Goldfish

[Amos]

the contents of the gutter



There is a gutter, in which there is fallen snow, Goldfish, and the end of the world. Goldfish knows that he is in the gutter, and that the end of the world is in the gutter with him. How he has come to share this impromptu bed of concrete and ice with the apocalypse is not a mystery to him, and he does not dwell on it. He studies said apocalypse, though, pays close attention to it's details. The clouds of the apocalypse are of particular interest. There is a bright patch where they hide the sun that hurts Goldfish's eyes. A group of grey-black clouds, shaped like melted crayons, fly overhead the bright patch. Beneath it, a single immense cloud is traveling in the opposite direction, gathering lesser clouds into it's fold as it goes, converting them to it's vast religion. None of the clouds look like animals or humanoids. Not even like sheep, who were probably made in the image of clouds, or vice versa. They just look like clouds. This resistance to recognisable forms is clearly a feature of the clouds of the apocalypse, and Goldfish takes note of it, even though he will surely be dead soon and then nothing he has noted is likely to matter. Goldfish is only doing this because he cannot move, not even a single digit at the end of a single limb will respond, and so watching the end of the world is the only thing to do until it actually happens.

Here is a more accurate summary of the situation: Goldfish is in the gutter, and the end of the world is inside Goldfish. Just to be clear, the entire planet is not about to suffer Armageddon. Only reality as it is perceived by Goldfish, who is dying of pneumonia. He has pneumonia because he is lying paralysed in a snow-laden gutter. He is here because a few short hours ago he was extremely drunk, and this is where he landed when he lost control of his motor functions. Everything is very simple and easily explainable except for one thing. The future. What happens in the future does not seem to fit with what we now know about Goldfish's predicament. It is thus: Goldfish does not die.

Beyond the cold confines of the gutter that contains the apocalypse, there is the rest of the world, a great big universe full of diverse incidents of life and momentum. More pertinently, there is the town of Jessamy, wherein lies our gutter. Jessamy, you might note, is a person's name, suitable for either a boy or a girl. Some towns are more like a living entity, rather than merely the sum of their parts, and Jessamy has always seemed to it's visitors and inhabitants as being such. Perhaps, as reputedly wise men and woman have remarked in the course of it's history, giving the town a person's name is precisely the cause of it's peculiar personality. Anthropomorphising, they call this phenomenom, which suggests that Jessamy only has human characteristics because it was given them by human people. This is rather obvious, really. The town was made by people, for the purpose of people, for goodness sake. Of course they are responsible for it's qualities. Naming it Jessamy was merely the icing on the cake. Let us waste no more time on the dissertations of these, I repeat with emphasis, reputedly wise men and women; they are not worth a mention.

In the universe lies the world, in the world the town of Jessamy, in the town of Jessamy the gutter, in the gutter Goldfish, and in Goldfish the end of the world. Is there anything in the end of the world? Even those Russian dolls, the ones that you split in half to find another smaller but identical doll inside, and another inside that one etc., have a final piece. A part which contains nothing else. The clouds are not inside the apocalypse, I should mention, they are more like the paint on the face of the doll. No, the end of the world is at the heart of everything. There is nothing inside the apocalypse. The apocalypse is death, the death of Goldfish, and it is the dark center of the universe. It is very simple and self-contained, and this is why Goldfish finds it easy to contemplate. Death is nothing more to him than the shifting of the clouds across the sky. The displacement and distortion of misty blobs. From them there might come storms of rain, or bolts of electricity. Beyond them there could be blue skies or dark nights. But at the heart of them is transigence, and that transigence is death, the end of the world as Goldfish knows it. There is a powerful calm in his eyes. He's still quite drunk.

Another person has some understanding of the latter information, especially the pneumonia part. Actually, quite a few people do. They are the doctors and nurses who come to Goldfish's rescue. Or rather, he comes to them at their clean and modern hospital, in the back of an ambulance summoned by an unidentified man who finds Goldfish lying in the streets. Their knowledge of the impending apocalypse allows them to avert it, just barely, and so Goldfish is saved. Whether or not he wishes to be saved is another matter entirely.

[Lyle]

Of ambulatory exorcisms.



