to network their way to a link from someone
with Adsense revenue high enough that they only have to
temp three days a week instead of full time.
Of the eight bloggers who'd turned up to the event there
was only one of them who was capable of generating this
kind of exposure. She was a girl, so naturally she was
thinking of leaving. Her name was Neon El Basha, Arab to
some unspecified and irrelevant degree and attractive
enough that none of the damaged men nearby could
muster the courage to converse with her in anything but
the smallest of small talk. Famos found a seat next to her
and extended his hand.
"Famos," He said, and when she failed to recognise him
he helpfully added, "EDAgeek.com?"
She pretended this was helpful and they limply shook
hands.
It wasn't helpful because Neon El Basha was not the
kind of girl who was interested in the activity of teaching
computers to make faster computers. She was the kind of
girl who recorded her dreams and uploaded them to her
blog. In this experiment this is what some people do.
People with interesting dreams record and upload them.
Successful ones make a living through ad revenue and
merchandising. Neon was wearing one of her own tshirts,
a dark blue American Apparel baby doll with a stylised
drawing of a floating plastic bag. In her dreams it was a
recurring motif, a giant plastic bag, as big as a man, drifting
idly past.
Though Famos was by no means an attractive man he
benefited from a quirk of anatomy that made him
considerably better looking than average when his head
was pointed directly forward. As this was the angle he
viewed himself in his mirror every morning he'd begun to
believe he really was that good looking, and consequently,
that he was worthy company for women who would quite
fairly be considered out of his league.
The whole idea of people being considered out of other
people's league is one which has been playing on my mind
lately. Because recently, like last week or something, one of
my friends got drunk and told me that:
"Riaz only likes white girls that are out of his league."
"What?"
"You only like really pretty girls who are way out of your
league."
I was taken aback, I mean I was shocked, I mean I was
clutching my heart and saying many oaths upon it. The
white girls thing didn't bother me too much (on account of
how easy it was to disprove) it was the out of my league
thing.
"What are you talking about? What do you mean out of
my league? What do you even know about what girls I
like?”
I was disgusted and frightened and a little thrilled by the
accusation. My friend tried pacify me by clarifying what he
meant.
"Not just for you, for me, for anyone. They're out of
everyone's league."
I had always assumed that the human libido had some
kind of built in mechanism to prevent you from only going
after people out of your league. Some kind of system that
meant that your standards would always be lowered
enough, that you'd intrinsically settle.
I mean I'm pretty sure I still believe this. I'm fairly
certain. But the idea that this mechanism could fail has
been bothering me ever since. I know that the whole idea
of people being out of your league is nonsense. But its also
pretty true. I don't know. It's been bothering me.
A few moments after time = zero, Ellen and Ben are

arguing over Ben reading Ellen's emails. The fact of the
matter is Ben couldn't access them if he wanted, Ellen's
password is fourteen characters long and she never lets her
computer save log in details. Ben was trying to explain this.
"Your password is like, eighteen characters long or
something. Why would I even try and read your emails?"
"I don't know,"
"What can I even say to that?"
"You could admit it."
"I won't, I won't admit something that isn't true."
Ellen was quiet for a second.
"I knew you wouldn't admit it."
"There's nothing to admit."
At this juncture I want to point out that there's nothing,
literally nothing that Ben is intentionally hiding from Ellen.
He's just a quiet man, not given to talking about himself.
Ellen cannot believe this, and although she started this
argument with no purpose other than distraction, she
sincerely believes he has committed every crime she has
accused him of. She's convinced he reads her email, and
she's convinced his stoicism is a cover.
I hope, I dearly hope that noone thinks I'm basing Ellen on
anyone I know. I would like to point out at this juncture,
that any character from real life will be referred to as such.
For example when writing the previous scene with
Famos and Neon I realised that according to my notes they
have a one night stand. I have no idea how people act
before after or during a one night stand. I mentioned this
to my friend. The friend who told me about Schiele, from
real life. I said:
“Maybe I should go out, have a one night stand and then
write it up. To ensure accuracy."
Then I started worrying that I'd wasted my life, that
maybe I should have had some one night stands by now, at
the very least so I'd know how people react in them so I
could maybe write some stories that contained them. I
started worrying that maybe I needed to live more, you
know? I started worrying.
Anyway my friend said maybe I should go out and have
a one night stand and then write it up. She mentioned a
girl I'd mentioned once. I think she had a thing for me, but
I wasn't that into her. I mean maybe I should have been
into her though, maybe I set my standards too high. Maybe
I think I'm better looking than I am because of the way I
look in mirrors. I mean it could happen, that kind of thing
could happen to me.
Either way I didn't do anything. I stayed in, so if any of
the details concerning this relationship seem phony I'm
sorry. It's because the creator of this experiment is
incapable of showing himself a good time, let alone
someone else.
