by Stephen Fry
“Oh boy . . .”
“Are you by any chance American?”
“Sheesh . . . Sleep tight, Mikey. Don’t let the bugs bite.”
C
Oh Jesus Pants. I thought I never got hangovers. This is a screamer. Think I may just lie here a while. Let the tongue work free of the palate.
Tp-tp-tp. Tp-tp-tp.
Work up a little spittle.
Oily-Moily’s dirtiest number.
A little spittle
It’ll
Do the trick
Hm.
Water.
Try opening the eyes. Just a little way. You can do it.
Oh boy . . .
It’s like when you were young and you used to take the cellophane wrapper from a Quality Street toffee and hold it over your eyes, giggling and chasing your saffron-colored mother around the kitchen. “Uer . . . you’re all yellow, Mummy.”
It’s not just that everything’s a sick egg-yolk color, there’s another problem. The room is . . .
Hold on, this can’t be right. It just can’t be right. Make a list. Put down what you know. In outline form, using one side of your brain only.
A room, containing:—
a table, containing:—
a bunch of keys
a packet of Lucky Strike cigarettes
a train ticket that says:
—New Jersey Transit Co.
a wallet
a mobile phone
a bottle of Evian, containing:
—Evian water (I assume)
a clock that says:
—09:12
a bed, containing:—
my body, wearing:
—strange clothes
—a bump on its head
my mind, feeling:
—sick
—weird
—confused
—frightened
windows, containing:—
blinds (shut)
a desk, containing:—
a computer
—off
books
a telephone
papers
a door (half open), leading to:—
a bathroom
walls, on which hang:—
posters of
—bands I don’t know
—a baseball team
—cute pop stars (M & F)
a black and orange flag
a wardrobe, containing:—
clothes (half-glimpsed), belonging to:
—??
another door (closed), leading to:—
???????
Nice inventory. What does it tell us? It tells us we have a hangover. It tells us we are somewhere strange. It tells us there is weirdness afoot.
But we don’t panic. We try to relax the mind open, like a constipated man easing a reluctant sphincter. Mm, cute image, Mikey.
Mikey?
Relax. Get used to this light.
Water. That’s better.
A little flower of memory blooms in the brain.
Me, vomiting in a garden.
No, not a garden, a square. A small town square.
A Burger King that didn’t look like a Burger King.
A book shop.
Some cars behaving strangely. Strangely? How, strangely? We’ll come back to that.
More water.
A bus. A cute little bus.
Someone saying “Henry Hall.”
Yes, that’s right, Henry Hall.
Now carefully, lad. Reassemble the thoughts. Remember them. One step at a time.
One step at a time . . . someone said that. Last night, if it was last night, someone said, “One step at a time.” I’m sure of it.
Steve . . . I’m getting the name Steve. It’s hard to pierce the veil, dear. But I am getting a call from someone called Steve. Is there a recently passed over loved one in your life by that name? He wants you to know that he’s very happy, at peace now.
I’m still getting that other name too. Mikey.
They kept calling me Mikey? Why? No one calls me Mikey. Ever.
I feel for the bump on my head and—
Jesus . . .
That’s another thing. Some arsehole’s been and cut my hair!
My beautiful hair . . . It was never like, hippie long, but it flowed, you know? It happened. And now it’s all squashy and dead.
Shit, I’d better get up.
I’d better get up and do . . .
. . . what?
We will leave me lying there for the moment, reassembling myself. I am not entirely sure that I am telling this story the right way round. I have said that it is like a circle, approachable from any point. It is also, like a circle, unapproachable from any point.
I came up with those very words at the very beginning of the circle. If circles have beginnings. Now I have to say them again.
As a historian, I said before, I should be able to offer a good, plain account of the events that took place on the . . . well, when did they take place? It is all highly debatable. The puzzle that besets me is best expressed by the following statements.
a: None of what follows ever happened
b: All of what follows is entirely true
So here I lie, wondering like Keats, Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music, do I wake or sleep? Wondering too, why the Christ Jane isn’t coiled warmly beside me. No, no wondering that. I know the answer there. She’s left me. That I know. That much I do know. She’s outta there. She’s history. Wondering then, where the hell I am.
In the center of my brain there is a dark well. I keep trying to lower buckets into it, buckets of words, images and associations that might bring something familiar to the top, some clear cool splash of memory. Maybe if I prime the pump everything will spew to the surface in a great fountain.
See, I know that there is something to know, that’s what’s galling me. Something to remember. Something momentous. But what? Memory is a salmon. The tighter you grip, the further it leaps away. That’s a familiar image too.
I must get up. Everything will come back to me when I am standing.
Woah! The head may ache, the gut tremble, the legs wobble, the throat sting, but we are uply up. I haven’t vomited for years and I don’t like the feeling.
No. That’s not right. I have thrown up recently. Over a toilet bowl, with a long string of gob hanging down and stuck to the back of my throat . . . was that last night? It was recent. It’ll come to me.
