Author: Alexander Fawn

The student sat with his lunch, looking out across the campus square.

He hadn’t been there long when he saw a mature student with a plastic lunch box coming out of the philosophy faculty. After looking around for a vacant seat, he made his way to where the young man was eating. He greeted the other with a friendly nod before making himself comfortable and opening his container. He took out what looked like a homemade sandwich and took a bite. The younger man had always admired the relatively small number of mature students that could be seen around the campus. He’d always felt that for a person to return to study in their later years showed a high degree of personal commitment. He sat for a while wondering how he could start a dialogue.

He opened with, “How’s it going with you today?”

The older man smiled. “Not bad, thanks. Just hungry, I guess. How about you? Study going OK?”

The other shrugged. “I like the subject. Philosophy, I mean… I do find some of it hard going.”

The older man chuckled softly, took another bite and sat staring at his sandwich for a while, before saying, “You know, I’ve often wondered about the value of it.”

Looking surprised, the other said, “You have?”

“Well, yes, I mean it’s all about looking for answers to life’s really big questions, I suppose.”

The other nodded.

He went on. “The problem is, it would be really hard sometimes keeping track of what philosophy actually is.”

“Well, strictly speaking it’s the love of wisdom.”

“Yes, no doubt, but what I’m saying is if it really is the study of values and reason and knowledge, in fact, the study of existence itself, at the end of the day who’s to say whether the answers that philosophers come up with are actually right?’

“I’m not sure what you mean by that, but my tutor puts it simply by frequently referring to our studies as ‘a reasoned pursuit of fundamental truths’. It’s some sort of mantra he uses, I suppose.”

The older man shook his head. “There you are, you see? How can any reliable standards of evidence be established to prove that truths are being found?”

The young collegian thought about it for a minute or two, before changing the subject. “What do you do, when you’re not here, I mean?”

“I’m a bus driver.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I drive a bus.”

“Do you really?”

“Really. I’m usually on the 14c route, but it can vary, if it’s needed.”

“You’re not a student, then?”

“No. Just visiting an old school friend who’s a cleaner here because I happened to be in the area. It’s my day off, today.”

He snapped the lid on his lunchbox and stood up. “Nice meeting you,” he said with a broad smile.

The young collegian watched him go.

Sometimes good fortune is hidden, but it’s there all the same.

The man who lives on the corner is a good example of this. He had trouble with his rates. He’d sent several emails to the council about them. This was the third year he had received a council rate notice that contained a glaring error. Each year his notice had included a fee for a copy of the previous year’s rates notice; something that he had never received because he had never requested one. The first year was the worst for the simple reason that he had not been living there the previous year, so no copy could possibly exist. At the time, it was sorted out fairly quickly along with an apology. The same thing happened the second year, last year, and it was so annoying to find that the same error was being repeated. This time it took a great deal longer to sort out, and with no apology.

On this third occasion he had not called or sent emails, instead he went directly to the offices in person, being perfectly prepared to spend the entire day getting it resolved once and for all. He took no paperwork or notices or notes about the previous years. He deliberately left all of that at home. He only carried proof of his identity. He had decided to take on the burden of personally paying a visit to the relevant department. He knew full well, that all necessary information regarding the council’s mistakes would be there, in their own computer system. He would have them work it out.

The building held a number of local government departments, but he quickly found the section that dealt with rates. From the start he was made to feel that he was being a nuisance. Although the matter took only three hours in total to have it put right and not a whole day, the attitude he was facing the entire time came very close to out and out rudeness.

As he was leaving the building he paused at the top of the steps to breathe in the fresh air. He was so glad to get out of the place. He remembered telling his wife he’d text her when he was done. He was doing this when the odd looking guy came struggling up the steps. He thought at the time he was odd looking because he was rather portly for someone with such a young face. When he got to the top, between gasps, he croaked, “You’re leaving?”

Taken by surprise, the man just nodded.

“You’re really lucky,” he said in a low voice and went in.

Although this had seemed a bit strange, he figured that he was saying that the place was so awful that anybody coming out was far better off than anybody going in. As he made his way to his car he smiled at the thought. After all, he would have to completely agree with the sentiment.

It was as he unlocked his car that he heard the explosion.

