The 13.5 Lives of Captain Bluebear

by Walter Moers

  ‘You mean there’s a way through the Bollogg’s brain?’

  ‘So it’s said. I had a cousin whose godfather had a grandfather who was reputed to know someone whose sister on his mother’s side had a boyfriend who tried it.’

  ‘Well? What happened to him?’

  ‘No one knows. Perhaps he went to ground in Atlantis.’

  I didn’t deliberate for long. ‘I’m an expert on labyrinths,’ I said. ‘I’ll try it.’

  Baldwyn gave me a lingering stare. ‘There’s only one problem …’

  ‘Which is?’

  He lowered his voice and whispered in my ear:

  ‘They say the head’s completely insane …’

  From the

  ‘Encyclopedia of Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and its Environs’

  by Professor Abdullah Nightingale

  Bollogg’s Head, The. Several Zamonian legends all state that, in early times, the continent was inhabited by Bolloggs far bigger than the ones surviving today. The most tangible clue to the existence of these prehistoric Megabolloggs is the so-called Bollogg’s Head in the Humongous Mountains in eastern Zamonia. It is surmised that one of these huge, primeval Bolloggs deposited his head in the mountain range’s deepest gorge and then set off to look for it. The Bollogg’s Head is approximately fifteen miles high and about the same distance across. It consists for the most part of dense, matted hair which continues to grow some sixty feet a year. The hair is inhabited by numerous small insects, chamois and nesting birds, as well as by the dreaded →Bollogg Fleas.

  The interior of the skull is estimated to contain a brain with a volume of roughly fifteen cubic miles, but size and weight are no indication of a creature’s intelligence. An elephant’s brain weighs on average twelve pounds, whereas that of a Nocturnomath tips the scales at half a pound. It might even be contended that a creature’s intelligence decreases in inverse relation to the size of its thinking apparatus. The bigger the brain, the more widely separated its various lobes and the poorer their lines of communication. Better than a large brain, therefore, are several well-connected smaller ones. It is further surmised that the Bollogg’s Head is not dead but asleep, because it allegedly emits periodic snores and mutters unintelligibly from time to time.

  A living mountain

  My ascent to the ear was disagreeable rather than genuinely difficult. If every mountain were hairy, mountaineering would be child’s play. There were handholds everywhere. The hairs were not only as strong as ship’s ropes but matted, tangled and knotted in a way that presented plenty of aids to climbing. What I found most unpleasant of all was the smell of the matted tufts, which had been proliferating unwashed for thousands of years, the feel of the gooey sebacious matter, and the very peculiar sensation aroused by scaling a gigantic head.

  The one thing I had to beware of was dandruff. Flakes of Bollogg scurf are as big as soup plates, weigh a couple of pounds apiece, and can, if dislodged, sweep you away like an avalanche.

  They covered the head in layers like roof tiles, and one tug at the wrong hair could set hundreds of them in motion. Two such avalanches of dandruff descended on me. I escaped the first by taking refuge beneath a greasy, matted strand of hair, the second missed me by only a few feet. But I made good progress. The weather was superb: not a breath of wind and no rain in prospect. Within an hour I had covered two-thirds of the distance and was taking a breather on a tuft of hopelessly knotted Bollogg hair.

  After a brief rest I resumed the ascent with renewed vigour. The Bollogg’s earlobe, an immense, fleshy overhang, was dangling less than a hundred feet above me. I skirted around it on the right so as to be able to climb straight into the auricle. Sprouting from the ear within arm’s reach of me was a long hair – a distasteful sight, admittedly, but a perfect means of swinging myself straight into the cavity.

  Except that the hair began to move.

  Instead of swinging straight into the ear, I was swung to and fro on the end of the hair. What with a sheer drop of several miles beneath me and no kind of handhold but a slippery growth, I could not have held out for long. But then – as if the hair had changed its mind – it hoisted me over the rampart of flesh and into the shell of the ear.

