Adjacentland

by Rabindranath Maharaj

  I knew she was likely drawing her story from a film she had seen in the smoker carriage and that it had probably been coloured by her own imagination, but I could not put aside my calculation that three weeks had passed since I awoke in the terminal, my memories washed. “What do you think will happen if one of these men escapes before three months?”

  “It’s impossible. The toad and his friends get them. They have a paladin man with a wolf. He calls himself other names, too. But I know how to get away from him. He is always talking to lizards and birds and cats.” She tittered as if she remembered something funny and then I saw a strange almost adult expression cross her face. “How long since you woke up?”

  “Did I mention that? In any event, it’s less than a month.”

  “Hmm. I have a crazy idea. You should try to get away. It will be the first time ever and you can go to the other side and you can tell everyone about the toad man and his friends and they will break all the walls and set everyone free. I will help you.”

  I thought of the burnt smoker carriage and the stolen ledger and all the crazy men and women trapped in some movie role. I didn’t believe a word the girl said, but she had come from some nearby town and obviously knew her way around. I told her, “Okay.”

  “Okay? I didn’t expect you to agree.”

  “Well, I did. You lead the way and I will follow.”

  “Are you crazy? We can’t walk. They will catch us when we get too tired.”

  “So how do you propose we escape?”

  “The train.”

  I was swiftly reminded I was talking to a child. I told her, “The trains are all rusty and seized. They have been abandoned for a long while.”

  “The bus, then. The one the paladin man travels in. We can sneak on when he is walking about with his wolf.”

  “I haven’t seen any working buses around. Besides, who would drive?”

  “You! Don’t tell me that an old man like you never learned to drive. Did they steal away that, too?”

  “I don’t know the route, so –”

  “Are you making excuses to remain here with everyone else so you can get more crazy every day until you forget every single thing?”

  “No, I wouldn’t want that to happen, but I am not sure your plan is practical. What if you forget the route?” I saw the frustration on her face so I hesitated in adding other obstacles.

  “Suit yourself. I will walk. All by myself. I don’t need anyone.”

  “You are quite a smug little girl,” I told her.

  I immediately regretted saying this but before I could apologize she said, “‘You are quite a smug little girl.’ And why not? I am the only one who has managed to escape.” She laughed loudly and cupped a palm against her ear. “The parrots are laughing, too. Smug. I must teach them that word. It sounds like a baby wren wrapped in a warm blanket. Smug.” She turned and walked away.

  “Wait,” I shouted after a while and when I caught up with her, I added, “Maybe...”

  “Maybe what?”

  “How far away is the bus?”

  “On the hill past all the old junk. We will have to leave when it’s raining because that is when the crazy paladin takes his wolf to walk about.” She skipped away. “In the early morning is when he goes.”

  19 THE TOAD, THE IMP AND THE SORCERER

  When I got to my carriage, I was a bit disappointed that I had actually considered the girl’s plan to leave the station. I was glad I had met her, though, because it meant there was a little village or town nearby. Perhaps I would explore the area and meet her parents or guardian. Or maybe she was an orphan and she had made up her wild story about the three men who had sent her to an institution or to her guardians or adopted parents. I wondered if her belief in the stealing of brains and stories was because she combined elements of her biological parents with that of her adopted parents. Poor child. She seemed tough, though, and resilient.

  That night I heard the steady patter of rain against the carriage’s window and I pictured her watching out from her bedroom, terrified of her paladin bogeyman. She was filled with stories, this child. I remembered her claim that the man who had leapt off the cliff had invented these horrible machines centuries earlier; machines used by the three men to steal stories.

  I fell asleep, a bit amused at the girl’s fantasies, but her description of the toadlike man and his companions instigated a nightmare that I will describe as best as I can.

  It began with a bluish light from the corner of my carriage and in my dream, I asked, “Who is there?” There was no answer and I called out again. “How did you get into my room? I have a weapon.”

