The buildings that lined my street bore signs in the form of strings of colored dots along their outer walls. To my right was the house of a childless Hexagon and his wife. To my left was the home of an equilateral Triangle, proud father of three little Squares. The Triangle’s door, a hinged line segment, stood ajar. One of his children, who had been playing in the street, sped inside, frightened by my appearance. The plane of Flatland cut me at the waist and arms, giving me the appearance of a large blob flanked by two smaller blobs—a weird and uncanny spectacle, to be sure.
Now the Triangle stuck his eye out of his door to study me. I could feel his excited voice vibrating the space touching my waist. Flatland seemed to made of a sort of jelly, perhaps one-sixteenth of an inch thick.
Suddenly I heard Deela calling to me. I looked back at the dark mouth of the tunnel, floating about eight feet above the mysterious ground on which I stood. I walked towards it, staying in the middle of the street. The little line-segment doors slammed as I walked past, and I could look down at the Flatlanders cowering in their homes.
I stopped under the tunnel’s mouth and looked up at Deela. She was holding a coiled-up rope-ladder.
“Do you want to come out now, Robert?” There was something cold and unpleasant about her voice.
“What happened to the Sikh?”
“He will not bother us again. How much money do you have with you?”
I recalled that so far I had only paid her half of the hundred pounds. “Don’t worry, I’ll give you the rest of the money.” But how could she even think of money with a wonder like this to …
I felt a sharp pain in the small of my back, then another. I whirled around to see a platoon of two dozen Flatland soldiers bearing down on me. Two of them had stuck into my back like knives. I wrenched them out, lifted them free of their space, and threw them into the next block. I was bleeding! Blade-thick and tough-skinned, these soldiers were a real threat. One by one, I picked them up by their blunt ends and set them down inside the nearest building. I kept them locked in by propping my side against the door.
“If you give me all your money, Robert,” said Deela, “then I will lower this rope-ladder.”
It was then that I finally grasped the desperation of my situation. Barring Deela’s help, there was no possible way for me to get up to the mouth of the tunnel. And Deela would not help unless I handed over all my cash…some three hundred pounds. The Sikh, whom I had mistakenly thought of as enemy, had been trying to save me from Deela’s trap!
“Come on,” she said. “I don’t have all night.”
There were some more soldiers coming down the street after me. I reached back to feel my wounds. My hand came away wet with blood. It was interesting here, but it was clearly time to leave.
“Very well, you nasty little thief. Here is all the money I have. Three hundred pounds. The police, I assure you, will hear of this.” I drew the bills out and held them up to the tunnel-mouth. Deela reached through, snatched the money, and then disappeared. The new troop of soldiers was almost upon me.
“Hurry!” I shouted. “Hurry up with the ladder! I need medical attention!” Moving quickly, I scooped up the soldiers as they came. One got past my hand and stabbed me in the stomach. I grew angry, and dealt with the remaining soldiers by poking out their hearts.
When I was free to look up at the tunnel-mouth again. I saw a sight to chill the blood. I was the Sikh, eyes glazed in death, his arms dangling down towards me. I realized that Deela had shot him. I grabbed one of his hands and pulled, hoping to lift myself up into the tunnel. But the corpse slid down, crashed through Flatland, and thudded onto the floor at my feet.
“Deela!” I screamed. “For the love of God!”
Her face appeared again…but she was no longer holding the rope-ladder. In its stead she held a pistol. Of course it would not do to set me free. I would make difficulties. With my body already safe in this dimensional oubliette, it would be nonsense to set me free. Deela aimed her gun.
As before, I ducked below Flatland’s opalescent surface and crawled for dear life. Deela didn’t even bother shooting.
“Goodbye, Robert,” I heard her calling. “Stay away from the tunnel or else!” This was followed by her laughter, her footsteps, the slamming of the cellar door, and then silence.
That was two days ago. My wounds have healed. The Sikh has grown stiff. I made several repellent efforts to use his corpse as a ladder or grappling-hook, but to no avail. The tunnel-mouth is too high, and I am constantly distracted by the attacks of the isosceles Triangles.
