Notions of Convexity

When I was younger I was kept locked in a empty room for weeks on end. The walls were painted beige, and the floor was a soft, dark green, plastic-like substance that indented gently wherever I walked on it, and slowly returned back to it's original shape. At some point I started thing of the flatness of the floor as its normal form. Food was provided for me, and liquids to drink, but always while I was asleep. I saw no-one in all that time, heard nothing other than sounds I made myself, and had only my own thoughts to entertain me.

I worked out after a while how to create self-sustaining dimples in the floor. It wasn't perfectly elastic and would initially overshoot when trying to return to its original state, and I could use that to set up a cycle that would retain dimples for what felt like long periods of time. That allowed me to write, in a primitive fashion, and helped me put my thoughts together.

And slowly, my mind became more convex. I think it became star-shaped from the centre at first, and as my thoughts turned more and more on themselves, the set of all star-shaped points expanded. Because that set is necessarily convex, so my whole mind became convex.

There are odd things in my mind that I found there, that seemed to have always been hidden behind corners before. I wrote down how I'd found them using my floor notation so that I wouldn't forget, and then I came back to them as often as I dared.

The problem with convexity is that it's not the highest level notion. I soon found myself increasing the sophistication of the floor notation, and realised that my mind was becoming subharmonic. And the odd things I found in my mind no longer seemed so odd. When I successfully applied the maximum principle to myself, something inside me seemed to turn through 90 degrees in a direction I'd not seen before, but which had surely always been there, and then there were whole new things to look at.

I used the fork that came with my next meal to prick my fingertips and draw on the floor in my own blood. The design was found in part of my mind that now lived in that extra direction I'd found, and even as I drew it on the floor, parts of it seemed to move by themselves. When I was done there was something organic on the floor. I punched the obvious spot in the design, and the floor rippled, and kept on rippling, the energy for it being supplied from outside. And with the energy came something else.

My subharmonic mind stepped up another level and became plurisubharmonic at that point, and yet more unsuspected directions opened to me, and the something else that I had summoned took up residence in the new directions and helped me see things that hadn't been visible before. This time when the food came I was only feigning sleep. My captor, a woman wearing a pale grey veil, dropped the tray of food as I moved, but my helper had moved faster and was invisible to her, and she became physically completely convex very briefly, and then was no longer my captor.

But the world outside seems so limited and convex, and I long to find a way to enhance its dimensions and show everyone the potential that it has. My helper will then be able to bring its friends and families through to live in this world as well, which can only be good for all us. I am sure of that.

This whole world needs a new, convex, normal form.

Ourorbouros

Moonlight falls through the gaps in the curtains and the room is like a black and white photograph. You are asleep in the bed, a shadowed hump, with a bare shoulder like a blazon in the night. Dark hair spread across the paleness of the pillow, contrasting your sallow skin, is like an inverse halo, a penumbra gone somehow wrong. Not for the first time I have the feeling that I am caught in a painting; that you and I will never move again; that we are frozen in time, waiting forever while other people puzzle over our meaning. Are we lovers, doubting ourselves, waiting for morning and the revelation of sunlight; or we stalker and victim knowing that for one of us the sun will never rise again?

If we are stalker and victim, then is it too late to end the hunt, pull back from the quarry, relax and embrace hesitation? Or is obsession too coarse in itself to permit such an ending?

I lean forward, resting my chin on my fist, my elbow on my knee, feeling self-conscious. You have laughed at me so many times, calling me your Thinker after the statue, and I have laughed with you and accepted your teasing with gracious good humour. And so the hours pass, as I watch you sleep and you dream of me thinking, and the snake eats its tail eternally.

Undine

I light the candles in the bathroom and press Play on the CD player: Mahler's first symphony breaks the silence. I have filled the bath with warmed mineral water, which Undine adores. I disrobe and hang the dressing gown on the door, a dark shadow against pale wood. I step into the bath and lie back.

The water flows around me and over me, climbing up my body and embracing me. Finally it reaches my lips and pauses, and slowly solidifies. The water gathers shape and sensation, firming against me. Undine holds me.

"I thought Undine was a woman," I murmur, my mind hazy and my sight dim.

"Love takes whatever shape it needs."

My love is in every drop of water.

Fortune Cookie

It was a simple plan really. I would go into the chinese takeaway and order food for both of us. When the food was done, and I needed to pay, Billy would burst in with his dad's gun, and announce that he was holding the place up. He'd order me and anyone else in the shop to pick up their food and leave, and when I was out, he'd suddenly realise his mistake and run off. No-one would be hurt, and we'd have chinese takeaway that we couldn't afford to pay for.

