by Steve Mosby
I flicked back a page, took in the photo and wasn’t surprised.
Dennison looked like a dictionary definition of white trash: long blond hair, centre parted and hanging in greasy strings down onto his thin, bony shoulders; bug eyes you could play pool with; not quite enough skin to comfortably cover his face. And an Adam’s apple like he’d swallowed a severed snake’s head. The guy finished off this wholly horrific ensemble with the kind of moustache and thin beard that you’d generally only grow if you had scars to cover. This was a passport photo, of course, and had been taken when he was twenty-one, but you could only give someone so much benefit of the doubt. Dennison looked like some kind of hitch-hiking, heavy metal necrophile.
I took one last look, and then continued.
Actually, it got better for him. According to the information, he was twenty-seven now, living and working in Asiago, but he’d been born in Thiene and had attended school at one of i-Mart’s more prestigious academies, graduating with honours at the age of twenty-one. He’d then disappeared for a year. His degree was joint computer science and linguistics, which should have seen him set for life, and there were hints in his profile that the sideways step away from everyday existence had come as a shock to many. He was arrested eleven months later for defacing a Nestlé billboard. That one got him a suspended sentence, but he did genuine jail time a year later for another campaign. The judge – banging a Nike gavel and sporting a Gap wig – was having none of it, and sentenced Dennison to three months inside. After that, his record appeared to be clean. Another vaguely wayward sheep returned to the fold.
The coach was lurching a bit. A waitress was rolling a juddering, clattering Coca-Cola coloured trolley up the aisle past me, so I stopped her and ordered a coffee. This was no doubt a disheartening sale of unlicensed caffeine, but – professional that she was – the smile only faltered for a nanosecond.
‘Two-fifty please, sir.’
I paid her and then, starting to slurp up all that goodness, proceeded to flick through another few sheets. The coach hit the motorway, and we really started to travel. The ride smoothed out a little.
These days, Dennison worked in a computer store, pulling in minus-three on the national average and keeping himself to himself. His bank details were in order – they seemed genuine – and the rest of his stuff seemed legit. The only indication that anything more interesting might be happening here was a couple of fluorescent marks that Gray had painted onto the pdfs of two bank statements. Both were beside payments for two hundred pounds, and both were transfers between Dennison’s account and another at the same bank. I turned to the next page, which didn’t seem to be about Dennison at all. It was a summary of some kind of pamphlet, or marketing material.
The heading said: ‘The Society for the Protection of Unwanted Words’.
There is nothing inherently special about the way the genome is constructed and read, and yet it does have a very special property. The genome contains the information within it to create something from materials in the world around it. And what it creates is a machine that is capable of carrying the genome around and producing more copies of it.
A machine which spreads the word, which produces more machines, which all spread the word. And so on.
There is nothing special about our bodies, however. Different animal genomes create different bodies, just as different people choose differently patterned suitcases. The suitcase that a particular genome creates will be one that is well-suited to surviving in the landscape – at least long enough to produce copies of that genome. In the case of human beings, this means bodies that will survive long enough to successfully mate and produce children.
And so it goes.
It is clear that – written in books and stacked along our shelf – the human genome is useless. The information is there, but it is in the wrong format. Written down on paper, it lacks the ability to translate itself and build a body. It needs to be written in chemicals and stored on chains of DNA. But this is only because that is the way the information is translated. The genome is software which builds its own hardware from the scrap flesh around it.
What we have in the case of language – both spoken and written – is software that uploads itself into already existing hardware, and then uses that hardware to create copies of itself. It does this, as we shall see, on exactly the same basis as the human genome. All books are realistically and actually alive.
They are alive in exactly the same sense that we are.
Now, in an existing pool of animals some will be better adapted to surviving in their environment than others. The genes that produce better equipped animals will find themselves, on average, translated and reproduced more successfully than their equivalents. To put it crudely, genes for sharper teeth enable a tiger to kill more successfully and survive longer: the chances of reproduction are better. The genes are therefore more likely to be passed on. Future generations will contain more sharper-toothed tigers, and then more still.
Advantages, by their definition, will become more common.
A work of fiction may be made up of various ‘gene concepts’. These represent the theme of the work. The character-types. The basic plots available to the writer. These genes are contained within the body of the whole, and if they give the book ‘sharp enough teeth’ then it will ‘survive long enough to reproduce’. It will succeed in propagating itself more numerously.
Let us now compare the translation of a human gene with the translation of the genome of a book.
The codons in a gene are copied into a strand of RNA. The words on the page are translated into electrical impulses in the brain representing visual pictures.
The strand of RNA is then translated into an alphabet of amino acids, which fold into a protein and begin to build an animal. The electrical impulses in the head cause further impulses, and the person experiences emotions and feelings based upon what he is reading.
The body built by the genes will either be good or bad at surviving in its environment. If it is good, the genes will be reproduced in further bodies. The appeal of the qualities that a particular book has will likewise determine how many copies continue to be printed, and how many more heads the gene-concepts will find themselves in.