The old man was reflecting on what was wrong with the world.

He quietly mumbled to himself, “If you ask me, there’s too much taking for my liking. It’s bound to all end in tears, you mark my word. There’s taking this and taking that. There’s taking advice, turns, minutes, threats, umbrage, vows, exception and instructions. There’s taking a chance, the blame, a thrashing, your temperature, someone’s life, a walk, a name, a memo, a drink, a seat, a fall, a break, or time out. Then, there’s taking an early bus, the wrong tablet, your girlfriend out, it all in, life for granted, a quicker route, whatever is going, it all back, or a late train. Of course, there’s taking the worst of it, sugar in your tea, what you can get, just one more gamble, the money and run, the long way home, or salt on your chips. There’s always taking the car for a spin, one page at a time, a walk on the wild side, the mower in for a service, or even a moment to think about it all.”

He looked up at the nurse. “You see? There’s just too much taking, if you ask me.”

She sighed.

He sighed. “But nobody does.”

There was a swishing sound that seemed to fill the room.

He wasn’t going to let it wake him up, after all it was probably just part of some weird dream he was having. He turned over. Slowly, he became aware of how hard his bed felt; hard and cold. The swishing continued. Was it wind? It didn’t sound like wind. Too close. Too much inside. He opened one eye and saw the blueness. His bedroom wasn’t blue! He lifted his head and looked around. The whole place… it wasn’t a room, it was a place. The whole place was filled with a soft, blue light. After blinking for a while he made out a large figure standing at the foot of his bed. Behind it, two great wings fanned slowly.

He sat up, rubbed his face and squinted. He couldn’t make out the figure’s facial features. With an effort he blurted, “Where am I?”

The voice, deep and soft, said, “You are here, with me.”

“Here? Am I dead?”

“You are.”

“This is only a dream isn’t it? I mean, I’ll wake up and all this will be gone, right?”

“No.”

“How? How did it happen?”

“I’m sorry. I can’t tell you that.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Well, won’t, if you like. It’s a protocol that we have to follow.”

“We? There are more of you?”

“Oh yes. Many more.”

“If this is real, I feel I have the right to know how I got here, how I … died.”

“It is your responsibility to know that.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’ll explain. Every person is totally responsible for their own death.”

“What, even when somebody else causes it?”

“Yes.”

“Even when it is caused by accident.”

“Yes.”

“What about when some fatal disease takes them, even then?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“Yes, it’s the only way this works.”

“And if I can’t remember, what then?”

“You remain here, but, people always remember eventually.”

“Can I go back to sleep?”

“Yes. If you wish.”

He slumped back and buried his head in the pillow. Within moments an image formed, a memory. A small rectangular patch of multi-coloured light. He recognised the icons. The swishing was still there. He sat up quickly. “I’ve remembered!” he shouted.

“Good. You can move on.”

“Where am I going?”

The swishing grew louder. “To eternal damnation, two others died.”

It was the end of the year and time to write a new list.

This was something she did every year. She really enjoyed thinking carefully about New Year resolutions. Now, with only one day to go, she would have to make a new list. Before this, she would review the old one to see how well she did. She went into the kitchen. She pulled the list off the fridge, and read: 1-Cut down on the amount of time spent watching television, 2-Go to bed earlier and get more quality sleep, 3-Read more and renew library membership, 4-Stop procrastinating, 5-Take up more regular exercise, 6-Eat healthier food, 7-Lose weight, 8-Reduce alcohol consumption, 9-Pay off all debts, and finally, the most important item, 10-Post this list on the refrigerator door so that it’s seen as a reminder, several times every day!

She looked at the piece of blu tack on the fridge’s door, then back at the list.

She sighed, and thought, one down and nine to go…

The two men got out of the limousine and stood looking up at the building.

They were in a quiet part of the city. The night was cold and the warm glow from the foyer looked inviting. The younger of the two went up the front steps first, the nozzle of the handgun gently prodding him in the back. He had no idea what he was doing there. Earlier, he had taken the call in the office, arranging to meet a potential client later in the evening. Nothing strange in that. After all, selling life insurance was a private business. It involved varying degrees of confidentiality, but this? The fancy car and chauffeur sent to pick him up, the elderly man in the back that hardly spoke, the gun pressed against him as they made their way to this, a building he didn’t recognise.