Billy had the idea when we found his dad's gun in his dad's underwear draw, next to the vibrator. Billy's eyes had gone wide, and then mine had too.
"Look at that!" said Billy, sounding awed.

"I know," I said, sounding shocked. "Why does your dad need a vibrator? Your mum left him years ago." Billy doesn't really remember his mum, so he doesn't get upset when I'm a bit tactless like that.

"What's a vibrator?" said Billy, reaching for the gun. I thought about telling him, and then decided that he could find that out for himself when he got older.

"I don't think we should play with the gun," I said, but Billy had picked it up now. He nearly dropped it again, clearly not expecting it to be so heavy, and then he pointed it at me. I dropped to the floor and scuttled under the bed where I found a snowdrift of used tissues.

"Put it down, Billy," I said. "It might be loaded!"

That's when Billy had his bright idea, and he put the gun down, so I came out from under the bed and made sure that the gun was unloaded before we went out for chinese takeaway.

I walked into the chinese takeaway and was relieved to see that no-one else was in there. Behind the counter, a tan formica rectangle running the length of the shop, sat a little chinese woman watching a talk-show on a tiny bakelite tv set. I smiled nervously, and ordered from the menu on top of the counter, pointing at the items we wanted on the laminated A4 sheets. She nodded, said something I couldn't understand, and disappeared through the door behind the counter, presumably into the kitchen.

When she came back she was carrying two white plastic carrier bags with foil and cardboard containers, and as she put them down on the counter, Billy burst in waving his dad's gun. The little chinese woman shrieked and ran through the door at the back of the counter. Billy stopped for a moment, looking around at the shop with only us two in it, then pushed the gun into his pocket, grabbed the bags and ran out of the shop. I waited a minute, but the chinese woman didn't come back, so I left too.

Back at Billy's we put the gun back in his dad's underwear drawer and ate the food. Billy was beaming, laughing and joking about his success holding the chinese takeaway up, and was making plans to do it again. I was concentrating on eating, this was the first proper food I'd had in two days. Then suddenly Billy went quiet, and I looked up. He'd opened up one of the two fortune cookies, and was staring at the slip of paper inside it.

"My fortune cookie's gone all weird," he said.

"Let me see?" I held my hand out and he let the slip of paper flutter into it. I looked at it.

"You're going to regret that," I read. "You're right Billy, that is weird. Pass me the other one."

I cracked it open, and shook the paper slip out of the crumbs, and picked it up.

"So are you," I read.

Talk radio

I let myself in through the kitchen door of Terry's house, intending to make the coffee myself before he could offer to microwave me some and found him sat at the kitchen table with his head in his hands, looking almost asleep. Seizing the opportunity, I checked the water level in the white electric jug kettle and flicked the switch to turn it on before saying hello.

"You look knackered, dude," I said. "Is your mum keeping you on your toes?"
Terry's mum, Mrs. M to me, had bruised her hip during a riot at the post-office a few days ago and had been advised to stay in bed for a few days by her doctor. Much to the surprise of us all, she'd been doing so as well.

"Mum's not too bad," said Terry, his eyes barely opening any wider. "I'll have a cup if you're making it. But between her and the exchange student and the job I don't seem to get much time for anything else anymore."

The kettle boiled quickly, and I pulled two cups from the dishwasher and looked for the jar of coffee.

"Is the student still in the manacles?" I said carefully. Terry's mum had taken in a Polish exchange student a few weeks ago in order, she'd said, to augment her pension a little. I had been a little surprised to find out that that was why Terry had been installing manacles in the spare room, and then felt I'd been told too much when I learned that the student was mostly kept chained up and in a gimp mask while he was in the house. Apparantly this was part of the arrangement.

"Yes, well, he likes it, doesn't he." said Terry, and there was something furtive about the way he said it that made me realise that the student wasn't the only one who liked it. I decided it was better to be ignorant and content than aware and trying to wash my brain out with carbolic soap.

"So, what's your mum doing while she's confined to bed? Has she had a lot of visitors? I know she's popular down at the WI," I said. "Although it was a bit weird, where those crack dealers tried to land-mine the driveway and blew themselves up."

"She's phoning radio talk-shows," said Terry, and there was a new note of depression in his voice. "I had the social services round here two days ago, because they'd traced her number. She'd phoned up one of those radio agony aunts and convinced her that she was being held in the basement of a nursing home as a sex-slave for geriatrics."

I burst out laughing, and because I'd just picked the kettle up to pour the water, I splashed boiling water all over the counter-top. I looked for a dishcloth to mop up the spill.

"Of course," he continued, "I couldn't let them look round, because they'd have found the exchange student and they'd get the wrong idea, and mum's bedroom still has all the bones in from when she was in Italy, so in the end I slipped some of mum's Valium into their coffee and drove them out to the Copperfield estate and left them there. I'm not proud of that."

