The Third Policeman

by Flann O'Brien

  ‘Blasting operations?’

  ‘Dynamiteering and extravagant combustions of the most far-reaching kind. But omnium is the business-end of everything. If you could find the right wave that results in a tree, you could make a small fortune out of timber for export.’

  ‘And policemen and cows, are they all in waves?’

  ‘Everything is on a wave and omnium is at the back of the whole shooting-match unless I am a Dutchman from the distant Netherlands. Some people call it God and there are other names for something that is identically resembling it and that thing is omnium also into the same bargain.’

  ‘Cheese?’

  ‘Yes. Omnium.’

  ‘Even braces?’

  ‘Even braces.’

  ‘Did you ever see a piece of it or what colour it is?’ MacCruiskeen smiled wryly and spread his hands into red fans.

  ‘That is the supreme pancake,’ he said, if you could say what the shouts mean it might be the makings of the answer.’

  ‘And storm-wind and water and brown bread and the feel of hailstones on the bare head, are those all omnium on a different wave?’

  ‘All omnium.’

  ‘Could you not get a piece and carry it in your waistcoat so that you could change the world to suit you when it suited you?’

  ‘It is the ultimate and the inexorable pancake. If you had a sack of it or even the half-full of a small matchbox of it, you could do anything and even do what could not be described by that name.’

  ‘I understand you.’

  MacCruiskeen sighed and went again to the dresser, taking something from the drawer. When he sat down at the table again, he started to move his hands together, performing intricate loops and convolutions with his fingers as if they were knitting something but there were no needles in them at all, nothing to be seen except his naked hands.

  ‘Are you working again at the little chest?’ I asked.

  ‘I am,’ he said.

  I sat watching him idly, thinking my own thoughts. For the first time I recalled the wherefore of my unhappy visit to the queer situation I was in. Not my watch but the black box. Where was it? If MacCruiskeen knew the answer, would he tell me if I asked him? If by chance I did not escape safely from the hangman’s morning, would I ever see it or know what was inside it, know the value of the money I could never spend, know how handsome could have been my volume on de Selby? Would I ever see John Divney again? Where was he now? Where was my watch?

  You have no watch.

  That was true. I felt my brain cluttered and stuffed with questions and blind perplexity and I also felt the sadness of my position coming back into my throat. I felt completely alone, but with a small hope that I would escape safely at the tail end of everything.

  I had made up my mind to ask him if he knew anything about the cashbox when my attention was distracted by another surprising thing.

  The door was flung open and in came Gilhaney, his red face puffed from the rough road. He did not quite stop or sit down but kept moving restlessly about the day-room, paying no attention to me at all. MacCruiskeen had reached a meticulous point in his work and had his head nearly on the table to make sure that his fingers were working correctly and making no serious mistakes. When he had passed the difficulty he looked up somewhat at Gilhaney.

  ‘Is it about a bicycle?’ he asked casually.

  ‘Only about timber,’ said Gilhaney.

  ‘And what is your timber news?’

  ‘The prices have been put up by a Dutch ring, the cost of a good scaffold would cost a fortune.’

  Trust the Dutchmen,’ MacCruiskeen said in a tone that meant that he knew the timber trade inside out.

  ‘A three-man scaffold with a good trap and satisfactory steps would set you back ten pounds without rope or labour,’ Gilhaney said.

  Ten pounds is a lot of money for a hanger,’ said MacCruiskeen.

  ‘But a two-man scaffold with a push-off instead of the mechanical trap and a ladder for the steps would cost the best majority of six pound, rope extra.’

  ‘And dear at the same price.’ said MacCruiskeen.

  ‘But the ten-pound scaffold is a better job, there is more class about it,’ said Gilhaney. ‘There is a charm about a scaffold if it is well-made and satisfactory.’

  What occurred next I did not see properly because I was listening to this pitiless talk even with my eyes. But something astonishing happened again. Gilhaney had gone near MacCruiskeen to talk down at him seriously and I think he made the mistake of stopping dead completely instead of keeping on the move to preserve his perpendicular balance. The outcome was that he crashed down, half on bent MacCruiskeen and half on the table, bringing the two of them with him into a heap of shouts and legs and confusion on the floor. The policeman’s face when I saw it was a frightening sight. It was the colour of a dark plum with passion, but his eyes burned like bonfires in the forehead and there were frothy discharges at his mouth. He said no words for a while, only sounds of jungle anger, wild grunts and clicks of demoniacal hostility. Gilhaney had cowered to the wall and raised himself with the help of it and then retreated to the door. When MacCruiskeen found his tongue again he used the most unclean language ever spoken and invented dirtier words than the dirtiest ever spoken anywhere. He put names on Gilhaney too impossible and revolting to be written with known letters. He was temporarily insane with anger because he rushed ultimately to the dresser where he kept all his properties and pulled out a patent pistol and swept it round the room to threaten the two of us and every breakable article in the house.

  ‘Get down on your four knees, the two of you, on the floor,’ he roared, ‘and don’t stop searching for that chest you have knocked down till you find it!’

