The Somnambulist and the Song

It starts with a man sitting up in bed. He’s dreaming but has done like this for a long time. The woman lying beside him used to wake up, years ago.

In the dream the man is looking out of the eyes of someone else. He can’t see himself in the dream, but he feels convincingly old. His breath is heavy and sounds like a far away carpenter’s workshop.

The old man in the dream is looking down at the tracks of a railway from the edge of the platform. He looks down for a good while, studying the lustrous surface of the steel. Eventually he looks up, turning his head in unison with the man in the bedroom and staring down the tunnel where the train will go. The old man considers its quiet, calm blackness.

Then there is the sound of a train coming from the opposite direction. Both men turn their head to look. The man sitting in bed feels his pulse begin to rise. On his left hand, his thumb starts to twitch. The men look down at it and frown. It’s got a lot worse recently and the old man knows what it means. He brings his hands to his open mouth to try to calm the tremor. All the man in the bedroom can think is that his hands feel so cold. Then the man in the bedroom starts to pull at something at the side of his finger. The old man is pulling his tatty fingerless gloves over his second knuckle. Both of them shiver.

The train comes into the platform and once again the man in the bedroom feels his pulse begin to race. He can feel his heart beat at the tips of his fingers. Just as the train is about to pass, both men can hear and see nothing else and the man in the bedroom feels the legs of the old man twitch. The man’s heart stops momentarily as he looks up to see the train pass. He feels the cold again, creeping through the old man’s anxious state.

The old man turns around and walks back to a blanket on the floor by the wall of the platform. He sits down like a rusty box of tools.

They both sit still for a while, catching their breath.

At this point, the man in the bedroom becomes aware of something in the old mans’ arms. He can’t see it because the old man has his own eyes closed. Instead the man in the bedroom just feels and hears the object. First the old man runs a fingertip along a wire. It gives a distant squeal. Then the old man runs his finger along a thin piece of something, counting small hard protrusions. Both men count nineteen and the man in the bedroom is suddenly aware of how warm the object feels in his arms. There is a pleasing wooden grain to its surface. Finally the old man looks down and it is a small guitar that the man in the bedroom does not know the name for.

Just before the old man starts to play, the man in the room notices how much calmer he feels. His breath is soft and relaxed. Then the old man starts to play and the quiet beauty of the song surprises him.

There is no one around of course; it is winter and late and there is never anyone here. Nobody walks past to hear the song. The only person who hears it is the man in the bedroom from somewhere inside, as it travels down and across his spine. A part of the song briefly makes him tingle as it becomes ever so slightly faster. Like the dream, the song is a minor lament and the sound of it is beautiful in their arms. The song is played so quietly by the old man it would be completely drowned out, were it not for the place being so utterly deserted.

After the song is finished they both look down and see an upside-down hat on the floor. It is as empty as ever. Both men reach out and pick it up, placing it carefully on their heads.

From somewhere far away, there is the sound of another train. The old man says, “I think this is mine.” He says it with a grainy lilt to his voice. The man in the bedroom speaks the words silently.

The old man stands up painfully; but both men expect this by now. The sound of the train comes in louder than the previous one, because of the quietness of the song.

Suddenly the old man breaks into an uneven run. This hurts both of them right down their spine and into their knees but by now it is too late and both men have smiles on their faces now. The train meets the men with its sudden light and noise and just as sudden blackness. The only thing the driver saw was a man in a dark coat, and the head of what looked like a guitar poking up over his shoulder.

The man in the bedroom wakes. He lets out a small shout.

The woman sits up and reaches around him. His body is cold and damp. She has seen this so many times before.

“Bad dream?” She says, softly into his ear.

“No.”

Autumn

The first day of autumn came like an old forgotten jigsaw of brown and orange. It was such a beautiful day that I decided to sit in the park and watch how things turned out. There was a lot of wind so I had taken my hat and placed it securely, or so I thought, on the top of my head.

The park was full of the little brown and orange jigsaw pieces. They drifted against the walls and blew like insects in the air. They made a good noise as they clattered against one another. By the bench where I sat, they were gathered in such number that it was like a carpet of noise under my feet.

There was a sudden change in the wind that surprised my hat and blew it to the ground. As I bent down to retrieve it, I remember there being a light rain in the air like dust. It was being blown in every direction. When I sat back up an old gentleman was beside me on the bench.

