The Great Escape

by Ian Watson

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Dystopian; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

Predictably unpredictable, normally abnormal. Watson combines science fiction and fantasy into an eclectic mix that includes stories about fallen angels in Hell rebelling and mounting a breakout, about the inconvenience of keeping aging parents in your brain instead of a nursing home, about Jesus' immortal brother as solo passenger on the first starship, about alien coffins bombarding the solar system, about right-wing U.S. militias stealing a quantum computer to commit nuclear blackmail, about a computer games designer haunted by the cyber-ghost of his murdered wife, about frozen heads and strange mind-changes, and how a cake decorator defeats a vampire with a sweet tooth. De-evolution, treasure-hunting via hang glider, dark animal fantasies, humanity as hive-entity, Hercules Poirot on a starship - Watson takes the strange, the eerie the weird, mixes his seasoned writing skills, and produces a potpourri of the fantastic. These nineteen stories are sure to amuse, bemuse and entertain.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 287

Sample

IT’S OVER FIFTEEN YEARS SINCE I LAST WROTE AN introduction to a story collection of mine (Slow Birds, Gollancz 1985), and in it I said that for me it is strangeness that brings a story to life and makes it real and believable. Not familiarity, but strangeness. In a sense familiarity is a filter which stops us from seeing the true wonder and singularity of the world, for habitually we perceive only a little part of reality. “Human kind” according to T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets, “cannot bear very much reality.”

I was fascinated by the adverse reaction of one leading American film critic to the Steven Spielberg film A. J. Artificial Intelligence, for which I wrote the Screen Story during nine months with Stanley Kubrick some years ago. Evidently this movie could not by definition be good because machines of our own creation simply cannot be conscious entities in the way that human beings are. (Only God can make a tree? Or a soul?)

Arguably the opposite is truer. Machines which have access to their own “mental” processes and which can rewrite their own programming, causing themselves or their successors to evolve in complexity, perhaps surpassing our ability to understand them, may in future be the true higher intelligences on Earth compared with whom us human beings are more like robots of flesh and blood—governed by our genes, our sensory input constantly filtered so that we can focus upon what is necessary, unable to analyse our own thought processes, our very sense of “self” perhaps an illusion.

Back in 1985 the neurosurgeon Benjamin Libet performed some surprising experiments, proving that our brain prepares to carry out an action before we take a conscious decision to act. An event is already occurring before “I” chose to begin it. Conscious awareness lags behind what happens—but we do not realise this because the brain puts events in order after the event occurs, so that “I” feel that I intentionally did so-and-so, although tests prove otherwise.

Even while awake you aren’t continuously conscious. You drive your car along a familiar route and suddenly wonder if you have already passed a certain place or not. Consciousness is full of gaps—of which you are unaware because those gaps do not register.

You walk into a room wallpapered with roses. Your eyes only see things in detail which are in front of you, so actually you only see a few roses in any resolution, yet you do not experience all the others as vague shapes—the brain fills in for you what is missing, just as it wallpapers the blank space that ought to correspond to the blind spot in your eyes.

Recently I was sitting in a park when two magpies landed on the grass ahead of me, one to the left and one to the right. They began to walk apart. By continuing to look straight ahead midway between the magpies, I was able to see both birds vanish even though the scene apparently remained complete and full. All that was visible now was grass (although of course I was not even seeing all that grass; my brain was filling in). When I shifted my head slightly the magpies returned.

Such matters are intimately bound up with the business of writing stories.

That is because what sustains our sense of a continuous self is to a large extent language, and narrative. (Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained is a must-read on this subject.) People continuously talk to themselves. Children often do so aloud. Adults usually do so without making noises (although I have been overheard chatting to myself).

A human being cannot easily or ordinarily maintain uninterrupted attention on a single problem for more than, say, half a minute—yet regularly we work at tasks that occupy much more time. To do so, we need to describe to ourselves what is going on so that we commit it to memory. Otherwise, the immediate contents of the stream of consciousness are lost very quickly.

An idea occurs to you. Something distracts you. What was that brilliant idea you had a moment ago? How hard it is to recapture! You need to grab hold of a chain of associations and recreate the exact frame of mind you were in when the idea occurred, then the idea can emerge again. But often it is gone forever.

