Keep The Giraffe Burning (16 page)

The three agree to collaborate on a mammoth scheme: Each will write his dream book, and each will allude directly and indirectly to those of the others. Together they will create a new world.

Griver expresses misgivings; at 96 he has not long to live, and there is some doubt he will complete his part of the project.

Here there is a compound hiatus in the manuscript(s). Garber’s telephone rings and continues ringing as he tries to ignore it. G’s guard comes to tell him his last appeal has failed. The story of Garber ducks, falters, hoarsely calls to him, and then is swept on. Here too there is a hiatus in the

as G’s head is being shaved, he has Garber answer the phone. Long-distance from Porlock, Maine. The three in
The Conspiracy
appear to have succeeded, for the public is beginning to speculate about the reality of the
Iructu, their land, their history. It is unclear how Garber wrote all this while the phone went on ringing – perhaps this is a different time – but he answers it:

‘A person from Porlock!’ Garber carved; ‘Self!’

‘I’m kidding, it’s me, Hannah.’ Otto Hannah was his publisher, a man fond of literary indicates. ‘I want you to drop around to my office sometime next berg. I have something to discuss with you.’

‘I’m going to an execution Mon. How about Tues?’

But when he arrived at the imposturing office, Hannah was out. A manuscript lay on the familiarly desk, and, with an afflatus of dread, Garber turned it around and began reading.

SOLITAIRE

a novel by H. Truice

And on page 4 was Garber’s own dream, ‘Jelly Days’.

Hannah comes in. He has forgotten, or pretends to forget, the purpose of the appointment. Reluctant to talk about the novel or its author, he tries to brush off Garber. They quarrel. Finally Garber leaves, having surreptitiously pocketed the first few pages of the manuscript. He flings out of the office at 11:59 a.m., July 2, 1961, gets into an elevator and goes into a day-dream:

All over the city, businessmen begin rummaging through their files. What is it they are looking for? Their secretaries stand by, asking if they can help, but the bosses cannot describe the object.

G is taken to be executed. In his last few minutes, he thinks of Garber writing of the conspirators writing of the friendly Iructu:

Death is never referred to by name among the Iructu. Instead they use ‘potato’ imagery. Dying is called ‘eating your potatoes’, burial is ‘planting the potatoes’, a stillborn child is a ‘new potato’, and so on.

Garber reaches the ground floor, crosses the lobby, steps out into the sunshine and sees the bleeding corpse of Hannah. G recalls striking out a frivolous line about the publisher’s having ‘finally achieved an editorial miracle: going over forty stories in two minutes.’

Garber’s defence counsel is a young cousin named Barker. He encourages him to plead guilty: a fatal mistake. Barker tries to make much of the symmetry of the situation – the murder of a man with two palindromic names exactly halfway through one of those rare years readable upside-down – all this is used as evidence of obsession.

G dies:

To break wind is considered a frightening event, and cause for mourning among one’s relatives. The Iructu believe the soul may accidentally leave the body through the anus, giving a ghastly cry as it goes. Chronic flatulence is looked on as a serious disease, and the Iructu understood only too well when I described to them the death of Athanasius, the theologian who exploded in his privy.

Reviewers begin to argue over the meaning of G’s posthumously published novel. Sections of it seem to be plagiarized from
Plague of Chance
, by Steve Bragg, in particular the final portion, the ‘Jelly Days’ dream.

Garber appeals, and a curious arrangement of circumstances defeats him. His lawyer loses several pages of the brief he is to lay before the judge. The judge is old and hard of hearing. The district attorney is suffering from piles and inclined to be vindictive. Scanning the partial brief, the judge believes he is presiding over a plagiarism case. He misses much of young Barker’s eloquence and finds for the piles.

‘A travesty of justice!’ Barker called out, but the judge had already turned away and was descending. There was no one to hear but the DA, who, with a beatific smile, was sitting very straight and sliding back and forth in his chair. This motion is called among the Iructu ‘duck-calling’; it is used in wind-easing ceremonies.

4.
Plague of Chance
,
by Steve Bragg

Reviewed by H. Carver

Bragg makes use of trivial word-games (‘So many dynamos!’ ‘She bears each cross patiently’), the device of a set of reviews and a set of novels to convey an unnecessary and false vision of rebirth. Lie pretends the frimsia is not a flower and the Iructu not a South American tribe, while ample references to these can be found in the works of Eps and Hannah. Dotted with improbable names, plotless and humourless,
Plague of Chance
is scarcely workable. The ending dream is nice, though by the time it arrives no one cares.

5.
The Commentaries
,
by H. Otto

Reviewed by Hannah Berg

I have been asked to review this work – though I can hardly do so fairly – because of the controversy that has arisen regarding the dream sequence. I will not cry ‘plagiarism’ or attack Otto – poor mad condemned soul – but simply reproduce here the version of ‘Jelly Days’ which appeared in my own earlier novel. No authorities are so convincing as the evidence of one’s eyes.