  The thing I’d been holding wasn’t a hair: it was the antenna of an outsize Bollogg Flea. I let go at once and landed with a thud, not that this did much to improve my situation. The huge creature was standing between me and the entrance to the ear, rubbing its forefeet together like a someone sharpening a carving knife.

  I had absolutely no time to panic; I had to act at once. I took a step to the left. The flea followed the movement with its massive body, but I promptly swung right and slipped between its legs. The flea was too bulky to react in time, which enabled me to sprint into the interior of the ear.

  The earwax pool

  Ponderously, the huge insect turned and took up the pursuit with long, powerful strides. A few yards ahead of me was a large pool full of what I took to be rainwater. It was dark brown and looked extremely uninviting, but I had no reason to be fastidious. I boldly dived head first into the murky brew, hoping that Bollogg Fleas couldn’t swim.

  Whether or not this was a mistake was hard to judge. It seemed to be a wise move where the Bollogg Flea was concerned, because it remained rooted to the spot on the edge of the pool and did not attempt to dive in after me. On the contrary, it made a peculiar movement resembling a sympathetic shake of the head, then turned and walked outside again.

  It wasn’t such a wise decision from my own point of view, because the putative rainwater turned out to be Bollogg earwax, a substance quite as potentially lethal as a morass or a bed of quicksand.

  The evil-smelling sludge encompassed me like a huge, greasy hand and drew me down. I thrashed around wildly with my forelegs – not a very well-considered course of action, but at least it kept me on the surface. My desperate doggy-paddling even brought me a little closer to the opposite bank of the earwax pool.

  Sprouting from the bank and trailing into the pool was a clump of black hairs the thickness of a finger. As I paddled towards it with all my might, the earwax closed over my head and found its way into my nose, eyes and ears, rendering me temporarily blind and deaf. I even swallowed a substantial helping of the sludge – the most disgusting sensation I ever experienced.

  In my horror and disgust I forgot to paddle and sank still deeper into the soft, warm ooze. All that now protruded from the pool was one of my paws, which groped for the clump of hairs. My final movement was less of a grab than a farewell wave. I was utterly exhausted.

  Someone or something – it was hard to tell which in such a predicament – grasped my paw. At least it didn’t feel like a flea’s antenna or anything else of an insectlike nature, so I clung to it and allowed myself to be hauled to the surface. I hung on tight and lashed out with my hind legs until they encountered terra firma. Then I crawled out of the pool on all fours and wiped the earwax from my eyes to see who had saved my life. A transparent, pulsating blob of light, it made – even at first sight – a strangely despondent impression.

  A bad idea

  ‘My name is 1600H,’ it said. ‘I’m an idea.’

  ‘Delighted to meet you,’ I replied. ‘My name is Bluebear, and I’m a bluebear.’

  We stood there rather awkwardly for a while, at a loss to know what to say next. For want of a better idea, I started to wring the earwax out of my fur.

  ‘You were lucky I happened to be nearby,’ the idea said. ‘Many people have drowned in that pool. Bollogg earwax is treacherous stuff.’

  ‘You can say that again. Many thanks, you saved my life. I owe you one.’

  ‘Don’t mention it. I’m glad to have been of service for once. I’m not much use as a rule.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, I’m an idea, but a bad one. Everyone began by making a tremendous fuss of me, but they eventually discovered that I wasn’t a good idea. When that happens, people simply drop
you. There are masses of us roaming the passages in this brain. We’re the dregs of the cerebral community. Could you find a use for a bad idea?’

  ‘I’m not sure. All I’d like to know is the quickest way through the head and out the other side.’

  ‘You don’t need an idea for that, you’ve already got one: “Through the head and out the other side.” Whether or not it’s a good idea I couldn’t say. It’s diabolically difficult and dangerous, getting from one side of the brain to the other. Do you know how many miles of cerebral convolutions there are in here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Neither do I, but there must be millions of them.’

  That was an exaggeration, I suspected, but I was beginning to realize that the whole business wasn’t as simple as I’d thought.