This is because evolution did not design human memory to be super-reliable, fast random-access memory as that of an Artificial Intelligence would be. So you need tricks to enhance your memory, and telling yourself what is going on is one of these tricks.

In a very real sense we do not even choose the words we use. On the contrary the words choose themselves (as Wittgenstein was well aware: the Proposition speaks through the mouth of the person). Inside our brain no switchboard operator sits coordinating what goes on. Instead, many sub-systems act in unison. Consequently a whole range of words is forever competing to be publicly expressed, both when you talk to other people and when you talk to yourself. Language isn’t something we constructed but something which came into being, and which we in turn became, creating and recreating ourselves through words. Being able to say things is the basis of our beliefs about who and what we are. We produce our “selves” in language. Each of us is a sort of fictional character in the narrative which we tell ourselves constantly.

In order to keep track of our bodily and mental circumstances we practise incessant story-telling and story-checking, some of it factual and some of it wholly fictional. “If she says this, I will say that.” “I ought to have said that—in fact lets rerun the conversation differently with me coming out of it better than I really did!” This goes on all the time. You tell a story to yourself and to other people about who you are so as to protect and control and define yourself.

Fundamentally our human consciousness is not the source of tales—it is the product of tales. Therefore the telling of tales, including the creation of fiction, science fiction and fantasy, isn’t something secondary to our lives. It is no mere entertainment compared with the serious business of real life. It’s fundamental to our whole existence and to our knowledge of the world.

This is very comforting for a writer to know! When I write stories, as the words compete for expression, I am doing something integral to our mental existence. And I try to expand the range of that existence by removing perceptual filters of normality so that the world can be seen in a new light—as different from what we assumed. Or perhaps I substitute alternative filters, of what if?

Maybe this is all a bit serious to introduce a collection of stories. For me, stories ought to be playful even when they are about totally serious themes; and of course stories are adventures too. A story is a game, grim or merry as it may be, or a paradoxical mixture of both. If stories are not fun to write—even if at the same time the narrative might be fairly harrowing—then why write them? Creation should be a joyful activity, not an agonising one. And also an uncertain and exploratory activity, uncertain as tomorrow is, for I rarely know when I start a story where it will take me to or how on Earth it will turn out. The words compete for utterance and the story evolves itself.

The question perhaps remains: will Artificial Intelligences feel a need to tell stories? And what might their stories be?

Ian Watson Moreton Pinkney, England 1st August 2001

SO I COME INTO EXISTENCE AGAIN.

Like a sleeper awaking, like a patient emerging from anaesthesia. The world out of focus. This clarifies quickly. I’m almost getting used to coming back to life. This is the fourth time.

There’s Matthew slouching along ten yards ahead of me. Sun-bright pavement’s crowded. Blokes in shirtsleeves, girls in short skirts and halter tops, heatwave. Can’t miss Matthew’s tight little ponytail and big bald patch. Turned-up jacket collar and knotted silk scarf hide the mulberry blotch of birthmark down the left side of his neck—too sweaty for a polo-neck today, eh Matthew?

Shops, bank branches: we’re in Royal Leamington Spa, heading down the Parade. There’s the grand red-brick and sandy-stone Town Hall and the bleach-white statue of Queen Victoria which a German bomb shifted one inch sideways on its plinth over half a century ago, but Matthew is the focus of my attention, the centre.

Toddler-buggies, fat woman in a powered wheelchair, trainer-girl walking a guide dog, a Sikh family, traveller couple with tattoos and piercings: the girl sports bright blue hair and a pea-size green bead under her lower lip, the bloke has a metal spike through the top of his nose as well as eyebrow-rings. The crowding’s good. Helps me keep my distance from Matthew, as if I’m genuinely following him through a press of people. I am, I am—he’s my energy source. Me, a moth emerging from nothingness and only existing because of his light, unless I fly too close and he flares, disintegrating me again.

Cars, cars. Kids with balloons straggling up the Parade, and lots more New Age types. Could be the day of the annual Peace Festival down in the park by the Pump Room. Could well be.

I’m a sort of invisible human balloon myself, bobbing along. Balloon without any skin, just the presence of myself. Intangible, proceeding through the gaps between people, bump bump but they don’t know this.

Come back to life, have I? Not to my own life, not to the life of Amanda Riley—but to his life, Matthew’s. This time I must try my best to hover on his periphery, resisting the attraction toward him yet sustained by his life, his continuing, ongoing life. Light of my life—there’s a joke. Definitely the light of my death—which I think he caused deliberately.

