The Third Person

by Steve Mosby

  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.
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br />   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.

  We don’t allow our handicapped to be ripped to shreds. We heal our sick, and look after our elderly. Those less well-suited to the environment are given benefits and helped to live and work by the state. Infants without parents are put up for adoption and brought up by genetic strangers who grow to love them regardless. We feel a strong sense of duty to help those less fortunate than ourselves, and when a weaker, less advantaged individual is hurt, or dies, we feel a sense of shame and regret that we didn’t do more to help.

  Natural selection still occurs, but we have shifted it onto an entirely different plane – even with animals. If a man tortures or kills an animal – even something as insignificant as a rabbit or a mouse – we put him in jail. It is wrong to hurt and wound. It is even wrong to neglect. We set up shelters for homeless animals, to stop them shivering and starving on the streets, and people spend years training in medicine solely so they can treat injured animals, often returning them to the wild afterwards. We employ our value system liberally and indiscriminately. The human instinct is becoming universal: when something is weak, exposed and vulnerable, we try to help it. And more than that, we think it would be wrong not to.

  Our Society has two main aims.

  The first is to campaign against practices which inflict unnecessary death, torture and cruelty on unwanted texts.

  Our main target in this area is censorship. When a tiger is loose amongst the general population, we make an attempt to recapture it because it is dangerous. We house it in a zoo or return it to the wild. But when a dangerous idea is manifested in a dangerous text, that text is simply eradicated or not allowed. This is a heinous double-standard. There is no difference between burning a book and burning an animal, and when you slice out a paragraph, you gouge out an eye or hack off a leg. We propose safe, managed environments, where supposedly dangerous animals are allowed to exist in small numbers. In short: we support a rating system (but oppose any racial value judgements based thereon).

  Our second aim is the rescue and rehoming of unwanted texts. Every scrap of used language is alive. We are aware that it is impossible to save them all. Even the most committed animal rights activist tramples down blades of grass and kills bacteria by treating disease or wiping down a surface with a sterilised dish-cloth. We can only do what we can. Not every bus ticket can be saved; not every discarded shopping list, scrunched into a ball. But here at the Society’s centre, our motto is this: we turn away nothing. We run a collection service in several major cities, ready to pick up used and unwanted texts. These units of volunteers will then pass the texts to a compilation team, who will enter their genetic code into the Society’s databanks, where it will be allowed to exist alongside other texts for as long as the Society continues. That way, the genes – at least – of these creatures will be preserved.

  Please do not throw away your used texts.

  We are only a telephone call away.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A surreal truth: as my consciousness was gradually solidifying, the fractured image inside – hanging in my head like a blurred poster – was the passport photograph of John James Dennison.

  He just didn’t look like that anymore.

  His hair had been cut – short and neat – and he looked tanned and fit. Maybe seaside living had worked a wonder on him. I recognised him from the eyes, which still seemed to protrude a little, but they were about all that remained of the sallow, ugly, long-haired individual that had posed for that passport photo. He also looked considerably older, and slightly more calm.

  I blinked, and it hurt.

  ‘It’s relatively easy to set up a simple circuit through a metal door knocker,’ he told me, nodding to himself as he crunched into the final third of the apple he was holding. The rest of the words were obscured by his wet chewing, but I could just about make them out.

  ‘Rapping the knocker completes the circuit. You see? You just wait for the person to lift the knocker away from the metal plate on the door and then switch on the juice.’ He swallowed. ‘Bang.’

  I just stared at him.

  ‘Little switch on the back of the door, see?’

  Well, I
couldn’t see, because we were in the living room and the front door was at the end of the hallway outside. Obviously stronger than he looked, Dennison had man-handled me through from where I’d fallen down in the street outside. The back of my head seemed to have taken a fair whack on the ground: it was still pounding, and I felt sick. My right arm was half-numb, too, resting limply over my thigh. It didn’t even feel like an arm at the moment – more like somebody had stitched a sock full of rocks onto my shoulder.

  The room we were in contained a table and chair, two settees, the pair of us (one of us on each settee, facing each other), and a whole lot of paper. Most of the paper was tethered in bundles against the base of the walls, but in places he’d piled it up to waist height. There was more on and under the table, which was in a curtained bay window at the far end of the room. The sheets on the table seemed more spread out, as though that was where he read things before cataloguing and binding them. And there was a ball of twine on the floor by the chair, so that made sense.

  I looked around. More paper.

  Paper as far as the eye could see.

  When I was growing up, there was an old lady living in the same street. Her house was owned by the council. She was kind of mad – in that harmless, slightly smelly way that some old people manage – but I always got on with her okay, and my mother went round there quite a bit, dragging me along to see if there was anything I could do: shopping, maybe, or odd jobs. What I remember about that old lady, whose name was Bunty, is that she had cats: cats by the armful. Probably twenty or so regulars – all strays – and she knew each of them by name. There were too many for her, of course, and that was why the council came and took them away; she couldn’t clean up after them or feed them properly, and I only had so much spare time for my mother to give away. It used to half kill Bunty every time the men came, and my mother would say that, although they had to, it was a shame – for the cats and for Bunty. I think that was one of my first encounters with the idea that there isn’t always something that’s entirely for the best. There’s only ever a compromise between a bunch of different interests.