Chapter 4: Holes in the Wall, Salt Substitute and the French Revolution
Richard, Tuesday 9th March, morning
The soldiers tramp by in their shiny white helmets, striking fear into people's hearts with their coldly monotonous steps. Not mine though.
With my special hat on, I'm as close to being a superhero as you can get. I'm the one they can never catch, Batman, the Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro... the Comte de Saint Germain.
The soldiers stop and turn to face a man pushing a wheelbarrow by the side of the road.
“What's that?” Their American accents grate on my ears.
The man giggles. He must be drunk, or mad. Not surprising with the way things are these days, lots of people have lost the plot.
You can see them in the zoo – the Losers' cage full of scruffy creatures who in my day would have been regarded as human, engaged in sad parodies of human activity, like the chimps' tea parties that were a staple attraction in the zoos of my grandparents' generation. One of them paces up and down in his dressing gown muttering to himself, another runs around stark naked masturbating at visitors.
What do I mean “in my day“? It's still my day, and always will be.
Their begging fingers poke out between the bars, their pleading voices incomprehensible but clearly distressed. Incomprehensible largely because most of them are foreigners, food refugees. When their boats wash up on the beaches of the south coast it's virtually impossible for them to resist the offer of something to eat, even if it's only grilled seagull. Beaches from Brighton to Dover these days are a continuous seagull barbecue, and the shady characters who supply the human zoos can sneak up on them as easily as the white-helmeted soldiers.
“Bring out your dead!” wheezes the old man, and to my amazement he produces a little bell and tinkles it in the soldiers' faces.
The sound of breaking bones is sickening. Confident that my high-explosive-lined hat will save me from injury, however (death being theoretically impossible), I'm not afraid. I walk up to the soldiers, pull their helmets off and bang their heads together.
“Crikey, it's you!” the old man exclaims. “The missus says you don't exist.”
“I'm for real.”
“And you really go around saving people? Just out of the goodness of your heart?”
“Don't be silly, I do it to impress girls.”
Waking up screaming is becoming a daily occurrence.
I get up and walk to the bathroom, still naked. I catch sight of myself in the mirror – I look awful. I splash cold water on my face and slowly summon up the energy to clean my teeth.
While I drink my coffee and wait for the pink pills to take effect I get out my laptop and try to write some notes about the dreams and their dramatic increase in intensity since Friday. There are the usual common themes – the nightmarishly futuristic atmosphere, me as an immortal superhero. The idea that an exploding hat set to blow my head off at the slightest provocation would make me invincible is an interesting new twist.
In the old days, of course (when exactly did the “old days” begin and end?) they used to believe that you could look up what you dream about in a book and it would tell you what it meant. I'm almost tempted to get hold of a traditional dream-book and see what it says – I'm sure they sell them in those new-age shops along with the chunks of stone that they attribute miraculous powers to. I'm not sure if they'd have entries for mutilation, cannons or boiling lakes though, and I very much doubt if exploding hats, making people into cat food or monks chanting numbers would be there.
And dinosaurs are ruled out because they didn't know about them in the old days. The dream about palaeontologists is one of the distant and fragmentary ones, and I don't really know why it's so scary. It involves watching them digging up dinosaur bones – there's no reason why that should be scary, in fact I'd love to do that in real life. In the dream, though, something about it terrifies me. The bones aren't as big as I expect and for some reason that's disturbing.
No doubt when I dream it again I'll remember it well enough. That makes me realise that life is about to get scarier – besides all the other reasons, if the present trend continues the nastier dreams are also due for their upgrade to full in-your-faceness.
I keep coming back to the question of whether they are a symptom of my repressed fears or some kind of psychic vision of my real future. Or does that come to the same thing? I suppose it could be argued that my real future is the very thing I'm trying so hard not to think about. I put the laptop in its bag and get my bike out for the ride in to work.
As I coast into the department car park I pass that Gowk kid from the Mysteries course. I don't think I've ever spoken to him before, or even really noticed him much apart from his odd name and the ridiculous wide-brimmed hat which he seems to wear all the time, indoors and out. Today it's complemented by a sort of crimson cloak affair in some light material, almost like a superhero's cape; the overall effect is to make him look like one of the Three Musketeers.
“Morning,” I say casually.
“Good morning, Dr. Mortimer!” he replies with what I can only describe as a knowing grin. Did he wink as well, or did I imagine it? It's very hard not to get paranoid, what with that Tom git and now this weirdo on my case – what the hell does he want, and why is he dressed up in this ludicrous outfit? Maybe that's considered cool among students of English, or maybe he's slightly out of touch with reality and imagines himself to be some literary character or other.
But who am I to accuse someone of being out of touch with reality? It would actually make perfect sense to believe I've gone completely insane. Who else but a raving nutter would think he'd proved himself to be immortal by trying to shoot himself in the head with a shotgun and a strange piece of physics apparatus?
And the dreams... if they say something about my subconscious then no doubt it's something pretty unpleasant. Maybe now's not the time to be hanging out with psychologists – I'll let something slip and then they'll spot me, “out” me as a loony.
No, that's a pile of crap. What did Weinmann say? “We all think they can see into our heads but they can't really.” Maybe Weinmann does think they can see into his head, though – rumours abound that the Prof used to be a hippy acid-head in his youth. That, they say, is how he got interested in cosmology – just by coincidence he turned out to be a genius. Of course the story might well be apocryphal. I wouldn't put it past him, though. Maybe I should run the dreams by him, get the opinion of someone experienced in hallucinations. Maybe not.
