Neil Gaiman - Fragile Things - Short Fictions and Wonders

When the mind the beloved scenes.

Whilst the beloved scenes.

They may also become enlarged.

In the end, the Lord gave Mankind the world. All the world was Man’s, save for one garden. This is my garden, said the Lord, and here you shall not enter.

There was a man and a woman who came to the garden, and their names were Earth and Breath.

They had with them a small fruit which the Man carried, and when they arrived at the gate to the garden, the Man gave the fruit to the Woman, and the Woman gave the fruit to the Serpent with the flaming sword who guarded the Eastern Gate.

And the Serpent took the fruit and placed it upon a tree in the center of the garden.

Then Earth and Breath knew their clothedness, and removed their garments, one by one, until they were naked; and when the Lord walked through the garden he saw the man and the woman, who no longer knew good from evil, but were satisfied, and He saw it was good.

Then the Lord opened the gates and gave Mankind the garden, and the Serpent raised up, and it walked away proudly on four strong legs; and where it went none but the Lord can say.

And after that there was nothing but silence in the Garden, save for the occasional sound of the man taking away its name from another animal.

I suppose I could claim that I had always suspected that the world was a cheap and shoddy sham, a bad cover for something deeper and weirder and infinitely more strange, and that, in some way, I already knew the truth. But I think that’s just how the world has always been. And even now that I know the truth-as you will, my love, if you’re reading this-the world still seems cheap and shoddy. Different world, different shoddy, but that’s how it feels.

They say, Here’s the truth, and I say, Is that all there is? And they say, Kind of. Pretty much. As far as we know.

So. It was 1977, and the nearest I had come to computers was I’d recently bought a big, expensive calculator, and then I’d lost the manual that came with it, so I didn’t know what it did anymore. I’d add, subtract, multiply, and divide, and was grateful I had no need to cos, sine, or find tangents or graph functions or whatever else the gizmo did, because, having recently been turned down by the RAF, I was working as a bookkeeper for a small discount carpet warehouse in Edgware, in north London, near the top of the Northern Line. I pretended that it didn’t hurt whenever I’d see a plane overhead, that I didn’t care that there was a world my size denied me. I just wrote down the numbers in a big double-entry book. I was sitting at the table at the back of the warehouse that served me as a desk when the world began to melt and drip away.

Honest. It was like the walls and the ceiling and the rolls of carpet and the News of the World topless calendar were all made of wax, and they started to ooze and run, to flow together and to drip. I could see the houses and the sky and the clouds and the road behind them, and then that dripped and flowed away, and behind it all was blackness.

I was standing in the puddle of the world, a weird, brightly colored thing that oozed and brimmed and didn’t cover the tops of my brown leather shoes. (I have feet like shoeboxes. Boots have to be specially made for me. Costs me a fortune.) The puddle cast a weird light upward.

In fiction, I think I would have refused to believe it was happening, would’ve wondered if I’d been drugged or if I was dreaming. In reality, hell, I was there and it was real, so I stared up into the darkness, and then, when nothing more happened, I began to walk, splashing through the liquid world, calling out, seeing if anyone was about.

Something flickered in front of me.

“Hey fella,” said a voice. The accent was American, although the intonation was odd.

“Hello,” I said.

The flickering continued for a few moments, and then resolved itself into a smartly dressed man in thick horn-rimmed spectacles.

“You’re a pretty big guy,” he said. “You know that?”

Of course I knew that. I was nineteen years old and even then I was close to seven feet tall. I have fingers like bananas. I scare children. I’m unlikely to see my fortieth birthday: people like me die young.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “Do you know?”

“Enemy missile took out a central processing unit,” he said. “Two hundred thousand people, hooked up in parallel, blown to dead meat. We’ve got a mirror going of course, and we’ll have it all up and running again in next to no time. You’re just free-floating here for a couple of nanoseconds, while we get London processing once more.”

“Are you God?” I asked. Nothing he had said had made any sense to me.

“Yes. No. Not really,” he said. “Not as you mean it, anyway.”

And then the world lurched and I found myself coming to work again that morning, poured myself a cup of tea, had the longest, strangest bout of deja vu I’ve ever had. Twenty minutes, where I knew everything that anyone was going to do or say. And then it went, and time passed properly once more, every second following every other second just like they’re meant to.

And the hours passed, and the days, and the years.

I lost my job in the carpet company and got a new job bookkeeping for a company that sold business machines. I got married to a girl called Sandra I met at the swimming baths and we had a couple of kids, both normal sized, and I thought I had the sort of marriage that could survive anything, but I hadn’t, so she went away and she took the kiddies with her. I was in my late twenties, and it was 1986, and I got a job in a little shop on Tottenham Court Road selling computers, and I turned out to be good at it.

I liked computers.

I liked the way they worked. It was an exciting time. I remember our first shipment of ATs, some of them with 40-megabyte hard drives… Well, I was impressed easily back then.

I still lived in Edgware, commuted to work on the Northern Line. I was on the tube one evening, going home-we’d just gone through Euston and half the passengers had got off-and I was looking at the other people in the carriage over the top of the Evening Standard and wondering who they were, who they really were, inside: the thin, black girl writing earnestly in her notebook, the little old lady with the green velvet hat on, the girl with the dog, the bearded man with the turban…

The tube stopped in the tunnel.

That was what I thought happened, anyway: I thought the tube had stopped. Everything went very quiet.

And then we went through Euston, and half the passengers got off.

And then we went through Euston, and half the passengers got off. And I was looking at the other passengers and wondering who they really were inside when the train stopped in the tunnel, and everything went very quiet.