Meanwhile . . . I look down at myself and ask, what the hey is going on rig-wise? I don’t recognize these shorts or this T-shirt. I’m sorry, but I just do not. I mean, I would never wear anything so . . . I don’t know, so clean, I suppose. Chino cotton shorts? I could swear they have even been ironed, for all the dried flecks of spew upon them. And a polo shirt . . . a polo shirt of sea island cotton, for God’s sake. With a kind of gold embroidered logo on the left tit. I grab the side of the shirt to get a better look. An elephant I think, it’s hard to tell upside down, an elephant in a sort of sling. The type of sling you use with a crane for swinging livestock from ship to shore. I mean, what kind of dead-beat geek wears ironed chino shorts and sea island cotton polo shirts decorated with embroidered fucking elephants?
The footwear I can relate to. Your bog-standard sloppy-heeled Timberland boat shoes. Not mine though, for all they fit like a . . . well, you know. Just so happens that I’m not a Timberland user. I’m a Sebago baby. No real reason, just that I always have been. I think.
It’s time to stand at the window, open the blinds and remind myself where I’ve ended up and why.
I’ve never been very good with Venetian
blinds. I always forget whether to pull the cord or to twist the handle. On this occasion I do both and the bottom right side of the blind rises to halfway and then jams there, slats provokingly closed. I bend down to peer through the small clear triangle of window.
Woah . . .
I don’t get this at all.
A long, low building dead ahead. Ivy growing up the side of mullioned windows. St. John’s College perhaps? Did I stay the night at St. John’s?
I turn, almost laughing to myself. It’s so comical I’ve just got to roll with it.
Wait a minute . . . you’ve gotta roll with it . . .
The phrase triggers the memory of a joke.
man: Waiter, that soup I just had . . .
waiter: What about it, sir?
man: Well, on the menu it said “Oasis Soup.” But it tasted to me like a perfectly ordinary tomato soup.
waiter: That’s right, sir. Perfectly ordinary tomato soup, sir.
man: Then why is it called Oasis Soup?
waiter: Because (singing) “You gotta roll with it . . .”
Der-dan, der-dan . . . tish!
Way-hey! And Oasis reminds me of something important. Something to do with Jane.
But Jane’s gone . . .
I think.
No, it was something she said. Something . . . oh, pants to it. I’d better go find my way home and sleep this one off.
“Find my way home”—simpler, finer words were never written. The Odyssey, The Incredible Journey, Star Trek: Voyager. In the end, it all comes down to finding your way home.
I took a shower—a good shower, I’ll give it that, a really fine shower, probably, when it came down to it, the best shower I’d ever had in my life, a real hot, hissy, wide-angled downpour that fell upon my shoulders like scalding rain. Under that shower I nearly fainted.
I felt shitty from a hangover and a banged head, that is true. But you know, somehow I felt good too. Looked good. I ran a finger round my pecs and thought maybe I was turning into a bit of a hunk at last. I looked down at my legs and that was when I nearly fainted. You would have fainted too.
I exchanged the chino shorts and the polo shirt for . . . another polo shirt and another pair of chino shorts, for it was hot—even this early in the day and after a shower it was steamy hot with no plain T-shirts to be found—and opened the door, after one more lingering backward look of puzzlement and dread.
I found myself, not in the corridor I expected, but in another room. Bookshelves filled with books, some sort of strange computer, more posters of unfamiliar models, musicians and sports stars, a small fridge, a window seat set beneath a sham Gothic window . . . everything alien. I hardly paused before walking towards another door.
Here was a corridor, not unlike that of a hotel, but brighter and wider; scruffier but at the same time grander. Less obsessively vacuumed, polished and waxed; but of a richer, more solid build—endowed with something of a sheen. The door facing me as I came out into this corridor was numbered 300 and beneath the number I saw a brass plaque, holding a card on which was calligraphed “Don Costello.” I turned to look at the door I was closing, the door of the room from which I had emerged.
303
Michael D. Young
I started to run, sweat already breaking out under my arms and sliding down my sides. I passed other rooms, some with doors flung open, their occupants sitting on beds pulling on thick white socks or padding to and fro with towels around their waists. I reached a glazed door at the end of the corridor, threw it open and hurled myself towards a wide staircase of shining pine.
The heat, the unfamiliar smells, the high glass windows, the creak of the wood, they contrived to squeeze together and leak out in my mind like fisted clay oozing through closed fingers. I felt the clammy prickle of the nightmare of the first day at a new school. That dismaying sense of wide-angled dread. The realization that the proportions and dimensions of the places you see now will quickly be remapped in your brain and that soon the perspectives, angles and eye lines will shrink. You will be able, standing in a hallway, to summon up an image of how that passageway first appeared to you before it became safe and known, and you will marvel that it was ever cast in such frightening lines. Yet all the time, tugging you down like lead, the knowledge that this familiarization is really a corruption, a loss.
The humidity, however . . . I could never accustom myself to that. At its heart a metallic savor that hinted at far-off storms boiling over the horizon.
Halfway down the stairs, I heard the squeak of trainers on wood and the spank of palm on banisters as someone threw themselves upwards.
