Not Even Honest People Remember

Henmy stared out the window down upon the street below.

'There's a horse pulling a cart,' he said, holding a cup of coffee inches from his face, maybe for the heat.

'Does it look healthy?' I asked, not really having heard, flipping through papers trying to find my notes on this or that.

'I don't know. I don't know anything about horses, but why is it pulling a cart?'

'Cats chase mice. Birds fly south. Horses pull carts.'

'But why here?'

'Why anywhere?'

'You're not taking this seriously.'

'It's just a horse pulling a cart.'

'It's not just a horse pulling a cart.'

'What's in the cart?'

'Pineapple husks.'

'Guess it's just a street vendor.'

'Can street vendors afford horses?'

'I don't know Henmy. Did you read the article I gave you?'

'Yes. It's bullcrap. I'll explain in a minute. I'm just going to get to the bottom of this horse and cart business.' He sauntered out of the office, kind of bouncing as he walked. Strange boy, I thought, not for the first time, before reminding myself that he's not even a boy, but he looks like a boy, I argued, quietly. I decided I'd keep thinking of him as a boy but I wouldn't let him know I think of him as a boy.

Strange as he was though, Henmy was my best friend at the office and, as such, my best friend in Paris. We weren't allowed to use our real names, see. Assuming we had one, of course, which one colleague claimed, insistently, he did not. Instead, they randomly assigned us computer-generated names. The computer's disregard for naming conventions ostracized us completely from the decrepit working-class Parisian community surrounding our office. Even if the names weren't so patently absurd, our contractual obligation to speak to nobody about what we were doing and our terrible, inconsistent falsified biographies rendered a normal social life implausible, if not unattainable.

Absent of any real contact with the outside world, we would eat together, drink together, becoming the alien life-form our work - the project - seemed to aspire to. Nothing like mutual alienation to kick down the doors of indifference.

'It turns out that it wasn't a horse,' Henmy explained, sitting down in his chair at the desk across the aisle. 'It was a mare.'

'Isn't a mare a type of horse?' I asked. He looked at me with the blank expression he used when he wanted to make it clear things he couldn't know tortured him.

'I don't think so,' he said finally, as if that was the end of the matter, and walked into the kitchen to refill his coffee. The coffee was petrol for Henmy, rocket fuel even, the juice for his boundless enthusiasm and infectious whimsy, usually misdirected toward fanaticism for the project and what he considered its 'utopian promise', and his tank was bottomless. For all his good intentions, he was, undoubtedly, deluded and potentially psychotic, a monomaniac with no center of gravity. Nonetheless, he was undoubtedly more qualified for the project than I, who often, late at night and early in the morning, thoughts tripping over themselves trying to find a light switch long since disconnected, considered it an arms race against nobody to the top of a mountain shrouded in mist.

'I want to give myself a nickname,' he announced, lighting a cigarette and sitting down again, adopting a posture excruciating to look at.

'You can't give yourself a nickname.'

'Why not? Is it in the contract?'

'No, but it's stupid. You can't give yourself a nickname.'

'That's not a reason.'

'It's just a faux pas.'

'What's a faux pas?'

'Doing something tactless.'

'Oh.'

'What nickname would you give yourself anyway?'

'It's a secret. I mean, I'm still thinking about it. I've just got to get it right. It's more or less finished. I'm going to work on it later. '

'How do you work on a nickname?'

'It's hard to explain.' He dragged on the cigarette, tilted his head back and exhaled into the air above his desk, picked up a manual and began to read aggressively, augmenting turns of the pages with noises that sounded like there was a small animal somewhere deep inside, locked up, not sad, just lonely, not trying to get out, just trying to let somebody know it was in there. The office gradually filled with tired faces and disjointed conversation, disaffected idle gossip mistaking itself for technical quandaries. At lunchtime, I took a walk by myself around the neighborhood.

'Lightning Bolt,' Henmy announced, smiled proudly, after allowing a few seconds for anticipation to build. I tried not to look at Brolle.

'Obviously, I don't know that people tell me things more than other people get told things,' Henmy explained, cradling a beer, elaborating on his theory that, for as long as he could remember and in spite of his mood or geniality, people who he did or didn't know well would tell him things, all kinds of things, not necessarily secrets but definitely like secrets, more like recently declassified information nobody really wants to look at, 'since I've never been any other person, but I feel like I'm a magnet for people who need to get something off their chest, who need to say this or that and would willingly tell it to anyone who would listen.'