  “Please remain on your bed. There’s no need to be unduly disturbed,” a voice said.

  I suppose I am more forthright in my sleep than awake because I demanded of the three silhouettes: “You waltz into my room while I am asleep and expect me to be fine with that. How long have you been here? How did you get in? I am not going to stand for –” I tried to get up to forcefully remove them but discovered that my feet were immobilized. I struggled to prise myself to a sitting position. My hands were tingling and there was a buzzing insect noise close to my ears.

  “Please calm yourself,” one of them said. “We are not here to harm you so there’s absolutely no reason to be so agitated.” I was not reassured by his guarantee and as I struggled to free myself, I heard a prolonged sigh from one and a murmur of impatience from another.

  Eventually I realized it was useless and I asked, “What do you want from me?”

  “As always, we want what’s best for you. For us. Everyone.”

  I now saw that the man on the right was tall in comparison with his associates, but so sclerotic that his hands hung close to his knees, and that the impish person on the left was little bigger than a child. The middle man, squat and powerful-looking, his arms folded, was blinking slowly like a toad. “If you want what’s best for me, why have you pinned me to my bed? I am not going to talk to you while I am all tied up.”

  “Pinned you?” said the imp.

  “Dear fellow,” began the man on the right, but he said nothing else.

  The toadlike man cleared his throat and took over. “Don’t be ridiculous. You are free to stride about if you choose to do so.” Once more, I tried to move my feet and although I now felt the sensation of tiny ants running along my legs I still could not get up. It was then that I was sure I was in a dream. I have this memory of a state referred to as sleep paralysis, where the afflicted, forced into immobility, imagine shadow people and ghosts hovering over their beds and outside their windows. “We have only your best interest in mind, so your cooperation will be helpful to everyone concerned.”

  “What is it you want of me? It must be important for you to sneak into my room.”

  “Before we begin, can you tell us your name?” the toad asked.

  I recalled all the crazy names of the actors in the carriage and I told him, “Doctor Damnation.”

  The imp seemed agitated by this silly name and the toad patted him like a child before he continued his interrogation. “We understand you have been wandering around.”

  My treatment of them as dream-figures lessened my panic somewhat. “That is true, but it is none of your concern.”

  “We beg to differ. How far did you get?”

  “At the hill but again –”

  “Did you meet anyone?”

  “There was a man and a little girl.”

  They conferred for a while before the tall man asked, “Do you know where they went?”

  “They disappeared.”

  “Excellent. That’s a good first step.”

  I waited for him to continue, but it was the gloomy man who said, “They disappeared to the place all your other visions went.” For a second, I wondered if I had also dreamed of the man who had jumped from the hill. It was easier to believe this of the man, but the girl’s features and her voice were quite distinct in my mind.

  The toad seemed to have
been reading my mind because he said, “You conjured her.”

  “Poof!” said the imp.

  I was struck by a sudden thought. “What of all the people I met in the carriages? All of them struck with some grave peculiarity.”

  “Peculiar, yes, but not in the manner you have framed them. Unremarkable people, but quite suggestible.”

  No one I had met had been unremarkable. I mentioned the loss of the ledger and the fire that had destroyed the smoker carriage. To my astonishment, the man on the right said that I had done the damage myself. “Why would I do something like this?” I asked.

  This is where the dream got interesting. Speaking in a ridiculously sombre manner he delivered the most amazing tale. One worthy of the most fertile dream – even with my limited memory. In his account, I was a writer who had written a series of books that all featured the same heroes. These heroes formed a team named the Amazing Acolytes, which was able to defeat its enemies by tapping into their hidden fears and anxieties. “A group of super empaths, you might say. Very clever. Very. But, at some point, your own anxieties came to the forefront. I suppose most writers are propelled by this sort of thing, but usually it is kept under control. And for a while, this was how you operated. Your readers cheered on your heroes as they took on a variety of government agencies. Not any garden-variety hoodlums, but federal bureaus and administrative units and high-ranking officials that were somehow all involved in surveillance and control of innocent citizens.”