A book is identical to the body of an animal. The more successful that body is, the more copies it will succeed in creating of itself.
There are more copies of An Elegant Ending by Jim Thornton in existence right now than there are tigers. There are more copies of the Bible than there are turtles. The genomes of these books are better at reproducing themselves than the genomes of turtles and tigers. As creatures, they are more successful. The environment that these books have to survive in is our culture, and they have to be good enough survivors to influence us to build more copies of them. If not, their competitors will succeed.
After all, we only have so much space on our shelves.
By the time the coach rolled into Asiago – a quarter of an hour ahead of schedule – I was most of the way through the bundle of society propaganda that Gray had pulled off the net for me, and my brain felt addled. As we eased slowly past the mirrored glass side of the terminal, it occurred to me that I ought to be nervous, but I couldn’t be bothered. All in all, I’d been through a full thirty-five page pamphlet purporting to prove that literature was alive, studied nine pdfs of various leaflets and flyers and read two newspaper articles. One was a two column report on a linguistics convention that Dennison had given a parallel session paper at, and the other was a half-page ‘look at the loonies’ piece in the local press.
In addition to giving papers in support of the cause, it seemed that Dennison had been donating two hundred pounds to them every other month. The articles I’d read made the society seem very active, with outings and demonstrations that bordered on the criminal. An accompanying photograph to the local paper’s piece showed a young woman with a nose stud holding a placard. She had written ‘Censorship Kills’ on it, and the caption beneath
read: ‘War of Words: a society supporter stirs up dissent’.
Well, she did look pretty pissed.
I put the papers down and, instead, imagined Amy sitting beside me, like we were on a regular trip to the seaside. On coach journeys, Amy always sat next to me, and she’d usually get tired real quick. So she’d go to sleep leaning on me. Her head would collapse slowly: from my shoulder to my chest, and then to a jerk awake. I’d brush an avalanche of hair from her face, hooking it behind her ears, and she’d snuggle back in, looking all crumpled and dozy.
A soothing voice came on over the coach’s tannoy system.
‘Please remain seated until the bus has come to rest.’
This was immediately taken as a sign to stand up and begin removing large and unwieldly objects from the overhead storage lockers. Businessmen were levering out enormous, jet-black briefcases, while women extracted baby-sacks and mountainous coats to hide their horrific children in. For all the equality of the sexes, nothing changes – although it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that some of these people were actors, paid by the coach company to give travel a sense of comfort and the everyday. I gathered my papers together and waited.
In the coach station itself, there were no police waiting for me. Nobody even looked twice. There was a small crowd of scattering people, heading this way and that, and another janitor: so like the one in Bracken I wondered for a second whether he’d been stowed away in the luggage department and let off first. I almost hoped it was true. The more likely alternative – that two different people had the same meaningless job of watering down mud on dirty white tiles – was more depressing.
I moved with the throng, swept out into the sunlit streets of Asiago.
In Asiago, the sky is blue.
You have the sea running alongside, and it’s so pure that it looks almost enhanced. It’s all pale blue and white, and you can see sail boats in the distance moving casually across the horizon. Most of these aren’t real. They’re motorised scenery, and they take them in on rainy days because they look too odd. Up close, at the harbour edge, the water’s actually blacky-green and murky, and you can see the oil and branches and shit on the surface.
Take that effect and extend it to the whole town.
In Asiago, the sand is like silk.
No it isn’t. Anyway, forget the sand. What you have – basically – is a manufactured seaside resort, complete with artificial shabbiness. You have penny arcades and souvenir shops and ye-olde-pubs with barrels instead of seats – but the beer’s no better than anywhere else and barrels aren’t comfortable to sit on for a beer-drinking length of time. Everywhere smells of salt and vinegar – and fat – and you’ll remember your parents hinting that, because it’s a seaside town, the fish should be wonderful here. But it turns out not to be. It’s just as battery and boring as anywhere inland.
In Asiago, as they say, the air is like warm, melted ice.
You have the fresh sea breeze, and the warmth of a hazy sun.
Always Asiago.
Because this is how Asiago was designed: as a place permeated with nostalgia. Time-wise – at least in marketing terms – the grass is always greener. Multi-nationals pull emotion out of us on strings by resurrecting long-dead ages and cultures and making us want them. We go running along, and sooner or later we trip up, or they do. That’s what happened here. Coca-Cola built this place from scratch, marketing it as a return to childhood and, of course, people came. But it was real enough to be really dull, and so people left again. It was too real. Somewhere along the line, manufactured, knowing shabbiness peeled off into real shabbiness, and people stopped coming altogether.