'For example,' he went on, 'a man approached me on a bus in Santiago. He asked me where I was from and I told him it was a hard question to answer. He went quiet for a second and then told me he was one of seventeen children, not just one of seventeen siblings but seventeen siblings born at the same time, carried for nine months by the same woman. I told him that was physically impossible. He didn't argue with me, he just told me the seventeen were split up at birth to avoid controversy, the hospital destroyed the papers and he'd never seen his mother or siblings again. We kept talking for the rest of the bus ride - which was about half an hour - about various things and then he said it was his stop. Just before I got off, he told me he'd never told anybody about the circumstances of his birth, mostly because he knows nobody would ever believe him. Another time, I was at a university function, a cocktail party for a lecturer visiting from abroad. A woman in her fifties, who introduced herself as the guest's partner, told me she met the guest in prison, where she was doing time for staging an impersonation competition for her famous, late husband in order to find a new husband. I asked her what law that breaks and she explained it turned out the impersonator had two penises, which was one more than her husband had, a strangely endearing biological normality feature which ruined the impersonator's facade in its absence. The impersonator offered to have the second penis removed and she paid the surgeon to accidentally overdose him with anesthetic, leaving the impersonator paralyzed from the waist down. Then the woman grabbed a canapé from a waiter, told me the visiting academic, her current partner, had no idea why she was in prison, and walked off.'

With this, Henmy finished his beer, shouted to the waiter for another and looked around the table, where everybody was staring at him, trying to decide whether to take him seriously, which was the main complication in dealing with him: sometimes, when you found yourself questioning everything you thought you knew about the world, you got to wondering whether maybe he knew something we don't know, whether he was actually some kind of savant and not just...

Brolle cleared his throat.

'Ignoring the probability you're not either really goddamn gullible or really full of crap,' he said, 'this doesn't exactly enlighten us with regard to our main man. I mean, you could have just told us what Pokil said. I really don't care where you went for breakfast on the tenth of December.'

Which is, of course, why Henmy was riffing in the first place. Most of those nights, looking back, are full of empty spaces where the conversation belongs, just faces and verbal tics, idiosyncrasies in the ways my colleagues walked or sat, whether they sat back in their chairs or leaned forward expectantly; I think of their wistfulness or their melancholy but I can't remember a single thought they shared or story they told. All that comes back to me now is the time we spent speculating about Pokil, our leader, a man in his sixties who seemed like he was born a million years ago, had watched humanity bloom and then capitulate, had done nothing but watch and listen, like a turtle or something that lives as long.

'I was just trying to give you some background,' Henmy argued, 'reasons why you should believe what I am going to tell you, ask you to suspend disbelief in the way people work, because, in my experience, the way people work isn't what you think. You know, you imagine people save their deepest secrets for people they know the best, love the most, or want to impress, for professional or romantic reasons, but in actual fact, there's no system, there are just receptacles peppered all over the world or universe and that's where the secrets go.'

'Okay,' Gumbit sighed. 'We get it, and?'

'So, I was drinking a coffee,' Henmy began, pausing to receive the beer from the waiter, 'and looking at the picture on the walk outside his office, you know the picture of the Arecibo message, the first message sent into space, the first deliberate attempt to broadcast life on Earth to whoever else is out there?' We all murmured to confer our understanding. 'I was staring at it, trying to imagine I was some life-form from another galaxy.'

'And what did you imagine?' Brolle laughed. 'That you were actually a life-form from another galaxy trying to imagine you were from Earth imagining a life-form from another galaxy?'

We all laughed at the cheap joke, we always laughed at Brolle's cheap jokes, I guess we imagined everyone had always laughed at his jokes and he'd be too confused if we shattered his illusion.

'I imagined I knew exactly what it was trying to say,' Henmy continued, 'but I couldn't put it into words.'

'So you didn't know what it was trying to say?' Brolle trolled again.

'Let him tell his story, Brolle,' someone interjected, reasonably enough. The only way with Henmy sometimes is to let him go, ride through the outskirts of his memory, the streets that mean nothing to anybody else, on the way to wherever it is that everything happens.