But my situation is not entirely desperate. The Flatlanders are, I have learned, edible, with a taste something like very moist smoked salmon. It takes quite a few of them to make a meal, but they are plentiful, and they are easy to catch. No matter how tightly they lock their doors, they never know when the five globs of my fingers will appear like Zöllner’s spirits to snatch them away.
I have filled the margins of my beloved old
Flatland
now. It is time to move on. Somewhere there may be another tunnel. Before leaving, I will throw this message up through the tunnel-mouth. It will lie beneath the basement stairs, and someday someone will find it.
Farewell, reader, and do not pity me. I was but a poor laborer in the vineyard of knowledge—and now I have become the Lord of Flatland.
============
Written in Summer, 1982.
The 57th Franz Kafka
, Ace Books, 1983.
My friend and fellow fourth-dimension maven Thomas Banchoff of Brown University traveled to London one summer to dig up information about Edwin Abbott. This story is my concept of what happened to him, although somehow Banchoff (or someone who says he is Banchoff) seems to have made it back to the States.
“Someone who, dreaming, says ‘I am dreaming,’ even if he speaks audibly in doing so, is no more right than if he said in his dream ‘it is raining,’ while it was in fact raining. Even if his dream were actually connected with the noise of the rain.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty.
Wittgenstein wrote these words two days before his death on April 29, 1951. He died of cancer. I see my typewriter, its plastic keys. I press the plastic letters and write these words. Am I a mumbling dreamer? And you?
Before I came here I lived in a UFO, a spaceship called Star Nine. My “brother” and I were set down in the suburbs of Louisville, Kentucky. We attended private schools. He went into the wood business, and I became a science-fiction writer.
I first remembered about Star Nine one night in 1964 after drinking a fifth of scotch. I told my brother about it and started choking him when he didn’t believe me. But the next day he admitted I was right.
The way Star Nine sends a person down is to aim a green laser-beam. The beam shudders like, and there’s a new fake Earthling. When we first got here, I was a five-year-old boy, and my brother was ten. It was in a cow pasture with a barbed-wire fence. We started crying and ran home. Star Nine had beamed memories to our “parents,” a childless couple just moving into town.
I am free to reveal all this because by the time you read this “I” will be gone. There are enough of us now to accomplish our task, the theft of your reality. You will dream on as before, there will be stimuli to mutter about, but the world will be absent. It is as if a farmer were to catch and make off with the rain of Wittgenstein’s dreamer. So that the dreamer will not be disturbed, the farmer sets up, in the now-empty night, a cassette-player with a tape of “Rain.” Splish-splash, gut-buckets of Iowa rain, and the corn rustling, all magnetic signals on a plastic tape. Miles off are Tenniel’s “mome raths” (us), orange pigs with bunches of pink worms for tails, we are the farmer, we are the rain without stopping. I eye “I,” to eat the exhale/inhale, day/night, summer/winter, parent/child, one/many, the broken clock all gone.
============
Written in November, 1982.
Live From the Stagger Café
, #5, Summer, 1987.
“Plastic Letters” is a quick vision that was inspired by a dream. It also represents the starting seed for my novel,
The Secret of Life
, in which the teenage hero learns that he is a saucer alien.
Live From the Stagger Café
was a little zine edited by Luke McGuff in Minneapolis. The story title is taken from the name of an album by the group Blondie.
For Henry and Diana Vaughan.
A draft plucked at Luanne Carrandine’s blonde hair. Visions of claws, shadows of deliverance.
“You see?” her salesgirl was saying. “There’s a hole in the floor, Mrs. Carrandine. Thank goodness no one fell in!”
A thick mist was drifting up, mist thick and slow as ketchup. A tendril snaked up to encircle Luanne’s calf. She caught a whiff of the stuff then, and tiny voices seemed to call from every corner. Luanne shook her head and widened her eyes.
Come on
, she thought to herself,
this is Monday morning, Luanne baby, it’s get-it-together time
. The facts, please.
The facts: There is a big, round hole in the floor of the dressing-room of Luanne and Garvey Carrandine’s dress-shop. The hole is oozing smoke.
Bummer
. Rain-gray post-holiday Monday, down there in Killeville, Virginia, man, and the goddamned store is like falling apart.
At least I don’t have hair on my face
.
The mist gave off an electric ozone charge. Breathing it, Luanne felt good, tight, strong, tingly.
