Best of British Fantasy 2018

by Jared Shurin

  Insisting the topic always came up, my parole officer subsequently taught me the formula for life trajectory, where L = life trajectory, i and j are points on the i and j axes, F = ability to forget what already happened, and Z = impersonal forces you can't subvert:

  L²= (±√Z * x) + (y – F)/∞ + L²

  She was so proud of her own life trajectory, she kept it framed on the wall of her office. The prosecution showed it to you, as Exhibit A.

  Preparation materials for the USAT are hard to find. Soon my parole officer had shown me all the index cards she had.

  There are no official books or websites to help you, but if you approach the docks towards dawn you’ll find tutors prepared to offer you tips. One of these told me the best tutors focused on patterns, not rote memorisation. “There’s a rhythm to it,” he assured me.

  “Did you pass the USAT?” I asked him, and he told me nobody ever passes the USAT.

  Knowing this somehow improved my morale. He advised me to learn a lot about bees, and when I asked why, said becoming an expert on a subject that might not turn up in the test is part of the process. “Always wear red during the exam,” he emphasised. “Some advise taking wind speed into account, although that part never made sense to me.” He sold me a map to use if I ever needed to get really lost – “but once you start unfolding it, there’s no way to fold it again. Forget whatever Chalkbrood told you.”

  Later I found part of an old test in the sleeve of a Laurence Crane LP at the public library.

  3. A corporation has invented alienation-flavoured soda. How many cans will you buy, expressed in terms of n?

  4. You spend six months in a factory motivating the workers to improve their productivity. Replacing one blue lightbulb with a green lightbulb triples productivity. Replacing another blue lightbulb with a green lightbulb halves productivity. At this point you realise you are not in a factory at all… you are in your bathtub, in the foetal position, staring at your Joseph Beuys shower curtain. There is no question to be answered here, so move on.

  In the weeks that followed, I learned about bees. I memorised lists of words that are not synonymous with themselves – Authenticity, Believability, Credibility, Duty – and learned which square roots are the nemeses of other square roots. I procured a supply of 27G clutch pencils, the only kind allowable for use during the USAT, and learned special vocabulary words suited only for answering USAT questions.

  I began seeing test questions everywhere I went. I noticed the words No Test Material On This Page spray-painted on the side of an abandoned sofa. I reread Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim – Exhibit B for the prosecution. The conversations I had at bus stations late at night were now on topics like whether bees are inherently capable of crime. You tell me.

  Post-its on the side of a bank said ROB THIS BANK, and suicide hotlines called me proactively, to make sure I wasn’t paying too much attention to current affairs. I kept my map tightly folded, all this time, near the bottom of my backpack.

  The person who administers the USAT test is always someone you aren’t expecting. In my case, my landlady appeared early one morning with an eviction notice that had the questions typed on the reverse, and an answer sheet. “You’re allowed to use a calculator,” she said, “but only for questions that don’t include any maths. Take a deep breath before you start.”

  Predictably, there was a question about bees.

  4

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  this one isn’t even a bee

  this one might be an owl

  5. Sozima collects twenty-ones bees, counts their stripes, and records her data in the table above. Has she ever really been in love?

  A. any response I make to this question might tend to incriminate me

  B. no way is that an owl

  C. 3√dreams

  D. still hungry for you, elephant

  I filled in the circles on the answer sheet, ‘darkly and completely’ as the instructions demanded, and every time a 27G clutch pencil malfunctioned, grabbed another – I’ve taken easier exams in my nightmares. Yet in a pure flow state, marshalling my emotional-logical resources to bear on tasks that would avail me nothing, happy and beyond time, I forgot I was soon to be evicted. At its core, the USAT measures how comfortable one can become with uncertainty.

  6. Which of the following does not help to make up the cytoskeleton?

  A. contributory negligence

  B. fleeing to the mountains to evade the coercive power of the state

  C. analepsis and prolepsis

  D. validating the semi-secret knowledge of the marginalised

  I guessed the answers I didn’t know. I employed the formula for the ambivalence of a triangle. I divided by ∞ repeatedly, and threw in random apostrophes.

  When I handed my answer sheet in, my landlady told me some cops had been around looking for me. “I didn’t want to tell you before,” she explained, giving me kumquats for the road, “in case it distracted you from your freaking test.”

  She also handed me a certificate emblazoned with the words YOU HAVE ENTERED AN INVALID LAST NAME.

  I thanked her, topped my backpack up with kumquats, and left via the fire-escape.

  On the outskirts of town, I took my map out of my backpack, and began unfolding it.

  The centre of the map had been cut away to make snowflake patterns.

  Following this problematic chart as best I could, I came to a copse where two women were tying their shoelaces. A sign nailed to a blighted tree said simply FISH, with an arrow pointing into the sky.

  “What kind of pencils do you use?” one woman asked, presumably to see if I was an utofuzi. She relaxed fractionally when I showed her my YOU HAVE ENTERED AN INVALID LAST NAME certificate.