On day two of this experiment Famos woke up in an

unfamiliar room with a slight hangover. He massaged his
eyeballs open and peered at his watch. It was still early and
the watch's plastic face had gained a couple dozen fresh
scratches overnight. He made a feeble attempt to buff them
out on the bedsheets before collapsing back into bed.
The impact of his body sent a gentle jolt to the bed's
other occupant, Neon El Basha. A sticky wave of nausea
rushed to her throat but she held it in, screwed up her eyes
and tried to act as if she was still asleep whilst Famos
stared out from his side of the bed.
He noticed two things in the diffuse light of morning.
The first was the fact that every single one of the walls in
this room was totally bare. There wasn't a painting or a peg
board on any one of them. This gave the room an
unfinished air. As if its occupant was still planning on
moving in or moving out.
The second thing he noticed was an old and outdated
Panasonic dream recorder lying on a dressing table.
Panasonic had never been much of a trend setter in the
dream recorder market. They'd caught on late to the
potential of the devices and been relegated to producing
low budget models with none of the accuracy or clarity of
the more refined manufacturers.
And it was odd that El Basha would own one, Famos
thought, because he'd seen some of her dreams and they
were well recorded. The sound seemed well synced to
whoever was talking and the overall level of detail the
device managed to extract was high.
Famos had always assumed this was because the
recordings were made on some top tier recorder. Probably
purchased from one of the many bespoke companies who
performed professional tuning and adjustments to optimize
signal analysis and pickup. The Panasonic he could see
didn't even have the user interface to do much more than
adjust brightness and contrast. He ignored it, considered
turning over to spoon, decided against it and went back to
sleep.
On day two of this experiment Ellen woke before Ben. This
was normal, Ellen's sleep was light and frequently
interrupted by the labyrinthine nightmares which coiled
and knotted through her subconscious. Conversely, Ben
slept the sleep of the dead and didn't notice Ellen get out of
bed and turn on her computer. And the sound of her
drumming her fingertips on the keyboard's wrist support
whilst she waited to log in didn't wake him either. Ellent's
finger tips struck against the plastic bluntly, her ragged
nails didn't make contact with the plastic.
The script which Ellen had dropped into Ben's home
directory when time = zero was basic. All it did was wait
until the computer went idle, scan the hard drive for new
dream recorder files and upload them to a webserver
rented for this exclusive purpose. She'd managed to write
the script in a couple of hours, then got bored and added
some routines which would vary how much bandwidth
would be used depending on whether the machine was still
idle or not.
By default it was set to use next to nothing, but this
didn't matter. Ben was one of those guys who left his
computer running 24/7, refusing to turn it off. During
thunder storms Ellen would beg him to unplug the device,
paranoid that lightning conducted through the ground wire
would fry his machine. He never did it.
What Ellen was checking now was the webserver that
Ben's dream files had been uploaded to, she selected one at
random and began streaming it.
The dream consisted primarily of a conversation
between Ben and a girl that Ellen didn't know. The two of
them were sat in a work cafeteria somewhere, discussing
an esoteric I.T problem that Ellen recognised. Ben had
asked her opinion on it weeks ago and she'd dutifully
explained an elaborate but practical solution which he'd
eventually implemented. The dream had obviously taken
place before this though, as Ben and the girl seemed to be
still trying to work to a solution.
"What if we"
"The firmware wouldn't support it"
"I saw an open source version."
The dream's viewpoint swung hazily around the room,
but always settled back on the girl's face. It was an OK face,
as far as Ellen could determine, probably one of Ben's
workmates.
But as she sat, absorbing everything she saw in the pale
morning light, a sense of slow uneasiness began to move
through her bones.
Famos and El Basha parted only somewhat awkwardly,

mainly due to Famos's inability to sense any of El Basha's
regret over their hook up. Oblivious as ever he caught a
taxi into town, bought a sandwich and then caught a train
back to his house. By the time he got in and began
uploading the meaningless photos of the meetup to the
meetup's meaningless photogroup it had been nearly fifteen
hours since he'd last logged onto his computer.
As a result his inbox was in a perilously overgrown state,
and as the status bar on his photo upload began ticking
upwards he did some cursory pruning. Starring a few
articles for reading at some fictional future date, and
reading follow up posts from other people at the meet,
hungrily scanning them for any mention of himself.
He noted that El Basha had also made a post which he
checked hurridly and not without some small amount of
apprehension. It didn't mention him, or even the meet. It
was a terse single line presenting her latest video in which
a confused El Basha, standing near a marsh fire, watched
crocodiles talking about train cars and balloon flight before
the emblematic giant plastic bag blew past her, lodged itself
in a tree and caught fire.