As he was rushed from salvation in the ambulance Goldfish felt drowsily alarmed. His mind was still muddled from years of living (and the scotch as well) so he couldn’t be sure of anything, least of all his own thoughts but there was something about this entire sequence of events that seemed horrifyingly obscene. It had been his time. Goldfish knew it with that certain clarity that is sole province of the near dead and dying. His life was a lightning-fast series of disjointed memories playing in slow motion but Goldfish had never had much faith in his powers of recollection. Even so, he knew enough of the basic mechanics of life to know that people were fleeting, even more fleeting than memory and he had made peace with the fact of his demise years before. The facts of death and subsequent oblivion had never troubled Goldfish. It had always been the smoky, half-truths of life and living which tore at his sanity, day in and day out. As a result of this his uniformed saviors seemed demonic in the swirling lights of his sadistic chariot, the sirens taunted him with their incessant melody and each second that passed him by lasted an eternity. “Who is the Jester in this circus?” he mused despondently, “What adulation can I possibly pay him that hasn’t already been siphoned from my limbs and extracted from my brain stem?”…

There were tubes and convoluted wiring all around him, protruding from him and enfolding him in their mysterious embraces. His dark head lay back on the painfully white pillow and he groaned an eerie, continuous wail as his captors sped down street by street to reach their spiteful nest. Memories arrived gradually, mixing with drugged notions and wrapping themselves around drunken-emotiveness. Goldfish was in a bad way. The body-butchers at the hospital might have the skill to save his form from cold inevitability but who would rescue his wounded mind from itself? What beautiful angel could offer Goldfish, the casualty caricature sufficient reason to regard his continued existence with anything but sullen resentment? A hungry child offered sustenance only to have it snatched away by a gang of white-clad bullies. In their ambulance…

As his mind began to succumb to the drugs and the tiredness, Goldfish decided he would pray for deliverance in the spirit of what the hell. His consciousness, ever treacherous began to sift through his tainted memories, searching for the correct formulation of a childhood prayer. Despite the sedatives seeping into his core Goldfish viciously clamped down on himself before he had gone too far back. “O’ secret admirer behind the stars, with your jealous possessiveness and childish temper tantrums, I salute you,” the sirens wailed on plaintively and Goldfish could hear the white demons chattering above him. “Allow your most impious child his just reward. You scheme and plot behind the moon but I am not as you are.” He stirred fitfully, baring his teeth in a weak snarl “Release me from this unjust sentence or I will arrange for the sun to weep and for your angels; to contract bubonic dissent through their pus-pissing third eyes” One of the demons bent over him smiling, with serrated fangs, gleaming.

“You’re okay buddy. You’re going to make it…”

[Amos]

moving stories



"That's not how it happened at all," said Goldfish to the audience, which consisted of several bored and curious hospital patients, two nurses, and a local newspaper reporter. "First off, I wasn't drunk. I've never touched a drop of liquor in my life."

"You're drunk right now!" exclaimed somebody.

"Well you lot drove me to it!" Goldfish snapped back. "Anyway, as I was saying.. I was being hunted by the notorious Bulgarian assassin, Zanzibar Amadeus Kroppleknoff. Hiding in the gutter was my strategy to get him off my tail. I packed the snow around me, and waited for what seemed a decent amount of time. Then I called the ambulance myself, pretending I had caught pneumonia, so that I could check into the hospital under an assumed name, and escape him entirely."

"You mean Goldfish isn't your real name?"

"Of course not. What kind of a stupid name is Goldfish? I have a perfectly normal real name... that I wont tell you. Just in case, you know."

The audience looked at him doubtfully, and with good reason, for he was lying through his gin-soaked teeth. His real name is Goldfish, he was completely drunk, and nobody knows the real name of the notorious Bulgarian assassin who has been hunting him.

This is how it probably happened:

He had awoken in a gutter, being sprinkled with snowflakes. Bleary and frost-bitten, he came to with a strangely clear premonition that, if he survived this, in exactly one year's time he would find himself in the same predicament he was in now: dying of pneumonia at three in the morning, in the freezing December streets of suburbia. It also occurred to him that he mightn't have actually woken up, that he was in a coma or a dream, or even the afterlife. This bed of concrete and ice had surely been his final resting place, and the illusion of his survival was a mirage he had been trapped in by certain higher powers! He never did manage to get to the truth of the matter, but his premonition would prove itself to be entirely accurate. He tried to explain to his rescuers - a bunch of intoxicated philosophy students from the university making their way back to campus and passionately arguing over who would win in a fight between Plato and Descartes - that they were wasting their efforts on him. That even if any of this was really happening, in any case they were setting in motion a chain of events that would lead his returning to the very same gutter with the very same pneumonia on the very same day one year into the future. They ignored his protests, though expressed sympathy at his claim of metaphysical calamity. The battered yellow taxi they summoned was piloted by a fat, serious Mexican who, by virtue of having completed several advanced driving courses, managed to bring them in record time to the fire station. Later, the students would debate whether this was the fault of the taxi driver, who spoke competent but ultimately flawed English, or the cruel higher powers that their rescuee had been muttering of, or both. Either way, by the time they finally reached the hospital, Goldfish was dead.