  “How did your test go?” the other woman asked. “Did you remember to capitalise everything? What does the U in USAT even stand for? I’m lucky that didn’t come up.”

  “Utofuzi?” I suggested. “Undisclosed?”

  “Umbrage,” the first woman said. “Unsubscribe.”

  “The USAT’s not as hard as the ASAT,” the second woman said. “I failed the ASAT seven times.” I looked at my hands, on one of which somebody had written with a Sharpie, without me noticing, ese tipo esta craquiado. So what else was new?

  “Unstandardisation,” the first woman said. “The USAT’s a standardised test for people who don’t want to be standardised.”

  “I’m told I got a really good score on the ZSAT,” the second woman said. I suspected the ZSAT was something she’d just made up.

  As we walked on through the woods, I kept an eye out for chanterelles but, not spotting any, I thought about Lord Jim instead. My latest rereading had altered my perspective. Before, I’d seen the ending as a cop out, suspecting Conrad was cobbling together some redemption for a character he wasn’t sure was redeemable. Lord Jim had seemed to me, towards the end, to slip back into being the kind of boy’s adventure story it had formerly done so good a job of avoiding.

  My current reading of the ending was darker – I now saw Jim’s final fate as an echo of his earlier failure, rather than a repudiation of it. Jim chooses, over whatever more practical solutions might have been possible, a death that demonstrates his courage – but in doing so he sacrifices himself unnecessarily, effectively deserting the people of Patusan as conclusively as he earlier deserted the pilgrims on the Padua, fulfilling Marlow’s prior dismissive judgment –

  “A certain readiness to perish is not so very rare, but it is seldom that you meet men whose souls, steeled in the impenetrable armour of resolution, are ready to fight a losing battle to the last, the desire of peace waxes stronger as hope declines, till at last it conquers the v
ery desire of life.”

  I admire the way that sentence slips out of being grammatical halfway through, so that you feel something more powerful than punctuation at work.1 Martyrdom, if not exactly a form of cowardice, is something worse in Marlow’s eyes – a flight from practicality. One might even argue that an excessive death wish is at the root of Jim’s initial shying from danger. When he deserts the Padua, his temptation to go down with the ship may be what he is really fighting against the hardest.

  He is no more ready at the end than he is at the beginning, to fight a losing battle to the last like an utofuzi.

  “Readiness to perish is my middle name,” I said.

  When I looked around, the two women were no longer there – I would not see them again until the start of my trial.

  I walked on alone, past burning churches and log cabins, and at last reached the tent city. The sky was like lemon curd left too long in a sauna.

  My parole officer was there. She told me she was on a spiritual retreat.

  “You’re scared of death and you’re also scared of living,” she advised me.

  “I’m not that scared of death,” I said.

  “If you see a man abusing a woman around here,” my parole officer warned me, “don’t try and intervene. She might think that’s condescending.”

  “I wasn’t born yesterday,” I said.

  “Forget whatever Chalkbrood told you,” my parole officer said.

  “I don’t know anyone called Chalkbrood,” I said.

  There were spilled flashcards lying in the grass, and I perused them at the same time all those things my lawyer says I shouldn’t talk about were happening.

  7. Please, you can make a relaxation music for people who knows much things. I know so many that for me is creepy even sounds of nature =(. Warning! message for all people: Is dangerous to know too 2 too much, and the xtreme knowing.=(.

  Lord Jim is a doppelganger of Kurtz in The Heart of Darkness, both dying in a colonial outpost they’ve failed single-handedly to subdue, both dying of their own romanticism. For although Jim is portrayed as a gentler potentate than Kurtz, people only invade other countries to escape their fear of their own inner savagery. Both antiheroes seek to manufacture states, and learn in the process their own nullity as individuals. What’s most important about both Jim and Kurtz may be what we learn through them about Marlow, who avoids self-disclosure and is always portrayed speaking in a leisurely, unflinching way to pipe-smoking men who implicitly accept Marlow as one of their kind, although a close analysis of his yarns cannot support their judgment. The nature of Marlow’s own history can be inferred only via his fascination with the life trajectories of others, and by the fact of his choosing to roam the world analysing doomed outcasts to unresponsive audiences.

  Someone came over and started abusing my parole officer, so I put some distance between us, wandering over to a picnic table by which a couple of VSAT instructors were playing mumbly-peg. The V in VSAT stands for Victim.

  8. Which is an important consideration when hunting from a ground blind?

  A. The hunter is in full view of the rabbit, so it is important to be flatteringly attired.

  B. It is difficult for other hunters to see you, so it is tactful to kill them first.

  C. You have no protection from the elements, so it is sagacious to optimise your workflow.

  D. All critters are projections of your own fears, so it is company policy to brace yourself against an unseen catastrophe.

  I turned back to look at my parole officer. She stood out against the sky. I think she was shouting.

  9. Distilling a lifetime of experience into an expressive silence requires

  A. prayer

  B. reverb

  C. hoodoo

  D. preventing the spile pin from accidentally falling out of the joining shackle

  Another flashcard demanded ‘What is the main theme of the following passage?’ followed by what looked like blood stains.