Coca-Cola moved out, and real people took up the leases on fake properties and made them real again. Still nobody came, really, but that was okay because that was how it was. The land had reclaimed itself. Bog-standard society took over, and Asiago began to evolve. Like the majority of genuine seaside towns were a while back, it was now being overtaken by big business developments, high-profile stores and ludicrously expensive condos. Further back from the peeling red and white boards of the promenade, there were office blocks springing up like roots through cracks in the pavement. Twenty years behind the rest of their kind, but giving it a frankly heroic go. Another twenty years and the social grass would have grown through Coca-Cola’s concrete, and you’d never know they’d ever been there.
Dennison’s address was a few streets back from the sea-front, but far enough away from the newer developments to be affordable. I wandered along the promenade, feeling curiously detached from my problems. Just like the adverts had promised, the sun was warm, coming in slow, alternate flashes of brightness and dullness, and the wind was icily cold. I felt young again, what with that sea breeze and the sound of the gulls, and figured that Amy and I could probably have lived here for a while. But, like the paint beneath my feet, the novelty would probably have peeled away from me in time.
There were plaintive little cottages here, built like city-centre back to backs, only with more charm. They might have been marketed as fishermen’s cottages at one time. When freshly built, they were probably the most expensive accommodation you could find, simply because they were the most nostalgic. Now, though, they were cheap as a two-dollar fuck, and maybe half as appealing. The smell of the sea was stained in the brick, and the windows looked misted over and lost. The buildings themselves were ramshackle and small. It was as though the gravity of the town had shifted a few miles inland, and had left these rather sorry-looking buildings in its wake.
Maybe we could have lived here once upon a time, but I hated Asiago now, because of what it represented. This is the truth about why Asiago failed: because nostalgia is a feeling of warmth towards the past, but it’s actually nostalgia itself that feels good, and not the past at all. All your life is in the past: you’re surfing on an ever-expanding cusp of lived time, and everything you think and feel is actually behind you, but you can’t go back. Asiago represented what would happen if you could, and it wasn’t quite as warm and cosy as you would have thought.
If you could go back and have it all again, this is what would happen:
You’d do exactly the same things; you’d waste it all; you’d wish for more.
If I had Amy back, we’d argue again. We’d fight. I’d lose my patience with her. We’d sleep back to back. I’d flirt with strangers and then feel guilty, and then do it all over again. You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone – yes: that’s well known. But they never add that, if you actually got it back, all you’d do is forget the value again. Over and over.
And that was pretty much all that the crumbling façade of this little seaside town had to say to me. The truth of it was seeping in with the ozone, chattering in the fruit machines, hanging off the wall in jagged strips. It brought back Graham’s words to me at the coach station.
Maybe you should let it go.
Yeah, maybe.
But I kept walking, working my way slightly inland onto streets edged by pavements of shattered, sodden wood. There were gangs of cats living wild in the branching alleys. I found Dennison’s front door, and checked the number just to make sure: this was it, all right. It had a rusted brass knocker in the middle. I rapped three times, and then took a step back and waited for him to answer.
After a second or two, I heard movements inside, heading for the door.
A pause.
I watched the spy-glass, and could feel it watching me back.
Nothing. I got impatient.
‘Hello?’ I said, and rapped the door knocker aga—.
Natural selection favours the well-adapted: that’s why we’re here. That is why giraffes have long necks, tigers have sharp teeth and turtles have hard shells. These are features which have evolved and become refined because they give those animals a better chance of survival than the animals without them. What this means, in reality, is that many millions of once-living creatures were killed or died because they weren’t as well adapted.
To have an advantage, there has to be something for you to have an advantage over.
Animals starve because they are less well-suited to finding food than other animals. They are killed because they are less able to defend themselves, or because they can’t outrun a predator.
In literature, texts die because they are less well-suited to the environment of our culture. They die out when they no longer appeal to us. We burn the books. We shred the paper, reconstituting it as a text we prefer. Once living ideas and themes are destroyed forever as whole paragraphs are excised from existing works. Every time we press delete, something dies.
Every time we reject a novel, we indulge in consumerist eugenics.
Now, at a genetic level, it doesn’t matter when an individual is killed. Matter, after all, is a human word. In nature, there is only well-adapted and less well-adapted: an entirely mechanical process. The individual is a vehicle for the propagation of the genes within, just as a book is a hard, physical machine for the transportation and reproduction of ideas. When a dog or a cat or a human baby dies, or when a text goes out of print, it’s ultimately nothing more than a machine stopping working. The genes within it were not successful in building a machine best-suited to surviving the environment. Some succeed. Most fail.
An important question, then.
Why do we cry?
There’s an equally important answer.
Because it is no longer fashionable to think of natural selection as a positive progression. We don’t think it’s right that less well-suited animals must die. In the animal kingdom, nature is indeed still red in tooth and claw, but we human beings like to think we have stepped beyond that. We have words like matter, right and wrong.
These are nothing more than themes and ideas, and they have evolved within us because they are tremendously good at surviving in us. They are concepts with real appeal. Human beings do not have claws or razor-sharp teeth; we have society, and the themes of right and wrong are ones which promote kinship. They bind us together in our society, continually tightening it around us as we promote them and propagate them.