  ‘What you need is a plan – a plan of this brain, so you don’t lose your way. A plan made by a planmaker, I mean. Do you follow me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The plans in this brain are made by planmakers. They’re good craftsman but very fussy. If you need a shoe you go to a shoemaker. If you need a plan you go to a planmaker. I know one who lives quite near here. Like me to take you to him?’

  Ideas, so 1600H told me, took their names from the hour, minute and second at which they occurred to someone. Most such names were much longer, for instance 2346H/46M/12S or 1321H/32M/55S, and so on, but 1600H really had originated on the stroke of 4 p.m.

  ‘The trouble is, lots of us have the same name. After all, new ideas crop up almost every second of every day. I know fifty other ideas named 1600H, and guess what? They’re all equally bad. Four p.m. doesn’t seem a particularly favourable time for good ideas …’

  In the auditory canal

  Entering a head by way of an ear gives one a vaguely burglarious sensation. I have to admit that I felt rather guilty and uneasy, somehow, like an uninvited guest sneaking in by the back door.

  Little daylight penetrated the passage at our backs. 1600H shuffled on ahead of me, wearily pointing out items of interest from time to time like a tourist guide who has seen them all far too often before. (‘Look up, and you will now see the massive temporal bone.’)

  I had to be careful not to lose my footing on the precipitous slope, which was slippery with earwax. Before long our path was barred by a wall resembling an expanse of parchment.

  ‘That’s the eardrum,’ 1600H explained. ‘I know a hole we can get through.’

  The tympanic membrane of the Bollogg’s ear was, in fact, as riddled with holes as a Swiss cheese, but most of the apertures were no bigger than a fist. 1600H led me over to one the size of a football.

  ‘The eardrum is very elastic,’ he told me. ‘We must simply squeeze through.’

  Ideas were very elastic too, it seemed, because 1600H slipped through the aperture just like that, whereas I managed to negotiate it only with his active assistance and by pulling in my stomach hard. We now found ourselves in a large cavern. Something appeared to be moving on the roof, high overhead, but the ambient lighting was now so poor that I couldn’t make out what it was.

  ‘Those are the hammer, anvil, and stirrup of the ear,’ said 1600H. ‘Don’t ask me why they’re called that, but they’re said to play an important part in hearing.’

  On reaching the other side of the cavern we had to squeeze through another perforated membrane (‘We’re now climbing through the cochlear or “snail” window, as it’s called’) and then climb a kind of staircase (‘We’re now ascending the majestic cochlear spiral’).

  There was no light at all now, discounting the meagre phosphorescence given off by 1600H’s body (doubtless the faint afterglow of an abandoned idea). In labyrinthine surroundings once more, I wondered how I could have been stupid enough to land myself back in a situation so alarmingly reminiscent of my experience with the Troglotroll.

  The passage ahead of us seemed to spiral inwards like a snail shell, becoming steadily narrower. We were now crawling along on our hands and knees.

  ‘Not much further,’ said 1600H, doing little to reassure me.

  He crawled into an even narrower tunnel that branched off the main passage. Its walls were lined with slimy cables of many different colours.

  ‘Those are nerve fibres. This is the auditory nerve canal. We’ve now reached the innermost part of the ear.’ The Troglotroll had uttered optimistic remarks of a similar nature.

  The passage terminated in a small aperture rendered visible by the faint light beyond. 1600H slipped through it with practised ease.

  ‘Come on!’ he called from the other side. I squeezed through the hole with a considerable effort.

  Inside the brain

  We were now in yet another passage, a big tunnel along whose walls minute specks of light were racing like demented sparklers. The sparks seemed to have voices, faint but clearly audible little voices that whispered or muttered, murmured or giggled as they sped past us. They varied in size and colour, some being white and others red or green. They came from all directions, from behind and ahead, above and below, making me feel as if I were in the middle of a miniature firework display. Sometimes two sparks collided, combined to produce a dazzling flash, and raced on into the darkness, chattering together. I paused to stare in amazement, turning my head this way and that like a spectator at a tennis match.

  1600H answered my unspoken question. ‘They’re thoughts,’ he said. ‘We’re now inside the Bollogg’s brain.’