  Security came over and asked me to fill out a form saying what I’d seen, but I’d no idea what I’d seen.

  They handcuffed me, while my unfoldable map and YOU HAVE ENTERED AN INVALID LAST NAME certificate blew away in a sudden gust, and threw me in the back of their van.

  “You know what I realised?” I asked the driver.

  He drove past nondescript cabins along a narrow asphalt road. So far this had been one of those drawn-out Conradian journeys to the epicentre of someone else’s moral failure – except that in this case the moral failure was my own: that of not having noticed my parole officer had fallen in with the wrong crowd.

  She was being rushed to hospital, and several people claimed to have seen me arguing with her.

  I thought of the van driver as Marlow, ascribing to him a lifetime of pacing decks whilst ruminating on human insufficiency.

  “The only thing the USAT tests,” I told him, “is how much time you’ve spent preparing for the USAT. USAT just stands for USAT Score Approximation Tribunal.”

  “I scored in the 93rd percentile,” Marlow told me. “You know how 1970s sports movies end,” he added, although actually I didn’t.

  For a while we seemed to be gaining on the ambulance transporting my parole officer, but before long it had outpaced us. Marlow’s countenance took on a thoughtful cast as he scrutinised me in the rear-view mirror.

  “I’m supposed to drop you off at the police station,” he remarked. “Who said ‘More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones?’ Was it A. St. Teresa of Avila, B. Beyoncé, C. Yogi Berra, or D. Sister Souljah?”

  “Trick question,” I said.

  “They all are,” Marlow said. Maybe one day he would explain me to a brooding, silent assemblage on some malarial verandah. “Perhaps you know I used to work for a private security company,” he would say. “Once I helped a murderer escape, who was a twisted sort of a chap, if you like. The cumulative effect of him was rather troublesome...”

  But the driver was not really Marlow, and he did not help me escape.

  He took me to the police station – some secret sharer he turned out to be. Outside the station, journalists asked me if I had any comments on the death of my parole officer.

  10. Problem sensitivity usually results in

  A. testing offenders for drugs and giving them more if permitted

  B. taunting probationers until they commit crimes aligned with their philosophical bearings

  C. applying general rules and procedures to specific anomalies

  D. neofascist backlast

  After spending a while in the holding tank, I was taken to the Prison.

  Here I first met Chalkbrood, who taught me the following:

  Examinations are a tool of psychological warfare employed by centralised governments, a way of dividing and ruling from the time of the Han dynasty onwards. Their purpose is to standardise what subjects ought to know in ways that benefit the imperial, metropolitan power, while sidestreaming other perceptual traditions.

  At the start of an examination, it’s customary to write your full name – already more information than it’s wise to give the government – and from there things keep going downhill. You may have to show an identity card, and the questions themselves perpetuate a managerial mindset. As the ocean sorts stones according to size, so exams sort the state’s human matériel according to brainwashability, approval-hungriness, and loyalty to establishment limitations of thought. In a society ridden with quantifiable measurements of pseudo-performance, prestige becomes dependent on thinking the way the authorities want, on answering questions in a way which abstracts from the flux and contingency of actuality in the direction of imposed categories.

  After testing, never knowing if your answers have been received, processed, or acknowledged, you cannot be sure you officially exist. This saps your courage, and makes you more pliable.

  Every exam question is a cage. That is why Chalkbrood has developed the ESAT. The E is for escape artist, and the ESAT is not m
ultiple-choice like the VSAT. One answers in a non-official language, if one shows up at all. A healthy response might confuse the examiner as to who one is, ridicule any oppressive background assumptions embedded in the question – those sleights of hand designed to force mystifications on us – and end by convincing the invigilators to burn down the records office. Consider this example:

  n(t) = t2/2 – 20t + k

  11. There was a 100-day period when the number of bees in a certain hive could be modelled by the function n above. In the function, k is a constant and represents the number of bees on day number t for 0 ≤ t ≤ 99. On what number day was the number of bees in the hive the same as it was on day number 10?

  In response I ask how to camouflage the hives so as to evade Board of Health scrutiny, how to encourage a sustainable variety of wildflowers in the vicinity, with adequately nutritious nectar, which inspectors can be bribed with honey, and how best to appraise the role in colony collapse of the decline of genetic diversity due to artificial queen insemination, to GMOs, and to neonicitinoids and other pesticides.

  Because one thing the question doesn’t tell you is that, on the 101st day – the same day my parole officer succumbed to her wounds, having been multiply stabbed with a 27G clutch pencil, or so the prosecution claims – the drones all vanished.

  Chalkbrood thinks the pesticides act as a nerve poison that disrupts their homing ability, so they never find their way back to the hive.

  But my own view is that the drones are avoiding the hive deliberately, having been provoked by state-of-the-art apicultural techniques into seeking out zones of schismatic resistance. I believe that, as a strategy of infrapolitical sabotage, all the bees are deliberately evolving back into being wasps.