'I couldn't put it into words because the language is different. Looking at it was like looking straight line from its end, where all you can see is a dot, and I was there, thinking this, sipping my coffee, when Pokil came and stood next to me. You know how he does it, just sneaks up on you, you turn to your left or right and all of a sudden he's there? I said hello and he told me when he was a boy, he'd cut the picture out of a magazine and stuck it to his wall, next to his bed. He told me he looked at it every night, out of the corner of his eyes as he said his evening prayers, imagining he was an astronaut, and as the prayers came out of his mouth he said in his head some other kinds of prayers, as if he were talking to aliens, talking to them about the trials and tribulations of a being a small boy in a small village in a former French colony, about the tremendous feeling he had of being born on the wrong planet, like his life was supposed to be somewhere else, where the numbers were different, where the language - not the linguistic approximation but the fantasy of an absolute, essential language - was different. He would stare at the picture until it blurred, as his mouth and tongue moved in the shape of gratitude to a god he would have loved to head-butt until he or she or it bled, he would stare at the picture as if it were one of those Magic Eye drawings, until out of the blurred image emerged strange shapes, shapes that grew to resemble fingers and fingers that resembled stick figures and then stick figures that resembled real figures, not like people, just creatures, bodies. Over time, the figures became less and less obscured by the play of the light and there were more of them, more and more until they filled his room, moving without moving, for this short time in the evening when he would kneel by his bed and pray to some stupid God, figures fitting into space like smog on a rainy day. Eventually they moved out through his window, escaping into the night, and then new shapes emerged from the picture, evolving until it was time for them to go as well. This continued for almost two years. He didn't tell anybody about it. Who would have believed me? he said. Then the military stormed his village and he and his family ended up in Birmingham. He told his mother and father he didn't want to pray anymore because he didn't see what good it had done. They didn't say anything and so he stopped praying, and so he stopped seeing these shapes that would turn into figures and escape through the fly-wire window onto the plains of Africa, but he didn't stop imagining that the language in the picture, which he'd carried with him to Europe, was missing something, and then he stopped talking. I tried to think of something to say but I had nothing to say. I mean, what do you say to something like that? Before I could say anything though, he looked at me and said "and I was right.' I looked at him, expecting I don't know what, but he just winked and walked away.' Henmy took a swig of beer and looked down at the floor. Nobody said anything for a few seconds.

'What the hell does all of that mean?' Brolle said, breaking the silence with a pickaxe.

That night, one of those humid nights you can't sleep no matter how tired you are, Henmy called. I was standing near the window, chugging water to replace the sweat I'd lost, staring down into the street full of people with nowhere to go.

'What are you doing?' he asked.

'Trying to sleep.'

'Do you remember what I said about Pokil?'

'Of course.'

'I think I figured it out.'

'Oh, yeah?'

'Pokil was abducted by aliens and he learnt to think like them.'

'Henmy, that's a giant leap of logic or faith or something.'

'Listen to me. I've got it figured out. That's what this is all about. This language we're trying to create.'

'What does language have to do with thought?'

'I don't know, but I remembered something else he said. Not today. Sometime last week.' He stopped talking, fell so silent I couldn't hear him breathing.

'Henmy?'

'Yes.'

'Well, what did he say?'

'I can't remember his words exactly, but it was something about how the echoes of certain voices formed the shape of the universe.'

'And this is your evidence he can communicate telepathically?'

'I didn't say he could communicate telepathically.'

'What did you say?'

'I said he learnt to think like the aliens that abducted him, but, and this is my theory, I don't think he could understand what he was thinking.'

'And so what we're trying to do is represent that thought in language?'

'In something like language.'

'So nothing we do has any intrinsic value besides allowing Pokil to understand the thoughts inside his head, or the memories of the thoughts that were inside his head?'

'Well, no, I think that it's something bigger than Pokil. Something he doesn't even understand.' He fell silent again. 'I wouldn't tell this to anybody except you, Muce.'

'Why not?'

'I mean I don't think we should talk about this to anybody else.'

'You know, I can't sleep, Henmy. Do you want to get a drink?'

We sat on the banks of the neighborhood canal, or what were the banks of the neighborhood canal, whenever there was water in it, and drank cans of cheap beer. Henmy was wearing a coat, which made no sense. Dotted along the canal were others like us, drinking to ward off insomnia in the languid heat, bums sprawled over benches, nowhere else to go, kids strumming guitars, a reminder of when things were that simple.

'The more I think about it, the more certain I am. No other explanation makes as much sense. Think about it.'

'Why are you wearing a coat?'