They entered and crossed the lobby to the lifts. The building seemed empty. With the barrel of the gun still pushed firmly against him, they entered the lift and rode to the top. Then, taking a short flight of steps, they came out onto a large, flat roof area. It was dimly lit.

“Where are we going?” the young man asked yet again.

The man finally spoke. “Just a few steps now, to the edge.”

“The edge? Why would I want to go to the edge?”

“There’s a great view of the city from up here.” The gun pushed harder.

At the edge, in front of a low wall, the younger man asked, “Why are you doing this?”

“I’m doing this for Blossom.”

“Blossom?”

“She is… she was, my Russian Blue.”

“Russian what?”

“Blue. She was an angel; my beautiful angel, so loving,” he sneered, “and very expensive!”

“I really have no idea what you are talking about.”

The man’s eyes filled with tears. “My late wife adored her. I adored her. Those delicate whiskers, and those eyes, such gorgeous eyes.” He turned to face the young man. “This, you took from us.”

“Are we talking about a cat?”

“A cat, yes, but no ordinary cat. She was our little angel.” More tears welled up. “Last Tuesday you killed it, with your car. I saw it, I witnessed it! I got your plate, the rest was easy. Now we fix your problem.”

“Problem? What problem?”

“We’re going to fix your depression.”

“I don’t have depression.”

“Yes, you do. A bad case of it, apparently.”

“Nobody’s going to believe that.”

“I think they will. Sometimes depression isn’t easy to see in a person. Besides, the letter found in your apartment will explain everything…”

He enjoyed sketching, especially faces.

It was only a hobby, but he spent a lot of time sitting at his small desk drawing and listening to classical music, when not working in the town’s music store. Although he lived alone in his small apartment, he often had visits from his old school friend. He was also in his early twenties, but lived a far more active social life. He knew that his friend was a loner and a bit of an oddball, if truth was told. Despite this, he enjoyed calling in and spending time with the budding artist. He had always admired his talent, having none of it himself. Seeing his friend’s latest work was something he looked forward to. On this occasion, he found his friend struggling with his latest creation. They both sat, looking down at the pencilled image.

The sketcher was saying, “I’m finding it difficult to get his real likeness. I can never get the face right. This is an early attempt that I keep coming back to.”

His friend asked, “Who is he?”

“Tom. Well, that’s what I call him. I don’t think he likes me calling him that, but it’s become a bit of a joke between us.”

“Ah! This would be the friend you’ve mentioned from time to time. A great musician, you reckon.”

“Yes, and a great deal more, really.”

“So, what so hard about finishing this one?”

“Because it’s always dark when we meet up for a chat.”

“Dark?”

“Yes. Well, it’s only late at night when he visits.”

The other frowned. He was becoming aware of his friend’s weird side coming out. He’d never been told about any late-night visitor. He decided not to push the point and let it drop. He went back to studying the crude outlines of the man’s face. It was then that he noticed the numbers. Pleased that he could change the subject, he asked, “These numbers?”

“What?”

“1751. What’s that about?”

“Oh. That; yes, that’s when the diabetes finally took him.”

The boy was sitting in his bedroom, swatting for his upcoming science essay.

Apart from the distant drone of his mother using the vacuum cleaner, the house was silent. He liked the silence when he was studying. He couldn’t help feeling that a cup of coffee would make it damn near perfect. He glanced at the glass of water his mother had insisted he take with him to his room. It was the latest thing. The latest health kick that everybody was supposed to be doing. The current advice was for people to consume two and a half to three litres a day. She’d even packed dad off to work with a flask of water. She had been so adamant about it, she had gone as far as to say it would help him with his homework. He took a sip and put the glass down on his bedroom desk. He sat staring at it.

It was all about invisibility.

He began to think about atoms. Atoms, and how they combine to form molecules. So many molecules. Hidden things. Molecules in water, each made of a group of three atoms, two hydrogen and one oxygen. Most of the time, they are crazy, tiny particles that constantly hare around, full of energy, endlessly bumping into one another. These little guys aren’t moving that fast, he thought, because they’re in water; not in anything that’s solid. Being in a liquid, they just have sufficient energy to flow passed one another. They flow, and as a result, water flows. That had to make sense.