  Gilhaney slipped down to his knees at once and I did the same thing without troubling to look at the Policeman’s face because I could remember distinctly what it looked like the last time I had eyed it. We crawled feebly about the floor, peering and feeling for something that could not be felt or seen and that was really too small to be lost at all.

  This is amusing. You are going to be hung for murdering a man you did not murder and now you will be shot for not finding a tiny thing that probably does not exist at all and which in any event you did not lose.

  I deserve it all, I answered, for not being here at all, to quote the words of the Sergeant.

  How long we remained at our peculiar task, Gilhaney and I, it is not easy to remember. Ten minutes or ten years, perhaps, with MacCruiskeen seated near us, fingering the iron and glaring savagely at our bent forms. Then I caught Gilhaney showing his face to me sideways and giving me a broad private wink. Soon he closed his fingers, got up erect with the assistance of the door-handle and advanced to where MacCruiskeen was, smiling his gappy smile.

  ‘Here you are and here it is,’ he said with his closed hand outstretched.

  ‘Put it on the table,’ MacCruiskeen said evenly.

  Gilhaney put his hand on the table and opened it.

  ‘You can now go away and take your departure,’ MacCruiskeen told him, ‘and leave the premises for the purpose of attending to the timber.’

  When Gilhaney was gone I saw that most of the passion had ebbed from the Policeman’s face. He sat silent for a time, then gave his customary sigh and got up.

  ‘I have more to do tonight,’ he said to me civilly, ‘so I will show you where you are to sleep for the dark night-time.’

  He lit a queer light that had wires to it and a diminutive box full of minor noises, and led me into a room where there were two white beds and nothing else.

  ‘Gilhaney thinks he is a clever one and a master mind,’ he said.

  ‘He might be or maybe not,’ I muttered.

  ‘He does not take much account of coincidental chances.’

  ‘He does not look like a man that would care much.’

  ‘When he said he had the chest he thought he was making me into a prize pup and blinding me by putting his thumb in my eye.’


  ‘That is what it looked like.’

  ‘But by a rare chance he did accidentally close his hand on the chest and it was the chest and nothing else that he replaced in due course on the table.’

  There was some silence here.

  ‘Which bed?’ I asked.

  ‘This one,’ said MacCruiskeen.

  Chapter 8

  After MacCruiskeen had tiptoed delicately from the room like a trained nurse and shut the door without a sound, I found myself standing by the bed and wondering stupidly what I was going to do with it. I was weary in body and my brain was numb. I had a curious feeling about my left leg. I thought that it was, so to speak, spreading – that its woodenness was slowly extending throughout my whole body, a dry timber poison killing me inch by inch. Soon my brain would be changed to wood completely and I would then be dead. Even the bed was made of wood, not metal. If I were to lie in it –

  Will you sit down for Pity’s sake and stop standing there like a gawm, Joe said suddenly.

  I am not sure what I do next if I stop standing, I answered. But I sat down on the bed for Pity’s sake.

  There is nothing difficult about a bed, even a child can learn to use a bed. Take off your clothes and get into bed and lie on it and keep lying on it even if it makes you feel foolish.

  I saw the wisdom of this and started to undress. I felt almost too tired to go through that simple task. When all my clothes were laid on the floor they were much more numerous than I had expected and my body was surprisingly white and thin.

  I opened the bed fastidiously, lay into the middle of it, closed it up again carefully and let out a sigh of happiness and rest. I felt as if all my weariness and perplexities of the day had descended on me pleasurably like a great heavy quilt which would keep me warm and sleepy. My knees opened up like rosebuds in rich sunlight, pushing my shins two inches further to the bottom of the bed. Every joint became loose and foolish and devoid of true utility. Every inch of my person gained weight with every second until the total burden on the bed was approximately five hundred thousand tons. This was evenly distributed on the four wooden legs of the bed, which had by now become an integral part of the universe. My eyelids, each weighing no less than four tons, slewed ponderously across my eyeballs. My narrow shins, itchier and more remote in their agony of relaxation, moved further away from me till my happy toes pressed closely on the bars. My position was completely horizontal, ponderous, absolute and incontrovertible. United with the bed I became momentous and planetary. Far away from the bed I could see the outside night framed neatly in the window as if it were a picture on the wall. There was a bright star in one corner with other smaller stars elsewhere littered about in sublime profusion. Lying quietly and dead-eyed, I reflected on how new the night1 was, how distinctive and unaccustomed its individuality. Robbing me of the reassurance of my eyesight, it was disintegrating my bodily personality into a flux of colour, smell, recollection, desire – all the strange uncounted essences of terrestrial and spiritual existence. I was deprived of definition, position and magnitude and my significance was considerably diminished. Lying there, I felt the weariness ebbing from me slowly, like a tide retiring over limitless sands. The feeling was so pleasurable and profound that I sighed again a long sound of happiness. Almost at once I heard another sigh and heard Joe murmuring some contented incoherency. His voice was near me, yet did not seem to come from the accustomed place within. I thought that he must be lying beside me in the bed and I kept my hands carefully at my sides in case I should accidentally touch him, I felt, for no reason, that his diminutive body would be horrible to the human touch – scaly or slimy like an eel or with a repelling roughness like a cat’s tongue.

