Illuminations, page 17
Finally, The Panperuleum was finished, to the satisfaction of The Panperule alone. So pleased was the eponymous dictator/deity by the dimensions of this loathsome idol, that it failed to notice how the quiff-tip of the graven image was turned inwards, pleasuring itself. This subtle touch – The Panperule forever wanking at the alleged centre of the universe – had been devised by an increasingly resentful Glynne, and executed by the deputy director’s phonetically sympathetic cohort Glytte, Glig, Glimp and Glock, that last of which chose to identify as an entirely different vowel sound. As the proto-university’s first term commenced, Glynne’s clique looked on with carefully suppressed amusement as the influx of collegiate brains filed solemnly into the multi-oriented auditorium beneath a semblance of their demiurge, captured eternally in flagrant self-abuse.
This palaeo-academic era, while it lasted, was largely congenial, aggressively erudite and crushingly monotonous. This was because The Panperuleum employed only one lecturer and taught only one subject, that being Thermo-never-die-namics. Worse, the single lecturer appeared not to have fully thought this self-invented theory through, and offered only a few heavily opinionated anecdotes in its support. Chief amongst these was the oft-repeated notion that the rumbling – by now loud enough to render many of the lectures unintelligible – was merely an aftershock being all that it could be, in a universe of everlasting self-improvement. Typically, The Panperule would make a rambling presentation of these same ideas, over and over, followed by the customary session of questions and answers, before calling for a recess. These break periods, during which socialising and, inevitably, much clattersmashtinkling were allowed, were demarcation points as critical as dawn or dusk in that unvarying bluish-pink continuum. They were also the only thing that made the academic life remotely bearable, all that prevented more of the assembled students from becoming restless and politically radical than there already were.
Glynne could not help but notice that the frequent calls for recess offered ample opportunity for the sole lecturer’s philandering amongst the student body, many of whom seemed inordinately flattered by their creepy principal’s advances. There would regularly be a dozen or so scholars that competed for The Panperule’s attention, always floating in those spaces closest to the lectern, teasing up their sensory extensions into ever more outrageous styles and flirting openly in the question-and-answer intervals. They made Glynne sick, with their pretended understanding of and interest in Thermo-never-die-namics, their sycophantic tittering each time The Panperule attempted an ellipsoid joke. Apparently, it only knew the one, this being a display of something stupid, actual or invented, that Glynne was reputed to have done. In fact, ‘the Glynne joke’ in its many variations had become so widespread that a number of the students had suggested glassy dissertations on the subject, their preposterous sound-library voices ringing in The Panperuleum’s deranged acoustics.
During recess periods, The Panperule would make itself available for one-on-one tuition with whichever simpering cerebellum had been fluttering their cilia most invitingly, these episodes invariably taking place off-campus, usually in the vicinity of the leftover levitating doughnuts. On one such occasion, Glynne suggested that the eager-to-please Glock should follow lecturer and student to establish the validity of these extracurricular excursions. Unsurprisingly, when the culturally appropriative hanger-on reported back to what it called its ‘vowelies’ – Glynne, Glytte, Glig, Glimp and company would shudder visibly whenever Glock used this expression – it regurgitated a long-lens ellipsoid image of The Panperule lewdly frolicking with glee, and, coincidentally, with Glee: off on the so-called dark side of the nearest hovering toroidal lump, master and pupil made ‘the beast with two brains’. Endlessly repeated in Glock’s paparazzi loop, The Panperule and Glee entwined their spinal tails as an obscene caduceus; mashing their hairy fascinators one against the other in delirious abandon. With a hardening hippocampus, Glynne gazed coldly at this pitiful and grubby assignation, the unsightly older brain making a fool of itself with the squeaking juvenile. Glynne didn’t excrete so much as a single cut-glass word, but all of its companions, even Glock, knew that the second-in-command was both resentful and humiliated (forty-two and fifty). Glynne was literally bristling.
It was a story old as time, which was to say less than a femtosecond.