“Hello,” I said, “I didn’t notice you there before.”

“Hello,” he said, “I wasn’t until now.”

I liked his reply a great deal. It was exactly the reply I would like to have given in his place. I smiled and looked out over the park. The trees were dancing so vigorously that their tops were now entirely naked.

“It’s a beautiful day,” I remarked. It was a beautiful day.

“I'm glad you like it,” he replied, and leant back on the bench with his hands behind his head. He was breathing softly and a strange whistling sound came from his nose. I liked this reply too.

The man’s outfit was that of a traditional British outdoorsman. He wore leather boots, heavy woollen trousers and a filthy waxed coat. Filthy was perhaps not the right word. I have known people with filthy coats in the past, but this coat had an agricultural significance all of its own. You could have probably grown good potatoes in folds of its fabric. However, the most striking feature of this man was his magnificent hair. It was white and thick and grew in every direction imaginable. Within it, and please bear in mind I could only examine its periphery, was a good assortment of leaves, moss, twigs, and other things I could not name. He was perhaps one of the few men I have met who could truly say, “Hello, I need a hat.”

He caught me staring at him and offered the kind of smile one would give to a precocious child. “What can I do for you?” he said. He made a whistling noise without opening his mouth.

If I didn’t ask I knew that I would regret it later. “I was wondering why you are dressed as you are?” I said. “You seem prepared for the elements.”

“Indeed!” said the man. “I dress like this for my job.”

“And what would that be, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Not at all!” he said. “I do many things throughout the year, but right now I’m in charge of the autumn.”

Having already become somewhat used to unexpected replies, this seemed to go straight in without touching the sides. I found myself saying in all seriousness, “Oh! Well, it must be a very busy time for you.”

“Exceedingly!” said the man. “There is an awful lot of wind to be made. Every year there are more people to blow about and then there are the leaves to be scattered. Of course, there are wind farms now as well. Wind farms are really very awkward.” He seemed set on considering wind farms for a while, so I gave him a moment. Eventually he let out a weary groan and leant back on the bench. He looked suddenly quite glum, and tremendously tired. He rubbed his eyes with large calloused hands and yawned.

I thought perhaps I should try to take his mind off wind farms and how awkward they were. “What’s your favourite part of the job?” I asked.

The man took his hand from his eyes and looked at me with sudden mischievous glee. He let out a small chuckle and leant over to me as if he were telling a secret. “Umbrellas!” he said, like he was at the circus. “Umbrellas are my most favourite things in all the world. That’s the good thing about living in the city. There are lots of umbrellas!”

“Umbrellas?” I asked.

I’ve never seen a man point with his eyebrows before, but this he did in a way that was far superior than using a finger. I followed the line from tangled white hair, over the playing field in front of us, to the path on the opposite side. There, a lady was walking a dog and holding an umbrella out in front of her like a medieval knight. It was one of those happy umbrellas that showed all the colours of the rainbow. Within an instant, the wind and leaves had swirled around behind her and with a pleasing WHOOMF, the umbrella was turned inside out. The dog became very excited and dragged the lady about the path. There was a great deal of yapping.

I chuckled into my hand and the man made a dry laugh as if he was filled with the leaves that sat all around us. “That’s quite a skill.” I said.

“Thank you,” said the man, drying his eyes with his hand. “It gets me though the day.” He looked quite a lot better.

There was a sudden break in the cloud and the wind changed again. I liked how the dried leaves piled up at the side of my feet, like they were trying to explore the lower regions of my trouser leg. I felt a sudden cold and looked to my side. The old man was gone. I stood up and looked around. On the other side of the park, the lady was wrestling with her ruined umbrella. It seemed to like its new look and was putting up a good fight. I looked behind me and saw the magnificent white hair of the man bobbing in the distance. The rest of him was perfectly camouflaged against the autumn that spun like brown and orange jigsaw pieces all around.

The Mill

The walls of the mill are streaked black with time and neglect, and bowed out like something is rotten inside. Once these walls were red brick, straight and proud, but those days don’t even belong to memory now. The windows are done-with target practise for generations of children. Rocks, catapults, grubby old air rifles. Some of the small ones on the sixth floor held out until a few months ago. The lower ones are heavily boarded and covered in the graffiti of years.

The roof is losing its battle with the autumn wind. Already it’s half gone, a sagging broken smile offered to the gathering crowd in the hope that it will be returned. So far no one has smiled back. All around, brightly coloured men climb into machinery like houses or stand talking into radios. They all smoke and are the only noise.