It all had happened exactly as the taxi driver had planned it. For he was not in actual fact a taxi driver, but an assassin from Bulgaria, highly skilled in unconventional methods of dispatch. Several years earlier he had read about the death of a man who, confused by an inaccurate English translation of a French guidebook, had driven his car over a long dismantled bridge and into a river canyon, plummeting to his death. Realising then the potential killing power of misinterpretation, the assassin had developed it into a deadly art. Doing away with Goldfish had been a well-timed blow of deliberate misunderstanding, backed up by the credible camouflage of being a foreigner. His alibi of English being a second language was never questioned, never even raised by the students, so obvious and innocent it seemed. Such was the cleverness of this assassin. He was much sought after for his guile, for his wide range of unlikely methods. He had written an epic poem so depressing that when his targets read it, they would be driven to despair and kill themselves within the hour, and the copies that he sold his clients had made him a millionaire. Shape-shifting was his favourite method though, and he claimed it was nothing more than an advanced form of camouflage. More complicated than wearing a fake moustache, but not inherently different and far more believable, was transforming into a man with an actual moustache. He had turned into a Bengali tiger once, and been deliberately captured by a dictator who collected exotic animals, faked at being uncommonly tame, then mauled the tyrant when he had gained his trust. Once, he claimed, he had killed by pretending to be the pacific ocean and drowning his target, though it was widely suspected this was untrue, and that the man's death had been a boating accident. Boasting was a weakness of his, actually, and had got him into trouble in the past. Immediately after dropping off the dead Goldfish and his rescuers at the hospital, he drove to an esoteric bar that only half-existed (but charged double for the privilege of obscurity), ordered a cocktail, and sat down with a group of complete strangers to boast of his cleverness. The strangers were miffed at his cockiness, the brazen way he interrupted their drinking session to gloat of his prowess, without regard for social formalities or even being properly drunk. One of the strangers happened to be a necromancer, and upon learning the name of the assassin's victim, excused himself to use the bathroom and while there used his magicks to revivify Goldfish via the vanity mirrors. He came back and told what he had done. His companions laughed heartily at the interloper's outrage, and toasted the necromancer. The assassin stormed off, and in the hospital, Goldfish had come back to life.

"What was it like?" asked one of the audience, after Goldfish had recounted this second, equally implausible tale. "You know, being dead?"

"I saw a luminous white ball, sitting on top of which was a fox. The ball was floating above the coal-black earth, and this and other balls like it, each complete with their own fox, are the only sources of light in this world. The foxes are the gods, or the guardians perhaps, silent and oracular, they are looked up to and appealed to by the humanoid inhabitants below. The humanoids are primitive savages, yet highly articulate, quite capable of expressing their base desires and motives in lyrical poems and moving stories. They do not use language as a tool to build cages that constrain their true natures, but only as a form of living art and honest expression. Nor have they used it as a means to uplift themselves and transcend their savagery. From down here, the globes that the fox-gods ride on vary greatly in size. Many are but pinpricks of light. Others, floating closer to the surface, appear quite large and incredibly luminous. Actually, the coal-black earth is only coal-black half of the time, as one fox-god is so close as to illumine half the planet at a time. Despite his relative nearness, none of the humanoid inhabitants have ever seen this, nor any of the other fox-gods, at least not in their natural habitats. On occasion, the fox-gods deign to come down to the earth, and wander about in various forms; rarely as foxes though. Whether the fox-gods actually exist is somewhat debatable. Few enough know about them, and those that do can be divided into two categories - those that don't believe in them; and the fox-gods. When they look to the sky the humanoids perceive the lights to be incredibly distant, and if not cold then lifeless. Also, they are not, as I said before, the only sources of light for the world. The humanoids have artificial lights that they themselves have invented, or discovered as it were. Too, there are those among them who have sought to transcend their savagery, or at least repress it. They are the minority, of course, and if their influence is wide-reaching, it is still far from absolute, and none has had such a fine philosophy as to enlighten the entire race. But then what else can you expect from people who don't believe in the fox-gods? The truth, for them, is so unfathomable that it's irrelevant. They are born liars."