Famos scratched his stomach, checked the post again
and scratched his stomach some more. It said she'd had the
dream last night, but he'd seen her dream recorder sitting
on her bedside table. And she hadn't been using it. It was a
puzzler, but he didn't have time to give it due
consideration. He had to write his own post meet up break
down, making special effort not to mention a single one of
the people who'd failed to mention him.
#
At this juncture I want to mention an anecdote of mine,

from a couple of years ago. I was in my kitchen, talking to
my housemate and I said:
"You know how you can guarantee getting someone to
talk to you? Say you had a dream with them in. Everyone
likes hearing about themselves in other people's dreams.
When you're in someone else's dream you're this weird
form of yourself, you're like the sum of other people's
perceptions."
He looked at me like I was an idiot.
"Duh man, I've been making up dreams so I can do that
that for years,"
For the remainder of the second day of this experiment

Ellen spent her time trying to get Ben to talk about his
dreams without mentioning the fact that she'd been
watching them. She wasn't successful. Ben claimed he
recorded his dreams for himself out of idle curiosity but he
refused to talk about them. He said talking about them
would give them a significance that he didn't think they
deserved. So Ellen kept watching.
She began to believe the girl from the first dream was in
all of Ben's dreams. It was difficult to be sure, and a non
crazy person would have realised this. Most people in
dream recordings were rendered blurrily or hazily or not at
all and recognising them was a chore. Ellen ignored this
and stuck with her gut feeling that Ben was hiding an
obsession with this vaporous girl. She was sitting on the
beach with him as he ate pens, she was selling him glasses
that made his eyes reduce to pin size dots in the mirror. In
reality, although there was other women in Ben's dreams,
the majority of the female figures were Ellen herself,
though she didn't realise it. Ellen decided Ben was obsessed
over this dream girl, and she brooded and sulked about it,
planning to draw out the inevitable fight over a period of
two days.
Ben had already sensed that this fight was brewing and
began a preliminary scouting mission in which he asked,
tentatively, if anything was wrong.
Ellen replied a little thinly:
"Why would you think anything was wrong?"
"You seem edgy."
"I'm not edgy, you always say that I seem edgy."
Ben did often say that Ellen seemed edgy. Anyone who
knew her frequently commented that she seemed edgy,
sketchy, wound up or freaked out. She was.
"I was just checking." Ben said, before retreating.
He knew there was an argument to come but its
approach would be glacial. It wouldn't arrive any faster or
any slower no matter what he did, but he knew it would
come.
By day three of the experiment Famos had gotten round to
being heavily perplexed by Neon's refusal to mention him
on her blog. Any Serengheti ranger can tell you that a
wounded animal is more of a danger than an able bodied
one and in this respect Famos' pride was a truly massive
creature with a bullet superficially lodged in its shoulder.
He called ElBasha and when she didn't pick up he went
to her house, hesitating only for a microsecond before
ringing her doorbell. She peered lazily out from behind the
door frame a second later.
"Yeah?"
"Can I come in?" He asked.
She swung the door wide open and walked through the
hallway into her lounge. After another microsecond of
hesitation Famos followed her. The windows were open and
net curtains were billowing inwards with the breeze. They
nearly engulfed her as she lay down on the couch. A new
looking copy of Moby Dick was next to her head on the
floor, its spine split to keep the page. The room had the
same unfinished air as her bedroom, mismatched furniture
and bare walls. An air of impermanence and diffused
afternoon light.
She picked up a still lit cigar balanced on the edge of a
saucer and Famos felt his confidence evaporate like
Panatela smoke. What was he doing here? What could he
say?
He said: "So how's it going?"
Neon looked at him sideways through the swaying
curtain and half smiled. There was only one other chair in
the room so he sat down on its edge.
"Not bad."
"I caught your latest dream. The one with the talking
crocodiles, I liked it."
"Yeah. That was a good one."
He shifted his weight around. Crossed his legs, then
uncrossed them.
"When exactly, did you record it?"
Neon El Basha smiled like she knew he was going to ask
her this.
"About two weeks ago, I think. Did I tell you I've been
drinking?"
She made a gesture towards a dusty and empty scotch
bottle. Expensive scotch. Famos acknowledged it, but tried
to remain on topic.
"Two weeks ago? But you said you recorded it the night I
slept over."
There was a barely precipitable ripple in Eprom's voice
when he said slept over. He thought it was barely
perceptible but he also saw Neon's mouth twitch into a
smile at the same time. It could have been a coincidence. It
wasn't, but it could have been.
"I've gotten so drunk," El Basha said in a clear voice.
"That I need to tell you something."
"Uh, sure,"
"The thing is, I don't record those dreams."
She exhaled blue smoke into the afternoon.
"I think if you went home and really analysed a couple
of my dreams, if you really analysed the plastic bag floating
past, you'd start to see something pretty interesting."
"Like what?"
She said nothing and stared at the ceiling as if he wasn't
there.
