Fragile Things

by Neil Gaiman

  On the milk train back to the big city I sat opposite a woman carrying a baby. It was floating in formaldehyde, in a heavy glass container. She needed to sell it, rather urgently, and although I was extremely tired we talked about her reasons for selling it, and about other things, for the rest of the journey.

  DISEASEMAKER’S CROUP

  An affliction, morbid in its intensity, unfortunate in its scope, afflicting those who habitually and pathologically catalogue and construct diseases.

  Obvious initial symptoms include headaches, nervous colic, a pronounced trembling, and one of several rashes of an intimate nature. These, however, taken together or apart, are not enough to guarantee a diagnosis.

  The secondary stage of the disease is mental: a fixation upon the notion of diseases and pathogens, unknown or undiscovered, and upon the supposed creators, discoverers, or other personages involved in the discovery, treatment, or cure of said diseases. Whatever the circumstances may be, once and for all the author would warn against any trust being placed in the specious advertisements in appearing, the eyes projecting; the usual way. The administration of small injections of beef tea or meat broth will assist in maintaining strength.

  At these stages the disease may be treatable.

  It is the tertiary stage of Diseasemaker’s Croup, though, at which its true nature can be seen and a diagnosis confirmed. It is at this point that certain problems afflicting both speech and thought manifest themselves in the speech and writing of the patient—who, if not placed under immediate care, will rapidly find the condition deteriorating.

  It has been remarked that the invasion of sleep and a boiling two ounces of the point of suffocation; the face becomes swollen and livid, the throat is a hereditary tendency, and the tongue assumes the natural characteristics of the lungs, supervene. The emotion is liable to be excited by whatever recalls forcibly to the disease in question, which are so perseveringly and disgustingly paraded before the public eye by quacks.

  Tertiary Diseasemaker’s Croup can be diagnosed by the unfortunate tendency of the diseased to interrupt otherwise normal chains of thought and description with commentaries upon diseases, real or imagined, cures nonsensical, and apparently logical. The symptoms are those of general fever; coming on suddenly, round swelling, just over the knee pan. When quite chronic, and finally, perhaps vomiting, offensive fogs. Jalap is an alkaline and presents itself as a colorless, and painting the large round worms which occur in the intestines.

  The most difficult part of the detection of such a disease is that the class of people who are most likely to suffer from tertiary Diseasemaker’s Croup are precisely the people who are least questioned and most heeded. Thus: they may be, nourishment cannot of ginger and rectified spirit, the veins turgid, the latter being evaporated by heat.

  It is by a great effort of will that a sufferer may continue to write and talk with ease and fluency. Eventually, however, at the final stages of the tertiary form of the disease all conversation devolves into a noxious babble of repetition, obsession, and flux. Whilst the expulsive cough is going on, the veins turgid, the eyes projecting; the whole frame is so shaken, that the invasion of epidemic has been preceded by dense, dark, and if this is not gratified, melancholy, loss of appetite, perhaps vomiting, heat, and the tongue assumes the natural characteristics of the bruised root.

  At this time, the only cure that has demonstrated its reliability in the war against Diseasemaker’s Croup is a solution of scammony. It is prepared with equal parts of scammony, resin of jalap, and for all the author would warn against any trust being evaporated by heat. Scammony is one widely distributed, though not always actively developed; the face becomes swollen and livid, the throat is more inflamed, and may be, once and for all the author would warn against any trust being placed in the intestines.

  Sufferers of Diseasemaker’s Croup are rarely aware of the nature of their affliction. Indeed, the descent into a netherworld of pseudo-medical nonsense is one that cannot fail to excite the pity and sympathy of any onlooker; nor do the frequent bursts of sense amidst the nonsense do more than force the medical man to harden his heart, and to declare, once and for all, his opposition to such practices as the invention and creation of imaginary diseases, which can have no place in this modern world.

  When bleeding from leech bites continues longer than is required by the system. They are seized with a boiling two ounces of sleep and a boiling two ounces of the specious advertisements in question, which are so perseveringly and disgustingly paraded before the public eye by quacks. Scammony is liable to be excited by heat. On the second day when the eruption in a strong tincture of iodine will generally suffice for all.

  This is not madness.

  This is such pain.

  The face becomes swollen and livid, dark, and consisting of bicarbonate of potash, sesquicarbonate of ammonia and rectified spirit, the expulsive cough is going on, the habitual consumption of a larger quantity of food than is thought necessary.

  When the mind the beloved scenes.

  Whilst the beloved scenes.

  They may also become enlarged.

  IN THE END

  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.

  GOLIATH

  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 déjà 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.

  And then everything lurched so hard I thought we’d been hit by another train.

  And then we went through Euston, and half the passengers got off, and then the train stopped in the tunnel, and then everything went—

  (Normal service will be resumed as possible, whispered a voice in the back of my head.)

  And this time as the train slowed and began to approach Euston I wondered if I was going crazy: I felt like I was jerking back and forth on a video loop. I knew it was happening, but there was nothing I could do to change anything, nothing I could do to break out of it.

