Ineffable

XXIX

  “Who are you? And what are you doing here?”

  The first thought that came to her head was not her name, but instead how incredibly sore her back was. She felt like she had been wound through steel rollers and stretched into long strips of spaghetti.

  “We have all eternity. You will tell me your name, and what you are doing here.”

  The Young Cripple stumbled around the room, reaching out with one hand for something to take hold of, and with the other, shielding her eyes from the flickering, fluorescent Light. There was nothing inside the room, though. And no matter what direction she turned, and how far she stumbled, she couldn’t find a single wall.

  Her panic started to swell.

  “Do you know where you are?”

  It was the same voice that had spoken out in the field. Now, though, there was a specific tone to it, which, like a handful of Valium, or a brown paper bag, calmed her somewhat, and in a way, encouraged her to speak.

  “Heaven,” she said, tensing her every muscle so as to stop herself from stumbling off what she imagined might be the edge of a cliff.

  “Very good. Well then, to my first question. What are you doing here?”

  The Young Cripple could hear now what sounded like a billion ants, spilling out of some gash or mound in the floor, and marching their way towards her. She had heard stories of this kind of thing before. Hell, she’d been the one telling them - about people being eaten alive by little creatures no bigger than a nail clipping, with teeth like barbed wire, and that could eat through a single person in less than a week.

  Though her eyes were closed, she could see the insects now, rushing towards her like a thunderous, black cloud. The sound of their trillions of tiny feet clattered in her ears, and sounded like scores of typewriters, busily scripting her apparently doomed fate. Desperate, The Young Cripple screamed, but as she did, she could feel her mouth filling with something thick, wet, and warm. She gagged instantly and fell to the ground, ripping at whatever it was with her hands, shoving her fingers as far as they would go down the back of her throat.

  “Your fear paralyses you.”

  The Young Cripple spat her fingers from her mouth and collapsed on the floor. The Voice sounded familiar though she could not pick it for the life of her. For whatever reason, though, when it spoke, she felt less ill-disposed.

  “Where am I?” she asked, after having nearly chewed her fingers off.

  “Have you forgotten already?”

  “I know I’m in Heaven, but where? What part?”

  “Each part is as the whole.”

  The sound of scurrying insects had vanished. The Young Cripple gripped herself tight, tucking her face into her knees, and wrapping her arms around her body like a belt. She held herself this way as best she could so that her body would behave like a clump of heavy matter, and be unbreakable, and immotile.

  “Where am I?” she asked again.

  “Have you exhausted your every pertinent solution?”

  The Young Cripple squeezed tighter.

  “Open your eyes,” said The Voice. Had it a head, it might have been shaking it by now. “Must all be named before it can be experienced?”

  The Young Cripple slowly let go of her strong bind, firstly letting her eyelids relax somewhat. The flickering Light, though upsetting when her eyes were shut, was disturbed and perverted now, as her eyes opened. Each flicker molested her iris with fright and provocation. And the way in which it flickered was like the twitch in a madman’s eye.

  When her eyes opened fully, she could see that she was in a room, no bigger than a broom cupboard. She could see no door whatsoever, nothing to indicate how she got in, and in that, how she might go about escaping.

  “Have a seat,” said The Voice.

  Beside her was a lone silver chair. The Young Cripple picked herself up and looked around the room. She couldn’t see where The Voice was coming from. There wasn’t a single mark in the room whatsoever – no speakers, no windows, and no slats; nothing at all that would let sound in or out.

  “OK,” said The Young Cripple. “But after, you explain to me what’s going on.”

  She stepped towards the chair, but as she did, she ended up back where she started, as if she hadn’t moved at all. She stepped again – once, twice and three times; a baby step at first, then a leap, and then a bound – but all to no avail. So she tried running, as fast as she could, and once again, no matter how fast she ran, she was always exactly the same distance away from the chair.

  Frustrated, The Young Cripple took off one of her shoes and threw it at the chair, and she screamed the second that it walloped the back of her head.

  “That’s not funny,” she said, dropping herself on the floor with her back to the chair.

  “How did you get here?” asked The Voice.

  “You tell me.”

  And then she remembered the loud bang, and the whistle before the bullet hit her head. “I died,” she said. “I was killed by someone.”

  “If you had died, you would be on a list. Why are you not on a list?”