He’s hesitating outside the Tripe & Tipple pub. We’ve been in there together from time to time—is that why he’s in two minds instead of marching right on in? Guest ales, Toulouse Lautrec posters, and chef’s specials of liver and onions, braised kidneys (which they don’t bother to core before cooking), and tripe à la mode de Caen, as well as the usual baguettes stuffed with prawns or ham. Triple-tipple, in Matthew’s case, but he always drove safely afterwards—no, that’s unfair, he would only down two and a half pints. Something to dilute the cranberry-flavoured vodka when he got home.

Out comes a red softpack. Burnt offering. Consult the smoke. Thinking things over, eh Matthew? To tipple or not to tipple before touring the Peace Festival, presumed reason for presence in Leamington on this fine day. Score a month’s supply of what it amuses you to call dry ice—the cracky sort, right? Keeps you alert while writing UNIX process software, compression algorithms, billing software, data fill for some new mobile phone company or some paltry shareware to be stuck as a CD on the front of a computer mag in the hope punters pay the registration fee to help you out with the whopping phone bill. Or something more illustrious, Project Director for a game script, pushing polygons around the screen. Or even … architecture for the ultimate virtual reality driving simulator, instructions for a cloudburst or a horse suddenly darting into the road?

Keep you alert half the night, the ice will.

My Christ! Never mind a phone bill. How about the whopping mortgage? Paid off by the life insurance by now, bound to have been. Paid by my death. How very timely.

Matthew rambling on again tonight in a fundamental assembly language, hmm? I used to assemble language, or tried to. During my final year doing Eng Lit at the University of Birmingham in Edgbaston, I shared a house with four other women and one nerdy bloke (supposedly our rape guard in residence) in a long seedy street not many stones’ throws from Winson Green prison. Ex-offenders were being rehabbed at a couple of community hostels elsewhere along our road, and another house sheltered former mental patients. Elderly old folk roosted alone here and there; when they died or were obliged to go into care, a few more Asian or West Indian families would most likely buy the vacated homes.

I never worked out which house the three-legged dog belonged to, but regular as clockwork it would lollop past me on my way to the campus in the morning, out on its own, wearing collar and lead … but holding its own lead in its jaws. The beagle’s left hind leg was missing, no doubt due to a car running over it followed by amputation, but the animal was nimble enough with one rear propulsion limb and two front legs for balance and steering. I thought and thought about that dog, all the while permutating—per-mutt-ating-ating!—the emotional possibilities. Two years later I was to win a £3500 first prize in a poetry competition with my “Voyage of the Beagle,” and three years after that the poem suggested the title of my first collection from trend-setting Bloodaxe Books, Three-Legged Hound. Prestige in the frog-pond of contemporary verse by the tender age of twenty-six!

A poet should strut her stuff, and besides this’ll help me keep my distance from Matthew …

Three-legged pooch runs down the street

Gripping its leash in its mouth.

Each morning I pass it, and it passes me,

Never pausing (how could it?) to cock

Its hind leg against any tree.

Why does its owner allow it

Out for a run on its own?

Perhaps it is its own owner, alone

In the world yet brainy enough

To pretend it isn’t a stray?

Is the leash an aid to balance,

A sort of steering wheel,

A way of correcting bias:

Slack, go west—tug and head south,

Technology of the mouth?

I’d love to ask it these questions.

Maybe that beagle can talk

Or—let’s be serious—convey

A reply by way of a bark?

If only its lips weren’t sealed.

So does it bite on the leash

Whenever it’s running around

To keep its secret securely safe

—Suppose we catch it unawares—

—From the likes of me and thee?

Is the dog slightly dotty?

(Not spotty—it’s fawn

And brown and cream.)

Maybe its owner died,

And she always came along here.

So this is a ritual remembrance,

A pretence that she’s still around.

At home every day the dog howls

Exactly at twenty-past-eight

Till, leashed, he has his way.

What hurts do we ourselves suffer,

Lost legs of the heart or the soul?

Invisible bits of us missing—

But we carry our leashes around,

Unseen. They stop us from falling over

—Like a running three-legged hound.

