I am surrounded by flame. It’s really quite eerie.
Alby tries to be charming, and courteously insists on treating me as a guest rather than as a hostage. In reality, of course, I am not free to leave, and I live in constant fear. And he is, actually, let’s face it, remarkably dull. And pedantic. And over-knowledgeable. And pompous. And excessively flickery. And over-inclined to disagree with my opinions, even when I’m totally right.
And yet, to be fair to this poor, socially dysfunctional, personality-challenged, abhorrently weird and alien flame monster, he does laugh at all my jokes. And there is also, I have to admit, though I hate to do so, something beguiling about this time we spend together. We dine, we converse, we reminisce, we have fierce debates about politics and art and television drama. We are like some old married couple settled in domesticity, while living in a space station that orbits a sun that is infested by sentient flames.
My grandfather once showed me his first typewriter. It was an Olivetti, and you had to really bang the keys to get the little metal arms to fly up and hit the paper and leave a mark. The ribbon was blue on top and red on the bottom; if you were technologically competent enough, you could swap from blue ribbon to red ribbon and have a multi-coloured text. Lord only knows why. Oh, and yes, I remember the way you corrected mistakes! If you wanted to delete something you literally painted the page with white goo, then let it dry, then typed over it. Or you stuck a little piece of white paper over the typing paper and tapped the same key as the letter you wanted to delete, so that the letter was replaced by a white replica which was the same colour as the typing paper, and hence, invisible. [God, that’s a bit hard to follow. And I worry my style is too informal – can you amend that last paragraph, deleting all the “yous” and substituting “ones”?]
[No, on second thoughts, don’t bother, it looks more spontaneous if I leave in the occasional grammatical solecism, don’t you think?] I think that you…
Hush, you mar my flow; as I was saying: That machine, my grandfather’s manual typewriter with its blue and red ribbon, is a vivid memory from my childhood that is seared into my brain. It was cutting-edge technology then. Now, I have a computer chip in my brain, and I am talking to a fire.
And the mystery is, why it doesn’t all feel stranger? How do we come to take these things for granted? For tens of thousands of years human beings whittled tools and farmed soil and ate animals. And now there are people who have themselves bioengineered so that their excrement emerges from their anus ready-wrapped in polythene. Such people have achieved the ultimate in human evolution; their shit does not stink.
How can I possibly stay sane, knowing a thing like that?
But, I suppose, the hardest thing to bear is when remarkable things don’t happen. If you are, for instance, a prehistoric human tending your field and you are never visited by beings from outer space, and never have a vision of a god, and are incapable of telepathy or telekinesis, and cannot see ghosts, and nothing ever changes for you, day after day after day… then that really would be strange. A life without magic; a life without wonder.
And, I must confess, a really odd thing has happened to me. I have become reconciled to my life of imprisonment. I have become used to being a bargaining chip. And I am confident that my beloved son Peter will pay the ransom and save his mother from this living Hell.
So life is good.
I sit down to dinner one night. As always, Alby sits with me, chatting, keeping me company. He doesn’t eat, he doesn’t drink, but as a dinner companion, I’ve had much worse.
Then the door opens and a woman walks in. She glides calmly forward, sits down, picks up my glass of wine and drinks from it. Then she looks at me.
I reach out. And I touch her face. I touch her breasts. I put my fingers in her mouth. She accepts all this. She smiles. “Will I do?” she asks Alby. He flickers, and I can sense his admiration, his pride, at the sight of this strikingly beautiful woman. But I, I am lost for words.
For she is me. The woman is me.