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My writes and wrongs

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Telephone Pole Story

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A cartographer friend of mine invited me to his study for drinks one day and explained how, in an effort to prevent others from copying his work, he had placed fake streets in his maps of nearby towns. Anyone including those streets must have duplicated his map, and he would be able to demonstrate their plagiarism with ease.

Some years later, while travelling with a book of his maps in my rucksack, I found myself passing through one of the towns he had surveyed, and thought to compare the accuracy of his work to the real thing. To my surprise, when I arrived at what should have been a fake street, I found an actual alleyway in its place. Assuming I had misremembered which streets he had pointed out to me, I walked to another, only to find the same thing. Over the afternoon, I visited each fake street in succession, each time only discovering an actual street in its place.

Sitting to rest at a street corner opposite a bar, I was surprised to notice that my cartographer friend, who I hadn’t seen in years, was being thrown out of it. I greeted him warmly, and after the two of us caught up with one another I asked him about the discrepancy between the maps and the actual town. He dejectedly explained how after he penned his map, the town had burnt down. With the municipal archives destroyed, they turned to the cartographer’s maps to reconstruct the town street-by-street — including the ones he had faked.

He went on to describe how, when he arrived after the reconstruction, discovered their error, and attempted to explain the extent of their mistake, no person would believe him. He finished by explaining how in the time since then, he had become so dejected by their denial of reality that he had become a drunk, and the butt of the town’s jokes.

Suddenly, a group of men emerged from the bar and chased him out of view. One of them came to apologise for having let the fool talk my ear off. When I asked him about the fake streets, he just laughed, and invited me to follow him down the block. We arrived at one of the alleys I had visited earlier.

“That so-called cartographer claims that this street was an invention of his, yet that cannot be true — this is the street I lived on as a child!”

He pointed out the details of the street: its hanging flower baskets, its lamp-posts, its decorated windowsills, and its cobblestone pavement. For each he recounted some role it had played in his childhood - how he had helped trim the flowers, change the lightbulbs, decorate the windowsills, and even showed a scar on his arm from when he had tripped on a loose cobblestone.

Was he lying to me to justify their fun at the expense of the cartographer? Or did he truly believe that this was his childhood home? I found myself in a deep confusion.

I retraced my steps, and for each fake street I returned to, any passer-by I asked had a story with which to vouch for its historicity (although none denied that the town had been razed and rebuilt). This was — where I had been engaged — where I opened the shop that pushed me to the brink of bankruptcy — where my first child was delivered in the dead of night — where I met my wife — where I lost my dog — and so on.

I left the town puzzled. From any angle, I couldn’t make sense of if the town had chosen to con me, or if they genuinely believed their stories. Or — was it actually the cartographer who had lied, having made me the first subject of his deception? Perhaps it was the case that after the fire, they sought so hard for the town to live on as it was that they had absorbed their mistakes into their nostalgia for the streets of the rebuilt city, and that memory makes fools of us all.

Indeed, when I returned from my long journey, I found inconsistencies in the features of my own town, which I had thought of often while away for so long. The patterns of the bricks, the height of the lamp-posts, the width of the canals: everything seemed to have flexed, compressed or expanded. Even the air tasted imperceptibly different. I couldn’t tell if I was living, then, in a city whose dimensions had shifted inexplicably, or if it was myself whose internal dimensions had gone askew. I chose — I’m afraid — to think about it no deeper.