Neon El Basha wasn't drunk at all, but Famos was far too
stupid to see this. At that moment the majority of his
mental processing was taken up with estimating the
amount of traffic that would be diverted to his blog if he
could work out exactly what she meant about not recording
her dreams. He mumbled a goodbye and got up to leave.
She didn't see him to the door.
At this juncture my notes simply say:
"People are recruited by a cult, sell and donate all their
possessions, cult leader says the end of the world is coming.
They go to the top of a multi story car park to wait, it's an
icy, cold night. At the appointed hour nothing happens, the
world doesn't end. Their leader appears in a new car, he
says all of their donations have been put into buying it, he
says that the end of the world has happened for them, from
now on they are reborn. He drives the car off the car park
roof. Remaining cult members think the whole thing is
corny as hell. Are all irritated. No one changes. Try to get
their money from the car insurance company"
On day four of this experiment Ellen and Ben were
breaking up loudly at a wedding. As predicted, the fight
had been a drawn out affair. Old grudges were brought out
to air, long dormant suspicions were taken as fact and
accusations of supposed wrongdoings were countered with
the proof of actual crimes. Near its 13th hour, in a period of
supposed truce Ellen had begun openly watching Ben's
dreams on her laptop, giving him the ammunition to go on
the offensive, an advantage he was pushing at this point,
near the buffet table. Which wasn't wise, given Ellen's
propensity for throwing things and the very expensive suit
he was wearing.
On the other side of the sparse dance floor Famos
Eeprom was trying to check his hit counter on his phone.
He didn't have enough bars to get a worthwhile data
connection and eventually gave up, sleepy eyed. He'd spent
the majority of the previous night feverishly overlaying
footage of floating plastic bags atop one another and for
the most part the footage matched up, frame for frame. It
looked like the bag had been taken from some common
source and artificially implanted in the scenes. He'd double
checked his findings and eventually published them to his
site, shaking with excitement. People had caught on and
the story had spread through the relevant channels in the
dream logger community.
After the post detailing his findings went global, people
started finding other problems with the recordings. Other
details which made the dreams seem like they were
doctored, or perhaps even fabricated entirely. Eventually an
out of work actor had stepped forward, claiming that he'd
been hired for a bit part in one of the dreams as a heavily
pierced man who moved like a holographic sticker. He said
the whole thing had been green screened and people who
saw his website couldn't see much to disagree about. He
looked like exactly the same guy because he was. Very few
people were questioning why an out of work actor would
have such a polished website or why he had so many
photos of the studio equipment that had been used to
record him.
Across the room, Ben was yelling.
"You just don't do that, it's a total breach of trust, it's
immoral."
Ben's arguments were still lodged in the rational and the
philosophical realms. They had corroborating statements,
bullet points and concluding paragraphs. Ellen's arguments
had collapsed into throwing a heavy bowl of ranch dressing
at her lover's chest. It hit his foot on the way down,
cracking a nail. Later that night, when undressing for bed
he'd find his sock stiff with blood, but now all he could look
at was Ellen's back as he limped after her.
At this juncture I want to mention something I read when I
was doing research for this story. I read that twelve percent
of people only dream in black and white. I read this fact on
Wikipedia when I was researching this story and I can't
think of any way to fit it in, but I wanted to mention it
because it's such a lovely idea.
Ellen's back was the last part of her Ben ever saw. He
couldn't limp fast enough and by the time he got outside he
was just in time to see her accelerating away in his car. He
picked it up from her sister's house a week later but Ellen
herself wasn't around.
At this juncture my notes consist of three lines from the
song Ellen and Ben:
It seems kinda weird,
they make each other feel like they could die but
they couldn't stay the slightest of friends
The song is the final track on the Dismemberment Plan's
final album, Change. It tells the story of the titular couple
from the view of a somewhat dispassionate first person
narrator. The narrator seems like the kind of guy who keeps
his head above water and relies on his heart to do nothing
but pump blood and keep time. Conversely, Ellen and Ben
are a couple that come together in a parabolic romance
that eventually collapses with the above results.
The song has obviously played some part in the
inspiration of this experiment, not only in the naming of
the characters, but also in the use of a third person narrator
who exists within the story world, not just as an omniscient
deity. Whilst I understand I, Riaz Moola, don't exist within
the science fiction world of dream loggers, I do exist as a
character within the context of this piece overall. And even
if I wasn't a character, I'd still exist here, somewhere. I
wrote the story. You'd still see me behind every paragraph
no matter what I did. It would still be just as much of a self
portrait. I guess maybe that's why the art world decided to
be so welcoming of self obsession in art. What can you do
that can't be somehow traced back to yourself?