'I don't know. I kept putting different clothes on but I felt like nothing fit me.'

'That coat doesn't exactly fit you either.'

'Would you prefer I wore an apartment block?'

'What?'

'Nothing. Just think about my theory.'

'I'm thinking, Henmy. There are probably dozens of other explanations. You just haven't thought of any of them.'

'I've thought of plenty. This is the one, though. Think of it like this. Think of it as an atom. There is a positive charge, the signifier, and a negative charge, the signified, and then there is a third unknown force, call it the signifying, which negates the positive and negative infinitely, making the behavior of the atom, the meaning of the language, impossible to predict or define, making it impossible to speak and know what the other person hears.'

'That's just language, Henmy.'

'No, because with language, the third force is history, experience, precedent, flexibility, malleability - of which there are quantifiable limits.'

'There's a limit to history?'

'Hypothetically. Anyway, in this language, the third force is autonomous; it doesn't fit into any logic that can be explained using any of the tools of comprehension, interpretation, intuition we have. It's not a binary formulation, it's not reducible to combinations of this and that.'

'And how does this explain Pokil's abduction?'

'What he said about the picture. That it turned out he was right. The only way he could know that is if he were abducted.'

'Okay, suppose he was abducted. Suppose we translate his memory of the abduction. What would he do with that information?' I lit a cigarette and we both turned and looked at a disheveled character stumbling, almost tumbling toward us, noisily, like a cow walking down a steep hill.

'Well,' Henmy answered, 'that depends on what the information is, I guess.' The disheveled character stopping in front of us. We looked at him and he looked back, as if there were a one-way mirror between us. He didn't seem old, just dirty, which wasn't unusual, his big blue eyes like a baby animal's.

'Have you heard the news?'

We shook our heads silently, struck dumb by the sudden intrusion, and he told us a famous actor, an actor whose death, from pancreatitis, at the age of eighty, in the middle of shooting a film in which he was dying of cancer, had made headlines a few years earlier, had been discovered living secretly under an assumed identity somewhere in the wastelands of middle America. Our character, who seemed at that moment the very definition of a character, laughed his head off and disappeared again, bumbling along the walkway, not bothering to wait for our reply. Neither of us said a word. What do you say to something like that?

'You know,' I said, a few minutes later, 'there was a famous dissident in the seventeen hundreds who had some idea like yours. I mean, he isn't really famous. Famous enough to be remembered, not famous enough to be well-known.'

'I suppose if people remember you after three hundred years, you should consider yourself lucky.'

'Or unlucky, depending on your perspective. Anyway, this guy, well, I mean, he was a dissident in his twenties, charged with conspiring against the British government, not quite high treason, just falsifying information, changing the history books. After he left prison or maybe while he was in prison-'

'I like how you could still be something after spending some time behind bars in those days.'

'You still can be. I guess there was a lull in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when the world of science and letters was dominated by rich, white people. Anyway, so this guy - whose name I can't remember - devised a means of rewiring human brains so language was perceived visually, not unlike a map, rather than in straight lines, like a palimpsest, based on studies of linguistic families which relied more heavily upon geographic signifiers than abstractions divined by painfully climbing etymological trees. He tested this in a tiny half-lit laboratory, using schizophrenics and other deranged types as his subjects.'

'How ethical.'

'Indeed.'

'But why?'

'He wanted something like communication which corresponded exactly with the geography of the brain, a language which didn't hinge on beginnings and endings but could contain everything at once, like whispering the milky way into a stranger's ear in a crowded room.'

'And he actually pulled this off?'

'Well, obviously not. When was the last time a stranger whispered the Milky Way into your ear?'

'Don't be a jerk.'

'I'm just kidding. His work wasn't taken seriously by the medical fraternity and most of it has been lost in time. Plus it wasn't really complete. One of his test subjects flipped out and beat him to death, which I think is the most famous part of his biography.'

'So you think he was abducted too?'

'No, of course not. Nobody knows what his motivation was. Nobody knows what Pokil's motivation is. People just become obsessed with things, imagine ways they can break out of whatever prison they think they're in.'

'You didn't see Pokil's face when he said it.'

'And?'

'I can't describe it.'

'Try.'

'You know those clowns they have at fairs? The ones that turn left and right with their mouth open, like they're turning to see whatever it is that freezes them there and they can't turn far enough or fast enough, and you have to put the ball in its mouth and hope it lands in the right place?' I nodded my head. 'He looked like one of those clowns, except his mouth was closed, all bets were off, the gambling ring had been shut down.'