Copyright by Amanda Riley. Not by Amanda Ramsbottom, the ghastly surname I was born with, butt of jokes. Actually Ram is a dialect word for wild garlic, while Bottom is a shallow valley. “To rob me of so rich a bottom,” says Hotspur in Henry IV.

Pretty vale of wild garlic. Try telling people that. Most certainly not a poet’s name, in my opinion! Matthew’s surname was a lot better. Not ideal but far neater and snappier, with a touch of the Irish, land of Seamus Heaney. The ancient Irish used to say, “If words are not poetry, they are useless.”

Not that I married Matthew for his name, but because I came to appreciate him. He was studying electronics and was a doyen of the computer club to which our rape guard, Adrian, also belonged. This was the dawn of the home computer boom. The Spectrum ZX81 had just come out. Games, in arcades at least, were still mainly clones of Space Invaders, but up in their bedrooms eager lads were coding for their micros. Since Matthew’s own digs were only a couple of streets away he would come round to see Adrian, and I began coinciding with the visitor in our communal kitchen. The other women ignored Matthew—socially awkward or oblivious, no girl friend of course, computer-junkie, wounded (as only a sensitive would-be poet could perceive) … that florid birthmark on his neck caused him a lot of embarrassment and trauma at school, as I was to learn rather later on, though he didn’t like to talk about this. Aside from the birthmark he wasn’t bad looking—trim and fresh-complexioned, unruly shock of hair, rather wild blue eyes. The birthmark didn’t figure immediately, since he kept it covered, Dr Who fashion, the scarf knitted by his auntie. Even before I knew of the birthmark I thought of him as belonging to the three-legged dog category—someone lame but who was also, as I began to realize, a sprinter, a goer; which I found interesting.

And increasingly interesting. Apparently Matthew had succeeded in finishing a fiendishly difficult computer game involving the breaking of a clever section of cryptography, whereupon he found on screen the message, “If you completed this game give us a call.” Which he duly did. The phone call anointed him as a Code Warrior. Only half a dozen players had phoned in so far. The company would be very interested in using him as part of a team. More than this: he was determined to give them a master game of his own devising, on which he was labouring long hours (even though he wasn’t yet using any dry ice).

“If it’s a winner,” Adrian explained to me glassy-eyed one morning, “Matthew’s made. He’ll be filthy rich. And he’s going to do it. I know he is.”

Filthy rich from a computer game? This seemed implausible, but Adrian regaled me with the story of some other youth who was set to scoop a million quid in fees and royalties. True story, so it turned out. This was going to be a giant market. Forget coin-in-the-slot arcade games; home gaming was the coming thing. Giant new heights loomed with such as Matthew as the pioneering climbers. Had I heard of a plumber called Mario, in Donkey Kong? Had I heard of Richard Garriot’s role-playing Ultima that ran on the Apple II? In a few more years really good affordable computers would be in every home in the land. Really neat consoles would plug into your TV, and these new CDs wouldn’t only have music on them; they would have big computer programmes. Matthew was a genius, a genius.

Poetry and computer games are pretty much at opposite ends of the spectrum—of the Sinclair Spectrum, you might almost say, if you can remember back then. Both as regards the persons involved, and also as regards the money.

What prospects did I have realistically? Probably teaching in some shitty school. I felt in my waters that Matthew Riley might well be my great chance. Pass it up, be a fool.

A poet is supposed to be emotional, spontaneous, candid, romantic even, but an artist is selfish and manipulative and driven too. A poet also has a hard drive in her. Believe me, I thought long and hard. I visited a professional Tarot reader, and “What is before me” was the Queen of Pentacles, signifying opulence, security, liberty (although the “What will finally come” card was more ambiguous, but that was a long way off).

To my own self untrue? Immoral, unethical, unpoetical? To which I say: read a few newspapers. Lies, sleaze, hypocrisy, corruption: those are the hallmarks of the golden life, at home and almost everywhere else in the world, to which can be added, in many instances, bare-faced murder, torture, massacres. What did Gerard Manley Hopkins cry out so plaintively and bitterly? “Why do sinners’ ways prosper? Why must disappointment all I endeavour end? The sots and thralls of lust do in spare hours more thrive than I.” Raised by my Mum with difficulty after my Dad legged it—not forgetting the troublesome Step-Dad episode of abuse—I was not about to repeat her naive mistakes. Protect yourself— with cash, obtained in the least insalubrious fashion, to be able to build some beauty for yourself.