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We love it when the river lifts from its banks, slipping upwards like a silver thread against the pale sky, leaving behind only the black residue that collected in the basin

[ciel-miel]

We had been agonising over it for so long, but to the surprise of everyone involved, one day global warming just went away. “And to think,” said a famous environmentalist, “we’d cared so much about something so insignificant”. All the coal factories opened again, smudged face miners grinning wide smiles pouring into the steel buildings and dancing arm-in-arm with pinstripe-suited industrialists. “I’d been really scared”, said one executive, “that one day it would come crashing down and I’d get what I deserved. Now, everything is fine!”. All the environmentalists traded in their hybrids for gas-guzzling Range Rovers and Humvees, driving up and down main street revving their engines with manic grins. Overnight, all the extinct animals suddenly came back too, and everyone rushed out of their homes to hug them and welcome them back. “We missed you! We missed you!”, we said, damp kisses planting polka-dots of tear-mingled saliva onto the cheeks of dodos, thylacine, and anomolocaris. The seas overflowed with Cambrian shellfish, Radiodonta cluttering the seaside where they were met with cheering, weeping crowds. Everything was okay again, everything went back to being fine, and everyone was so, so happy.

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Earlier, around 2:20pm, I almost got ran over. I was walking to university, listening to the new Caroline Polachek album on my headphones. I was near the end of “I Believe”, and was so lost in the song that I didn’t look to the right when I crossed the road— in that moment a car roared past, only inches from hitting me. If I had crossed probably half a second earlier I would have been hit — critically injured, comatose, or dead.

I was okay, though. I wondered if this was supposed to be the kind of near-death moment that changed people’s lives, and took stock to see if it had changed mine. First impression: not really. I wondered if that attitude reflected the idea that 20-somethings think they’re invincible. I continued to walk to school, pretty unphased.

I thought about what would have been the last things I’d done if I had died, and made a little list in my head:

- The day before last, I had visited my parents and aunt. It was a very happy visit, so I decided that it would have been fitting as a final one if I had died.

- That night, I sat in the kitchen and talked with my flatmates, and we compared our fortunes from a Cantonese palm-reading website. We had laughed a lot, cracking jokes about each other’s fates in marriage, love, and careers. It was a really nice conversation, so I decided I was satisfied if it was a final one.

- I had handed in my final dissertation for university yesterday. That night, I had stayed up late to hear the new Polachek album and discussed each track with my best friend. I decided this would be a nice thing to leave as our last discussion: sharing something we were both excited for and enjoyed together. If I had died they would have that album to remember me by.

- That morning, I had taken a walk in the park and got a Diet Coke in the cafe at the top of the hill. It was a sunny and hazy winter day: my favourite kind of weather. I sat there and drew in my sketchbook, sending the drawing to a couple of friends. I was proud of it— it was based on an illustration by Egon Schiele, but I had tried to make it my own. If that was my last drawing I think it was pretty representative. I imagined my friends releasing it after my death, and felt content.

- I’d eaten carrot soup and a wholewheat roll for lunch. That’s a pretty humble last meal, which felt good. It wouldn’t sit right with me if it was a Tesco meal deal or something opulent. The simpler, the better.

- I realised that it was Valentine’s Day. Dying on Valentine’s Day would have been a pretty literary and romantic end, which felt satisfying. 02-14 is also a good sequence of numbers. I think I’d be annoyed if I died on an odd-numbered day of an odd-numbered month. I resolved that years in the future, if I was already on the way out then Valentine’s Day would be a nice date to surrender myself.

Weighing everything up, I realised how content I would have been if that was my final moment. Sure, I had a few loose ends untied and a couple of secrets left lying around, but that’s forgivable and expected. Of course, I had failed to live the rest of my life and had never done all the things that I was about to, planned or unplanned. That’s sad, of course, but I realised how content I was with what I’d done up to then. Likewise, I didn’t want to put my friends and family through any grief at all— I really was mindful of how much it would destroy the people that loved me, but it wasn’t like I was trying to die, though. I was just weighing up the outcomes of a freak accident that I didn’t have control over.

I made a mental note to be more careful when crossing the road, laughed a little at how self absorbed the whole train of thought had been. (Although I think it’s forgivable to spend time thinking about how you’d be remembered in a moment like that.)

