Alasdair Gray - Unlikely Stories Mostly

Control to president: SUPPORT SUFFICIENT. THE SPIRIT OF MAN IS TOO GREAT TO BE CONFINED BY A PHYSICAL BOUNDARY.

The control room was always a comforting place after the hysteria below. In complete silence (everyone wore helmets) the chief, the army commander and the financial secretary sat round a triangular table controlling the industrial process which produced the flame. Their faces showed the stern jubilation of masterly men who understand exactly what they are doing. Dials and graphs indicated the current bank-rate, stock exchange index, food and fuel reserves, activity of stokers at furnaces, position of soldiers guarding them, flow of chemicals to the crucibles, flow of gas to the burners, and the heat and width of the flame. A needle would flicker, then a hand would change the angle of a lever, or write and despatch an order. Between these times the triumvirate played knockout whist.

I was taking the final note down in the lift when I sensed a silence. Shielding my eyes I leaned out, looked up and saw the blue heaven opening and coming down to us. A lovely white flower bloomed whose hundred petals and stamens reached down and embraced us all. I was suddenly in white mist beside a white wall. The cable holding the lift must have snapped. I was spinning (I now know) downward through drenching whiteness, but I thought I was going up. Until I glimpsed collapsing pinnacles with whiteness gushing round them, water of course. I spun in drenching whiteness down cataracts of drenching whiteness flecked with rubble, bodies or furniture. And then I was in sunshine a few yards above plunging water and, ah, great waves. I went beyond these waves. I saw an edge of foaming water racing across fields, islanding woods and villages. Tiny figures waded, gesticulating from doors, then a huge wave engulfed them. A few floated up, some clinging to each other, then a vaster wave smashed down on them and nothing floated after that. The wind which carried the lift took me skyward and then back toward that white pillar, that waterfall from the sky beneath which the work of two thousand years was melting like a sandcastle. I grinned as I flew toward that dazzling pillar but I did not strike it, the lift went down again and out with the waves again to that foamy edge racing across the ordinary green and brown earth. Later I lost sight of the pillar. Either the heavenly continent had healed up or dissolved completely into water. The sky has been a lighter shade of blue ever since.

I must have managed the lift intelligently for I came down in shallow water near a ridge of rocks, a shore of the new sea. I sat a long time on those rocks, sometimes howling, sometimes weeping, always staring at the waves which drowned everything I knew and will drown it forever. I tried to think of a reason for living and failed, but life is too strong to need reasons. Next day two quite new sensations, hunger and loneliness, made me walk until I met a tribe of nomads. They have strange notions of hygiene but are otherwise tolerant and generous. When I had learned their language they valued my ability to exactly weigh, measure and record their herds and produce. I now have sons who are keen to learn arithmetic but refuse to learn, and will certainly never read, the language of the axletree. The older tribesmen know something about the axletree but the knowledge confuses them. They prefer to forget it. Yet I am the man who touched the sky! And when I try explaining this to my boys, because sons should admire fathers, the younger nudges the elder who says, “Did you visit the sun too? Did you stand on it, Dad? Was it hot?”

A week ago we pitched tents below a rocky cliff. Broken columns stood before the entrance to a ravine, which I explored. It led to a marble block carved with these words in the language of the old empire:

OZYMANDIAS

3D EMPEROR OF THE GREAT WHEEL

RECEIVED

FROM

GOD

IN

THE CAVERN

BEHIND

THIS STONE

THE

PLAN

OF THE

AXLETREE

LOOK ON HIS WORK YE MIGHTY

AND DESPAIR

The block has a crack the width of my finger between the top edge and the granite rock above. Tests with a stick show that the sheepskin on which I write this account can be slid through to fall in the cave behind. The marble is too vast to be moved by any but administrative people commanding a large labour-force to satisfy idle curiosity, so unless there is a shattering earthquake my history will not be found till the next world empire is established. Many centuries will pass before that happens, because tribes dispersed round a central sea will take longer to unify. But mere love-making and house-keeping, mere increase of men will bring us all together again one day, though I suppose ruling castes will speed the business by organising invasion and plunder. So when unity is achieved the accumulation of capital which created the first great tower will lead to another, or to something very similar.

But men are not completely sheeplike. Their vanity ensures that they never exactly repeat the past, if they know what it is. So if you have understood this story you had better tell it to others.

The Reverend Dr Phelim MacLeod is a healthy, boyish-looking bachelor who has outlived all his relations except a distant cousin in Canada. Though unsurpassed in his knowledge of Latin, Hebrew and Greek his main reading since retirement has been detective stories, but he can still beat me at the game of chess we play at least once a fortnight. I tell you this to indicate his apparent normality before the accident last year. A badly driven, badly stacked glazier’s van crashed beside his garden gate as he walked out of it, and a fragment of glass sheered off a section of skull with his right ear on it. I am his closest friend. At the Royal Infirmary I heard that no visitors could be allowed to see him in his present state, but I would be called if it changed.

I was called a week later. The brain surgeon in charge of him said, ‘Dr MacLeod has regained consciousness. We are providing him with peace, privacy and a well-balanced diet. His unique constitution makes it impossible for us to do more.’ “But is he recovering?”

“I think so. Judge for yourself. And please tell him nothing about his appearance that would needlessly disturb him.”

In a small ward of his own I found Dr MacLeod propped up in bed reading one of his detective thrillers. He greeted me with his usual calm, self-satisfied smile. I asked how he felt.

“Very well,” he said. “You are interested in my wound, I see. How does it look? The staff here are less than informative.”

In war films I had seen many buildings with an outer wall missing and the side of my friend’s head resembled one. Through a big opening I saw tiny rooms with doors, light fittings and wall sockets, all empty of furniture but with signs of hasty evacuation. There was also scaffolding and heaps of building material suggesting that repair was in progress. I said hesitantly, “You seem to be mending quite well.”

Dr MacLeod smiled complacently and pointed out that he would be seventy-six on his next birthday. I asked if he had any pain.

“No pain but a deal of inconvenience. I am forbidden to move my head and am sometimes wakened at night by hammering noises inside it. I sleep best during the day.”

After chatting with him about the weather and our acquaintances I returned to the surgeon’s office. I told him that my friend seemed surprisingly fit for a man in his condition and asked who was responsible for the improvement.

“Agents,” said the surgeon slowly, “who seem to inhabit the undamaged parts of his anatomy, only emerging to operate on him when nobody is looking — nobody like us, I mean. I am carefully keeping students and younger doctors away from this case. Mere curiosity might lead them to kill your friend by delving into what they understand as little as I do.” “There are obviously more things in heaven and earth,” I said, “than are dreamed of in your …” The surgeon interrupted testily, saying every experienced medical practitioner knew that better than Shakespeare. A year seldom passed without them encountering at least one inexplicable case. A hospital he would not name recently treated a woman, otherwise normal, for panic attacks caused by her certainty that a sudden shock would crack her into a million pieces. When every other therapy had failed a psychiatrist, thinking a practical demonstration might work, suddenly tripped her so that she fell on a padded surface which could not have injured a child, and she had cracked into a million pieces. “With tact,” said the surgeon, “your friend’s case may have a happier conclusion.”