I didn't say anything. I had no idea what the hell that meant.

'Why do you think that actor faked his own death?' Henmy asked, breaking the silence.

'Who knows?' I answered. 'Maybe he was trying to win a bet. Here comes our man, anyway. Maybe you can ask him.' Henmy looked down the canal. The disheveled man walked, tripped, whatever you want to call it, toward us again, coming from the same direction as the first time. He almost fell in front of us, like the cow had now had its legs screwed around the wrong way, and then turned to look at us, staring as if he'd never seen us before.

'Hey man,' Henmy asked, 'why did the actor fake his own death?'

'I don't know what you're talking about.' He started to walk off.

'You told us-'

'Leave me alone, okay,' he muttered, not looking back, walked to the edge of the canal and dived in, as if it were full of water. There were no cries of pain, he just crumpled into a ball and lay as he fell, twitching on the floor of the empty canal. Nervous excitement spread along the bank and either side people stood close to see what was happening. Later on, like me, they'd probably claim they saw all of it. A youngish woman with dark, matted hair leapt from the third rung of a ladder carved into the wall of the canal ten meters away and seemed to land exactly next to him.

'Are you okay, Elsie?' she asked, kneeling down beside him. 'You just jumped into the canal. It had no water in it. There was no water in the canal, Elsie. You should have waited for me. I don't know what we're supposed to do now.'

Though she kept talking to him, I kept replaying this opening stanza, wondering if I'd heard properly. Was Elsie supposed to wait for her, so they could jump into the empty canal together? Or would the canal not have been empty if they'd jumped together?

'Should we call an ambulance?' Henmy asked, and I remembered where we were, whom I was with. I turned to look at him, to see his mouth agape, eyes forced open, hunched forward as if the scene in the canal were a magnetic field.

'The paramedics are on strike,' a familiar voice answered and we both turned to see Pokil beside us, in a dark suit, smoking a cigarette. 'There are no ambulances in all of Paris,' he went on, not bothering to explain himself, as if it were perfectly reasonable to just appear beside us like that.

'Elsie, can you hear me?' the woman with the matted hair was asking the man, still twitching on the floor of the canal. 'He thinks he's swimming.' She looked around at the people watching and mumbled 'Jesus Christ,' as if she were addressing somebody.

'What are you doing here, Pokil?'

'I could ask you the same question, but it's not important. Have you seen that man before?'

Henmy told Pokil what had happened, about the actor who faked his own death at the age of ninety. I turned back to the canal.

'Elsie, can you hear me?' the woman kept talking, as if the man had just crashed a bike or something. 'Where are you? Have you broken anything? Can you see the stars? Anything that looks like it's living?'

'He seemed pretty-' Henmy paused, looked at the ground, trying to find the right word amongst the filth on the pavement, '- deranged.'

'Probably just mixed up,' Pokil replied, absent-mindedly, staring intently at the man and the woman. 'Got the directions wrong. Dyspraxia. Happens often enough. Brain doesn't agree with the body.'

'He doesn't want to walk. He says he can swim all day.' She put her hand in the pocket of her jacket - why is everyone wearing coats and jackets, I wondered - and seemed to fidget with something. 'Elsie, you can't just keep swimming. We won't be able to find you. We don't know where you are.'

Explanations for what was happening rushed through my mind, hundreds of explanations all at once, following no logic external or internal, but explaining who the man was, why he'd jumped into the canal, why Pokil was there, who the girl was talking to or thought she was talking to, what she was talking about; what Pokil meant by 'dyspraxia', what on earth we were even doing there. The actor who faked his own death. The horse and the goddamn cart. The project, Henmy's theories, the story about Pokil and the picture of the Arecibo message. Pokil and Henmy talked about world lines - 'the longest path between two events is a straight line' - and shizenzo, the Japanese notion of a 'natural funeral', and I thought about the actor's fake death and whether the only common language in the universe is the fallibility of mortality, whether the girl was speaking to the man in the language of Henmy's ramblings. Nothing explained everything because all of the explanations seemed to be looking at the canal from a different position, from the position of the woman in the leotard leaning over the canal twenty meters up or the old man with the tattered cowboy hat on the opposite side, and one explanation distorted the other and when I realized Henmy and Pokil were staring at me waiting for my response to some question, they'd been looking at me a long time and I didn't know what the question was. I tried to read their faces, guess what I was supposed to say, but their eyes were empty, vacant of anything I could intuit, maybe anything at all.