To salt my conversation and so that Matthew could explain things, I bought all of one month’s computer magazines (try loading up from the racks now if you’re a weight lifter!).

“Matthew, I’m thirsty, do you and Adrian fancy a pint in the pub?” Was I not getting a poetic buzz from computer jargon? Was cross-fertilisation not occurring? Is code not creative too?

“What I’m doing is a platform game, you see?” “But not as in railway stations, no?” “No no, levels of play stacked above each other. Mine will be different. You’ll be able to make decisions about where you want to go. Instead of being told by the program, the player will be in control. Cyber means steering, you see. Captaining, being in command.” “So games are really about steering.” “Sort of. One day we’ll be able to speak to computers, and they’ll be able to talk back to us.”

“Matthew, would you go with me to the Christmas party at the Guild? I’m supposed to ask someone.” He gaped a bit, mumbled about hours of keyboarding, but no female had ever paid attention to him before.

And after the party, as such things turn out, we ended up tipsily in bed—in darkness since he wanted darkness (the birthmark was yet to reveal itself). Successfully enough in bed: he lost his virginity, and thus became imprinted on me, give or take his computer obsessions. When he called round a couple of nights after the event—interim of fantasising and fretting?—he was a bit hangdog and nervous. Couldn’t believe his luck, though might I be annoyed and snub him? I asked him up to my room to reinforce the imprinting. At least he hadn’t poured aftershave all over himself. Probably never even occurred to him. This time can I light some candles? So that he could see me naked, watch me. Reciprocal revelation of the birthmark might have been a minor calamity, but it didn’t bother me at all.

The other women thought I was crazy, but by then the Christmas vacation arrived. Matthew could stay home in Nottingham for three weeks solid finishing off his code and hopefully mooning a bit about me. He was bound to me, though I could unbind him.

Success, sweet success: for him, for me. Contract swiftly signed; big up-front payment. Million-and-a-half quid the game would net Matthew. Alien Reign was his brilliant masterpiece, ranking him as a major Code Warrior. Despite the steep price it sold and sold, and unlike some rivals the code contained no errors which would make the game impossible to complete. No more such fabulously original ideas were to come to him, but that hardly mattered for quite a few years … I nursed him through the implications of his good fortune, like some latter-day lottery adviser taking a thunderstruck winner under their wing, though Matthew’s win was well deserved, not sheer luck. I steered him, and he was grateful for this as well as for our sessions in bed.

“Would you marry me?” he blurted.

“Yes!” We would adventure together.

Dizzy years were to follow once we both left college. Newly hired accountant advised investment in property, and we needed somewhere to live. A manor house (just a little one) would suit me fine, so we bought Malsbury Manor in the charming village of Malsbury, Warwickshire, very convenient for Birmingham where the team was based—this was before the days of networking and high speed data connections—as well as a flat in Birmingham itself. But don’t pay the whole whack outright in cash. Go for a huge endowment mortgage, then you’re racking up a small fortune for the future as well as getting tax relief. Start pension funds, et cetera, et cetera. Assemble a portfolio of shares. Plus, of course, snazzy cars, attending functions and yuppie shampoo parties to be recognized, oh and full-time gardener and cleaners and whatnot, and games room, including authentic old cinema organ rising from the floor and converted to play automatically (oh, what a party we had), and my flights to exotic places for inspiration, sometimes even accompanied by Matthew, though he had plenty of coding to keep him busy and this remained his obsession, particularly when the next big idea simply did not come, and lesser goals occupied him. He was still pulling in fairish money till recently, but outgoings were steep.

“Driving games are a bit sad,” he said to me not too long ago.

“Why sad?” He liked driving.

“They’re such old stuff now … If only I could come up with …” And he wandered off, preoccupied and fretful.

I liked to work on my poems in the herb garden in fine weather or in the lovely old kitchen into which on warm days a clever swallow would dart to catch flies.

Three-Legged Hound was followed by Seer, fruit of my journeys in search of self and soul in far-away places.