The wind picks up dried leaves and dust from the floor; the men cover their eyes. The machines briefly halt their approach but don’t get any quieter. The crowd examine their feet. The cold wind carries across the yard and blows through the empty building with a deep, sad sound that's lost in the noise of machinery.

The smile in the roof is the first thing to drop. It opens wide and falls with a heavy sigh. Birds vacate through windows and come to rest in symphony on power cables nearby. They whistle a jumbled but affectionate farewell.

Like an end-of-show curtain the front wall drops, somehow leaving the rest of the building in tact. It takes everyone by surprise, even the man with the radio and name badge.

The late afternoon sun slants through the windows on the opposite side, cutting through the autumn shadow cast on the street below. For one brief moment before the collapse, everyone stops to stare at the lonely relic of white cotton on the second floor. It’s as pure and fragile as the day it was made, and waves like a perfect golden sail in the cold autumn wind. No one can make out what it’s attached to, and no one gets the photograph in time.

A Silver Bird

I was walking in a field of long grass, inspecting the seeds and listening to the wind blow past when I felt something hard against my foot. I looked down and noticed a silver bird in the shape of a bracelet half buried in the earth. I picked it up and held it in my hands. It was silver like a reflection of the moon and felt good to touch. It was colder than I expected. I held the bird up close to my ear and it told me that it had become lost trying to find its way home. It had a nice sound to its voice.

I placed it carefully in my inside coat pocket and walked to the top of the nearest hill. Looking down into the next valley, I noticed a house nestling in some trees. The house was small and white, and had a gentle smoke pouring from the chimney that wandered toward the top of the valley.

I walked down to the house and saw a young woman kneeling down planting silver seeds in her garden. They glinted raw sunlight as she held them in her hand. All around, silver necklaces grew from the earth, coiling themselves around whatever was there. Bushes planted in neat rows flowered silver rings that shimmered playfully as the wind swirled through the garden. It was an incredible sight. When I looked back at the woman she had stood up and was facing me, wiping her hands on her apron. The wind blew brown hair across her face and she placed it carefully back behind her ear. She smiled and said hello.

I walked up to her and held out the silver bird. I kept my hands gently around it like I was riding a horse. She took the bird bracelet from me and held it for a time, perhaps appreciating its coolness as I had done earlier. She held it up to her ear and smiled in one corner of her mouth.

After a while she handed it back to me and pointed loosely to a small outbuilding with a tree growing against it. The branches of the tree were pinned to the wall. It was so laden with silver bird bracelets and earrings I doubted whether it could support its own weight. As I walked toward it, the other birds chirped excitedly. The bird said thank you as I held up my hands and it hopped onto a branch to join its friends.

As I passed the woman she smiled at me and told me thank you. She held out her hand and offered me a bird in shape of a ring. It was a very small bird and would only fit on my little finger, but it fitted there perfectly. I said thank you and set off through the long grass back over the hill, feeling the wind of the valley blow past me and listening to the song of the silver bird that was perched on my little finger.

[O: Here, I guess...]

A Love, A Wind

Outside, it's raining almost hail. She can’t concentrate. She’s sat at her desk, legs held closely together, biting her lip and imagining that it’s him. She does this until the pain is unbearable, releases, and then savours the momentary cold, perfect ache. She’s tingling all over and outside is real hail now.

Later, there’s no wind. Her friends don’t know it, but she is now pierced in six places, all of them for him. She sent him photographs in her last letter. She closes her eyes to the cold grey evening and explores each one in turn, reaching orgasm effortlessly. She whispers his name to make it harder. A wind comes up and brushes across her face. It smells of the lilac tree outside her house or him, she can’t decide.

Afterward, she lies there catching her breath, for a while daydreaming in the billowing clouds. The wind has picked up strongly. She sits up, rubs her face back into life and flicks on the television set. He smiles at her and she smiles back. He tells her there will be more hail tomorrow. The blind clatters against the bedroom window but she doesn't look.

Excerpt 01

A love, a wind

We made a long and slow love. A wind came up and the windows trembled slightly, the sugar set fragiley ajar by the wind. I like Pauline's body and she said that she liked mine, too, and we couldn't think of anything to say. The wind suddely stopped and Pauline said, "What's that?"
"It's the Wind."