These guys are just gliding around, but if you applied heat… that’s another matter, of course. They would all speed up. He thought about how the kinetic molecular theory says these tiny thingamajigs are always on the move.

It came to him that he now had the topic for his essay.

His mother was right!

The woman at number fourteen was cooking dinner when the phone rang. She looked at the clock, wondering who could be calling at such a time. She felt she had to answer it as her cousin was recently killed in a road accident and she knew that relatives were still grieving. She wiped her hands on her apron and picked up the phone. She said, “Hello?”

She heard, “Hello”, then there was a pause on the line.

“Hello,” she repeated. “Who is this?”

“Ah! Yes. Hello, I do hope this isn’t an inconvenient time for you.”

The woman didn’t reply.

“Yes, well, I’m the lady from number-twenty-seven. You may have seen our Winnebago on the front lawn. Anyway, our son recently lost his pet guinea pig. You’ve probably seen the posters he put up all over town. As you can imagine, he was terribly fond of little Squeaky, his pet name for it, and he has recently been told about something I feel I need to talk to you about. Somebody said they thought you and your husband came here from Paucartambo, I hope I got the spelling right. Looking it up in Google maps I see that it’s a town in Southern Peru. I, we, my son, husband and I, we also discovered that Peruvians actually eat guinea pigs and consider them a delicacy. In fact, our neighbour from across the road in twenty-six, b says that Peruvians consume something like sixty-five million guinea pigs a year…

The woman at number fourteen put the phone down gently.

What she whispered to herself as she returned to the kitchen would have embarrassed a Croatian construction worker.

It was the recent incident during their geography class that had him working on a code.

Note-passing was common practice among the pupils. It all came about when their teacher had stood on a chair to take down a large atlas, showing just how broad her hips actually where. That’s when his friend on the desk behind tapped him on the shoulder and passed the note. The truth is, if he hadn’t sniggered, and had the note not got passed around, nothing would have come of it. As it was, she became aware of all the commotion and giggling, she seized the note and read it for herself.

What followed was very unpleasant, with her trying to find out who actually wrote it. There were threats of a visit to the principal’s office and possible expulsion. Naturally, she never got to the bottom of it, no pun intended, but it did leave everybody rattled. That’s when he started to work on his code. It had to be something they could all use to keep their messages private. He felt himself to be more than competent in the business of creating something robust; something unbreakable.

It was a couple of nights later, at his home, that he and his friend from the desk behind sat looking at what he had come up with so far.

“It has to be robust,” he was saying, as he spread several sheets of paper out across his bedroom floor. “I started by finding a word that would be the key word to base the code on.”

“Key word?” asked his friend.

“Yes. That’s the word, the secret word if you like, that you need to know in order to read the message.”

“OK. Did you find one?”

“I did.”

“Wow! Go on.”

“I didn’t want it to contain too many letters, which would only make it unnecessarily complicated, no more than ten. After all, even ten is almost half of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Also, I had to find a word of that length where none of the letters were repeated.”

“And you found one, you say?”

“Yes. Guilderton.”

“What’s that?”

“Not what… where. It’s a place name. Found it in the class notes. It’s a small town on the west coast of Australia.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Gee! You really have put a lot of work in on this. It’s going to be great!”

“I hope so. The next step was to assign numbers to each letter. Each of these letters is represented by a number from one to twenty-six. Here’s the chart I made.”

At this point he produced a printout and they both studied it.

“Wow! Looks good.”

“Thanks. Anyway, at first, I thought I would convert the ten numbers 4, 5, 7, 9, 12, 14, 15, 18, 20 and 21. These being the letters used to make the key word, then put the letters down in the order originally shown in the alphabet. This gave me the word ‘degilnortu’. I wasn’t happy with that.”

His friend shrugged and said, “No.”

“No. What I did was add all ten numbers up. This gave me 125. Then, I divided this number by the number of letters; ten. Unfortunately, the result was 12.5.”

At this point his friend frowned. “I can’t see how that helps.”

“It doesn’t.”

“OK. What do we do then?”

“Ah!” he said, thinking hard. “I think we should be more careful about writing notes.”