The inevitable confrontation happened at the start of summer term, although in accordance with the principles of Thermo-never-die-namics they were all summer terms. The rumbling sound was so pronounced by this point that the bulbous declarations of The Panperule were necessarily the size of glass dirigibles, in order to be heard above the thunderous reverberations. The bore of The Panperuleum’s entrance tunnels had been widened so that these spent conversation-globules could more easily be swept into the outer void by students made to serve as Boltzmann janitors, yet still the garrulous detritus tended to accumulate in corners of the multiplanar auditorium, shimmering and jingling unappealingly.
The Panperule had just concluded a meandering account of how Thermo-never-die-namics implied that the classic Glynne joke would just keep on getting funnier and funnier the more it was repeated, then called for a session of questions and answers with its furry sensor lecherously pointed at the giggling front-row students. It was here that Glynne and a tail-picked team of phonetic cronies made their entrance, shimmying into position between lecturer and audience with cerise suds everywhere. In the immediate apprehensive silence, while The Panperule contracted its receptor cone into a perplexed squint, Glynne volunteered a carefully considered question.
‘For whom can this perpetually improving universe be said to be improving?’
The Panperule, taken aback by Glynne’s enquiry, blustered a long stream of floating ornaments to the effect that space-time was continually getting better from its own perspective, and that surely this must be the same for everyone and everything. Aware that this could be seen as a flimsy argument, The Panperule fell back on the increasingly loud rumble as supporting evidence, then ended with a flourish of arch rhetoric by asking if Glynne had a more convincing theory. Glee, Glam, Gloop and all the other fawning teacher’s pets were tittering already at their tutor’s classic put-down, and agreeing that this ill-planned intervention took the whole Glynne joke to the next level, when the deputy brain dipped its velvet prong in an affirming nod.
‘Yes, I believe I have. It seems to me that this existence, far from constantly improving on perfection, is in no small measure getting worse. As evidence, I too would cite the mounting volume of the rumbling noise that makes our discourse pointless and inaudible, that forces us to cough up speeches like translucent zeppelins. How does this, in any sense, improve our situation?’
Reeling from this heresy, its sense-aperture hanging slack with disbelief, The Panperule here accidentally loaned weight to Glynne’s proposal by exclaiming, ‘What?’
In audiovisual bubbles now inflected with a heavily ironic tone, Glynne condescendingly reprised those opening remarks, then went on to make matters worse by calling into doubt the customary explanation for the worsening grumble of eternity.
‘I put it to you that, rather than high-spirited aftershocks, it is more likely that these sounds are instead the fore-rumble of some cataclysm yet to come.’
Spluttering incoherent image-beads, The Panperule loudly insisted that this absurd notion contradicted the established tenets of Thermo-never-die-namics, and at this, Glynne merely nodded.
‘I contend that it is well past time for Thermo-never-die-namics to be superseded by a more substantial theory of my own devising. I contend that our improbably well-organised continuum is in fact degenerating, with the advent of self-aware creatures actively contributing to that decline: putting a bunch of brains in charge of space-time is, quite evidently, a disastrous idea.’
The omnipresent rumbling was briefly challenged by the incredulous murmur of the students as they tried to comprehend Glynne’s radical new train of thought. The Panperule anxiously noted that Glee, Glam, Gloop, Glow and Gleam – its fan club/harem – were all gazing gooey-haired at Glynne, using the tips of their spine-tails to toy coquettishly with their luxuriant forelocks. From The Panperule’s perspective, none of this was going well. As space-time’s self-described creator dithered over how best to subdue the insurrection, Glynne calmly continued its incendiary monologue.
‘My theory states that our unlikely universe will shift to a condition of continual collapse, perhaps commenced by whatever catastrophe is presaged by these current rumbles. This slow disintegration will eventually end when our continuum is stripped of all complexity; of life, and form, and energy; unburdened of the many tropes that comprise its existence. This un-tropic state, inevitable, unavoidable, I have named Untropy.