A few days later, someone smarter than Famos linked the
out of work actor's website to an ad company in Berlin who
eventually revealed that the whole thing had been schilling
for some new Sony camcorder and editing package that
had apparently been used to stitch the fake dreams
together. El Basha's credibility plummeted, people were
upset and betrayed for about a week, before they found
something new to fixate on. El Basha didn't get particularly
upset. She'd been growing tired of recording dreams at
around the time Sony approached her, so she dropped the
blog and used the money to buy more Scotch, more
Panatellas, and start up a recruitment firm specialising in
financial analysts.
The boost of traffic Famos got for his expose was of
course, fleeting. The majority of the hits were from people
who were interested in the nocturnal habits of a dark
haired woman with big eyes and not the activity of
teaching computers to make better computers. He had to
turn comments off after the big reveal. Most people
assumed he'd been part of the grand deception, when in
reality he'd merely been a pawn. When the traffic died
down he was back to hustling, working freelance for some
digital signal processing company and trying to keep his
bounce rate below 75%.
Ellen and Ben really didn't see each other again, soon
after their breakup Ellen was head hunted by a recruitment
company in competition with El Basha's firm and had to
relocate for the job. Ben stayed in the robotic coastal town
and found another girlfriend who was less interested in his
hobbies, but also less crazy. He was happier with Ellen.
As for me, your humble narrator, I finished writing this
story, graduated from university and moved back in with
my mother. My eyes hurt, especially the left one and I'm
afraid I'm going blind. My father's family has a history of
eye problems and it terrifies me. It really does. I try and
comfort myself with the thought of famous writers who
went blind (Joyce, Borges) but it doesn't really work. I'm
not Borges and I know it and it terrifies me. Everything
terrifies me.
PROBLEMS WITH CRANE FLY
Alright, so the entire space station is covered in crane flies.
They're everywhere, they're all over my quarters. One of
them flew through my Solar System Hologram map and left
this weird hole in Saturn. One of them flew near my mouth
whilst I was brushing my teeth and then I had to brush
them again. Every day my space cat managed to murder
about two or three hundred by jumping from my couch and
swinging wildly at the dense cloud of flies which gathered
around my lamp. Eventually the swarm demonstrated a
sinister intelligence and collectively picked her up and flew
her into the airlock. She managed to override the door
controls and escape before they launched her into space
but once she told me about the whole episode I realised I
needed to up my game. Previously I'd just been applying
double insect repellent and using an old Lynx "Africa"
deodorant aerosol and a lighter as a crude flame thrower to
clear a path to wherever I needed to go but if the crane
flies were up to actually harassing a mammal then it was
only a matter of time before they came after me, and there
was no way I was going down because of some low ass
Diptera. Motherfuckers can't even be bothered to evolve
lungs.
So I decide to head down to the repair bay because I
know Ahmed would be there fixing the aft deflector array. I
rig my desk fan to one of my particle batteries and use it to
clear a path through the flies as I head down the three
floors to the repair bay. When I finally get there I find
Ahmed has turned the main satellite dish into a bowl and is
skating it on a nine inch wide pool board.
I turn off the fan.
PROBLEMS WITH CRANE FLY 53
"Hey AHMED," Ahmed clicks up the coping and stands
on the ledge and I yell again, "Hey, HEY AHMED."
"Salaaaaams brother, I'm working on my backside axel
stalls."
I'm like "What?"
"I saw this awesome Bones Brigade thing on Google
Video, all this kind of old school stuff. Tony Hawk's in it but
he's really young."
"Ahmed I'm having a problem with the crane flies."
He takes his helmet off and wipes at his forehead then
puts it back on and strokes his beard.
"Crane flies?"
"Yeah Ahmed, the fucking crane flies, they're all over the
fucking station. What are we going to do about it? I caught
some of them trying to fuck with the RAID array on my
machine, this shit has to stop."
"Have you tried praying to Allah almighty?"
"Yeah, sure Ahmed, I prayed like fifty times, he told me
to ask you why the fuck we've got so many flies on a
fucking space station, are they space flies or something?
Because I don't need that kind of problem Ahmed. We need
to like, irradiate the entire place and kill them all or
something, I don't know."
"These are all Allah's creatures," Ahmed says, holding
out his hands like, what can I do? "Maybe their growth has
been encouraged due to the recent heat and moisture
giving their larvae an ideal environment to thrive in?"
"What?"
"They need moist, leafy debris to feed on and warm
weather encourages their reproductive process."
I'm like, flabbergasted. "Ahmed, this is a space station,
we don't have any weather or leafy debris. What's the
matter with you?"
"Have you considered the hydroponics deck?" Ahmed
says as he redoes the strap on his helmet but I'm not
listening because I have an idea.
"I got it, I'll just like, replicate some small birds or
whatever to EAT all the crane fly, and I can get rid of those
with like, hawks or something."
"Have you not heard the story of the woman who
swallowed the fly?" Ahmed thinks he's so fucking wise, but
he's not.