  From the

  ‘Encyclopedia of Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and its Environs’

  by Professor Abdullah Nightingale

  Bollogg Thoughts. Strictly speaking, these are any ideas promoted by means of cerebral activity from a →Bollogg’s realm of perception and sensation to that of the conceptual, judgemental, and inferential. In a wider sense, however, they are ideas relating to matters not directly perceived by a Bollogg or possibly inaccessible to its senses; in other words, ideas conjured up not only by the power of memory but also by the Bollogg’s imaginative faculty.

  As usual, the encyclopedia’s explanation had turned up too late, at the wrong moment, and couched in insufficiently comprehensible language.

  To put it rather more simply: a thought is intermediate between a feeling and a spoken sentence. This is much the same in Bolloggs as in other creatures capable of thought.

  I felt I ought to comment on this, but nothing occurred to me.

  Precisely. That is another very good definition of thought.

  I sometimes had the peculiar feeling that Professor Nightingale was calling me on the telephone, as it were, and that it wasn’t the encyclopedia inside me speaking at all.

  Bollogg Brain, The. The Bollogg’s immense cerebrum consists of two parts or so-called hemispheres traversed by deep furrows [sulci] and subdivided by a principal fissure [sulcus maximus]. The cerebrum is assumed to be the seat of consciousness, memory, and volition. Also based there are fear, humour, hunger, and – depending on the character of the subject – modesty or megalomania. The cerebellum of a discarded Bollogg head is uninteresting because it controls the tactile sense and muscular coordination, both of which help to facilitate physical movement, and these, since the discarded head no longer possesses a body, are completely redundant.

  1600H pointed to the specks of light flitting along the wall of the tunnel.

  ‘There are a lot of different ideas in here, you can tell them apart by their colours. The red ones are commonplace, everyday ideas – those are in the majority. The yellow ones are worries, of which there are also plenty. The blue are questions the brain keeps asking, and the green are answers. If a blue question collides with a wrong green answer, absolutely nothing happens.’

  Just then a green flash collided with a blue one, setting off a few sparks. They circled each other in a puzzled kind of way before whizzing off again.

  ‘You see? If the blue question bumped into the correct green answer, they’d merge and become a solution. See that big orange flash th
ere? That’s a solution.’

  In fact, several of these orange flashes were racing along the wall of the tunnel. 1600H drove his fist into his palm.

  A good idea

  ‘If two solutions collide they produce an idea – a good one or a bad one, whichever. I’m a bad one.’ He sighed. ‘Here comes a good one.’ A glowing blob of light rounded the bend a few feet behind us. At least twice the size of 1600H, it was lit up from within like a Christmas tree and hummed like an electricity pylon as it strode majestically past us.

  ‘Hello, 1600H,’ it said in a condescending tone.

  ‘Hello, 2100H/36M/14S,’ 1600H replied humbly.

  ‘How does a Bollogg manage to have a good idea?’ I asked. ‘I thought Bolloggs were mentally rather ill-equipped.’

  We were walking side by side along the tunnel, which seemed to meander on for ever. At brief intervals, numerous neuron paths branched off it to left and right. Meanwhile, we were surrounded by a continuous, multicoloured stream of racing thoughts, questions, answers, and solutions.

  ‘They don’t become stupid until they remove their heads. The heads themselves are far from daft. Only the bodies are stupid.’

  ‘Then why did this one remove his head, if he was so intelligent?’ 1600H glowed red for a moment. He hummed and hawed, then:

  ‘Well … That was one of his bad ideas …’

  ‘Why are you blushing?’ I asked.

  1600H groaned. ‘To be quite honest, the bad idea was me.’

  We rounded a bend beyond which I expected to find yet another passage. Instead, the tunnel suddenly opened out to reveal an impressive view of a cerebral valley, one of the enormous cavities that sometimes occur in a Bollogg’s brain. Thoughts were flashing across the roof of this cavern like colourful comets speeding across a dark firmament. Below us lay a tangled maze of cerebral convolutions, narrow little lanes in which thousands of ideas scurried around like the inhabitants of an oriental medina.