A lamb at false dawn

Pauline began talking in her sleep at false dawn from under the watermelon covers. She told a little story about a lamb going for a walk. "The lamb sat down in the flowers," she said. "The lamb was all right," and that was the end of the story. Pauline often talks in her sleep. Last week she sang a little song. I forget how it went. I put my hand on her breast. She stirred in her sleep. I took my hand off her breast and she was quiet again. She felt very good in bed. There was a nice sleepy smell coming from her body. Perhaps that is where the lamb sat down.

In Watermelon Sugar, Richard Brautigan

Errors 02

You always used to see eye to eye; this is what you remember. True, you were never exactly staring down each other’s optic nerves, but whilst you saw each other most days, this slight error, this offset in angle made no difference whatsoever. Nowadays, it seems like the distance between you is huge. You are both as flawed as you ever were, but here you now sit helplessly gazing into the blank space at the side of each other’s head.

Errors 01

Every word you type introduces an error, a small discrepancy between your intention and its realisation. The inaccuracies accrue; they gather round the dimly lit ends of sentences, knowing that you’re headed their way. As you approach, they start to jeer. You used to go back and find a different way, but not any more. Now, you walk straight through them, stealing a can of Stella and a cigarette as you go. You’ve leaned that the ideal quantization of thought is an unrealistic aim, and that mistakes are a good thing. You still get a kicking occasionally though.

The Pool

This is how she was found.

Two old men sat in a cloud of smoke on a boulder above a large stagnant pool. They were deep in a forest above the town looking for a cave one had stayed in years before. Both were a little gone on marijuana and it was not helping their search. They had been walking for what seemed a long time, and had come down to the stream to find water.

“It’s blue,” said one, squinting. “I tell you man, it’s blue.” He wore a relaxed smile and an grimy headband with stars.

“It’s your eyes,” sighed the other. “It’s green, you know? Green.” He pointed at a nearby bush.

The pool, thirty feet on each side, was cloudy like the soup they gave out near the train station in town. The odour was too much for either of them; it rose up putrid from the surface and was amplified to awful by the afternoon heat. It blurred their eyes and made sure their hunger stayed put. The smell was almost ferrous. It reminded the other of nights spent sheltering under decaying cars in the scrap yard. He remembered the water there, wicked after seeping through the rotting carcasses of machinery, the bones of mankind’s achievement. He could taste it even now in the back of his throat.

Too light headed to consider doing much else, they remained there for a time looking down at the pool. Plants with strange, dark glossy leaves, shapes unidentifiable, rose from the perimeter or laid indifferent on its surface. There were no flowers here, just green, sticky, engorged heads festooned with insects. The scene was fresh-painted; it was slick and oily, like a photograph of a meal outside a restaurant. One held up his index finger, tuning his hearing to a strange sound emanating from a bush near the pool.

“Hey, can you hear that frog? It’s beautiful,” said the first, smiling slightly.

“That’s no frog,” said the other. “It’s a bird. Listen.”

They listened again. A common consensus was not obtained.

“Well it’s definitely an odd place,” said one. Silence. This at least they could agree on.

The other picked up a rock and threw it into the centre of the pool. It was a surprisingly good shot. The sound, deep like they expected, resonated briefly from the interior walls of the pool. Neither of them knew the science, but it confirmed to them that it was deep.

The sudden noise interrupted this odd tranquillity. There was a buzzing, instant binary on, as the whole evil scene erupted organic before them, giving the pool a new glistening surface of life. The breath of myriad creatures’ wings a temporal, transient disturbance. They could hardly see the water anymore; the impression was of a television set stuck between channels, out of phase with the rest of existence, a parallel of coded life. They felt like strangers here, like they were viewing all this through the wrong end of a telescope. It was all a flutter, even their insides. Within a minute however, tranquillity was returned, the phases locked, the final formations of insect life once more inert.

A single errant bug landed heavily beside them. Iridescent blue shimmering in the afternoon light, it was saturated magnificent. Neither of the men knew high school biology, but they had knowledge of life: the dumb, the edible, the useful, and the dangerous. A doctrine that cannot be found in books, their’s is instead etched into the walls of railway tunnels and caves, stored away inside hollowed-out trees and oil drums filled with smouldering wet ash, it is preached to absent congregations from park benches and deserted railway carriages. Still, this was mystery to both men.

“It’s a Beetle. Definitely a Beetle,” said the other looking back to the pool.