“Is that the basement?” her salesgirl inquired
“There isn’t any basement,” said Luanne. “None of the plaza stores have basements, baby. There’s just a concrete slab, and garbage under that. Who found the hole? Have you called the fire-department?”
“I—I found it, but I haven’t called. I wasn’t sure who—do you think there’s been a robbery?”
Luanne stepped back from the hole and looked around. Tops and bottoms, silk and fuzz. “I don’t know what the hell anyone could have stolen, Kathy. There’s nothing here worth taking—just ask our customers.” She was sick of running the clothes-store, sick of making her money a dollar at a time.
The mist had her feeling reckless. “Maybe it’s a sinkhole like in Florida. Maybe the whole damned store will fall in, and Garvey and I can collect insurance. I hope so, Kathy, I really do.”
Luanne emphasized her point by jumping up and down. She was a small blonde with bold eyes and a pert mouth. Bold and round, pert and lipsticked. She was early thirties going on Sweet Sixteen.
Kathy watched her boss jump up and down. The jumps were surprisingly high. “What shall I do, Mrs. Carrandine?”
“Go on home, honey. I’ll get Garvey and the cops and the insurance men over here. We’ll stay closed for two days and then have a Fire Sale. A Sinkhole Special.” She smiled, stopped jumping, and made her way to the phone. “Just run along, Kathy. We’ll pay you for today, and tomorrow you can come in and help me mark down some of the tags.” Kathy left.
The phone was behind the counter, over on one side with the store-room and the dressing-room. There was mist, and Luanne felt funny again as she started dialing.
“What’s up?” asked Garvey’s voice. He dealt with their wholesalers from an office downtown.
“Honey, there’s a big hole in the dressing-room floor. It’s like a manhole.”
“Uh, how deep is it?” Garvey was not an excitable man.
“I don’t know. But…I’m starting to see things. Hurry.”
When Garvey reached the store, he found Luanne at her desk, drawing pictures with her youngest daughter’s colored pencils. The whole floor was covered with mist, a slow gray carpet of magic gas. Some of the stuff drifted up to meet Garvey’s nose. He inhaled and saw the shop fill with lazy blobs of color. It felt like skin-diving amidst tropical fish.
“God loves me, Garvey, He’s sent me a vision. Just look at
that
one—the teal scroll with red stars printed on it? Can you see that as a blouse?”
“Uh …” Garvey
could
see it, sort of.
“Yes, Garvey, we can do it! We’ll collect insurance and sell the store and start making our own line of clothes. Luanne’s Luxuries, can you dig it?” She breathed deeply and looked around, eyes ablaze. “All these new images, it’s just fantastic!”
Garvey was a tall, slim man with a perpetually unfocused air. He regarded his wife for a moment, then went to look at the hole in the dressing-room floor. The way the mist was pouring out, it was hard to see in. He wondered if the smoke might be dangerous to breathe, then decided not. He felt wonderful.
“Is there a flashlight, Luanne?”
“By the fuse-box, Gar.”
He got the light and shone it at the hole. He could make out the sides—the hole was a slanting shaft some three feet across—but the bottom was all fogged up. He went out to the front counter and found a short length of leftover Christmas ribbon.
Luanne was too busy with her new fashion-drawings to look up.
“I’m going to lower this down into the hole,” announced Garvey as he tied the ribbon’s end around the flashlight. His skin was tingling, and colors were everywhere. He kept thinking he heard voices. “Luanne? Do you feel as weird as I do?”
She laughed softly and filled in some green cross-hatching. “It’s the mist, man, it’s giving me teachings. We’ve got the burning bush right here with us.”
For the first time, Garvey noticed that rain was coming through the dressing-room ceiling. There was a big hole in the ceiling right over the hole in the floor.
“Hey Luanne, I think it’s a meteorite!”
“Straight from heaven, baby. Luanne’s Leisure Luxuries!”
Garvey crouched down by the hole and lowered away. The light swung this way and that, a pale blob in the mist. Three feet, six—he was out of ribbon and the bottom was still out of reach. He took a deep breath and reached way down in the hole, hoping to find out how deep it was.
Just then a bit of the floor’s concrete crumbled. Garvey fell head first into the fog-shrouded hole.