  “I don’t know the answer to those things.”

  “What is the last thing you remember?”

  “The whistle in the air,” she said.

  “What whistle?”

  “When the bullet left the gun.”

  “Tell me about life,” said The Voice.

  “What do you mean? There’s a lot to know. I don’t wanna mess up.”

  “Your story,” said The Voice, sternly. “Tell me your story.”

  The Light stopped flickering all of a sudden.

  “I’m just a girl; an ordinary girl.”

  She stared down at her legs which once were crooked and now were straight.

  “When I was really young, we went to the beach. I’d never been before. The sand was so strange. It felt like I’d topple over at any second. I was scared, but my mother held my hand, and then I wasn’t worried about falling. The waves were so loud when they crashed on the shore. And the spray that came up from them, it hung in the air for so long that I didn’t think it would ever come down. The part I remember the most was feeling the water pass over my feet. When it pulled away, it felt like the Earth was crumbling. I was so scared.”

  The Young Cripple gripped her toes tight, feeling that inevitable collapse again.

  “That’s not the story,” said The Voice.

  “But that’s just what I remembered. If you want…I can tell you about the time I got lost at a fair. To tell you the truth, I was left behind.”

  “Tell me the story,” shouted The Voice.

  “What story?” said The Young Cripple, panicking.

  “How does she remember, boss?” said another voice.

  “Tell me about Light,’ said The Voice.

  “That? OK, I’m an expert on Light. I can tell you everything you want to know.”

  “How is it that you know of Light, and yet you speak of these other stories as if they were real - as if they were your own?”

  “Because they were. Light, that’s just a story. The things I said, they happened. They’re my past. They’re who I am.”

  “Who killed you?”

  “Delilah. She’s a mean……”

  “I ask you again. Who are you and what are you doing here?”

  “I just woke up here. But if this Heaven, and if I’m dead, then I belong here.”

  “You do not belong here. How did you get here?”

  “I don’t know. I was shot, I told you.”

  “Why are you not on the list?”

  “What list?”

  “What are you doing here?” shouted The Voice.

  “You brought me here,” said The Young Cripple, bursting into tears.

  There was silence for some time. The Young Cripple curled herself into a ball and rocked back and forth while the Light returned to its disorientating flicker. And then, after what felt like a day in a desert, or a week in a dungeon, The Voice returned.

  “Do you
know what a discrepancy is?” asked The Voice.

  “A left over,” said the girl.

  “You, child, are a discrepancy, a miscalculation.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “A discrepancy must be found.”

  “You found me. So now what?”

  “A discrepancy can be either justified or written off.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  The Young Cripple waited for a great deal of time, but there was no response. This alone was worse, being left idle in a room full of nothing, with an imagination that famous for thinking up the very worst of things.

  “Hello?” she asked, warily.

  In a room with little more than a filing cabinet, an abacus, and a microphone, two men argued amongst themselves about a divergent integer, both parading each other’s solutions to this predicament as outlandish and hardly within the means of proper accounting. Both men, we’ll call them The Accountant and Bean, were dressed in shabby, ill-fitted suits, and had faces like bruised elbows, with one wearing thick, bottled spectacles, while the other insisted on reading all of his material beneath a tiny microscope.

  “I say we just round up, or down, whatever.”

  “Round up, or down? Are you mad?”

  “To the nearest whole number. We’re dealing with infinity, right? So what’s the matter?”

  “What’s the matter is that she’s not part of any bloody set. She’s a plus one. She’s outside of the set, or she should be, but she’s bloody well inside it now.”

  “So round her off. Assign her somewhere, give her a function.”

  “It’s not that bloody simple. I don’t even know what type of number she is. God knows how long that will take.”

  “Well, should we ask God then?”

  “No, you bloody numbskull. We found her, it’s our problem. Nobody else need know, not until we know what the bloody hell we’re dealing with here. Or else we’ll be in the same strife, expect with you know who, standing over and threatening to do you know what.”

  The larger of the two men, The Accountant, was apparently the superior, at least in this room. He had a bristly moustache that was always sticky and clumped from his morning porridge and hourly protein shakes. And he had a trail of breadcrumbs, crackers and sesame seeds that ran down the front of his splitting shirt, filling his cavernous belly button like loose rocks at the bottom of a quarry.