I continued the walk to university, enjoying the rest of the album as I walked. At a zebra crossing, I bumped into a friend of mine, and waved at her. When I crossed the street to speak to her, however, I realised that she was ghost-pale and shocked about something. She told me not to walk down the street she had approached from, that someone had been ran over, and that it must have been at high speed because long streaks of blood were covering the street. I gave her a hug to calm her down and made sure she was okay, and then continued my walk, chewing it over. I’m still not sure what to think, but the coincidence feels a little meaningful. I had almost been ran over, and everything was set up for it to have been a good moment to die tragically young. But I had been spared, and someone else was struck— who knows, maybe even by the same driver!

I wasn’t sure what I think about it, so I wrote it all down to try to figure it out. (That’s this writing). I hoped it would reveal an answer from the pattern, but there wasn’t something immediately special I could take from it, only this: I’m sad that person was hit, and despite the fact that it would have been a good ending, I’m glad that I wasn’t. That’s awfully plain, but maybe that’s just because it’s true. Something more poetic would probably be a little deceptive or constructed.

Anyway, I’ll continue with my day. I have some homework to take care of, and this evening I’ll go to a life drawing class with my flatmate. And then I’ll live the rest of my life after that.

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Solitaire ending explained

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When I enter a supermarket and see the grainy footage of myself captured by a security camera and displayed on a screen above the entrance, the thought crosses my mind that this could be the last footage ever captured of me if I were to suddenly disappear.

I hear the narration over the footage. “This was the last time he was seen before he disappeared.” — an image of me frozen on screen, time and date in the corner, picture grainy, my mid-stride posture telling nothing, the low-resolution expression on my face expressing nothing, only asking a question: did he know what was about to happen? or was he completely unaware? What was going through his head? Was he, by any chance, toying with the possibility that this would be the last time he was seen?

Standing there, staring at the camera, saying nothing, bathed in the heat-fan warmth blasting the entryway— maybe this is the picture released by the police, plastered on newscasts, a desperate search in vain. Given up on and forgotten about, body and memory consigned to the blurry world of speculation and theory. Grainy image zoomed into by the documentary, face almost dissolving into the air around me.

And then I walk off camera, and I’m gone.

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Hell

I woke up and I was in Hell. At first I did not know that I was in Hell because it did not look like Hell. I was sitting in a metal chair at a metal table. Across from me was a fiftysomething year-old man in a nice suit smoking a cigarette. He stared back at me with a neutral sort of expression that revealed nothing at all, and continued to smoke his cigarette. I blinked a few times, and looked around the room to try to situate myself. All around the table was only Black, but you could tell that it was a medium-sized sort of room because of the way it sounded when your clothes rustled. I blinked a few more times, Nodded to myself, and looked back at the man. He looked back at me, again with an expression that said nothing at all. I asked him where I was, because I did not know that I was in Hell. He smiled with the corners of his mouth.

"That's not really important" said the man, shrugging as he took another puff of his cigarette.

"Okay", I said.

We both sat there for a while, him continuing to smoke while I twiddled my thumbs. He tapped out the stump of his cigarette, then produced another from his pocket, lit it, and continued to smoke. I twiddled my thumbs some more for good measure.

"Well?" said the man.

"Well what?"

"Aren't you going to take a guess? Where you are and who I am?" He smiled mischievously, making a kind of sweeping gesture that left rivulets of smoke arcing across the air above the table.

I looked around dumbly. Nothing new to notice. Sensing he was expecting some display of detective work, I tapped the metal table with my fingernail a couple of times, and went back to looking around. The guy had an expression like someone about to eat a four-course meal.

"Take a guess", offered the man.

I shrugged. "Am I in Hell?"

The man looked completely crestfallen, his arm dropping limply to his side with disappointment.

"Damn! What gave it away? That's usually my favourite part!"

I felt sorry for the guy. "Sorry. If you'd like, you can try revealing it again, and I'll pretend I didn't figure it out."

He waved me off. "Eh, the moment's passed. Water under the bridge, but I appreciate the offer."

He took another drag of his cigarette and sat up a little.

"Yeah, you're in Hell. This is Hell."

I looked around. There weren't any boiling lakes of fire or medieval torture devices. All in all, it was a little underwhelming.