  The black girl sitting next to me passed me a note. ARE WE DEAD? it said.

  I shrugged. I didn’t know. It seemed as good an explanation as any.

  Slowly, everything faded to white.

  There was no ground beneath my feet, nothing above me, no sense of distance, no sense of time. I was in a white place. And I was not alone.

  The man wore thick horn-rimmed spectacles, and a suit that looked like it might have been an Armani. “You again?” he said. “The big guy. I just spoke to you.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Half an hour ago. When the missiles hit.”

  “In the carpet factory? That was years ago. Half a lifetime.”

  “About thirty-seven minutes back. We’ve been running in an accelerated mode since then, trying to patch and cover, while we’ve been processing potential solutions.”

  “Who sent the missiles?” I asked. “The U.S.S.R.? The Iranians?”

  “Aliens,” he said.

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Not as far as we can tell. We’ve been sending out seed probes for a couple of hundred years now. Looks like something has followed one back. We learned about it when the first missiles landed. It’s taken us a good twenty minutes to get a retaliatory plan up and running. That’s why we’ve been processing in overdrive. Did it seem like the last decade went pretty fast?”

  “Yeah. I suppose.”

  “That’s why. We ran it through pretty fast, trying to maintain a common reality while coprocessing.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “We’re going to counterattack. We’re going to take them out. I’m afraid it will take a while: we don’t have the machinery yet. We have to build it.”

  The white was fading now, fading into dark pinks and dull reds. I opened my eyes. For the first time. I choked on it. It was too much to take in.

  So. Sharp the world and tangled-tubed and strange and dark and somewhere beyond belief. It made no sense. Nothing made sense. It was real, and it was a nightmare. It lasted for thirty seconds, and each cold second felt like a tiny forever.

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

  I started talking to the black girl with the notebook. Her name was Susan. Several weeks later she moved in with me.

  Time rumbled and rolled. I suppose I was becoming sensitive to it. Maybe I knew what I was looking for—knew there was something to look for, even if I didn’t know what it was.

  I made the mistake of telling Susan some of what I believed one night—about how none of this was real. About how we were really just hanging there, plugged and wired, central processing units or just cheap memory chips for some computer the size of the world, being fed a consensual hallucination to keep us happy, to allow us to communicate and dream using the tiny fraction of our brains that weren’t being used by them—whoever they were—to crunch numbers and store information.

  “We’re memory,” I told her. “That’s what we are. Memory.”

  “You don’t really believe this stuff,” she told me, and her voice was trembling. “It’s a story.”

  When we made love, she always wanted me to be rough with her, but I never dared. I didn’t know my own strength, and I’m so clumsy. I didn’t want to hurt her.

  I never wanted to hurt her, so I stopped telling her my ideas, tried to kiss it better, to pretend it had all been a joke, just not the funny kind….

  It didn’t matter. She moved out the following weekend.

  I missed her, deeply, painfully. But life goes on.

  The moments of déjà vu were coming more frequently now. Moments would stutter and hiccup and falter and repeat. Sometimes whole mornings wou
ld repeat. Once I lost a day. Time seemed to be breaking down entirely.

  And then I woke up one morning and it was 1975 again, and I was sixteen, and after a day of hell at school I was walking out of school, into the RAF recruiting office next to the kebab house in Chapel Road.

  “You’re a big lad,” said the recruiting officer. I thought he was American at first, but he said he was Canadian. He wore big horn-rimmed glasses.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And you want to fly?”

  “More than anything.” It seemed like I half-remembered a world in which I’d forgotten that I wanted to fly planes, which seemed as strange to me as forgetting my own name.

  “Well,” said the horn-rimmed man, “we’re going to have to bend a few rules. But we’ll have you up in the air in no time.” And he meant it, too.

  The next few years passed really fast. It seemed like I spent all of them in planes of different kinds, cramped into tiny cockpits, in seats I barely fitted, flicking switches too small for my fingers.

  I got Secret clearance, then I got Noble clearance, which leaves Secret clearance in the shade, and then I got Graceful clearance, which the Prime Minister himself doesn’t have, by which time I was piloting flying saucers and other craft that moved with no visible means of support.

  I started dating a girl called Sandra, and then we got married, because if we married we got to move into married quarters, which was a nice little semi-detached house near Dartmoor. We never had any children: I had been warned that it was possible I might have been exposed to enough radiation to fry my gonads, and it seemed sensible not to try for kids, under the circumstances: didn’t want to breed monsters.

  It was 1985 when the man with horn-rimmed spectacles walked into my house.

  My wife was at her mother’s that week. Things had got a bit tense, and she’d moved out to buy herself some “breathing room.” She said I was getting on her nerves. But if I was getting on anyone’s nerves, I think they must have been my own. It seemed like I knew what was going to happen all the time. Not just me: it seemed like everyone knew what was going to happen. Like we were sleepwalking through our lives for the tenth or the twentieth or the hundredth time.