  That’s not very logical – or complimentary either, he said suddenly. What isn’t?

  That about my body. Why scaly?

  That’s only my joke, I chuckled drowsily. I know you have no body. Except my own perhaps. But why scaly?

  I don’t know. How can I know why I think my thoughts? By God I won’t be called scaly.

  His voice to my surprise had become shrill with petulance. Then he seemed to fill the world with his resentment, not by speaking but by remaining silent after he had spoken.

  Now, now, Joe, I murmured soothingly.

  Because if you are looking for trouble you can have your bellyful, he snapped.

  You have no body, Joe.

  Then why do you say I have? And why scaly?

  Here I had a strange idea not unworthy of de Selby. Why was Joe so disturbed at the suggestion that he had a body? What if he had a body? A body with another body inside it in turn, thousands of such bodies within each other like the skins of an onion, receding to some unimaginable ultimum? Was I in turn merely a link in a vast sequence of imponderable beings, the world I knew merely the interior of the being whose inner voice I myself was? Who or what was the core and what monster in what world was the final uncontained colossus? God? Nothing? Was I receiving these wild thoughts from Lower Down or were they brewing newly in me to be transmitted Higher Up?

  From Lower Down, Joe barked.

  Thank you.

  I’m leaving.

  What?

  Clearing out We will see who is scaly in two minutes.

  These few words sickened me instantly with fear although their meaning was too momentous to be grasped without close reasoning.

  The scaly idea – where did I get that from? I cried.

  Higher Up, he shouted.

  Puzzled and frightened I tried to understand the complexities not only of my intermediate dependence and my catenal unintegrity but also my dangerous adjunctiveness and my embarrassing unisolation. If one assumes –

  Listen. Before I go I will tell you this. I am your soul and all your souls. When I am gone you are dead. Past humanity is not only implicit in each new man born but is contained in him. Humanity is an ever-widening spiral and life is the beam that plays briefly on each succeeding ring. All humanity from its beginning to its end is already present but the beam has not yet played beyond you. Your earthly successors await dumbly and trust to your guidance and mine and all my people inside me to preserve them and lead the light further. You are not now the top of your people’s line any more than your mother was when she had you inside her. When I leave you I take with me all that has made you what you are – I take all your significance and importance and all the accumulations of human instinct and appetite and wisdom and dignity. You will be left with nothing behind you and nothing to give the waiting ones. Woe to you when they find you out! Good-bye!

  Although I thought this speech was rather far-fetched and ridiculous, he was gone and I was dead.

  Preparations for the funeral were put in hand at once. Lying in my dark blanket-padded coffin I could hear the sharp blows of a hammer nailing down the lid.

  It soon turned out that the hammering was the work of Sergeant Pluck. He was standing smiling at me from the doorway and he looked large and lifelike and surprisingly full of breakfast. Over the tight collar of his tunic he wore a red ring of fat that looked fresh and decorative as if it had come directly from the laundry. His moustache was damp from drinking milk.

  Thank goodness to be back to sanity, Joe said.

  His voice was friendly and reassuring, like pockets in an old suit.

  ‘Good morning to you in the morning-time,’ the Sergeant said pleasantly.

  I answered him in a civil way and gave particulars of my dream. He leaned listening on the jamb, taking in the difficult parts with a skilled ear. When I had finished he smiled at me in pity and good humour.

  ‘You have been dreaming, man,’ he said.

  Wondering at him, I looked away to the window. Night was gone from it without a trace, leaving in substitution a distant hill that lay gently against the sky. Clouds of white and grey pillowed it and on its soft shoulder trees and boulders were put pleasingly to make it true. I could hear a morning wind making its way indomitably throughout the world and all the low unsilence of the d
aytime was in my ear, bright and restless like a caged bird. I sighed and looked back at the Sergeant, who was still leaning and quietly picking his teeth, absent-faced and still.

  ‘I remember well,’ he said, ‘a dream that I had six years ago on the twenty-third of November next. A nightmare would be a truer word. I dreamt if you please that I had a slow puncture.’

  That is a surprising thing,’ I said idly, ‘but not astonishing. Was it the work of a tintack?’

  ‘Not a tintack,’ said the Sergeant, ‘but too much starch.’

  ‘I did not know,’ I said sarcastically, ‘that they starched the roads.’

  ‘It was not the road, and for a wonder it was not the fault of the County Council. I dreamt that I was cycling on official business for three days. Suddenly I felt the saddle getting hard and lumpy underneath me. I got down and felt the tyres but they were unexceptionable and fully pumped. Then I thought my head was giving me a nervous outbreak from too much overwork. I went into a private house where there was a qualified doctor and he examined me completely and told me what the trouble was. I had a slow puncture.’

  He gave a coarse laugh and half-turned to me his enormous backside.

  ‘Here, look,’ he laughed.

  ‘I see,’ I murmured.

  Chuckling loudly he went away for a minute and came back again.

  ‘I have put the stirabout on the table,’ he said, ‘and the milk is still hot from being inside the cow’s milk-bag.’

  I put on my clothes and went to my breakfast in the day-room where the Sergeant and MacCruiskeen were talking about their figures.