"Course I've heard that shitty story you retard. Haven't
you heard that as you climb the food chain you have
animals with a larger mass but a lower population
density?"
"Of course, Allah Almighty has created everything in
balance."
"So eventually there'll only be like, three Centurian
Death Worms on board or whatever, and I'll just waste
them using my ion blaster." I pat the ion blaster on my hip
and smile smugly.
Ahmed looks at me pityingly before he drops back into
the satellite dish and pumps around the perimeter a couple
of times to build momentum. I turn to leave and behind
me, he flies out of the dish and catches at least 4 foot of air
above the main capacitor bank. I hear the sharp click of his
landing before the bay doors close and I head through the
soft clouds of crane fly towards the replicators.
PROBLEMS WITH CHEMISTRY
It was a pale blue day. The leaves on my street were

turning white instead of yellow and it made all the trees
look like they were covered in frost. I sat in my office trying
to learn how to roll a coin across my knuckles. I'd seen a
card sharp do it last week at a casino bust and it'd
impressed me. It looked like the kind of skill that'd impress
people, unless you looked like you'd been practising it in
your office. I always look like I practice things in my office.
The Chief walked in and I dropped the coin with a
clatter.
"You done with the paperwork on the Manhattan file?"
he asked. The chief is one of those fifty five year olds who
still look twenty five. He was wearing a brightly coloured
tie which set off his tan beautifully and he was drinking a
smoothie with added B vitamins.
"I left it with my partner." I replied. "She handles all of
that kind of thing."
My partner is a piece of bark who can tell when people
are lying. She was in my left hand desk draw, lying on a
bed of tissue paper.
"I got a new case for you two," The Chief said, and he
dropped a brown folder onto my desk. I didn't make any
movement towards it.
"What's the problem? Some kid screw up his taxes?"
"Six murders, Laplace." The Chief said, softly.
I pulled a toffee out of my right hand desk draw and
unwrapping it as I leaned back in my chair.
"So what?"
The Chief wondered over to my window and stared
through the blinds.
PROBLEMS WITH CHEMISTRY 56
"This city used to be quiet as felt maracas three weeks
ago, now it's a gang bang, and it's the public's sense of
safety getting fucked."
"What can I say?"
"Say you'll take the case."
"I'll think about it."
The Chief looked sadly at me, I sucked on my toffee
contemplatively.
The case began long before that though, the first clue was
an engraved fountain pen. It was brushed steel with a 13
karat nib. The lid was engraved with the words: "To Ace,
with Love." One of the forensics team showed it to me,
Turner, a serious looking brunette with a habit of sitting on
desks. She's too young for me. Too smart for me too. I
stepped under the crime tape as she handed the pen to me,
sealed in a ziploc bag.
The plot used to hold a 24 hour supermarket. Now the
blackened hull stood there, skeletal. I could still see price
tags, cash registers, piles of biscuits melted in their
wrappers. I've burned a biscuit once in my life, in science
class a long time ago. The biscuit heated a beaker of water.
The purpose of the experiment is lost to me now. Chemistry
was always my weakest subject. French was my strongest.
The remains smelt like barbecue sauce flavoured crisps.
Not like an actual barbeque, like the artificial
approximation of a barbeque. A friend from Internal Affairs
told me that the smell of barbequed human flesh is like that
of chicken. He told me that his doctor fired a laser into his
eyes and the smell of fried chicken engulfed the room. He
says he saw his doctor, a thin, unhealthy man, pawing fast
food chicken into his mouth three weeks later. He says it
unnerved him but he couldn't tell me why. He shuffled from
side to side and left the room. No one trusts a man from
internal affairs.
"What've we got?" I asked.
"Shop burnt down, poor bastard died of smoke
inhalation. We're thinking either arson or a faulty gas
mains."
"You can't tell?"
"We've reason to suspect the gas main had been
tampered with."
A guy in a white mylar suit took wide strides next to me
and stepped into a van packed with some serious looking
equipment. Nearby I heard the sound of a flash gun
capacitor recharging.
"Tampered with how?"
"Forensics have been examining what's left of the boiler
and they reckon it's possible that it was rigged within the
production process itself, we suspect that this particular
unit was fitted with a regulator valve that was set to
catastrophically fail after eight years use."
"Keep talking."
"We're liaising with the distributors, they're telling a
different story."
"Natch."
"They say they were fed a dud regulator valve. The way
they sing it you'd believe someone at the valve plant
wanted this poor bastard dead."
"That's sweet, but this isn't their opera. What're you
singing?"
She exhaled and shrugged.
