Randle would think when I didn’t show up on Friday, what she would think when she realised I’d gone. Maybe she’d feel good. Maybe she’d think that her fugue theories had been right all along. Probably she’d think that. I hoped she’d miss me a little too.
I’m at my desk now, at my typewriter in the bedroom. Ian is on the bed, sleeping on a pile of my notebooks. The Dictaphone noise doesn’t bother him anymore. After all this time I don’t really hear it either. Soon I’ll wrestle the cat into his carry box, pack up the Dictaphones and leave the house, maybe for good.
Two nights after my living room floor disintegrated into a wet, deep concept and I’d swum and recited the Ryan Mitchell Mantra for my life, the shark came back. Two a.m. and me sitting up in bed, cold with panic sweat and covers bunched up in my white knuckled fists. The walls strained and stretched, sending odd shadows and strange associations rippling around the room. But the First Eric Sanderson’s newly unpackaged Dictaphones chattered away to themselves in each corner of the bedroom and the memory shark, the Ludovician, stayed locked out behind the plaster. It couldn’t cross the perimeter. It couldn’t break through the non-divergent conceptual loop. The First Eric Sanderson’s letters ranged from lucid to almost indecipherable, but his tactics worked. They all worked.
And so, tentatively at first and then with careful but growing confidence, I became a pupil of my last self. I learned about the Ludovician and about the word-trails of Dr Trey Fidorous. I learned what little Eric could remember about the labelless car parks, access tunnels and buried places that made up un-space. I learned how to set up fake conceptual flows and short-circuit the existing ones, how to attach the bracken and lichen of foreign ideas to my scalp and work the mud and grass of another self into and over my skin and clothes until I could become invisible at will, until anyone or anything could be looking straight at me and never see the real me at all.
The First Eric Sanderson sent me a CV and I got a job. The First Eric Sanderson sent me a list of useful character attributes to look out for and that’s how I chose Mark Richardson, the data analyst. We worked in the same office. At work, I learned about Richardson’s family, his past, his beliefs, his worldview, his hopes. I studied his voice, mannerisms, expressions. I practised in front of a mirror, with a video camera and with a tape recorder. I practised them for days and months until I could build him around me in seconds, until I could disappear, until I could move around at will without sending a single ripple of my real self out into the world. If the Ryan Mitchell Mantra was a clumsy crisis shield for those early months, then my fake Mark Richardson persona was a stronger, more flexible, more advanced replacement – an almost perfect mask.
When the First Eric Sanderson wrote the letters he was an empty box of tactics and manoeuvres, a broken wind-up soldier. It took me a while to realise: he was training me to do something he should have done himself. Something he didn’t have the strength for.
The months of my new life stretched out until they became a year. Eventually I’d done everything I could, become as good at all the tricks and the tactics as I could be.
The letters from the First Eric Sanderson stopped four days ago. Just like Clio’s idea for a tattooed face on her big toe, Eric had ghost-projected the last whispers of himself into the future, bacon-sliced up into 300 envelopes and boxes. And finally the last one had arrived. A man lives so many different lengths of time. And each one has its own end.
•
If I don’t come back, or if I do come back without my mind, I’m leaving a copy of this account in the red filing cabinet with all the first Eric’s letters. If there is another Eric Sanderson reading this, I’ve left you everything I can. I’m sorry it’s not much.
I’m going to look for Dr Trey Fidorous.
All I have done here is learn to protect myself, I haven’t made a single step towards understanding anything. The First Eric Sanderson was right; if there are any answers, they will be with him. My plan is to follow the route the first Eric took to find Fidorous when all of this began. I’m going to start in Hull and work my way across the country. Hull. Leeds. Sheffield. Manchester. Blackpool. East to west. Fidorous’s trail of words must be years old now, but it’s the only lead I have. I can’t stay here and try to defend myself like the last Eric did.
And there’s something else: I have dreams about Clio Aames. I have dreams where I’ve seen her and recognised her and known her and held her. But in the morning, they go, lifted from me like the low-hanging mists lift from the playing fields and I have nothing. Just emotion, and a general sense of something lost. The truth is; I can’t be only this anymore.
In the garden across the street, the shadow of the telegraph pole creeps its way slowly around the world. At its top, there’s a starling, hunched down against the end of summer.
At night the salmon move out from the river and into the town
Raymond Carver
On the Trail of Trey Fidorous – Recovered Palaeontology and Finds (Hull to Sheffield)
1. Single-celled animals
The first of two flyposted texts discovered in Leeds and possibly created by Dr Fidorous (although, in appearance, these could not be further from the biro-swarmed sheets described in the first Eric’s letters). This and the following text were exposed as part of the refurbishment of Leeds Central Station. Despite weeks of searching, no other possible Fidorous flypostings were discovered in the city. Single-celled animals is the original title (printed in the bottom left corner).
AaBbCcD dEeFfGgHhIiJj KkLlMmNnOoP pQqRrSsTtUuV vWwXxYyZz
2. The nucleus of the cell contains biological information The second possible Fidorous text, discovered alongside the first. Again, The nucleus of the cell contains biological information is the original title.
3. Fossil fish reconstruction
The first image is a replica of a text structure found in the Arundel Way underpass in Sheffield. The image had been created horizontally across two tiles at the base of a stairway (see photos & map of underpass layout) using letter transfers. The structure seems to represent a species of prehistoric armoured fish, although the image is incomplete with large areas of damage. The second image is my speculative reconstruction. The text has been reproduced actual size. No other underpass texts were recovered.
4. Computer virus mosquito in amber
This image was discovered as an acetate label on a 3½” floppy disk in Sheffield Interchange (see maps/photos) and has been greatly enlarged here. The structure is probably a mosquito. The disk carrying this image is transparent orange plastic (rather than the usual matt black), giving the impression of an insect trapped in amber. The text appears to be programming source code and there are some similarities to the Melissa Virus code circa 2000/2001. Could this be connected to Fidorous? The disk itself is unsalvageable.
