An Unusual Angle

by Greg Egan

  It’s times like that when I wonder if I’m the only person in the world with a sense of humour.

  Only kidding.

  It is a new year but all the faces are the same and so little has changed.

  —Would all students move to the Western Quadrangle now, please. All students to the Western Quadrangle for a brief assembly before sorting into tutorial groups.

  Sorting into what?

  They can’t have! I don’t believe it!

  They have! They’ve changed something!

  Tutorial groups. Now that sounds scholastic.

  Yawn.

  I don’t want to find these pitiful lumps exciting, it’s so degrading to lick such crumbs from the hands that knead us.

  Tutorial groups. Mmmmm. Yummm. Interested? You bet!

  No time to contemplate the implications because I have subconsciously walked to the quadrangle and I am sitting and poor Deputy Question Mark Mr Callow is nervously calling for attention.

  And then Seward arrives.

  I would definitely use ‘Zarathustra’ again, for consistency. I guess the repetition risks predictability, but at the same time it is aesthetically attractive to associate a piece of music with a character or mood, and stick with it. In any case, the very fact that ‘Zarathustra’ is repeated changes its meaning, for when it accompanied Seward’s first appearance, the audience had never seen him before, and the build-up of the chords was not entirely a mockery; now from the very first sound they know just what to expect, and the awesome introduction is seen as empty flatulence. They can imagine a hundred thousand repetitions of the same event, each one ridiculously heralded as the revelation of something new and remarkable.

  Also, I can’t think of anything else to do.

  As the music dies, he talks:

  —Well, kids, this is my second year at Fenirk Vale, and believe me, in the short time I’ve been here, I’ve seen it improve literally before my eyes. This school is getting better and better every day, and with your help it’s going to keep on doing it, it’s going to …

  Now I have to do something here. My integrity demands it (a small, petulant voice). Cut to a talking cockatoo? Split screen with library film of Hitler, subtitles about the progress he’s made?

  Not very subtle. Now, in if… they managed to mock their headmaster without any clichéed metaphors … they just shot him through the forehead. However great the temptation, that’s out of the question with mine, because I still need him for dozens of later scenes. Maybe at the end of the film …

  But I need something right now, so the stage rises high into the air by hydraulic magic, and beneath it rises a vast polystyrene cave housing a choir of eyeless pink creatures, singing with soaring sweetness and slow choreography by Bob Fosse:

  Stand up! Stand up! For Fenkirk!

  The school we all adore!

  Stand up! Stand up! For Seward!

  Who rules for ever more!

  Our name we will send forward!

  Our banners we’ll unfurl!

  Till everyone knows that Fenkirk is

  The best school in the world!

  Editing fits the action to the music so he walks off the stage just as the choir fades out, as their bodies implode.

  Where would we be without editing?

  —First years move to the hall for sorting into tutorial groups. Second years to the end of the quadrangle.

  Third years move out onto the oval. Fourth and fifth years to the southern lawn. I’ll just repeat that …

  Which he did.

  A short, red-haired woman reads off names in each tutorial group and I am 2A2. The exact significance of the designation escapes me, but it is something to cling to so I accept it gratefully (gracefully).

  Oh shut up.

  Our tutorial teacher is Mr Houghton, thirtyish Social Studies teacher with a walrus-like moustache and a generally drooping countenance. You see they only have one mould. Our form room is a metalwork room where we sit on blue wooden benches and breathe the tiny iron particles in from the air.

  And it is all explained to us.

  A new system has been introduced, in an attempt to deepen divisions between students. It is called the House System. There are four houses, named after four signs of the zodiac: Aquarius, Gemini, Leo, and Scorpio. Do not ask why. Perhaps Those Who Plan have left the eighteenth century and entered the mystical nineteen-sixties. A twenty-year lag is better than we have any right to hope for.

  Students are divided randomly between the four houses (non-horoscopically, at least; perhaps other parameters from our Files are used). The House System replaces the Faction System in sport, but it is also extended into every other corner of our lives where it can be fitted. Each House has three tutorial groups in each year, each tutorial group being designated by the year number, the first letter of the House name, then the number 1, 2, or 3. Students will keep the same House and tutorial group number every year, so we will be 3A2 next year. And the tutorial teacher will move up with the students, being a solid, constant, dependable presence in their lives.

  Like a gall stone.

  Sorry, go on. This is really gripping stuff.

  The tutorial teacher will be like a counsellor to the students in his tutorial group, and they should come to him with any problem they have, either with school-work or (they must be kidding) their personal lives.

  Please sir, I’m a mass murderer, a heroin addict, and I’m failing English. Can you help me?

  Sorry, go on.

  The extra period on Wednesday formerly devoted nominally to Scripture Classes will now be used as a Tutorial Period. Students will be encouraged to join clubs so they can defend the honour of their House in non-sporting fields, such as chess, model-building, computer games, stamp collecting, handwriting analysis, vivisection, and necromancy. (I’m kidding about the last; this isn’t the USA after all.) (Prejudiced? Against the land of the free? Never! Their brave boys on R&R keep our brothels buoyant.) So easily distracted, that’s my big weakness. I must get right to the core of this thing, which is to say:

  Stand up! For the House System!