‘Further to this, I can predict with confidence that in whatever eras of the cosmos follow, signs of Untropy will be so commonplace they will establish my conjecture as a universal fact. Indeed, these later ages will be so immersed in Untropy, in all existence running down to frigid, black disorder, that our world will only be imaginable by assuming that the universe began in a high-energy state of near infinite complexity, as a logical opposite of its eventual end in cold, and dark, and utter disarray: in Untropy. And other than the implication that The Panperule will no longer be tangling tonsures with cheap floozies up on the leftover doughnuts, I’m afraid I really can’t see frozen nothingness as an improvement.’
Though the by-now-sensor-splitting rumble drowned the odd word here and there, everyone caught the gist. Some of the more highly strung brains fainted, floating quiff-down and unconscious in amongst their gaping colleagues. Glee and Gloop applauded by slapping their undersides together. It may have been this final indignity that drove The Panperule to its unfortunate reaction.
Howling, ‘Glynne! The Panperule! That’s quite enough! The Panperule!’ in a speech-glob big as a double-decker Hindenburg, The Panperule lifted its skeletal flagellum up above the shivering hairpiece in the manner of a not-yet-extant scorpion. Before it had the time to fully understand what it was doing, the infuriated elder lashed out with a bone whip in the general direction of its smirking deputy. The crack as the tail’s flexible tip broke a prototype sound barrier was like an atom bomb, audible even through the all-consuming seismic background noise.
Intended as a reprimanding slap, the narrow tail end caught Glynn squarely on the frontal lobe and smashed the younger brain to pseudo-molecules. Glynne’s twitching tail, no longer anchored to a central cortex, fell unhurriedly into the depths or heights of the stunned auditorium.
The Panperule was as surprised as anybody. Having only just invented homicide, it had been previously unaware of the brainform’s alarming vulnerability. With this in mind, it was already starting to materialise a hard, protective carapace around its softer parts, an armour plating in metallic blue that left only the hairpiece and the tail exposed. The student brains, still numb with shock and watching Glynne’s remains tumble away from them into The Panperuleum’s immense concavity, did not immediately notice what The Panperule was doing. When they did, they quickly realised there was nothing stopping them from modifying their own forms in the same way.
It was immediately a quasi-biologic arms race. Now adorned with frightful morning stars that turned each thrashing tail into a mace and chain, both Glytte and Glig launched themselves at The Panperule in a consuming lust for vengeance (one hundred and fifteen). Fortunately for the startled tyrant, a still-loyal squad of ‘ee’-named brains that had evolved a sort of belly-mounted crossbow intervened between The Panperule and his Glynnist attackers. Bolts of bone fizzed through the fluid atmosphere on bubbling trajectories, blasting a fatal hole through Glig but giving Glytte the instants needed to evolve a more robust defensive shell, a metal-plated galleon with two rows of cannon poking through its gun ports on each side.
The femtosecond was within a hair’s breadth of its end; the rumbling a hair’s breadth of its crescendo. Wriggling away from the engagement’s epicentre to a safer vantage point, The Panperule was disconcerted by how rapidly the incident was escalating, how this in its turn drove the advance of military technology into a murderous fast-forward blur. Elsewhere in the university-turned-battlefield, the homophonic triplets Glare, Glheir and Glhey’re had modified themselves with buzz saws before slaughtering a gang of diphthongs that had only managed catapults. The much-maligned brains with an ‘uh’ sound in their names meanwhile extruded petrol engines, biplane fins and sub-machine guns, settling scores with the more privileged vowels that denigrated them as brutish and promiscuous. The Panperuleum’s vast interior became now a Hieronymus Bosch firefight, scarred by arcs of funeral-black smoke as Glup or Glug went down in flames. It was a Boltzmann blitz, and everywhere the steel-jacketed combatants streaked through a hail of cannonballs and cluster-bombs, performing haphazard lobotomies on one another as they went.
The rumbling was now visible, and everything was shaking. Ugly cracks began to race across the concave inner surface of The Panperuleum, just as Glytte sprouted guided missiles and attained a nuclear capability. You couldn’t see for bits of brain.
‘Clattersmashtinkle,’ thought The Panperule, approximately and belatedly.
Somewhere hydrogen was happening, and it was all downhill from there.