  He had in his hands a small leaflet entitled, ‘The Infinite Set’. It was a document that had infinite pages, and infinite folds, yet here - in infinite space - it was the size of refresher towel and fitted neatly beneath the larger of the two men’s handheld microscope.

  “I don’t see why you don’t just get some specs,” said the intern, Bean. “Don’t have to use your hands.”

  “I, unlike you, am not lessened by the occupation of my parts,” replied The Accountant.

  “Just saying is all.”

  The larger man sighed.

  “I’ve gone through this list a thousand times, and her name is not on here.”

  “Maybe there’s another set, one we don’t know about. I mean, there are infinite realities.”

  “That’s why we have an infinite set, idiot. And anyway, since the boss’ got rid of that boy, there ‘aint no multiples of anything anymore. Every reality and every existence are working towards zero. And that’s us. We’re the bottom of the sink. We are the bottom line.”

  “So what type of number is she then?”

  “I don’t know. She ‘aint livin’ and she ‘aint dead. She shouldn’t be here, that’s all I know.”

  “But she is.”

  “Yeah, she is, smart arse. And now our book keeping is fucked. I can’t consolidate which means I’m gonna have The Board on my arse.”

  “Jeeze, you reckon you’ll get purged?”

  “Shut up. You’re not helping. I need a cigarette.”

  “You want I should make us some tea?”

  “Tea? You bloody retarded?”

  “I just thought I’d ask.”

  “Of course I want tea. Jesus! I swear if this goes pear shaped, then whatever happens to me, I’ll bloody well make sure you get it ten times worse. You know I actually asked for you. I could have gone with that girl you know, the one with the bucked teeth. I picked you though because I…”

  “Yeah, because you’re all funny with girls and that. Everyone knows that.”

  “Shut it! Bloody goose. I picked you,” said The Accountant, jabbing his stubby finger into his colleague’s chest. “I picked you because you were the second best in your class. You know what that means?”

  “You had the second best career plan?”

  “No, you nimrod. You’d yet to bloody peak, yet to ripen. That’s why I picked you, not because I’m funny round girls. Jesus! Who the hell told you that?”

  “It was just something some other people said.”

  “Who?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Who?”

  “It doesn’t matter.

  “Fucking who?”

  “The other students,” said Bean, backing away from his hefty colleague. “That and, you know, the faculty, some of the cleaners, the physicists on the first floor…”

  “They wouldn’t know shit.”

  “And your mom.”

  The Accountant was so tense, he nearly crushed his microscope.

  “Well it’s not true,” he said. “They’re all full of shit.”

  “Even your mom?”

  “Even mom,” said The Accountant, returning to the eye piece and scanning through an infinite channel of names.

  “Why don’t you just do a Ctrl-F search?” asked Bean, growing bored.

  “You know, part of finding a solution is bloody well looking for it. You need to know your tracks, it’s just good accounting is all.”

  “So why don’t we just leave it? Pretend we didn’t find it?”

  “Then we can’t consolidate.”

  “So?”

  “So, when we can’t consolidate the set, bad shit happens, go it?”

  “It’s just an extra one in an infinite number. I really don’t see the big problem here. Like a grain of sand in the desert.”

  “Try a blood filled syringe in the desert. She might very well destroy our whole accounting system. And that, my numbskull apprentice, will spell the end of Heaven, got it?”

  “Right,” said Bean. “Got it.”

  The two were silent for some time while The Accountant scanned every name on the infinite set, and his questionable colleague learned how to tie loops in his shoelaces, having only this morning made the switch from Velcro slip-ons. But sometime in the midst of their rumbling bellies, Bean got his finger caught in a loop, and rather than cry like he normally would for someone to free his hand, and to finish tying his lace, he laughed in maddened hilarity.

  “What is it? I’m bloody working here. Don’t distract me,” said The Accountant.

  “I got it.”

  The Accountant looked down and saw his apprentice trapped in his shoe laces.

  “You fishing for idiots?” he said.

  “No. I think I got the solution. I mean, I know I do. Well, I think I know I do. What if….Now, hear me out here,” said Bean, staring drunkenly at his trapped finger.

  “What? What is it? This better be bloody good.”