My prize-winning inclusion this time, in the mode of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues, was a long poem prompted by the Sultan’s harem in Istanbul. The hundreds of women confined to the luxurious, labyrinthine harem could practise arts and sciences if they wished. Intellectual activity was quite okay if you had an intellect. (Often intellect was devoted to palace intrigue, and you ran a certain risk of ending up at the bottom of the Bosphorus sewn inside a sack.) My harem-virgin studies astronomy deeply. With the permission of the Mistress of the Seraglio, attended by a black eunuch she stargazes from the roof of the harem so forested with domes and towers and chimneys as to resemble a chessboard in mid-game, pieces sculpted by De Chirico. She’s quite a genius. This particular Sultan doesn’t bother her with any demands, unlike certain debauchees such as Ibrahim who would strip all his women bare, order them to play-act being mares, and riot among them as a stallion. Hundreds of concubines, as I said; this Sultan has only set eyes on her once or twice. My heroine predicts that a transit of Venus will track the tiny shadow of our sister world across the full Moon, observable through her little telescope. On the night in question, when her mental life would be fulfilled, the Sultan finally calls her to his bed for the very first time.

Some reviews of Seer sneered at its tourist tone, “Jet-Set gems” et cetera. Sour grapes, said I (though Bloodaxe took note).

One critic, keen to show that he understood astronomy better than me, took exception to the harem poem: the shadow of Venus is planet-size and so faint that not even the most sensitive modern detectors could tell the difference in the amount of sunlight illuminating the full Moon, as he explained at some length. Though chagrined, I felt that there was still a poetical truth; and I had won an award, after all, from judges who appreciated powerful pathos and irony.

Seer, see-er, equals visionary. Swap the letters around, and sere means dried-up. Work for my third hoped-for collection was a real struggle, mirroring perhaps the frustrations Matthew himself was experiencing even if he was churning out reams, or megabytes, of stuff. I would take out a piece I had finished a fortnight earlier, feeling fairly satisfied at the time, and oh God the flaws in it. Magazines actually declined several of my submissions and Bloodaxe cooled off from me.

I could easily start up my own poetry press, but that would be cheating. Downright amateur. I had standards, I was sincere.

Nice photo of me on the back cover of Three-Legged Hound, taken by Matthew with his digicam in the walled herb garden, seeming slightly over-exposed the way Bloodaxe printed it, me with my long blond hair wearing a white cotton dress made in India. Even then I looked a bit ghostlike. When I went abroad with Matthew he was forever taking pictures which could be used for realistic games locations. Download the images into the computer using a twain-driver, then manipulate them any which way. If I flew off on my own I must be sure to take along my own digicam and use it.

I was a passenger in Matthew’s life, along for the ride, which had been the plan, but life’s more complicated than that. He had enriched me immeasurably. I cherished him. We made love quite often and I had no affairs. (Nor did he; he mightn’t have known how to.) Amanda means “to be loved.” Must be loved. And so it was. Not so long ago I said to him, “If anything happens to me, I’ll watch over you,” and for a moment he seemed to flinch, as if at a threat, though he quickly hid this with a smile.

Matthew seemed oblivious to himself as potential parent, and I did not wish for the intrusion yet, even though time was passing by, how it was passing for both of us. Maybe if we had a child my creative juices would flow more freely, though I might be resigning my poetical hopes by creating flesh instead of word. Nowadays a woman could safely have a first child in her late thirties, early forties.

True, we rattled a bit in Malsbury Manor, not that Matthew noticed, but there were plenty of friends who envied, in the nicest way, our fortune which seemed fine enough to them even after we sold the Birmingham flat—who needs a city base when there’s networking?—and there was family, my Mum and Matthew’s parents and his brother Jim whom he twice set up in brilliant-idea businesses which failed.

He drops his used-up fag. He’s going into the Tripe & Tipple, into which inevitably I flow, sucked in there by the vacancy he left behind him.

Pub’s at least half full but I can anchor myself, magnetically so to speak, to a cast-iron pine-top table no one’s yet using, being still cluttered with dirty plates. Bit of a wait at the bar till he gets a chilled bottle of Pils and retires to a long railed shelf to lounge and eye other drinkers. Maybe he’ll spot a contact for brain-ice.

The first time I came back to haunt him he was sitting in ray lovely old kitchen, printouts spread across the huge oak table. (Was he missing me? Or was he colonizing my vacated space?) I rushed toward him, in a sense—a disembodied sense. I could see and hear—the lawnmower outside, Bert Tucker was busy—although smells were missing—I ought to have caught a lovely whiff of cut grass—and as for touch … no, there was merely closeness, proximity.

Matthew, Matthew