"Did any of them get out alive?" I was shocked, this kind of thinking was what I expected of Terry's mum, not Terry.

"They've not been back. But she keeps phoning the stations and winding them up."

"Worse than pretending to be an old-age sex slave?"

Terry sighed, and took the cup of coffee from me, and turned on the radio on the shelf behind him.

"...well, Joanne, I've been scared of open spaces for a long time now, and I've not been out of my little flat since November last year," said a familiar voice. I looked at Terry, and mouthed your mum! and he nodded back. "But then recently I'd started to feel a little bit confined. You know, when you're looking at the same walls all the time, you start to get itchy feet."

"Well yes," said the soft tones of the radio show's agony aunt. "So, have I got this straight? You've been agoraphobic for a while, and last November it got so bad that you no longer wanted to leave the flat?"

"I don't know about the agriculture thingy, but yes, that's right. Only now I'm not very comfortable staying in the flat."

"Well, how do you feel about going outside?" said the agony aunt. "Have you tried just opening your front door and looking at the outside from the safety of your hall?"

Suddenly we heard a banging sound on the radio, echoed from upstairs. I looked at Terry, and I could see tears in his eyes. He just shook his head, so I carried on listening.

"Oh there's someone at the door," said Terry's mum. "I hate the hall, it's so small, and I feel like the walls are closing in on me when I'm in there. Hang on while I see who's there."

There was a pause, and then she spoke again, sounding frightened. "Oh Joanne, there's men hammering nails into boards across my door!"

Terry reached up and turned the radio off again.

"She did this yesterday as well," he said. "She's going to tell that poor woman that she's being boarded in, and then a petrol bomb will come through the letter box, but she'll be too scared to leave the house, and too claustrophobic to hide anywhere in the house that might protect her. The one yesterday had a nervous breakdown on air.

I finished my coffee in one gulp and put the cup down on the counter top. "Your mother's a remarkable woman, Terry."

Puss in Boots

Dick Whittington lay dead on a grimy blue mattress that reeked of cat's piss. His arms were flung out over his head as though he'd tried to stop himself falling, and the sleeves of his ragged shirt were rolled up, revealing track marks down the length of his arms. His plump, pale face was turned slightly to the side, and a trickle of dried blood, burgundy like the port I'd been drinking before being called out here, ran from a nostril down to his chin. His feet were bare and the soles of his feet had been slashed with something sharp. I suspected a razor blade.

"It's murder, isn't it?" said the woman stood in the doorway to the room. Silhouetted against the neon lights outside, her figure curved like an ecstatic scoliosis sufferer and her thigh-high burgundy leather boots glistening wetly she leaned one arm against the doorframe and bowed her head slightly. Thick blonde hair cascaded over her face and her shoulder trembled ever so slightly as though she were crying. If she sobbed I couldn't hear it for the howl of the night-time wind that very nearly drowned out the wail of the sirens: in this neighbourhood the ambulances were often attending to the fallen police and fire brigades. I shrugged my shoulders, and kicked Dick's feet.

"Miss Bootes," I spat, and then started coughing, heavy, wracking gasps for air like a volcano god with indigestion. I doubled over, feeling my cracked ribs grating against each other as I did so and a hot sensation in my eyes that would have been tears if Mad Frankie hadn't had my tear ducts cauterised last week as a precaution against me giving him the Evil Eye. Slowly I recovered and pulled myself upright, and looked to the doorway. She had come a couple of paces into the room, keeping her distance like most people do, and was looking at me with something less than loathing.

"Call me Pussy," she said. "Dick always liked that."

I bit my tongue hard to stop myself from laughing; with my fragile physical state I'd've ended up on the mattress with Dick, and corpses don't get paid. I tasted iron and remembered a night with a sadistic acupunturist when the wind had howled like this and I'd howled like the wind, and the laughter died.

"Seriously, McArthur," said Pussy, "It's murder isn't it? They've murdered the former Lord Mayor."

"You seem very certain of that," I growled, wishing I had enough lungs left to smoke. My voice grated like gravel in a washing machine. "So far I'm seeing a junkie with a bastinado fetish, and that's not a crime. Hell, dying in a one-room shit-hole like this is just a cliche."

"But what about the stiletto?" said Pussy. She frowned at me, and for an instant I felt like was six again, standing in front of my mother who would frown in exactly the same way wondering why I hadn't run away from home yet.

"What stiletto?" I said, and frowned back at her. She recoiled as though I'd shoved a 3-day old fish under her nose.

"The one in his chest," she said, and her voice was now flat and calm. She crossed her arms, threw her head back and shook her hair out like a sudden blaze of sunlight in the depths of the night.