  “What if, at least, until we figure out what kind of number she is, what if we just hide her somewhere; sweep her underneath some celestial rug.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, where is the one place where nobody would bother to notice? The one place where nobody would ever look?”

  They were both staring Bean’s finger, caught in a loop.

  “A paradox,” said The Accountant.

  “Exactly. We assign her to a paradox and she’ll be invisible. Nobody will know, unless they ask, of course, but….you know…”

  “No-one gives two shits about a paradox.”

  “That’s
right. No-one cares about a paradox. It’s just a stupid waste of time.”

  “A waste of time. We can hide her in a waste of time. Nobody will look for her there, and she’ll be indivisible from the set.”

  “It’s brilliant.”

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself there, son. It’ll work for now, but we gotta figure this shit out before our arses get handed to us. So what are you waiting for?”

  “Yes, boss,” said Bean, feeling pretty proud of himself.

  Back in her room, The Young Cripple continued to call out.

  “Hello?” she said.

  Her voice echoed around the room in accents she had never heard before. Around her neck, the small Light on the radio was buzzing - one could say it was livid. As if remembering a pot on a slow burn, or a child, on one end of a broken promise, The Young Cripple dived desperate and panic-stricken for the volume button.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I forgot, I forgot. Oh God, I’m sorry. Are you mad? Do you forgive me? I’m sorry, I really am. I’m not usually so…”

  “Shhhh,” said T, monitorially. “Don’t make a scene. It’s ok. It really is. It’s good actually, cause they think you’re alone. They don’t know about me. We just have to figure out how to get out of here.”

  “Where is here?” asked The Young Cripple.

  She stared around the room, which felt less like a room, and more like a confined emptiness. She couldn’t see, though, and neither could the boy, any way of getting out. That was until, out of nowhere, two doors appeared – one green and one blue. And from behind each door came a single soldier, both carrying rifles slung over their shoulders. With their expressionless and sexless personas, it was impossible to tell one apart from the other.

  The boy’s radio went almost silent.

  “Say nothing. Do nothing. Let me think. It’ll be ok,” he said before his transmission went dead.

  In the other room, the two bookkeepers could barely contain their relief, such was the joy accrued to equanimity. They both sipped their tea and watched the young girl on a monitor as she shook nervously in front of the two menacing guards. The Accountant waited until he had swirled the very last sip of his tepid drink, before he switched on the microphone once more and spoke to the girl.

  “You are in a room with two doors,” he said.

  His voice, through the microphone, sounded like a mother’s hug saying that everything was fine, and a father’s consolidation, that nothing was under the bed. The microphone had a plug-in which filtered out The Accountant’s incessant cursing, and chose for him, the more appropriate words, and spaces between said words.

  “One door leads to freedom and is a way out. The other to unspeakable and immeasurable suffering, or what you know as hell.”

  The Young Cripple followed with her eyes, looking at each coloured door. Blue, in her thoughts, was the colour of the sky, a place where birds flew, and they were free. Yet those birds spent their lives entire looking down at the leaves which were green, as a place to raise their young, and to hide from English Pointers and armed aristocrats.

  She stared at her little radio, flicking the switches and turning the dial.

  “Please, T,” she whispered. “Now more than ever, I could use a friend.”

  The Accountant continued.

  “There are two soldiers, one guarding each door,” he said, as The Young Cripple trained her eyes on the armed an expressionless thugs that stood staunchly in front of each coloured door.

  “One soldier tells the truth, and the other always lies,” he said.

  The Young Cripple scanned the two soldiers, looking left and right with such fervent vigour that it was hard to tell if she was rigorously making her assumptions, or if she was just negating the reality of her predicament.

  “You have one question that you can ask to find out which door is which. Is the blue door, the door to your freedom? Or is it a window to pain and torture? You get one question, so take your time. You do not want to spoil your outcome with brash resoluteness.”

  “Nice,” said Bean, amazed by his colleague’s dialect. “You speak like that more often… I tell ya…you’ll be able to woo any girl you want. Suave.”

  “Shut up you idiot. And who the hell woos anything anymore? Keep your head in the bloody game. We’re not in the clear yet. We still gotta figure out what to do with her.”