  Which breaks us into four!

  This healthy competition

  Is what we’ve come here for!

  The path to a true identity

  Leads surely to this gate!

  So fight for your House my brother

  And you will be truly great!

  Just thought I’d keep in the School Spirit of things.

  To my dismay, the means have not changed.

  What happened to the volatile convulsions of fashion?

  Dismay? Why should I care? Not even disgust. At least I’ve changed the frequency of my purple glow by one or two Hertz. Distress? Claustrophobia? In fact I hardly noticed, did I? I decide to think about something else? Yes.

  Like the exciting courses I will be doing this year. In second year, they kindly let us pick, from a wide range of optional courses, what we will do for ten periods of every week.

  I asked for four periods of French, four periods of German, and two periods of Technical Drawing.

  I end up with two periods of Metalwork, two periods of Woodwork, two periods of Typing, and four periods of Technical Drawing.

  Goodbye, Lake Geneva!

  Something went wrong. Two things went wrong.

  Too few students for a French class.

  Too few students for a German class.

  So it goes.

  Why should I care? Not even disgust.

  I’m not very good at Metalwork.

  Good.

  The critics love the intellectual to be forced to work with his hands.

  Goodbye, CERN!

  What intellectual?

  Stop wallowing in self-pity. If you wanted the benefits of a classical education, you should have stayed at ADSUMMUM COLLEGE.

  I can always study French and German at home, read Teach Yourself books, perhaps even go to night school …

  But I’m too lazy. It’s really all my own fa
ult.

  Stop wallowing in self-hatred.

  I can’t help it. It comes from being so introspective, from spying on myself, filming myself and taping and tapping myself, watching myself and studying myself and brooding and worrying and talking to myself and …

  … And that reminds me: I never did get to learn about reflexive verbs in first-year French.

  Even more depressing is the fact that, despite all my morbid self-obsession, I still do not really seem to understand myself; all my detailed analysing and examining seems shallow, looking back. I search for a model which will explain the world lines of my constituent particles, but none I try fit even roughly. I know that I can never understand anyone else deeply, and thus if I do not even understand myself, then I am alone.

  That sounds like Shakespeare’s sentiments without his eloquence.

  Not that I mean anything specific. Just generally sort of Shakespearish, the same sort of lonely brooding. I have no idea what his personal thoughts or emotions or goals were.

  Unlike Stephen Dedalus.

  I haven’t even seen King Lear.

  Snap out of this.

  My surroundings come into focus and I am in my new English class.

  —This year, we will be working on ten main topics. As I give you each topic, you will have two weeks to write as much as possible on it, then I will collect it up and mark it. I expect at least twenty pages, and anything less will fail automatically. Anything will do: essays, poems, newspaper cuttings …

  Newspaper cuttings?

  —… plays, film scripts, pictures, crossword puzzles …

  Crossword puzzles?

  (Signal echoes at boundary between two media.)

  —… maps, letters, legal documents, advertising copy …

  Forget it!

  —… diaries, memoranda, constitutions, operating instructions, road signs, government reports, sky writing …

  (A choking noise.)

  —… petitions, autographs, doodles …

  Her voice rises rapidly to a high, hysterical screech.

  —… fingerprints, candid snapshots, intimate personal possessions, black lace underwear, samples of flesh …

  Three people are calmly writing this down in little pocket notebooks. I have a little pocket notebook, but I only write strange things in it like film companies’ addresses, verses of sarcastic school songs, and the fact that BSC stands for British Society of Cinematographers.

  —… strands of hair, teeth, fingernail clippings …

  The worst is over. Fingernail clippings are really almost civilised compared with samples of flesh.

  English should be fun this year.

  —Now, the first topic for the year will be water. I expect you all to do a nice little title page … ‘WATER’ … with a pretty illustration.

  At least she’s not stereotyped. I hate stereotyped teachers. When I get a stereotyped teacher, I think I’m in a Peanuts cartoon.

  Not that I have anything against animation.

  The next day our English teacher has vanished. Imagine that. She is replaced by a fat young man with lots of hair. He too wants us to do nice little title pages with pretty illustrations.

  I take a blue pencil and shade in the entire page. Then I take a green pencil and shade over the entire page. The result looks a little murky. Then I print in large, plain capitals: WATER.

  —That’s bloody awful

  he complains as he looks at mine.

  —I can’t draw too well

  I explain. I really can’t.

  —Well, what the hell do you think you come to school for except to learn how to draw?

  —With all due respect, learned sir, I do not expect to learn how to draw from an English teacher in an English class. I’d learn how to draw from an Art teacher in an Art class, if I wanted to learn how to draw at all, but Art is optional this year and I did not choose to study it. I do not expect to have my drawing ability either questioned or improved in an English class.