Whoever this is, I said to myself, I shall ask them as calmly as I can.
I looked down and saw a flop of light hair bouncing up towards me.
“Excuse me,” I said, “I wonder if . . .”
“Yay, it’s alive!”
“Um . . .”
“So, how’s it going?”
“I . . .”
He clapped a hand on my shoulder, blue, concerned eyes scanning my own. “Woah, you’re still looking rough. Gosh you were gone last night. I, er, I just came over to check you out.”
“Er . . . where am I exactly?”
“Right! Sure! I think maybe we’d better hit the Tower for a coffee.”
We descended the staircase. It was the boy from the night before, that much I was sure of.
“It’s Steve, isn’t it?”
“Hey, come on, Mikey, cut it out, okay? Still not funny. Hoo! Pretty much got a head myself.”
“Where are we going?”
“Like I said, the Tower . . . no, second thought, state you’re in, better make it PJ’s. Get some air blowing round you.”
I followed him down to a door at the bottom of the stairs, on which he leaned for a second, regarding me through half-closed eyes and shaking his head sorrowfully as a schoolmaster looks at the one boy in the class he knows will come to no good. There was a puzzled look too, a puzzled almost hopeful look that I did not understand. Not until later—much, much later—did I understand that look.
“Ay-yi-yi . . .”
He sighed and pushed the door open. Warm air buffeted against my face in a moist, tropical wave. Striking with a greater force, a force that took away all breath and all hope of sanity was the vision laid out before me of a huge courtyard, a huge series of courtyards. Collegiate towers, gatehouses, lawns, vaulted passageways, quadrangles and statuary stretched in every direction. It was as if St. Matthew’s had developed cancer and erupted with extravagant mutated growths, lush and demented variations on a Cambridge theme.
I stood frozen, my legs braced like a child.
“What’s the problem?”
“I . . . I . . .”
“Heck, something’s really bugging you, isn’t it?”
I nodded dumbly.
“C’m here,” said Steve. “Look at me. Look at me . . .” He peered anxiously into my eyes. I stared back, frightened as hell.
“Maybe you’re concussed. Your pupils are okay, I guess. I don’t even know what the hell concussion is supposed to do to them. Let’s go.”
I walked alongside in a kind of dream. Above me fake Jacobean bell towers, mock medieval castellations and incongruously handsome gargoyles loomed down; beneath my feet cobbled pathways set in rose tarmac led us through the heart of this huge and magnificent village.
The word provoked a vision in me of Patrick McGoohan, The Prisoner, waking up in his little room in The Village. The camera zooming with period mania from Ping-Pong ball springing fountains to green copper cupolas; from miniature domed palaces to sneering stone cherubs.
—Where am I?
—The Village.
—Who are you?
—I am Number Two.
—Who is Number One?
—YOU are
Number Six.
—I am not a number, I’m a FREE MAN.
We walked, Steve’s arm through mine, into a gatehouse, ancient in style but solid and clean and new, and emerged onto a street, busy with traffic.
It took a second for the point to sink home.
“Jesus,” I said. “The cars . . .”
“Hey, c’mon, Mikey. Calm down, will you? There’s nothing to worry about. We’ll cross the street further down.”
“But where are we? This isn’t England!”
“Oh God, Mike.”
I looked at him, trembling and afraid, and saw my fear reflected in his face.
Tears sprang into my eyes. “I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry! But I really don’t know what’s going on. Why do you know me when I don’t know you? And the traffic. It’s driving on the right-hand side of the road. Where are we? Please, where are we?”
He stood in front of me, a hand on each of my shoulders, and I could sense him fighting down his own panic and a desire, as people passed by staring, to be miles away from such a howling mess. He spoke to me in a raised voice, as you talk to the deaf, the foreign and the insane.
“Mike, it’s okay. I think you bumped your head last night and I think maybe it’s screwed up your memory. You’re talking a little crazy, but it’s okay. Look at me. Come on, look at me, Mikey!”
My voice shook in a treble whine. “But where am I? Please! I don’t understand where I am.”
“I’m gonna take you to see a doctor now, Mikey. So just come along with me, ’kay? Everything’s fine. You’re in Princeton, where you should be, and there’s nothing to get hot under the collar about, okay?”
MILITARY HISTORY
The Frenchman and the Colonel’s helmet: II
“It’s hot. It’s boiling hot and still they insist we wear these tunics.”
Hans Mend scuffed his boots along the duckboards in the direction of the forward trench, loudly and breezily damning the generals. Ernst Schmidt beside him remained as resolutely silent as usual, offering as comment only the occasional wheeze from his gas-injured lungs.
“Mind you,” said Hans. “Even if someone did explode a howitzer up their arses they would probably manage to claim it as a tactical victory. And another thing,” he went on, after leaving a polite pause for comment, a pause he knew would go unfilled. “Franzmann and that twice-damned helmet. Something must be done. Our Franconian puppies need to be led by example. They should be shown that we Bavarians do not take this kind of insult lying down. A revenge must be exacted. A lesson must be taught.”