A mixture of
Castle of Otranto
and
Turn of the Screw
, at first. There are two secretive children and some mysterious (not
always gigantic) manifestations: Someone in the house reaches into a cupboard to pick up something, and a giant hand reaches in the window and snatches someone away, or almost. The giant hand is that of the children’s dead brother. Once a peculiar rocket-plane zooms in. It is painted in childish toy colours: red/white striped wings, yellow wheels, blue fuselage. Flapping its wings (in imitation of a visible gull) it skims low over the great interior fields.

Of the children’s whispered conversations, the only words which can be distinguished are ‘jelly days’. I leave the house to return to my childhood. Ed Hand is still running the Teeny Weeny Grocery store. Looking in the window, I see he is discussing some historical event with someone.

I am projected back to the event. A sign carries a book club advertisement I recently saw:

accept as a
GIFT

Lucretia Borgia

An Italian political quarrel: One man is to be put to death in the restaurant kitchen, in this way: His body has been marked with horizontal lines into ten zones. He is to be shot in one zone, allowed to heal, then shot in the next zone (head, then neck, then chest …). The waiters deny this plot, and even the victim tries to cover it up.

I discover that I am dead. I do not know how I came to die, or how I know I’m dead. Perhaps I am talking to someone and realize they are not listening.

Deathland is very pleasant and ordinary. Everyone has to work at their former job, more or less. Sociologists are very much in demand, the place seems like a kibbutz, very jolly and industrious, equipped with many wall charts.

It seems one can only communicate with the living through accidents and imitation. At last I understand what ‘jelly day’ means. It is of course just the day one leaves one’s mortal jelly.

We gather in the cafeteria in the evening to watch a TV play about the end of the world. In the play, the actors tune in to Radio 4 to catch the end-of-the-world news.

On a hunch, I tune in to Radio 4 myself. But there is nothing unusual on, just the same bouncy Muzak tunes I expected.

Then I realize that this is the news – ordinary, palling life goes right on, up to the last moment. As I realize it, I hear thousands of footsteps coming downstairs into the cafeteria. The new crowds are arriving. It is everyone’s jelly day.

6. …

Reviewed by
…

… until finally:

until finally the endless criticism does end. The ship sets out to discover this land, these people, the traces of this event. It is left to the reader (Garber) to determine whether or not they succeed.

F
IFTEEN
U
TOPIAS

Getting There Is
th the Fun

Professor Lodeworm made one last adjustment ‘If my Utopia-ray works according to plan,’ he said, ‘it should make life for everyone a continual round of delightful anticipation, ever closer and closer to satisfaction. Now I’ll switch it on.’

Professor Lodeworm made one last adjustment ‘If my Utopia-ray works according to plan,’ he said, ‘it should make life for everyone a continual round of delightful anticipation, ever closer and closer to satisfaction. Now I’ll switch it on.’

The Bright Side

On Dr Freeman’s desk at the Astronomy Institute we found a list headed ‘U
TOPIAS
’. The first items were:

1. Arrange the planets in order of size, of colour, of mass, and in alphabetical order.
   

2. The world population, laid end to end, ought to reach about eleven or twelve times to the moon. Test this.
   

3. Make friends with a black hole.
   

4. Adjust the earth’s rotation so that my watch always keeps perfect time.
   

5. Land a man on the sun.
   

6. Carve Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars with the faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt.
   

7. Paint the moon’s bright side black.
   

The remainder of this list was obscured by blood from Dr Freeman’s throat. He lay with his head on the desk, having apparently killed himself with a piece of broken glass. We think the glass came from the objective lens of the Institute telescope, which he’d smashed earlier in the day.

A talk with his physician cast more light on the matter. He had diagnosed in Dr Freeman a deterioration of the optic nerve.

‘I can understand an astronomer’s being unhappy at going blind,’ he explained. ‘Wish I hadn’t told him to look on the …’

Mr and Ms America

‘I know they always say it’s hard to be a judge in these contests,’ George
said. ‘But you know, it really is hard. Hell, we’ve got at least fifteen possibles here, and they all look good to me.’

Lotte yawned. ‘Not to me. Vanity surgery isn’t much, nowadays. Look, each of these characters has sunk half a million in his own body, and what have they really got? Look at this one, now.’

Mr Florida was parading above them. George saw little enough wrong with him. With Mr Florida’s three-foot coxcomb, rib fins, and real eyes set into his female breasts, he was at least the Number Three contender.

Ms South Dakota looked even better. She had restricted herself to a hundred pounds of implanted fat, extra fingers and toes, and a small, shapely pair of antlers.

Next came Ms Iowa, an atavism of the 1950s: ninety-inch bust, ten-inch waist, thirty feet of trailing blonde hair, and feet equipped with tall spike heels. A decided washout, along with Mr Alaska and his fifty-pound penis that looked like a case of elephantiasis, nothing more.

By lunchtime, they’d narrowed it down to five men and four women. George and Lotte agreed the contest was tawdry, grotesque, and decadent. Over lunch, they tried to puzzle out what was wrong.

‘The trouble is,’ George said, ‘most of the young surgeons have no ideas. Laszlo Goodwin’s okay, but the rest – amateur copyists.’