[Amos]

a mansion of evil



I am rather proud of the hospital. Like I already said, it is clean and modern, and staffed by highly trained medical professionals. It has three stories, loads of technical gadgetry, and modern art on the walls. What more could you want in a hospital, and certainly the township is well served by it. Everyone is always talking about how nice it is to have such a good hospital. They wax poetic about Dr. Jane Beasely, who runs the show, and is considered one of the wisest and most compassionate women in town. In the playground of Jessamy Middle School you can hear the children singing the song that Thomasson the wandering minstrel wrote in honour of Dr. Beasely and her contributions to the town.

All praise to Dr. Jane Beasely
Who cured our ailments so easily
Oh the world was sick and weasely
'Til we were bless'd by Dr. Jane Beasely

A few days before he was dragged to the moon, I asked Goldfish what he thought of the hospital.

"It is a mansion of evil. Do you know they kept me locked in there for three straight weeks? Whenever I tried to leave some nark would buzz for security, and I'd get hauled right back into my skinny metal hammock that passes for a bed in such forsaken regions."

What a joker!

[Amos]

the existence of mazes



On the night of his first death Goldfish conversed with the director of the hospital, Dr. Jane Beasely, the main topic of their discussion being Dr. Jane Beasely's desire not to have Goldfish remain in her medical establishment because she didn't believe in the treatment of foreign persons (due to their unnatural constitutions and other peculiarities of their Biologies, not to mention her position as a racist), and also because he was clearly unwell. Goldfish had not previously considered himself to be a foreign person, and was disinclined to begin doing so on the spurious grounds that he had 'a funny voice and a pale complexion', both of which were a result of the previous day's whiskey binge and hypothermia. Unfortunately for Goldfish his physical condition was inhibiting his mental faculties and prevented him from raising a reasonable argument. In any case Doctor Jane Beasely was not a person overly concerned with reasonable arguments.

From as early as her third birthday Jane Beasely had been considered an eccentric by her social contemporaries and near relations thanks to her intuitive grasp of the arts of musical composition and pottery. Being philistines, her peers naturally sought to inhibit her progression into the ranks of geniuses and other assorted misfits by means of taunting her and destroying the tools of her arts. The result had been a rather unexpected increase in eccentricity in Jane Beasely's character, for while they were excellent philistines, her loved ones slash oppressors were often known to score poorly in games of predication, and were if anything even less adept at the difficult art of child-rearing. Her mental brilliance was such that at the age of eleven she was admitted into medial school, but she still didn't graduate at an earlier age than the less-gifted students due to the intermittent periods she was forced to spend in the Jessamese Asylum for the Stark Raving Mad, the only place she had ever felt accepted for who she was, and where she returned to in times of mental distress or nostalgia.

At the time of his meeting Doctor Jane Beasely was approaching her fiftieth year, but to Goldfish she appeared to be no more than twenty-five, thanks to her inherent inability to perceive time in an orderly fashion that affected her genetic components to such an extent that she was essentially immortal, as well as uncannily prescient; this had led to her rapid rise through the hospital ranks where permanent good health and intricate knowledge of the future were considered to be signs of excellent management skills. She was responsible for the design of the maze at the entrance to the hospital, much to the relief of the surgical staff who would rather not deign to operate on intellectually and physically inferior patients: at the heart of this maze (the hospital dwelled at the far end, rather than the center) there was supposedly a mythical beast, who had not been included in the original design but had turned up of its own free will or because of some equally mysterious force that governed the existence of mazes - Doctor Jane Beasely and the rest of the medical staff affectionately called it "the Kurd", and praised its efficacy in destroying destitute patients seeking charity treatment from the aristocratic healers. People without the instinct for survival rarely made it to the waiting room, except by ambulance, at least in the early days of its creation, until an underground movement began distributing maps of the maze and alerting patients to the movements of the Kurd by means of an unsophisticated warning system that exploited flamingoes with bells tied to their feet.

Despite her high position and instinct for medicine, Dr. Jane Beasely was still not fully accepted as a member of the hospital society, and this caused her varying degrees of unhappiness depending on her fluctuating levels of sanity and the vagaries of the Jessamese weather that conformed to no known season or method of prediction, even time-travelling.