"Are you the Devil?"

"Yeah, that's me. Although– it's actually just Devil" said Devil.

"Hm."

Devil smoked some more. First, I tried to think about how I died, but came up blank, which I realised was probably pretty expectable. Next, I tried to think of what I had done to get sent to hell, but couldn't find the sort of big, theatrical act of evil that I'd expect to get eternally punished for. Devil sat there patiently.

"Got any questions about all this?", Devil offered helpfully.

"Yeah– What got me sent to Hell? I wasn't a serial killer or anything."

Devil Shrugged.

"Eh, It's not really about that, turns out. It's the little, insignificant things you probably don't even notice. All the times you slacked off when you had an assignment due, all the times you left a cup on the table for the barista to clear when leaving a cafe, all the times you couldn't be bothered to avoid a puddle while driving and got a pedestrian's shoes wet. That sort of thing. On the scale of the universe and the grand total of human suffering, it really is insignificant, but it adds up if you live long enough. For example– ever drink a diet coke?"

"Of course."

"That's Hell."

"That's Hell?"

"Yup."

Devil shrugged with a sort of apologetic "I don't make the rules" expression. I rolled the shape of the word 'Hell' around my mouth for a few moments. To my surprise, This really wasn't any shock at all. I had almost instantly gotten completely used to the fact that I had been sent to Hell.

"Okay, I get it. All those little things added up, and now I'm in Hell."

Devil chuckled.

"Yeah, don't you wish that were the case. All you did was step on the grass or puncture a tire or something, maybe ruffle a few feathers or turn a couple friendships sour, and that's all you had to do to qualify for an eternity of torment– But between you and me, I think we both know why you're really here. We both know what kind of sick thoughts are lurking in that head of yours. Even though you kept yourself upright and wrapped yourself in a veneer of Humanity, that doesn't change what's inside. You're rotten to the core, and even though you never even entertained doing anything with those thoughts of yours, Did you really think it would just go away and you'd get a pat on the back for acting like a normal human being? Sorry, but it's Hell."

I laughed. Yeah, that fit. "Okay. So you're going to torture me?"

"Yeah, but don't get so ahead of yourself. You've got to wait first. There's a way these things are done, after all– I don't make the rules, it's just what you gotta do."

"Okay." I figured waiting had to be better than being skinned alive.

Devil smiled warmly, stubbed out his cigarette, stood up, and disappeared. I sat in the room. After a few hours I became hungry. A few hours later, I became thirsty. It took a few days for me to get bored of feeling Hungry and Thirsty. I found that I couldn't sleep. Masturbation was useless. I spent a long time trying to see how many shapes I could make with my body. After that, I decided to pluck every hair from my body, starting with my eyebrows. I spent a few weeks just sorting the hairs in different ways– according to length, colour, curve, etc. After I got bored of that, I spent a great deal of time rolling around. I counted how many different ways you could arrange the table, chair, and hairs in interaction with each-other. I tried pushing each hair back into the follicles on my body without any luck. I really didn't like how silent the room was, so I began to shout. After a few days of shouting at the top of my lungs, my voice gave out and I could only produce hoarse, painful squeaks. I spent a few years crying in one corner, and then a few more crying in another. I ripped my nails out. I spent a couple decades moving as slowly as possible, acting out a typical apartment day at 0.000001% speed. I tried biting my limbs off but couldn't break the skin, so instead I gnawed at the table legs long enough to contort them into new, unpleasant shapes. I spent 700 years sitting in the chair and another 700 just pacing. I dislocated every bone in my body and slot each back into place, then did it again in as many different orders as possible.

Having managed to tie my legs into an entangled knot in 239 years and licking both elbows in 194, I was 73 years into trying to swallow both arms whole when Devil re-appeared.

"How was that?"

I slipped my spit-soaked arms from my throat.

"I didn't like it very much. What kept you so long?"

Devil shrugged with a tired look. "I had a lot of paperwork."

I had to feel sorry for the guy.