  “Can you now see how ridiculous this was?” the middle man asked.

  On the contrary, I found it extremely plausible, but I said nothing. The tall man said, “At what point does an obsession darken into a psychosis?” I felt that if they had rehearsed this little event, he must have been chosen to utter all the overly dramatic statements. “Your heroes were the last defence against an encroaching world of listeners and infiltrators and provocateurs. But in time, they became something more. Only they could protect, civilize and humanize. You called it ‘the superman’s burden’ in one of your books. Then you decided to send them on one final mission. The mother of all battles. To bring back the fire.”

  “The chaos,” the gloomy man added.

  “The slithering reptile brain,” the imp said with a chuckle.

  “Do you see what we are getting at?” the toad asked.

  “You will have to forgive me because it’s difficult to deduce who is crazier here – the writer who has created a fictional world or those who believe that this world is real?”

  “Exactly!” the imp emitted.

  The toad ignored him. “You ask who is crazier. Well let me tell you, it is the writer who begins to believe in the reality of his creations. I am talking about the men or women who awaken in the mornings and carry with them the fancies of the nights so that after a while the real world recedes before their fables and concoctions. Ghosts walking in the shadows, you might say. And this is precisely what happened in your case. You began to believe you were followed, spied upon, violated. Everyone was somehow connected to this great web, the only purpose of which was to ensnare or kidnap or eliminate you. You wrote threatening letters, attacked co-workers, tried to burn down the department in which you worked, barged into offices screaming your accusations and so on.” He paused to offer a woeful sigh. “At some point, you began to conjure up your heroes as your personal defenders and monitors. Your guardians. And so, your presence in this place.”

  “Which did not turn out as we expected,” the tall one intoned. “We were hoping for some improvement, but we have grown to accept that it is the very intelligent who put up the most resistance. The most accomplished.”

  Dream or not, I decided to put them to the test. “Why are you revealing all of this?” I asked. “Aren’t you afraid your revelations about the nature of this place will add to my supposed paranoia?”

  “We have nothing to hide,” the toad said. “And we keep hoping for precisely the opposite elicitation. Though our experience does not grant us any optimism, we continue to hope that you will understand that your paranoiac state is far more crippling than the amnesia you claim. We keep hoping that you will become more amenable to our directions.”

  “And what result will this bring?”

  The toad, who seemed to be the ringleader in this dream, said, “It is a common fallacy, this belief that madness involves an emptying of the mind, or, in fact, that there are different types of craziness, but every mad person has one trait in common. Voices. The mind of an afflicted person is never empty but paralyzed with these vying voices.” He spread his hands. “So you see we are here only to help.”

  “Evacuate these voices,” the imp said.

  “Our happiness will be your happiness,” the sombre man said. “Paticca-samuppada. We live, we die and we live again.”

  I felt like laughing at his illogic before I considered this arbitrariness was a common quality of all dreams. It is remarkable, is it not, that I should be aware of the structure of a dream while I was actually inside one? I closed my eyes and discovered that the sensation of insects running along my legs was gone. I tested my feet and found that although still numb, they could now move. However, I still felt a bit light-headed and drowsy, perhaps like the moment when one dream is transferred to another. I waited for the drowsiness to pass. I must have awakened then because I opened my eyes and, as you would expect, the room was empty.

  When I tried to walk to the door, I stumbled to the floor. I waited for a short while, dragged myself to the window and saw it was close to morning. I considered the events of the night. Had I been drugged or was my residual paralysis caused by the severity of the nightmare? The rain that had begun in the night had tapered off to a drizzle. I stood watching out the window for an hour or so before I decided to visit the canteen. There was an odd ringing in my left ear and my balance was slightly off so I walked slowly, hoping the place would not be filled or at least everyone would be too distracted with something else to pay me any attention.