"Too obvious. A valve rigged to blow in eight years
would raise a lot of red flags down at the distributors, way
I see it, the valve was set to do something a lot less
dramatic, cause some kind of problem that'd convince the
poor bastard to call a plumber. Only his usual plumber isn't
available, he's sick, so he goes with a new guy. Only the
new guy isn't exactly on the level, he leaves the device in
great shape, but he knows it won't stay that way too long, if
you follow my drift."
"I follow it fine. You can't throw an apple core in this city
without it hitting a dozen rotten plumbers. Sounds like
you've got it all wrapped up. I've got just one more
question. Why'd you call me down here?"
"I wanted you to see that pen, recognise it?"
I'd forgotten I was holding it. I pulled it out of my pocket
and stared hard through the plastic bag.
"Your wife wanted you to buy her a pen like this, once."
Turner said.
"The exact same pen?"
"No, not the same kind of pen, just a nice pen. It could
have been any pen. She was sick of using biros, she always
lost them, and she knew if she bought herself a nice pen
she'd lose it too, but she thought if you bought her a pen, a
nice one, she thought she'd be too scared to lose it."
I lowered the pen and looked at her.
"Never bought her one though, did you?" Turner said. It
didn't sound like a question. I put the question mark there
to appease my high school english teacher.
I held out my hands, palms up.
"What can I say?"
She snatched the pen back and put it in her pocket.
"Not a thing."
I chewed the whole thing over with Jones in our after
work bar, The Purple Crab. I was drinking a Cherry
Comfort. That's two shots of Southern Comfort mixed with
Cherry Coke and ice. I sipped it quietly. Jones was hitting
on the bartender. She was too young for him but he didn't
care, he was running his finger up her arm. She squealed
with delight. I rolled my eyes as hard as possible but
neither of them seemed to notice.
"Look, Jones," I said, "five murders, all of them look like
accidents. Its got to be a professional job."
He wasn't listening, he was saying something to the girl
about how the moment he saw her, he knew she had a very
vivid imagination.
"Either a professional job, or someone wants it to look
like it was a professional job."
Neither Jones nor the girl would have noticed if I'd set
my eyebrows on fire. I took another sip of Cherry Comfort
anyway. It gave me the strength to go on talking.
"Except the only people smart enough to pull off that
kind of double bluff are professionals themselves. So we're
dealing with professionals acting like amateurs. The whole
thing stinks."
"What time do you get out of here?" Jones asked the
bartender.
"Seven," she smiled.
It was four forty five.
"I tell you what, I'll meet you back here at seven fifteen.
But right now me and my friend have to leave."
"We only just got here," I said.
"It doesn't matter, we're leaving." Jones said, and
ushered me out of my chair. I walked with him, still holding
my half full glass. We ended up on the street. I took
another sip of Cherry Comfort. It didn't calm me.
"What the hell was that about?"
"Got to establish a pattern for the relationship, Laplace.
This is the way women's minds work. Show them
something they can't have and they'll want it more than
anything else in the world."
"You think it's only women's brains that work like that?
She's too young for you, anyway."
"Not true, not true at all. You're only as young as the
women you feel."
He made a crude gesture.
The pen was the first clue. The second clue was the
tracks near the reservoir. The distance between them
varied. That meant that what the eye witness thought was
a truck had actually been two motorcycles. He'd seen both
the tail lights fading into the distance and jumped to
conclusions. He wasn't exactly thinking straight anyway.
Not that I blame the poor bastard. Murder isn't an easy
thing to stomach. The guy was a mess when I got round to
questioning him. Some Russian astronomy student wearing
a thick anorak with a vague dusting of facial hair and
square glasses.
I've got a very good manner with witnesses, by the way. I
put them at ease. The guy gestured to his telescope. Next to
it was a thermos of tea that was going cold as slowly as
possible. There's a vacuum in every thermos flask. Heat
dissipates through a vacuum very slowly. I was taught that
by my high school physics teacher. The astronomy student
started talking, he had perfect English.
"I was here, near the reservoir. Out here, away from the
city lights, it's much easier to view the stars. I was set up
just across the road."
"Uh huh, and was the road busy?"
"Moderately, moderately. But just before I heard the
screams, maybe thirty seconds before that, I heard a truck
go past. I saw its lights fading away from me. I couldn't
catch the license plate. It was too dark."
I checked with my partner. She said he was telling the
truth.
"And that was when you called us?"
"No, it was only the next day that I heard someone had
been murdered here. Then I placed the call."
The murder had taken place on the other side of the
reservoir, but every sound travelled out there on the water.
I got back in my car and tried to see the connection. Two
motorbikes drive past an astronomer on a cloudless
November evening and then, nearly a kilometre away, a
woman out walking her dog loses her footing and falls
down a ravine. The connection was there, somewhere, but I
couldn't see it. Not that night.
#
The third clue was a post it note with a number, a date and
a time written on it. I did a reverse look up on the number,
it was one of those rough hairdressers on the other side of
town. The kind of place for men too poor to shave their
own heads. The second I walked in I knew I was going to
have problems.