  “Can’t we just leave her there? She’ll never get the right answer. I say we just tuck her away, and you know…forget about her. We’ve got so much other crap to get through. I still haven’t even touched the cost depreciation reports…”

  “What? You’ve had them for bloody ages. Now you see… this is exactly what I mean. You lack focus, Bean. You need to learn how to prioritize and monetize your efforts better. Prior preparation prevents…”

  “Boss.”

  “Performance, Bean. Your performance is piss-poor. That’s what I’m getting at. You see this girly here.”

  “Yeah, boss, the girl.”

  “Exactly, she’s a black swan. And what you do with a black swan that you can’t paint white?”

  “Boss, seriously.”

  “Rip out its bloody feathers,” said The Accountant. “And that’s what we’ll do to this anomaly. We’ll tear her apart, atom by atom, and string by fucking string.”

  “Boss, look, the girl. The discrepancy, she’s doing something.”

  Both bookkeepers smeared their concentration on the monitor.

  “What the hell’s she doing?”

  “I dunno, boss. She aint doing much thinking, though.”

  On the monitor, the girl was gliding around the room.

  “Is she dancing? What the hell is she dancing for? She’s supposed to be rationalizing herself into emotional ruin. What the bloody hell is she dancing for?”

  “Well, we should say something, boss; like, stop it, or something.

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “Then what? How do we get her back to thinking?”

  “Give me a second will ya? Need to be smart and convincing; sweet and bloody deceptive. Think, think, think…”

  The Accountant reached for the microphone and steadied his thoughts.

  “You,” he said, in a low and heavy tone.

  The Young Cripple looked upwards and continued her dance.

  “Now, what boss?”

  “Don’t rush me for fuck’s sake. I got it, I got it.”

  The Accountant pressed his lips over the microphone and shut his eyes.

  “Stop it,” he said. “Stop it right now. OK? Just…cut it out. Or else…”

  The girl continued dancing.

  “Balls.”

  “She’s a kid, boss. They’re like, you know, mesons and bloody bosons. You’re tryna apply some big world solution to a little world dilemma. You gotta think small and chaotic if you wanna push a kid around. You ever had one when you were alive?”

  “Nah,” said The Accountant abruptly. “You know I uhh… I um, had some issues. I never really wanted one.”

  “Really? I heard you had a weak erection.”

  “Seriously, Bean? Where do you hear this crap?”

  “Water cooler. Poker night.”

  “Who the fuck invites you to poker?”

  “Some of the guys from logistics. They have a regular thing going. Nothing fancy or nothing.”

  “You’d do good to keep with your own kind, not like the likes of those wheel turners. Seriously kid, you got a bright spark alright? Now, I don’t give out compliments much, or ever for that matter. You ask anyone that. But I see a lot of myself in you. You know I wasn’t always such a reliable upstart. I had my days too. But just like you, I…”

  “Boss,”

  “I’m trying to give you a bloody compliment and…”

  “Boss, she escaped.”

  “Whatya mean she escaped? How the fuck did she escape?”

  Both bookkeepers scraped their sight along every inch of the monitor.

  “Where the hell is s
he?”

  “She just walked out, boss. Just like that. While you were talking and all…She just walked out.”

  “Which door?”

  “The blue one.”

  “Where does that go?”

  “Same as the green one I suppose.”

  “Whatya mean same as the green one? One let’s her go and the other kills her, right?”

  Bean scoffed mildly.

  “In theory yeah, but they were just doors, you know? They could go anywhere. It was the riddle that bound her, not the guards.”

  “So she’s free.”

  “Looks that way, boss.”

  “The paradox was supposed to bind her. What the hell happened?”

  “Chance,” said Bean.

  The Accountant shook his head. “How did we not see that?”

  “So uhh, I guess we’re in the shit again.”

  “Yeah, too right,” said The Accountant, tucking gin his shirt. “Get your things together - guns, knives, pixie dust, whatever. We’re goin on a hunt. We’re gonna get that little shit, and purge her.”

  “Sweet.”

  “No. Sweet? No, not at all. If we don’t find her, we’re ruined, you and I, you do know that right? Heaven will be ruined. And trust me, we’ll cop it first. Death is nothing compared to what happens to the dead in this place.”

  “Where do we look?”

  “Room by room,” said The Accountant.

  “But there’s infinite rooms, and in each door, infinite possibilities.”

  “Well then, we’d better hurry then, hadn’t we?”