  My wish was granted in a way. When I entered, I saw tables and chairs on the floor and Balzac and the group gathered on one side of the carriage. On the other side was a lanky man with goggles and some kind of chain-mail armour. From the state of the carriage and the manner they were glaring at the newcomer, I could tell there had been a ruckus. Now they seemed to be in a standoff. I was about to quietly leave when the stranger turned to me and said, “So you have decided to show your face. I should warn you that today Kothar means business. You are not going to escape this time.” For a brief moment, I hoped he was rehearsing some line but as he stomped toward me, I knew my hope was misplaced.

  20 THE BATTLE

  In my panic, the only thing that came to mind was, “If you do not like the role I can give you another.”

  He stopped so abruptly he almost toppled over. He pushed up his goggles and I saw that his frightfully red eyes were blinking slowly as if he was in pain. “Convince me.”

  “What would you like to be?”

  “A man.”

  “Granted.” There was a gasp from the group, but I felt Kothar was not impressed. This was confirmed by his bellowing laugh. “You were not here earlier so all the good roles were taken,” I said encouragingly.

  “You believe I am a random monster. A faceless monstrosity.” He poured something liquid into his eyes and dispersed the liquid by poking his eyelids. “Do you know what I learned during my travels? Creatures with no faces deserve to be slaughtered. Who would take the time to rearrange the features? Have you ever looked at a pig? Poor things must be thankful just to be slaughtered. Rank ugliness. Tiny eyes. Snout. Cloven hooves. All that red flesh.”

  As he continued with his unnecessary description of a variety of animals, I was more taken up with his confession that he had travelled than with his clumsy self-pity. No one I had met so far had talked about the land outside the terminal. I interrupted his flow to ask, “Where did you go?”

  He issued a prolonged, rickety sigh. “To w
herever monsters roam? Should creatures like us saunter along merrily in the street where everyone is thinking the same thing? A single thought passed from woman to child? In Adjacentland, I was my own man.”

  “Where exactly is this land?” someone asked.

  “Can we plot the coordinates?”

  “Lolo need a cuddle.”

  “Will we meet our doppelgängers there?”

  One by one the questions came and I saw this awkward giant who called himself Kothar losing his temper. I asked quickly, “How far away is this place? Can we get there?”

  He seemed even more irritated as he shifted his scrutiny to me. “Why don’t you tell me, Mr. Creator?”

  “A creator who has abandoned his creation. It is most callous. It makes me hanker for gristle.”

  I didn’t like the way the focus had suddenly shifted to me. But Kurt asked, “What colour is the sun in that place, my friend? And what is the power source?”

  “Everything is powered by steam geysers. They have been using these strategically aligned vents for centuries.”

  Lolo began to swish and Balzac said, “Ingenious.”

  “Everything is ingenious to outsiders. Until it’s no longer ingenious. Or they are no longer outsiders.” He turned to me. “Are you one in this new rendering?”

  I was not sure of his question but I told him, “I suppose I am.” I noticed Fingers pointing to his head and smirking and, at another table, a group huddling and whispering.

  Kothar continued, “Then you will find it intriguing that they treat epilepsy as an interruption between life and death?” I was silent for a while. I obviously didn’t believe a word he had said but I briefly considered whether my own memory loss, or losses, occurred in sequences similar in nature to epilepsy. I wanted him to elaborate but he said, “This is how I live my life now. As an interruption.” He grew morose and offered me his profile in a dramatic fashion, looking upward and pushing out his chin. I felt certain he was a character actor relegated to B-movie bits. He obviously carried a grudge. “I am an uncomplicated monster.” He rubbed the side of his neck, twisting his head this way and that. “You made me one. Perhaps I should hog-tie you this very minute.” He came rushing toward me and I moved away from the door in alarm. Outside, he slid down his goggles and gazed upward. There was a mask of suffering on his face. “I am certain this will not be the last you see of me.”