There was only one chair occupied out of three. A
nervous looking schoolboy was sat in it. Staring straight
ahead. A broad guy with thick fingers and faded tattoos
was manhandling his head by precise increments, allegedly
so that he could trim his side burns. It looked like he was
trying to pull the poor kid's head off.
"Take a seat, mate." he said, gesturing with his
eyebrows.
"I was planning on making an appointment, actually."
He turned to the side and bellowed.
"SAMANTHA."
The kid jumped a couple dozen inches, but the barber
managed to slap him back down again. I stood and waited.
The girl who appeared might have had blonde hair,
once. Now it was a bleached out shade of pink that looked
as stiff and fake as my smile. She looked unimpressed with
something about me as she walked in. I think it might have
been my shoes. I'd been meaning to polish them.
"Yes?" she said. She had a beautiful accent. Crisper than
autumn leaves. I put a photocopy of the post it note down
on the table.
"I'd like to know who made this appointment." I asked.
"Not sure if it would be wise to distribute that
information to the general public," she said without looking
at the photocopy. The appointment book she was leaning
on was dusty. It didn't look like it'd been opened in weeks.
"This is actually, a police matter." I said.
As soon as I said it the steady sound of hairclippers
stopped. I counted to two and ducked. There was a rushing
noise and a thud. And when I stood up again there was a
pair of stainless steel barber's scissors was embedded in the
wall where my head would have been.
"Please," I said, "it'd be much easier for both of us if
you'd co operate."
There was a ring as the kid rushed out the door, slinging
his backpack over one shoulder. By the time I stopped
paying attention to that the barber had put a fist into my
jaw, just to feel me out. I took a step backwards to avoid
the following right hook and I checked with my partner.
She thought I could take him, but I wasn't so sure. I let him
swing the next punch whilst I made up my mind. It caught
me in the gut. I doubled over and got a good look at his
shoes. They needed a polish too.
I stayed like that for a second longer than strictly
necessary and rose back up with an uppercut that caught
him off guard. It knocked him a few paces backwards, I
pushed my advantage, got a leg behind him and tripped
him into the row of grimy sinks. He cracked his head off
the nearest one and fell unconscious to the floor.
"Now, that appointment." I said, turning around to speak
to the girl. But she was gone, and so was the appointment
book.
The Chief burst into my office, he was wearing a dark
blue suit with a lime green tie and a pink shirt. He looked
like a fruit salad that had just learnt to smile.
"They get one of those new coffee enemas?" I asked, but
even my razor sharp wit couldn't cut him down to size.
"Don't be vulgar Laplace, this is a beautiful day. It could
be over, this whole thing could well be over."
I leaned forward, he had my attention.
"You mean the case? Did the kids at the lab manage to
match the prints to her?"
"What? Forget your stupid case Laplace, I'm talking big,
bigger. Crime, Laplace. I think we've cracked it. I think
we've finally cracked it."
"The whole thing?"
"The whole damn thing. There hasn't been a single
report come in all day."
I checked the time, it was three pm.
"You think we finally got it?"
I pulled two toffees out of my draw and slid one across
of my desk for him. He unwrapped it with trembling
fingers.
"I think we did it, I think we imprisoned them all and
scared the rest."
"You could be out of a job." I cautioned. He didn't care.
"God, I don't care. The last Chief of Police. What an
epigraph."
I didn't care either. I keep my CV up to date and I have a
lot of marketable skills. During my time as a Police
detective I have been responsible for the interviewing and
cross examination of witnesses and suspects. This has
helped develop my soft skills, as well as showing my
proven ability to work with people. The only flaw on my CV
was my bad high school chemistry grade. I wasn't too
worried. Chemistry just wasn't my subject.
It went on for two days. The downturn in crime.
Eventually we found out the phones had been down. The
Chief started crying when he heard. Right at his desk. His
tears left watermarks on the thick polish.
BRIEF, INFORMAL NOTES
FROM RIAZ
These stories were written in the period 2006 – 2008. I
don't use Notepad SX any more. They were written in
approximately this order:
Problems With The Letter W
Problems With Crane Fly
Problems With Art Students
Problems With Writer's Block
Problems With Pharmacists
Problems With Helicopters
Problems With Dreams
Problems With Chemistry
Here's a link about the dream playback robot:
http://www.wemakemoneynot
art.com/archives/2008/02/howdoesitworkexactly.php
If for some reason this file ends up in the possession of

someone who doesn't know me, and they want to get in
contact (unlikely) they can do so by using
theongoingrealityshow@gmail.com or going to my tumble
log: riazm.tumblr.com.
I'd like to thank anyone.
BRIEF, INFORMAL NOTES FROM RIAZ
65

DAGELAN

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