'You know,' I said, needing to say something, 'This isn't the first time an actor faked his own death. When he might easily have died naturally anyway. It happened once before - the fake death was written into his contract for promotional purposes.'

Henmy and Pokil laughed their heads off and it started to rain. We took cover under a tree and watched silently as the girl continued to talk, either to the man or to nobody we could see, and, an hour later, daybreak, we went into a cafe and drank coffee while the rain pelted down. It rained all day, buckets and buckets, more rain than anybody had seen in over ten years, and we sat there, shooting the crap, about books and music and whatever, not bothering even try to make our way back home or to the office through the flooded streets. Occasionally we'd walk out beneath the awning of the cafe, on a small patio rising several meters above the sidewalk, and from there we could see the woman, still talking to the man, as the canal filled over them, as it continued to rain. More people came into the cafe, and it stayed open all night. People brought news from the outside, rumors about what was happening, people with connections to news services told of contradictory theories proffered by rival organizations, and the woman kept kneeling beside the man in the canal, talking, as if praying, keeping vigil as the rain poured down. The cafe filled up with people, whose ground-level homes had filled with water, and with more people came more theories, some backed by science, some based on religion, some drawn from the realm of what used to be known as conspiracy, all of them melodramatic in any other time. Pokil listened calmly to each and every one of them, offering no explanation of his own, Henmy talked rabidly about the plausibility of extra-terrestrial intervention. It might have been possible to brave the torrential rain and clamber home, but we didn't. The water pulsed around the woman and the man, who most dismissed as hysterical subjects of one or another of the cults that had sprung up in recent years, even those who braved the downpour to offer them food or shelter, which they always refused. A man with a wispy grey moustache, who claimed to be an expert in space - as in, outer space - law, told me the woman was wanted by some American intelligence agency for her role in the coercion of the International Extras Guild into an act of interstitial espionage, which he was not at liberty to go into details of.

The rain stopped after a few days or maybe a week - nobody really knows how long it lasted, as you know - and we walked out to the canal, not worried about getting our shoes wet, since who needs dry shoes when everything is soaked through, we walked out to where we'd stood what felt like several lifetimes ago and watched the bodies of the woman and the man, the youngish woman with the matted hair and the man who'd jumped in when it was empty, watched the bodies float away, even though the canal had no current.

The next morning, I woke up to the sound of a hundred school-aged children splashing in the streets, helping, somehow, with the clean-up mission now underway. After a modest breakfast of stale bread and melted cheese - electricity had been cut off - and a makeshift shower, dried sweat rinsing into my mouth, I traipsed down the stairs and walked slowly, deliberately, to the office, still stuck halfway between here and there. Looking back, I suppose I knew what I was going to find, but it still surprised me; the empty office, all peeling wallpaper and loose scraps of paper strewn across a muddy floor, like nobody had been there in years. I sat in my old chair, swiveling back and forth, walked aimlessly around the office, in and out of the kitchen, and then I left again. I tried to call Henmy, but telecommunications were still down, so I walked to his apartment, which I'd never been inside of, though I knew the building and apartment number. The front gate was open so I climbed the stairs, five flights, and knocked on the door. A middle-aged woman in a dressing gown with rollers in her hair opened it.

'Um, I'm looking for my friend, Henmy,' I explained. 'He lives here.'

'I don't know who you're talking about.'

'This is his apartment. 506. This is his address.' I don't know what the woman said, though I remember she closed the door after she said it. My own words were too busy spinning around, dizzily, spinning out of order, intertwined with the disheveled city I could see from the window of the landing, in between the doors of four apartments, until I couldn't be sure they were what I'd even said.

I never saw Henmy again. If I did, if I could, all I'd want to know - and I've thought about this long and hard - is what he or Pokil asked me, on the canal, before they started laughing, before it started raining like that. If I'd just heard the question, I'm sure I would have understood, and I'm sure I would have been the one laughing.

THE END

Bio: Mr. Englefield is an Australian writer who lives in Beijing. He has been published in Offset-13, Critical Animalia and Gore Journal. He writes short fiction about the things he wants to remember, even if they didn't happen.

E-mail: Travis Englefield

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