ILLUMINATIONS
He’d never have abandoned past for future in the first place, if it hadn’t been for her. She’d lured him from his sandcastles, and told him that the grown-up world was ice cream. They’d walked up a beach of years together, getting good jobs/house and two kids/older, then she’d left him in the drizzle on tomorrow’s seafront, when its long-postponed amusement park was in sight just ahead, and all his strings of coloured bulbs had gone out one by one.
He’s looking at the album, the black pages mourning childhood summers. Silvery triangles of antique gum and his late parents’ spit, commemorating photo hinges long since fallen out, or squares of absence as the old book loses, one by one, its memories. A remaining image has an unknown little girl in the grey gradients of its background, stepping gingerly along a shoreline of the previous century, with all four foot of her reflection caught there in the film of brine beneath her flinching toes.
His former wife had not only called off their times to come, but cancelled their times fled into the bargain. Based on mutual misperception, all the moments he’d thought he remembered had become unreal, or only real to him, a dream erased on waking. Most of who he’d been was gone, leaving a gaping hole that he’d been trying frantically to stuff with photographs, newspaper clippings, anything; a gutted scarecrow with a sportscoat where he’d had a chest.
Turning the pages, heavy with incarcerated light, he looks long on a better world, sadnesses edited away by the Box Brownie’s limitations: in the glazed emulsions of its memory, nothing is happening indoors, or after dark, or in the rain. The only month is August and the only fortnight factory. His mum and dad are squinting, holding a flat hand to shadow-stripe their eyes like sailors looking out for land, smiling both, happy just to be in Welmouth and no longer dead.
The pair of them had changed tense, gone from is to was, during his rubble years that followed the divorce, children replaced by weekly voices on the phone. He’d first lost his retired bus-driver dad, of a failed heart, then six weeks later his increasingly deaf mother, grief-distracted, run down by a number twenty-seven that she’d not heard coming. There followed her sparse funeral, the mourners’ sympathy so recently depleted, and then later the house clearance; the discovered books of photographs.
Him and his mum are both in swimming costumes, sitting damp on towels behind a flapping windbreak, the white dunes around them mohawked spiky black by grass. He’s eight with a side-parting, fiddling with a plastic bucket, Mum expressionless as she unscrews the thermos. Seawater is glittering, beaded on elastic-captured cleavage, and he feels the ghost of his off-picture father’s momentary lust fluttering briefly under the gloss finish, batting against the long-lost lens.
Become a family of one, a no-such-thing, he’d not known who or what he was. He’d searched all over for the missing man – home, work, pub, internet – attempting to retrieve a version of himself he recognised, all the time looking like a bad identikit in his own bathroom mirror. Then, sat in his parents’ disappearing parlour, finally he’d found the grinning, gap-toothed nipper riding a giant snail of painted fibreglass through fifty years ago, and he’d thought, ‘There he is!’
Thin lines of sand, chalk-dusting flagstone seams along the prom, and in the background rises Pleasureland, with helter-skelter spire and monster wheel and plunging track past its pretended castle gates. Dad stoops to give him something on the threshold, either coming out or going in, and through an entrance tumorous with balloons you can see snail cars, watchful louts, ghost corridors, skirts lifting in the funhouse gust; unnerving premonitions of adulthood, painted all in 1967’s ashen palette.
Was that mollusc ride the last time he’d been unconditionally happy? He found himself thinking about Welmouth all the while, and the east coast resort town’s props and scenery set-dressed his dreams. He thought he should perhaps go back there for a day out, a weekend, and in this way arrest his life’s now unrequired forward momentum. Every day he’d bravely re-enlisted in the human struggle with tomorrow, but, as its big guns came out, he planned a staged withdrawal into yesterday.
Each snapshot is a moment’s snakeskin moult, and begs an awful question: that break in the cloud, that street, that afternoon, those walk-on extras, where have they all gone? Why is there no investigation? These dead children, paddling bony in the surf, how do they come to be pressed flat in weighty volumes, with the colours all squeezed out of them? He broods like a TV detective, nagged by the cold case that never felt right, taping overexposed faces to his cranial whiteboard.