The first shook his head, knowing this was untrue. Instead of saying anything, he picked up large rock and threw it to the pool, hoping more insects would come his way. He was not a great shot, and missed the middle of the pool by at least ten feet. The rock barely broke the surface. Instead, it deflected off something, causing a large metallic resonance that hung in the air, an unexpected stranger calling late at night. They both stood up.

“There’s something in there, man” he said. “Something metal.”

Slowly, they stumbled down to the edge of the pool. They found heavy branches from the fallen wood, and began to poke through the stinking broth. To begin with, the sticks went in all the way to their hands, but eventually they found what they were looking for. Just below the surface on the far side, only visible from this distance, they could just make out the glinting metal edge of something. They pushed hard against it but it didn’t move.

“There’s nothing round here for miles, man,” said one. He crouched down, staring into the pool, “no roads, no mines.” He scratched his head and looked up at the other. “It’s gotta be a plane.”

The other looked down, wanting to disagree, for form’s sake if nothing else. “You think it might be valuable?” He asked this almost exclusively to himself.

“Listen, man,” said one, standing up. “If it is a plane, there still might be somebody inside it. We need to get the sheriff; he’ll know what to do. Come on, let’s go.” He threw the branch down and walked past the other into the trees.

The other followed along only a few steps behind, more coherent now but still struggling through this unfamiliar terrain. He still carried his heavy branch with him. He knew the way back. He knew the way back.

Fifteen years later, a man discovered the body whilst out hunting with his dog, and then, he found her. They came, drained the pool and airlifted her out. She was kept undercover but the media had already been and taken their photographs. It was reported as a weather balloon, to begin with.

The Boxcar

I met a man on freight train to somewhere, the destination unimportant. Thrown together by incompetence, the train guard had forgotten to lock this particular car. It was spring. Birds finally free of winter flocked together, silhouetted against the evening sky. To travel this time of year, to take slowly and suck in all that God creates, is a privilege of the rich, and people like me.

I asked the man where he was headed, or if he even knew. A reasonable courtesy when trapped for periods of time with people you don’t know. The man looked like he was made of stone, his skin so greasy and tarred and his beard deep winter-grey. A hat, unremarkable in every way, sat proudly on his brow. He gazed over the trappings of his life. A comb, teeth missing in childlike grin, urchin dirty, but not yet useless, a well-used corncob pipe, again unremarkable, and a dark bottle of non-descript liquid, probably decanted from the springs of hell itself. He picked up the comb, hands more machinery than limb, and slowly flicked the teeth that remained.

For the first time, he made eye contact. I couldn’t hold his gaze, his eyes so clear and blue and mine so rheumy. For some reason I felt ashamed of my appearance. His face, as furrowed as his hands, was almost entirely covered by that grey beard. A great Oak tree that stood up and shook its roots free of the earth. In the shadows I could see creatures there intertwined, nesting, fornicating, fighting for survival or escape. A microcosm grown from the earth-filled pores of his skin.

When he spoke the words, his tone cut the stale air, a clear channel opened direct twixt him and me, drowning out the clamour of the railroad. His voice was as soft as the July wind; it had a melody to it indescribable. Not at all the sound you would expect from his appearance, the pipe, the whisky.

He told me. I’ve seen that you’ve noticed the spring. The eager clouds gathering themselves for the rains, the birds weaving together, knitting the fabric of the day, the streams overflowing with ambition after the thaw, the mountains heaving with new life. But you and I, trapped in here with no light, no sky, no air. Our clouds are not full of water but tobacco vapour, our birds are the flies that drink our blood, our streams, made of urine, saliva and whisky, our mountains, made not of rock but of the gathering dust. Remember, that wherever you go, no matter how far you travel, you take your own clouds, your own birds, your own streams, and your own mountains with you.

By the time he had finished, the dark encroached into my vision too much for me to see him. I didn’t need light however to know that he was no longer on this train. The boxcar sounded different, the clamour returning a more hollow sound than before. I wasn’t concerned. I shut my eyes, leant back, and let the familiar sounds of the railroad lull me to sleep.

I woke with the beginnings of dawn light; my quarters indeed deserted. The train stopped to wait for its turn at whatever station and I stepped out onto the tracks, stretching in that cold spring air. I lit my pipe and walked without purpose, watching the sky as my own clouds gathered peacefully over the railroad.