  —You’ll learn what I say you’ll learn, you little smart-arse!

  Ooh, he’s asking for it!

  I rise from my chair carefully, deliberately, slowly revealing the full splendour of my costume (a perfect copy of Michael York’s in The Three Musketeers) to the accompaniment of shocked sighs from the crowd (class).

  —I challenge you to a duel to the death

  I say in Michael York’s voice.

  The teacher laughs like Peter Cushing, then says, with the matched educated evil voice:

  —It will be a privilege to get rid of you once and for all.

  We draw our swords; they shimmer with sunbeams in the dawn’s light.

  I wish I’d taken fencing lessons.

  The classroom has vanished, and we are standing a few metres apart in a field glistening with dew and frozen manure. The sun turns a forest to the east into hundreds of mile-long shadows visible clearly from the helicopter filming us from above. We’ll have to dub in the dialogue later because of the noise.

  We circle our centre of mass like a double star (I’d bet Dumas never gave you that sort of simile!). I thrust my sword forward into his neck. Blood spurts from his jugular at once.

  —We were supposed to keep circling for thirty seconds, you fool!

  he says in sign language because he is unable to speak.

  I look up. The helicopter is gone, and in the distance I hear police sirens. He just lies there, bleeding.

  The helicopter has gone up very high, too high for me to see it, but with a telephoto lens they watch as the police arrive and handcuff me, lead me to the car. The shadows of the forest grow shorter and shorter, and then the ambulance arrives. Bill Cosby steps out.

  Rewind to ‘I can’t draw too well’.

  —I’m sure you could have managed something

  he says then walks on.

  I quickly sketch the Empire State Building in one corner of the page. It’s one of the few things I can draw reasonably well.

  People would think it very odd if I took fencing lessons, and, besides, I can’t afford them.

  I imagine they’re very expensive.

  Chapter 7

  ENTERPRISE

  I used to dream of living in a house built on top of an enormous reinforced-concrete tower. I’d get electricity from solar collectors, water from rain, and food from hydroponic gardens, and hence I could live for free, and wouldn’t need to earn any money once I’d paid for everything.

  But of course there would be council rates.

  So I decided I would defend myself from rate collectors by fitting aerosol cans with fuses and throwing them down from the tower.

  But I’d have to buy the aerosol cans.

  So I decided I would defend myself from rate collectors by surrounding the tower with a grid of metal. The tower would contain enormous capacitors to store solar electricity, and I’d zap the rate collectors with high-voltage discharges.

  Non-lethal. I suppose.

  Of course!

  But they’d probably drop a bomb on me from the air.

  So I decided I would build a spacecraft and move to the moon. Assuming a sufficient range of chemical compositions of lunar minerals to make up for small losses in my recycling system, I could survive indefinitely.

  But spacecraft are expensive, so I’d have to save a lot of money, somehow.

  So I went into films. Look where it got me.

  Look closely.

  Nowhere.

  I have been producing high-quality (really) 35 mm films practically since I was four years old (when I grew the camera), and I have not sold one of them to a major (or even a minor) distributor. This is mainly (entirely) because all the film is exposed, developed, printed, and edited inside my head. And I can’t persuade any reputable brain surgeons that they should operate and remove a few of the better final prints. I have limited storage space, so I make only two release prints of each film. The brain surgeons say I can’t pay them, and I promise them enormous percentages of my takin
gs once I can get some prints out of my brain. But they have no faith.

  I no longer wish to live in a tower or on the moon.

  But I’d still like to get some of those prints out of my brain. I may just have to train as a brain surgeon and do it all myself.

  Only kidding. My dexterity is zero.

  When I tell people I have 35 mm films stored inside my brain, they tell me to project them onto a screen via my eyes. This is of course ridiculous, as I have no light source in there. All my printing is done by special non-optical diffusion methods which I tried to patent. The patent examiner was very polite. He rejected my application. He said it was not practical or useful because film surfaces could never be manufactured to the tolerances I specified, and the enzymes I mentioned could not be synthesised with current technology.

  All of which was true, up to a point.

  Of course, I could always start using conventional cameras and film stocks. But I’d have to pay for them.

  And candid shots would become much more difficult.

  Sometimes I even think of expressing myself in other media. It isn’t that hard at all.

  This line of thinking causes me to reach an important decision. I will publish a magazine. And I do.

  I must be very careful not to forget that I am no longer writing screenplays. Screenplays are often very dull to read. Instead of writing screenplays, I must write films on paper. Frame by frame but so fast that the flicker is unnoticeable. Which of course requires fast reading.

  Out of pure frustration I screen my ten best films to myself, and write them on paper, frame by frame. The result is exceptionally bulky, as it takes many words to describe just one frame (and each individual frame must be described separately, not in terms of the previous frame; each frame must be a unique and completely independent written image).

  In fact the written films are so bulky that I decide to publish only one in the first issue of the magazine. I am sure that it will be enough.

  I have four hundred copies printed. I am sure that it will be enough.