I kicked Dick again, and rolled him over with one aching foot, and there it was, just as she said. A red stiletto-heeled shoe embedded a good three inches deep in his chest.

"So the question is," I mused aloud, "where's the other one?"

"Does it matter?" said Pussy.

"Of course," I said. "When someone is shot you ask where the gun is that goes with the bullet. When someone is knifed, you ask where the hand is that wielded the knife. And when someone stamps on your chest so hard that they leave their shoe behind, you ask where the other shoe is. But tell me, Puss, how did you know where to find Dick?"

"The mayoral elections are in two months time," she said, her eyes going wide. "Dick keeps me up to date with his whereabouts, in case we can find a PR opportunity."

I looked around the room, ill-lit with a 40 watt bare bulb hanging from frayed flex. There was the mattress and the corpse, some floorboards ripped up from the floor and stacked in a corner, and some writing on one of the walls, but otherwise the room was empty of everything but dirt. I checked the writing on the wall; it was a shopping list.

Pussy glared at me, her eyes sparkling defiantly. "Even here," she said. "I can turn this into PR about the poor housing conditions that still plague the city, and make the mayor a martyr for spending time here to get a feel for how the people who slip through the cracks in the system live."

"People like me?"

"There are no people like you McArthur! If you have membership of the human race then it's with a forged birth certificate."

I shrugged, my doctor had been telling me the same thing for years, and my mother had always been elusive when I'd asked her about my father.

"I'll take your case, Puss," I said. "I'll find out who did for Dick."

Travelogue 3: Tal Mallan

Haruspice is farmed on the hills within the walls of Tal Mallan and nowhere else. As the name suggests, it is used by diviners and prognosticators to accurately see the future, and Tal Mallan jealously guards them so as to take best advantage of this unusual spice. I came to Tal Mallan by the only safe route, on board a ship that had left from Port Sinistrex under license from the Emir of the city.

Tal Mallan is on a peninsula, and is surrounded completely by walls that are ten feet high at their lowest point. The walls are well maintained, built from the dense, egg-yolk-yellow-veined grey rock that is quarried from higher up the peninsula. The cubic blocks cut from the quarries are each half the height of a man and are either dressed, if being used for the foundations of the walls, or carefully carved if being used for the visible area. The carvings are images taken from the Tal Mallan religious beliefs, and hard to describe and unpleasant to see. The Gods of Tal Mallan are despotic.

Guards in uniforms of ochre and brown patrol the walls both inside and atop and are fiercely loyal to the Emir. Although no human agency has attempted an assault on the city in two hundred years, there are periodic incursions from the large phlogistonic mammals that live further up the peninsula, beyond the quarries, and where the land is in a constant state of tectonic upheaval and volcanic activity. Looking north at night you can see a dull red glow on the horizon from the active lava lakes and rivers, and when the eruptions are in full swing the sky sometimes seems filled with fireworks. Rains of ash over the city are commonplace.

Tal Mallan is annular for visitors. You enter through the port and pass through the customs house where there is a simple visual inspection to check that you are not on a list of people banned from the city or wanted for crimes. You may bring anything you like into Tal Mallan, but you leave with almost nothing. If you look across the customs house to the queue of people leaving they are empty handed and all wear the same ivory shirts and trousers. These clothes are provided by the grace of the Emir to replace your own, and are soft and comfortable, though not entirely suited to a sea-voyage as they become see-through when wet.

Visitors may travel anywhere between the outer and inner walls, but not beyond the inner walls. Inside those walls are the central hills of Tal Mallan where Haruspice is farmed, the temples to the pantheon have been built, and the Emir's palace stands.

When I entered the city for the first time, I was warned not to stay any longer than two weeks. The guard who warned me was a middle-aged woman wearing a brown and ochre uniform and carrying a bone-handled da, the weapon they use to kill the alligator-sized salamanders when they swarm in the mating season. She had a lined face that made her seem older than she was, and hazel eyes that never quite focussed on me when she was talking, but constantly slipped away and looked over my shoulder. Haruspice, she told me, permeated the air and the water of the city because it was farmed from the centre. Haruspice is addictive over long exposure times, and the longer I spent in the city, the harder I would find it to leave.

I stayed only four days that time, but she was right, and I've not been able to stay away for longer than eight months at a time. I woke last night to find I was sweating blood and my fingernails had turned a deep green, like the colour in the depths of the abyssal ocean just before the light gives out. I could remember fragments of a dream about things I would be doing today, and I've been experiencing deja vu all day. I've been expecting it, and so I walked down to the Sinistrex harbour this morning and booked passage on the next ship. It's time to return to Tal Mallan.